Alt Left: Karl Marx, “The Genesis of Capital”: The Creation of Capitalism and Its Link to Modern Land Reform

This fascinating document is available in booklet form as it is only ~35 pages. It is an excerpt from the larger Capital volume. It’s not an easy read but it’s not impossible either.

Some of the writing is gorgeous. I read one sentence to my very anti-Communist liberal Democrat father and he swooned over the prose. That one sentence was both perfect and beautiful, though it dealt with some terrible.

In many places, this is forceful – see the fencing of the Commons in the 1300’s, done deliberately to force the peasants into the capitalist mode or production. Indeed theorists said that if the peasants could not be shoved into capitalism, there would be no capitalism, for their would be no workers. It was essential to destroy the peasants ability to live off the land for themselves in order to force them into worse circumstances as industrial workers.

We see this very same rhetoric employed today in India – where it is argued that the tribals in Chattisargh and other places must be uprooted from the lands, have their lands stolen from them to give to mining and forest industries, and forced into the capitalist mode in cities in order to properly develop the economy. It is argued that India cannot develop its economy until the Adivasis have been destroyed. Note that as with the ancient peasants, the Adivasis will live much poorer lives in the cities than the were in the rural areas.

In Colombia, we see something very similar. In Colombia, small farmers own a lot of land. They are able to subsist off this land and they do not need to participate in the larger economy. They grow enough food for themselves and some city people. The process of the Colombian revolution and the genocidal response of the Colombian oligarchy to it is all throwing the peasants off of these small plots, stealing their land at gunpoint (the paramilitaries are used for this), and terrorizing or killing them if they refuse to hand over their land.

The land is then confiscated by latifundias or large landowners who by and large control the Colombian economy. They grow coffee, bananas, etc. and raise cattle for export, generating money for the economy in the process.

In fact, this process has been going on all over Latin America for over 200 years as sort of a slow-motion process of ethnic cleansing and land theft. Smalholders are able to live off the land in Colombia, Nicaragua, Honduras, Guatemala, Colombia, Paraguay, and Brazil, and this is seen as unacceptable as they only grow food for themselves and possibly for city-dwellers but the produce cannot be exported.

These countries wish to develop an export model of agriculture based on the large scale production of food crops for export mostly to the US. In return, their ability to produce their own food is destroyed, in my opinion, rendering their economies completely backwards. The people are then rendered vulnerable to the purchase of imported food from the US, often packaged or canned food that is not very good for you.

As you can see, the country gets screwed and the US wins both ways. By destroying the basis for feeding themselves, the US wins an export market for its processed foods. By replacing these with food crops for export to the US, the US gets to make money by importing and selling these food crops. In return the country gains nothing.

Only a small landholding and import-export elite (maybe 2

And in the process, of course, the country generates a revolutionary movement, often an armed one.

This can be seen in areas of Colombia. In one particular part of Southern Colombia, most of the rural peasantry had been thrown off the land and most of the land was now held by a few large landowners who were raising cattle on the land. The peasants had been terrorized off of their stolen land and formed ghettos in a large city nearby, which increased the poverty rate and the slump percentage of the city by a lot. Here they were poor, unhealthy, poorly fed and clothed, living in slums in shacks with no sewage systems, clean water or electricity.

These slums began to generate a lot of street crime as they tend to do. Outside of the cities on the main roads, there were soldiers and paramilitaries everywhere and one went from one armed roadblock to the other. Curiously enough, a large guerrilla movement had developed among the few remaining peasants and in teeming slums. Armed guerrillas extorted the latifundias for money that they called “war taxes.” The latifundias now paid a lot of money for paramilitaries to patrol their lands.

In the slums, an urban guerrilla movement was developing. Police, soldiers and paramilitary members were attacked with bombs, RPG’s and automatic weapons all the time and took significant casualties. The war had now moved to the city where there was no war before. Bomb and gun attacks hit city police stations on a regular basis. Death squads and army units roamed the land and the unarmed Left in the form or human rights activists, labor union members and organizers, community organizers and activists, environmentalists, campesino organizations, organizations of slum-dwellers and indigineous leaders were murdered and tortured to death on a regular basis.

The idiot US and the West see this as a process of “Communist guerrillas trying to subvert Colombian democracy, shoot their way into power, and set up a murderous Communist dictatorship which will destroy freedom and prosperity in Colombia”. The vast majority of Americans and others in the West actually buy this bullshit. Many on the Left refuse to support the Colombian guerrilla, insisting that they are anachronistic and that they should try to seek power peacefully. However, since the FARC disarmed, former members and members of newly formed political parties have been massacred like flies. So state terror blocks all road to peaceful change, leaving no alternative but the way of the gun.

Obviously the ridiculous analysis of this situation that Westerners believe has no basis in reality. The Western media cheers on the genocidal Colombian state and says that the Colombian democracy is waging a war against irrational and bloodthirsty terrorism, typically linked with drug trafficking to describe them as criminals and destroy their legitimacy.

As long as this process goes on, Colombia’s economy will stay forever backwards.

It is necessary to do a land reform in the rural areas before any country can prosper economically. Indeed this “socialist” project of land reform which the US spent decades in the Cold War slaughtering millions of people to stop was actually implemented by the US in Taiwan, South Korea, and Japan in order to fend off a Communist threat. Oddly enough, it ended up creating the basis for subsequent booming development in those places.

Land reform was and is the basis for the Communist and Leftist revolutions and guerrilla forces in South Vietnam, Thailand, Colombia, Nepal, Peru, Cuba, Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua, and Paraguay in the past 55-65 years, with some of the revolutions happening later 40 years ago. In Paraguay this process has just started several years ago when a FARC split has taken up arms agains the state.

Alt Left: Why We Fight (PFLP version)

Alt Left: Capitalism Will Always Tend Towards Fascism: Does that Mean It Is Fatally Flawed?

DiscoCat: The Far Left has an explicit goal of ending capitalism. The Far Right does not. This is why when forced to choose between the Far Right and the Far Left, liberals, capitalists, industrialists, and plutocrats will always choose the Far Right.

It is precisely for this reason that the wealthy industrialists and plutocrats in Germany supported Hitler’s chancellorship campaign in 1931. They didn’t give a flying fuck about his nationalism, bigotry, warmongering, and antisemitism. Most of the plutocrats probably thought Hitler’s ravings were just harmless antics to galvanize his base. Whatever it takes to rile up the mindless cattle and garner their support. All they cared about is that he would let them keep their ownership of the factories and protect their interests from socialists and communists.

The plutocrats will always support fascism as a bulwark against socialism if they feel the latter’s gaining popularity among the masses. They usually don’t like fascism but they’re driven to support it by pure self-interest and pragmatism.

Thank you very much for this comment! And by the way, welcome to the site if you are new here!

I have felt this way a long time myself. I think it goes deeper than this though. Many of the leftwingers that got overthrown by fascists were just liberals who did some tinkering around the edges. Arbenz in Guatemala and many others such as Juan Bosch in the Dominican Republic were overthrown for trying to do a land reform. The leader of Honduras and Aristide in Haiti were overthrown by fascists for literally raising the minimum wage! That’s all they did. And Bill Clinton helped overthrow Aristide and Hitlery Clinton herself literally overthrew the leader of Honduras and installed a fascist coup that very quickly murdered 1,000 social activists.

This has happened many times. The new Peruvian leader has promised to do only very mild reforms and he’s already being called a Communist. The mild reformer of the PT, Lula, was overthrown in a judicial coup that was assisted by the FBI! I told you Feds are crap. Feds are the worst pigs of them all.

So I disagree where the poster says all of these people go fascist for fear that the Left will end capitalism. It appears that any threat to their profits at all is enough to cause the capitalists to put in a fascist regime. So I think the comment should be amended from fear of the overthrow of capitalism to the fear of any loss of profits and income at all.

A while back, I told my mother that down in Latin America, it is routine for the Right to murder trade unionists and union leaders. She shook her head and said, “That’s because down there, if you’re in a union, they think that means you’re a Communist.” I would point out that that was all done with the help of the US, especially the CIA.

The US has been murdering union members in Latin America for 60 years now, and probably even longer if you consider the Banana Revolt in the Uraba of Colombia in 1921. And every one of our Latin American interventions from 1910-1950 was done on the basis more or less of “kill the trade unionists,” among other things. The Sandinistas of Nicaragua are named after Augusto Sandino, the leader of Nicaraguan guerrillas who fought the US Marines in Nicaragua for many years.

That’s exactly correct. I’d like to add that not one thing has changed. Social activists including union members and leaders, are murdered every day in Colombia for years now.

Alt Left: Quit Worrying about Being Replaced by Some Stupid Machine

I laugh when people tell me these stupid machines are going to replace all of us humans. Every time I go to the bank readyteller, one of the two machines is literally down. Most of the time I try to do much of anything new on the Net, especially involving money, it simply doesn’t work, often giving me “Unknown error.” See that?

That machine is just intelligent enough to recognize that it screwed up (hence smarter than half of humans right there), but beyond that, it can’t even tell why or how it screwed up! Most humans can do that at least if they’ve got the balls to admit they’re not flawless, a tall order, admittedly.

The machine says, “I screwed up! I’m a dumbass machine! I’m as dumb as a rock! I only know whatever you humans told me to know! But can I figure out how or why I screwed up or even what sort of error I made? Well, of course not! What do you expect? I’m just a stupid machine!”

Anyway, I’m laffin’. These machines are literally failed 5

Think about it. How many times have you gone to the store and asked a worker a question, and the worker tells you, “I’m sorry! This worker is out of order at the moment! Please come back later when one of our human repairmen come out to fix me!”

I know, a lot of store workers probably should say something like that if they were being honest, but when do they ever? Never.

The humans are never broken. They’re never malfunctioning as long as they’re not dead or hooked up to hospital tubes.

Humans are better than machines. Machines aren’t any threat to any of us except in the depraved fantasies of the capitalists who would replace us all with these infernal metal machine objects in a New York minute if they had our way.

Machines are crap. Machines are shit. LOL. They don’t even work more than half the time!

“Oranges and Lemons,” by Alpha Unit

Humans are among the few mammal species unable to synthesize Vitamin C from glucose. All of our Vitamin C has to come from our diets. If you were somehow to end up with no Vitamin C in your diet whatsoever for a prolonged time – say, three or four months and counting, indefinitely – it is no exaggeration to say that the repercussions could be dire.

Without Vitamin C we can’t make collagen, and without collagen your body can’t repair your skin, bone, cartilage, ligaments and tendons, blood vessel walls, and teeth. You need fresh food in your diet, either from plant or animal sources, to get this done.

Wherever you find people going without fresh food for long periods, you’ll find Vitamin C deficiency, or scurvy.

Scurvy has been prevalent throughout much of human history. It likely began to occur in humans during the development of agriculture. According to biologist Thomas Jukes, once people in temperate zones adopted an agrarian lifestyle they were able to store grains for use during winter. They were also able to spread into other temperate regions previously uninhabitable due to the lack of food supply during winters.

But because stored grains are extremely low in Vitamin C, it is likely that these ancient peoples developed scurvy during the long winter months because grain dominated their diets.

During long journeys or overland campaigns, such as the Crusades, scurvy inevitably appeared.

The first written account of a disease likely to be scurvy comes from the Eber Papyrus of ancient Egypt, dated to 1550 BC. The Papyrus not only diagnosed scurvy but prescribed that its victims be given onions, which contain Vitamin C.

Throughout maritime history, people had to figure out not only how to transport themselves across seas and oceans but how to stay healthy along the way. They were clearly relatively successful at both. Millennia ago, Austronesians were the first humans to invent oceangoing vessels; they colonized a large part of the Indo-Pacific region. Early Polynesians were superb seafarers and traveled thousands of miles exploring and settling the region we know as the Polynesian Triangle (drawn by connecting the points of Hawaii, New Zealand, and Easter Island).

Somali seafarers developed extensive trade networks, and Somali merchants at one time led commerce between Asia and Africa. Chinese merchants sailed the Indian Ocean and traded throughout Southeast Asia, the Arabian Peninsula, and East Africa.

How did ancient seafaring peoples deal with scurvy?

Stefan Slater writes that Polynesian seafarers relied on freshly caught fish, crustaceans, and octopi, and would sometimes slaughter some of the animals they were transporting for breeding stock. Jin Ding, Chaojan Shi, and Adam Weintrit report that the diet on Chinese sailing ships included green tea, which contains more Vitamin C than black tea. They also say that Chinese ships began to carry gardens with them, growing soybean sprouts, which are high in Vitamin C.

So there is some evidence that ancient seafarers knew the importance of keeping fresh vegetables and meat in their diets on long voyages.

For Europeans, it wasn’t until the Age of Sail that the problem of scurvy truly came into focus. Wealth and national interest were at stake in ways they hadn’t been before.

Advances in naval technology and a rush for exploration and conquest brought Europeans the “plague of the sea.” Scurvy was the main occupational disease of what historians call the European Age of Exploration. More sailors died of scurvy than all other causes combined, including battles, storms, and other diseases.

Jason A. Mayberry makes the case that a unique confluence of conditions made scurvy and seafaring a deadly combination for Europeans. In his essay “Scurvy and Vitamin C,” he draws upon the work of Stephen Bown, author of Scurvy: How a Surgeon, a Mariner, and a Gentleman Solved the Greatest Medical Mystery of the Age of Sail.

First, countries had difficulty maintaining sufficient crews for their naval vessels, so they relied on impressment: the taking of men into the military by compulsion, with or without notice. It had been legally sanctioned in Britain since the time of Edward I.

