I Have A Newspaper Position

[JPSartre12]

I've had the privilege of being able to do a biweekly editorial column in my university's newspaper for quite a while now, but I've recently received a promotion and am now allowed to a weekly column. My word limit has grown from a limit of 800-900 words to a half of a page in the newspaper (closer to 1100 or so). I'm going to do my best to keep you all up to date on what I'm able to say and do on my university campus, and I would like your input on things which I can write about and how to best go about explaining and conveying them. The editorial section that I have control over is referred to as "From the Left", and there have been two of us doing it - myself, and a fellow student who is nothing more than a liberal Democrat (thus, capitalist, and I would argue that he is not "Left" in any way).

Rather than provide the link to my university newspaper's website, I'm going to place my articles here in quotes on Revleft, because I do not want my university to feel uneasy about information regarding it to be posted in a far-Left website and potentially use it as an excuse to remove me from the paper. I will do my best to post each week's article here in this thread so that you will be able to stay up-to-day on what I am discussing.

Some of my recent articles include: "The End of Reaganism", about how the rising level of social tolerance is gradually eliminating prejudice and bigotry; "Obamacare, and Other Evil 'Socialism'", how the Affordable Care Act is a conservative compromise, not socialized medicine; "American Foreign Policy Gone Wrong", about our atrocious policies in the Middle East and Latin America; "Romney is Not a Working-Class Hero", about how Romney has only the interests of the rich at heart; "President Obama is No Socialist", about how his entire résumé reeks of perpetuating capitalism; "Democracy Endangered", about the Supreme Court's Citizens United case; and the most recent, "Capitalism is Killing Our Humanity", about how capitalism is able to sustain itself by exploiting the Third World.

If there is any advice that you can give me, please do so. I do not hide the fact that I am a Marxist when I have fellow classmates, professors, etc ask me about my political views or my articles. If there is anything that you think that I can or say to spread the socialist message to my university, I would greatly appreciate your advice.

Note - the person who writes my university's "From the Right" column identifies as an anarcho-capitalist, and is a fanatical supporter of Ayn Rand.

Here is my article that came out earlier this morning:


If people judged capitalism by the same standards that they judged socialism with, they would have declared it a failure generations ago. The rampant intellectual dishonesty amongst the anti-Left crowd is astounding - the mere idea that anyone would vocally support a system that is able to sustain itself by the plundering of under-developing countries reeks of soullessness and an utter disregard for human welfare. The parasitic relationship between First World nations and their Third World subjugates serves only to treat those in developing countries as tools, as completely commodified machines whose only purpose is to continue their forced labor for the mass-production of super-cheap imports.

It is even more unbelievable that people continue to equate socialism - real, genuine, unfettered socialism - with the atrocities committed by Stalin and his Marxist-Leninist allies. Anyone who has taken the time to sit down and read legitimate socialist literature will most likely find a deeper hatred for centralized State bureaucracies like the former Soviet Union than for capitalist nations. It’s also incredibly amusing that the right-wing radicals that rail against President Obama’s alleged European-style “socialist” tendencies or the Soviets’ Marxist-Leninism are, in reality, woefully uneducated on the subject, and choose to regurgitate the racist nationalism of Fox News instead of deciding to pick up a book on proper socialist theory.

When the ruling class apologizes to the working class for: pre-emptive war, colonialism, the 14-hour work day, child labor, the Massacre of the Paris Commune, apartheid, international war, deforestation, Exxon Valdez, and the military suppression of democratic movements in Latin America and the replacement of their elected leaders with CIA-backed fascist dictators for the sake of economic interests, then - and only then - will I even consider apologizing for the errors committed in the name of “socialist” countries.

The capitalist mode of production does nothing to expand “liberty” or raise the standard of living for the people that live under it. In reality, a capitalist nation commodifies the workers, turning them into cogs in the profit-making machine without their awareness or consent of it. The “high standard of living” that the far-right often evokes is only sustained by the outrageously parasitic behavior that we continue to exhibit.

A system that disproportionately redistributes all wealth upwards while reducing aid for the working class is not sustainable. Capitalism is not something that can last indefinitely; it is a cancer that needs to stretch its malignant tendrils abroad in neocolonial, imperialist war in order to seize natural resources and exploit cheap labor. One day, when this cancer has no more resources to draw upon, it is going to collapse in upon itself, and the working class will be left to pick up the pieces of the world that the corporate aristocracy’s greed had destroyed, and will have to built a new one from the ashes of the old.

Although, to even talk about the possibility of having an economic system other than capitalism is heresy in the United States. Capitalism has been intricately tied to “liberty” and “freedom” by the right-wing nationalists, who throw the words around at every possible chance that they have, draining them of any real meaning and using “liberty” to justify unfettered corporatism.

The burden for the recession should not be placed on the backs of the workers, of the citizens who spent their entire life playing by the rules only to have the programs that they paid into their entire lives be slashed in order to continue the budget-busting tax cuts that we shower the ultra-wealthy with. Some rebuke this by saying that we have the highest corporate tax rate in the world; however, that 35% tax is so riddled with loopholes that the effective tax rate for hovers just below 9%. In reality, we have one of the most lax tax systems on the entire planet. The Bush-era tax cuts (which, thankfully, have been repealed for individuals making $400,000 or more, and for households making $450,000 or more a year) cost this nation a staggering $100.2 billion a year. In the past decade, that amounts to over a trillion dollars in hand-outs to the top 1%.

The idea that slashing the federal budget in the hopes that reduced aid for special education, the handicapped, and our seniors will somehow create limitless prosperity for all is not simply foolish - it is downright cruel. The proposed changes to Social Security would save approximately $10 billion a year (which is barely a drop in the bucket, in comparison to our over-16-trillion dollar deficit), and it would do so by tweaking the Consumer Price Index for Urban Wage Earners and Clerical Workers, what is generally referred to as the CPI, so that the benefits that are based on inflation would be calculated differently. If put into practice, it would mean that Social Security benefits would become much less comprehensive - a senior citizen who lives on Social Security collects just under $15,000 a year in total pay, and the affect of the CPI “tweak” would cost them $650 a year. As inflation continues and the market fluctuates, the cumulative effects of the CPI change will result in American senior citizens being stripped of $1,000 or more.

The fact that we are allow such a system to exist is mind-boggling. The complete disregard that some people have for our fellow brothers and sisters in this world is heartbreaking; the absence of human solidarity is disheartening. I look forward to the day when our country enters cultural modernity and we decide to work together for a system that puts human well-being over short-term profit.

[B5C]

Congrats! Are you thinking of posting some of the articles here or linking to them. I would love to read your future work.

[Fourth Internationalist]

Great article! :D

[JPSartre12]

I've submitted another article to my editor, it is going to be released in the paper tomorrow morning. It's about how Jesus can be considered one of the primary fathers of socialist theory. I've pasted it below as a quote below for those of you that are interested.

Also - I'm currently considering what to do for next week's article. I've been recommended by one friend to do a critique of the feminist movement, and talk about how feminism is inherently sexist because it believes in the concept of "woman", and so on. I'm not sure about this and I'm still thinking. Do you have any ideas about what I could write about next?



Jesus can accurately be considered to be one of the fathers of socialism. The religious right-wing distorts an overwhelming majority of what Jesus says - abandoning material possessions, common ownership, universal solidarity, limitless compassion, and railing against the anti-progressive Pharisaic establishment of the time. He was outstandingly revolutionary. There is nothing “conservative” about Christianity, when you look at its actual teachings.

There is nothing in our Christian religion for justifies a system based on human exploitation. There is nothing holy about capitalism: it is a system that ignores the needs of the poor and homeless, rejects the foreign, forgets about the sick and hungry, and rewards the greedy over the compassionate. Capitalism is a cruel and inhumane system that places short-term profit and corporate interests over those of the working class; it is not something that Jesus Himself would be able to support. Catholic Bishop Thomas Gumbleton of Detroit acknowledged that “the system doesn’t seem to be providing for the well-being of all the people. It is almost, in its very nature, contrary to the Jesus who said ‘blessed are the poor, woe to the rich’.”

Father Dick Preston, a Michigan-based priest, agreed and even went on to say that “capitalism, in its present form, is an evil. It is contrary to all that is good ... Capitalism is precisely what the Holy Book reminds us is unjust and, in some form of fashion, God will come down and eradicate. It is wrong, and therefore needs to be eliminated.” So did Father Peter Dougherty, who went so say that “it is immoral, it is obscene, it is outrageous. It is really radically evil ... It’s radical evil.”

