from:
http://threewayfight.blogspot.com/2010/01/barack-badiou-and-bilal-al-has...

Don Hamerquist

I wrote a draft of this in early December that had some limited circulation. This version moves the focus away from criticisms of the left responses to the Obama Afghanistan policy towards the policy itself. In some ways it’s a restatement of arguments I made about Iraq five years ago that tries to incorporate the impact of a global economic crisis and of a different political face for the ruling class. I hope to open up two discussions: the first concerns the origins, objectives, and implications of the policy - particularly with respect to the ruling class flexibility to reconsider and change it. The other concerns the development of a more useful conceptual framework for the left.

Obama has made his speech on Afghanistan and we should think about what it entails and implies.
The majority of the U.S. left looks at these issues in the context of classical conceptions of imperialism, emphasizing the interests of U.S. capital in maintaining and extending its dominant position: in the first place against popular anti-imperialist movements; but with increasing frequency also against purported imperialist rivals.
Two examples:

The following debates have developed on various forums over the past months. Both Hamerquist and Harvey argue that the crisis Capitalism currently faces is not merely a cyclical (or self-correcting) crisis, but a one reflecting Capitalism running up against the limits imposed by its internal contradictions. Their arguments hold drastic implications for the priorities and tasks of those who see the need for systemic alternatives, and are worth examination.

David Harvey,"Organizing for the Anti-Capitalist Transition:

http://davidharvey.org/2009/12/organizing-for-the-anti-capitalist-transi...

Don Hamerquist,"Lenin, Leninism and Some Leftovers"(and various responses):

http://threewayfight.blogspot.com/2009/09/sketchy-thoughts-drawing-lesso...

by Erinn

So, I went to see a movie called “Collapse.” I read about this movie a little bit before seeing it (full disclosure: I get caught it weird Internet spaces and was reading an article about Mein Kampf. This movie was mentioned in the article for some reason). The premise of the movie is pretty simple: Michael Ruppert believes that he know how and why the US and global economies are currently collapsing (Get it? That’s the movie title…and the country…). The ticket was like $4, which in LA is pretty much like highway robbery.

What is Repeal?

The Arizona Repeal Coalition is an organization committed to repealing over 60 anti-immigrant laws and bills that have been passed or considered by Arizona politicians in the past few years. We demand the repeal of all laws—federal, state, and local—that degrade and discriminate against undocumented individuals and that deny U.S. citizens their lawful rights. We demand that all human beings—with papers or without—be guaranteed access to work, housing, health care, education, legal protection, and other public benefits, as well as the right to organize. Our strategy is to help build a grass roots social movement that can repeal these laws, change the terms of the national debate on immigration, and expand the freedom of all people—documented and undocumented.

originally posted at Imagine2050.org

By Joel Olson

I recently reviewed The Rise of the Ku Klux Klan by Rory McVeigh (University of Minnesota Press 2009) for the academic journal American Studies. The book is a little dry, but there were some notable lessons in it for understanding anti-immigration organizations today.

The Klan originated after the Civil War to restore white supremacy by terrorizing ex-slaves and antislavery whites during Reconstruction. This generation of the Klan ended when Reconstruction did in the 1870s. McVeigh’s book studies the second generation of the KKK, which started in 1915 (coinciding with the release of D.W. Griffith’s famous pro-Klan movie The Birth of a Nation) and exploded in growth from 1920-1924, with a membership of over four million people at its peak.

McVeigh argues that this version of the Klan emerged as a white Protestant response to the rise of large-scale manufacturing and retail, which squeezed small businesses and farms, diminished the political influence of the heartland, and strengthened the power of the cities—and the ethnic communities that lived in them. Klan organizers successfully mobilized White Anglo-Saxon Protestants (WASPs) by playing on their fears of losing their economic, political, and social power as a result of these economic and political changes.

originally available at: http://www.counterpunch.org/maher11242009.html

November 24, 2009

By GEORGE CICCARIELLO-MAHER

Berkeley.

This was bound to be a big week in California regardless, as the threat of a 32 percent tuition and fee increase across the University of California system made a crashing entrance into reality with Wednesday’s vote by the UC Board of Regents. Perhaps the Regents and UC President Mark Yudof expected that their diversionary tactics--lament the crisis and direct blame to Sacramento’s budget cuts--would pay off. But this was not to be.