It was basically kidnapping. Gangs of men would go into port towns looking for “recruits.” They would club a man and drag him back to the ship. The man’s family might have no idea what happened to him, and many of the men never made it back home.

Some had experience at sea, some didn’t. Some were in poor health to begin with, being homeless, convicts, or elderly. On average a third of a ship’s crew was made up of impressed men.

Even the men who volunteered for naval service were often in poor health. Many would volunteer in order to secure a place to sleep and get regular meals. Sometimes boys who were orphans or runaways would join.

A second reason that Vitamin C deficiency was hastened during this period were the working conditions on ships. Discipline was harsh and included flogging, keelhauling, and starvation. The body needs more Vitamin C when it is under stress, and sailors had heightened stress in the form of physical exertion, exposure to the elements, fear of battle, and sleep deprivation.

The third and main factor in the development of scurvy was clearly the diet onboard ships. What mattered most for food supplies was that the food be storable for long periods without spoiling. The nutritional content of the food was of little concern for those in charge. What was most important to them was to maintain a suitable labor force at the least possible cost.

A typical weekly ration for a sailor, according to Bown:

  • 1 lb. hardtack (biscuit) daily
  • 2 lbs. salted beef twice weekly
  • 1 lb. salted pork twice weekly
  • 2 oz. salted fish 3 times weekly
  • 2 oz. butter 3 times weekly
  • 4 oz. cheese 3 times weekly
  • 8 oz. dried peas 4 times weekly
  • 1 gal. beer daily

Sometimes the rations included dried fruit or barley meal. But the lack of fresh fruits and vegetables left the diet almost completely devoid of Vitamin C.

Compounding this problem was that even the food sailors had access to wasn’t always fit to eat. Spoilage was a huge problem on ships. Ships were a dark, damp, and sometimes waterlogged environment for sailors and their food, and this led to moldy, worm-eaten bread, or other dried foods. Meat would begin spoiling almost as soon as it left port, no matter how salt-laden it was.

European navies did provide surgeons and surgeon’s mates on ships, but most of a surgeon’s time was spent caring for battle wounds instead of focusing on the treatment and prevention of disease.

All of these factors made scurvy the leading cause of death during the Age of Sail.

The onset of scurvy is a slow progression, Bown and others inform us, usually appearing after 60 to 90 days of a Vitamin C-deficient diet. This is when the body’s lingering stores of Vitamin C are depleted. The initial symptoms are fatigue and muscle aches. Upon waking, a scurvy victim’s joints will ache.

During the second stage, his gums begin to swell and will bleed with slight pressure. The teeth become loose at the roots. He also feels pain throughout his joints and muscles.

During the third stage, the gums begin to rot. They also bleed profusely. The victim’s flesh becomes gangrenous and will spontaneously hemorrhage. His skin, especially on the legs and feet, develop ulcers that turn gangrenous. As connective tissue fails, long-healed broken bones begin to refracture, and long-healed wounds begin to reopen. The legs cramp so severely that the person cannot walk.

At this point the person is in excruciating pain.

In the final stage of scurvy, the person gets a high fever. His skin develops black spots and he begins having tremors. He will drift in and out of consciousness for a while, and then he dies.

An estimated two million sailors died of scurvy between the 15th and 18th centuries. The science at the time was of very little use in treating them – even though various people throughout European history had made the connection between citrus fruits and the prevention of scurvy.

On July 8, 1497, Vasco da Gama set sail from Lisbon, Portugal, in search of a passage to India. On January 11, 1498, the fleet anchored off Mozambique. After five weeks at sea, the crew began showing the symptoms of scurvy.

Fortunately, some weeks later, they arrived at Mombasa, on the coast of Kenya, where they met local traders who traded them oranges. Within six days of eating them, the crew recovered. Da Gama left Africa and began his voyage across the Indian Ocean to Kozhikode (or Calicut to Westerners).

After staying in India for four months, da Gama left for a three-month journey at sea in which scurvy killed many of his sailors. On January 7, 1499, the ships anchored at Malindi, Kenya, where the sailors, remembering their previous cure in Mombasa, asked for oranges. Still, more sailors died of the disease “which started in the mouth.” Six months later the survivors made it back to Lisbon.

Did Vasco da Gama alert any ship owners or controlling authorities of what he had discovered about treating scurvy? No one knows.

Sir Richard Hawkins had discovered a cure for scurvy in 1593 when it appeared in his crew in southern Brazil. He reported that oranges and lemons had been a remedy for his men. To whom did he report this? What did they do with the information?

The Dutch had known about the value of citrus fruits since at least the late 16th century. According to J. Burnby and A. Bierman, who wrote “The Incidence of Scurvy at Sea and Its Treatment,” the Dutch East India Company bartered for lemons in Africa and also established vegetable gardens and orchards in their colonies to provide fresh citrus to their ships. How did the Dutch manage to keep this knowledge to themselves? Was that their intention?

Burnby and Bierman also write about an Elizabethan merchant, Sir Hugh Plat, who had an interest in botany and gave bottled lemon juice to the commander of the first fleet of the English East India Company. It was only the crew of the flagship, Red Dragon, which received a daily allowance of lemon juice. It was also the only crew that remained relatively free of scurvy. What did the English East India Company do with this information?

In the early 1600s John Woodall, a surgeon for the same East India Company, described the symptoms of scurvy and recommended that ships’ surgeons inform Governors of “all places they touch in the Indies” that the juices of oranges, lemons, limes, and tamarinds be used as medicine for scurvy.

The East India Company actually supplied “lemon water,” as it was called, for its ships until 1625, when the Company chose not to provide it because “the woman supplying it wanted 12d. a gallon above the usual price.” The return voyage of 1626 was badly afflicted with scurvy because they had bought tamarinds in the East Indies which they presumed to be as effective as lemons. All sour fruits and even acids such as vinegar were erroneously thought to be cures for scurvy.

J. F. Bachstrom, a Lutheran theologian and physician, wrote in 1734 that there was only one cause of scurvy – the absence of fresh fruits and vegetables for a long period. No drugs would help, nor would mineral acids. Were any companies or government entities aware of his findings? If so, did they take them seriously?

Europe was slowly making headway against this problem nevertheless. In 1739 James Lind, a former physician’s apprentice, volunteered for the Royal Navy and was designated a surgeon’s mate. After seven years in that position, he was promoted to surgeon on HMS Salisbury. It was on this ship that he performed his famous scurvy experiment.

Lind showed an insight ahead of his time by understanding that, to develop a cure, treatments must be compared simultaneously in similar patients. He had envisioned the concept of clinical trials, as rudimentary as his idea might have been.

After eight weeks at sea, and when scurvy was beginning to take its toll on the crew, Lind decided to test his idea that the putrefaction of the body caused by the disease could be prevented with acids. He divided 12 sick patients into six pairs, and provided each pair with a different supplement to their diet: cider, vitriolic acid (diluted sulfuric acid), vinegar, sea water, two oranges and one lemon, or a purgative mixture.

Only the pair who took the oranges and lemons improved.

You would think that Lind had established a clear connection between citrus and scurvy and that the Navy would have taken immediate action. But neither happened.

Lind continued to believe that there were multiple causes of scurvy. He also advocated a method of preserving the virtues of oranges and lemons that involved boiling the juices. Unbeknownst to Lind, boiling destroyed the active ingredient in citrus juices – Vitamin C. When the boiled juice was tried on ships as a preventative measure and found lacking, people began to dismiss the whole idea that citrus fruits were effective against scurvy!

In 1753 Lind published his Treatise on the Scurvy, considered a classic of medical science. But it took the Royal Navy over 40 years to adopt Lind’s recommendations. This happened under the direction of Sir Gilbert Blane, who had been appointed Physician to the Fleet.

Blane was familiar with Lind’s work and had the power and initiative to bring about change, Mayberry states. He organized an experiment on HMS Suffolk on a 23-week trip to India. The sailors were given a mixture of rum, water, sugar, and lemon juice. A few sailors developed a slight case of scurvy. They were given additional rations of lemon juice and the scurvy was quickly cured.

With the results from the HMS Suffolk and the power of his position, Blane was able to ensure that fresh citrus juice became a staple in the British Navy. For the British, scurvy had finally been conquered.

The question remains: why did it take so long, when so many had found the cure time and time again?

Burnby and Bierman note that there was the view among ship owners and government authorities that seamen were expendable. They also suggest that seamen themselves might have been reluctant to take part in experiments that might have settled the issue. But they mention other considerations, mainly the problem of “sheer impracticability.”

How does one store many thousands of oranges and lemons on an overcrowded man-of-war laden with guns, gunpowder, and shot? Using the juice of citrus fruits was certainly a space saver but it readily became moldy, especially under poor storage conditions, which were usually the case.

Speaking of practical considerations, how long can it be practical to treat your work force as if they are expendable? There were no sailors’ advocates at the time to make it impractical for businessmen and governments to do so. Nothing stopped or even slowed Europe’s exploration and colonization, so losing sailors to scurvy was just one of the costs of doing business.

Alt Left: Trotsky on Fascism: One of the Best Analyses of Fascism Ever Written

Brian: Leon Trotsky, as far as I can tell, held the view that fascism is a capitalist phase that occurs when capitalism needs to be rescued from rising discontent among workers.

He wrote:

The Nazis call their overturn [of Social Democracy] by the usurped title of revolution. As a matter of fact, in Germany as well as in Italy, fascism leaves the social system untouched. Taken by itself, Hitler’s overturn has no right even to the name counterrevolution.

But it cannot be viewed as an isolated event; it is the conclusion of a cycle of shocks which began in Germany in 1918. The November Revolution, which gave the power to the workers’ and peasants’ soviets, was proletarian in its fundamental tendencies. But the party that stood at the head of the proletariat returned the power to the bourgeoisie. In this sense social democracy opened the era of counterrevolution before the revolution could bring its work to completion.

However, so long as the bourgeoisie depended upon social democracy and consequently upon the workers, the regime retained elements of compromise. All the same, the international and internal situation of German capitalism left no more room for concessions. As social democracy saved the bourgeoisie from the proletarian revolution, fascism came in its turn to liberate the bourgeoisie from social democracy. Hitler’s coup is only the final link in the chain of counterrevolutionary shifts.

In Trotsky’s view, social democracy overturned socialism after 1918, promising compromise between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, and then Nazism overturned social democracy so as to end the need for compromise between the bourgeoisie and proletariat.

Nazism, in his analysis, and fascism in general is an expression of the petty bourgeoisie, which is hostile to economic and social development because such development in the current era necessarily favors either capitalists or workers.

So the petty bourgeois start making a commotion when economic and social conditions turn against them, and when the big bourgeoisie feels sufficiently threatened by the Left, they ally with the petty bourgeois elements and fascism begins. The primary objective is to throttle the workers so that both the big and petty bourgeoisie can be relatively comfortable in their socioeconomic positions.

However, the big capitalists prefer not to be in alliance with the petty bourgeoisie and to rule on their own, so such an alliance is merely convenient, and the big capitalists are not fully comfortable with it since it, like social democracy, limits their autonomy.

So during the capitalist stage of history, the upper class naturally prefers laissez faire capitalism or libertarianism, the middle class naturally prefers stasis and to hinder development so as to preserve themselves, and the working class naturally prefers socialism.

Perhaps it can be thought of like this: Fascism occurs when both the upper and middle Class agree that workers’ power threatens to grow too starkly, and they ally. Social democracy, perhaps, occurs when the middle and working class feel acutely threatened by the upper class, and they ally. Laissez faire capitalism occurs when the upper class is firmly in control. And socialism occurs when the working class is firmly in control.

Moreover, social democracy tends to pave the way for the upper class to regain much of its diminished power by maintaining the social system of the capitalist stage of history in general. This is why Trotsky thinks only a full proletarian revolution can safeguard against the return of an anti-worker regime, whether that regime is laissez faire or fascist.

Of course, Marxism in general holds that capitalism must reach a certain level of development before a true and lasting proletarian revolution can occur.

What do you think of all this?

Trotsky’s take on national socialism and fascism.

Thank you very much for this comment. Anyone want to argue against this or expand on it.

Yes, I read that essay. Written ~1930, right? It’s perfect. Trotsky is unjustly maligned, though his position on WW2 was unconscionable. His murder by Stalin was a serious crime. Need we remind ourselves that Leon Trotsky was the leader of the Red Army itself? That’s pretty impressive right there.

Trotsky’s essay, though written 90 years ago, remains one of the finest analyses ever of the phenomenon of fascism, which surprisingly is a very hard concept to figure out, mostly due to its chameleon-like and ever-mutating nature which tries to hide its fascist nature by saying a fascist project is not fascist. Fascism can and does call itself just about anything. In fact, there are fascist movements that have called themselves antifascists!

I recall there was this anti-Semite on the Jewish and Israeli newsgroups who often posed as an antifascist. He called actual antifascists fascists and called fascists antifascists. So he ended up railing against fascism while actually promoting it! He was pretty confusing for a while there until a I finally figured out his game after a few months. He sure was sneaky though, I’ll give him that.

The ever-mutating nature of fascism mirrors that of capitalism itself. Following Marx, I agree that capitalism is an amazing thing. I stand in awe at its capacity to continuously innovate and suit itself to most any material conditions. Think about this: A capitalist can literally print up t-shirts with Che Guevara’s face them and Revolution! written across the fronts, sell them and make a million dollars from them! That’s amazing. A capitalist making a bundle by selling anti-capitalist products. This is why capitalism is such a formidable foe.