Gumbleton, Preston, and Dougherty are absolutely correct. Capitalism does need to be eliminated, but what should take its place?

On what grounds, then, can the bourgeois élite and corporate aristocracy argue that Jesus is on there side? Christ would not come to modern-day America to ring the daily bell at the New York Stock Exchange. Christ would not argue that obsessive deregulation will provide healthcare for everyone, and He would certainly not support any war, even those under the faux-guise of humanitarianism and democratization. Jesus would charge into Stock Exchange, denounce the moneylender for disregarding the well-being of the whole community, and stand in unwavering solidarity with the poor, sick, diseased, socially-outcast, and brokenhearted - the very people that capitalism refuses to help.

My Savior is one who stands with the working class and the needy, not one who rejects them.

The Jesus Christ that we, as Christians, worship is not the same Jesus that the rich and powerful have claimed for their own; our is a loving God, one of that heals the sick and houses the poor, not one that shakes His finger in righteous anger at them and tells them to work harder, for longer hours, for less pay. The bourgeois power structures that exist in our society - the banks, energy producers, pharmaceutical corporations, venture capitalists, and the lobbying industry - have a vested interest in wrapping naked greed up in Christian rhetoric, because as long as they do so they’ll have an illusion of legitimacy. The ultra-rich have claimed Jesus for their own in an attempt to make it look like their existence has meaning - even though their overly parasitic nature is becoming increasingly obvious as they continue to wage class warfare against the working class.

Religion holds a very important place in our society - it in intimately tied in with our federal government, prominent Church leaders hold political clout in the lobbying industry, and Church teachings dictate morality in our supposedly-secular culture. At what point are we going to stop lying to ourselves and pretending that we live in a modern, post-medieval society, when our entire economic system is modeled off of the unholy alliance of the Church and aristocracy that characterized our previous mode of production? At what point are we going to be honest to ourselves, and admit that the “religion” that capitalists adhere to has absolutely no correlation with the teachings of Jesus Christ - the same teachings that gave birth to numerous collectivist, agricultural communes between the first generations of Christians helped establish?

Or what about the oh-so-famous line that Christ said in Matthew 19:24: “Again, I tell you, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God”. Christianity is not a religion for the wealthy to justify their greed; it is a philosophy of hope for the working class, a form of inspiration to help them deal with the truly lethal climate that laissez-faire capitalism spawned. A position that I found to be especially interesting is the story of Sodom and Gomorrah. Of course, the literalists and fundamentalists are going to tell you that it and the over-used quote from Leviticus 18:22 (“Thou shalt not lie with mankind as with womankind; it is an abomination”) justifies and inequality and homophobia, but will ignore the context in which it was said regarding negative population growth in the midst of waring country. One cannot argue with the people who are so dead-set and close-minded in their beliefs that they are unwilling to have an intellectually honest discussion.

It is time to stop lying to ourselves about what Jesus said and what He stands for, and realize that he championed the poor and denounced the rich, not the other way around. Jesus Christ is the hero of the working class and one of the principal fathers of socialism.

[Fourth Internationalist]

HA! I hope that article makes every conservative Christian's head explode!


I've been recommended by one friend to do a critique of the feminist movement, and talk about how feminism is inherently sexist because it believes in the concept of "woman", and so on. I'm not sure about this and I'm still thinking. Do not even consider this. Feminism is a major part of socialism and leftism. The idea that feminists are sexist against men is b.s. from our patriarchal, capitalist society.


Do you have any ideas about what I could write about next?Perhaps something about how the Soviet Union, North Korea, China, Cuba, Vietnam, etc. were not socialist? OR Maybe something about the growing socialist movement in Latin America (Venezuela)?

[Brutus]

Check out
Acatheunderground.wordpress.com
We are a leftist site who provide news and theory.
There's also 2 of us, like you.

[Questionable]

I know this thread is a bit old, but out of curiosity, what does the "From The Right" column look like? Do you and its author ever engage in polemics or anything like that?

[Jimmie Higgins]

Congratulations, I think this is a great way for radicals to intervine in more general discussions.

I also recommend checking out the book "Detroit I do mind Dying" because there's some early sections in there where white new-left radicals and black marxists took over the student paper at a community college in Detroit and used it as a radical voice for the whole community. I found a pdf online when it was still out of print, but when I searched just now I could only find the first two chapters and I think the newspaper is discussed in 3 or 4. Maybe a more thourgough search could find the right chapeter.

At any rate, keep doing what you're doing. My two cents is that ideological or abstract political discussions will only go so far and, when possible, I might try and relate my articles more towards immediate issues that concern students but have wider implications. Discuss your perspective on tuition increases or other things that are happening on campus or in the community that impact students (which would include almost any issue of austerity and attacks on workers since this is the labor situation many of the students are likely to find themselves in a year or two). From there you can discuss what people might do about it, which would distinguish your perspective from the liberal most likely) and make strong connections then to the ideological perspective. So something on austerity could go: students are being hit with X cuts... the big picture is that this is not "bad planning" or a mistake, the people who hold power in society want to make all education something for the elite, want to lower our expectations for a stable life in the workforce etc... it's connected to X larger issues in the community... as a Socialist I see this as X, Y, Z and it's up to us as students and workers to put a stop to these attacks, etc.

Maybe if your school is more calm and passive, presenting just an ideological argument is enough in itself. But I think that while we can score some political points and make some convincing arguments in this way with people who are interested in ideological debates, I think that there is a tendancy then to view the arguments as just a perspective rather than a useful and necissary guide to action for workers and the oppressed.

The articles are very well written, so I think they are great, like I said, this was just my 2 cents about an approach to the column. There was a comrade when I was in school from Socialist Alternative who had a column like that and an ISO comrade of mine had a similar column and they both took that sort of approach. Of course there are times where it seems that there is fuck-all going on at school politically or you are under deadline, so there's also nothing wrong with engaging in just interesting topics and questions alone.

[Orange Juche]

An anarcho-capitalist colleague there, huh? Almost as interesting as Marxism-Ayn Randism, and the libertarian fascists.

[Green Girl]

Thanks JPSartre12

Great articles! :)

[JPSartre12]

My latest article - it was printed earlier this week

"Let's Not Forget the 'T' in LGBT"


The “Transilience” film that Dr. Joelle Ruby Ryan of the Women’s Studies department presented to the public in the MUB last week is something that all UNH students should see. For those that missed it, it can be found online on Youtube. It is not a Transgender 101 film; it is not something that is meant to be an introduction towards the transgender community. It the third installment her film series that gives one the chance to see how she, as a gender outlaw and proud activist, has dealt with the challenges presented to her by a cis-supremacist society that does not value gender diversity. It is not meant to represent the trans community as a whole; no one person can speak for an entire movement, but Dr. Ryan does a fantastic job of highlighting how we, decades after the civil rights movement, still marginalize entire sections of the American populace.

There are numerous people here at the University that would do well to take a Women’s Studies class, and I encourage everyone to do so. It is a learning experience that some people are in desperate need of, as there continue to be to many people who are needlessly vicious to the department and take part in the oppression of trans minorities, while at the same time garbing themselves in the rhetoric of “liberty” and “freedom”. How can one proselytize about our enduring “liberty” when entire social groups are shunned by society and treated as deviant outcasts? One cannot.

The fight for gender equality - and even the fight against the compartmentalizing concept of “gender” itself - is the next great civil rights struggle of our time. Yes, the LGBT community is going to score a major victory this coming spring when the Supreme Court declares the constitutionality of same-sex marriage, but we should not focus the argument entirely on those of the same sex; we should not forget our transgender comrades who have had to deal with oppression in a way that the mainstream LGBT community cannot even think of. To have a non-heterosexual sexual orientation is certainly against the grain of America’s viciously patriarchal society, but to actually be transgender puts one on a whole different level. Name changes, gender-reassignment surgery, systemic legal oppression, economic classism - the transgender community has had to face persecution and brutality in a way that no other minority has ever had to. I cannot imagine the struggle that my trans friends have to go through, but the fact that they do - and that they persevere and come out stronger - makes me indescribably proud of them. They deserve the utmost respect and support.
 If there is one thing that the trans community can remind us of, it is that is how desperately important it is for us to live our own truths. There is a particular kind of joyful pride at being able to inhabit one’s own skin and readily accept one’s identity. Of course, being “different” will always be difficult, but those that do - and those of us that stand side-by-side with them in unwavering solidarity - are helping to pave the way for generations that will come after, and are changing the world by resolutely stating the truth,that all people are created equal, and that everyone should have the right to live their life in a way that brings them the most joy.

