BOURGEOIS LEFT

JEREMY KUZMAROV—With the Ukraine war expanding and the threat of nuclear catastrophe rising, Bill Clinton has written an article in The Atlantic magazine trying to defend what many see as indefensible: his administration’s support for the expansion of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) in March 1999 into Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic against a pledge by the Bush administration to Mikhail Gorbachev that NATO would not expand “one inch eastward.”

Much of the Western population are such babies, and basically believe that the entire world is like a Marvel Comics movie, that they wouldn’t be able to understand it anyway. There are people, however, who would not be swayed by the “Russians are just evil and that’s that” narrative if they were allowed to hear the other side. Even with the censorship, we are seeing normie conservatives begin to slowly back away from this childish narrative.

Pulitzer Prize winning journalist and long time truth-teller Chris Hedges sits down with Briahna for an intimate conversation about the recent purging of his RT show On Contact from YouTube, what to make of online criticism AOC received for “stealing valor” from the successful Amazon unionization effort, the limits of electoralism, and why he still fights despite it all. Briahna asks Hedges to respond to Ro Khanna’s apparent surprise that esteemed public intellectuals like Hedges and Cornel West are not invited onto mainstream news outlets, and he even responds to his first ever clip from The View. The two spar over the relevance of social media to progressive movements, and have a solemn conversation about the personal risks of fighting for what you believe in.

How times have changed. In the period of capitalist decline, philosophy has also undergone a process of regression. The clearest expression of this trend is postmodernism. For the last half-century or more, this tendency has been slowly spreading like a virus throughout the world, jumping from country to country, constantly mutating into new and ever-more-bizarre variants. It has spun off an industry of subschools and trends such as post-colonialism, queer theory, several forms of feminism and many more, which, in open or disguised forms, dominate today’s social sciences and academia.

BEN NORTON—Murray Bookchin is something of a saint in the anarchist community. His ideas on social ecology and what he termed “libertarian municipalism” and “communalism” have influenced generations of self-declared leftists, and he was frequently cited as an ideological force behind the anti-globalization and Occupy Wall Street movements.

Bookchin became especially influential in Kurdish circles after Abdullah Öcalan, the imprisoned leader of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), adopted his ideas to advance a vision of “democratic confederalism,” a vision his followers later attempted to implement in northeast Syria — with the help of the US military.