 

 

Alt Left: Why US Conservatism Fails – Social Conservatism/Support for Working Class Whites and Neoliberalism Are Always Incompatible

There Is No Society

Margaret Thatcher summed it up well when she said, “There is no society.” This is what all conservatives want. They want there to be no society at all. It’s odd because this white picket fence White America they all want to go back to was a society if there ever was one. So all rightwingers want to get rid of society (as it’s bad for business) but then the paradises they all want to go back to had deep societal structures.

Why US Conservatism Fails – Social Conservatism/Support for Working Class Whites and Neoliberalism Are Always Incompatible

Just as Keynesian economics, social liberalism, and even social democracy always inevitably pave the way for and give ground to neoliberalism in the future, social conservatism and neoliberalism are never really compatible, at least not in the US. Another problem for Republicans is selling their project to working class Whites while pushing a project – neoliberalism – that is designed by its very nature to devastate all workers but the working class first and foremost.

Hence the Republicans claim to speak for the White Working Class while pushing the very economics that is causing declining life expectancy, opioid addiction and overdose epidemics, complete social degeneration, and economic wreckage in White working class America. The Republicans have always done this by getting working class Whites to vote for them on social issues. But then the Republicans never really get around to fixing any of the social issues.

Abortion legal yet? Of course not.

Got a handle on illegal immigration?

Porn illegal? You kidding?

Social degeneration arrested? You must be joking.

Divorce and single parenthood? Pull the other one.

Drug abuse, sales, and use? Please.

For abortion, porn, and illegal immigration, the Republicans don’t want to fix any of these issues. They just want to say they will and then never do it. The daughters of the rich get abortions too. I’m sure the rich love their porn, depraved degenerates that they are. And Republicans will never fix illegal immigration because their corporate and small business supporters want to keep the illegal flow coming for the cheap wages and control over labor.

Divorce, single parenthood, social degeneration, drug use, sales, and abuse, including opioid use and overdose epidemics? Curiously, the neoliberal economics that Republicans push tend to directly cause all of these forms of cultural decay and degeneration.

US Conservatism Will Always Be Incoherent

As usual, conservatives are incoherent. The problem isn’t capitalism, it “state capitalism” or “state interference in the market.” This is the Libertarian idiocy. Yet every time there’s a crisis in the market – and under neoliberalism there will be more than ever – the capitalists all go running to the state with their hands out asking for the workers to bail them out. The only thank you the workers get is a giant IOW for trillions of dollars they have to pay back that they loaned to the capitalists.

I go to rightwing blogs all the time and I see them flailing about. Many are starting to figure out that neoliberalism is utterly corrosive of all of the socially conservative values that they wish to cultivate.

Neoliberalism will always support mass immigration and illegal immigration to keep wages down.

Neoliberalism will always oppose any moral structures in society because the more we let it all hang loose, the more consumers we have.

Neoliberalism will never be race realist because capitalists care absolutely nothing whatsoever about race. It means nothing to them. The only color capitalists have ever cared about is green.

I see them flailing around, searching for something, anything – that will give them their social conservatism while keeping their free markets. Huey Longism, “agrarian socialism”, distributism, antisemitic campaigns against “banksters” that leave the rest of the neoliberal economy alone, on and on.

They want the usual starvation of the state with low taxes and no social programs, but that always results in no society at all or something that looks more like Somalia than Norman Rockwell.

They decry the pain that neoliberalism has inflicted on the White working class while refusing to recognize that neoliberalism had anything to do with it.

They never have any solid proposals about anything because their love of neoliberalism, a small or near-zero state, no regulation, etc. always runs afoul of their desires to limit immigration, slow the decline of the White working class, arrest the decay of values and behavior, and adopt some sanity on race, gender, sexual orientation, or gender identity because the two things are utterly incompatible.

You either have one or the other.

You can’t have both.

Alt Left: That $15/Hour Minimum Wage

The Democrats are trying to push a bill that will raise the federal minimum wage to $15/hour. This is part of the Push for Fifteen movement sponsored by labor and the Left in general, especially the Bernie Sanders crowd.

This is part of the Democrats’ $1.9 billion COVID relief package. I generally support this, and the $1,400 is certainly much needed, especially around these parts, as in, my humble abode.

However, Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Krysten Sinema of Arizona, the  two most conservative Democrats in the Senate, vow to oppose the $15/hour minimum wage. Well, good for them! See? Here I am, rooting for the most conservative Democrats in the Senate. I think that shows more than anything else how insane and extreme the modern Democratic Party is on so many issues. I never support conservative Democrats on anything!

Manchin somehow always manages to get re-elected in a state that Trump won by 39 points in 2016 and 29 points this time around. But West Virginia has a long tradition of electing conservative Democrats. Remember Robert Byrd? Sinema managed to win in purple Arizona, long a very conservative state, home of Barry Goldwater after all. She probably won by billing  herself as a conservative Democrat. Just to show you that conservatives are as woke as liberals nowadays, Sinema is openly bisexual. The Culture War is over. The Left won. Time to pull down the flag and go home, social conservatives.

Manchin and Sinema are proposing an $11/hour minimum wage. Well that lifts families of one and two persons out of poverty at least. It leaves families of three $1,000 short and families of four $4,500 short. I don’t mind this compromise. I’d prefer $12/hour, but I will settle for $11. Anything’s better than $7.25/hour.

Mitt Romney and Tom Cotton (Tom Cotton! He’s one the most rightwing people in the Senate!) are proposing a slow increase in  the minimum wage to $10/hour in 2025. I guess it raises at ~60 cents an hour. That seems awful meager.

And it’s also linked to E-Verify, and mandates all employers to use it. I believe it submits the worker’s Social Security # if he even has one and sees if they are eligible to work in the US.

You realize that illegal aliens engage in mass identity theft of other people’s social security #’s, right? You all think that’s ok? Why is that ok? How would you like it if some crook who sneaked into your country illegal was using your SS# to steal a job from an American citizen or legal immigrant.

This E-Verify is utterly reasonable. How this is unreasonable is beyond me. Insanely, the ACLU went to court to put an injunction on E-Verify at the federal level, apparently because it messes up sometimes. Oh, my God! Something doesn’t work right all the time! So let’s throw it out and never use it!  Try applying that to every object you own and see how that works.

I completely support full implementation of E-Verify at the federal level. Maybe then we can get a lot of these damned illegals to self-deport.

For some insane reason, the Democratic Party is opposed to E-Verify! Why?! Do illegal aliens automatically have a right to work in this country? No other country on Earth allows such nonsense. Go to any country on Earth and try to work if you’re not a citizen or a legal immigrant. Good luck with that. But we are America, and the whole damn world has a right to sneak in here anytime they want!

Biden also opposes E-Verify. Why, for God’s sake? What in the Hell is their reason? What good reason is there to oppose such a completely reasonable measure?

The present minimum wage is way too low. It’s $ 7.25/hour. It’s been stuck there since 2009. Obviously it needs raising. Question is by how much. It is stated that the present minimum wage is not a living wage. I haven’t the faintest idea what a living wage even means. What in the Hell does that mean?

$7.25/hour definitely puts a single worker above the poverty line. That’s all I think the minimum wage should do. Poverty level is ~$13,000/year for one person. Try living on that sometime. Good luck!

Family of two? $17,420. With the present federal minimum wage, a family of two would live in poverty. That’s not ok. You would need a minimum wage of $9/hour to lift that family out of poverty.

Family of three? $23,000. Well, you would need a minimum wage of $11.75/hour to lift them out of poverty.

Family of four? $26,500. You need a minimum wage of $13.50 to raise that family out of poverty.

What is the purpose of a minimum wage? If it is to keep one person out of poverty, the present wage is fine. If it is to keep a family of two out of poverty, we need to go up to $9/hour. If it is to keep a family of three out of poverty, we need a minimum wage of $11.75/hour to raise them out of poverty. Is it to raise a family of four out of poverty? Then we need to raise it to $13.50/hour.

We can also go by the historical minimum wage. It was at its highest level in 1968, when it was the equivalent of $12.20/hour. I say to raise it to that level. Raise the minimum wage to $12.25/hour to match it with the highest it ever was in the past.  Reasonable, right? It also lifts a family of three out of poverty, though a family of four is still $2,000 below the poverty line.

Someone needs to tell me what the ideal purpose of the minimum wage is? To raise a family of one out of poverty? A family of two? A family of three? A family of four?

Here in California, we have a minimum wage of $12/hour. That’s $24,000/year. That seems like quite an acceptable minimum wage for these parts. I would certainly be happy to make that much money.

I’m quite dubious about a $15/hour minimum wage. That just sounds way too high. Why not raise it to $50/hour then if we are going to keep jacking it up. Why stop at 15?

Alt Left: TThe SJW Left Is the Fake Left

As long as few Americans die, Americans don’t care what sort of terrible things we do overseas. It doesn’t matter how many people we kill. It doesn’t matter how many countries we destroy. It doesn’t matter how much money and oil we steal. It doesn’t matter how much land or countries we illegally occupy. The American people strike me as a rather depraved bunch.

The thing is that if you discuss all the terrible things our military does overseas, most people throw a block up. Most people believe US foreign policy and the behavior of the US military is 10

And some of these people are fanatical SJW’s. So you see most SJW fanatics support full-blown US imperialism, bombing, destroying, killing, stealing, conquering, occupying, bullying, menacing, the whole nine yards.

One more reason that the SJW movement is fake. It’s not even the Left. It’s the fake Left. You think

So the SJW Left isn’t even doing any good. And it’s probably dividing the workers because all people labeled as oppressors – Whites, men, straights, cis people, nationalists – tend to go rightwing because they Left is demonizing them and calling them oppressors.So the SJW’s are like a gigantic rightwinger manufacturing facility. They’re a factory that churns out conservatives by the boatload. Congratulations!

I will show you how the SJW Left is the Fake Left.

No Communist country ever called a certain race or ethnic group of the country oppressors and singled them out.  There has never been one anti-White or anti-European Communist country anywhere on Earth, though South Africa comes close. Still, the South African Communist Party doesn’t run the country and the ANC is just another rightwing party by now. But South Africa is the only place on Earth that a White-hating Left has come into power.

No Communist country ever demonized men or masculinity, nor did they attack men for the crime of trying to get laid. Sex was seen as a healthy drive between male and female workers. There has never been one anti-male Communist country on Earth.

No Communist country ever demonized straight people. In fact, most were very conservative, and in most places, homosexuality was made illegal as a bourgeois vice.

Needless to say, no Communist country ever demonized cis people and exalted trans people as the best thing since sliced bread.

Alt Left: The Assassination of Politician Jorge Eliécer Gaitán in Colombia in 1948

This is the information contained in the huge update I just made in this post. I just updated the post with a lot of information about the assassination of Jorge Eliécer Gaitán in 1948 which led to the massive riots called The Bogotazo, after which a decade of mass killings called La Violencia took place. The assassination of Gaitan, even more than the banana workers strike, jump-started the movement of the armed Colombian Left in the form of the Colombian guerrillas.

In 1948 in Colombia, a very popular presidential candidate, Jorge Eliécer Gaitán of the Liberal Party, was assassinated for the same reason that given for the overthrow of Arbenz of Guatemala seven years later. The Liberal Party was one of two fascist parties of the oligarchy, along with the Conservative Party. See below for more on them.

The Liberal Party was anything but. Yet Gaitán was an interesting figure, part of a socialist movement in the party who advocated very popular candidate who promised major changes in Colombian society a battle against social, political, and economic inequality. He was also a feminist who advocated the uplift of the status of Colombian woman in society. In addition, he broached the subject of land reform, a hot button issue in Colombia.

In fact, as in so many other places in Latin America such as Guatemala, Nicaragua, and El Salvador, the endless Leftist guerrilla war against the government is more of a fight over land than anything else. To this day, the Colombian oligarchy has refused to do a land reform, in part because this is where most of their money comes from.

Even Venezuela has had only partial success at a land reform, as it has proven too difficult to break up the big estates or latifundias. Instead, since much of the land lies idle and fallow, peasants have conducted land invasions of fallowed land in the latifundias, which has resulted in a lot of conflict.

Death squads funded by the latifundia oligarchs have murdered over 150 peasant leaders since Chavez came in over the last 20 years. Parts of the Chavista Movement have been aligned with the rural rich for whatever reason, and they have been involved in repressing these peasant movements also.

He was murdered by the Colombian oligarchy or ruling class, which has stayed in power by mass murder for 75 years now. They were even massacring people earlier, as there was a mass slaughter of striking workers at banana plantations in the northwest in a place called La Magdalena in 1928.

Even this early, the US was waging a Cold War against the USSR. The US became very alarmed by the strike, as the plantations were owned by the US United Fruit Company. United Fruit and the US government described the strikers as subversives and Communists. The US threatened to invade if the strike was not put down by the Colombian government.

Under orders from United Fruit, the Colombian military attacked the workers. Many striking workers were killed. The event was memorialized by Gabriel Garcia Marquez in his famous novel 100 Years of Solitude. The event was a watershed in Colombian politics, as an actual Colombian Left was formed around this time.

Gaitan was an excellent speaker and his rallies drew large crowds of union members and poor people. He was characterized as a demagogue, like Juan Peron, who was already rising to power in Argentina. He was also a budding nationalist. He was criticized by the Conservative Party, the right wing of the Liberal Party, and even the Communist Party, which regarded him as a competitor for the interests of the workers.