UNH has made excellent progress on trans issues, and I applaud them, but there are still issues that need to be faced. The Transgender Policy and Climate Committee (T-PACC) is a sub-committee of the President’s Commission on the Status of GLBT Issues, and is dedicated to monitoring the campus climate for trans students, faculty, and staff. It works to recommend and implement policy changes to promote an environment that reaffirms gender diversity. Thus far, it has worked with Health Services to explore resources available for trans students, and has approached the Registrar’s office in the hopes of initiating a system change to better serve the trans community on campus by potentially changing the “sex” categories on university applications and paperwork.

Unfortunately, there continues to be a faction of radical “radfem” feminists that are extraordinarily hostile to transgender and transsexual people, especially trans women. Radfems in Western society are viciously obsessed with the concept of “woman” and involve themselves with calling out, and working to abolish, male patriarchy in the name of female empowerment. In the process, though, they unfortunately alienate those that do not adhere to a strict male-or-female gender binary. The radfem faction of feminists, and their overtly black-and-white pro-women views, unfortunately caused them to be estranged from their fellow social revolutionaries. Why is it that this rampant sectarianism has to continue to plague the feminist community? Why do the radfems continue to marginalize their trans comrades in the name of women’s liberation, when, if united together in a feminist popular front, they could be a force to be reckoned with against the patriarchy?

Everything that people do counts, and no action is “too small”. Whether someone is heterosexual or homosexual, cis-gendered or transgendered, makes no difference; if there is systemic oppression and rampant inequality in our world, we should work to resolve the problem together. Us cis-gendered allies can be effective catalysts for change if we stand together and not just accept but actually fight for our transgendered brothers and sisters. Activism can be as simple and everyday as interrupting an offensive joke, or calling out rude comments in public. Start where you are, and remember that your actions will have a ripple effect. Trans rights are human rights, and we all benefit when we are all liberated by the ability to be able to live our lives without fear, shame, or judgement.

[JPSartre12]

My latest article, it was printed this past Thursday.

The Sequester: Another Attempt by the Corporate Élite to Crush Labour


The news has been up in arms recently about the economic sequester that is, as the Republican Party says, an attempt to offset the “reckless spending” of our leaderless and partisan President. Even though the sequester cuts only a mere 3% of federal spending - which, in the scope of the nation’s $15.1 trillion GDP and $16.72 trillion federal deficit - is only a drop in the bucket, it represents a particularly dangerous road for us to take if our goal is to balance the federal budget. Despite the fact that the working class’ discretionary income has stayed fairly consistent (and, in some regions and demographics, even dipped), inflation has reduced its economic purchasing power, leaving the middle class with increasingly little influence over the economy. As capitalist-style “tax reform” continues to redistribute wealth upwards, workers have less power to influence the state of the economy; the only other entities with enough purchasing power to impact the state of the economy are: first and foremost, the federal government, with its incredible collective bargaining power accounting for trillions of dollars and millions of participatory taxpayers; and secondly, to a lesser extent, private corporations, who currently sit on over $2.2 trillion unused and untapped assets and armies of lobbyists (nearly 5 per every 1 member of Congress).

If individual consumers no longer have the power to impact the economy through their elective expenses, then we need to have the second and third most powerful economic entities take responsibility and do something to defibrillate the American economy. Private corporations have no desire to do so - not only does the Dodge v. Ford Supreme Court case requires them to operate in the interests of profiteering shareholders rather than in the economic interests of the community, but they exist to generate profit regardless of their legal obligations. We cannot trust in the corporate aristocracy to work in the interests of the working class. I am not arguing that we should place our faith in federal institutions rather than corporate ones (indeed, I’m much more a fan of the abolition of the State), but we need to be intellectually honest with ourselves by acknowledging that the federal government has enormous power, and it has the potential to use that power to jump-start the economy.

At the risk of sounding like an angsty, deficit-spending-obsessed Keynesian, we need to use the government’s extraordinary budget to invest in the working class. Gutting the federal budget in such a delicate time is not something that will serve the direct interests of the American middle class.

The sequestration is not a good idea; we should not be pulling billions of dollars out of the economy when our recovery is still so fragile; we should be pumping money into it, be investing in the working class and small business, and enacting massive public works programs that hire hundreds of thousands of American citizens to repair, expand, and modernize our roads, bridges, ports, and infrastructure.

There is nothing about this “sequestration” that involves fiscal responsibility; the entire concept reeks of a overt attempt by the bourgeois class to initiate privatization at all levels under a fabricated illusion of financial collapse. Without these budget cuts, they cry, our debt with skyrocket to a point wherein our interest payments to China will consume our entire budget, and it, and other foreign powers, will effectively own the rights to our economy. Without this sequestration, the evil “socialist” president that we re-elected (by voter fraud, some right-wing maniacs argue) our debt will grow to consume our entire budget and a second Great Depression will be ushered in by our outrageously left-wing president.

The entire sequestration is the result of an illusion by the corporate aristocracy, who are so outrageously financially irresponsible that they are unwilling to claim responsibility for the Wall Street collapse of 2008 that they are willing to create an elaborate illusion of pending economic collapse in order to have the working class shoulder their burden, rather than accept responsibility. The sequestration is an attempt to shift the responsibility for our economic woes from the 1% to the 99%; it is a way for the élite to shift responsibility to the Average Joe through a series of intricate lies about the state of the economy.

No matter what Wall Street says - about the “bankruptcy” of Medicare in the coming years, the shrinking Social Security surplus, the atrocious tax-and-spend policy of our “far-left” President, or the budget-busting cost of our progressive Congress - we are not broke. The United States is not poor; we are not out of money. We have the funds to do anything that we want - the problem is merely that we have chosen to spend our tax-payer dollars in horribly irresponsible ways. Of course, why on Earth should we invest in modern, eco-friendly green energy when we can fund the construction of ten thousand more wartime missiles instead? Why should we spend our money on universal healthcare, comprehensive education, or the mass-repair of our national infrastructure when we can spend it on a bloated Pentagon bureaucracy and imperialist war?

If we want to be intellectually honest with ourselves, we need to realize that the host of economic reforms that President Obama has passed - from the Affordable Care Act to the Economic Recovery Act - have already begun to pay off and have started to defibrillate our economy. The reckless spending of the previous administrations has hit a critical point wherein its begun to compound at an exponential rate: Nixon’s two-trillion-and-counting “War on Drugs” and Bush’s $2.2 trillion “War on Terror” - when combined with the post-2001 tax cuts for the rich that constitute 48% of our entire federal debt - put Obama’s entire “socialist” agenda to shame. I am not defending the Democratic Party in any sense; the Party is riddled with internal corruption and financial waste, but, if we want to have an honest conversation about our federal deficit, we cannot blame the current administration. Our debt is the result of generations of tax-and-spend obsessed bureaucrats, not a single President.

It is time that the American people stop blaming President Obama for every economic woe that comes their way and start being honest with themselves about the government’s electoral history and start taking responsibility for themselves for electing those those petty bureaucrats into office. Now is not the time to play the blame-game in D.C.; now is the time to take responsibility and set aside partisanship to actually work towards an economy geared in the economic interests of the working class.

[Philosophos]

Very nice articles even though I have a headache from the words I couldn't understand

[Riveraxis]

I think you're a talented writer and I've enjoyed reading your articles.

I don't have much in the line of criticism/feedback, but I do hope you continue to post them, and continue to write them. I come across many socialist blogs that simply parrot the idea that capitalism is evil without providing background information as to the nature of the system. It gets very old very fast. People are not just going to accept that it is evil because the writer *sounds* intelligent. We are not all well-read, dedicated Marxists. There must be proof, at the very least reasoning, backing up the accusations. I'd say you've done a fine job.

One piece of advice I have is that you should alternate between the evils of capitalism and the potential of socialism. Don't make it all doom-and-gloom, even if it is actually all doom-and-gloom. People shut off from politics when it's nothing but bad news. Provide an alternative. Inspire people.

[JPSartre12]

My latest article, it came out in the paper earlier this morning.

The American Republic has become the American Empire


At what point did we allow our country to turn into a corporate police state? When was it that our great American Republic mutated into a nationalist Empire? Did it start when President Obama expanded the use of drone strikes in the Middle East, bombing women and children in the hopes of potentially eliminating a single al Qaeda agent, or when his Affordable Care Act restructured our healthcare system to reinforce, and even mandate, participation in a for-profit and anti-trust law exempt market? Was it then, when his healthcare and financial “reform” padded the pockets of the ultra-rich at the expense of the working class?

