redFlags

Note on sock-puppetry

Talking to a friend about this site, he said he thinks me posting under more than one name isn't cool. So I thought about it and decided if that's the expected ettiquette then I will no longer do so. Though I have never made an effort to create full identities distinct from myself, I have posted occassional comments under other monikers. I will now sign my own posts JB, and leave it at that. Other folks are welcome to post however they want, but as the site admin I will avoid confusions and comment by my initials. — JB

Campus Strikes Against the War

Starting with a call from UC Santa Barbara – students around the country are planning strikes Thursday, February 15 against the escalation and war in Iraq. World Can't Wait has an excellent student strike resource page with a list of participating campuses and materials to help activists and there's a February 15 blog up and running with updates (and where I found the picture above).

From the initial call out of UC—Santa Barbara:

We, the students and staff of UC Santa Barbara, want to challenge our generation to put an end to the U.S. conquest of Iraq. Right now most opposition to the war is only symbolic. Congress is being sheepish and choosing not to end the war because we, the people, are not forcing them to act.

People's historian Howard Zinn says:

"I would like to endorse the idea of a student strike on campuses all over the country on Feb. 15, to rekindle the flame of protest that flared up all over the world  on that date four years ago, as  ten million people protested the pending invasion of Iraq by the United States. A student strike at this time would be a great boost to the movement against the war and would send a signal to Congress that it should listen to the American people and act immediately to stop this ugly war."

Join in where you can. If you're on a campus where nothing is currently planned, get involved now. It's going to be a hot spring~!

  Download STRIKE flyers
  PDF — easy to print & localize!
  Four different flyers!
  Put 'em up everywhere!

Rage Against the Machine Re-Unites!

"Is it coincidence that in the seven years that Rage Against the Machine has been away that the country has slid into right-wing purgatory? I think not," [says Tom Morello]. "It occurred to all of us that the times were right to see if we can knock the Bush administration out in one fell swoop, and we hope to do that job well. This administration has done enough damage that it may take generations to undo. This is an administration that believes it's beyond the laws of the land, which is fine for emperors, but not so great for presidents. One thing this president isn't above is the laws of physics, and there is no action without reaction. And we're part of that reaction."

Read MTV News coverage

Breaking the Imperial "We"

The assembled columnists of the New York Times are known for their maudlin self-import. Think Thomas Friedman as freelance sloganeer of empire (while living off his wife's millions). But every now and then, one of these courtiers hits the nail on the head. David Brooks, who is something of a translator for the hard right to the urbane middle classes and generic barometer of the establishment, wrote a piece called The Iraq Syndrome, R.I.P. One of the comments in the discussion on the January 27 antiwar protests brought it to my attention – and I'm glad. Leave it to the Right to cut to the chase, after all: what are we fighting about in the first place?

Today, Americans are disillusioned with the war in Iraq, and many around the world predict that an exhausted America will turn inward again. Some see a nation in permanent decline and an end to American hegemony. At Davos, some Europeans apparently envisioned a post-American world.

Forget about it. Americans are having a debate about how to proceed in Iraq, but we are not having a strategic debate about retracting American power and influence. What’s most important about this debate is what doesn’t need to be said. No major American leader doubts that America must remain, as Dean Acheson put it, the locomotive of the world.....

The U.S. has no cultural need to retrench. Vietnam sparked a broad cultural revolution, a shift in values and a loss of confidence. Iraq has not had the same effect. Many Americans have lost faith in the Bush administration and in this particular venture, but there has been no generalized loss of faith in the American system or in American goodness....

In short, the U.S. has taken its share of blows over the past few years, but the isolationist dog is not barking. The hegemon will change. The hegemon will do more negotiating. But the hegemon will live.

Well, to quote that great American poet of national "confusion" — you have no faith to lose, and you know it.

