Honduran Coup and US Ambiguity

This Real News broadcast features an illuminating report from Forrest Hylton on the attitude of the US towards the coup in Honduras. "The silence from Washington over the past month of human rights abuses from the de facto Honduran government becomes deafening when one considers that the US government holds both the ability to bring that regime down as well as a recent history of criticizing similar abuses in Iran. Groups inside the US have taken up the call to pressure the government into taking the action required by US law in addressing a military coup. Forrest Hylton is the author of Evil Hour in Colombia (Verso, 2006), and with Sinclair Thomson, co-author of Revolutionary Horizons: Past and Present in Bolivian Politics (Verso, 2007). He is a regular contributor to New Left Review and NACLA Report on the Americas."

With the Hondoran coup reminiscent of the dark days of the 70's and 80's in Latin America now over five weeks old, tensions are high inside the country itself and finally rising in international politics. The legitimate president Zelaya is trying all avenues to restore democracy, from the International Criminal Court to mobilising his people. While most countries have officially denounced the coup, apparently including president Obama who said he would follow the lead of the Organisation of American States (OAS) in opposing the coup regime. However, US foreign secretary Hillary Clinton has no use for the word coup. Using this word carries legal implications under US law to stop all aid to Honduras and recall the US Ambassador. Since the coup regime hired Lanny Davis, who served as White House counsel for President Bill Clinton, and Bennet Ratcliff, a public relations specialist with ties to former President Bill Clinton, Hillary has started to denounce president Zelaya as 'reckless' for trying to return to his country. According to Clinton, Zelaya would do better to simply keep negotiating with the 'current government'.

As news on Honduras is somewhat harder to come by than on Iran, I thought I'd post some links to good starting points for further research into what is happening in Honduras right now. I found some overviews of news on Honduras from the Real News and Democracy Now, who did several exclusive interviews with Zelaya and his wife. The archives of The Nation Magazine and venezuelanalysis.com also proved interesting sources of information.

Leo Panitch: Still a Marxist after All

In this lecture, Leo Panitch explains his positive but critical relation to Marx and how to understand current events, like the crisis, in Marxist terms. He does this not by just labelling current events with Marxist language, but is interested in how different capitalisms came to pass and how to transcend them in today's world. This is what makes Panitch very stimulating to read and listen to.

He has been a Professor of Political Science at York University since 1984. He was the Chair of the Department of Political Science at York from 1988-1994. He was the General Co-editor of State and Economic Life series, U. of T. Press, from 1979 to 1995 and is the Co-founder and a Board Member of Studies in Political Economy. He is also the author of numerous articles and books dealing with political science including The End of Parliamentary Socialism (1997). He was a member of the Movement for an Independent and Socialist Canada, 1973-1975, the Ottawa Committee for Labour Action, 1975-1984, the Canadian Political Science Association, the Committee of Socialist Studies, the Marxist Institute and the Royal Society of Canada. He is currently a supporter of the Socialist Project.

He is a prominent exponent of Marxism who sees his own work as theoretically innovative within that tradition, because he maintains that the dominance of the United States in the early years of the twenty-first century can't be understood using theories of imperialism that are themselves a century old.

He has argued, for example, that the concept of imperialism developed for the Victorian era over-emphasized the matter of the export of capital. Yet if one uses that as a yardstick today (he reasons) Great Britain is more a victim of U.S. imperialism than Kenya -- since American investors have much more at stake in the former than in the latter. The advanced industrial nations, in other words, are interpenetrating -- exporting capital to one another, not to the 'South,' and this requires a great deal of revision in Marxist-Leninist models.

A vast amount of his publications can be found here.

Panitch has also argued that Marx was wrong to contend that the rise of trade unions would develop a socialistic class-consciousness in the working class. The association of workers for the purpose of collective bargaining has proven quite compatible with capitalism -- since such bargaining concerns the terms of wage labor, not the legitimacy of wage labor. He argues that Marxist political parties must abandon the assumption that there is anything inherently revolutionary about any class, so that they can get to work creating a self-conscious revolutionary class of wage earners, "articulating the articulation."

Timeline: Historical overview of Afghanistan

Stop the War officer John Rees provides a short history of imperialist intervention and local resistance in Afghanistan. Timeline is a series of programmes on political history presented by John Rees and produced by the Islam Channel [ http://www.islamchannel.tv ].

Stop the war coalition: http://www.stopwar.org.uk

http://www.counterfire.org

Marxism 2009: some highlights

Unfortunately, finishing my bachelors this summer turned out to mean I could not attend Marxism festival 2009 in London. However, some of the most prominent speakers have had their speeches filmed and posted on Youtube.

Slavoj Žižek on reinventing socialism and what it means to be a revolutionary today.



Tariq Ali on recent international politics: Obama, Pakistan and the US empire.



More can be found here, including speeches by David Harvey, Chris Harman, and Alex Callinicos (the diehard leninist).

Tariq Ali at the Parkland Conference

Tariq Ali speaks at the Parkland Conference in Edmonton, Canada, on November 16, 2008. Amazing speech on The Dictatorship of Capital: Its Impact on Politics and Culture. With the fall of the Berlin Wall what happened to diversity and freedom of expression? How did market-realism establish its ascendancy in Western culture? He also quotes from and addresses the admirable culture of resistance that is an integral part of Arab poetry.