No - the situation that we have now is the result of more than a generation’s worth of political apathy, of allowing capitalist bureaucrats and Wall Street financiers to make our decisions for us. Being an angsty, anti-establishment government-basher has become fashionable; sitting around and pointing out the flaws of the nation, without making an effort to take a part and offer a practical solution, makes one “cool” and “edgy”.

The USA PATRIOT Act codified many of the wishes of statists into law. Whether we’re talking about the Act’s regulation of bank accounts, the broadening of the government’s authority to deport citizens, or the authorization of roving wiretaps and non-consenting business record searches, the Act is only the first brick in the construction of the modern police state. We have also had the unfortunately passage of the National Defense Authorization Act of 2012, which appropriates and divides up Defense and war spending, but contained a blatantly unconstitutional clause that gives the government the authority to indefinitely detain American citizens. And now - even after the intense political backlash against the NDAA 2012, our Congress has the gall to discretely slip another clause into the NDAA 2013 that repeals the World War II-era legislation that prevents the government from using State-approved propaganda, and would make Washington immune to any court cases challenging them. The entire NDAA 2013 sets the stage for an Orwellian thought police program, complete with the blessing of our elected representatives. The impacts of these laws - both constitutionally and as a matter of personal liberty - become even more frightening when we realize that they do not stand alone; hosts of other bills - from the surveillance-expanding USA Act of 2001 or the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act’s drastic expansion of state-approved execution, or even the protest-restricting Federal Restricted Buildings and Grounds Improvement Act that was passed during the populist Occupy Wall Street uprising - are also on the books. One could fill an entire library with books full of these heinously unconstitutional laws that the élite class uses to secure its hegemony. When coupled with the push for prison “reform” vis-à-vis privatization, expanding TSA and Homeland Security powers, and the government’s recent mass purchasing of guns and ammunition, it seems that we are getting dangerously close to fascism.

All of the dozens of harsh, inhumane bills that were passed from the FDR era and on are nothing compared to the outrageous human rights violations that have been committed in the name of “liberty” and “democracy” since 9/11. We have allowed the bourgeois élite to take advantage of us by uniting us against the “terrorists” by appealing to a demagogic and emotionalist sense of nationalism and fear - by uniting us against a common “enemy”, they have expanded and centralized police power. Since that tragic day, the profiteering élite have created a false threat, a faux-strawman of pending immediate danger of the foreign terrorists who want nothing more than to end our entire way of life and kill all of us, for no other reason than our being “free” and “rich”, not in retaliation for the toppling of their democratically-elected leaders and incessant bombings.

The Middle Eastern neo-colonialism of the Bush-Cheney regime reeks of overt imperialism. Who are we to colonize and occupy foreign lands, topple governments that we do not like, and establish radical ones that serve our economic interests? How can we go about proselytizing incessantly about “freedom” and “liberty” while presiding over the systematic eradication and political disenfranchisement of millions of our fellow human beings?

It does not matter who the president or the current administration is, or what political party controls Congress or the governorships; every single politician that takes part in the government is guilty of the construction of the American Empire.

We should not be encouraging an expansion of State power; we should not crushing ever single liberty that our Founding Fathers fought for, especially amidst cheering and applause. We should be championing the abolition State authority in all spheres, not supporting it. If we continue to rely on the State to solve all of our problems, than we have no one else to blame for our country’s descent into fascism than ourselves.

[JPSartre12]

One piece of advice I have is that you should alternate between the evils of capitalism and the potential of socialism. Don't make it all doom-and-gloom, even if it is actually all doom-and-gloom. People shut off from politics when it's nothing but bad news. Provide an alternative. Inspire people.

Thank you, comrade. I value your advice. What do you think would be a good topic to write about for next week?

[JPSartre12]

My latest article from this week's paper.

"Proposed Immigration Reform Doesn't Go Far Enough"


The immigration reform that is being drafted in the U.S. Senate does not go far enough. Like President Barack Obama’s Affordable Care Act, almost all progressive elements have been stripped from it in order to get the votes necessary for it to pass. Now is not the time to allow yet another watered-down centrist band-aid; our broken immigration system is in dire need of immediate repair and needs a complete overhaul. The entire system needs to be redesigned, and the proposals from the so-called “Gang of Eight” senators - four Democrats and four Republicans - does not come close enough to addressing the problem.

Immigration reform should be something that allows us to unite our immigrant brothers and sisters with their families back home, and create an atmosphere that invites hard workers to come and take part in the American Dream. The senators’ draft bill has several components that do not do this. Rather than try to create a peaceful bridge between the Untied States and other countries, the draft bill creates harsh barriers between us. It builds over 350 miles of new fencing along the U.S.-Mexican border, implements biometric scanners at airports and seaports near them, radically increases the number of border security agents, and installs a massive, border-wide camera-and-radar system to track movement across it. This is not a “progressive” reform in any way: it is a nationalist’s dream of radical isolationism mediated by a police state.

There are dozens of clauses in it that would create a harsh, anti-immigration environment that would dissuade many of the immigrants already here from coming out into the open, from a dramatic increase in fines for employers knowlingly hiring non-citizens, to cutting their access to public and social services, even if they are below the poverty line and need drastic medical care. Of course, there are several mildly acceptable pieces to the bill - mostly, streamlining and accelerating the naturalization process, and creating a 10-year program to allow undocumented individuals to become citizens - but the negatives far outweigh the positives.

What disturbs me the most is the rhetoric that’s being thrown around during the immigration debate. The labeling of people as “illegal aliens” strikes me as exceptionally dehumanizing and derogatory. No human being is “illegal” for the sake of their birth; simply because one is born on a different side of a bureaucratically drawn line does not mean that that person has less value, or that they are not entitled to the same liberties as every other human being. If we truly believe that all peoples are created equal, and that we have inalienable rights given to us by our Creator, then we have to realize that no human being should be treated differently than another, and we should embrace everyone – both legal and “illegal” – with open arms. Our “reform” should allow anyone and everyone that wants to take part in the American Dream to be able to; it should welcome every single person that’s willing to come and work hard.

What we need is an immediate, universal amnesty program to allow every undocumented individual in the country to be immediately recognized as an American citizen. The people who have spent years here, working strenuous hours, taking part in the community, raising a family and saluting our flag are already Americans in everything but name. It’s time that we recognize that these people are just as valuable as we are, and that we need to treat them as equals in every respect. The idea that we, just because we were born inside of those bureaucratic lines, are better than others drips with the toxic filth of nationalism, of an intolerant classism hidden behind the romanticized rhetoric of “exceptionalism”.

We need to drop this hyper-patriotic language and realize that every human being on this planet is equal in every way – no nationality, creed, language, culture, or religion makes anyone any better or worse than anyone else. Comprehensive immigration reform is not just something that is economically beneficial for our nation. It’s not just something that will enrich our culture and introduce millions of consumers and potential job creators. It’s more than just a social justice movement; it’s a matter of basic human rights and individual dignity.

Our immigration “reform” is an absolute joke, yet another shadow of a compromise, another failed attempt at a potentially transformative piece of legislation. We need to enact a universal amnesty program immediately, and every moment that we do not is a disservice to the millions of undocumented people here that are American in every single way other than on paper.

[JPSartre12]

Here is a copy of another article of mine. It is going to be published in this week's university newspaper.

Solidarity Can Overcome Any Problem


Noam Chomsky, a linguistic professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a fellow libertarian socialist, put it well when he said that “propaganda is to a democracy what the bludgeon is to a totalitarian state”. What is it that we learn in our schools - history (taught from an imperial and nationalist perspective), literature (that reinforces a hegemonic ideology), social studies (that impose patriarchal heteronormativity), and science (geared toward capitalist production)? The school systems that we take part in have been so radically politicized that they have been turned into State tools of indoctrination, where we are told what to think and not how to think. Everything that we are taught is done to reinforce and perpetuate bourgeois philosophy.

Us students that are able to put ourselves through school by acquiring large debt are unlikely to think about radically changing the world. The debt that we accrue acts as a disciplinary technique that forces us to work for capitalist employers in order to make the ridiculous sums of money needed to pay our schools back. We come out of school freshly programmed by the State, and have also internalized the disciplinarian culture of a capitalist society. We are manufactured to be State-supporting automatons that are efficient components of a consumer economy.

