The Anti-Empire Report #122 By William Blum: NSA / The United Nations vote on the Cuba embargo – 22 years in a row / Let’s not repeat the Barack fuckup with Hillary

7 November 2013 — The Anti-Empire Report

National Security Agency – The only part of the government that really listens to what you have to say

The New York Times (November 2) ran a long article based on NSA documents released by Edward Snowden. One of the lines that most caught my attention concerned “Sigint” – Signals intelligence, the term used for electronic intercepts. The document stated: Continue reading

Book Review: The talented and reviled Mr Pepper (Comintern agent) By Dan La Botz

20 October 2013 — New Politics

The great European revolutionary epoch of the post war period from the 1910s through the 1920s provides endless biographical material revealing all that is best and worst in the human material of revolution, the Russians having been the most studied, providing shelves of biographies of Lenin, Bukharin, Stalin and Trotsky. Continue reading

Alienation in Karl Marx’s early writing By Daniel Lopez

October 15, 2013 — Links international Journal of Socialist Renewal

Marx 3

Young Marx

As Karl Korsh noted in Marxism and Philosophy, the philosophical foundation of Marx’s works has often been neglected. The Second International had, in Korsch’s view, pushed aside philosophy as an ideology, preferring “science”. This, he charged, tended to reduce Marxism to a positivistic sociology, and in so doing, it internalised and replicated the theoretical logic of capitalism. [1] In place of this, Korsch called for a revitalisation of Marxism that would view philosophy not simply as false consciousness but as a necessary part of the social totality.[2]

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The Challenge of Sustainable Development and the Culture of Substantive Equality By István Mészáros

December 2001 — Monthly Review

István MészÁros is author of Socialism or Barbarism: From the “American Century” to the Crossroads (Monthly Review Press, 2001), and Beyond Capital: Toward a Theory of Transition (Monthly Review Press, 1995).

This article is based on a lecture delivered at the Latin American Parliaments’ “Summit on the Social Debt and Latin American Integration,” held in Caracas, Venezuela, July 10-13, 2001.

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Video: The Great Rift: Capitalism and the metabolism of nature and production John Bellamy Foster

7 August 2013 — MRZine

John Bellamy Foster: We need a society that is geared, as István Mészáros always tells us, to substantive equality. And no compromise on the issue of equality. Bolívar said equality is the law of laws. So we need substantive equality and we need ecological sustainability. And they have to go together. How do we know they have to go together? Because what is causing the ecological damage and what is causing the social damage is the same thing: it’s the rift in the production system; it’s the alienation of nature, which is one with the alienation of human society. Continue reading

Movie Review: “We Steal Secrets”: A Masterclass in Propaganda. The Assassination of Julian Assange By Jonathan Cook

30 July 2013 — Jonathan Cook

I have just watched We Steal Secrets, Alex Gibney’s documentary about Wikileaks and Julian Assange. One useful thing I learnt is the difference between a hatchet job and character assassination. Gibney is too clever for a hatchet job, and his propaganda is all the more effective for it.

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The Anti-Empire Report #119 By William Blum: Nationalism and Hypocrisy

29 July 2013 — Anti-Empire Report

That most charming of couples: Nationalism and hypocrisy

It’s not easy being a flag-waving American nationalist. In addition to having to deal with the usual disillusion, anger, and scorn from around the world incited by Washington’s endless bombings and endless wars, the nationalist is assaulted by whistle blowers like Bradley Manning and Edward Snowden, who have disclosed a steady stream of human-rights and civil-liberties scandals, atrocities, embarrassing lies, and embarrassing truths. Believers in “American exceptionalism” and “noble intentions” have been hard pressed to keep the rhetorical flag waving by the dawn’s early light and the twilight’s last gleaming.

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They Know Much More Than You Think By James Bamford

27 July 2013 — New York Review of Books

In mid-May, Edward Snowden, an American in his late twenties, walked through the onyx entrance of the Mira Hotel on Nathan Road in Hong Kong and checked in. He was pulling a small black travel bag and had a number of laptop cases draped over his shoulders. Inside those cases were four computers packed with some of his country’s most closely held secrets.

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Book Review: One Eye on the Red Horizon – The Condition of Communism By Joseph G. Ramsey

22 July 2013 — Dissident Voice

comhorizon_DV

The eye-grabbing cover of Jodi Dean’s The Communist Horizon (Verso, 2012) depicts what could be the dawn of a new day. A red sun, half in view, arcs across the volume’s bottom edge. From this solid red spot, dozens of thin but widening beams fan out; crossing the background, the sunlight splits the sky itself into stripes of red and white.

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Egypt Under Empire, Part 1: Working Class Resistance and European Imperial Ambitions By Andrew Gavin Marshall

11 July 2013 — The Hampton Institute

Egypt is one of the most important countries in the world, geopolitically speaking. With a history spanning some 7,000 years, it is one of the oldest civilizations in the world, sitting at the point at which Africa meets the Middle East, across the Mediterranean from Europe. Continue reading

How to Send a Good FOIA Request to the Department of State By Laura S. Kauer

11 July 2013 — Unredacted

The Department of State’s launch of its new Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) online request platform and terrific, comprehensive, 80,000-document online FOIA reading room, makes it a fitting time to review how to craft a good FOIA request to the Department of State (or any agency, actually).  Continue reading