Saturday, December 17, 2016

Notes on Trump (Bromma Dec. 2016)

TrumpFlag1. The normality of white supremacy

Since Trump’s election, I keep hearing that we shouldn’t “normalize” him or his agenda. I believe that’s looking through the wrong end of the telescope. There’s nothing as “normal” in the U.S. as white supremacy. Sometimes it’s disguised by tokenism and obscured by “multiculturalism.” But in this country, white supremacy has always shown its true naked face at times of stress and transition.

Because white supremacy isn’t just a bunch of bad ideas inherited from ignorant elders. It’s a deeply-rooted institution through which the U.S. rules over many oppressed peoples. It’s the glue that keeps hundred of millions loyal to that very same program. It’s the central ideological, political and physical system set up by white capital to rule the land and dominate its internal and external colonies. And therefore white supremacy underpins all the wealth and power this country’s ruling class possesses. Without it, the U.S. falls.

2. Contradictions within white capitalism

White supremacy is constant, but it keeps changing form. For instance, African Americans have endured a variety of modes of white supremacy: slavery, Jim Crow, gentrification, and more. White capitalism welcomed Mexicans and Chinese as semi-slave laborers, then attacked and deported them when conditions changed. Native peoples faced extermination campaigns, phony treaties, forced assimilation and confinement on reservations at various times. White supremacy isn’t a singular strategy by white society towards people of color. The form can change, as long as whiteness is always valued; as long as white people are always on top.

U.S. white supremacy was modified in response to world anti-colonial struggles and, after the Cold War, to globalization. Together these developments generated significant contradictions for traditional forms of white supremacy. By the late 1970s, old-style white military colonialism had lost much of its power, beaten back by a phalanx of national liberation struggles. So imperialism rebooted, searching out colonial partners and new forms of financial blackmail to replace or supplement military occupation. And, in the 1990s, U.S. capitalism entered a period of intense cooperation with other capitalists around the world, aiming to make the global economy increasingly “borderless.” Open, blatant racism wasn’t helpful in this changed environment.

So the U.S. ruling class adapted white surpremacy to the new conditions and gave it a new look. In the revised, neocolonial order, some people of color were accepted into positions of wealth and authority. Racist violence and discrimination continued inside and outside the country. But at the same time, U.S. high culture increasingly professed to celebrate the diversity of people of all nationalities and races (and genders too). This helped present U.S. capitalism to the world with a friendlier face. White supremacy continued, masked by capitalist multiculturalism.

Some white people embraced the concept of multiculturalism, sincerely hoping it could be the basis for a genuine progressive culture. But most white amerikans felt that this new incarnation of capitalism was a demotion. They didn’t like having people of color as their bosses. They didn’t like seeing “good jobs” and social bribery spread around the world, instead of being reserved for them. And they hated the “political correctness” of having to hide their racism. U.S. capitalism’s perceived “disloyalty” to its white home base during the rise of globalization fueled the current upsurge of right wing populism, including eventually the campaign of Donald Trump.

But for quite a while the ruling class turned a deaf ear to its disgruntled white masses. The capitalists had global interests to tend to; global profits to bank. And frankly, a willing Asian dictator or Latina judge or African American president was worth more to them than a thousand whining white people. The militia movement was repressed when it became militant; the Tea Party was mocked by the global sophisticates. (Neither was destroyed, though; they remained as a possibility, a fallback.)

As globalization continued to advance in the last few decades, white amerika was gradually forced and cajoled to accept modest changes in the hierarchy of imperial privilege. It seemed possible that monopoly capital, pushing white people to fall in line with multiculturalism, might continue forever along that path, backed and cheered by cohorts of optimistic and idealistic artists and intellectuals.

To a large extent, this is where the plaintive cry not to “normalize” Trump comes from. Cosmopolitan liberals, now accustomed to living under globalized capitalism, can’t believe that U.S. society is going to be allowed to go backward; can’t believe that a rich country could ever be permitted to trash multiculturalism; to turn back the clock on women’s rights and environmentalism and so much more. They have a hard time accepting that their bright dream of a blended world culture, a dream that had previously been tolerated and even encouraged by monopoly capital, might be betrayed, and end in a surge of old-fashioned racist violence. Their disbelief echoes the disbelief among the liberal intelligentsia in England after Brexit, and in other countries where globalization is giving ground.

3. Timing is everything

It’s important to understand that populist opposition to globalization in the West is making breakthroughs not as globalization rises, but as it falters. In fact, the rise of these political movements is probably more a reflection of globalization’s decline than the cause of that decline. What’s coming into view, semi-hidden underneath the frenzied soap opera of reactionary populism, is that the tide of globalization has crested and started to recede. It wasn’t permanent after all.

It should be stipulated, right off the bat, that globalization has unleashed immense changes, many of which are irreversible. For example, the peasantry, once the largest class of all, isn’t coming back. Globalization broke it; sent it streaming out of the countryside by the hundreds of millions. Out of that broken peasantry, a giant new woman-centered proletariat and a sprawling lumpen-proletariat are still being formed around the world.

Yet globalization as a financially-integrated, transnational form of capitalism can’t advance without constant expansion, constant profit growth. Since no global state exists to mediate among the world’s capitalists, shared growth is the only thing that restrains them from cut-throat competition. Growth is also what allows capitalists to at least partly mollify the displaced masses back home with cheap commodities and whatever jobs a rising world economy has to offer. But now, instead of growing, the world economy is slowing. In fact globalized capitalism, having bulked up on steroidal injections of speculation and unsustainable, leveraged debt, is teetering on the edge of disaster.

From the U.S. to China, from the Eurozone to Brazil, danger signs are flashing; massive globalized industries are shifting into reverse. International trade and investment are flat or falling. Capital that was formerly used for investment in “emerging economies” is now flowing backward into safe haven investments in the metropolis. Automation, renewable energy and other new technologies are starting to shorten supply chains, reducing the demand for imports from far away. Intractable economic and political crises, like those in the Middle East and Greece and Ukraine, are eroding cooperation and sapping confidence in already-weak globalist institutions. The internet, a key factor in globalization, is gradually becoming segmented, as governments and corporations privatize, censor and manipulate parts of it. And underneath everything, the increased inequality caused by globalization itself is throttling the demand for commodities.

Multinational corporations aren’t abandoning world markets by any means. But leading monopoly capitalists are hedging against trade wars and reducing their reliance on complex, interdependent trade and finance. Facing what he calls a “protectionist global environment,” GE CEO Jeffrey Immelt is shifting his company’s production from a globalized to a “localized” model. “We used to have one site to make locomotives; now we have multiple global sites that give us market access. A localization strategy can’t be shut down by protectionist policies.” This is a defensive posture, harkening back to an earlier form of imperialism.

Once it seemed that transnational integration had an unstoppable momentum. But now a retreat into the once-familiar zones of old-fashioned nation-based imperialism seems to be on the capitalist menu.

4. A previous wave of globalization

If the ongoing shift away from from transnationalism and towards harsh national rivalry continues, it won’t be the first instance of “de-globalization” in modern history. It’s happened before.

From 1870 to 1913, fueled by the industrial revolution and the explosive rise of U.S. capitalism, there was a massive spike in international trade and market integration. It was centered in Western Europe and the U.S., but extended further into Latin America and other parts of the world. Borders were opened, tariffs were lowered, and there was a rapid increase in exports and financial interdependence. The world capitalist economy boomed. Just as during the current wave of globalization, this earlier period was marked by major innovations in transport and communications, as well as an unprecedented upsurge in transnational migration. (Including tens of millions of workers who migrated from Europe to the U.S.) Economists refer to this as the “first wave” of modern globalization.

But capitalism is at best an unstable and contradictory system, periodically riven by economic crisis. And a globalized form of capitalism appears to be particularly vulnerable to those crises.

The globalization of 1870-1913 collapsed like a house of cards. Growing economic imbalances and stalled growth led many imperialist countries to impose tariffs and take other protectionist measures, vainly striving to boost their own home economy at the expense of others. Inevitably, there was retaliation in kind. This cannibalistic inter-imperial competition only aggravated the already deteriorating economic conditions. Trade and global commodities became more and more expensive. There was a rapid downward spiral of economic depression and reactionary nationalism.

There was no pretense of multiculturalism in the U.S. back then, of course. Massive vio-lence against people of color was already common during the boom years of globalization. So it’s hard to say if racism became worse during the period of de-globalization. But in 1913, segregation was officially initiated in all federal offices, including lunchrooms and bathrooms. In the following decades there were dozens of vicious race riots against Black enclaves in cities North and South, causing many hundreds of deaths and thousands of people driven from their homes. Having been pushed down previously, the Klan was revived in 1915. Its peak was in the 1920’s, with some 4 million members.

Finally, the first wave of globalization imploded in a frenzy of national hatred and two brutal world wars, fought without quarter among the capitalist powers. Something we should keep in mind as we confront the current situation.