It reminds me of the famous (and unfortunately anonymous) quote: “Go to work, send your kids to school, follow fashion, act normal, walk on the pavement, watch TV, save for your old age, obey the law .... and repeat after me: I am free”.

We have problems other than just education. The entire system does not work, and 18 million die each year from poverty-related causes. Global agriculture production can feed 118% the world’s population, despite the fact that the bureaucratic morass of the market allows 868 million to starve each year. There are more than 5 vacant homes for every homeless person, and 77.5% of the occupied ones are in debt; of them, 1 in 7 is being pursued by a debt collector. Nearly 50 million American citizens are without healthcare, and the unemployment rate stands at 14.3%, if one takes into consideration the unemployed who have given up looking for work, as well as those who work but do not make enough to regularly stay above the poverty line.

How do we go about fixing this problem? Is it through electing populist candidates that promise “reform” and “change”? No. It doesn’t matter whether we elect some pseudo-nationalist conservative or a partisan progressive. After all, the two are distressingly similar - two people that went to similar universities, have massive fortunes, are both financed by the same corporate institutions. At the Democratic Convention, President Obama said that “only in this country, only in America, could someone like me appear here”. Really? The fact that he had the gall to explicitly state this perturbs me. In other countries, people much poorer and much more disadvantaged have not only be keynote speakers at massive political conventions, but have even been elected president.

Take Luiz Inácio Lula de Silva, the former President of Brazil. He had a peasant background, was a union organizer and advocate for the poor, and never went to school. Despite this, he ended up becoming president of the second-largest country in that hemisphere. Or Salvador Allende, the first democratically-elected self-proclaimed Marxist, whose pro-poor economic reforms earned him a CIA-sponsored military coup d’état that put fascist dictator Augusto Pinochet in power?

“Only in America”? Yes, only in America can a genuine candidate of the people be suppressed by military and corporate interests, and only in America are they shunned so utterly from the political process. Only in America can someone who was elected president twice and committed heinous war crimes vis-à-vis the drone-strike bombing of Middle Eastern women and children (am I speaking of Bush or Obama - but then again, is there a difference?), and only in America can someone who exposes war crimes be locked in solitary confinement for two years and be called a terrorist (I mean Bradley Manning, of course).

We have numerous problems here in the Untied States - exploding poverty, indoctrinatory education, a patriarchal culture. The list goes on, as does the to-do list of policies that need to be immediately enacted to bring back both liberty and a growing economy. We need a massive public works program, single-payer healthcare, gender-neutral marriage, an unprecedentedly large investment in alternative energy, economic democracy in the workplace, and an end to corporate personhood.

There is nothing that we, as Americans, cannot accomplish when we stand together in unwavering solidarity and confront our problems side-by-side. We have already been through so much, from economic depressions to imperialist wars, and we have survived; we will continue to thrive, no despite how much the corporate oligarchy wishes to push us down, so long as we remember that the working class outnumbers them millions-to-one.

[JPSartre12]

Comrades, I'm going to be going to back to my university in the coming weeks, and I'm going to continue to do my "From the Left" section in the school newspaper.

Are there any topics that you think I should focus on or discuss? What do you think I should write about, and how do you think I can go about improving my articles? I'm considering doing my first piece on the education system, because it would be easy to tie in a greeting to the new first-year students.

Your advice is invaluable to me, comrades.

[Brutus]

What about an article explaining the inevitable collapse of capitlaism due to internal contradictions and the fact that it's either Socialism or barbarism?

[Leftsolidarity]

If you don't mind me asking, what region of the states are you in? It's always good to be able to connect a fundamental issue to the local ones.

[Invader Zim]

If you want constructive criticism, then I suggest that you need to work a little more on your style. You have a tendency to be abrupt in your sentence construction followed by relatively lengthy sentences which do not suit the snappy style you seem to be going for.

[JPSartre12]

If you don't mind me asking, what region of the states are you in? It's always good to be able to connect a fundamental issue to the local ones.

The north-east. I'm situated in New England, which is considered one of the more "progressive" sections of the country, despite the fact that it still feels so socially and economically backwards.


If you want constructive criticism, then I suggest that you need to work a little more on your style. You have a tendency to be abrupt in your sentence construction followed by relatively lengthy sentences which do not suit the snappy style you seem to be going for.

Thanks, comrade. What do you think I should do to make it better?

[JPSartre12]

Here is the first article that I'm going to have in my university's newspaper this semester.

After reading it, please give me some feedback; I'm constantly trying to improve my writing style and I'm always open to constructive criticism. Also, what do you think would be appropriate topics to write about in my second article? I'm considering doing it on how economic democracy (ie, democratic worker's ownership and self-management of the means of production, or "socialism") is a threat to top-down, hierarchical business structures, and should be supported. I feel as if too many of the articles that I wrote last year were too negative - I spent more time critiquing and debasing bourgeois politics than I did trying to propose a legitimate socialist alternative. This is something that I want to fix. I want me articles to be more positive, inspiring, and openly revolutionary. What do you think I should do to make them so?

Is Our Education an Indoctrination System?


Noam Chomsky, the linguistics professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who was famously declared by the New York Times as the “most important intellectual alive”, put it wonderfully when he said the following: “Students who acquire large debts putting themselves through school are unlikely to think about changing society. When you trap people in a system of debt, they can’t afford the time to think. Tuition fee increases are a disciplinary technique, and by the time students graduate, they are not only loaded with debt, but they have also internalized the disciplinarian culture. This makes them efficient components of the consumer economy.”

Professor Chomsky is absolutely right. After all, what is the education system? As one local professor said, the modern classroom is nothing more than an authoritarian, thought-controlling institution complete with a truth-inscription board, all designed to induce a psychological obedience to the State. Overwhelmingly, people do not go to universities for a sheer interest in learning; people do not spend years of time and effort simply trying to improve the human condition. Rather, people spend tens of thousands of dollars for a piece of paper that creates a sense of productive legitimacy, a piece of paper whose sole purpose is to prove to corporations that they have spent a number of years in a brainwashing “school” that has molded them into efficient cogs in the capitalist system. In the end, is that not what an “education” is nowadays? Is it not merely an investment in economic conformity?

Is this what education has come to? Has it degenerated into an indoctrinatory tool of the bourgeois State into forcing the working class into a never-ending cycle of debt enslavement and brainwashed social conservatism? Has it lost the sacred position of being a means of pedagogic, intellectual maturity and collapsed into a propagandistic profit-making machine?

Education is no longer about self-improvement. It is a tool of the ruling class to induce a particular social mindset. It no longer produces revolutionary scholars; it produces endless cogs in the machine, cogs who, as if suffering from Stockholm Syndrome, worship their oppressor with nationalist fervor.
What can we do to fix this? What can we do to turn the State brainwashing camps back into institutions of academic self-betterment? Primarily, we would need a new economy based on collective production-for-use rather than individualistic production-for-profit. But short of that, there are several steps that we can immediately take. The first thing that anyone should do is step back and look objectively at the situation - look at the social and economic roles that schools occupy in a regional economy, and understand the deeply political character that they have. Schools have the power to employ thousands and move markets, but they also have the power to be tools of mass sociologic propaganda.

Understand the political space that the education system occupies, and question it. Question the role, purpose, and authority of every aspect of our academic bureaucracy. Question why some things (such as Predator drone strike program, which PolicyMic reports accidentally kills 50 innocent civilians for every 1 terrorist - and then question whether the State-designated “terrorist” is justified for his actions based upon the objective conditions) are funded by tax-payer money, while others such as the school system are the victims of deep, brutal budget cuts?

To the new students, here is my message to you: do not be afraid to engage in revolutionary acts of sedition. To not be afraid to challenge social and economic power structures that you have taken for granted your entire life. To be brave enough to question every professor, every social norm, everything that you have ever learned. To be and express yourself in a way that you choose, no matter what the system does to try and condition you to be otherwise. Question everything. Accept nothing.

Do not be afraid to fight for liberty, in the most radical and literal sense of the word, or to demand the unconditional emancipation of all of humanity from the terminal disease that we call capitalism. Do not be afraid to demand that education, healthcare, housing, and energy production be of a higher economic priority than weapons development or war spending. But do question why the latter is of greater economic importance - is it for the righteous cause of spreading democracy and freedom to an oppressed, war-torn country? Or is it to secure imperial military hegemony in one of the most oil-rich regions on the planet, all in order to facilitate world domination by a police-state Empire?

