Ideology

Reclaiming The Radical Critique Of Education

February 12, 2018 By Eva-Maria Swidler, Zcomm.org Create! Education, Ideology

The left has a long history of critiquing not just the content of schooling, but the very concepts and institutions foundational to formal education. Sometimes incompatible but sometimes complementary, radical arguments have marched along side by side over the centuries. Some claimed that the working classes deserved open access to elite education, others that what schools taught was actually nothing more than indoctrination in service to elites and that schools needed a total overhaul in content, while yet others argued that the concepts of school and teacher were in themselves tools for indoctrination and disempowerment and should be abolished. Sometimes one person would adopt more than one, even all, of the above views, depending on the situation or moment.

Thinking Freedom: Achieving The Impossible Collectively

January 27, 2018 Michael Neocosmos, Roarmag.org Resist! Class Struggle, Ideology, Left Politics

I don’t think we should make power the starting point for thinking emancipation, particularly a binary notion of power. Whether you are talking about power or counter-power, you are starting from an idea of people’s interests and identities rather than from an idea of universal emancipation. And you end up talking about states and how we relate to them rather than defining human universality in our own terms. Of course, power is always involved in the arenas and sites where politics takes place. I am concerned, however, that once we use categories of power, even if it is to think about a different way of addressing power, we end up using words and thinking through categories that are not helpful because they are categories through which the state itself thinks.

You Don’t Need A Telescope To Find A ‘Shithole Country’

January 17, 2018 Chris Hedges, Truthdig.com Educate! Class Struggle, Ideology, Latin America

I covered the war in El Salvador for five years. It was a peasant uprising by the dispossessed against the 14 ruling families and the handful of American corporations that ran El Salvador as if it was a plantation. Half of the population was landless. Laborers worked as serfs in the coffee plantations, the sugar cane fields and the cotton fields in appalling poverty. Attempts to organize and protest peacefully to combat the huge social inequality were met with violence, including fire from machine guns mounted on the tops of buildings in downtown San Salvador that rained down bullets indiscriminately on crowds of demonstrators. Peasant, labor, church and university leaders were kidnapped by death squads, brutally tortured and murdered, their mutilated bodies often left on roadsides for public view.

Corpses Of Souls

January 9, 2018 By Chris Hedges, Truthdig.com Educate! Donald Trump, Ideology, Politics

Walker Percy in his 1971 dystopian novel “Love in the Ruins” paints a picture of a morally degenerate America consumed by hedonism, wallowing in ignorance, led by kleptocrats and fools, fragmented into warring and often violent cultural extremes and on the cusp of a nuclear war. It is a country cursed by its failure to address or atone for its original sins of genocide and slavery. The ethos of ceaseless capitalist expansion, white supremacy and American exceptionalism, perpetuated overseas in the country’s imperial wars, eventually consumes the nation itself. The accomplices, who once benefited from this evil, become its victims. How, Percy asks, does one live a life of meaning in such a predatory society? Is it even possible?

New Gilded Age: First Time Arrogance, Second Time Vengeance

January 9, 2018 David Rosen, Counterpunch.org Educate! History, Ideology

In his 1852 essay, “The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte,” Marx recalls a saying from Hegel, “that all great world-historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice.” Marx adds, “He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.” Often forgotten, Marx follows with an equally telling observation: “Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past.” He warns, “The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living.” That nightmare defines 21stcentury U.S. politics. In 1873, Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner published The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today, a popular work that satirized the greed and political corruption of the modern era.

Will USian PseudoLeft Evolve True Revolutionary Consciousness?

December 29, 2017 Loren Bliss, Dispatchesfromdystopia.net Educate! Ideology, Left Politics, Political Education, United States

Exemplifying how Capitalism's momentum invariably thrusts it toward fascism, Mainstream Media was headed in that direction even under the independent ownership that characterized most USian newspapers and broadcast outlets during the years of my later teens and earlier manhood, 1956 through about 1980 or thereabouts. While the only meaningful difference between local Capitalists and their global counterparts has never been more than the geographical limits of their greed, the socioeconomic interactions characteristic of local ownership exercised enough moral restraint on publishers that in most instances, mass media did not metastasize into its present-day malignancy until the news monopolies took over.