5. De-globalization

Today’s capitalist globalization isn’t failing because of political blows landed by Western anti-globalization movements, although those have had a real effect. Rather, the populist movements are reaching for real power just as chunks of the ruling class globalist consensus are themselves breaking away and seeking alternate, nationalistic strategies.

Former globalizers are floating back toward the anchors of their old home economies and shifting the blame for economic crisis onto “foreigners” and social minorities. They’re muting their former advocacy of free trade while backing away from trade agreements. They’re rediscovering protectionism. They’re experimenting with cyber-attacks on other countries, building up their militaries, increasing their involvement in proxy wars, and manipulating their currencies to gain temporary advantage over trading partners. And as a natural part of this shift, they’re unleashing their most rabid “patriotic” social bases to sell their new/old program, control the streets, and, potentially, to serve as cannon fodder down the road.

In every quarter of the globe, nationalistic xenophobia is on the rise, strangling the remaining globalists’ fading dreams about world government and a borderless economy. Right wing populism is being released, and it’s rising out of its reservoirs, flowing like water filling dry river beds. In country after country, old social prejudices are being revived and intensified; former globalist capitalists are reaching out and mending fences with their most trusted national social bases.

That’s how it is here in the U.S., too. A return to the old white amerika is becoming a more and more practical program for U.S. capitalists—not just for the white masses. It offers the only natural form of capitalist regroupment as globalization wanes. An option as amerikan as apple pie.

A wiser comrade once warned me, during the rise of globalization, that the ruling class would someday “give amerika back to white people.” That’s what seems to be happening with Trump. (Whether or not the capitalists can control the populists they are unleashing remains, as always, an open question.)

6. Capitalists shift gears

The recent wave of accelerated globalization that started in the 1990’s was led by a bloc of Western capital, along with Japan and other close allies in Asia. There were two key geopolitical factors in its take-off. One was the formation of the EU, which consolidated European capital, including parts of the old Soviet empire. The EU also provided a model for what a globalized borderless world might look like, complete with transnational institutions and regulations.

The second factor was a tacit agreement between Western capital and China to collaborate on capitalist development. China supplied a low-wage labor force to produce cheap commodities, enabling enormous profits for investors. In return, the Chinese state and Party skimmed off some of those profits, retained significant control over investment decisions, and accumulated advanced technology. This “win-win” capitalist model, involving high-level financial integration and lowered trade barriers, was eventually applied to other countries, including India.

Both of these key factors of globalization appear to be disintegrating. When times were good in Europe, national jealousies were kept in check. But with economic slowdown, and now with the refugee crisis originating in the Middle East, centrifugal forces are rising inside the EU. Brexit is only one example. As for the deal with China, that was always a marriage of convenience. The West never planned to let China become a serious rival. While on the other hand, Chinese capitalists planned from the very beginning to use globalization as a springboard to empire.

Globalization has always had opposition among capitalists. In many cases, that opposition comes from businesses based in a single country, who resent having to compete with a flood of cheap imports from abroad. It also comes from the more rabid proponents of imperial power. They think military force and economic blackmail can be more profitable than friendly internationalism. When globalization starts to show signs of deterioration, these opponents fight hard to shift the capitalist consensus.

For some time, a group of Republican lawmakers have been chomping at the bit to take China and Russia down a notch militarily. And a group of Democrats, egged on by the unions, wanted more tariffs and other protections. Each represented a piece of the anti-globalist agenda. Neither cared for Trump because he was an outsider and a wild cannon, but he’s putting the pieces together. There was significant ruling class support for his campaign from the beginning – including Kenneth Langone of Home Depot, Peter Thiel of PayPal, David Green of Hobby Lobby and plenty more. Now Republican politicians, manufacturers, tech billionaires, oil company executives and Goldman Sachs bankers are lining up to apply for cabinet jobs and to “consult” with Trump, the anti-globalizer.

Although most British capitalists opposed the Brexit campaign, many also funded and supported it. They saw it as an opportunity to “deregulate” and privatize the economy and to make trade deals specifically favoring England. In China, a country that was once the poster child for globalization, the ruling class has made the conscious decision to become less dependent on exports to the West. They want to build up their home market. Meanwhile, they are responding to a weakening economy by fomenting xenophobia and populist narratives of imperial glory to come. In Russia, patriotic fervor and expansionist dreams are the only thing keeping Putin’s currupt authoritarian regime afloat. This trend of rising capitalist anti-globalization is general; worldwide.

As the U.S. starts to hunker down–starts to game-out possible trade wars and military conflicts with China and Russia; starts to think about closing borders and opening detention camps—white supremacy naturally comes fully back out into the open. That’s the default mode—always—for a country built on genocide, slavery, annexation, colonialism and every form of parasitism on people of color. If inter-imperialist rivalry is to be the order of the day, the U.S. ruling class will need the militant loyalty of racist white people. Without that, the imperial center will not hold. The U.S. will be unable to wage cold wars, trade wars or physical wars against its hungry rivals.

And so, it’s back to “normal” in amerika. We shouldn’t waste our energy wishing it wasn’t so. We should invest that energy in destroying any remaining illusions about a political system built from day one on oppressing non-white peoples and nations, here and all over the world. A system that must be uprooted, not reformed.

7. “Normalizing” Obama

And in the meantime, how about not “normalizing” Obama? Are the war crimes, assassinations, amnesty for torturers, mass incarceration, orwellian spy networks, out-of-control gangster cops, attacks on journalists and whistleblowers and vastly increased inequality that happened during his regime supposed to be some sort of baseline? Should we forget that he set a record for deportations? Are we going accept the bizarre narrative that Obama is really a well-meaning progressive “community organizer,” who was frustrated and stymied by Republicans?

Notice that while we are girding ourselves to fight Trump, Obama is not. Do we see him boldly attacking Trump’s racist, mysogynist plans, his corrupt appointments, his corruption, his militarism? Nope. He’s making nice with The Donald. His attention has already turned to more important things, like his exciting plans for an opulent presidential library to praise his “legacy.” Funded, of course, by the capitalists he has served so well.

We can project onto Obama that he’s a tortured soul, wishing he could have done more to help people. But actually he’s had a hugely successful career, and he’s solidly loyal to monopoly capitalism. When multiculturalism served that cause, he was multiculturalism’s very incarnation. Now, smart man that he is, he understands that his new job is to help manage a smooth transition from globalist multiculturalism to a system where open white supremacist nationalism can be mainstream again. And like a true professional, he’s putting his personal feelings aside and taking care of business.

Much is made of the fact that, as he leaves office, Obama has commuted a few thousand particularly harsh sentences inflicted on people jailed for non-violent drug “crimes.” With their sentences commuted, those people still have a criminal record; still face a hard road of injustice. And he only commuted a small percentage of low-level drug sentences. But it’s something, right?

Consider this: a president’s constitutional power to pardon people is practically unlimited. Pardon, not commute. As in, wipe the record clear. There are millions of victims of unjust and racist mass incarceration who could be pardoned with a stroke of Obama’s pen. And there’s nothing Trump could do to reverse it. Obama could pardon Leonard Peltier and Chelsea Manning and other political prisoners too.

Why stop there? There are millions of immigrants who are directly threatened with deportation by the incoming regime. Trump has said he would begin the expulsion process by deporting 3-4 million immigrants who are “criminals.” Actually, the only “crime” committed by most immigrants is that they crossed the border illegally or overstayed their visa. Obama could pardon all of those people, too, before Trump takes office.

Obama, as of this writing, has actually pardoned fewer people than any president in history. (Except for James Garfield, who was assassinated three months into his term.) As a matter of fact, when a few Democratic congresspeople actually had the nerve to ask Obama to pardon the 750,000 vulnerable young immigrant “Dreamers” to protect them from Trump, he turned them down flat.

Obama isn’t Trump’s enemy, or his friend. He’s simply an operative working for a fundamentally reactionary, white supremacist system. As popular resistance to Trump builds, we have to struggle to turn it into a deeper mass understanding of that system instead of normalizing Obama or his sponsors. And we must find and unite with those who, based on that deeper understanding, are moving toward revolution; towards actually overthrowing white supremacy and capitalism entirely.

Bromma, 12-16



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Monday, December 12, 2016

When Writing Kersplebedeb from Prison

prison-societyMany people write to Kersplebedeb from inside u.s. prisons. This note is a basic guide to what to expect and what not to expect when doing so. People in prison normally cannot access my website, so if you are in touch with someone in prison who you know is interested in writing me, maybe print this out and send them a copy.

What i Can Do

1) If you write to me wanting a catalog or to know about books, i will send you a catalog and try to answer your questions. That said, as i get a lot of correspondence, and update my catalog only once or twice a year, i may only send you the new catalog when it is updated. In other words, if we do not have a pre-existing relationship, it may take upwards of 6 months for you to hear back from me.