Don’t be just a “liberal” or a “conservative”, but a warrior for social and economic justice - do not be afraid to fight the class war on the side of the working class. Do not be afraid to get engaged civically, discuss revolutionary politics, and debate anti-establishment philosophy. Do not be afraid to stand together in united solidarity and openly challenge power structures, and do not be afraid to question every aspect of the education you obtain here. In the end at graduation, you may learn what there is to know in your given degree field, but it may be more important to know about what you know and place it in a larger anthropologic context.

Good luck, new students. We were all in your position once, and we stand in solidarity with you. I wish you the best in the coming weeks and look forward to seeing you all around the campus.

[JPSartre12]

My most recent, due to appear in my university newspaper later this week.

As always, comments and constructive criticism are greatly appreciated.

No War but Class War


On September 13, America and Russia came to an agreement to place Syria’s chemical weapons under international control. President Obama has beaten the war drums again and proved that the government will not tolerate any undermining of its imperial hegemony in the Middle East - but due to overwhelming popular opinion, he were forced to back down. The U.S. has historically flexed its muscles in one CIA-funded coup d’état after another, under the politically-correct veil of “regime change” that is, in reality, nothing more than the political re-structuring of puppet client states so as to make them work in the economic interests of the American corporate aristocracy. History proves that the U.S. is the imperial power par excellence.

We should not go to war with Syria, even though the media continues to repeat the need for immediate action for the sake of “humanitarian intervention”. But we know what the media really is: the public relations arm of the totalitarian police-state. It’s the tool used by our super-PAC-appointed politicians to manufacture consent among the masses for whatever initiative they want enacted at a given time. It’s not world news; it’s sensationalist propaganda force-fed to the working class in order to induce a particular mindset that serves the interests of the ruling class. It breeds racism, hetero-normativity, cis-gender supremacism, trans-misogyny, a viscously patriarchal culture, and (possibly worst of all) the toxic filth of nationalism.

Despite what the “media” says, there is no reason to go to war with Syria other than to re-enforce our current military presence in the area. The cascade of riots and revolutions during the so-called “Arab Spring” have weakened our military dominance, and President Obama and his fellow aristocrats want to spend American resources to re-establish imperial hegemony in the area, a hegemony so absolute that it will secure America’s neocolonial control of one of the largest oil-rich regions in the world for another decade. War is an excuse for the U.S. to strengthen its military control over finite energy resources. Humanitarianism is the public-relations justification for war - it’s a façade trying to hide the fact that the government desperately needs a reason to legitimize its extensive military presence in the Middle East.

Think of the new 800km-long oil pipeline project from the Kirkuk oil fields in Iraq to Baniyas, Syria that pumps 300,000 gallons of crude oil daily. Private oil contractors would love to get their hands on it, like Dick Cheney’s Halliburton corporation that got oil contracts and openly stated that “oil remains, fundamentally, a government business” after 9/11. Or Donald Rumsfeld, the ex-Secretary of Defense, who lied to Congress in 2002 when he stated that Iraq has “stockpiles of chemical weapons - including VX, sarin, cyclosarin, and mustard gas” and “anthrax and botulism toxin, and possibly smallpox”. A decade later, we’ve found no Iraqi stockpile, but spend nearly $11.26 million per day on the “war on terror” since 2001.

We should not give in the “media” and jump into war. It costs trillions of dollars (currently over $1.4 trillion, according to the Defense budget passed this March!), developing machines designed specifically to slaughter other human beings, and spills innocent blood (be it of men, women, or children) in the name of economic conquest. No human should advocate war under any circumstance - to do so speaks volumes about their own soulless lack of humanity and support for the big-brother Empire. To go to war isn’t just a moral perversion but also a direct violation of the principles laid down in the Nuremberg trials that convicted Nazi officials of war crimes in World War II.

If we want to be the model of “freedom” and “liberty”, we need a drastic re-assessment of our foreign and domestic policy. If Obama wages war against Syria, he’ll continue the trend that Reagan started: the conservative dream of transforming our democratic Republic into a corporate Empire by transferring decision-making power from democratically-accountable public institutions to unaccountable corporate boardrooms. There is only one war that needs to be fought: the class war. The working class should not be on the defensive. It needs to be on the offensive, and the offense it launches against the chronic parasite called Wall Street needs to be powerful enough to completely eradicate it, to abolish every aspect of its cancerous politics and dirty money. Economic decisions need to be made in a decentralized, democratic manner by the individuals who are impacted by them, not by centralized, oligarchic powers.

The working class needs to seize control of the State and use its immense legal and economic authority to re-direct the economy in their direct material interests. It’s interesting how it’s “class warfare” when the working class tries to fight back, but “the status quo” and “the way things should be” when its being absolutely pulverized by capitalist economics.

It’s wrong to go to war against Syria - we need to leave the Middle East alone and focus on our own internal problems. Rather than wage another “war on terror”, we should be waging a class war. There is nothing more important than the emancipation of the working class from all forms of oppression, be they misogynistic conservatism or corporate-dominated politics. Do not be afraid to stand in open opposition to authoritarian power structures and demand their unconditional destruction; to do so makes you a champion of liberty and a warrior for justice. We don’t have to live under capitalism - with the exponential growth of technology and the infinite creativity of the human spirit, there are endless ways for us to organize society. There is no reason to assume that society today is the only way to live. Another world is possible - don’t be afraid to fight for it. Don’t be afraid to fight for liberty, socialism, and democracy; don’t be afraid to shake up the system and propose radical alternatives.

[JPSartre12]

My most recent. I'm currently working on my next one, and I'll post it as soon as it's finished.

A Co-Op Economy Can Effectively Replace Wall Street.

I should note that, because I have limited space in my university newspaper, the articles that I write can tend to be reductionist for the sake of formatting. If you think that I've failed to effectively state a point, please let me know and I'll do my best to make my works more explicitly and understandably socialist. Instead of constantly bashing capitalism, I want to propose feasible alternatives, and I think that what I have could be the beginning of a rough framework for immediate tactics.

If there are specific points that you think I should make about how a socialist economy could be structured, let me know. I want my articles to be the best that they possibly can.


What my “From the Right” comrade continues to miss, week after week, is that an endless regurgitation of antiquated, colonial-era moralism and FOX News romanticism does nothing to improve the material conditions of the working class. The élitist notion that a cabal of financial aristocrats know what is best for the economy is one of the most cancerous, anti-democratic parts of corporate ideology. The transnational companies that control the flow of the economy, and who warp elections with million-dollar super-PACs, need to have their hegemony brought to an end. Corporations need to be fundamentally changed, to be radically deconstructed and re-built in a manner that is conducive for economic security, working-class prosperity, and a dedication to legitimate democracy.

“Democracy” is not just a sensational talking point, comrade. It is not rhetoric, it is a legitimate way of organizing society. Democracy and capitalism are mutually exclusive and completely irreconcilable.

The banks can no longer privatize successes and socialize losses. How long are we going to allow the redistribution of wealth upwards? How long are we going to let these parasites use their super-PACs to appoint our Congress or dictate how the economy run? Capitalism is not just unstable, but also profoundly undemocratic; it is characterized by the monopolization of economic decision-making by people who are not proletarian. Capitalism is antithetical to liberty and the embryo of totalitarianism.

The banks must be nationalized because State power is the only force strong enough to legally wrest ownership of major industries from the ruling class. If the workers can politically capture the State, and have the State capture major industries, then steps can be taken to make the now-public businesses into full co-ops. Nationalization is a means, not an ends; the ends is always local, decentralized control of the economy by the working class so that it functions in their direct interest. By nationalizing industry, it can be expropriated from the hands of profit-driven aristocrats and turned to serve the interest of the working class by changing it into worker-owned and worker-managed co-operatives.

An economy based on competing co-op conglomerates that enter into large, long-term business contracts with public agencies has the potential to phase out the market and introduce economic planning. It has the potential to be the seeds of a new economy - an economy where resources are allocated through the decentralized, democratic decision-making of workers councils, not the heartless up-and-down of the market. People would actually have a say in how the economy is structured, and the input of the common worker would have more weight than that of the corporate accountant hundreds of miles away.

All power needs to be given to the workers. They need to collectively own and democratically manage the workplace as equals - as a genuine co-op. These co-ops need to join together into large industry-specific or cross-industry conglomerates and be left to compete against one another, mixing both a competitive market mechanism and direct worker control. The best conglomerates would win stable, long-term business contracts with government institutions. This new system would be simple, democratic, and worker-based, and holds the seeds of a truly democratic economy.

