In Honor of Oney Judge: NH Black HistoryWas just contacted by an unpublished author about Judge. Most pertinent fact: her name was "Ona" and that "Oney" was a slave owner's cutesy diminutive.
Have changed event title accordingly.
Repost from Other Thread to Keep Y'all Up to Speed
Tomorrow is the Anti-President's Day Black History Month event that I organized in honor of Ona Judge, runaway slave of George Washington's that ended up in Portsmouth, New Hampshire.
Yesterday, the woman who runs Black Lives Matter NH (and wife of one of my ex-players) discovered (although I had already told her in advance) that the featured speaker was from the still-running Occupy Seacoast group, mostly liberal and progressive Democrats with whom BLM NH doesn't get along because the former had issued a "words we suggest you don't use on your Women's March signs" and one of them was "intersectionality," which they defined as "You-have-to-agree-with-me-on-everything feminism." There were some other microaggressions, I guess is the term, I don't know much about them, really.
Anyway, our reaction to working with people whose politics we disagree with is "fight it out;" hers is "take my ball and go home." She was upset that we "had provided them with a platform" (who does she think they are? The Bad Man?) and withdrew BLM NH's endorsement from the event. The BLM speaker, however, said he still wanted to speak so we just billed him as a member of the New Hampshire Socialist Coalition.
Anyway, I am just reporting how smugly pleased I am that the identitarian politics-peeps are withdrawing because of the liberal Democrats.
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After that, went to a pretty crappily-attended event at UMass Lowell addressed by none other than Nino Brown from earlier in the thread. At one point during the proceedings, he approvingly cited Leon Trotsky on fascism, which was out of character for a Marcyite tankie and frequent Facebook Trotsky shiznit-poster, so I made sure to memorialize his citation with a post on Facebook:
"On February 24th, at 4:27 pm, in Lowell, Massachusetts, @Nino Brown approvingly cited Leon Trotsky. That is all."
Anyway, he gave a good talk on Organizing Against Racism, Black Lives Matter and Beyond. I was hoping to steal some shiznit for the speech that I have to give today. Got a few tidbits, but not much.
Anyway, organizing events is always a stresser, and I went to bed last night around midnight, planning to wake up around eight and write my speech before heading out. But I was struck with the jitters and insomnia, didn't get any sleep and just stared into space for five hours. Couldn't take it any more and rolled out of bed and wrote the following, with only one bit plagiarized (the bit about Bacon's Rebellion). Hope it goes well and hope I don't fall asleep on the drive back from Portsmouth.
Draft for speech for Red Anti-President's Day Black History Month Event In Honor of Ona Judge
If it doesn't hang together, well, I wrote it at 5 in the morning on no sleep.
Thank you. Black History Month was established back in 1926, originally as Negro History Week, to commemorate the births, in the same week, of the great abolitionist Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln. It was established by a scholar named Carter G. Woodson in order to uncover the hidden history of black accomplishment and traditions of struggle of black people in the United States.
We know that the United States of America was founded on the extermination of indigenous peoples and the enslavement of African labor. We know that international capitalism, the whole world that we live in today, was built from the slave trade. The maritime provinces of France, the shipyards of Liverpool, the Triangular Trade of slaves-sugar-rum, the factories of Manchester, both Manchesters, Lowell, the whole industrial revolution and the world that we live in today was built on the profits extracted from black flesh by the lash and the lynch rope. But we also know there is another current of history, the current of struggle and resistance.
As the past couple of months have shown, this history and these traditions of struggle are going to have a particular relevance in the years to come. For just one, obvious, glaring example that’s been driven home again and again by, among others, Robert Forrant, a history professor ally of ours at UMass Lowell, the recent spate of ICE raids and the network of sanctuary activists springing up to meet them, recalls the body-snatching runaway slave catchers and the network of abolitionists who resisted them and their crowning achievement, the Underground Railroad.
The past is never dead, the great novelist William Faulkner wrote, it isn’t event past.
