Just listened to an interview with Cornel West. He's a jazz lover, music lover. He expressed how music can bring folks together; give us a sense of cummunity and humanity. For sure you know very well how centering and calming and honest and soul searching music can be. When music is used as a tool, a very strong tool, for hatred I can see how that would get you protesteing on the street. Keep on keepig on Paul.
Brother West is a lovely human. I personally don't care for electoral politics. I suspect he doesn't either, really but has decided that a presidential run could be useful for consciousness-raising.
I love music, grew up as the only child of two piano players and a mother with a lovely singing voice. I wish I spent more time on it and really developed beyond my tinkering around. But then I also wish I was taking French classes and trying to get back to where I was decades ago with that language -- and then beyond. So little extra time right now. Music will always be used for both good and bad, as will visual arts and literature and sports and science and so on...Well maybe not always. If humanity ever gets truly and fully beyond class rule and other forms of oppression, perhaps the impluse to misuse art/science/literature/sports would pretty much go extinct.
It is fascinating to see how even a small group standing up for what they believe in has the power to make others think. The fact that the cops threatened to arrest them for "alarming and disturbing others" only shows how powerful their message was. Though it may not have changed anyone's mind immediately, it is an important step towards creating change.
Being anti-fascist is always the correct response. It has a long history in the U.S. One of my earlier arrests was for burning a Nazi flag. So rather than fighting with each other and weakening our limited resourses, leftists might better consider how to work together or at least not shoot at each other. As Malcolm X always reminded us, the West ain't the world and those fighting against racism, imperialism, ecocide and fascism are the majority of world's peoples. Keep on keepin' on!
Paul, I guess I am just wondering if someone has tried to burn a flag at a Pentagon briefing. Or a Biden “press conference “. Or, even more to the point, has anyone in your organization expressed support for those who are confronting
George, have you reached out to the loved ones of people killed by armed fascists in Charleston, El Paso, Pittsburgh, Buffalo, Kenosha and elsewhere across the USA to tell their lost loved ones weren't murdered by real armed fascists because "the real armed fascists (are) in Ukraine"?!
Are you in the fashy Putinleft? I Ask cuz you are writing like it here. I am against the war on internationalist anti-imperialist communist grounds, not Russian nationalist/imperialist grounds ffs. Are you aware that the Putin regime is a leading world fascist champion and role model? Putin defended Trump the other day. Look for an Aldean concert attended by Vlad in Moscow next year!
I would also defend Trump against the ridiculous Russiagate hoax, perpetrated by the Democrats. And Putin has recently stated that American policy toward Russia will not change under a Trump administration. George
Well, let me say what a communist wants in Russia: a new and improved socialist revolution, building on and transcending the Soviet experience. F Putin. F Biden. F Zelesnky. F capitlaism-imperialism.
You assume too much, Paul. I have studied Avakian's politics through their many twists turns. (Even his 'New Constitution,' but especially starting with Red Papers#5 I knew you shared a 'aim the main blow at Obama' through all the varieties of fighting fascism. And I though at the time, 'this will lead him into Avakian's camp.' I even did a public program--not with him, but a 'REVCOM,' when Jerry Harris and I first published our piece, with accompanying powerpoint, of the rise of the theocratic right in the 1990s. Every once in a while, Clark Kissinger inserts a note of a little sanity, but the REVCOM approach at the movement is a variety of youth syndicalism and self-expression and spectacle via flag burning. I'm neither a flag waver nor a flag burner, but I can see the appeal to anarchist youth.
....CD, you refer to "strategic" vs. "spectacle" (a smear of the rcp, really, as was Hedges' past legal identification of them as "violent") but the actual difference between your approach and standpoint and the rcp's/Avakian's is reformist semi-progressivism under the cover of the neoliberal Dems (Obama et al) versus revolutionary socialism/communism with zero fealty to the Dems. The "strategic", really reformist and cringing approach appears to be running on fumes at this late stage in bourgeois democracy, US American Style. It's pretty much spent. Like the Yeats poem says, the center cannot hold. The future is radical and the question is radicallly terrible fascism or radically liberating socialism. Right now, with the current plague of left, liberal, progressive, and moderate sleepwalking and denial, the money is on radically terrible. Credit for having a longstanding understanding of the GOP as truly terrilble. Great agreement on that. Remarkably enough we have a bunch of left identified folks who don;t get that, even after 1-6.