In 1933, he split with the Liberal Party and formed the Unión Nacional Izquierdista Revolucionaria (National Leftist Revolutionary Union). In 1946, he proposed a Gaitanista Program. It advocated many things:

Development agencies for the advancement of the social, political, and economic advancement of peasants in the countryside. Policies to redistribute wealth in Colombia. Nationalization of public services, a progressive income tax, and the development of a national economy. A land reform and new pro-labor laws.

In terms of foreign policy, it advocated an economic union of Latin American countries so they could serve the interests of their people instead of that of the oligarchies and foreign carpetbagging corporations. His project could be best described as anti-plutocratic and anti-imperialist.

He was assassinated in 1948 by a “lone gunman,” Juan Roa Sierra, along the lines of Lee Harvey Oswald. Two ex-CIA agents have confessed that it was really the CIA that was behind the operation. The assassin took orders from two named CIA agents and the assassination plan was called Operation Pantomime.

This was probably one of the first of countless assassinations of liberal and leftwing figures the world over by the CIA undertaken as part of the Cold War. Sierra visited Gaitan in his office in  the morning and at 1 PM, he shot Gaitan dead.

An enraged mob then set upon Sierra, who was protected by an Army colonel. He was chased to a store where  he holed up. The mob smashed into the store and dragged him outside. He was beaten and stabbed so many times that his corpse was unrecognizable.

At the time of his assassination, a meeting of the Pan-American Conference led by US Secretary of State George Marshall. At this meeting, all members of the group agreed that fighting Communism was their number one concern.

The despicable Organization of American States or OAS, a fake organization of Latin American countries that is actually run by the US and serves to promote the interests of the US and its neo-colonies in Latin America.

At the same time, the Latin American Youth Congress was taking place. It been organized by Fidel Castro of Cuba and was funded by Juan Peron of Argentina. A young Gabriel Garcia Marquez was a law student at the time and was eating lunch at the time  Gaitan was killed. He rushed to the scene and arrived just in time to see Sierra lynched by the mob. He memorialized the event in his book, Living to Tell the Tale.

It is possible that Gaitan, like Oswald and Sirhan Sirhan and James Earl Ray, was a patsy for an assassination carried out by the US Deep State in the case of the former and by the FBI itself in the case of Ray. Gaitan suffered from schizophrenia, could not fire a gun properly, the gun in his hand was not capable of firing accurately, and he was standing quite a distance away from Gaitan while the murder occurred at a short distance. Further, Sierra was not seen anywhere near the assassination. The first time  he was spotted, he was in between two police officers.

The Colombian government quickly blamed the USSR and the Colombian Communist Party for the murder. They also tied in the young Fidel Castro with the plot. This version seems very unlikely.

Notice that this CIA assassination took place under “liberal Democrat” Harry Truman.

The murder of this candidate was followed by a wild  riot known as the Bogotazo. Many of the rioters were armed and the riots left much of downtown Bogota in ruins. The riots left 1,800 people dead. This was part of a larger reign of violence in the countryside which had started in 1930. By 1948, Bogota was full of peasants fleeing the violence in the countryside.

Alt Left: Updated: How the Armed Colombian Left (the FARC and the ELN) Came to Be

I just updated this post with a lot of information about the assassination of Jorge Eliécer Gaitán in 1948 which led to the massive riots called The Bogotazo, after which a decade of mass killings called La Violencia took place. The assassination of Gaitan, even more than the banana workers strike, jump-started the movement of the armed Colombian Left in the form of the Colombian guerrillas.

In 1948 in Colombia, a very popular presidential candidate, Jorge Eliécer Gaitán of the Liberal Party, was assassinated for the same reason that given for the overthrow of Arbenz of Guatemala seven years later. The Liberal Party was one of two fascist parties of the oligarchy, along with the Conservative Party. See below for more on them.

The Liberal Party was anything but. Yet Gaitán was an interesting figure, part of a socialist movement in the party who advocated very popular candidate who promised major changes in Colombian society a battle against social, political, and economic inequality. He was also a feminist who advocated the uplift of the status of Colombian woman in society. In addition, he broached the subject of land reform, a hot button issue in Colombia.

In fact, as in so many other places in Latin America such as Guatemala, Nicaragua, and El Salvador, the endless Leftist guerrilla war against the government is more of a fight over land than anything else. To this day, the Colombian oligarchy has refused to do a land reform, in part because this is where most of their money comes from.

Even Venezuela has had only partial success at a land reform, as it has proven too difficult to break up the big estates or latifundias. Instead, since much of the land lies idle and fallow, peasants have conducted land invasions of fallowed land in the latifundias, which has resulted in a lot of conflict.

Death squads funded by the latifundia oligarchs have murdered over 150 peasant leaders since Chavez came in over the last 20 years. Parts of the Chavista Movement have been aligned with the rural rich for whatever reason, and they have been involved in repressing these peasant movements also.

He was murdered by the Colombian oligarchy or ruling class, which has stayed in power by mass murder for 75 years now. They were even massacring people earlier, as there was a mass slaughter of striking workers at banana plantations in the northwest in a place called La Magdalena in 1928.

Even this early, the US was waging a Cold War against the USSR. The US became very alarmed by the strike, as the plantations were owned by the US United Fruit Company. United Fruit and the US government described the strikers as subversives and Communists. The US threatened to invade if the strike was not put down by the Colombian government.

Under orders from United Fruit, the Colombian military attacked the workers. Many striking workers were killed. The event was memorialized by Gabriel Garcia Marquez in his famous novel 100 Years of Solitude. The event was a watershed in Colombian politics, as an actual Colombian Left was formed around this time.

Gaitan was an excellent speaker and his rallies drew large crowds of union members and poor people. He was characterized as a demagogue, like Juan Peron, who was already rising to power in Argentina. He was also a budding nationalist. He was criticized by the Conservative Party, the right wing of the Liberal Party, and even the Communist Party, which regarded him as a competitor for the interests of the workers.

In 1933, he split with the Liberal Party and formed the Unión Nacional Izquierdista Revolucionaria (National Leftist Revolutionary Union). In 1946, he proposed a Gaitanista Program. It advocated many things:

Development agencies for the advancement of the social, political, and economic advancement of peasants in the countryside. Policies to redistribute wealth in Colombia. Nationalization of public services, a progressive income tax, and the development of a national economy. A land reform and new pro-labor laws.

In terms of foreign policy, it advocated an economic union of Latin American countries so they could serve the interests of their people instead of that of the oligarchies and foreign carpetbagging corporations. His project could be best described as anti-plutocratic and anti-imperialist.

He was assassinated in 1948 by a “lone gunman,” Juan Roa Sierra, along the lines of Lee Harvey Oswald. Two ex-CIA agents have confessed that it was really the CIA that was behind the operation. The assassin took orders from two named CIA agents and the assassination plan was called Operation Pantomime.

This was probably one of the first of countless assassinations of liberal and leftwing figures the world over by the CIA undertaken as part of the Cold War. Sierra visited Gaitan in his office in  the morning and at 1 PM, he shot Gaitan dead.

An enraged mob then set upon Sierra, who was protected by an Army colonel. He was chased to a store where  he holed up. The mob smashed into the store and dragged him outside. He was beaten and stabbed so many times that his corpse was unrecognizable.

At the time of his assassination, a meeting of the Pan-American Conference led by US Secretary of State George Marshall. At this meeting, all members of the group agreed that fighting Communism was their number one concern.

The despicable Organization of American States or OAS, a fake organization of Latin American countries that is actually run by the US and serves to promote the interests of the US and its neo-colonies in Latin America.

At the same time, the Latin American Youth Congress was taking place. It been organized by Fidel Castro of Cuba and was funded by Juan Peron of Argentina. A young Gabriel Garcia Marquez was a law student at the time and was eating lunch at the time  Gaitan was killed. He rushed to the scene and arrived just in time to see Sierra lynched by the mob. He memorialized the event in his book, Living to Tell the Tale.

It is possible that Gaitan, like Oswald and Sirhan Sirhan and James Earl Ray, was a patsy for an assassination carried out by the US Deep State in the case of the former and by the FBI itself in the case of Ray.

Gaitan suffered from schizophrenia, could not fire a gun properly, the gun in his hand was not capable of firing accurately, and he was standing quite a distance away from Gaitan while the murder occurred at a short distance. Further, Sierra was not seen anywhere near the assassination. The first time  he was spotted, he was in between two police officers.

The Colombian government quickly blamed the USSR and the Colombian Communist Party for the murder. They also tied in the young Fidel Castro with the plot. This version seems very unlikely.

Notice that this CIA assassination took place under “liberal Democrat” Harry Truman.

The murder of this candidate was followed by a wild  riot known as the Bogotazo. Many of the rioters were armed and the riots left much of downtown Bogota in ruins. The riots left 1,800 people dead. This was part of a larger reign of violence in the countryside which had started in 1930. By 1948, Bogota was full of peasants fleeing the violence in the countryside.

The Bogotazo led eventually to La Violencia, a truly crazy 10 year period from 1954-1964 in which Liberals and Conservatives, which ideologically are both simply fascist parties, with the Liberals masquerading as social democrats to the extent that they are even members of the Socialist International, massacred each other in huge numbers for no particular reason at all.

The Liberals and Conservatives typically trade off running the country. Although they hated each other to the point of slaughtering hundreds of thousands of each other, the odd thing is that despite their names, ideologically and in governance, there is little difference between. They are both far rightwing parties of the oligarchy.

The armed Left in the form of the ELN, which was created in 1964, theorizes that La Violencia was simply a way for the elite to slaughter the politically active working class.

After La Violencia ended in 1964, a small group of people tired of being massacred settled in some property in West-Central Colombia and declared themselves a semi-autonomous republic. They were also heavily armed. They said that and armed themselves mostly to keep from being massacred. And they did set it up as a “Communist republic” but it was only a small patch of land of no particular consequence and the group’s numbers never numbered greater than 200.

They named this place Marquetalia. Manuel “Sure Shot” Marulanda, the leader of the FARC for the next 40 years, was one of the founders of this commune. The Colombian government became very alarmed that 200 people had called themselves Communists and settled some lands that they freaked out and called for Uncle Sam to come help.

This was under the “liberal Democrat” Johnson Administration. The US also became very alarmed and we sent several generals and a troop of Green Berets down there.

At this time, the Green Berets were advising the Guatemalan government in putting down a Left insurgency that began there in 1960. They put it down via massacres of the civilian population. There’s nothing noble about the Green Berets. They’re simply the US government version of a Latin American death squad.

Anyway, a significant army detachment was mobilized and Marquetalia was attacked with US advisors by their side. There are suggestions that the US and Colombia even used chemical weapons against the commune.

The Marquetalians fought back but were defeated, suffering many casualties. The survivors retreated into the mountains of Colombia. These are really mountain jungles as the mountains are covered in a jungle-like near-rainforest and it’s impossible to find anyone or anything in there.

There they decided that all peaceful attempts at change, including setting up a semi-autonomous commune, were impossible, so they could either sit in the villages and wait for the government to come murder them or they could take up arms so they could at least fight back when the army and death squads came.

The group was called the FARC (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia), and they are still active to this day, 56 years later. At one time around 2000, they controlled ~5

The ELN (National Liberation Army) was formed at the same time, in 1964, in Eastern Colombia under obscure circumstances that I’m not aware of.

The original philosophy was Liberation Theology and their leader was Camilo Torres, the original “priest with a machine gun.” Liberation theology can be thought of as “Jesus with a machine gun” and in fact there are murals in Latin America showing exactly this. The idea is that Jesus supported “the preferential option for the poor” and that even armed struggle to achieve this goal was not only valid but very Christian.

One of the original theorists was an educator named Paulo Friere in Brazil who published a famous book, Pedagogy of the Oppressed – also published in the same year that the ELN and the FARC were formed in 1964 -along these lines, advocating a liberation theology component to be the focus of the curriculum in Latin America. Theologian Gustavo Gutierrez could be considered the father of Liberation Theology. He wrote a book called The Theology of Liberation around this same time.

To this day, although the ELN are Leftists, they are still officially a Christian organization and they have many supporters among the Catholic clergy in Colombia, as does the officially atheist FARC.

Alt Left: Why the World Bank and IMF Push Structural Adjustment on Countries That Request Loans from Them

The World Bank and the IMF (both of which are basically run by the US) forced the Third World countries that requested loans to gut and privatize their public sectors in order to get the loans. The stated reason was to lower the state’s expenditures so they would have more money to pay their loans back.

But it often came with a lot of other demands like opening up the country to foreign investment (rape, rob, and ruin exploitation) cutting the wages of workers, attacking labor unions and gutting labor protection law, lowering or eliminating the minimum wage, etc. It’s hard to see how any of these things enables the state to pay their loans back easier, especially as the attack on the incomes of the 8

I’d say the World Bank and the IMF have an ulterior motive, the same as the US – to promote neoliberalism, if need be by force, the world over because the neoliberal model is what’s best for the US oligarchy and the corporations.

Alt Left: People Wonder Why I Am a Socialist

Alt Left: America Is Now an Exact Replica of a Latin American Rightwing Authoritarian State

The US is now a Latin American country. This is the perfect model of a Latin American extreme rightwing regime. The only thing missing is the death squads. I’m sure they’ll be coming along soon enough now.

Otherwise it’s a complete replication, all the way down to a very White rightwing ruling class who lord it over the browner proles.

Corrupt/stolen elections? Check.

Corrupt judiciary? Check.

Culture of lies? Check.

Culture of extreme militarism? Check.

Culture of violent anti-Communist fanaticism? Check.

Both an armed Left (leftwing guerrillas = antifa) and right (death squads/brownshirts/guarimbas = Proud Boys) engaging in violence against each other? Check.