The ruling class, of course, would prefer if we’d forget about these traditions of struggle and resistance. They would prefer if we forgot about Gabriel Prosser, Denmark Vesey and Nat Turner, about Harriet Tubman, John Brown and Frederick Douglass, Sojourner Truth, Ida B. Wells and W.E.B. Du Bois and countless others. But it is our duty to remember. The great Russian revolutionary leader, Leon Trotsky, once commented that the revolutionary party serves as the memory of the working class. It remembers the battles of yesterday, it remembers the traditions of struggle, it hands down, from generation to generation, the hard-won lessons of the past. This is why we study black history; this is why we struggle to remember.
When the English colonists first set up on what was to become the United States, they faced a problem. This allegedly virgin continent, what Native Americans?, had a wealth of riches to bestow, but there wasn’t enough people to do the work. After deeming the Native American unfit for such labor, the North American colonist landowners turned to white indentured labor to solve the shortage. To be indentured meant to work as a virtual slave for a period of up to seven years before being set free. In the 150 years up to the end of the eighteenth century, up to 250,000 English, Irish, German and other impoverished Europeans came to North America as indentured servants but, due to death rates from overwork and mistreatment, many died in bondage.
Throughout this same period there was also a steady arrival of black people purchased from slave traders. However, there was not yet a system of outright racial slavery in the colonies. Upon arrival, these black slaves were converted into indentured servants and integrated into the existing labor system. Being black did not yet automatically brand them as a slave. Some even lived to achieve freedom.
The turning point came in 1676 with Bacon’s Rebellion in Virginia. In this uprising against the aristocratic landowners, black and white indentured servants, runaways, landless free laborers and small farmers united. The Rebellion was brutally crushed, the final group of rebels killed, who chose to stand together in class solidarity and fight to the bitter end comprised, in the account of the time, “Eighty Negroes and Twenty English.” And it terrified the ruling class.
I’d like to point out that it said 20 english. Not 80 negroes and 20 whites, but 20 english. Because, as scholars like Theodore W. Allen have striven to prove, there weren’t yet any white people. There were Englishmen and Irishmen and Frenchmen and Germans, but there weren’t yet any whites. But that was about to change.
In the wake of Bacon’s Rebellion, the ruling class invented systemic racism. They created a system that anticipated South African apartheid by centuries. First, they created a privileged middle layer to act as a social buffer for their rule. They called these people “white” and gave them privileges. Whipping them was to be forbidden, when their term of indenture was over, they were given food, fifty acres of land and a gun, all to give them a stake in the existing order of society. They were given the right to participate in the slave patrols, which, we remember, are the forerunners for our modern police forces. The past is never dead…
Meanwhile, black indentured servants lost all of their rights. For blacks, indentured servitude became lifetime slavery. On the big plantations, white and black living quarters were segregated and the newly minted whites were given better clothes and easier work to distinguish them. Poor whites were forced to believe that they were superior and the whole, nonsensical belief in white supremacy and racism were born, made in the USA.
This is the dirty secret of US history and American capitalism, divide-and-conquer, pit poor whites against poor blacks so that they forget that they are both poor. When slavery was smashed in the Civil War, what we Marxists like to call the Second American Revolution, this same divide-and-conquer system was brought to bear against Reconstruction and the Populists. As W.E.B. DuBois put it in his book, Black Reconstruction:
It must be remembered that the white group of laborers, while they received a low wage, were compensated in part by a sort of public and psychological wage. They were given public deference and titles of courtesy because they were white. They were admitted freely with all classes of white people to public functions, public parks, and the best schools. The police were drawn from their ranks, and the courts, dependent on their votes, treated them with such leniency as to encourage lawlessness. Their vote selected public officials, and while this had small effect upon the economic situation, it had great effect upon their personal treatment and the deference shown them. White schoolhouses were the best in the community, and conspicuously placed, and they cost anywhere from twice to ten times as much per capita as the colored schools. The newspapers specialized on news that flattered the poor whites and almost utterly ignored the Negro except in crime and ridicule.