Very little if anything with anarchists/zero syndicalism.....when I was writing on Obama 2004-2013-14 it was more ala Chomsky and Pilger and Z Magazine/ZNet (which was anarchish) and (very different) BAR (a Panther-backgrounded mix of Marxism and some nationalism), no hint of RCP ism. I met revcoms and Refuse Fascism in the streets in Chicago in 2018-19. They were truly the only folks doing anything at all with an eye to the national scene and, well, in-power fascin, not just lame localism about de-funding cops and getting Lori Lightfoot tro declare a climate emerency and other silly stuff like that. Once I got over aversion to the sell and actually read Avakian, I was surprisingly and significantly impressed, even at times knocked out. Very fucking serious thinker to say the least; good luck matching BA, CD! And frankly very many of the revcoms I've met run circles around the US left both as acticvists and as thinkers. Much more than spectacle going on. Nothing wrong with a bit of spectacle. This show of audacity could prove useful and expand..it has broken a bit into the superstructure. You remember the word of audacity from that reactionary book The Audacity of Hope by Obama, no? I reviewed it once or twice. God what an imperialist piece of crap it was!
Aim the "main blow" at the head of the U.S. empire? The one who developed dirty wars to kill more adeptly while sparing American lives? Who "looked forward, not backward," so as not to hold his war criminal predecessors accountable? Who served Wall Street, not the millions bankrupted and foreclosed after 2008/2009 financial collapse? Who prosecuted more whistleblowers more severely than any president before him? Maybe that's a symptom of thinking about humanity and the crying need to radically transform the world, not trying to find the latest progressive Democratic politician to tie your coattails to, while the earth burns and the current Democratic occupant of the WH barrels towards a worldwide conflagration, nukes and all. And frankly, I can't see any appeal to that.
Yes, and Carl might want to review my tens of thousands of words, including a whole damn book, aimed precisely at Trump and Trumpism-fascism 2016-present. LOL. A few main blows at the Republi-facist right, I'd say, https://www.amazon.com/This-Happened-Here-Paul-Street/dp/1032150599
Racist MAGA morons like Aldean deserve nothing but disrespect and disruption. But Aldean has not led us to the brink of nuclear annihilation. The warmonger in diapers who resides in the White House is pushing us in that direction. Where are the demonstrations at his rare press conferences or other propaganda presentations? Isn’t the warmongering imperialism of the two major parties a much greater immediate danger then Jason Aldean? What can I do about that?
Oh my goodness I have spoken out against the inter-imperialist US-Russia proxy war and the NATO death machine at an RCP protest in Millennium Park in downtown Chicago earlier this year. I did a Chicago video hosted by a revcom and against the NATO imperalism in Ukraine early on. I agree that Jason Aldean is not the chief executive of the US Empire!
Aldean's song is much more than another racist country song. Did you read Paul's Sept 7 article about why it's another important part of mobilizing the fascist troops (in and out of uniform) for civil war? Gotten over 200 million hits online, and where's the outcry? Next to nada. Everyone who was out at the protest at Tinley Park last Saturday has protested against the US proxy war vs Ukraine, and taken a lot of shit from most of "the left" for doing so. One doesn't preclude the other.
So you are now in the deep end of politics as self-expression with Chairman Bob's Revcoms. Makes sense to me, but I'm in the other pool, politics as strategy, not spectacle.
Very revealing that you see this as just childish self-expression under "chairman Bob" with no concern for strategy. But of course. Translation: you haven't undergone any serious intellectual engagrement with Avakian's remarkable body of work or you kinda tried but are too wedded to the tame revisionism that had you wedded to the Obama phenomenon. Like me and my late friends at BAR, Glen Ford and Bruce Dixon, the RCP properly understood Obama in ways that you simply would not, in the name of what you call/called strategy. Okay. My sense is that we share an understanding of the Republicans now as fascist (and the Democrats as persistebtly bourgeois-democratic) but you still can't really extract from the nothingness of the dismal Weimar Dems (in the name of what you believe is strategy). I just happen to actually agree with Avakian on a ton of shit about the history of communism, the problems with "the left," the splits within the ruling class and the populace, the essence and taproots and rise of American fascism, and the fading capacity of bourgeois institutions and politics and the existential necessiity and possibility of socialist revolution of a kind that leads to communism. I think you would do well to step back from these real and perceived differences to help organize a protest of Aldean....there's a strategic anti-fascist opening of sorts there; a wake up call to help overcome what I call the audacity gap, which is a real thing. Too many folks are hoping for Obamanistic solutions that aren't coming
...I've been paying attention the last few years to left thinkers' ironically reflexive and anti-intellectual reponse to Avakian and find it at once darkly amusing, revealing, and sad.
The LA Times took notice: https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/music/story/2023-09-11/protesters-demonstrate-jason-aldean-concert-chicago. of course the Streetwriter's piece benefits from Paul having been there...thank you!!