Bread and circuses in the ruling class controlled media? Check.

Distracting the workers with fake divisive issues like abortion? Check.

Threats of rightwing coups, military or otherwise? Check.

A rightwing that literally believes that the Left has no right to rule? Check.

Frequent street violence and rioting? Check.

Sense of living in an alternate reality of nothing but lies? Check.

State rule by big capitalists? Check.

Increasingly militant, radical, and even armed Left? Check.

Increasingly radical and even militant educational sector, especially at the university level? Check.

Fake leftwing parties that only mask the rightwing authoritarian state = Democrats? Check.

Politicized, very rightwing military? Check.

Increasingly incendiary political discourse on both sides? Check.

Economic war waged against left governments in order to destroy the economy? Check.

Extreme and irrational conspiracy mindset on the part of the Right? Check.

Extreme rightwing that pretends to be populist and pro-worker in order to get elected? Check.

Frequent death threats against politicians? Check.

Belligerent, pro-imperialist foreign policy? Check.

Police/surveillance state? Check.

Absence of legal leftwing newspapers, newsmagazines, TV/radio stations? Check.

Alt Left: No, China Is Not Engaging In Imperialism or Colonialism in China

It’s not doing either. Vijay Prashad here tells us what imperialism and colonialism are and lays out how China, a Communist country, is of course neither because imperialism and colonialism both violate Communist principles. In addition, much of the investment is from Chinese state firms or public enterprises and these firms by their nature do not exploit people or plunder resources as they do not operate on an extreme profit motive.

Yes, they like to make money but instead of the money going into the owners’ and shareholders’ pockets, it goes into government coffers, where it is then given back to the people in various ways. A firm with that sort of orientation is not going to be rapaciously profit above all else oriented. Few state enterprises are. This nonsense is all just Western propaganda against China. China has done more for Africa than the West ever did. All we ever did is exploit Africans and plunder their resources.

China, being Communist, operates on the basis of solidarity, not imperialism. And it’s orientation is win-win. The orientation of Western capitalists is zero sum game. As much as possible for me (profits) and as little as possible for you (cuts into profits hence minimized. Western imperialism, by its very nature, is I win – you lose. It can’t be any other way. That’s the air that capitalism breathes.

As I noted, China is not without self-interest and they want something out of all of these operations in Africa. And public firms do operate on a modified profit motive. I like this system better than the “profits uber alles” (maximize profits) motivations of capitalist corporations.

Profits aren’t everything. Many nonprofit enterprises do just fine. They hire lots of workers, pay them well, and stay above water. Cooperatives operate on a profit basis, but the cooperative mode of development is not a capitalist mode because there is no exploitation. All profits go back to the firm and management decides how much to plow back into the firm. Whatever is left over goes into the pockets of the workers.

There has to be a disinterested management layer above the workers because when you leave these decisions to workers as was done in Yugoslavia, they failed to reinvest enough in the firms and instead opted to put much of that money into their pockets. Predictably, as reinvestment was not kept up, the firms tended to deteriorate and collapse.

This can be avoided as in the Mondragon Cooperatives in the Basque Country in Spain by having the workers hire and fire disinterested management. Furthermore, decisions regarding how much to reinvest and how much to dole out in salaries are made at the level of huge community-wide banks. These banks are not stuffing their pockets with the profits of these firms, hence they are able to rationally allocate resources to reinvestment or profits as required. There’s no self-interest on their part.

Nevertheless, the Mondragon cooperatives have to compete with bottom line uber alles capitalist firms so they too are subjected to the laws of capitalism – successfully compete with the competition or go under. The result is that this form of development ends up being less utopian than it could be.

Instead, China is engaging in commerce, or in a word, capitalism. Furthermore, Chinese loans are given to Africa on very favorable terms and many loans are out and out forgiven. China is building an incredible amount of infrastructure in Africa. Nor is China only hiring Chinese and not hiring locals. In fact, 9

Alt Left: Sadism and Creativity in Society Are Related to Economic and Societal Structure

Another interesting post from commenter Brian. He ties societal sadism and Social Darwinism into economic changes and ties societal creativity into societal structure, in particular its degree of flexibility.

I completely agree that there is a sadistic tendency in people that is expressed toward those deemed socially inferior. I’ve seen it and, having been in foster homes for a time growing up, experienced it.

I’ve often wondered at what seems to be a mean-spiritedness of the culture in general during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and if this mean-spirited character was linked to industrialization and to the growth of severe inequalities in society, both class and race based.

Those inequalities existed before the industrial revolution, but industrialization marked a new level of complexity in social organization, and the rise of many “new men” as elites. In the transformation of a society toward a new economic system and set of social relations, old inequalities are exacerbated, and the new elites who have risen to the top seem eager to shore up their position by waging a reactionary crackdown on dissent and calls to moderate their avarice.

The Social Darwinist, let-the-undeserving-poor-rot, bootstrap mentality of the upper class was encouraged in the general population by those who had risen to the top as a way to justify their behavior, and it had the effect of drawing out the worst tendencies in human nature in society at large. It was a bully’s ideology and encouraged ordinary people to let out their inner sadism, which ordinarily – without authoritative encouragement – would have been more repressed.

This is how you get gleeful lynchings, the hanging of elephants from a giant chain, the proliferation of freak shows where people can satisfy their inner monster by laughing at folks with severe genetic deformities.

I wonder if this witches’ brew of inhumanity cooked up by the propagandists of the new robber baron class was a factor precipitating World War I. Indeed the displacements of industrialization along with repression of the working class by disconnected and haughty elites and the whole toxic culture this gave rise to poisoned Europe just as badly as it had the United States.

The periods of the cruelest treatment of ordinary people tend to coincide with episodes of great economic expansion, the rise of new men and new families to positions nearer the top of society, and the complexification of society in general.

Another example is a century earlier in Britain, around the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. This was the very beginning of the industrial revolution – or the first industrial revolution, as opposed to the second which I was referring to above – and began with the Enclosure Acts that forced peasants off the common lands so they could become the new urban class of industrial laborers.

During this time the Bloody Code reached its bloodiest extreme and more than two hundred crimes could be punished by death, even as a number of minors were executed for rather petty crimes. These were the classic Dickensian times, and they are marked by great new opportunities for moneymaking that attracted a class of people willing to subject other humans to appalling degradations for their own profit.

When we think of the medieval period, we often think of brutal tortures. But in fact such tortures, while they occurred in the medieval period, were used far more extensively in the Renaissance and early modern times than in the medieval period as was the death penalty in general.

Once again, what we find at that time is a transformation in the socioeconomic system, specifically moving away from feudalism in Western Europe and the rise of a new middle merchant class across much of Europe, starting in Italy. Perhaps the use of such punishments is meant to break the spirits of those who suffer most during such transitional periods so they are less of a threat to the elites, especially the new and very insecure/paranoid elites.

I suspect that what we see today, with the mean-spirited attitude of the neoliberal age – the expansions of the prison system going back to the 70s and 80s (the very dawn of the neoliberal age) and the electronics and digital boom – is another such period of social complexification, economic transformation, dispossession of whole sections of society and even of regions in general like the rust belt, and the rise of many new men (and women now) into the ranks of the ruling class.

For around forty years I’ve been seeing among the upper middle classes and above is an increase in callousness, selfishness towards and even dehumanization of various groups of people, from Blacks to working class (now often poor) Whites and anyone who isn’t at least upper middle class.

To address the idea that such periods help to breed out criminal genes from a population, I do not doubt this is true. These phases of societal transformation seem to yield a more docile population on the other end of them. But I think this process will eventually eliminate the spark of genius in our population and in the West in general.

It largely has eliminated this spark already. At least in the realm of the social sciences of fundamental thought like philosophy, modern European philosophy having seen its best days some two to three centuries ago. Other fields that are downstream of basic thought have been able to flourish since then, but they will stagnate, and some are stagnating already.

Going back to civilizational and race theory, the difference between White civilization and Asian seems to be that White civilization has been far more creative for centuries now, despite Asians having higher average IQ’s. The spark of genius requires a high IQ but also creativity and originality, which mostly comes from people who are off-kilter and don’t easily fit into a very conventional, static society that looks down on new ideas or unusual behavior.

You, Robert, have mentioned before that many very intelligent and interesting people work in odd jobs and have little to show for their talents. I think such people have struggled in any society, but they struggle more as society becomes more closed-minded and starts distrusting anyone who isn’t stable, conventional, and predictable; in other words, someone who fits ready social expectations.

A lot of academics are very bright, but few have that special spark of brilliance in them, and if anything, having that is a detriment for someone in academia today.

As our society stiffens we will likely become less creative, whereas in the past few centuries, we’ve seemed to be able to accept originality even if many geniuses are not exactly paragons of stability. I am not saying that Asians are without creativity or the spark of genius, just that as their populations became more controlled and regimented, they exhibited fewer instances of real inspiration.

We are moving towards greater control and the consequent heavy formalization of life which sucks the naturalness out of life. We should probably expect relative cultural stagnation, at least compared to what we’ve been experiencing for centuries in the West.

The problem with African peoples and societies is an excess of naturalness or primal behavior, which, while it is energetic and creative, lacks the mental and social channels to develop it.

Higher intelligence on the other hand takes that same primal energy the Africans have in excess and focus that energy into socially accepted interests and goals. The problem with Asian societies is there is a serious lack of primal behavior, though I suspect some genetic potential for creativity remains in their populations and could be freed up if they loosened up a bit.

As to our current period of neoliberalism in the West, I think whatever good it did in juicing the development of the new electronic and digital economy is already finished and have been since probably 2008. At this point neoliberalism’s effects on society are very detrimental and could even touch off serious convulsions across Western society if it isn’t moderated.

Continuing on this path can only benefit a small handful of elites and only if they are able to maintain control. But they are gamblers, so they will try, and they seem unlikely to concede much to the population for the sake of reconciliation.

Alt Left: The Elaine, Arkansas Massacre of October 1919

Here.

This is how White people treated Blacks under Jim Crow. And this was in 1919. God knows how Blacks were treated from 1865-1900. I haven’t heard a lot of reports. There are some fascinating recordings from former slaves recorded during the Depression by a make-work New Deal program during the Depression. They might have a word or two about it. You can’t understand  their Black dialect at all. I don’t even think it’s AAVE. I think it’s just a really strong Black Southern accent. All those videos need subtitles all the way.

Those Whites out and  out murdered in cold blood 200 and  possibly up to 800 Black men. For no Goddamned reason at all other than the Blacks forming a labor union to protest against debt peonage, which is otherwise known as semi-feudalism or possibly a form of out and out feudalism. Debt peonage continues to this day in places like Pakistan, the Philippines, and possibly other places. It’s a scam. Once you go into debt you can never get out no matter how hard you try.

No way were all those Black men killed to keep a bunch of niggers from going on a ghetto crime spree and victimizing all us Whites,  so we had to set an example and murder hundreds of them to prevent the ghetto street crime wave.  Nonsense. This was sheer enforcement of – and I really hate this phrase – White supremacy. It term is grossly abused by SJW idiots, but it definitely applies to some Whites at some periods.  There was also a mass murdering  fascist anti-labor motive going on too.

Screw this bullshit. I’m never going to support this sick mass murdering supremacist crap. Get out of here with that.

The Whites started some crazy rumor based on the fear of a Black uprising, except no Black uprising was planned. This a typical scenario for most wartime and political mass murders and genocides. The genociders and killers always project away their mass murdering by framing it as “They (the victims of the genocide) were going to kill us (the genociders) all!” It’s hard to get people to go massacre lots of other humans out of sheer cruelty.

But if it’s a “fight to the death, somebody’s going to die, and it’s them or you, I say it’s going to be you.” I have literally been in situations were 3-4 men were trying to kill my friend and I. I escaped in a vehicle but one of them attacked the vehicle from the front as we were escaping so I turned the wheel into him and hit him with the car. I was trying to kill the motherfucker. Hey, he was trying to kill me.

  1. One or more people are trying to kill you.
  2. You think real fast. You don’t have time to think about anything. All you think is, “This guy is trying to kill me, what do I do?”
  3. Your brain answers, “I’m going to kill this sonofabitch before he kills me.” You don’t think, “Whoa I might go to jail for homicide” or review law statutes or any of that. You don’t have time and it’s a dumb thing to do. It’s just kill or be killed, real simple. Given a choice between killing them and them killing me, I don’t know about you guys, but I pick killing them.
  4. Then you do it. You try to kill the guy, knock him out, or knock him down and hurt him so badly that he can’t get up to chase you.
  5. You try to kill him, and then you escape. As fast as you can.

 

 

Alt Left: Liberal California? Californians Voted Rightwing on Eight out of 12 Propositions on the Ballot

Why people keep saying California is liberal is beyond me. My city is 8

Let’s look at the ballot propositions. Either Californians are dumb and get swayed by the big money and their fake lying campaigns on the propositions or they’re just not that liberal. Because the vote wasn’t very liberal.

Californians Voted Rightwing on Eight out of 12 Initiatives

Proposition 15: A fake privacy law bolstering law written by criminals like Reddit, Facebook, Twitter, and the rest of the Silicon Valley crooks that actually weakened privacy laws passed! “Liberal” Californians sided with crooked tech billionaire enemies of the people to screw over consumers!

Proposition 16: Bring back affirmative action in employment failed badly. I like that result, but face it, it’s rightwing. So California “liberals” supported an anti-affirmative action proposition.

Proposition 18: Allowing 17 year olds to vote in primaries if they will be 18 in the general in the fall (Big deal!) failed. That’s a very rightwing vote. California “liberals” voted rightwing again.