This, of course, is the germ of what we now call white skin privilege theory, but I would like to point out, that a big difference is that for many, if not most, adherents of white skin privilege, the idea is that white people, including white workers, MATERIALLY BENEFIT from black oppression; whereas, for DuBois, it was the division of the working class into racial components that kept workers down, both white and black, although, obviously, it held black workers down even more. This is what Karl Marx meant when he wrote in Capital at the end of the Civil War that “Labor in the white skin can never free itself as long as labor in the black skin is branded.” This is what Malcolm X meant in his 1964 speech, almost a hundred years later, when he said that “You can’t have capitalism without racism.”
The past is never dead. You have probably read, over the past couple months, about the debate within the Democratic Party between so-called “identity politics” Democrats and “class politics” Democrats. What is this, if not a shamefaced admission of the inability of even modern American capitalism to do without divide and conquer? We reject this false dichotomy. We understand that identity politics without class politics is admitting minorities into positions of power in the name of diversity while the poor of all races are left behind; it is Madeleine Albright, she of “we believe a half million dead Iraqi children is worth it”, saying there’s a special place in hell for women who don’t vote for yuppie racist neoliberals like Hillary Clinton. We understand that class politics without identity politics is white, male job-trusting; it is the New Deal of the thirties, with a dozen loopholes to exclude blacks. We reject, as I said, this false dichotomy, just as, in fact, we reject the Democratic Party as any kind of vehicle for liberation. We, instead, understand that there is no end to class exploitation or racial division without overthrowing capitalism, that there will be no liberation for black people without socialism and there will be socialism unless the worker’s movement champions the rights of all of the oppressed.
This is our starting point. Black rights, immigrant rights, women’s rights, gay rights, trans rights, we have to champion the cause of all of the oppressed, in the words of another great Russian revolutionary, Vladimir Lenin, to act as a “tribune of the people, who is able to react to every manifestation of tyranny and oppression, no matter where it appears, no matter what stratum or class of people it affects.” In modern parlance, this might be called intersectionality, but we hearken back to the old watchwords of the great revolutionary trade unionists of the Industrial Workers of the World, “An injury to one is an injury to all!”
As I mentioned above, Carter G. Woodson inaugurated what we now call Black History Month to honor the birth week of Douglass and Lincoln. President’s Day, on the other hand, is a combination of the birthdays of George Washington and Abraham Lincoln. This year, there were quite a few Anti-President’s Day events, the closest I know of in Worcester, Massachusetts, trading under the slogan that we’ve all heard since November, Not My President.
We concur: Trump isn’t our president. But, we have to say, neither was Obama, and neither were any of them. We shall hear today about George Washington. We remember that, from Thomas Jefferson to James Buchanan, the presidents of the United States of America were all the willing representatives of the slave power. We remember that even Abraham Lincoln, the Great Emancipator, who Carter G. Woodson wanted to co-honor with his original Black History Week probably the only American president that I admire, signed the order for the largest mass execution in United States history, the hanging of 38 Dakota Sioux warriors. As we hear about the news coming back from Standing Rock, we are reminded, again, the past is never dead.
Woodrow Wilson? Racist and Klan apologist who was approvingly cited in D.W. Griffith’s racist The Birth of a Nation. Franklin D. Roosevelt? Last week commemorated the 75th anniversary of the signing of Executive Order 9066 and the internment of Japanese-Americans into concentration camps. As we look at the gulag archipelago that exists throughout this country of private prisons and internment camps for undocumented workers, we can hear Faulkner again: The past is never dead. Kennedy and Johnson? We remember the dirty war in Vietnam, the FBI’s collaboration with the Ku Klux Klan, the assassination of Congolese independence leader Patrice Lumumba and the CIA fingering Nelson Mandela to the apartheid regime. Bill Clinton? Mass incarceration, the war on drugs, slashing welfare. Obama? Deportations, drone assassinations, bailing out banks, slashing food stamps. I had the occasion, two days ago, to hear a leader of the Boston-area Mass Action Against Police Brutality speak in Lowell and he reminded us that back when Obama was elected he said he wasn’t the president of black America, he was the president of all America. What was that, the Mass Action activist asked, other than Obamaspeak for “All Lives Matter”?