Just listened to an interview with Cornel West. He's a jazz lover, music lover. He expressed how music can bring folks together; give us a sense of cummunity and humanity. For sure you know very well how centering and calming and honest and soul searching music can be. When music is used as a tool, a very strong tool, for hatred I can see how that would get you protesteing on the street. Keep on keepig on Paul.
Brother West is a lovely human. I personally don't care for electoral politics. I suspect he doesn't either, really but has decided that a presidential run could be useful for consciousness-raising.
I love music, grew up as the only child of two piano players and a mother with a lovely singing voice. I wish I spent more time on it and really developed beyond my tinkering around. But then I also wish I was taking French classes and trying to get back to where I was decades ago with that language -- and then beyond. So little extra time right now. Music will always be used for both good and bad, as will visual arts and literature and sports and science and so on...Well maybe not always. If humanity ever gets truly and fully beyond class rule and other forms of oppression, perhaps the impluse to misuse art/science/literature/sports would pretty much go extinct.
It is fascinating to see how even a small group standing up for what they believe in has the power to make others think. The fact that the cops threatened to arrest them for "alarming and disturbing others" only shows how powerful their message was. Though it may not have changed anyone's mind immediately, it is an important step towards creating change.
Being anti-fascist is always the correct response. It has a long history in the U.S. One of my earlier arrests was for burning a Nazi flag. So rather than fighting with each other and weakening our limited resourses, leftists might better consider how to work together or at least not shoot at each other. As Malcolm X always reminded us, the West ain't the world and those fighting against racism, imperialism, ecocide and fascism are the majority of world's peoples. Keep on keepin' on!
Paul, I guess I am just wondering if someone has tried to burn a flag at a Pentagon briefing. Or a Biden “press conference “. Or, even more to the point, has anyone in your organization expressed support for those who are confronting
the real armed fascists in Ukraine?
George, have you reached out to the loved ones of people killed by armed fascists in Charleston, El Paso, Pittsburgh, Buffalo, Kenosha and elsewhere across the USA to tell their lost loved ones weren't murdered by real armed fascists because "the real armed fascists (are) in Ukraine"?!
Yeah, George, the Revcoms go to Pentagon briefings. You betchya. 😂
Are you in the fashy Putinleft? I Ask cuz you are writing like it here. I am against the war on internationalist anti-imperialist communist grounds, not Russian nationalist/imperialist grounds ffs. Are you aware that the Putin regime is a leading world fascist champion and role model? Putin defended Trump the other day. Look for an Aldean concert attended by Vlad in Moscow next year!
I would also defend Trump against the ridiculous Russiagate hoax, perpetrated by the Democrats. And Putin has recently stated that American policy toward Russia will not change under a Trump administration. George
And I would never accuse you of being a Schiff Dem.
Anyway I'm totally against the war There's plenty of fascism to go around, including a bunch in Russia.
Plenty of Russophobia as well. George
Well, let me say what a communist wants in Russia: a new and improved socialist revolution, building on and transcending the Soviet experience. F Putin. F Biden. F Zelesnky. F capitlaism-imperialism.
You assume too much, Paul. I have studied Avakian's politics through their many twists turns. (Even his 'New Constitution,' but especially starting with Red Papers#5 I knew you shared a 'aim the main blow at Obama' through all the varieties of fighting fascism. And I though at the time, 'this will lead him into Avakian's camp.' I even did a public program--not with him, but a 'REVCOM,' when Jerry Harris and I first published our piece, with accompanying powerpoint, of the rise of the theocratic right in the 1990s. Every once in a while, Clark Kissinger inserts a note of a little sanity, but the REVCOM approach at the movement is a variety of youth syndicalism and self-expression and spectacle via flag burning. I'm neither a flag waver nor a flag burner, but I can see the appeal to anarchist youth.
....CD, you refer to "strategic" vs. "spectacle" (a smear of the rcp, really, as was Hedges' past legal identification of them as "violent") but the actual difference between your approach and standpoint and the rcp's/Avakian's is reformist semi-progressivism under the cover of the neoliberal Dems (Obama et al) versus revolutionary socialism/communism with zero fealty to the Dems. The "strategic", really reformist and cringing approach appears to be running on fumes at this late stage in bourgeois democracy, US American Style. It's pretty much spent. Like the Yeats poem says, the center cannot hold. The future is radical and the question is radicallly terrible fascism or radically liberating socialism. Right now, with the current plague of left, liberal, progressive, and moderate sleepwalking and denial, the money is on radically terrible. Credit for having a longstanding understanding of the GOP as truly terrilble. Great agreement on that. Remarkably enough we have a bunch of left identified folks who don;t get that, even after 1-6.