What i Cannot Do

2) i cannot normally supply you with free books, or direct you to other resources. i apologize but there is just one of me and i get a lot of mail, and requests, and this is just not something i can normally do. It is no problem if you ask, and if i can help i will, but 99% of the time i can’t. The best i can normally do is to provide books with free postage.

3) i cannot use u.s. stamps. i appreciate you sending them to me, but you shouldn’t, because in canada we use different stamps. Sending a stamp or stamps will not change how fast (or slow) i can get back to you.

What i Sometimes Do, but Normally Can’t

4) i sometimes do publish things, including writings by people in prison. These publications almost always are in the category of things that do not break even, and are subsidized by other work or sales i make. As such, i cannot pay you for your writings. Furthermore, as i have years of backlog of things to publish, it is unlikely that i can publish your book or pamphlet.

 

 

Please note that the above is for people who i do not know who write me. If we have a pre-existing relationship, if we have corresponded before, or if we are somehow connected, the above does not apply. For other people, i wish i could do more and work with you, but chances are given my overall workload, that i cannot.

For people outside of prison, who are thinking of including Kersplebedeb in a list of resources for prisoners, i appreciate the sentiment and can certainly send people a catalog (though i normally do these mailings only a couple of times a year), but beyond that am pretty limited. Please indicate this when listing my project in your directory, if you choose to do so.



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Sunday, December 11, 2016

Meet the Alt Lite, the People Mainstreaming the Alt Right’s White Nationalism (repost)

What a fascist ideological current needs to become a movement is a way to crossover. To gain entry into the culture, into public discourse, into the collective consciousness.

Read the rest of this post on the original site at Meet the Alt Lite, the People Mainstreaming the Alt Right’s White Nationalism



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Meet the Alt Lite, the People Mainstreaming the Alt Right’s White Nationalism



What a fascist ideological current needs to become a movement is a way to crossover. To gain entry into the culture, into public discourse, into the collective consciousness.

Read the rest of this post on the original site at Meet the Alt Lite, the People Mainstreaming the Alt Right’s White Nationalism



Monday, December 05, 2016

Let’s Watch as the Alt Right Implodes (repost)

Get some popcorn, because its time to watch the Alt Right implode.

Read the rest of this post on the original site at Let’s Watch as the Alt Right Implodes



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Sunday, December 04, 2016

Let’s Watch as the Alt Right Implodes



Get some popcorn, because its time to watch the Alt Right implode.

Read the rest of this post on the original site at Let’s Watch as the Alt Right Implodes



Alt-right: more misogynistic than many neonazis (repost)

One of the major problems with the campaign to replace the term “alt-right” with “white supremacist” is that it tends to obscure other important dimensions of alt-right politics. The alt-right’s misogyny merits special attention, for a couple of reasons.

Read the rest of this post on the original site at Alt-right: more misogynistic than many neonazis



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Alt-right: more misogynistic than many neonazis



One of the major problems with the campaign to replace the term “alt-right” with “white supremacist” is that it tends to obscure other important dimensions of alt-right politics. The alt-right’s misogyny merits special attention, for a couple of reasons.

Read the rest of this post on the original site at Alt-right: more misogynistic than many neonazis



Tuesday, November 29, 2016

Castro and Us

fidel-castro-26All of leftbook seems to have been posting about Cuba and Castro, and in a really weird way this has served as a pretext for rehashing all kinds of 20th century debates. Nostalgia can be a fun drug, but like all fun drugs, best not to do it too often or let it get too serious.
 
Castro and Cuba were never important to me. Becoming political as an anarchist in the 80s has something to do with this. Not being from an oppressed nation aided by Cuba certainly played a part. Being in canada where honestly besides a smattering of trots the main Cuba supporters always seemed to be nice social democrats or at least people integrated into social democratic structures, definitely was a big factor (no surprise to me that our racist colonialist neoliberalism-with-a-smile PM wrote such a warm tribute to Castro; warmth towards Castro has been in no way confined to “our side” in the society in which i live)
 
Of the states within the world-system, Cuba with Castro may have had the most humane government in the americas. Definitely worth defending against u.s. imperialism, and worth celebrating the fact that out and out invasion and assassination attempts by the u.s. failed.
 
But you’re not defending anything against u.s. imperialism simply by getting mad at other radical leftists who don’t share your position on a revolution that occurred and charted its path in what was essentially a different world, one that no longer exists.
 
In 2016, one’s response to the former head of state’s passing, is not a good basis for choosing friends and enemies, and this would be so even if we weren’t clearly entering a particularly intense and desperate period of struggle.


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Friday, November 25, 2016

T-Shirts for Standing Rock

tshirt_sSUPPORT THE WATER PROTECTORS! SOLIDARITY AGAINST COLONIAL TERROR!

Until further notice, from this point on all proceeds from t-shirt sales purchased through this link (http://ift.tt/2gpb6ic) will be donated to support the people resisting colonial terror at Standing Rock.

The only money that will be kept by Kersplebedeb will be what is necessary to pay the paypal fees and the postage to mail you your shirt(s). The remainder will be sent to the official Oceti Sakowin Camp (Seven Council Fires) Fund. The Oceti Sakowin Camp is the main campsite where most water protectors are living and working — donations go toward continued functioning of the camp, including basic needs like food and winter equipment..

i don’t have all shirts in all sizes or colours. What i suggest is that you let me know what size(s) you would like, and what design(s) you would prefer (when you place your order you will be given a chance to add a message with your order). I will do my best to make you happy – if i do not have what you have indicated you want, i’ll get in touch by email and we will work something out. If you order a large quantity of shirts (12 or 72) I will send an assortment of shirts if you like. As the price goes down with larger quantities, this is also a good way to raise funds for your own projects.

Please help spread the word about this, by sharing it on social media, including for instance sharing the facebook event page (http://ift.tt/2fw4Tg7)



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Anti-fascists plan to protest black metal concert in Montreal on Saturday (repost)

Graveland, from Poland, is expected to perform. In 2008, Germany outlawed the sale of four of Graveland’s albums as “unsafe for youth.” Graveland

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Shut Down Milo: No Fascists On Campus (repost)

Milo Yiannopoulos is on a speaking tour of universities throughout the US, including major universities in the Mid-West & West Coast.

Read the rest of this post on the original site at Shut Down Milo: No Fascists On Campus



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Riseup’s Canary Has Died (repost)

Popular provider of web tools for activists and anarchists and backbone of much infrastructure for internet freedom, Riseup.net has almost certainly been issued a gag order by the US government.

Read the rest of this post on the original site at Riseup’s Canary Has Died



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Kersplebedeb Pop-Up Book Sale at Concordia

10608468_264558740400838_1179856300152640482_o

Monday November 28, 10 AM – 6 PM
Concordia University – Hall Building (1455, boulevard de Maisonneuve Ouest)
2nd Floor at the Kiosk just outside the cafe

Looking for radical literature for the holidays?

Come to the Kiosk (on the second floor of the Hall Building, just outside the cafe entrance) on Monday November 28th to say hi to Kersplebedeb, and to check out all of our books!

We will be tabling at the kiosk all day on Monday — there will be books on special, as well as titles from PM Press, AK Press, and many others — also t-shirts and buttons (anti-Trump!)

See you there!



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Anti-fascists plan to protest black metal concert in Montreal on Saturday



Graveland, from Poland, is expected to perform. In 2008, Germany outlawed the sale of four of Graveland's albums as "unsafe for youth." Graveland

Read the rest of this post on the original site at Anti-fascists plan to protest black metal concert in Montreal on Saturday



Shut Down Milo: No Fascists On Campus



Milo Yiannopoulos is on a speaking tour of universities throughout the US, including major universities in the Mid-West & West Coast.

Read the rest of this post on the original site at Shut Down Milo: No Fascists On Campus



Riseup’s Canary Has Died



Popular provider of web tools for activists and anarchists and backbone of much infrastructure for internet freedom, Riseup.net has almost certainly been issued a gag order by the US government.

Read the rest of this post on the original site at Riseup’s Canary Has Died



Thursday, November 24, 2016

Fin de cavale d’un punk qui voulait «vivre à fond» (repost)

Gilles a l’air déboussolé. Après vingt-huit ans de cavale, ce grand échalas vient de débarquer avec son sac à dos dans un café toulousain où il a rendez-vous avec son avocat. Il n’avait pas remis les pieds en France depuis 1988.

Read the rest of this post on the original site at Fin de cavale d’un punk qui voulait «vivre à fond»



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Fin de cavale d’un punk qui voulait «vivre à fond»



Gilles a l’air déboussolé. Après vingt-huit ans de cavale, ce grand échalas vient de débarquer avec son sac à dos dans un café toulousain où il a rendez-vous avec son avocat. Il n’avait pas remis les pieds en France depuis 1988.