And now we’ve Donald J. Trump, slimy bigot and sexual predator, who took out a full-page advertisement back in 1989 calling for the execution of the framed Central Park Five, who calls for racist stop and frisk to be implemented in Chicago, the deportations, the Muslim travel ban, etc., etc. As soon as Trump was elected, we in Socialist Alternative called for nation-wide protests and the next day, over 40,000 people in cities like Boston and New York and Chicago and Seattle answered the call. Since then we were active in building the J20 protests and the Women’s March and we are calling to step up the resistance in the months to come, particularly on March 8, International Working Women’s Day, and May 1st, International Workers Day. We hope that you will join us in resistance against Trump and capitalism, and we hope that you will check out our newspaper, and we hope that you will check out socialist ideas and join an anti-capitalist organization. Before I turn it over to Nur and Tammi, I would just like to finish with the words of the unbowed black revolutionary, Assata Shakur:
“It is our duty to fight for our freedom.
It is our duty to win.
We must love each other and support each other.
We have nothing to lose but our chains.”
I hope you will join us. Thank you.
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We started ten minutes late and I panicked when Mr. Comrade gave me the "three minutes left" signal and cut it off at the Marx and Malcolm X quotes. Got to work in a couple of the other paragraphs in the sum up.
Overall, a resounding (although not unqualified) success. About thirty people, in a city we rarely visit, no leafleting, just word of mouth working with other groups. Pretty happy that we seemed to get one or two people from each of the other groups that we've been working with, so that was nice. Nothing I said (granted, I didn't get to say it all) was deemed the least bit controversial and even the liberal Democrats were chiming in with their disgust for Clinton, Obama and the Democrats.
One small snafu was that I didn't check in with all of the other speakers for the activist roundtable to see what they planned to speak about and both our high school student comrade and the young man from BLM NH had prepared talks on, what else?, the Black Panther Party, but they worked well on the fly together to merge their talks.
My favorite part:
One of the women from BLM NH (actually, ex-, I think, but we're not sure; definitely not the woman mentioned above) that I've always been particularly sweet on spoke during the discussion and asked the perennial question that people of color ask at socialist meetings to the consternation of white leftists: why aren't there more people of color at socialist meetings?
After a couple of white (and one Turkish) activists made well-meaning, but clumsy attempts to answer the perennial question, High School Student Comrade knocked it out of the f*~&ing park:
"I often get asked why am I socialist, isn't socialism just a bunch of white people, and I say, What about Thomas Sankara? Angela Davis? The Panthers? There are movements all over this planet, in Africa, in Asia, in Latin America, inspired by socialism, fighting for liberation and when people ask aren't socialists just another bunch of white people, I think they are erasing the contributions of black, brown, and yellow socialists all over the world."
Eighteen years old, first time public speaking, and she comes up with that? I f@&%ing love this kid!
Heroes of Revolutionary Socialism
South African trade unionist, Treason Trial defendant, exile, communist
La Principessa's Single Mother Comrade and Her Son came up to visit for the weekend. A founding member, she was recently expelled by our [redacted redacted] leadership. Democratic centralism, of course, prevents me from going into the hows and whys, but everybody on the Facebook Far Left knows about it because of leaks from leadership so I don't see how me mentioning it here could be in any way objectionable.
Anyway, at a social event after the public meeting in Portsmouth, LPSMC gave a stunning impromptu speech about Leninism, the party question and internationalism, with a lengthy and impassioned discussion in the middle of the work of our comrades in Nigeria, South Africa, Ivory Coast and Zimbabwe. The young comrades were, as I said, stunned, and I openly wept.
The next morning, she broke down and cried on the couch as she told Mr. Comrade and I about Nimrod (whom she had known in Ireland as a young woman), the decimation of our Zimbabwean comrades by Mugabe's thugs, and other heroic acts of sacrifice of our African comrades.
As you might imagine, what with all that and Ona Judge memorial meetings and trips to African Burying Grounds, some Sanctuary work that I didn't even mention, etc., etc., it was a pretty emotionally exhausting weekend.