Helen Scott on Rosa Luxemburg

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A wonderful introduction into the life and times of Rosa Luxemburg, the early 20th century German revolutionary. Helen Scott is editor of "The essential Rosa Luxemburg : Reform or revolution & The mass strike".

Meet Mumia Abu Jamal

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Mumia Abu-Jamal is an American who was convicted and sentenced to death for the 1981 murder of police officer Daniel Faulkner. Before his arrest he was a Black Panther Party activist, cab driver, and journalist. Since his conviction, his case has received international attention and he has become a controversial cultural icon. During his imprisonment he has published several books and other commentaries, most notably 'Live from Death Row'. On April 6, 2009, the United States Supreme Court ruled that his original conviction of 28 years ago would stand.
Despite all the setbacks and defeats in the struggle for his own life, Mumia is still regularly broadcasting broadcasting his insightful and eloquent columns trough Prison Radio.

Every Cook Can Govern

C. L. R. James 1956
Every Cook Can Govern
A Study of Democracy in Ancient Greece
Its Meaning for Today

I've come across a gem of an article by C.L.R. James, whom I suspect to be one of the 20th century's most inspiring historians. Apparently, he wrote a large number of important scholarly works in the 50s and 60s that explored entirely new terrain; and he had a knack for reading history for what it can tell us today.

Perhaps the most striking thing about Greek Democracy was that the administration (and there were immense administrative problems) was organized upon the basis of what is known as sortition, or, more easily, selection by lot. The vast majority of Greek officials were chosen by a method which amounted to putting names into a hat and appointing the ones whose names came out.

Now the average CIO bureaucrat or Labor Member of Parliament in Britain would fall in a fit if it was suggested to him that any worker selected at random could do the work that he is doing, but that was precisely the guiding principle of Greek Democracy. And this form of government is the government under which flourished the greatest civilization the world has ever known.

(...)

For the Greek, the word isonomia, which meant equality, was used interchangeably for democracy. For the Greek, the two meant the same thing. For the Greek, a man who did not take part in politics was an idiotes, an idiot, from which we get our modern word idiot, whose meaning, however, we have limited. Not only did the Greeks choose all officials by lot, they limited their time of service. When a man had served once, as a general rule, he was excluded from serving again because the Greeks believed in rotation, everybody taking his turn to administer the state.

Books by C.L.R. James

Documentary: Secrets of the CIA

In this amazingly accessible documentary, the secret history of the CIA since its founding is covered case by case. It explains how the CIA pioneered, developed, manipulated prisoner abuse, sold drugs, changed regimes and killed millions of people worldwide to further 'security interests'. Very helpful as a first tip for people who are just doubting the stylised story that hides so much of political history after the Second World War.

Edward Said on 'The Clash of Civilizations' and Cultural Imperialism

In 1993 Harvard Professor Samuel P. Huntington wrote an essay titled "The Clash of Civilizations?" and later he expanded into a book with the same title, but without the question mark. Edward Said, late Columbia professor rips Huntington's thesis to shreds, and with it, the kind of reductionist, 'realist' world view that 'The Clash of Civilizations' is an expression and symbol of. Literary theorist and activist Edward Said has provided indispensable insight into the cultural side of contemporary imperialism.

Orientalism and other books by Edward Said

Philosopher Manuel DeLanda gives a presentation that challenges some commonly held beliefs in the realm of political theory. Challenging systems-thinking and the essentialising of institutions, he argues that the military during peacetime has had a large influence on the structure of modern industrial societies, for example, the ways in which factories, schools, and hospitals continually manage the activities of humans. He traces the developments of European military techniques to their use in micromanaging the movements of humans in various institutions.

Even if I wouldn't discard nearly as much of Marx' theory as DeLanda, I found this speech to be a healthy reminder of the pitfalls that Marxists and systems thinkers in general too easily fall for.

One of my favorite comedians, Mark Steel combines a sense of british humour, an amazing ability to make history come to life, and a healthy activist spirit in this lecture (or performance) on the French Revolution. First of two parts.

Playwright Harold Pinter's masterfully eloquent and flamingly critical Nobel Prize acceptance speech on anglo-american foreign policy since the second world war and it's surrounding 'tapestry of lies'.

Historian Michael Parenti on the diversity and orthodoxy in the US media system. If you want to learn more about Parenti, click here for his website.

Sociologist and Philosopher Slavoj Žižek on objective violence or violence inherent in systems. Double click on the video for the whole intruiging interview in which Žižek talks about ideology, psychoanalyses the (liberal) left, and necessity of radical thinking.

Cambridge anthropologist and historian Alan MacFarlane on famine. The conclusions many people have drawn from the limits to growth debate imply that we ought to be concerned with this topic again. Many experts argue that the Green Revolution has made most people on this planet immune from famine, but only temporarily. Thomas Malthus might just be back with a vengeance when fossil fuels have passed peak production and climate change starts becoming more severe.

Naomi Klein at the University of Chicago

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Journalist and writer Naomi Klein addresses students at the University of Chicago on neoliberalism and the economic collapse.

Documentary on Frankfurt School Critical Theorist Herbert Marcuse as a figure in the American student activist movements.

Writer and activist Tariq Ali presents an inspiring tour d'horizon of international politics since the fall of the Soviet Union. On the rise of neoliberalism, the hollowing out of democracy in the West, and humanitarian militarism.