Read the rest of this post on the original site at Fin de cavale d’un punk qui voulait «vivre à fond»



Wednesday, November 23, 2016

Certain Days 2017 — Quantities are Limited!!!

june imageAre you looking for a meaningful gift for your friends and fam?

Consider the Certain Days: Freedom for Political Prisoners Calendar. For only $12 per copy (or $8 per copy if you order 10 or more), you’ll be sharing 12 full months of powerful art and writings. This year’s theme is “Sustaining Movements,” and we hope it will inspire resistance and hope in the year to come.

You’ll also be contributing to the important work of grassroots groups. Each copy helps raise funds for Release Aging People in Prison (RAPP), Addameer Prisoner Support and Human Rights Association (Palestine), and Unist’ot’en Camp.

Supplies are limited, so we encourage you to order soon to avoid disappointment. In order to ensure holiday delivery, please order by December 12.

This is a gift that gives to both your loved ones, and to our communities. We thank you for your support!

Click here to to order 1-9 copies of the the 2017 Certain Days: Freedom for Political Prisoners Calendar

Click here to order 10 or more copies of the the 2017 Certain Days: Freedom for Political Prisoners Calendar

Please feel free to contact info@certaindays.org if you have questions.

The Certain Days collective

certaindays.org
http://ift.tt/2ghm0TG
http://twitter.com/certaindays



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PM Press 50% Off Sale — For the Rest of the Year!

pmpress50

For the rest of 2016, PM Press is offering 50% OFF ALL PM Press books, ebooks,
DVDs, and CDs with coupon code GIFT — just go to http://www.pmpress.org

 



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Ottawa Feminist Fair 2016

feministfair2016

Sunday, November 27
11 AM – 4 PM

Montgomery Legion
330 Kent St, Ottawa, Ontario K2P 2A6

The Feminist Twins are proud to present the 3rd annual Feminist Fair taking place on Sunday November 27th at the Montgomery Legion. Kersplebedeb tabled there last year, and we are happy to be there again in 2016 (Ottawa is always nice to visit!) bringing a large selection of books, pamphlets, as well as some relevant t-shirts and buttons!

The Feminist Fair is ALL AGES, pay what you can (no one turned away for lack of funds!), with proceeds going to Ottawa Coalition to End Violence Against Women. They are also accepting toiletries donations for STORM and Building Purple Bridges programs, which support sex trade workers and women at risk.

Some things you can expect to find include buttons, pins, patches, jewellery, clothing, bags, books, zines, prints, art, cupcakes, and more! Come support local artists!

Besides yours truly from Kersplebedeb, some of the other vendors include…

* Anxiety Slug
* astropuke
* Starchild Stela
* Trashy Kitty Jewelry
* Tess Giberson
* Second Aura
* Kel-Lee’s cards
* Country meet City
* FaeLord Crafts
* Lady Arkenstone
* My Oh My Jewellery
* Prickly Business: Jen Makes Plants
* OMG Becky
* Elizabeth Fry Society of Ottawa
* Ottawa Coalition to End Violence Against Women (OCTEVAW)

and more!

***

Accessibility:

– The venue is accessible & there is an elevator in the building (the fair is on the 2nd floor)
– There is a free coat check on site
– There will be childminding this year on site. This means children will be attended to in the same space as the fair, and will be given crafts and coloring books. To sign up for childminding, you will fill out a form on site.
– Please be aware of scents (perfumes, body spray, etc) and how they may affect others. Keep all scents to a minimum
– Please do not take pictures of people without their consent
– There is some parking but it is street parking
– If you are feeling unsafe for any reason, please speak to a volunteer. They will be wearing name tags
– There are two/2 washrooms on site and they are gender neutral

 



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Night-Vision, Available as Ebook (For Free!)

nv_coversThe authors of Night-Vision: Illuminating War and Class on the Neo-Colonial Terrain have been working on significant additional material to include in a new edition, which is to be published by Kersplebedeb in 2017.

That said, given the current political conflagration — itself a clear manifestation of the deadly deepening tensions between processes of neocolonial desettlerization and neocolonial revanchism — we felt it was important to make this book available. For that reason, it is being uploaded to amazon, with some minor alterations, but without the new material that is expected next year. This is a slightly modified version of the 1993 edition, available on amazon for download, and from November 24-28 for free (after that $4.95):

http://ift.tt/2gChfIq

(a big thank you to everyone who worked on transcribing this!)

Some people found the recent giveaway we did of Settlers on Amazon confusing, because it gives you two options, to sign up for “Kindle Unlimited” or to “Buy Now”. Given that this is free, some people thought the former was the thing to click, and then were disappointed that they were being asked to subscribe to Amazon’s not-free service. To be clear: when going to Amazon to download a free book, you click on the “Buy Now With One Click” button, not the Kindle unlimited button.

ABOUT NIGHT-VISION

The transformation to a neo-colonial world has only begun, but it promises to be as drastic, as disorienting a change as was the original european colonial conquest of the human race. Capitalism is again ripping apart & restructuring the world, and nothing will be the same. Not race, not nation, not gender, and certainly not whatever culture you used to have.

Now you have outcast groups as diverse as the Aryan Nation and the Queer Nation and the Hip Hop Nation publicly rejecting the right of the u.s. government to rule them. All the building blocks of human culture—race, gender, nation, and especially class—are being transformed under great pressure to embody the spirit of this neo-colonial age.

The definitive analysis of postmodern capitalism, the decline of u.s. hegemony, and the need and possibilities for a revolutionary movement of the oppressed to overthrow it all. Now available in ebook format from Amazon:

http://ift.tt/2gChfIq

WHAT PEOPLE ARE SAYING

“A book that should be read by anyone who gives a damn about a non-racist, non-sexist, non-homophobic future.” — Bo Brown, former political prisoner

“Night-Vision was so compelling to me because it has a spirit of militancy which reformist feminism tries to kill because militant feminism is seen as a threat to the liberal bourgeois feminism that just wants to be equal with men. It has that raw, unmediated truth-telling which I think we are going to need in order to deal with the fascism that’s upon us” — bell hooks

“Confronted with a world that is disintegrating daily under patriarchy, women need a book like this which begins to challenge us to build a truly communal way of life.” — Liz Fink, Attica prison rebellion lawyer

“This book gives new insight into the powerful force of neo-colonialism, a reality of today’s world which is worldwide in scope. Neo-colonialism is revealed as hard to fight for it has found a way to scramble relationships, making it difficult to clearly know one’s enemy. This book also binds together sex, race, and class in a new form, a form which helps one to grasp the interlocking nature of these oppressions. Night-Vision is well worth reading and studying.” — Mary I. Buckley

“Lee and Rover argue that the very ascension of the global economy is the backdrop for the disturbing surge of ethnic and national antagonisms, as players below the world ruling class level frantically scramble to control pieces of territory in order to have some arena of power. (While this insight is helpful, it is not adequate because it doesn’t explain why these forces won’t instead ally in order to enhance their power.) There’s been a shift from a bipolar world of the colonizers vs. the colonized to a more fluid and chaotic world of transnational capital on top of a range of fragmented subgroups let loose to fight out their sectional needs. The resulting series of social conflicts are not moral issues to the ruling class but simply matters of the maximization of profit for capital. They are perfectly willing to let these subgroups fight it out for position – and then make use of the victors against the losers and of the conflict itself to maintain social control from above.” — David Gilbert, political prisoner



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Monday, November 21, 2016

#TrumpTheRegime: Resources and Ongoing Resistance to Trump and the Far-Right (repost)

Trump’s win of the electoral college (despite losing the popular vote by 2 million votes) thrust many into the streets for the first time against the billionaire real estate mogul and the wider system and crisis of capitalist civilization he seeks to manage.

Read the rest of this post on the original site at #TrumpTheRegime: Resources and Ongoing Resistance to Trump and the Far-Right



on the main Kersplebedeb website: http://ift.tt/2gdLxP9



Important Things to Read in the Present Juncture

These are some specific documents available on Kersplebedeb and related sites that are of particular relevance in the present juncture:

In terms of books available through Leftwingbooks.Net, the following titles may be of special interest:

Finally, although the contours of the actual situation are still in the process of materializing, the following texts found elsewhere online have struck me as being timely — please note that inclusion here does not denote agreement, just that these are “of interest”:

Also, It’s Going Down has a useful “#TRUMPTHEREGIME: RESOURCES AND ONGOING RESISTANCE TO TRUMP AND THE FAR-RIGHT” page that is worth checking out

 

 

 



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#TrumpTheRegime: Resources and Ongoing Resistance to Trump and the Far-Right



Trump’s win of the electoral college (despite losing the popular vote by 2 million votes) thrust many into the streets for the first time against the billionaire real estate mogul and the wider system and crisis of capitalist civilization he seeks to manage.

