MDS STATEMENT ON “STOP THE MACHINE, CREATE A NEW WORLD” (October2011)

In May 2011, Movement for a Democratic Society (MDS) endorsed”Stop The Machine, Create a New World” (october2011.org) and joined the October 6 Coalition in good faith and in the belief that the call to occupy Freedom Plaza in Washington DC was a timely and much needed step forward for American protest. Buoyed by thoughts of the Arab Spring and the idea that the time had come to take resistance to the next level, some members joined the Coalition “Steering Committee” to assist in planning a Tahrir Square-style occupation in the US. That is, an occupation in the political sense of the word — taking over a public or private space against the will of government or ownership — as it’s been commonly understood by generations of activists.

Also encouraging was the idea that rather than it being yet another organizational call out of the top down variety, this event would be entirely directed by individual activists of diverse background and ideology. In other words, different. The presumption being that much like Occupy Wall Street, it would be a horizontal and egalitarian effort to build a truly participatory democratic peoples’ movement..This, of course, would be right in keeping with the spirit and raison d’etre of MDS and SDS. Since that time, however, several factors caused us to question the action and the intent of those who characterized themselves as the “core organizers”, and ultimately to conclude that it was not what it claimed to be. In course, we witnessed & experienced controlling top down behavior, bullying, dishonesty, snitchjacketing, censorship, and a total lack of respect for fellow activists.

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What it will take to win concrete victory
Richard Pithouse

The choice of Wall Street as the target for the occupation is, in itself, a perfectly eloquent statement. And slogans like, ‘We’re young; we’re poor; we’re not going to take it any more’, are incisive enough. But if the occupation of sites of symbolic power in cities across North America is to win concrete rather than moral victories, and to make a decisive intervention against the hold that finance capital has taken over so much of political and social life, it will have to do two things. It will need, without giving up its autonomy, to build links with organisations like churches, trade unions and students groups that are rooted in everyday life and can support this struggle over the long haul. It will also need to find ways to build its own power and to exercise it with sufficient impact to force real change.

Wall Street is usually a world away from Main Street and bringing it under control is no easy task. But it is encouraging that what links Tahrir Square to Liberty Plaza, the protests in Athens and Madrid and the movements that have emerged in the shack settlements of Port-au-Prince, La Plaz, Caracas and Durban, is a concern with democracy. In Tahrir Square the primary point was to unseat a dictatorship but elsewhere there is a global sense that the standard model of parliamentary democracy is just not democratic enough. This is a crucial realisation because, in many countries, America being one of them, you just can’t vote for an alternative to the subordination of society to capital. But a serious commitment to dispersing power by sustained organising from below can shift power relations. It is the only realistic route to achieving any sort of meaningful subordination of capital to society.

Click here to read “On the Wall Street occupation: What it will take to win concrete victory” by Richard Pithouse.

Zizek, in my opinion, eluded to an important conversation taking place when he said:

In April 2011, the Chinese government prohibited on TV and films and in novels all stories that contain alternate reality or time travel. This is a good sign for China. It means that people still dream about alternatives, so you have to prohibit this dream. Here we don’t think of prohibition. Because the ruling system has even suppressed our capacity to dream. Look at the movies that we see all the time. It’s easy to imagine the end of the world. An asteroid destroying all life and so on. But you cannot imagine the end of capitalism. So what are we doing here? Let me tell you a wonderful old joke from communist times.

A guy was sent from East Germany to work in Siberia. He knew his mail would be read by censors. So he told his friends: Let’s establish a code. If the letter you get from me is written in blue ink ,it is true what I said. If it is written in red ink, it is false. After a month his friends get a first letter. Everything is in blue. It says, this letter: everything is wonderful here. Stores are full of good food. Movie theaters show good films from the West. Apartments are large and luxurious. The only thing you cannot buy is red ink.

This is how we live. We have all the freedoms we want. But what we are missing is red ink. The language to articulate our non-freedom. The way we are taught to speak about freedom war and terrorism and so on falsifies freedom. And this is what you are doing here: You are giving all of us red ink.

But is that conversation really taking place? There needs to be more red ink spent clarifying the anti-capitalist position. Many who support OccupyWallSt are merely expressing resentment for bank bailouts but not disenchantment with capitalism.

by Toufic Haddad

If the prisoner exchange deal announced on 11 October 2011 between Hamas and the Israeli government is fully implemented without major hitches, there is little question who “won” this five-year war of wills: the deal will constitute a major victory for Hamas and the resistance-oriented political forces in Palestinian society, while simultaneously representing a significant retreat for Israel and its historical doctrines of forceful coercion and rejectionism vis-à-vis the Palestinian people and their rights.

Click here to continue reading “The Deal Behind the “Shalit Deal”: Prisoners, Power, Racism” by Toufic Haddad.

The “privatization” of British foreign policy

Justin Raimondo, October 19, 2011

The forced resignation of Britain’s defense minister, Liam Fox, has opened up a window into the way foreign policy in the “free world” is made – and a very revealing window it is.

At the center of the scandal that led to Fox’s ouster is his “best man,” and “very good friend” Adam Werritty, a 33-year-old man-about-town who went around handing out business cards informing recipients that the bearer was an “adviser” to Fox, although he held no such official title. In reality, however, Werritty was (and is) far closer to Fox than any of his official advisors: they met, apparently, when Werritty was a mere teenager in the Young Conservative organization, and have been virtually inseparable ever since. So inseparable that young Werrity met Fox at dozens of locations throughout the world, from Dubai to Israel, when the defense minister was on official business: they traveled together, as if they were a married couple (not that there’s anything wrong with that). The problem for the former defense minister is that the tab for Werrity’s high-flying lifestyle (luxury hotels, expensive meals, drinks all ‘round) was picked up by a group of businessmen, lobbyists, and others with a keen interest in influencing the MoD.

Click here to continue reading “The Sins of Liam Fox” by Justin Raimondo.

This should be titled “Congress threatens China for refusing to sanction Syria”. The topic is red meat for 2012 campaigners desperately seeking such bloody tripe.