Proposition 21: Putting in some common sense rent controls in this insanely overpriced housing market failed again. It always fails! Some liberal state! The Legislature won’t pass it either because all the “liberal Democrats” in there are bought off by extremely wealthy landlords. Some liberals!

Proposition 22: Reclassifying gig workers are contractors so their crooked billionaire employers can keep ripping them off and paying them $5/hour, which is what Lyft and Uber pay their drivers (!) passed! “Liberal” Californians voted for big business crooked bosses and ripped off poor workers!

Proposition 23: Regulating the criminal dog capitalists who run crooked dialysis facilities preying on poor workers suffering kidney failure terribly! They’re not regulated at all right now and that’s terrible for sick workers. California “liberals” voted to keep the dialysis crooks unregulated!

Proposition 25: Changing the cash bail system which keeps workers accused of crimes in California’s”liberal” jails that are as terrible as a Hieronymus Bosch painting before they have even been convicted of a thing, sometimes for years, to let non-dangerous people who haven’t even been convicted of a thing out of jail until they go on trial failed! “Liberal” Californians voted to keep poor workers in California’s Dantesque jails just because they’re not rich enough to afford bail!

Californians Voted Liberal on Four Initiatives

Proposition 14: Funding stem cell research barely passed.

Proposition 17: Restore voting rights for felons on parole passed.

Proposition 20: Increasing penalties for some crimes failed.

Proposition 21: The vote to make some large property owners pay the going rate for their property taxes barely passed. The only “homeowners” it applied to had three or more houses! If you own 3+ houses, you’re a “homeowner?” Get out.

There were 12 ballot initiatives. “Liberal” Californians voted rightwing on eight of those 12 initiatives and voted left on only three of the 12, and two of those barely passed with the skin of their teeth!

California “liberals” are not even all that liberal. They’re more like liberal Republicans. The only way they are left is Fake Left which means SJW Left, which isn’t even left at all. It’s just a bunch of bourgeois “fake rights,” most of which attack Whites and men and vastly privilege sexual degenerates and mentally ill freaks who think they’re the opposite sex against people who are normal sexually and do not have a psychosis about their genitals.

Anyone who thinks that is “left” is insane. Remember the Communist countries of the 20th Century? Remember how socially conservative they all were?

Homosexuality was often illegal. Castro put gays in prison.

Trannies would be sent to an asylum where they belong.

Men were free to be men and women to be women.

No Communist country on the face of the Earth was anti-White. In fact, the USSR and the East Bloc were some of the most pro-White countries the world has ever seen.

Porn and gross, open sexual degeneracy and perversion were banned.

That’s the Real Left. The Real Left is left on economics but fairly conservative on the BS social issues..

Alt Left: And People Keep Incredulously Wondering Why I’m a Socialist and Why I Hate Rightwing and Libertarian Economics

Here.

When I say socialism, I’m not necessarily talking about the state running the whole economy. We have plenty of good evidence of the limitations of that model.

Read in that article where it says that $2.5 trillion has been stolen from the bottom 9

That’s all we “evil socialists” and “evil Leftists” want. We want you, the bottom 9

What in the Hell is wrong with that?

Why On Earth Are You Supporting Neoliberalism?

This is what rightwing economics is. Rightwing economics says take $2.5 trillion from the bottom 9

It’s for the top 1

What is the economics that the World Bank and the IMF forces on every nation in the South? Neoliberalism, the theft of money from the bottom 9

What is the economics of every social democracy in Europe? In terms of their  foreign policy, it’s the maintenance of neoliberalism, which is the theft of income of the bottom 9

A Bigoted Socialist Beats a Woke Neoliberal Any Day of the Week

No wonder everyone’s given up on them in favor of the populist Right. At least the populist Right speaks to the concerns of the ordinary people, the workers. And the populist Right in Europe is very socialist. The party of Marie Le Pen is one of the most socialist parties in France. They’re far more socialist than the fake socialist Social Democrats.

I don’t particularly care if they’re not nice to immigrants, Muslims, and Arabs. So what? I’d rather have racist socialists who support the workers than of antiracist neoliberals. I can’t eat a BLM flag. I can’t pay my rent with a critical race theory lecture. I can’t fix my car by tearing down a stupid statue. Throwing shit at cops for no good reason won’t help me pay my bills. SJWism offers me, a straight White man, just about nothing at all, other than designating me as Enemy #1.

The Democratic Party: The Worst of the Right Combined with the Worst of the Left

There’s an ideology pushed by woke SJW neoliberal entities in the form of individuals like (((Soros))) and (((Bloomberg))) and corporations like the Tech Giants. Woke SJWism + neoliberalism is literally the worst of the Right combined with the worst of the Left. What do you get when you combined the worst of the Left with the worst of the Right? The Democratic Party! The party of Woke SJW Corporate Neoliberal Democrats.

Alt Left: If They Can Get You Asking the Wrong Questions, They Don’t Have to Worry about the Answers

Ever notice all these corporations getting on board the Cultural Left stuff? There are several reasons for this.

  1. First is that they can use fake progressivism (the Cultural Left) to gain progressive credentials and woke points, both great for public relations.
  2. While they are at it, they get to divide the workers into squabbling factions who are too busy fighting each other to fight their class enemies.
  3. And of course it is a grand diversion. Look over there! Let’s talk about transsexual bathhouses for all ages. Let’s not talk about economics or foreign policy. This is known as changing the subject to avoid talking about unpleasant subjects.
  4. And last but not least, this is a form of “progressivism” that doesn’t cost them a nickel!

First there was greenwashing, fake environmentalism by corporations, now there is wokewashing, fake progressivism by corporations. Same animal, different subspecies. In this way, corporations can “launder” their “illegal” moral failings into “legal” woke points.

It’s also a classic diversion tactic: get people talking about something else. Shell says let’s not talk about Ben Saro-Wiwa, murdered under our watchful eyes. Let’s talk about our support for the woke 1619 Project instead!

The theme here is basic to power politics, and straight out of Parables for Paranoids (h.t. Tom P.): If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don’t have to worry about the answers.

Alt Left: Repost: “Why Growing Up in India Makes You a Nasty, Cruel, Desensitzed Faux-nationalistic Gold-digger,” by Novusipsum

An older article that has aged quite well. It’s as true today and the day it was printed fully eight years ago. Not even one thing has changed even one bit. I hate to talk like this but I really think that India is hopeless. I hope I’m wrong but I gave up on this Dystopia of Damnation some time ago.

This is a great piece by an Indian blogger that he left on my blog as a comment. The original is here. It’s very good, and it’s actually quite well written. He takes on his country in a way that is not often seen in Indian writers.

I particularly enjoyed the bit about Kashmir because it rings so true. Almost every Indian I know goes nuts when I mention Kashmir. They raise their voice and start pounding on the table as their faces gets red. They tell me that the problem is 10

However, when I tell them that most Kashmiris hate India and that many Kashmiris have taken up arms against India, they insist that I am wrong. Most every Indian I met was exactly like this. They are like drones, utterly indoctrinated by some Borg. They are brainwashed on this subject as bad as a North Korean.

Most of these folks are what you might call middle class or upper middle class educated people. A number of them had university degrees and were quite intelligent. One man used to be a university professor.

Why Growing Up in India Makes You a Nasty, Cruel, Desensitized, Faux-nationalistic Gold-digger

1. School

While people remark on shortage of functional schools in India, I say the kids who don’t go to school have it good. The national curriculum is odious and objectionable, seeing as it is designed for kids who bow down before all authority and the various empty suits regardless of whether they make any sense at all. You cannot contest your teacher. At all. Ever. Such behavior is simply unacceptable. Put another way, the system is a hundred percent authoritarian.

School kills all your creativity. Creativity, especially of the extroverted kind, is not encouraged. There are tried and tested methods to break the will of those who are too free. The system is based on rote-memorization. You must bend your mind a certain way to do that: it means all the rules are already laid out and decided for you. You do not need to think. Your brain must function in a certain way. Any challenge to the established order will make you a pariah.

Kids learn how to secretly and openly hate each other over the grades they are given for breaking their own will and doing pointless mind-numbing work that will be of no use to them at any point in their later life. The focus is on merit – on who is better at following rules. No wonder India has not produced a single India-based world-class scientist, technician, engineer. Science, technology, and engineering after all,re fields where your ability to think is highly valuable.

Barack Obama does not need to worry about Indian kids out-smarting American kids. If they do, it will be by doing hours of grinding and rioting, and when they do, the rest of the world need to start worrying.

This system is evil!

2. Parents, Teachers, Peers

All these people are the product of evil Indian schools and other cramming establishments and will force you to succeed in a way that they deem appropriate. You must resist this but you can’t. They are everywhere.

Your peers will pressure you to bow down, submit, and ‘teach you the value of money’. In other words, how to be a vicious gold-digger. Money is nice but being a nasty, evil, little scummy gold-digger is a degeneration of your soul that even Indian’s ascetic scat-munchers do not attain.

Indian people are therefore nasty and selfish to the extreme. It is of no surprise, seeing their upbringing and their environment.

3. The environment

Your average Indian city, town, village is a primitive clusterfuck without running water or proper sewage disposal. Casteism is rampant; stupid people need little motivation to be proud of what is after all a genetic accident. They think their bloodline is ‘pure’ and grind the ‘lower’ caste people down into the dirt. Respect for human life and dignity in India has to be the lowest in human civilization.

The streets are narrow and dirty, usually overflowing with broken sewage and water lines (which frequently mix), and the garbage the average Indian household does not feel ashamed of throwing on the streets. Any kind of social grace is completely absent, people shove and push each other, vehicles honk incessantly and without reason, and the local temple’s loudspeakers blare out shitty religious hymns.

Living and growing up here, you will learn little by little to let go of your humanity. You will get desensitized to the beggars and lepers in the street: emancipated, poor and trodden down. You will see old men and women driven out of their homes by their sons, eyes pleading for mercy and trying to make sense of the plethora of people around them who ignore their plight and pass right by.

Your average Indian will not even notice the squalor on the street or the helpless human beings on the street. He will simply accept these things as a part of life, which is why things never improve. He is the selfish product of a callous, heartless, and evil system. He will never change, and western democracies should not allow such people into their homelands. Not even for a ‘visit’.

4. The Media

Catering to a large middle class that pretends to be educated, some people have taken the initiative to bring them these people latest news of the world. These people are funded by rich business interests with their own agenda as well as Hindu nationalists. They make the usual salutary noises about bad governance and bloated bureaucracy, things that are so odious that it even permeates the thick bourgeois skull. This is why the middle class types buy newspapers and watch news—they can relate to it.

But the most vicious thing the media does is to fill the average Indian with a sense of pride and nationalism, something that certainly goes against all basic logic and sanity. What people would be proud of a country like this? Only brain-washed, selfish jerks that the education system produces and the media maintains.

The average Indian is full to the brim with national pride that he has no logical reason to feel. His ideas on casteism and the workings of the society are reinforced by editors of the national dailies and the news channels.

His stance on Kashmir, a truly beautiful place inhabited by beautiful people, has been drilled into him incessantly. The parable of Pakistan exporting its terrorists (not that it doesn’t – and it turns out the Americans knew about it all along) to India and that the Kashmiris love India (Huh?) has been in print for thirty years now. Of course, India is always the poor, helpless victim.

5. College

Most people in India never even graduate from their high schools, let alone college. And I say good for them. Because the system feels the need to grind out all kind of potential competition it may get from any future thinkers.

If school doesn’t manage to turn you into a humanoid selfish fuck, your college certainly will. India’s unemployment problem is vast. Of the colleges that ‘guarantee’ any jobs such as professional degree mills like IIT, NIT, AIIM, etc., it is interesting to note that only Indians think these places are good. An independent peer review ranked the ‘best’ IIT at around 350th at world level. Yet the middle-class scramble for securing a seat there so intense it simply has to be seen to be believed.

Millions (you heard that right, millions) of middle-class Indians right now are rioting, grinding, and chewing equations, formulas, and facts for entrance exams that maybe a hundred of them really understand. These people aspire to be ‘engineers’ and ‘doctors’.

The workload is so immense that you can’t find time at age 16 and 17 to ogle girls (or boys), party, learn how to drink beer without making a face, or hang out with your friends. But what am I saying? Hell, most Indian people don’t find time to do that ever in their lives anyway.

College itself is a turdfest -professors with massive egos, an anal-retentive and callous administration, and overall awkward social interaction between the sexes. Girls hanging out with boys are labeled ‘hookers’ and ‘sluts’. Massive sexual repression is the hallmark of this point in your life, and given the pressure to rote more equations and secure a job, you’d be lucky escaping the place without a drug habit or a drinking problem.

Is there anything good about India at all? With fertile plains to the north, large iron ore deposits to the south, the biggest aluminum stores in the world and 3

The only thing wrong with India is Indians.

Alt Left: How We Got Here: The Origins of Identity Politics and the Modern Cultural Left

There is a ready explanation for all this nonsense.

First is the tendency of Identity Politics to become more radicalized with time.

There has long been an argument on the Left against this BS. Sanders actually came out of that tradition.

The US White Left married with the radical Blacks. After they did that they started heading down this nutty race train track along with all the other IdPol madness.

The entire Left moved away from economics and foreign policy to go down this cultural road instead. Perhaps 1989 was a trigger. The Eastern Bloc collapsed and the US Left was in disarray and didn’t know what to think or even believe. The dictatorship of he proletariat, democratic centralism, it was all up in the air now. Further, it seemed the Communist economics in the East Bloc had not kept pace with socialist social democracy economics on the rest of Europe. A lot of the US Left packed it in on economics and started to focus on cultural BS instead.