Read the rest of this post on the original site at #TrumpTheRegime: Resources and Ongoing Resistance to Trump and the Far-Right



Settlers the Mythology of the White Proletariat FREE DOWNLOAD

2_settlersUntil midnight on November 22nd (less than 36 hours from now), you can download Settlers: The Mythology of the White Proletariat from Mayflower to Modern by J. Sakai, for free:

https://www.amazon.com/Settlers-Mythology-Proletariat-Mayflower-Modern-ebook/dp/B00N980EQK

Kersplebedeb is offering this book for free download, as it seems particularly timely in the present political context.

Settlers is a uniquely important book in the canon of the North American revolutionary left and anticolonial movements. First published in the 1980s by activists with decades of experience organizing in grassroots anticapitalist struggles against white supremacy, the book soon established itself as an essential reference point for revolutionary nationalists and dissident currents within the predominantly colonialist Marxist-Leninist and anarchist movements at that time.

Always controversial within the establishment Left Settlers uncovers centuries of collaboration between capitalism and white workers and their organizations, as well as their neocolonial allies, showing how the United States was designed from the ground up as a parasitic and genocidal entity. Settlers exposes the fact that America’s white citizenry have never supported themselves but have always resorted to exploitation and theft, culminating in acts of genocide to maintain their culture and way of life. As recounted in painful detail by Sakai, the United States has been built on the theft of Indigenous lands and of Afrikan labor, on the robbery of the northern third of Mexico, the colonization of Puerto Rico, and the expropriation of the Asian working class, with each of these crimes being accompanied by violence.

This new edition includes “Cash & Genocide: The True Story of Japanese-American Reparations” and an interview with author J. Sakai by Ernesto Aguilar.

What People Are Saying

“Settlers is a critical analysis of the colonization of the Americas that overturns the ‘official’ narrative of poor and dispossessed European settlers to reveal the true nature of genocidal invasion and land theft that has occurred for over five hundred years. If you want to understand the present, you must know the past, and this book is a vital contribution to that effort.”
—Gord Hill, author of 500 Years of Indigenous Resistance

“Great works measure up, inspire higher standards of intellectual and moral honesty, and, when appreciated for what they are, serve as a guide for those among us who intend a transformation of reality. Settlers should serve as a reminder (to anyone who needs one) of the genocidal tendencies of the empire, the traitorous interplay between settler-capitalist, settler-nondescript, and colonial flunkies.”
—Kuwasi Balagoon, Black Liberation Army

“When Settlers hit the tiers of San Quentin, back in 1986, it totally exploded our ideas about what we as a new class of revolutionaries thought we knew about a so-called ‘united working class’ in amerika. And what’s more, it brought the actual contradictions of national oppression and imperialism into sharp focus. It was my first, and as such my truest, study of the actual mechanics behind the expertly fabricated illusion of an amerikan proletariat.”
—Sanyika Shakur, author of Monster: The Autobiography of an L.A. Gang Member

About the Author

J. Sakai is a revolutionary intellectual with decades of experience as an activist in the United States. On the subject of his own past, and the writing of Settlers, he has said:

“In the Fall 1961, i found myself with other militant Sit-In veterans in the reborn Oakland chapter of Congress of Racial Equality, picketing a major store which had refused to hire New Afrikans. Even in the Bay Area that was the custom and law back then. It had started years earlier for me in high school in L.A.’s 1950’s San Fernando Valley. Where as the lone uneducated leftist i had tried unsuccessfully to sell copies of the socialist labor party newspaper (the only one i could get) every week to my classmates. At the same time was working as an Asian houseboy for the family of a Jewish used car dealer (stereotypes abound for a reason). Was fired for taking a night off for my own high school graduation. The wife lost it and screamed, ” People like you don’t need graduations!” A month later was living in a different state to find a job and avoid the “colored” military draft. And active as the novice food drive coordinator in a long, bitter, ugly hospital workers’ strike, whose main public demand was pay raises up to the federal minimum wage (we lost badly).

Have been through a thousand campaigns and movement groups since then, and can’t believe i’ve been so dumb so often. In 1975, while mostly active doing Afrikan liberation movement support with radical exiles from various countries, i started writing a historical investigation into the puzzling class politics of euro-amerikan workers. Which i naively thought would only be a quick movement paper. Eight years later what became re-titled as Settlers was finished. Even then i didn’t believe there was any audience for it, and planned to only photocopy fifty copies of my typed draft for internal education in the underground black liberation army coordinating committee. Comrades with more sense than myself insisted that we publish it as a book if only for the liberation movement. Over the years, we took it through three editions, but finally it’s time to hand it on to new publishers. Remember only, i wrote this with my life.”



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Free Shipping at Leftwingbooks.NET

free-shipping-stampJust to let people know, for the remainder of 2016, Kersplebedeb Leftwingbooks.Net is offering free shipping on orders of $50 or more, anywhere in the world. Please note that this special will get you the cheapest mail delivery available — i.e. surface mail if you are overseas. Orders placed after December 11th will definitely arrive after December 25th.

Leftwingbooks.Net distributes all Kersplebedeb Publications, all books published by AK Press and PM Press, as well as publications from many other left, anarchist, and communist publishers and projects. We are especially happy to carry both the Certain Days Freedom for Political Prisoners Calendar, and the Slingshot desktop and pocket organizers.



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Marine Le Pen takes huge lead over Nicolas Sarkozy in French first round presidential election poll (repost)

Front National leader Marine Le Pen has taken a sizeable lead over Nicolas Sarkozy in a new French presidential election poll.

Read the rest of this post on the original site at Marine Le Pen takes huge lead over Nicolas Sarkozy in French first round presidential election poll



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Lyon : affrontements à la librairie anarchiste “La Plume Noire” (repost)

Le Parti de Gauche dénonce “l’attaque de la librairie Plume Noire à coups de barres de fer et de battes de baseball” par une vingtaine de militants d’extrême droite ce samedi.

Read the rest of this post on the original site at Lyon : affrontements à la librairie anarchiste “La Plume Noire”



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A Red Guards Reflection on the Recent “White Lives Matter” Protest (repost)

As organized fascists have been attempting to make a presence and gain traction here in Austin, communists and otherwise revolutionary-minded folks have been ramping up our antifascist work.

Read the rest of this post on the original site at A Red Guards Reflection on the Recent “White Lives Matter” Protest



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Marine Le Pen takes huge lead over Nicolas Sarkozy in French first round presidential election poll



Front National leader Marine Le Pen has taken a sizeable lead over Nicolas Sarkozy in a new French presidential election poll.

Read the rest of this post on the original site at Marine Le Pen takes huge lead over Nicolas Sarkozy in French first round presidential election poll



Lyon : affrontements à la librairie anarchiste "La Plume Noire"



Le Parti de Gauche dénonce "l'attaque de la librairie Plume Noire à coups de barres de fer et de battes de baseball" par une vingtaine de militants d'extrême droite ce samedi.

Read the rest of this post on the original site at Lyon : affrontements à la librairie anarchiste "La Plume Noire"



A Red Guards Reflection on the Recent “White Lives Matter” Protest



As organized fascists have been attempting to make a presence and gain traction here in Austin, communists and otherwise revolutionary-minded folks have been ramping up our antifascist work.

Read the rest of this post on the original site at A Red Guards Reflection on the Recent “White Lives Matter” Protest



Friday, November 18, 2016

Listening to Trump (repost)

Leaning into the mic, face flushed, speaking with unhurried and angry deliberation, Donald Trump told a cheering New Hampshire audience: “We’re gonna bring businesses back. We’re gonna have businesses that used to be in New Hampshire, that are now in Mexico, come back to New Hampshire.

Read the rest of this post on the original site at Listening to Trump



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Listening to Trump



Leaning into the mic, face flushed, speaking with unhurried and angry deliberation, Donald Trump told a cheering New Hampshire audience: “We’re gonna bring businesses back. We’re gonna have businesses that used to be in New Hampshire, that are now in Mexico, come back to New Hampshire.

Read the rest of this post on the original site at Listening to Trump



Saturday, November 12, 2016

Peter Thiel goes ‘big league’, joining Trump’s presidential transition team (repost)

The PayPal founder’s support for Donald Trump made him an outlier in liberal Silicon Valley. What do we know about this controversial billionaire? Controversial Silicon Valley billionaire Peter Thiel will be a member of Donald Trump’s transition team, the campaign has confirmed.

Read the rest of this post on the original site at Peter Thiel goes ‘big league’, joining Trump’s presidential transition team



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No One is Coming to Save Us (repost)

The surprise victory of Donald Trump this past Tuesday has quickly presented people in this country (and around the world) with a vastly different political landscape than we had expected.