Very little if anything with anarchists/zero syndicalism.....when I was writing on Obama 2004-2013-14 it was more ala Chomsky and Pilger and Z Magazine/ZNet (which was anarchish) and (very different) BAR (a Panther-backgrounded mix of Marxism and some nationalism), no hint of RCP ism. I met revcoms and Refuse Fascism in the streets in Chicago in 2018-19. They were truly the only folks doing anything at all with an eye to the national scene and, well, in-power fascin, not just lame localism about de-funding cops and getting Lori Lightfoot tro declare a climate emerency and other silly stuff like that. Once I got over aversion to the sell and actually read Avakian, I was surprisingly and significantly impressed, even at times knocked out. Very fucking serious thinker to say the least; good luck matching BA, CD! And frankly very many of the revcoms I've met run circles around the US left both as acticvists and as thinkers. Much more than spectacle going on. Nothing wrong with a bit of spectacle. This show of audacity could prove useful and expand..it has broken a bit into the superstructure. You remember the word of audacity from that reactionary book The Audacity of Hope by Obama, no? I reviewed it once or twice. God what an imperialist piece of crap it was!
Aim the "main blow" at the head of the U.S. empire? The one who developed dirty wars to kill more adeptly while sparing American lives? Who "looked forward, not backward," so as not to hold his war criminal predecessors accountable? Who served Wall Street, not the millions bankrupted and foreclosed after 2008/2009 financial collapse? Who prosecuted more whistleblowers more severely than any president before him? Maybe that's a symptom of thinking about humanity and the crying need to radically transform the world, not trying to find the latest progressive Democratic politician to tie your coattails to, while the earth burns and the current Democratic occupant of the WH barrels towards a worldwide conflagration, nukes and all. And frankly, I can't see any appeal to that.
Yes, and Carl might want to review my tens of thousands of words, including a whole damn book, aimed precisely at Trump and Trumpism-fascism 2016-present. LOL. A few main blows at the Republi-facist right, I'd say, https://www.amazon.com/This-Happened-Here-Paul-Street/dp/1032150599
Racist MAGA morons like Aldean deserve nothing but disrespect and disruption. But Aldean has not led us to the brink of nuclear annihilation. The warmonger in diapers who resides in the White House is pushing us in that direction. Where are the demonstrations at his rare press conferences or other propaganda presentations? Isn’t the warmongering imperialism of the two major parties a much greater immediate danger then Jason Aldean? What can I do about that?
Oh my goodness I have spoken out against the inter-imperialist US-Russia proxy war and the NATO death machine at an RCP protest in Millennium Park in downtown Chicago earlier this year. I did a Chicago video hosted by a revcom and against the NATO imperalism in Ukraine early on. I agree that Jason Aldean is not the chief executive of the US Empire!
Aldean's song is much more than another racist country song. Did you read Paul's Sept 7 article about why it's another important part of mobilizing the fascist troops (in and out of uniform) for civil war? Gotten over 200 million hits online, and where's the outcry? Next to nada. Everyone who was out at the protest at Tinley Park last Saturday has protested against the US proxy war vs Ukraine, and taken a lot of shit from most of "the left" for doing so. One doesn't preclude the other.
So you are now in the deep end of politics as self-expression with Chairman Bob's Revcoms. Makes sense to me, but I'm in the other pool, politics as strategy, not spectacle.
Very revealing that you see this as just childish self-expression under "chairman Bob" with no concern for strategy. But of course. Translation: you haven't undergone any serious intellectual engagrement with Avakian's remarkable body of work or you kinda tried but are too wedded to the tame revisionism that had you wedded to the Obama phenomenon. Like me and my late friends at BAR, Glen Ford and Bruce Dixon, the RCP properly understood Obama in ways that you simply would not, in the name of what you call/called strategy. Okay. My sense is that we share an understanding of the Republicans now as fascist (and the Democrats as persistebtly bourgeois-democratic) but you still can't really extract from the nothingness of the dismal Weimar Dems (in the name of what you believe is strategy). I just happen to actually agree with Avakian on a ton of shit about the history of communism, the problems with "the left," the splits within the ruling class and the populace, the essence and taproots and rise of American fascism, and the fading capacity of bourgeois institutions and politics and the existential necessiity and possibility of socialist revolution of a kind that leads to communism. I think you would do well to step back from these real and perceived differences to help organize a protest of Aldean....there's a strategic anti-fascist opening of sorts there; a wake up call to help overcome what I call the audacity gap, which is a real thing. Too many folks are hoping for Obamanistic solutions that aren't coming
...I've been paying attention the last few years to left thinkers' ironically reflexive and anti-intellectual reponse to Avakian and find it at once darkly amusing, revealing, and sad.