The Left now is nothing but pure IdPol. Ever see BLM or Antifa morons say one word about US foreign policy and US imperialism? Course not. Ever hear them say one word about neoliberal economics? Course not. That’s what drives me up the wall. Here is a movement ripe for radicalizing against the US ruling class program of neoliberalism at home and invite the world – invade the word neoconservatism abroad. Let’s call this combined package Neoliberalism-Neoconservatism. That’s a rightwing project any way you slice it.

But at the same time, the ruling class went full left on culture. Hence the Libertarian-type fiscal conservative-social liberal of the upper middle class in the last 40 years. Neoliberalism-Neoconservatism plus the Cultural Left. What a project! It’s literally the worst of the Left combined with the worst of the Right! And the upper middle class is proud of this nightmare ideology. Which is one more reason that this class, which always sides with the ruling class against the workers, is no good.

Now that the Left bailed on anti-imperialism and left economics in favor of a pure Cultural Left, what are they doing with this new ideology? Why, they are rioting about nothing at all or at worst for an outright lie. Brilliant!

But if we get police reform out of these riots, it would be good. It’s an ill wind that blows no good.

Thing is the corporations, foundations, media, etc. and both political parties are down with this Neoliberalism-Neoconservatism project because they’re businessmen and rich people, and Neoliberalism-Neoconservatism is good for them for reasons I won’t go into here but perhaps you can guess at.

This Neoliberalism-Neoconservatism project is how the rich, the corporations, and the U.S. ruling class make all their money. So they oppose Left efforts against Neoliberalism-Neoconservatism such as the 60’s revolutions with all-out ferocity. If such a movement arises, they will sic their media attack dogs on it, smash it to bits, and brainwash the sheep via their media monopoly to go along with this destruction.

The thing is that this is a perfectly safe progressive project. It doesn’t cost them one nickel, and they get groovy hip woke points for jumping on the bandwagon.

How much of the US ruling class are going to lose out on an anti-White project?

How many of them will be replaced by an unqualified Black via affirmative action?

How many of them will be replaced by an illegal alien on their jobs?

Does the US ruling class have to live with the consequences of Black crime and civilizational collapse? Course not. They don’t have to deal with the downside of this crazy movement so they can support it all they want. See?

Also, the US ruling class has been socially liberal and Neoliberal-Neoconservative for a long time now.

The Left won the Culture War.

But so what?

We lost the Economics and Foreign Policy (US imperialism) War. They even defeated the Vietnam War Syndrome, a bad thing because it posed a severe threat to US imperialism.

So what did we win?

Our women have become insane, manhating harridans. If you ask a woman for a date now, it’s sexual harassment and you can be fired. We overthrew Patriarchy but replaced it with something worse – Matriarchy or Female Rule (Feminist Rule) – with all the manhating, war on male sexuality, and horrific puritanism that always goes along with it.

The latter is most painful to me as a 60’s child. One of the revolutions was the Sexual Revolution. Our attitude was “do it in the streets!” Now look. If I ask a woman for her #, it’s sexual harassment and you can get the police called on you. All sexuality has been sucked out of public space by #metoo, so it feels like a sexual desert, which is apparently the way women want it! They actually like to live like this.

And at the same time as this crazy Victorianism, we also have a society drenched in porn. So my personal world is porn saturated, but if you so much as look at a woman, she might act like she’s going to call the cops. How’s that for crazy cognitive dissonance? No wonder incels exist and go on killing sprees. Societies can’t handle grotesque cognitive dissonance. It literally drives people insane and often results in serious violence.

What else did we win? Modern anti-racism – a movement with great roots that has gone insane and is worse than useless.

What else? Depraved, disgusting, and lewd gay pride parades. Great! My favorite!

“Pansexuals,” “queer” as a noun, “genderqueer” and “nonbinary” nonsense, and the insane and depraved transgender cult. It gets sicker and more perverted, weird, and stupid every year. What’s next? Transsexual bathhouses for all ages? Back then, we fought for liberation, not weirdness, sickness, perversion, and deviancy.

Further, these Cultural Left boneheads have badly divided the working class. Check out this great plan they had!

Let’s have a revolution!

Cool! Yay!

But first lets get all the non-White workers to hate the White workers!

Cool! Yay! Oppressors and oppressed!

And while we’re at it, let’s get the woman workers to hate the man workers! Oppressors and oppressed!

Cool! Yay!

Now let’s have a revolution, boys and girls!

Whoops. Whoa! What happened?

No one showed up! That’s what happened.

Why? Because we got them all to hate each other!

Brilliant! You got to hand it to these guys with these genius ideas of theirs.

What I mean is this Cultural Left project is easy for the ruling class to swallow. Many are already decadent, depraved rich people, so the sicko stuff works for them. Rich men get all the sex they want. If a rich man asks a woman for her #, does she threaten to call the cops? Course not.

Homosexuality? The ruling class is always full of gay men and all manner of decadent bisexual libertines. Works for them.

Trannies? Cut into the bottom line? Course not. Support.

The ruling class has been left on social BS and right on economics (neoliberalism) and on foreign policy (US imperialism) for a long time now. It works for them and doesn’t cost them a nickel! Hell, it even makes them bank too!

And you see the outgrowth of this ideology in this destructive BLM movement that makes the Black workers hate the White workers and vice versa.

Brilliant! Way to go, Lefties! Why didn’t I think of that?

The ruling class loves this because they benefit by dividing the workers and getting them all to hate each other so they won’t organize against the Neoliberalism-Neoconservatism bread and butter issues of the ruling class.

It also explains why BLM won’t dare touch economics or US imperialism.

See all those corporate and foundation millions flooding into BLM?

Kiss them all goodbye once BLM goes after neoliberal economics and neoconservative foreign policy, for this is what fills the bank vaults of the corporations and ruling class.

Alt Left: 16 and 17 Year Olds Are Not Children or Kids!

Think  about it. No way in Hell is a  16 or 17 year old girl or boy a “child” or even a “kid.” Not really. Children and kids are those humans that run about acting like children from birth to age 12. The behavior of an 8 year old is so different from a 17 year old that they might as well be different species.

Indeed in the UK and Germany, where the Age of Consent is 15-16, they laugh at us and call us stupid puritan fools (which is exactly what we are in this bizarre and sexually mindfucked nation) for calling 16 and 17 year olds children. They call 16 and 17 year olds “young adults” or “little adults,” which is about what they are. If you spend a lot of time around them, what they resemble more than anything else is a very young and extremely immature adult. And adult that has just hatched out of the childhood egg and is fumbling its way around in the world awkwardly like a baby with its first steps.

Now granted in Germany and the UK, 16-17 year olds do have some  restrictions on them. They are seen as such immature adults that they are not allowed to buy or consume alcohol or go to bars or nightclubs where alcohol is served. Their immaturity renders them unable to handle alcohol reasonably.

16 and  17 year olds need to be kept out of the military. They’re much  too immature of adults  to be in  the military. They would be discipline problems and we don’t like the idea of minors being killed in battle.

There are certain other things you cannot do until the age of majority (18). Sign a contract? Take out a loan? Anyway these need to be kept in as these little adults are too immature to handle such things.

In addition, it is acknowledged that they still need protection.

Hence, in these countries, 16-17 year olds cannot be prostitutes or act in porn movies. I believe there are also restrictions on men with power over those girls not being allowed to have sex with them because it’s seen as an abuse of power over a very immature and naive adult who should not be taken advantage of.

Of course, when she hits 18, she’s not protected from power differentials anymore, except that many professions and workplaces have rules saying that those in power over others are not allowed to have sex with those they are in charge of.

So university professors are not allowed to have sex with students. Doctors and therapists and not allowed to have sex with their clients. Supervisors are not allowed to have sex with those under them. In the military, fraternization rules mean that officers cannot have sex with enlisted people.

In general you won’t go to jail for these power and trust violations, which is proper, although there are some very stupid laws now whereby high school teachers having sex with an adult high school student has committed a crime and can go to jail. Screw that. Fire them and pull their licenses. For God’s sake, we’ve already made half of life illegal. Can we please stop now?

Rather than going to jail, instead you will be fired or lose your license. A teacher will be fired and lose their license. A physician or therapist will have their license pulled. Professors and supervisors will simply be fired. I don’t know what happens in the military but there is some punishment.

If 16-17 year old girls were allowed in porn, very quickly the entire Net would be awash with 16 and 17 year old girls doing porn because “16 is the new 18” would be the motto, and the thrill, danger, and forbidden nature of it, in addition to the lure of youth, would drive millions of mostly men to watch these 16-17 year old girls doing all the crazy stuff a porn star does.

It would happen overnight because pornographers are the worst scumbags with just about zero morals. They are always pushing the envelope of the acceptable towards wilder, sicker, and more perverted stuff. I am starting to wonder how porn can even get more perverted and sick than it already is. Isn’t this about the limit? What’s not been done yet? Shit-eating? Child porn? Snuff films? You get to the point where all that’s left are things that are too awful or horrific to contemplate. We’ve maxxed out or sick, perverted sex in porn.

I don’t know about you, but I don’t  want to live in a world where the Net is flooded with 16-17 year old girls engaging in all the crazy sex acts of a porn stars. Forget it.

These restrictions are completely proper. All of these restrictions are completely proper. Sure 16 and 17 year olds are little adults but they are extremely immature adults, so immature that they need to be restricted in a few ways because they’re too immature to do certain things. We also need to protect them from power and trust abuses by those over them. We need to keep them out of prostitution because that’s just gross. We don’t want 16 year old prostitutes on the streets. And  we need to keep them out of porn because we don’t want to live in a world where 16 year old girls having sick, perverted sex on camera are a click away from  anyone who can get on the Net.

Yet still…

16-17 year olds aren’t kids! 16-17 year olds aren’t children! Quit calling them that.

Alt Left: The White Protestant Work Ethic Is Masochistic and It’s Not a Good Value for Whites to Have

When I was young, I my bosses were all men in my parent’s generation. They hated nearly from the moment they met me and they fired me endlessly.

They were workaholics and their attitude was that I was lazy. I’m not lazy. I work, dammit! I work a lot, too.  There were times when I was working two or maybe even  three different jobs. I’ve worked 50, 60, and even 70 hour weeks. It wasn’t fun but I did it.

I’m not lazy but I’m not a hyperactive monkey.Ive never met the proverbial lazy worker. I’ve met some workers who didn’t seem to work very much but I’ve never met a worker who worked hard all the time but seemed to be working too slowly. The very idea seems odd to me. I’m not wired to see hyperactivity as a normal state anywhere.

I was never at public service jobs where “hustling” was mandatory. Anyway that was a typical complaint: “You don’t hustle!” I just have a slower pace of life. There’s Type A and there’s Type B. And then there’s me. Type Z. I simply have a very relaxed style of living.

Even when I am working, even working hard, I feel relaxed and casual. People even said, “Even when you’re working hard you don’t look like you are working!” It’s been acknowledged that I work just as hard as anyone else. I worked for a legal coding company once and they told me that out of 80 people, there was only one person, a woman, who was coding faster and more accurately than I was. It’s always been this way. So I’m not Mr. So-Mo. I just look like I am, ha ha!

I do all my work. I guess I could work at breakneck speed, but that’s rarely a good idea, and I don’t take jobs like that anyway. Most work, believe it or not, does not have to be done at breakneck speed.

What’s the hurry? In the future you are going to die. That’s about all that’s going to happen. That’s what you have to look forward to. So hurry up and die? How bout, like me, take your sweet time, stop and smell the flowers for a bit, and then die? How bout that?

I come in on time or even early, I don’t take excessive breaks or lunches, I often stay late, I’m responsible, I do all my work, and I don’t think I’m lazy. Lazy means you don’t work. Lazy doesn’t mean “more relaxed work style that’s not cooking a heart attack or a stroke.” Anyway if you think I’m lazy because I prefer to cherish life rather than have a heart attack at 50, be my guest. You’re certainly in the American mainstream.

This is the down side of Protestant masochistic work ethic. Life is supposed to suck, almost all the time. Then you cut loose on the weekend or for a couple of weeks a year and let it all rip loose. That’s a Hell of a lousy way to live your life, that’s all I’ve got to say.

You only go around once. You want to spent almost all of your waking life in working misery and drudgery, with no time off? You get to the end of your life and soon you will be dead. You look back on your life and all you see is misery, drudgery, pain, endless work, no fun ever, and masochistic overwork, no fun ever until you die except for those brief periods when you cut loose.Your life has been an endless drag with a few rare periods where you ripped loose and let it all hang out. A life worth living? Why?

Why this masochism must be a White value is beyond me. Really? Masochism is a White value? Since when?

Alt Left: Behaviorally Alpha Societies Tend to Be Socialist and Good for Workers, the Poor and Men in General

Transformer: Do you think Southern Euro behavior Alphas are not such great societies for working poor people like in Latin America, do you agree? I think that Paternalism and Authoritarianism is a big reason why there is such political instability and economic inequality in Latin America.

https://www.aei.org/articles/from-popular-sovereignty-to-the-reality-of-state-paternalism/

https://www.amazon.com/Authoritarian-Regimes-Latin-America-Dictators/dp/0742537390

https://items.ssrc.org/from-our-archives/industrialization-and-authoritarianism-in-latin-america/

In Southern Europe, Eastern Europe, Russia, the Middle East, and North Africa, and even traditional Southeast Asian and Asian cultures, there are not a lot of problems for working poor people. Al of these societies are very much pro-worker, pro-poor,

Southern Europe, Eastern Europe, Russia, the Middle East, and North Africa: All of these societies are collectivist, not individualist, and they are very pro-worker, pro-poor, pro-common man populist. In addition, almost all societies over there are socialist in name or in deed.