Read the rest of this post on the original site at No One is Coming to Save Us



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“For the Love of Palestine:” New booklet highlights stories of Palestinian women prisoners

booklettMembers of the Prison, Labor and Academic Delegation to Palestine, working with The Freedom Archives, have developed and released a new booklet focusing on the struggle of Palestinian women prisoners. “For the Love of Palestine: Stories of Women, Imprisonment and Resistance” highlights the cases of ten present and former Palestinian women prisoners and the continuing struggle of Palestinian women for justice, return and liberation.

The booklet was edited by Diana Block and Anna Henry, and the front cover features a 1989 drawing by former U.S. political prisoner Laura Whitehorn, drawn in the DC jail in 1989. The booklet was produced in partnership with Addameer Prisoner Support and Human Rights Association and Samidoun Palestinian Prisoner Solidarity Network.

The booklet includes an introduction by the editors, Block and Henry, a map of prisons and detention centers in occupied Palestine, a glossary of important terms, a reflection by Whitehorn about mutual struggle and a resource guide, as well as presenting the stories of specific Palestinian women and solidarity messages from US political prisoners.

The booklet includes the cases of Dareen Tatour, Khalida Jarrar, Dima al-Wawi, Lina Jarbouni, Mona Qa’adan, Ihsan Dababseh, Natalie Shokha, Lina Khattab, Hana Shalabi and Rasmea Odeh; it also includes solidarity messages by Herman Bell, Jalil Muntaqim and David Gilbert.

The book was published by the Freedom Archives and is available for download: http://ift.tt/2fImvHp



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Peter Thiel goes 'big league', joining Trump's presidential transition team



The PayPal founder’s support for Donald Trump made him an outlier in liberal Silicon Valley. What do we know about this controversial billionaire? Controversial Silicon Valley billionaire Peter Thiel will be a member of Donald Trump’s transition team, the campaign has confirmed.

Read the rest of this post on the original site at Peter Thiel goes 'big league', joining Trump's presidential transition team



No One is Coming to Save Us



The surprise victory of Donald Trump this past Tuesday has quickly presented people in this country (and around the world) with a vastly different political landscape than we had expected.

Read the rest of this post on the original site at No One is Coming to Save Us



Tuesday, November 08, 2016

Stein Lillevolden Reviews Det Globale Perspektiv

det-global-perspektiv_sA book review of
Torkil Lauesen
380 pages
Nemo Publishing, Copenhagen 2016

by Stein Lillevolden (social worker)

First posted at: http://ift.tt/2fzOIQQ

Also published in the Danish newsletter Demos

In the late 1970s, I studied political science at Oslo University, by all evidence pretty half-heartedly. With half a heart — mostly because it was a deeply reactionary subject with a unilateral Western perspective on the world, though fortunately the activist students at that time were still able to squeeze into the syllabus theories about unequal exchange between the center and periphery of the imperialist system.

Theorists like Arghiri Emmanuel, Samir Amin, and Andre Gunder Frank saved my graduation (and continued student loans). They also gave compelling and inspirational insights into how poor developing countries were exploited in the world economy through unequal exchange, and provided a surprisingly revolutionary perspective on how such countries could liberate themselves from Western economic domination; this in a course where Henry Kissinger was seen as a credible statesman rather than a war criminal.

Activist Political Scientist

When I googled “unequal exchange” to see if it still has a place in the Norwegian Institute for Political Sciences curriculum, the first link was on the importance of changing hair shampoo based on different kinds of activity (jogging, partying, work, etc.), which might say something about Norway’s position in anti-imperialist discourse, given that the corresponding searches in Danish and English gave far more relevant results. Fortunately, there are still some activist and leftist political scientists outside of Norway. One of the most important is Torkil Lauesen, in Denmark, and his new book Det Globale Perspektiv, besides being a compelling survey of imperialist history, also provided a lovely reunion with my theoretical rescuers from poli-sci.

In this new book, Torkil Lauesen explains how global neoliberalism, with increased movement of goods, capital, and labor, simultaneously enhances a global racial hierarchy — a global system of apartheid. At the same time, the current economic and political crisis in this structure opens up opportunities for the progressive forces around the world to organize basic systemic changes through global analysis and cooperation, making resistance against imperialism as international as capitalism.

Struggle against Capitalism

Torkil Lauesen has spent more than 40 years politically active in very different forms of struggle against capitalism, and he does not hide the different strengths and weaknesses of these different forms of struggle.

Lauesen has a somewhat unconventional educational background. He completed his degree in political science while serving a 10-year sentence in a high security prison in the outskirts of Copenhagen. The sentence was handed down for participation in the so-called Blekingegade Group’s robberies to obtain money for liberation movements such as the PFLP in Palestine. After journalist Peter Øvig Knudsen’s highly dramatized and tendentious books on the “Blekingegade Gang” and the subsequent films and television productions, it comes as a relief to read Lauesen’s sober description of the theoretical background, political development, and illegal practice of the Blekingegade Group, all without any hint of glorifying their actions.

When Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri wrote Empire, another of today’s major books on imperialism, there were strenuous attempts to marginalize Negri because of his 30-year prison sentence, “reduced” to 13 years, for “promoting terrorism and insurrection against the state”. There have been similar attempts to marginalize Torkil Lauesen, following his release, in particular by the venerable and respectable section of the left. So his book will not be part of the curriculum at the Institute of Political Science, but that will not prevent it from becoming part of activists’ revolutionary curriculum.

Unequal Exchange

Lauesen tells about his background in assorted “alphabet-organizations” like KAK and M-KA; the latter, the Manifest Communist Working Group, would later become famous as the “Blekingegade Gang”. The group´s worldview was inspired by Lenin´s so-called parasite-state theory, where the material wealth in our part of the world is built on imperialist exploitation of the Third World. From this theory, they drew the conclusion that the Western working class is a labor aristocracy without revolutionary potential. This was also rooted in Lenin’s theory of imperialism, where a portion of the superprofits Western capitalists acquire through exploiting the rest of the world are used to buy off and pacify the Western working class, making it into to an aristocracy of consumers who have no interest in ending the imperialist exploitation of the Third World.

Following this logic, the group concluded that their revolutionary practice had to be to support the liberation movements in the Third World, instead of the traditional left-wing practice in trade unions and left-wing parties in the North. To put it mildly, this is not my favorite theory, as it is demobilizing and strongly discourages any attempt to counter power and resist the conditions of life in our part of the world. That said, it’s much more interesting with the theories of imperialism that Lauesen derives from here on in, and there’s no reason for me to get into a big fight over the “correct line”, when his analysis of imperialism is so good. The book contains a few such attempts at “line battles” against long-extinct dinosaurs, but fortunately, the main analysis of the current situation is far more convincing than the theoretical and practical issues of the 1970s.

Easy to Read

The biggest strength of Torkil Lauesen’s new book is that he succeeds in writing about theory and imperialist history in a language that doesn’t require readers to have earned a black belt in Marxist theory. I can assure everyone with traumatic experiences from trying to follow the debates between Maoists, anti-imperialists, and Kapital interpreters during the 1970s — or, for that matter, from the 1980s and ‘90s autonomist mumbo-jumbo I myself partook in — that Lauesen’s book reads really well and is practically free of any dogmatic rhetoric. Considering the author’s political background, this is a feat unto itself.

It was also a minor stroke of genius that Lauesen left the discussion of Marx’s theory of value to a separate appendix in the back of the book. A “major nightmare” for everyone who ever participated in a study circle, which caused people to run away screaming after an endless review of the Marxist theory of value, before they ever got to the interesting philosophical, historical, economic, and political analyses, was redeemed here by the author in a sensible, elegant, and educational way. In addition, even his appendix on the theory of value is good and easy to comprehend, and is completely free of dogmatism tainting the historical and political analysis.

Globalized capitalism

The core of Lauesen’s political and economic analysis consists of his rethinking of the theory of the unequal exchange, though still with clear references to the dependency theories of Arghiri Emmanuel and Samir Amin.

It is also a strength of the book that it combines theory with the art of putting concrete numbers on the size of unequal exchange and the global apartheid system in which international capitalism is organized. The annoyingly slow Dell notebook computer I write reports on when at work, is assembled by East Asian or South Asian workers who might earn only a few per cent of what I earn when I use it, and this is not just because I’m highly paid by Danish standards. The production of computers is globalized in transnational production chains, where each sub-process is located where production costs, infrastructure, taxes, wages, etc. are best for capital.

Moreover, the iPad I am so happy with and with which I am presently sitting in the sun and writing this article on, was produced under equally outrageous conditions. According to Lauesen, Apple management refers to the Foxconn factories in China, which produce their iPads, as “Mordor” – the name of the hell where the prince of darkness rules in Lord of the Rings. This insight does not stop Apple from taking out at least 45 percent of the sale price of an iPad in pure profit, while the wages of the person who assembles it can be measured in thousandths of the sale price.