Understanding Coates-West Conflict Clarifies Many Issues

December 28, 2017 Robin D. G. Kelley, Bostonreview.net Strategize! Black Capitalism, Black Nationalism, Ideology, Liberals

When the emails started coming in, I ignored them. By day’s end, my voicemail and email inboxes were filling up with links to the Guardian, followed by links to Facebook pages and blogposts devoted to Cornel West’s takedown of Ta-Nehisi Coates. I felt like I was being summoned to see a schoolyard brawl, and, now that I no longer use social media, I was already late. By the time I read West’s piece, “Ta-Nehisi Coates is the neoliberal face of the black freedom struggle,” it had become the center of international controversy. Perhaps because West named me as an ally, the New York Times requested a comment, followed by Le Monde, and then a slew of publications all trying to get the scoop on the latest battle royale among the titans of the black intelligentsia.

The Counter-Revolution

December 21, 2017 Adrian Kuzminski, counterpunch.org Resist! Class Struggle, Ideology, Politics

The polarization of our country isn’t between left and right, liberal and conservative, Democrat and Republican. It’s between richer and poorer, elitists and proletarians, over-educated and under-educated, globalists and localists. The line between the two is a shifting one, depending on where you live, but the consistent difference is the ability to participate successfully in the economy. Successful participants are able, without onerous labor, to accumulate sufficient income, assets, and benefits to provide for security for themselves and family–a comfortable home, useful education, vacations and travel, health care, a few luxuries, and comfortable retirement. This was the reality once made possible for most middle-class Americans by competent public education and high-paying industrial jobs.

Utilizing Indigenous Thought To Cope In The Age Of Trump

November 27, 2017 Four Arrows, truth-out.org Strategize! Border, Donald Trump, Ideology, Indigenous Peoples, Nationalism

By Four Arrows for Truthout - November 9, 2016, was a typical North Dakota wintry day and the cold wind bit into me. Unlike the group of fellow Veterans for Peace I was with, who had come from northern or eastern locations, I was fresh in from a fishing village in central Mexico. We huddled around a red camper van, listening to a radio station in anticipation of hearing the results of the election. The crowded camp below our hilly perch was strewn with makeshift buildings, campers and tipis, and we were surrounded by rolling hills, grass plains and buttes that bordered the sacred Missouri River we were trying to protect. Hearing the radio transmission clearly was difficult, owing to static and occasional interruptions from TigerSwan, a private military contractor hired by Energy Transfer Partners to disrupt our communications with the outside world. Nonetheless, when we heard that Trump was the new president of the United States, the words resonated all too clearly. No one spoke at first. Then, showing tearful emotion, one of our younger vets, who had regretfully participated in two tours in Iraq, angrily spoke out: "How stupid are people in this country?" Immediately, one of our female Lakota vets walked up to him and gave him a sincere hug. She was a round-faced woman in her 40s or 50s who wore a derby-type leather brimmed hat, long beaded earrings, a brightly colored vintage Navajo-styled Pendleton blanket coat and a pair of eyeglasses that illuminated eyes that radiated gentle wisdom.

The FBI Targets Black “Ideology”

October 14, 2017 Glen Ford, www.blackagendareport.com Educate! Black Nationalism, FBI, Ideology

By Glen Ford for Black Agenda Report - The FBI has apparently chosen a new heading under which to lump Black Americans targeted for political persecution: “Black Identity Extremists.” There’s a simple explanation for the new categorization. The FBI is a bureaucracy whose day-to-day work involves drawing up lists of people and organizations to be surveilled, disrupted and prosecuted. The dramatic increase in Black “movement” activity since the 2014 police killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, has presented the FBI with a much larger field of targets, including youthful elements loosely grouped under the Black Lives Matter banner. When bureaucracies compile new lists, they typically file them under new names. In a sense, the change in nomenclature is an acknowledgement by the FBI that, after nearly two generations of Black political stagnation and capitulation, there is finally a Black “movement” with the potential to upset the status quo. The leaked FBI counterterrorism division report, scooped by Foreign Policy magazine , also signifies that Black grassroots political activity is under the purview of the national security state’s War on Terror and, therefore, subject to the awesome array of repressive measures authorized to law enforcement and intelligence agencies since 9/11. “The change in nomenclature is an acknowledgement by the FBI that there is finally a Black ‘movement’ with the potential to upset the status quo.”

