Google Is Committed To The Suppression Of Free Speech

by Paul Craig Roberts

Institute of Political Economy | August 08, 2017

The Google engineer, a Harvard Ph.D., who raised questions about the non-fact-based ideological culture within the Google organization has been identified and fired.

Sundar Pichai, Google’s CEO, said that the employee in expressing his views had violated Google’s code of conduct and had crossed “the line by advancing harmful gender stereotypes in our workplace.” The employee, James Damore, confirms that he was fired for “perpetuating gender stereotypes” by expressing his views.

Bertrand Russell and the Socialism That Wasn’t

by Jean Bricmont and Normand Baillargeon

Monthly Review |  Volume 69, Issue 03 (July-August 2017)

Presidium of the Second Northern Oblast Congress of Soviets, 1 August 1918. Seated: Uritskii, Trotsky, Sverdlov, Zinoviev, and Lashevich. Standing: Kharitonov, Lisovskii, Korsak, Voskov, Gusev, Ravich, Bakaev, and Kuzmin. St. Petersburg Institute of History, Russian Academy of Sciences. (The Bolsheviks in Power, p. 325)

In 1918, a few days before being jailed for pacifism, Bertrand Russell completed Proposed Roads to Freedom: Socialism, Anarchism and Syndicalism, a short, simple, and profound guide to the theories of anarchism, Marxist socialism, anarcho-socialism, and guild socialism—the associative form of socialism that existed in Great Britain in those days.

What is Eco-Socialism?

by Saral Sarkar

Frontier | Vol. 50, No.4, Jul 30 – Aug 5, 2017

Few days ago I read a longish interview that Prof John Bellamy Foster, had given to a leftist journal called Left Voice (LV). Prof Foster is a renowned American Marxist scholar and a leading eco-socialist theoretician. Among many other things, he expressed in the interview his high regard for Naomi Klein, who had, 2-3 years ago, published a best-seller entitled This Changes Everything—Capitalism vs. the Climate. That would not have been any problem for anybody. But Prof Foster also said : “She is aligned with eco-socialism”. What the phrase “aligned with” actually meant was not clear. So Richard Smith, another renowned American eco-socialist, took it as meaning Klein is an eco-socialist. According to Smith, who has read Klein’s 576 page book, she is not an eco-socialist. He criticized Prof Foster for thinking so, probably meaning thereby also that Foster was thus diluting the content of eco-socialism. Thereafter several comments appeared in the website of the forum the Simpler Way. I too published there my first quick response to the debate. Below I am posting a revised and expanded version of my response.

Revolution and Counterrevolution, 1917–2017

by John Bellamy Foster

Monthly Review | Volume 69, Issue 03 (July-August 2017)

Petrograd workers drill on Palace Square. State Museum of the Political History of Russia, St. Petersburg.(The Bolsheviks in Power, p. 240)

The Russian Revolution of 1917 erupted on the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of Karl Marx’s Capital. From the start, the October Revolution seemed both to confirm and contradict Marx’s analysis. He had envisioned a working-class-based socialist revolution breaking out in the developed capitalist countries of Western Europe. But the 1882 preface to the Communist Manifesto, written a year before his death, amended this by pointing to a revolution in Russia as a possible “signal for proletarian revolution in the West.”¹ Yet although a worker-peasant revolution under Marxist leadership triumphed in Russia in 1917, Russia was still a largely underdeveloped country, and the revolutionary uprisings in Germany and Central Europe which followed were weak and easily extinguished.

World’s Poorest President Warns Public: ‘Remove Wealthy Elites from Politics’

Alternative News Network | July 23, 2017

José ‘Pepe’ Mujica warns the public to stop wealthy politicians before it’s too late

The former President of Uruguay José ‘Pepe’ Mujica, also known as the World’s Poorest President, has issued a stark warning to the public:

“Remove the wealthy Elites from politics before it’s too late.”

In an emotional message to citizens worldwide, he has urged people to wake up to the financially motivated corruption that is rotting democracy from the core.

On Prabhat Patnaik’s article “The October Revolution and the Survival of Capitalism” in Monthly Review, July 2017

by Sandeep Banerjee

Frontier | July 19, 2017

It is indeed very difficult to present a critic on any of Prabhat Patnaik’s essay. So many points are always there to be argued and Frontier Weekly has a very limited space. So let me draw only some dots in brief and may the readers develop the picture themselves.

He argued, as against Bernstein and Rosa “The Leninist argument altered the basis of this debate altogether.[1] Capitalism had become historically obsolete or “moribund” as he called it, because in its imperialist stage it engulfed humanity in periodic and devastating wars”. Strange!