Apple does not own a single factory, but gets everything produced by subcontractors in the South who brutally exploit labor. The same goes for many brand products that are part of our everyday lives, whether we’re talking about clothing, shoes, automobiles, furniture or electronics. The subcomponents in my beloved iPad are manufactured by companies such as Toshiba and Samsung. All the subcomponents are then transported to Shenzhen in China, where the company Foxconn has its huge assembly plants. Here iPhones, iPads, MacBooks, and other brand PCs are assembled by 400,000 Chinese workers who produce 12 hours each day, 6 days a week, sleeping and eating in the factory dormitory and receiving a salary which in 2009 was the legal minimum in Shenzhen, namely 83 cents an hour.

A Totally Changed World

We are part of an increasingly unequal world, where the working class in the South is exploited in ways that have not been since the early industrialization of Europe. Technological advances in the productive forces have led to an industrialization of the former periphery, which the dependency theorists never thought possible, as they believed the South would remain suppliers of raw materials. However, today 80 percent of the world’s industrial workers are located in the South, while the North has de-industrialized.

This has meant a totally changed world, with China being the most obvious example. Yet my daily wages are still equivalent to at least a week’s salary in China, so I can buy cheap goods from the South, which in turn allows me a far greater material consumption than what would be possible if everything was produced on a Danish wage level. This is a recipe for ecological disaster, in addition to the sweatshops, child labor, and appalling working conditions with which the international working class is exploited to the utmost. The consumer aristocracy in the North takes daily “advantage” of this disastrous course, when we with our salaries can buy cheap products created through the exploitation of humans and corresponding exploitation of nature via the consumption of undervalued raw materials.

In the theory of imperialism of the 1970s, political economists explained how the development of the periphery in the South depended on capitalism in the center. Today we in the “center” are dependent on the production of the “periphery”. Lauesen argues that today, the “producer economies” and “consumer economies” are closely connected through global production chains, and that unequal exchange within this system has altered relations in the global system from the 1970s model of center and periphery. Lauesen predicts this economic development will create revolutionary situations in the South, which it is our responsibility to ally with and support.

The Global Resistance

At a time when there is a tabloid consensus that it is no use trying get people to read more than tweets of at most 140 characters at a time, or else just enjoy the selfies on Facebook, it is obviously risky to recommend a 380-page Danish volume on imperialism. However, the fact is that people are reading theoretical and analytical political works to a surprising extent, and that it is more the subsequent organizational effort that is lagging behind.

For example, Negri and Hardt’s Empire and Pikettys Capital are sold in huge numbers, and they are read. Therefore, my recommendation of Lauesen’s book has to do with continuing these earlier debates. His book has caused me to jump up from my chair, to yell and scream in rage about globalized capitalism, and has set the rusty gears in my brain and my dormant anarchic attitudes in motion.

In many ways, Lauesen is starting where Piketty leaves off, and although Piketty is empirically impressive, unlike Lauesen he provides no figures about globalized capitalism. Whereas Negri and Hardt’s analysis leads us to a universal Imperium with neither center nor periphery, it is Lauesen’s great strength that he ends his book by sketching a theory of action for the coming revolutionary struggle. He draws on the lessons learned from the Zapatistas and other revolutions of the 20th century where people tried to build transnational alliances with like-minded movements.

Lauesen emphasizes that the struggle against globalized capitalism also provides opportunities to undo the distinction between “us” and “them” that characterizes the politics of nation-states and the West, whether in relation to refugees, racism or economic exploitation, and from there move in the direction of global awareness, concrete solidarity, and common struggle. Confronting worldwide unequal exchange will have consequences for our way of life, but is indispensable if we do not want predatory capitalism to wipe out all human existence. Torkil Lauesen´s book Det Globale Perspektiv is a good place to start studying in the increasingly necessary revolutionary curriculum.


 

In the 1970s and 80s, Torkil Lauesen was a member of a clandestine communist cell which carried out a series of robberies in Denmark, netting very large sums which were then sent on to various national liberation movements in the Third World. Following their capture in 1989, Torkil would spend six years in prison. In 2016, Torkil’s book Det Globale Perspektiv was released in Denmark. In it, he explains how he sees the world political situation today, and his thoughts about the future. This story of Torkil and his comrades’ activities that led to their arrest is recounted in fascinating detail in the book Turning Money into Rebellion: The Unlikely Story of Denmark’s Revolutionary Bank Robbers (edited and translated by Gabriel Kuhn, published by Kersplebedeb & PM Press in 2014) currently on sale at leftwingbooks.netThere is currently an Indiegogo fundraiser to be able to have Det Globale Perspectiv translated into English and published by Kersplebedeb in 2018. Please consider donating here.



on the main Kersplebedeb website: http://ift.tt/2eAwfkL



Saturday, November 05, 2016

Cultural appropriation is a toxic concept. (repost)

If the title of my article alone makes you wanna write me off right off the bat, and makes you decide not to read my article then that is your right, but you lose any right to argue or attack me unless you have listened to what I am gonna say here and considered all my points.

Read the rest of this post on the original site at Cultural appropriation is a toxic concept.



on the main Kersplebedeb website: http://ift.tt/2f4LYw9



Cultural appropriation is a toxic concept.



If the title of my article alone makes you wanna write me off right off the bat, and makes you decide not to read my article then that is your right, but you lose any right to argue or attack me unless you have listened to what I am gonna say here and considered all my points.

Read the rest of this post on the original site at Cultural appropriation is a toxic concept.



Friday, November 04, 2016

Torkil Lauesen on Politics, Struggle, and The Global Perspective

torkil_emmanuel

In the 1970s and 80s, Torkil Lauesen was a member of a clandestine communist cell which carried out a series of robberies in Denmark, netting very large sums which were then sent on to various national liberation movements in the Third World. Following their capture in 1989, Torkil would spend six years in prison. In 2016, Torkil’s book Det Globale Perspektiv was released in Denmark. In it, he explains how he sees the world political situation today, and his thoughts about the future. This story of Torkil and his comrades’ activities that led to their arrest is recounted in fascinating detail in the book Turning Money into Rebellion: The Unlikely Story of Denmark’s Revolutionary Bank Robbers (edited and translated by Gabriel Kuhn, published by Kersplebedeb & PM Press in 2014) currently on sale at leftwingbooks.net
There is currently an Indiegogo fundraiser to be able to have Det Globale Perspectiv translated into English and published by Kersplebedeb in 2018. Please consider donating here.

Background to “The Global Perspective”: Why this book?

I was born in 1952 in Denmark. My mother was a nurse, my father a seaman. If ever there was a capitalist welfare state, Denmark was it. We got a TV and a refrigerator in 56, a small Renault car in 59, and we moved from a social housing flat to our own house in 62. The slogan of the ruling Social Democratic Party was: “Make good times better.”

My first experience with politics was the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962. During the Cold War, as part of the arms race between the superpowers, the Soviet Union intended to deploy nuclear missiles in Cuba. This was partly a response to the US deployment of similar missiles in Turkey directed against the Soviet Union and partly a response to the unsuccessful CIA-backed invasion of Cuba at the Bay of Pigs in 1961.

The Soviet ships, bound for Cuba with the equipment, were spotted in the Baltic Sea near the coast of Denmark, and the US established a naval blockade of Cuba. What would happen when the Soviet ships came into confrontation with the US Navy? Nuclear war between the superpowers lurked on the horizon.

I was ten years old, but understood very well the seriousness of the situation. The Civil Defense had distributed a leaflet to every family entitled: “If the War Comes.” In the booklet there were pictures of how one should take cover under the coffee table when you see the light flash of the exploding bomb. On our new TV, I had seen the image of the mushroom cloud, and in our street, I heard the sound of sirens that were tested every Wednesday. Our neighbor had stored a lot of canned food and water down in their basement. I thought about what would happen when we had eaten the food and were forced to come up from the basement. What would the world be like?

The immediate danger passed. Elvis, the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, and discussions about hair length took over in my mind. But now there was also an organization : “No More War” was the first political movement I supported, and I was quite sure that I would be a conscientious objector when I was drafted.

Another military confrontation—the Vietnam War—loomed larger and larger in my mind, not least because of the daily footage on TV. It is no wonder that the Vietnam War was an important mobilizing factor for my generation of anti-imperialists. The war was one of the most brutal in recent history. The bombing from B-52 aircrafts, which began with Operation Rolling Thunder in 1965 and continued until the ceasefire negotiations in 1973, was massive. North Vietnam, which was the size of Texas, was bombed with a tonnage three times greater than the total bombing of Europe, Asia, and Africa during the entire Second World War. Fifteen million tons of bombs with an explosive force equivalent to 400 Hiroshima bombs were poured down on Vietnam. CIA anti-guerrilla operations, such as Operation Phoenix, “neutralized” more than 80,000 civilians suspected of being Viet Cong supporters. Overall, more than 1.5 million Vietnamese were killed because of the US war. It is not an exaggeration to call the American war a “genocide”—a verdict that the Russell Tribunal, chaired by Jean Paul Sartre, reached in Stockholm 1967. President Nixon and Secretary of State Kissinger should, according to international law, have been brought before a war crimes tribunal.