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Inflatable animal standoff: Union responds to construction company cat balloon with larger rat
Glad to see that the union learned from Dr. Strangelove that you can't allow an inflatable animal gap! :)
Comrade Anklebiter, you're going to want to make sure your beloved Communists get a website and assorted social media feeds up and running. Without a "platform" to stand on, leaflets and what not are going to take too long to get the word out.
Never fear, we have those, too, although I am partial to leaflets.
For example, from the ongoing 1917 centenary leaflet collection:
Which reminds me that I already regret switching shifts.
Tomorrow evening: Emergency Rally Against Muslim Ban 2.0
The following evening: International Women's Day at UMass Lowell
The evening after that: LEJA (Lowell Education Justice Alliance) film and discussion on the impact of high stakes testing
I can't wait to go back to day shift.
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Leeds Deliveroo couriers stage demo after workers are sacked for joining the IWW
The RMT (Rail, Maritime and Transport) union are holding a train strike today, too.
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Stopped at the gas station on the way home from work and discovered that I was on the cover of the local paper all day.
Questions linger in fentanyl jail death
Telegraph seeks records on overdose of homeless man
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After Professor Sue helped us celebrate International Women's Day, she asked if we'd help organize an event on campus for a visiting Khmer former garment worker and president of the Cambodian Alliance of Trade Unions. We were, of course, more than happy to help.
Women Workers Resist: Cambodian labor leader Sophorn Yang speaks
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More 1917 Centenary leaflets:
‘For a general strike against autocracy’
March 12, 2017 (Petersburg Interdistrict Committee)
Two more articles:
RUSSIA MARCH 1917: AFTER THE FALL OF THE CZAR
and one I have to read for a Day School on Sunday, about 1905, not 1917,
1905 Russian Revolution - When workers gained a glimpse of power
From last year, but the best article I found after fifteen seconds of looking on the internet:
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Well, that was, by far, the oddest contact session I've ever attended.
Big, beefy guy started showing up at some of our events last summer. Talked about Lenin on the national question, later mentioned that he used to be a local union president. Talk to him later, ask him what union he was with and he shamefacedly says that he used to be the president of a small town NH police union local. Says that he first ran into us in 2003 at an anti-Free Trade of the Americas march in Fort Lauderdale...while serving in the riot squad.
Article about it in Mother Jones
Since then, he left the force, became a social worker and started reading Marxism and wants to join up.
Had long conversations about Marxism and the state and he regaled us with stories of racist cop abuse, rousting homeless people, domestic violence among the cops that he has served with, a cop that he served with who is now on death row for killing a prostitute, etc., etc.
Not sure if we're being infiltrated or not; but, have to admit, he talked a good game. Never heard of an ex-cop commie before. Ex-soldiers, ex-Marines, ex-Pinkertons, etc., etc., but never an ex-cop.
There are more things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio, etc., etc.
Have to admit my first thought was, "infiltrator." But everyone deserves a chance, no?
Yeah. We'll see, I guess. Fortunately, we don't do anything illegal (low-level controlled substance abuse aside, and even that's pretty much decriminalized around here now).
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For something lighter, Young Gay Autistic Comrade, who has taken it upon himself to run the world's most popular communist furry page, found a bronie adaptation of the Teamsters logo.
---
EDIT: Never mind, can't make the link work.
EDIT 2: Here we go.
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I say welcome the guy in! Is he an infiltrator? Possible, but I would worry far more about the person who doesn't admit they are a former cop.
As a fairly fit guy with a buzz cut, I have been suspected of being an undercover many times. I have also played "spot the undercover cop" at dozens of critical mass rides and other protests. Over the years I have concluded that you can't really know, and it is best to just be inclusive and just keep in mind that virtually anyone could be an undercover. Being a hardass about spotting undercovers is just going to mean the person who does infiltrate is good at it, and that you will have a false sense of security.
With that said, always keep an eye out for odd things like protestors who get "arrested", then end up hanging out with the cops at the doughnut shop an hour later.