Think of the wild threats that this would pose to the top-down, hierarchical sociology that we have now. Imagine an co-op economy, where the workers actually own and manage the workplace and run it in a way that’s conducive for their own economic security. Imagine the profound impacts that this would have on all social and economic relationship if we had both political and economic democracy?

In practice, a very real possibility would be to do something akin to what President Salvador Allende did in Chile from 1971-1973, before Nixon ordered the CIA to violently topple him and appoint fascist dictator Augusto Pinochet and a military-junta government - but never mind that British Prime Minister Margret Thatcher said Pinochet “brought democracy to Chile”, even though he was indicted for human rights violations, suppressing and assassinating political dissenters, and embezzling taxpayer funds for personal profit. Under Allende, the Chilean government began a famous program called Project Cybersyn. With it, various business enterprises installed computer programs so that information - employee hours, material input and output, quotas, shipping manifestos, manufacturing statistics, etc - could be readily and instantaneously shared, turning a single workplace into constituent pieces of an enormous, multi-business network. The “Cybernet” networks could be plugged into the government’s “Cyberstride” software program to provide detailed, minute-by-minute statistical models of how the national economy was doing. If the economy was not doing well, it would automatically alert all those in the affected Cybernets and offer incentives (tax breaks, funding, regulation changes, etc) to improve them as positive reinforcers to encourage economic growth.

Rather than punishing poorly-functioning businesses by cutting their funding and tax benefits as in done under capitalism (think of Bush’s No Child Left Behind, or Obama’s Race To The Top, which cut funding to failing schools), Project Cybersyn encouraged innovation by providing a series of instantaneous incentives to motive the workers. It was a united, digital economy. It opened the door to economic models other than that of corporate bureaucracy and promised that workers would have both democratic control of the workplace and the national economy.

Wall Street is afraid of this. The corporate and political aristocracy in Washington, D.C. are afraid of economic alternatives - they enjoy sitting in a position of power, able to tell others what to think and what to do. An economy wherein businesses become democratic co-ops, and wherein they join together into ever-growing networks with collective bargaining power, has the potential to shake the foundations of contemporary capitalism.

The ruling élite are afraid of a democratic economy. They are afraid of the working class being in control. They are afraid of a co-op economy. They are afraid of socialism.

[JPSartre12]

Another article that I've written for my university paper's in my weekly "From the Left" section. It will be out tomorrow. As always, any and all input is greatly appreciated.

Two-Party System is Anti-Worker to the Core

Poverty is not “natural”. It is a social construct unique to the human race. The sociology of poverty is a construct generated by an unequal distribution of fiat capital in the market, and radical poverty among our fellow American citizens has been normalized by the generations-long propaganda campaign that the ruling class launched to condition the public that there is no plausible, effective alternative. We created the market, decided to give it value, and chose to perpetuate it; we have the power to abolish and replace it with something else.

The truth of the matter is that there are infinite ways to organize society. The market is only one; there are countless others that have been proposed that are profoundly more democratic than market fundamentalism, such as Pannekoek’s councilism, Rocker’s anarcho-syndicalism, and Albert and Hahnel’s participatory economics (“parecon”). I encourage each and every one of you to look into these, and into others. The more you analyze the system, the more that you realize that it is not geared in your interests. To think otherwise only proves that the post-New Deal propaganda campaign (that is, mass media) to normalize fetishized, unregulated corporate hegemony has proven to be effective.

The GOP is collapsing from an internal civil war. Moderate Republicans are being purged from the party while science-hating, reactionary nationalism is on the rise, cloaked in the sensationalist rhetoric of “liberty” and “freedom” while at the same time destroying both. The Republicans’ reckless behavior is ripping our economy apart at the seams - if the 2011 down-grading of U.S. credit under their economic management (or the budget sequestration, or the government shutdown, etc) isn’t blatant enough to show their incompetence, than nothing will.

The Republican Party fought for (and won) hundreds of billions of dollars in tax breaks for the top 2% of income earners. They put two imperial wars on the nation’s credit card and handed the Medicare prescription program over to for-profit pharmaceutical corporations that have repeatedly been charged with Medicare fraud and artificially raising prices on patients. This corrupt party - one that privatizes gains amongst a handful of aristocrats, but socializes losses amongst the entire tax-paying public - needs to be relegated to the dustbin of history. It is an organization whose leaders are nothing more than the generals in the class war - Paul Ryan, Mitt Romney, John Boehner, Mitch McConnell, and other jingoist neoliberals are the ones leading the campaign to obliterate working class in order to continue their generations-long plot: the centralization of all political and economic decision-making power in non-democratic, unaccountable corporate board rooms, all for the sake of profit. They do not understand what it is like to live from paycheck to paycheck, carefully managing every cent in their bank accounts in the hope that they’ll have just enough money to buy food, gas, rent, and medicine. They do not understand what it means to be “working class” and fight desperately for economic security.

The modern-day GOP establishment drips with the toxic filth of nationalism, imperial conquest, and anti-intellectualism. It is not the party of Lincoln or of “liberty”. It has been completely taken over by violent, reactionary elements that have dragged it from being a centre-right party to a profoundly far-right one, and it is terrifying to think of what a Tea Party president could do with a fully Republican Congress.
Yet, I do not mean to come across as partisan. The overwhelming majority of the Democratic Party is as deep in the corporate aristocracy’s pocket as the Republicans are - they’re just the ‘good cop’ to balance out the GOP ‘bad cop’, a gentle face to violent oppression. It disgusts me when white-privileged, cis-gendered liberal élites occasionally call upon populist and progressive rhetoric. They are not “progressive”, bur rather “oppressive”. They may pretend to speak the language of the working class, but they’re just posers - they know nothing of the struggles of the chronically poor and violently discriminated. These “progressives” are no comrades of mine.

The two capitalist parties continue to prove that they are incapable of properly managing an advanced, industrial economy and running in it the direct interests of working people. What is needed isn’t a liberal Democratic administration, and certainly not a Republican one of any kind, nor do we need to have romanticized “bipartisanship”; after all, how can there be any when Congress is occupied by one party, and one party only - the Business Party? It has its internal factions that pretend to be political enemies but who always, in the end, cave in to the demands of their corporate masters and their lobbyist armies. The Democrat-Republican binary is a false one. At the end of the day, they are both the puppets of Wall Street aristocrats and rely on their unlimited-spending corporate super-PACs. They do not care about the people; we need a real working-class political party.

What are we to say about Republican laissez-faire economics - are we to equate them with “freedom”, even though the philosophic founders of capitalist theory themselves refute the idea that there is an intrinsic connection between liberty and the market? Whether it is Adam Smith’s ambivalence towards the moral debauchery of that caste systems that markets create, or Friedrich Hayek arguing that a freely-competitive market can be socially destabilizing and destructively cyclical, there have always been philosophic undertones of the ethical disapproval of capitalism by market theorists.

Even though capitalist fundamentalists - like Ayn Rand and her Objectivist cult that preach the virtue of selfishness - believe in the romanticized notion of feedback-controlled supply-and-demand and in self-regulating competition, it does not change the fact that markets trend towards monopolization. Market fetishization denies economic logic and assumes that the “perfect competition” is more than an idealist pipe-dream. The internal contradictions in this idea are too numerous to count, if for nothing else other than the fact that competition naturally erases others and consolidates power.

Those who worship at the alter of market fundamentalism put self-righteous ideology before working-class reality. They are radically disconnected from the day-to-day struggle of working people and blindly place colonial-era notions of “liberty” before real-world, practical reforms that would improve working-class conditions. The intellectual dishonesty and fanatical anti-workerism of market advocates is appalling.

[synthesis]

You might want to try a little rabble-rousing. Take on a popular professor or a really controversial event on campus or a current event that is emotionally loaded and then troll the shit out of non-leftists and anti-Marxists as much as you feel comfortable with. I can help you with this if you'd like. Don't be afraid of iconoclasm.

[JPSartre12]

Comrades, here is a preview of my most recent article, which is scheduled to appear in my university newspaper tomorrow. Work and classes have been extraordinarily busy the past several weeks and I haven't posted here recently, but I'm going to do my best to begin to re-post my articles here on Revleft so that you all can stay up-to-date with the activism on my campus.

As always, I appreciate all of your constructive criticism and input. Do any of you have any recommendations as to what I should write about in the future? What issue(s) do you think I should tackle next?

