CLASS STRUGGLE

SUBHUTI2—It’s two mafia (maybe more) factions in a war of all against all with us little people serially screwed, sitting on the sidelines, mystified and confused over what the hell is going on. It’s democracy for the oligarchs, who get to fight it out with all the dirty tricks at their disposal. The voting machine and dead voters are the strategy of one faction, but that hardly lets Trump and his faction off the hook.

ALASTAIR CROOKE—We have today almost unlimited web access: Yet, its sheer overload seems to cause us to ‘dig in’, rather than ‘open up’. Anyone who wants it, can find a whole universe of alternative viewpoints online, but very few do. Paradoxically, the Information age has made us less willing to consider worldviews unlike our own. We cleave to the like-minded. We want to hear from the like-minded and have them as our friends.

And since it is so much easier to confirm our perspective and biases – and disdain others’ – the notion of politics by argument or consensus, is almost entirely lost. We can, and do, live in our segregated digital worlds, even when physically, those ‘others’ may indeed be our next door neighbour.

CALEB MAUPIN—At this point it’s worth recaling that all these calamities were created by the elites’ obstinate allegiance to incurably irrational predatory capitalism, which, devious rhetoric aside, continues to this day.  The legitimacy /representational problem is serious, and they know it. Heck, even Americans, world famous for their political cluelessness are now ferociously alienated from their own media and political establishment (not yet from capitalism itself, though, as they have been heavily indoctrinated to believe it is “the American way”). These crises, of which the massive and incurable unemployment, caused by capitalism’s periodic”overproduction”, now aggravated by the digital revolution, constitute a perennial challenge to the elites’ governance, can be overcome only through two paths: socialism or barbarism. (The latter by definition only a temporary fix). 

Black Agenda Report Presents: The Left Lens
In the second episode of The Left Lens, Danny and Margaret discuss emerging developments relating to the debate about “free speech” that has surfaced amid the mass uprising against racist policing in the United States. Like the video, subscribe to the channel, and please consider donating to Black Agenda Report.

BRUCE LERRO—Groups of human beings are not machines. They are composed of individuals with free will who can coordinate, practice cooperation, obey or leave a group. Because groups become “alive” as they function over time, the truth is that in groups, there are no neutral bystanders. Every member of the group is either actively or passively producing expansion or contraction of the group’s power. Those twelve people are complicit in whatever happens in the group, for better or for worse