Above all, remember that revolutions are much more successful when they include the workers in the police and military. Guys like him have seen the flaws in the police establishment more then almost anyone, so it isn't surprising he would be open to your ideas. If you can be that bridge to bring guys like him into your movement, you are pretty much unstoppable!
Also Miami 2003! Damn Anklebiter, you have some serious street cred!
I agree. Paranoia is a killer. You get infiltrated, you make the infiltrator do paper sales and all the other work. You get actual evidence they're an infiltrator, you kick them out.
For clarity, I wasn't at Ft. Lauderdale in 2003; the organization was.
In 2003 I was in the beginnings of my commie sabbatical, working at the used record store.
Just spent a couple minutes looking for the "Fort Lauderdale method" that I remembered Comrade Fergie posting a few times over the years.
Of course, it wasn't the "Fort Lauderdale method," it was the Miami model.
I say welcome the guy in! Is he an infiltrator? Possible, but I would worry far more about the person who doesn't admit they are a former cop.
As a fairly fit guy with a buzz cut, I have been suspected of being an undercover many times. I have also played "spot the undercover cop" at dozens of critical mass rides and other protests. Over the years I have concluded that you can't really know, and it is best to just be inclusive and just keep in mind that virtually anyone could be an undercover. Being a hardass about spotting undercovers is just going to mean the person who does infiltrate is good at it, and that you will have a false sense of security.
With that said, always keep an eye out for odd things like protestors who get "arrested", then end up hanging out with the cops at the doughnut shop an hour later.
They used to say you could pick 'em out because the undercover coppers were the only people at the meeting/on the march with polished boots.
After Professor Sue helped us celebrate International Women's Day, she asked if we'd help organize an event on campus for a visiting Khmer former garment worker and president of the Cambodian Alliance of Trade Unions. We were, of course, more than happy to help.
Women Workers Resist: Cambodian labor leader Sophorn Yang speaks
And this was cancelled last night by Professor Sue.
:(
Got the heads up about this last week from one of Comrade Omar's Vermont union sisters. Didn't really pay attention to it because it was all the way over in Vermont, but I saw today on Democracy Now! that they are being held in New Hampshire and that caught my attention.
Organizer: ICE Detention of Immigrant Rights Activists in VT is Clear Case of Political Retaliation
Demand the release of detained human rights leaders Enrique and Zully!
Justicia Migrane/Migrant Justice FB page
We have learned that they are being held in the Stratford County Courthouse in Dover, NH. Kind of off our beaten path (about an hour east), but happily we've been making all kinds of friends on the coast (Occupy Seacoast, Seacoast Young Socialists, Democratic Socialists of America) so maybe I can spur them into organizing something.
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Exclusive: 17,000 AT&T Phone Workers Going on Strike
IIRC, their contract expired last year in the middle of the Verizon strike. A bunch of commies called for them going out and having a bicoastal phone strike, but they just had a couple of one-day strikes to blow off steam.
Until now, it seems.
For a rarity, an event I can only attend because I changed shifts.
Rally to Stop Jailing Farmworkers #FreeEnriqueFreeZullyFreeAlex
I remember posting about radical attorney Lynne Stewart a couple of years ago when she was in jail.
Just learned that she passed earlier this year.
Amsterdam News: Community sends abolitionist attorney Lynne Stewart home
[Clenched fist salute]
[Clenched fist salute]
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Judge denies bond for 1 Vt. immigrant, approves other 2
"Cameron, who is representing all three immigrants pro-bono, said he was shocked by Department of Homeland Security documents showing that [Zully] Palacios had been the target of a Counterterrorism and Criminal Exploitation Unit investigation. The unit generally looks at people with gang or terrorism connections.
"'You don't just get on that list'," Cameron said. 'If there was something to this, it would have come out in court. It is a complete pretext.'"
Duh. Organizing migrant farm workers = terrorism.
Similar ground covered in the Boston Globe:
(They misspelled her last name in the headline--[facepalm])
(It's also unfortunate that his nickname is a homonym for an anti-Semitic slur. Young Gay Autistic Comrade also goes by that nickname, but he spells it "Keke".)