Ukrainian Working Class Should Reject the EU and Russia


Despite the media blackout by the corporate-controlled FOX-CNN-MSNBC complex, the truth about the atrocities being committed by the Ukrainian government against its own people are slowing seeping out, thanks to the likes of Twitter, Reddit, and independent journalists. No matter what the Ukrainian government wants, the fact that we live in a digital era means that small bits of information are going to slide across the Internet and land on your news homepage - and that’s devastating to their government because it means that they cannot necessarily control the narrative that it making its way into Europe and America.

It’s not uncommon for the people to rise up against their government and demand change. Whenever the working class wants economic reforms that improve its living conditions and protect its civil liberties, it has the fight the ruling class in order to get them. Hegemonic power systems do not relinquish their power willingly, and any transfer of power from the State to the people can only be done by direct action by the people themselves. Reforms are never a gift from above; they are the result of popular struggles by the working-class majority. If the populace wants change, it has to forcefully extract it from the ruling class because the latter will never peacefully diminish its own authority to empower the former.

But we need to be intellectually honest and recognize the effect of these reforms: when the working class obtains momentary political victories (expanded access to healthcare, extra funding for education, trimming Defense spending, etc) it effectively de-radicalizes them. This means that the ruling class has a vested interest in slowly, incrementally introducing political reforms because it serves as a means through which the working class is drained of its revolutionary zeal. Reforms are effectively counter-productive to the working class achieving political supremacy because it causes them to grow complacent with their immediate material conditions and lose sight of the real future goal - socialism.

The Ukraine is currently at an impasse. Should its government listen to the cries of the western Ukrainian citizens and integrate into the European Union? Or should they listen to the citizens along the eastern border that want desperately to become economic partners with the Russian Federation? Whom Ukraine works with should be a trivial question, but it is literally ripping the nation apart and putting it on the brink of an all-out self-destructive civil war.

This is what the Ukrainian people are trying to do: decide what their political destiny is going to be since the formal dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, after which the countries in eastern Europe that were economically and militarily integrated into the USSR via the Warsaw Pact of 1955 have been ravaged by neoliberalism. Neoliberalism is the political cancer of our generation; it is to the post-USSR world what fascism was during the 1900s. Neoliberals worship at the alter of market fundamentalism: they preach fanatically that deregulating markets, privatizing economic affairs, and replacing public spending with private spending all promote liberty when, in fact, they do the exact opposite. Neoliberal policies lead inevitably to monopolization, corporate hegemony, and an ever-widening gap between the rich and the poor. If followed through to conclusion, a generation of unrestrained neoliberal policies lead to the transformation of a genuine democratic republic into a corporate-run banana republic.

Since the USSR and its mostly-state-run economy vanished, western corporations jumped eagerly into Ukraine in the hopes of opening up new foreign markets. Nothing is more illustrative of neoliberalism’s destructive power in the post-USSR Ukraine than the fact that its national currency, the hryvnia, has never had a lower value: when compared side-by-side with the U.S. dollar, it’s worth only 11 cents. This means that the hryvnia has lost 89% of the value, and this hyper-deflation was caused by the reckless, capitalist politics of the Ukrainian Central Bank as it works hand-in-hand with international corporations in the industrial west.

If the Ukraine wants to escape the neoliberal horrors that have been shoved down its throat by international powers since the USSR collapsed in 1991, then they have to do something to fundamentally change their political system, and I do not think that that change should involve either their integration into the EU or Russia. Both Viktor Yanukovych and Serhiy Arbuzov (the Ukrainian President and his Prime Minister, respectively - even though Arbuzov should be bared from public office because he directed the massive for-profit commercial bank PrivatBank, among others, and is thus nothing more than a corporate delegate in the peoples’ government) should both be immediately removed from office. Democratic and transparent elections should be called, and Yanukovych and Arbuzov should be replaced by genuine representatives of the Ukrainian working class so that they can decide, for their own, what their political destiny should be - it should not be a decision made by corporate élites and career politicians. In the end, the Ukrainian working class should reject neoliberalism not by joining Putin’s Russia or Merkel’s EU, but rather by working together to build a new, humane, and socialist economy that runs in their direct material interests.

[JPSartre12]

My most recent one, scheduled to be out in the university paper tomorrow morning.

As always, constructive criticism is appreciated.
What topic(s) should I do next?

Reform Every Industry - Even the Constitution


The Constitution is not something that we should fetishize and cling blindly to. The Founding Fathers would want us to constantly question, challenge, and update the system based on the needs of the American citizens, not dogmatically worship its bureaucracy as absolute and unquestionable. If there is one thing we Americans should debate, it’s the Constitution. Federalists, anti-Federalists, progressive reformers, and conservative partisans should have this rich and dynamic debate every day - whether it’s the Tea Party’s desire for a Federal Marriage Amendment that makes national same-sex marriage constitutionally illegal, or the Communist Party USA’s desire to add more than a half-dozen new civil liberties to the Bill of Rights.

The Constitution isn’t the only thing that needs to be changed, but Obama’s reforms have been half-hearted, temporary band-aid solutions rather than the comprehensive economic surgery that we really need. No matter what the Republican Party (or its crypto-fascist “Tea Party” fringe) say about Obama, know that he is not left-wing. The policies enacted via legislation and executive order are not what any legitimate “Left” administration would enact. When the vanguard party of the proletariat seizes control of the State, it won’t look anything like what Obama, Biden, Pelosi, and Reid are pushing for.

What would a real Left party do? It certainly wouldn’t enact the Affordable Care Act: that is, use the federal government’s power to tax citizens as a means to coerce them into a bureaucratic, for-profit market monopolized by a handful of insurance corporations. As the Socialist Party presidential nominee, Stuart Alexander, called the it, it’s “nothing more than a corporate re-structuring of the healthcare system”. Real progressives would institutionalize a universal, non-profit, single-payer Medicare-for-All national insurance program that covers every citizen from birth to death. Some laws have been introduced to do this, including Rep. Dennis Kucinich’s H.R. 676, which would cover all primary, preventative, emergency, therapeutic, dental, optic, and specialist care.

The Congressional Budget Office has (repeatedly) estimated that H.R. 676 could save$450 billion per year by streamlining the insurance filing process, reducing administrative waste and bureaucracy, simplifying payments, and allow the program to bargain with pharmaceutical corporations by entering into long-term prescription supply contracts with them in exchange for making them the sole provider of a given medication. This is what is done in other countries, including: Britain, which also nationalized all hospitals to cut down on costs by streamlining hospital administration to further reduce the multi-insurer bureaucracy; Taiwan, which copied Britain and gave everyone with a “Health IC” smart card thats swiped when you enter the the hospital, cutting down on billions lost by insurance fraud; and Canada, which left most hospitals privately owned but required all to accept its national insurance, allowing citizens to pick which hospital they want to go to, and thus inducing a market mechanism wherein each hospital competes with each other to be the best and attract the most patients.

Healthcare reform isn’t the only thing that America needs. We need a profound, revolutionary reconstruction of our entire economy so that it works in the direct material interests of the working class. We need to nationalize higher education so that we can cut down on the wasteful, for-profit corrupt politics of privately-owned universities and save billions of dollars, which can be re-directed to subsidize the tuition costs of millions of low-income and middle-class college students. Numerous economists have repeated that if the government paid every university students’ tuition across the whole country, it would actually cost less that what it pays now via the Pell Grant and Plus Loan programs because privately-owned for-profit colleges charge more for their tuition payments because they know the government will pay the extra costs. Did Obama make the education system work in the interest of the working class, or did he re-structured the college loan payment system so that the majority of the interest payments go to the federal government instead of the corporate banks? Has Obama created a universal higher education system, or did he preserve and re-direct loan exploitation?

A healthy, educated populace should be able to find jobs via a public works program: a never-ending national re-construction program wherein we work together to constantly upgrade, modernize, and weatherize our infrastructure and energy grid in an eco-friendly manner so that they are prepared for the economic challenges of the 21st century. These jobs should be able to take place in a workplace wherein the workers themselves have ultimate control over production and exchange. That is, rather than bail out the corporate banks that wrecked the economy via illegal insider trading, federal funds should support worker-owned and worker-managed co-operative businesses so that democracy would be introduced into economics, not just politics. This collective, democratic decision-making would be a powerful sociologic threat to the disciplinarian, top-down management of capitalism. It would be a means through which the seeds of a new society could be planted, and people would have control over their own financial destiny via genuine economic democracy.

What do you think? Do you think that we should leave all of our major economic decisions to the Republican and Democratic élite, or do you think that we should transfer all political and economic decision-making power to the working class via direct democracy? One path is conducive for liberty and solidarity; the other promotes economic exploitation and a hyper-partisan police-state. You decide which is which.