COMMUNISM

P. GREANVILLE—This is an excellent video by The Finnish Bolshevik discussing perhaps one of the most contentious topics separating people who supposedly share the same political objectives. Ahh, they say, the devil is in the details, and they are right. In this case, the “details” refer to the fact that anarchists and libertarian socialist critics of Marxist-Leninist socialist construction conveniently underestimate or dismiss the urgent and often horribly penurious historical context in which actual revolutions are made. For lack of a better term, I call this “contextual degradation” of any historico-political discussion. At times, this is deliberate, in which case we deal with a dishonest interlocutor, and there’s not much we can do about that, except walk away.  But far more frequently, the critics take this tack due to intellectual laziness, a tendency to superficiality in argumentation, voluntarism, or simply a woeful deficit in revolutionary imagination. Egoist tendencies, which normally fuel bourgeois individualism, also explain such behaviour.

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.

BRUCE LERRO—What these New Age physicists were saying was that because subatomic particles were unstable (both a wave and a particle) the observer had to make a “decision” as to which to measure. If you couldn’t decide whether a subatomic particle was a wave or a particle without a state of consciousness, that meant that consciousness was at the heart of matter. We were told that western science has finally caught up with the wise ancients of the East. At a liberal arts New Age university I taught at, we had a science teacher who taught a class called “Quantum Physics and Eastern Mysticism”. No one in the class was required to take any preliminary physics classes in order to take the class. We had students walking around the campus holding court about the mysteries of quantum mechanics when most of them knew nothing about physics. Here we have the New Age spirituality.

In this video Caleb discusses the origins of liberalism and individualism as a progressive development in the 17th and 18th centuries, essential parts of the anti-feudal capitalist revolutions, and their eventual ideological degeneration as capitalism itself became dialectically obsolete and an obstacle to human progress.

PATRICE GREANVILLE—In this segment, Caleb interviews Christopher Helali, a Communist candidate to the US Congress (PCUSA), based in Vermont. Helali’s background is most interesting: he’s a small farmer, and a descendant of Greek communist partisans who fought the Nazis and later the reactionaries supported by the British and the Americans after the war. Despite his open leftwing views, he enjoys a fraternal relationship with working class men and fellow farmers, mny of whom support Trump, and is able to educate them about the issues confronting them all—in itself a major breakthrough considering the cultural circumstances. Don’t miss this highly instructive and inspiring chat. In the recent 2020 election, although the Democrat candidate (Peter Welch) won, as expected, by a huge majority with 67% of the vote, Helali managed a respectable 1%, with 3,432 people casting their ballot for him. This despite the fact he lacked the enormous financial and media resources enjoyed by the Democrat incumbent, and that he had to communicate his message while pushing back against the deep-seated anti-communist hostility and appalling ignorance that defines the US electorate. Obviously his honesty, courage, steadfastness, and cogency played a big role in this outcome.