The Chapter 8 of his book Imperialism the Highest Stage of Capitalism, bears a name “Parasitism and Decay of Capitalism” after the Chapter 7, named, “Imperialism, as a Special Stage of Capitalism” which ends with the lines: “The question is: what means other than war could there be under capitalism to overcome the disparity between the development of productive forces and the accumulation of capital on the one side, and the division of colonies and spheres of influence for finance capital on the other?” Whereas Chapter 7 ended with the conclusion: how Social Chauvinism arises in the scene or the objectivity of that. Indeed, social chauvinists so eager to protect the unity & integrity of India, (the ‘market’ named India or the map provided by the British Imperialism) would not like to dwell on such uncanny points. 

Third nature

Edward Said on ecology and imperialism

by John Bellamy Foster

John Bellamy Foster’s essay,“Third Nature: Edward Said on Ecology and Imperialism” is taken from Vijay Prashad, ed., Will the Flower Slip Through the Asphalt (New Delhi: LeftWord Books, 2017), pp. 50-57. This edited collection was organized around Naomi Klein’s 2016 Edward W. Said Lecture, “Let Them Drown,” originally published in the June 2016 issue of the London Review of Booksand then reprinted in Will the Flower Slip the Through the Asphalt, together with original pieces by other authors. In her Edward W. Said Lecture, Klein insightfully discussed Said’s implicit connection to ecology as expressed in many of his works, and arising from his deep Palestinian roots. Foster’s essay, which came immediately after Klein’s in the book, critically extended her argument to take into consideration Said’s later more explicit contributions to an ecological critique in his 1993 book Culture and Imperialism. —Monthly Review Eds.

Naomi Klein’s wonderful essay on the numerous ecological implications that appear almost unconsciously in Edward Said’s texts, forming part of their structural background—a perfect example of what he himself famously called a “contrapuntal reading”—demonstrates that ecological themes were always just below the surface in his work, conditioning his own sense of resistance.¹

The Great Struggle to Escape Capitalism

by Bernard D’Mello

Monthly Review | Volume 69, Issue 03 (July-August 2017)

The crisis of the ruling order that unfolded in Russia in 1917 brought on an enormous social upheaval, culminating in a revolution—a process of fundamental transformation of the society’s socioeconomic and political structures and institutions. This revolution—history’s first major attempt to transcend capitalism—inevitably provoked a counterrevolution that sought to turn back the clock. Such life-and-death struggles have recurred in the periphery and semi-periphery of the world capitalist system since 1917, right up to the present.

In what follows—going by the dictum that the truth is the whole, but without trying to achieve the impossible, comprehensiveness—I look at revolution and counterrevolution as interdependent processes, the latter inevitably accompanying the former, and whose principal base has been in imperialism. I stress the fact that post-revolutionary society, in its efforts to combat counterrevolution, not only had to overcome the appalling heritage of the past, but was also confronted with its own contradictions, and with the persistent threat that an exploiting class could reemerge. Instead of the intended socialization of the economy and democratization of the polity, what resulted was (largely) state ownership of the economy and stultifying bureaucratization of both the economy and the polity, a cultural revolution in China notwithstanding.

Neoliberalism in crisis

Interview of John Bellamy Foster and Kevin B. Anderson by Sofia Cutler, Sara Farah and Emanuel Guay.

MR Online | July 14, 2017

Originally published at 3:AM magazine (July 13, 2017)

This year marks the 150th publication anniversary of Marx’s Capital. While the world has inevitably changed in the last century and a half, Marx’s work remains crucial to explaining—and critiquing— the logic and historical development of capitalism today. As Ernst Mandel notes in his introduction to the English translation, Capital lays bare “the ruthless and irresistible impulse to growth which characterizes production for private profit and the predominant use of profit for capital accumulation.” To mark this anniversary, and to better situate Marx’s pièce de résistance in our own contemporary moment of neoliberal crisis, we have interviewed two leading, but slightly diverging voices on Capital: Kevin B. Anderson and John Bellamy Foster.

Some notes on white monopoly capital: Definition, use and denial 40

by Christopher Malikane

Pambazuka News | June 29, 2017

Fred Chartrand

Dismantling white monopoly capital in South Africa has always been central to the national liberation struggle. White monopoly capital simultaneously implies colonialism of a special type. The two concepts are inter-twined. To fail to mention the racial character of monopoly capital is to fail to acknowledge the colonial character of South Africa and the special nature of that colonialism.

 

“The theoretical conclusions of the Communists are in no way based on ideas or principles that have been invented, or discovered, by this or that would-be universal reformer. They merely express, in general terms, actual relations springing from an existing class struggle, from a historical movement going on under our very eyes” – Manifesto of the Communist Party, 1848.

“Today, the main task of the working class is to abolish the white monopoly of power, to carry out the national democratic revolution for the liberation of African and other oppressed people”- Augmented Meeting of the Central Committee of the South African Communist Party, 1970.