Google eyed

by Tony Norfield

Economics of Imperialism | October 01, 2017

The Hoover Company’s vacuum cleaners once so dominated its market that people often still describe using any make of vacuum cleaner as ‘hoovering up’. Similarly, people ‘Google’ information from the Internet, even if they do not use Google. The only difference is that Google’s dominance of the Internet search market is far greater than Hoover had ever achieved with its vacuum cleaners. Earlier this year, Google’s search engine had an astonishing 92% of the market, with Bing, the next in line, owned by Microsoft, having barely 3%. This underpins its position as the world’s second largest private company by market capitalisation, at a massive $670bn on 29 September, and backs its seventy offices in forty countries. [1]

Third World Quarterly row: Why some western intellectuals are trying to debrutalise colonialism

by Vijay Prashad

 Scroll.in | September 21, 2017

The ugliness of colonial power in India emerged at its end with the Bengal Famine and the Partition | Wikimedia Commons

Ek tarz-e-taghaful hai so vo unko mubarak;
Ek ‘arz-e-tamanna hai so ham karte-rahenge.

[There is a style of indifference to which they are welcome;
But our wishes, we will continue to list.]

— Faiz Ahmed Faiz, Dast-e-Saba, 1952

In 1950, Aimé Césaire, one of the clearest voices of the 20th century, looked back at the long history of colonialism that was coming to an end. He wanted to judge colonialism from the ashes of Nazism, an ideology that surprised the innocent in Europe but which had been fostered slowly in Europe’s colonial experience. After all, the instruments of Nazism – racial superiority as well as brutal, genocidal violence – had been cultivated in the colonial worlds of Africa, Asia and Latin America. Césaire, the effervescent poet and communist, had no problem with the encounter between cultures. The entanglements of Europe’s culture with that of Africa and Asia had forged the best of human history across the Mediterranean Sea. But colonialism was not cultural contact. It was brutality.

On Marx’s philosophical methodology in the Grundrisse

 by Matthew McManus

MR Online | September 29, 2017

There is a considerable debate about the value of Marx’s earlier philosophical works relative to his mature period writing the three volumes of Capital. Some believe that they are of great importance for understanding Marx, while others such as Althusser¹ famously believed that the early works were mere preparation for presenting the full science of history and philosophy of dialectical materialism in the great work. I fall squarely into the first camp. While Capital is undoubtedly Marx’s masterpiece, there is a great deal in it that remains ambiguous and not always spelled out.

Have Off-The-Shelf Companies Caused Venezuela’s Exchange Rate Fraud?

by Luis Salas Rodriguez

teleSUR | 03 October, 2017

A cashier counts bolivars at money exchange in Caracas. | Photo: Reuters

It seems obvious that the Attorney General is committed to seeing that justice is done, to clearing up and making good the scandalous embezzlement in Venezuela caused by speculation and corruption revolving around exchange rate controls and the policies for assigning foreign currency, from 2003 until now.

10 Amazing Places to Visit in Latin America

IN PICTURES: teleSUR highlights some of Latin America’s most incredible sites.

 teleSUR | September 27, 2017

Latin America has some of the world’s most amazing natural wonders, some that are well-known and some that are hidden treasures.With cultures dating back thousands of years and a biodiversity rivaling any other in the world, Latin America provides awe-inspiring destinations.

Angel Falls in Venezuela is the highest waterfall in the world at 979 meters. Photo:EFE

Villa Clara youth to pay tribute to Che

by Ángel Freddy Pérez Cabrera

Granma | October 03, 2017

As part of the activities, on October 16 students of the Camilo Cienfuegos Military School will perform the traditional guard of honor before the mausoleum to the combatants of the Las Villas Front. Photo: Freddy Pérez Cabrera

SANTA CLARA.– Thousands of students from across Villa Clara province will lead the traditional “Por la ruta del Che” (Che’s route) walk this Thursday, October 5, in honor of the Hero of the Battle of Santa Clara on the 50th anniversary of his death, which will be commemorated across the island this October 8.