Therefore, it was no accident that one of the first political books I bought was War Crimes in Vietnam, by Nobel Prize winner and philosopher Bertrand Russell. Recently, in connection with writing The Global Perspective, I looked at the book again. The following passage had been underlined by me in the late sixties:

“To some, the expression ‘U.S. imperialism’ appears as a cliché because it is not part of their own experience. We in the West are the beneficiaries of imperialism. The spoils of exploitation are the means of our corruption.” (Russell, Bertrand, 2013 [1966], ‘Peace through Resistance to US Imperialism’, in Barry Feinberg and Ronald Kasril, eds., Russell’s America: His Transatlantic Travels and Writings, A Documented Account, vol. 2, 1945-1970, London: Routledge)

This passage obviously affected me, for looking back on the development of my political views, the words sum up my experience. It began with feelings: as a need for justice for the people of Vietnam, as resentment against US napalm bombings. Possibly, I was also having a guilty conscience over the fact that I was leading a rich life, while so many people in the Third World lead theirs under such poor conditions. I am comfortably writing this text on one of our two household computers. We also have an iPad, a couple of mobile phones, and a flat panel TV. Our 90-square-meter apartment has a bathroom and a modern kitchen. On holidays I travel abroad by plane, enjoying the sun in countries where people are stone broke. The high income I have can pay for it all. Perhaps it is this disparity in the necessities of life that has given me my personal political drive. What kind of history is it that has led to this global disparity? What mechanisms are involved in maintaining it? And why is it so hard to change this situation? In order to find answers to these questions, I began searching through political theory.

In 1969, I found the answers in the political organization that later turned into the so-called “Blekinge Street Group.” Their theory explained to me how the world is organized and functions in a manner that I could recognize immediately from my own everyday life. The theory explained that there was a connection between all the riches in our part of the world and the poverty in the Third World—the connection being imperialism. It also explained why the working class in our part of the world did not want socialism, preferring reforms within the existing system.

I became a member of the Kommunistisk Arbejdskreds (Communist Working Circle), or KAK. Theory turned my individual uncoordinated political action into organized strategic practice. Concretely, this meant study visits to the Third World to see the social conditions and meet with liberation movements first hand, and later on, practical material support to some of these movements. These experiences strengthened my initial feelings: We felt a personal responsibility to help the liberation movements – which had now turned into real people, into comrades. We wanted to be a little cog in the machinery promoting a different world order.

This practice, these feelings, again brought about political reflection and studies aimed at investigating, explaining, and mobilizing others—and hopefully ourselves—i.e. evoking feelings and action.

Thus, theoretical development was always important to us. There was always careful theoretical, strategic, and tactical thought behind our practice. We always discussed politics before practice when working with liberation movements. Therefore, when looking back on more than forty years of political activity, one can see an oscillation between feelings, practice, and theoretical reflection. This book is a collection of these theoretical deliberations.

As mentioned above, I was politicized by the Vietnam War. In the solidarity work and in demonstrations against the war, it was primarily students who were at the forefront. We did not see much of the working class and its organizations. At the same time, it seemed to me that there was an enormous difference between the conditions which the proletariat of the Third World was living under and the problems that the working class in my part of the world was grappling with. There is a great difference between starvation, long unhealthy workdays, and two dollars pay a day, on the one side, and longer holidays, increased pensions, and two dollars more per hour, which were on the agenda of the labor struggles in Denmark in the sixties.

The fact that the challenges facing the working class of the Third World are far greater than the problems the working class faces here might seem obvious to most people. That there is a connection between these living conditions and the radicalism of the resistance and the desire for a different world order might also be regarded as an uncontroversial observation. Among leftists in our part of the world, however, this observation is highly controversial. To claim that the working class in countries like Denmark is taking advantage of the global division of labor, and therefore doesn’t have a direct interest in changing the existing system—and that this fact is the reason for the lack of international solidarity on the part of the working class—is considered taboo and almost treasonous.

Nevertheless, these were the kinds of heretical thoughts that the KAK was putting forth in what it referred to as the “parasite state theory.” However, it was not just the intellectual consistency of the KAK’s theory that drew me in. It was also the commitment and the integrity that the members I met were showing. To them solidarity was not just political statements, but “something you could hold in your hand.” There was a connection between what they were saying and the practice they maintained.

The parasite state theory was formulated and developed primarily by the leader of the KAK, Gotfred Appel, in a series of articles that appeared in the KAK’s newspaper Kommunistisk Orientering (Communist Orientation) between 1966 and the dissolution of the KAK in 1977. (Many of these texts are available online at snylterstaten.dk) One consequence of the dissolution was the formation of the Manifest–Kommunistisk Arbejdsgruppe (Manifest – Communist Working Group), or MKA. In the MKA we tried to substantiate and develop the economic basis of the theory of the parasite state, linking it to Arghiri Emmanuel’s theory of unequal exchange, which described how the exploitation of the proletariat in Asia, Africa, and South America comes about by way of international trade. Historically and sociologically, we also tried to elaborate our theory, linking it especially to Immanuel Wallerstein’s world-systems theory. This theory describes the historical and political development of capitalism from the Middle Ages up until today, as a continuous center-periphery relationship.

In 1983, the MKA released the book Unequal Exchange and the Prospects for Socialism in a Divided World. At the time, it was the most comprehensive and coherent statement in Danish on the theory of the parasite state, addressing both its economic basis and its consequences from a political and a class point of view, not to mention providing a strategy for what to do in the core countries of imperialism. (Originally published in Danish in 1983, Unequal Exchange and the Prospects for Socialism in a Divided World was translated into English in 1986, and is available at snylterstaten.dk)

In April 1989, the MKA was disbanded due to the incarceration of several of its members in connection with the so-called “Blekinge Street Gang” case. Today, there is no formal organization around the theory of the parasite state in Denmark – even though the internet website snylterstaten.dk can be seen as an expression of the ongoing relevance and interest in these matters.

Following imprisonment in 1989, the focus of my political studies was globalization and neoliberalism, which were becoming more and more prominent in those days. At the same time, there were big political changes in the world. The Soviet Union and the socialist states of Eastern Europe were dissolved and integrated into the capitalist world market, while the anti-imperialist struggle in the Third World ran out of steam and/or lost its socialist content.

My theoretical framework was still the global “center-periphery” divide. There was no sign of change in the polarization between rich and poor countries. However, the fading socialist perspectives in the liberation struggle and the dissolution of the Soviet Union led me to reflect on how a socialist economy and political order might be established, and with which strategies and practices we might move in that direction.

For a number of years after my release from prison in 1996 I was active in various forms of globalized resistance. I took part in an “Encuentro” in Chiapas, Mexico and several World Social Forum meetings; organizing inspired by the Zapatista uprising and the resistance to the World Trade Organization (WTO).

So I hadn’t considered the parasite state theory systematically in the light of the big changes that had occurred in the global division of labor and the new transnational modes of production etc. since we had first laid out the theory in Unequal Exchange and the Prospects for Socialism in a Divided World. This is what I want to contribute with my book The Global Perspective.

The book is divided into three parts: history, political economy, and political strategy. In part one, I go over the history and theory of imperialism, the parasite state, and labor aristocracy from its origin in the 1850s up to 1989—as seen from my personal perspective. I made the cut off point 1989, partly because it strikes me as an important year historically, what with the fall of the Berlin Wall, and partly because it was also an important year for me personally, for it was when the MKA was disbanded and I was imprisoned due to the exposure of our illegal practice. This is a major historical survey, full of quotes and names, reflections, asides, and literary references, so that those interested may get a sampling of, and an easier introduction to, the theory. It was very important for me to trace the main thread of the theory in time and space, from its creation in the mid-19th century onwards.

In part two I present the status of imperialism today. How does globalized capitalism function? How does it affect class relations globally? Here I include the many new contributions which have been added to the theory since the 1990s up to today, both from academia and political movements.

Lastly, in part three I deal with politics and strategy. Who are the actors? What are their current politics? I offer strategies for anti-imperialist movements in the present time. In this section I also assess the future of capitalism and the possibilities for socialism. So, while part one is history and part two is characterized by facts, part three presents a proposal for debate.

Over the last few years, I have come to learn – through another new development since 1983, the internet – that a number of political organizations and theorists have been developing, and are working continually with, theories about the connections between imperialistic modes of exploitation and their political and class-related consequences. Such theory is not a dying idea from the 1970s, but is still is very much alive and kicking. It has been encouraging to discover that I am not part of a dying breed, and it is to this tradition that I hope The Global Perspective will constitute a worthwhile contribution.



on the main Kersplebedeb website: http://ift.tt/2fDUggt