Aided in no small part by the explosive exposé published by UC Santa Cruz Professor of Political Science Bob Meister, the student, faculty, and workers’ movements the length and breadth of the state were no longer willing to accept privatization disguised as crisis-imposed budget cuts. As Meister explained in no uncertain terms, the proposed (and now passed) tuition increase has nothing whatsoever to do with budget cuts, but the cuts merely provided the pretext for a long-planned drive (and Reaganite wet dream) to privatize public education in California once and for all.

Anti-Capital Projects

Part 1 embedded above. View parts 2-8 on the Phoenix Class War Council's YouTube Channel.

This is a transcription of Mike Davis’ speech and closing remarks at the ISO’s “Socialism” conference which took place in San Francisco this summer. Originally published at Advance the Struggle

I took my 15-year-old son last night to the movies in Berkeley to see the remake of The Taking of Pelham 1-2-3. I kept thinking: is this set in Sacramento?

Here you have the governor and his gang of Republicans, and they’re holding the people captive and threatening to shoot them one by one unless their demands for budget cuts and a new stage in the Republican fiscal revolution occurs. And then on the other hand, you have the leadership of the Democratic Party in Sacramento, Karen Bass and Darrell Steinberg, and they’re saying “Oh, no, no, no, don’t shoot all the passengers, just shoot half the passengers.”

Part of being a good comrade is being able to give and accept critiques of each others' politics. When a comrade puts forth politics you have disagreement with, it should be your responsibility as a comrade and a revolutionary to voice those disagreements in a principled way. To do otherwise would be liberalism and serves only to weaken the revolutionary movement.

It is in this spirit that I offer a critique of the weaknesses of the politics of the "Smack a White Boy" group within Anarchist People of Color (APOC) and a small critique of APOC itself. It is my hope that this will contribute to the debate currently happening within APOC and lead to more cohesive politics and a stronger APOC.

comradely,

Sam Emm, APOC-NYC

Smack Bad Politics, Abolish the White Race

As a participant in Anarchists People of Color (APOC) in New York City, I have been very aware of the serious weaknesses of the APOC model. We organize around two things: being Anarchists (some prefer Anti-Authoritarian or Autonomist), and being people of color. There are a few serious potential problems with this.

Firstly, the "Anarchist" part of Anarchist People of Color is never defined. Anyone who has spent any time at all studying Anarchist politics knows that someone calling themselves an Anarchist can range from repairing bicycles and serving dumpster-dived food to building revolutionary unions or other forms of dual power. The politics of participants in APOC (I use the term "participant" over "member" because APOC is generally not a membership-based organization) reflect this diversity.

Secondly, while I think it's safe to say that we have a shared definition of what it means to be a "person of color" (which I would briefly define as a person who does not receive the set of privileges enjoyed by "white" people), the implication here is that we share a common experience of racism. This is just not the case, with people of African descent and indigenous peoples suffering from the effects of white supremacy in a very different way in the United States.

With APOC having such ambiguous politics, I watched with interest when a group of APOC coming out of D.C. APOC and Philadelphia APOC put out the "Smack a White Boy Statement" in Mid-March of this year. The same groups just recently put out a "Smack a White Boy Part Two" statement. While both statements definitely put forth a more focused set of politics for APOC, there is a serious problem: it gets white supremacy all wrong.

Advance the Struggle recently published an essay entitled Justice For Oscar Grant: A Lost Opportunity? From the essay's introduction:

The murder of Oscar Grant set Oakland on fire, but who put the fire out? The working class people of Oakland, their consciousness set ablaze, found an inadequate set of organizational tools at their disposal to do the work that deep down we all know has to be done – confront the state (government) and its underlying property relations.

The primary organization available to them was a coalition of nonprofits; the secondary organizational tool was a self-labeled revolutionary communist organization. Both played prominent but ultimately problematic leadership roles while Oakland youth lacked cohesive theory and organizational structure through which to effectively challenge their oppressors.

Using the Oscar Grant episode as a case study in the role of political leadership in the Bay Area, we hope to reveal the most glaring shortcomings of the left today. We believe new leadership is necessary, and hope that this document can contribute to its emergence.