The walk will begin at 4.00 pm at the Marta Abreu de Las Villas Central University, which served as Guevara’s command headquarters during the capture of the city of Santa Clara, and where he returned in December 1959 to receive the title of Doctor Honoris Causa in Pedagogy. It will conclude close to the Loma del Capiro, in areas of the Sandino Cultural and Recreational Complex, with a concert by trova artist Adrián Berazaín, as José Antonio Marimón Carrazana, vice rector of expansion, computerization and communication of the institution, told Granma.

Oscar López Rivera, a tireless activist

by Jeiddy Martínez Armas

Granma | October 02, 2017

Photo: Granma

Shortly before completing his term in office, former U.S. President Barack Obama commuted the sentence of Puerto Rican independence fighter Oscar López Rivera on January 17, 2017; following a strong international campaign for his release, according to PL.

López Rivera was born in San Sebastián, Puerto Rico in 1943, and at 14 years of age moved to the U.S. city of Chicago with his family. Later, he was drafted into the army to fight in the war against Vietnam for which he was awarded the Bronze Star, reports Puerto Rican newspaper, El Nuevo Día.

A Few Words About Naxalbari

by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak

Frontier | Autumn Number | Vol. 50, No.12-15, Sep 24 – Oct 21, 2017

It is hard to think that fifty years have passed since the first confrontation in Naxalbari. I was both too far and too close. One of my cousins, with whom I had gone to school every day as a child, was deeply involved. And one of our batchmates let loose unbelievable mass brutality upon young men lining a street, asking householders to close their windows. Rumours, before cable television (we had a small black and white), before the internet, before satellite telephone. I was tucked away at the University of Iowa, a young Assistant Professor quite set in with the anti-Vietnam War struggle earlier, and with the diasporic support of the Bangladesh upheaval later, but about Naxalbari was caught in helpless hearsay. Hadn’t enough money to go home until 1972, only then to realise the depth and breadth of the wounded polity. But, and I say this with some embarrassment, an old cynical woman now, some of us had romanticised the fact that the first shot was an arrow. My best understanding of the entire movement still comes from Sumanta Banerjee’s In the Woke of Naxalbari. I have learnt some Chinese since then, enough to teach some Mao Zedong with the help of graduate students in Chinese. It seems at this distance that, although Charu Mazumder’s general inspiration from Mao was certainly enormously effective and moving, it was the at least temporary conscientisation of Left intellectuals that seemed most impressive to us. In 1968, when French university students joined hands with the working class, the Naxalbari phenomenon seemed to us, from far away, a greater political achievement.

Naxalbari: the Turning Point of Indian History

by Jan Myrdal

Frontier | Autumn Number | Vol. 50, No.12-15, Sep 24 – Oct 21, 2017

For what is called the common people of India life has since the formation of class society been one of blood, sweat and toil. Centuries and millennia of misery for the overwhelming majority. So harsh is the ruling class that many like the debt-ridden farmers of Bihar felt forced to flee into suicide. But despite this despair that is hailed by some intellectuals in the West as the inner wisdom of India, the villages of India have all the time been hotbeds of uprising and struggle. We all know that, we can sit down and make long lists of these popular struggles.

50 Years of Naxalbari: The ‘Spark’ did not turn into a Prairie Fire

by Timir Basu

Frontier  | Autumn Number | Vol. 50, No.12-15, Sep 24 – Oct 21, 2017

It was probably the middle of 1968, the period of the United Front Government in West Bengal. Clashes among partners of the United Front were endemic in the countryside. The Naxalite movement was in the middle of the sky. We, who had bade adieu to university education and came to the villages under the inspiration of the movement of Naxalbari, had to face political hostility at various levels. Slogans such as ‘go to the villages’, ‘get integrated with peasants’ ‘complete the agrarian revolution’, ‘build up revolutionary peasant committees’, attracted many of the younger generation of that period. We also had thought that a comprehensive change was imminent. But as we came to the village we understood that practice on the basis of this theory was not so easy. There is no doubt that there was much thrill in the urban discussions on revolution in the countryside, building up organisations was not that easy because the rural social structure was very much complex.