And, back to 1917 Centenary:
And, friend of La Principessa's in the news:
Local Antifa leader: 'I fight what’s wrong and I know I’m winning'
He was also part of that "Generations KKK" show that A&E pulled after mounting outrage that it was giving free press to the Klan. I'm generally against giving them, the Klan that is, a platform, but from what I could tell, the show was going to be about activists trying to extricate people from Klan families.
Professor Bob on Boston's NPR website:
Brave Hearts: When Lowell Was A Sanctuary City — For Fugitive Slaves
Oh, and a bit of leftie celebrity Facebook fun.
Mr. Comrade got a friend request from William Ayers last night. He was about to delete it (he thinks most of his friend requests are cops or porn robots; actually, he does get a lot of porn robots); when I was like, "Don't you know who that is?!?" He was all like, "Um...no?" and I was all, "William Ayers? Bill Ayers? Bernadine Dohrn's husband? Leader of the motherf!&+ing Weather Underground?!?" He was all like, "Oh yeah."
Anyway, he accepted it, but then Facebook told him that Bill had too many FB friends (apparently you can only have five thousand) and would have to drop some before adding Mr. Comrade.
Mr. Comrade, of course, is walking on clouds that he has caught the attention of Bill Ayers, even after I told him I think Ayers is just a Democrat now.
Enraged liberals, as Lenin said.
Didn't Bill Ayers advise or work with Obama in some capacity, and wasn't there a bit of a fuss about that at the time?
I believe so. Maybe not Obama specifically, but that same circle of Chicago Democrats.
And apparently The Nation put out an article by one of my all-time faves this morning. Haven't read it yet, but will link it on principle.
(Although, I'm pretty sure he was already an internationalist before the Nazis invaded Poland.)
So, I'm curious—with all the privacy happenings of late, what's the socialist take on matters of internet privacy?
Good to see The Non-Jewish Jew and Other Essays is back in print.
Bit of commie folklore from my old comrades.
It was the summer of 1965 in New York City and the founding members of the Spartacist tendency had been kicked out of the SWP about a year and a half prior, but they were able to get one of their theoretical heavies, a guy with the awesome name of
Shane Mage on the speaker's panel at the Second Socialist Scholars Conference (now known as Left Forum) alongside Deutscher. Unbeknownst to the other Sparts, Professor Mage had, earlier in the month, experimented with a new drug going around. During Professor Mage's talk he suddenly dropped all pretenses to Marxism and started expounding upon the gospel of LSD.
He was summarily expelled on the spot, as legend would have it, from the floor by another Spart leader during the discussion.
The SWP somehow got the rights to Deutscher's speech and published it as On Socialist Man and, although the other panel participants comments aren't included, Deutscher does refer to the false utopia of "liberating drugs" in his sum-up.
[Bubble bubble bubble]
So, I'm curious—with all the privacy happenings of late, what's the socialist take on matters of internet privacy?
I don't know. As I said in the other thread, computer science talk is gibberish to me.
Let's see if I can find something...
...Sorry, I got nothing. Looked at our website, Socialist Worker and Jacobin before I got distracted by something else.
I'll go out on a limb and say we're in favor of internet privacy.
Item that distracted me:
Late last week, we heard rumors that there are plans, within the next two years, to automate our hub. The Black Goblin told me I better start signing up for full-time jobs (they automtically get seniority over part-timers). I told Mr. Comrade that if (when) layoffs come, I would give the Teamsters one chance to organize sit-ins and if that failed, I'd kill myself, but I guess I should be more proactive and start agitating now.
ICE strikes in the Merrimack Valley
ICE Arrests Green Card Applicants In Lawrence, Signaling Shift In Priorities
Emergency demo at 3.
Snow storm started a couple hours ago and they've already postponed the Voters Rights March in Concord to Sunday (Sununu's been attacking same-day registration, which is the only reason I was able to vote this year), when the Granite State Organizing Project was holding a conversation about race and gender.
New England weather...