The Silencing Of Dissent

September 19, 2017 Chris Hedges, www.truthdig.com Educate! Capitalism, Ideology, Repression

By Chris Hedges for Truth Dig - The ruling elites, who grasp that the reigning ideology of global corporate capitalism and imperial expansion no longer has moral or intellectual credibility, have mounted a campaign to shut down the platforms given to their critics. The attacks within this campaign include blacklisting, censorship and slandering dissidents as foreign agents for Russia and purveyors of “fake news.” No dominant class can long retain control when the credibility of the ideas that justify its existence evaporates. It is forced, at that point, to resort to crude forms of coercion, intimidation and censorship. This ideological collapse in the United States has transformed those of us who attack the corporate state into a potent threat, not because we reach large numbers of people, and certainly not because we spread Russian propaganda, but because the elites no longer have a plausible counterargument. The elites face an unpleasant choice. They could impose harsh controls to protect the status quo or veer leftward toward socialism to ameliorate the mounting economic and political injustices endured by most of the population. But a move leftward, essentially reinstating and expanding the New Deal programs they have destroyed, would impede corporate power and corporate profits.

Eve Of Destruction…Or Revolution?

August 9, 2017 Ron Jacobs, www.counterpunch.org Create! Books, Ideology, Revolution

By Ron Jacobs for Counter Punch - “In order to replace capitalism with an ecological society we need a revolution.” That modest sentence is how Fred Magdoff and Chris Williams, the authors of Creating an Ecological Society: Toward a Revolutionary Transformation, begin the last chapter of their new book. Although the chapter is the end of the book, it is also an opening to a new direction, a new movement. It is also the essence of the entire text. Capitalism is the reason our biosphere is collapsing and the only way humanity and the rest of earth’s species can survive is by ending capitalism. Given that capitalism and those who profit most from it have proven time and time again that not only are they unwilling to give up the rapacious economy that is destroying earth, but that they even refuse to admit that it is that system which is the cause, the only solution is revolution. This text is written by two environmental activists (and teachers) with credentials that more than back up the science they explain in this book. Indeed, it is their understanding of the science involved when discussing the ecological crisis we face that has helped inform their Marxist politics.

The Last Liberal

July 12, 2017 Zoltan Zigedy, www.zzs-blg.blogspot.com Educate! Ideology, Left Politics, Liberals

By Zoltan Zigedy for ZZ's Blog - The year 1989 marked the death of the independent journalist, Isidor Feinstein (I.F.) Stone, the last twentieth century US liberal. Liberalism in the last century combined the liberties of the original Bill of Rights with Roosevelt’s proposed Second Bill of Rights. By mid-century, US liberalism reached its greatest heights, supplementing the historic bourgeois rights that dismantled feudalism and enshrined the right to property with the promise of an entirely new set of economic rights-- rights to employment, housing, medical care, social security, education, among others. The economic rights sought to codify the social democratic gains made in the New Deal era. By the time of I.F. Stone’s death in 1989, liberalism had nearly shed all of its commitment to the Rooseveltian social justice rights. The bearer of the liberal legacy, the Democratic Party, swiftly retreated from New Deal values in the face of the Reagan attack on social welfare programs. Consequently, the Democratic Party of Bill Clinton, the “third way,” market-obsessed Democrats, eschewed the term “liberal” and appropriated the once-meaningful term “progressive” in its place. Stone would have been appalled.

Beware The Politics Of Fear And ‘Non-Ideological’ Saviors

June 28, 2017 Slavoj Zizek, www.independent.co.uk Educate! Class Struggle, Fear, Ideology, Politics

By Slavoj Zizek for Independent - Recall how, in the last elections in France, every leftist scepticism about Macron was immediately denounced as a support for Marine le Pen. And look at the empty universality of successful statements like Macron's 'La Republique En Marche!' – the designation of a victorious movement forward without any obvious or specific goal. An old Chinese curse is “May you live in interesting times!” – interesting times are the times of troubles, confusion and suffering. And it seems that in some “democratic” countries, we are lately witnessing a weird phenomenon which proves that we live in interesting times: a candidate emerges and wins elections as it were from nowhere, in a moment of confusion building a movement around his name – both Berlusconi and Macron exploded like this. What is this process a sign of? Definitely not of any kind of direct popular engagement beyond party politics – on the contrary, we should never forget that such figures explode with the full support of social and economic establishment. Their function is to obfuscate actual social antagonisms – people are magically united against some demonised “fascist” threat.

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