RAINER SHEA—By applying his familiar dishonest framing tactics to demonize militant anti-capitalist strains in modern America, Hedges is trying to undermine the strains of our society that seek to carry out practical steps towards revolution. The overthrow of the bourgeoisie, especially in the highly militarized United States, will require some amount of violent struggle. As Lenin concluded while he was participating in an actual anti-capitalist revolution, “The replacement of the bourgeois by the proletarian state is impossible without a violent revolution.” But Hedges attacks both those who acknowledge the necessity of violence, and those who seek to apply Lenin’s other lessons for building proletarian power.
LEFT-LIBERALS
-
-
How to Maliciously Smear Your Critics (and Not Get Away with It)
42 minutes readCJ HOPKINS—he life of a professional political satirist is many things, but it is certainly never boring. Last week, for example, was particularly not boring. OK, I wasn’t called before a Senate committee to testify against a rapey nominee to the highest court in the United States, or smeared by the right-wing media for doing so, nothing that dramatic or consequential. No, while most Americans were parsing every “he said” and “she said” of the Kavanaugh hearings, I was embroiled in my own little sordid drama involving “going public,” and smears, and my colleagues attempting to assassinate my character, and so on.
-
Three years since Syriza’s referendum on EU austerity in Greece
13 minutes readALEX LANTIER—In warning the Greek workers about Syriza, the ICFI fought for the building of a revolutionary alternative. The experience of Syriza has underscored that only a return to the traditions of the Bolshevik Party and the October 1917 revolution can provide a viable strategy for the working class. In its statement “ The Political Lessons of Syriza’s Betrayal in Greece ,” the ICFI stressed: … the working class cannot defend itself by electing new, ‘left’ capitalist governments. The only way forward is through a genuinely revolutionary policy, mobilizing the working class in Greece and internationally in struggle. It requires a direct assault on the capitalist class, the confiscation of their wealth, the seizure of the major banks and productive forces, in order to place them under the democratic control of working people, and the creation of workers states across Europe and the world. Such struggles require the building of Marxist parties to offer political leadership to the working class, in ruthless struggle against parties like Syriza.
-
Philip Roth and the narrow framework of postwar cultural life
25 minutes readThis work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License ALL CAPTIONS…
-
The Left Needs More Critical Debate and Real Discussion, Less Twitter/Facebook Name Calling and Mic Drops
14 minutes readBRUCE DIXON—So-called social media, as Jodi Dean and others have explained for years, is NOT our friend. It’s not even social, except in the sense that it hijacks the social interactions of millions and turns them into private property, into marketing data and makes the owners of that data into billionaires. That’s not good. Even worse, we have allowed the parasitic marketing platforms of communicative capitalism to teach us how to interact with each other.