The argument that's been bubbling among antiwar forces is about whether the issue is "this war", narrowly defined as the occupation of Iraq (forget the occupation of Kuwait going on 16 years, forget Palestine, forget the dozens of other countries with "entanglements") – or whether the Bush Agenda of the imperial presidency with its triple whammy of fear, repression and war is the target.

This is one of the ways where we can see the danger of narrowing the focus on "Republican mistakes" and the need to generate a culture of resistance that leads to definitive repudiation of the fascist direction Bush (and Hil) have taken the country. Read Brooks to see inside the mind of the collossus, look around to trip those clay feet.

Full commentary follows.

Class Instinct?

In a comment on Avakian's Three Alternative Worlds, which was the most widely distributed radical essay at the recent antiwar march in Washington, Zamora posed a question that opens a few lines of discussion on what she calls "class instinct". Maybe I'm old fashioned for thinking in terms of "class consciousness", but the underlying questions of what materialism is, the nature of leadership, the role of passion, and the relationship between identity and solidarity are a lot to unpack. Zamora writes:

In my own communist training, and in conversations with fellow communists, I have always understood ‘class instinct’ or ‘class feelings’ to play some sort of indeterminate role in the formation of a class stand that allows us to apply our scientific method in the interests of the proletariat and not, as many have done, in the service of just understanding the world better and perhaps furthering their own personal interests in the process.

Class feelings has never been understood, in the context I have encountered it as a revolutionary communist, as a ‘Jimmy Higgins’ type attitude. Rather, I have understood it as the sort of feelings and emotions that lead us, even in many cases before gaining our broader understanding of MLM and world history, and then deepened on the basis of that understanding, to oppose the police and to oppose the various crimes and wars of imperialism. That somehow, there is this visceral, emotional component to our understanding that allows us to make sacrifices and to wield the classless knowledge (i.e., truth that, as truth, has no class character per se) for a partisan class cause.

And yet, I can’t but feel a little uncomfortable with that.

Impeachment: What's the word?

Far-fetched? Unlikely? Liberal? Won't impeaching Bush just leave us with Cheney? Didn't Pelosi say it's "off the table?"

Planned for February 17 and 18, the Emergency Summit to Impeach Bush for War Crimes in New York,  is a must-attend event.

Sponsored by World Can't Wait, Progressive Democrats of America, Troops Out Now, DemocracyRising, Ramsey Clarke's ImpeachBush.org, After Downing Street and the Green Party of the United States – it's looking to be a movement that won't be deniable. For any activists reading this, there's an open call for workshops — so if you know what the movement is missing, here's your chance to change the game.

Saving the summit talk for the gathering, I did want to bring together some of the available writing on impeachment and what people's thinking is. On the jump, I've posted the entirety of Howard Zinn's recent article Impeachment by the People.

Also worth a read, on both the urgency of the situation and the strategy of impeachment:
Voices for Impeachment | Voices Speak Out | US Rep. John Conyers (D-MI) on Oct. 5 | Deborah Sweet: Presentation to WCW National Meeting 1/13/07 | Liz Holtzman: The Case for  Impeachment | Fact Sheet on the Military Commissions Act | Why Demand Impeachment Now?  | Sunsara Taylor: Why the Democrats Won't Stand and Fight (and Why YOU Must) | The New Investigation Season | Nader: Talking About Impeachment | 4 Things You Can Do to Drive Out the Bush Regime

Blazing Trail: A Journey Through the Indian Revolution

World Revolution Media says Blazing Trail is the "saga of India's Communist Revolutionary Movement initiated by the historical Naxalbari uprising of May 1967, breaking the chains of revisionism that had enveloped the movement for decades. From the first Congress of the Communist Party Of India (Marxist-Leninist) held in 1970 to its second congress held over three decades later in 2001 under the name Communist Party Of India(Marxist-Leninist)(People's War). A saga of heroism and sacrifice in the face of a brutal enemy masquarading as the World's 'largest democracy', foundations are being laid for a New Democratic India."

Download Blazing Trail (496mb)