Feudalism was always an uncomfortable fit in the Arab World and it took a lot of mangling of Islam to try to justify it. As soon as the Arab World went free, it all went socialist right away. Despite tremendous efforts by Western neoliberal dipshits to try to shove neoliberalism down Arab throats, it refuses to take hold. Almost no one wants it. The fact that neoliberalism is grotesquely anti-Islamic is probably the main reason. Furthermore, neoliberalism is very hard to impose on a collectivist culture, though it is possible as in Latin America and the Philippines.

Men in Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos and Thailand are traditionally very Alpha. Most of Southeast Asia has been socialist for 50 years now. Radical capitalism was an aberration for SE Asia because all of SE Asia has always been a very collectivist culture. Check out Fire in the Lake by Frances Fitzgerald about how the collectivist nature of Vietnamese society made the Viet Cong almost impossible to defeat.

Very unequal Thailand is a recent aberration but it’s been run by military rule and juntas for most of recent history. Communist guerrillas were extremely succesful in Thailand during the Vietnam War. The Pentagon said there were just a few guerrillas but people who went over there to study them found that they were everywhere, especially in the North.

For some reason they faded away but recently class war has returned to Thailand with a vengeance with the wars between Yellow Shirts (rightwing middle class) and red shirts (workers). Of course the Yellow Shirts are winning because the army supports them, but still, rightwing individualist economics is an aberration in collectivist Thailand.

In China, Korea, Japan, the Philippines and Indonesia the men seem to be quite Alpha. The Philippines and Indonesia have retained Latin America-style systems with extreme inequality and authoritarianism

Japan and Korea were probably barely feudal. Obviously they were never individualist and even their capitalism is very collectivist and uses a lot of state involvement in the economy all the way down to actual planning of the economy.

China was under rightwing economics (feudalism) for much of its history. Communism was an easy sell in China because it was always an extremely collectivist culture.

In addition, capitalism never took hold, as feudalism was the only form of rightwing economics the Chinese knew. The feudalism was so bad that many to most Chinese peasants were effectively slaves and quite a few actually were slaves. 8

The Philippines was a colony forever, and after independence, somehow feudalism developed. The Philippines is a collectivist culture that has developed a very Latin American-style economic system probably due to being colonized by Spaniards. Everywhere the Spanish colonized, they wrecked. However, they have also had armed Communist rebellions almost non-stop from 1945-on. The most recent president, Duterte, says he is a socialist.

Indonesia was another country that went hard rightwing, in this case classical fascist, after independence, however not before murdering 1 million Communists as the Communists were the most popular movement in the country. Obviously Communism hasn’t been popular since and in fact it is illegal to have that political opinion. However, the last couple of presidents did refer to themselves as social democrats.

Both the Philippines and Indonesia are horribly class-cucked. In addition, both are subject to a reactionary merchant ruling class in the form of overseas Chinese, a feudal-type people who retained the pre-Communist feudal culture of China when they left long ago. Not having been subject to a revolution, they are a feudal type ruling class that mirrors the Latin American ruling class in many ways.

Feudalism can absolutely arise in a collectivist culture whereas US style rightwing individualist neoliberal economics has a difficult time getting a foothold.

So societies where all the man are Alphas are often very good for poor and working class men and I would argue that they are good for men period for obvious reasons.

I think that Paternalism and Authoritarianism is a big reason why there is such political instability and economic inequality in Latin America.

Why would societies where all men are Alphas end up paternalistic? Why would authoritarian societies be bad for poor and working class people and for men? Southern and Eastern Europe have traditions of authoritarianism and very pro-worker populist governments.

North Africa and the Middle East is still very authoritarian, and it is very good for poor and working class people and for men. Russia is somewhat authoritarian and has been authoritarian for much of its history. For the last hundred years, Russian society has been very good for poor and working class people and for men. All of these places have traditions of relatively equal societies and strong redistributionist economics.

Paternalistic governments help their people. Rightwing governments in Latin America tend to be anything but paternalistic.

It is true that some societies where most men are Alphas have evolved a rightwing authoritarian, often semi-feudal system, however, many other such societies have not done so. Societies where most men are behaviorally Alpha oddly enough seem to be collectivist societies (someone explain this to me). But the rightwing authoritarian societies where most men are behaviorally Alpha actually look more feudal than US-style neoliberal, although they sometimes preach the latter.

Coronavirus Kills 30,000/Month; Unemployment from Lockdown Kills 1,200 Month

Claudius: Also, stimulus can’t go on forever. It’s borrowed money.

It can go on for some time. We print our own money you know. And if we are borrowing it from ourselves as Japan does, it’s not important.

And what about business who can’t service their debt.

I don’t know. Maybe we can freeze the payments for a while. It’s all owned to bankscum anyway, right. Fuck em.

Claudius: I care about household mortgage payments and businesses making loan payments.

Mortgages can be frozen and loan payments can be frozen too. They both just go to banks anyway. The banksters can go fuck themselves.

Claudius: Credit is what fuels the economy to a large degree.

Last time I checked, they’re still loaning out money. It’s not 2008.

Claudius: Yes, we can hold out the whole summer if need be. But what good does that do? The virus won’t go away. We’re going to reopen sooner or later.

Easy. We get it down to where it’s not killing so many people.

Claudius: We might as well do it now and not destroy three more months of the economy.

The economy’s opened up anyway. What’s not open?

Claudius: I doubt we can save any more lives at this point.

We are saving lives.

Corona kills 30,000/month. Unemployment from lockdown kills 1,200/month.

Claudius: All we can do is kill, hurt and maim people through economic disaster.

But it doesn’t kill, hurt, or maim many people. The virus kills 30X more. You do what kills less.

Claudius: It seems mostly restaurants

I believe they are open now in California in some way or other. They’ve been open for takeout for some time and business has been pretty good.

Claudius: gathering venue employees

What’s that?

Alt Left: The Fencing of the Commons: Why Displacement of Small Farmers and Theft of Their Land Is Necessary for the Development of Capitalism

In England, the poor and peasants lived off what was called The Commons. This was royal land but they didn’t have much use for it other than foxhunting, so they didn’t care. People had enough to eat and often made a lot of their stuff or bought it from nearby tradesmen. There was a small capitalist economy made up of selling agricultural produce, meat, and mostly the small tradesmen, most of whom didn’t even hire labor. There were hardly any hired laborers because everyone had all they needed.

The capitalists decided that they needed to develop a capitalist economy. They had a  problem. No workers. All of the workers were living off the land doing fine on their own. The capitalists would have to  drive them off the land, proletarianize and impoverish them in large cities, where they would make up the reserve army of labor Marx’s discusses.

So the Commons was fenced off. The people lost all their livelihood because they no longer had any land to live off. They moved to the cities as an impoverished, downtrodden, often starving proletariat, where they formed large miserable slums. Crime rose. The capitalists starated building factories in the cities. With this newfound reserve army of labor, the capitalists now had captured workers who had their livelihood tied to their job at the factory. The capitalists waved the threat of impoverishment and starvation over anyone who complained.

A similar thing actually happened in the American West and in fact this was how capitalism in the American West actually developed, believe it or not. Herders versus farmers wars, common in the West and still in many parts of the world (Sudan, Northern Nigeria) are similar in that they also involve driving farmers off the land but also quite different as the land is taken over to grazing by herders.  But now this new landless class or former landholders was proletarianized and stuck as a reserve army of labor for the development of capitalism in the West.

A similar thing was done with the railroads. The government was getting very worried about all of the people who were just living off the land on their own. At first, the state gave people small plots because this helped in the theft of land from the Indians which was essential for the development of the nation.

But by the late 1800’s this had become a liability. So vast tracts of land were given to the railroads before homesteaders could snap them up. In this way, the development of rural self-sufficiency in the countryside could be slowed and the creation of a large impoverished, hungry class of workers could form in the city slums to serve as the reserve army of labor for the development of capitalism in the West. Until recently, Southern Pacific had large landholdings in the West.

Alt Left: A Rundown of the “Conservative Left”

Here is a rundown on the “conservative Left” – liberal to Left on economics and centrist to Right on social issues.

Nazbols or National Bolsheviks– The classic socially conservative and economically Leftist group. Founded in Russia by Limonov, a writer. They never had much of an ideology other than some extreme nationalism, albeit not ethnic nationalism but instead “Russian Empire nationalism” -see below. Mostly they were just permanent rebels, almost perverse in that sense. They seemed to automatically oppose anything or anyone in power reflexively. Often tarred by the Cultural Left as fascists, Nazis, etc. However, Limonov himself was neither a Nazi nor a fash. His movement united people from the left, right and center in a populist nationalism similar to Peronism. More of a Third Positionist. Arkan’s Serbian Tigers of the Serbian National Party could be seen as Nazbol. Horribly marred by racism and even genocidism. They were guilty of genocide of non-Serbs in the Balkans. Milosevic may have been similar – a racist Communist (see below).

The Alternative Left or Alt Left – more Centrist than conservative on social stuff. Already splintered to Hell and split into 13 different wings, including a moderate sort of liberal-Left White Nationalist wing rejected by the others but nevertheless one of the founding factions. Movement was originally race realist, now dropped from program. Agnostic and silent – no comment – on race realism. Brocialist Left (Brocialists), also Partyboy Left, Fratboy Left, Trollblogger Left, Shitlord Left, or Asshole Left, sometimes very irreverent and offensive but mostly just trolls. Shitlord, shitposting and trolling tendencies. Some are “trollbloggers” like Max

The Realist Left. More liberal than left on culture and more between the Cultural Left and the Alt Left on social stuff. Their beef is more intellectual – opposition to postmodernism. They are also anti-Marxist though. Basically Keynesians with safety net.

The Old Left. Hard Left on economics. Quite conservative on culture. Think KPRF or the Russian Communist Party.

Dirtbag Left, etc. Left economics. Other groups think the are too SJW. Basically brocialists. Jimmy Dore, Kyle Kuklinski, Cenk Uyghur, etc. Anti-SJW, irreverent. Partyboy Left, Fratboy Left, Asshole Left. Brocialists.

leftypol -longstanding 4chan sub. Marxist on economics but somewhat anti-Identity Politics (Idpol), nevertheless quite left on culture but not nearly as far as the Cultural Left. Sort of Cultural Left 1995, if you will.

Third Positionists. All sorts of groupings. Vary a lot but tend to be nationalists but not ethnic nationalists – anyone can come to the nation, assimilate, and be a national – French post-Revolution nationalism or Russian nationalism. Russian nationalism like French nationalism is assimilationist nationalist and typically not ethnic nationalist, accepts many minorities into the “empire” of the Russian state, Orthodox but warm towards moderate Islam and assimilating Jews, very pragmatic.

Peronism – longstanding socialist nationalism of the “common man” or shirtless ones and populist in that sense. Somewhat socially conservative. Like Nazbols in uniting right, left, and center around a populist nationalism. Also contained both Marxist and fash wings!

International Socialist Movement –  runs International Socialist Review website. Trotskyist but pragmatic, longstanding anti-Idpol on  a Marxist theoretical basis.

“Conservative Left” – There are others that are part of existing states. However they are marred by ethnic chauvinism, racism, fash tendencies, authoritarianism, brutality, or even genocidism. Erdogans in Turkey, Orban in Hungary, Arab nationalists like Baath Party people in Syria and Iraq, Burmese regime, Qaddafi’s green socialism in Libya, Iranian Revolutionary Left or even the existing state, Putin in Russia, Lukashenko in Belarus, Duterte in Philippines, Sandinistas, ETA in Basque Country (dissolved), and even Hamas &  Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood to some extent. All former Communist countries were conservative on social stuff with left economics.

Red Tories – Canadian group. Liberal-left on economics, a bit conservative on social stuff but not too much. Moderate heterodox movement.

George Wallace supporters – left populism marred by racism.

Strasserists – “White Nationalist Left” or worse Nazi Left or Racist Left in the original incarnation. Heimbach’s Traditionalist Workers Party, Tom Metzger, etc. I appreciate Metzger’s populist support for workers – albeit White workers – and ferocious anti-bossism, anti-rich rhetoric. Both are Strasserists, but they are terribly marred by racism- Metzger’s followers have murdered minorities and Heimbach’s movement was very racist. Original Strasserists disliked Jews on an economic instead of racial basis and rejected Nazi scientific racism. Nevertheless, modern Strasserists have committed racist murders against Jews, so I don’t see why the reason for their antisemitism is important. They are extremely marred if not discredited by racism. Basically Nazi Communists, if that term even makes sense. Strasserists were very pro worker and anti-capitalist, I’ll give them that. There is a huge Strasserist wing on Stormfront. Most people don’t know that.

“Economic reductionists” – slur directed by mainstream Left towards the conservative left. Also often called fascists, rightists, conservatives, racists, sexists, homophobes, transphobes, bigots, etc. probably falsely because conservative Left types are not even as bigoted as conservative Republicans, instead more centrist on minority and women’s issues, and in general most conservative Left groups support equal rights based on race, ethnicity, religion, sexual orientation, and gender identity.

We can go on and on here. Jack London was a sort of Racist Left akin to the WN wing of the Alt Left. The US Left was like this pre-Kennedy. Many US working class and union members are still like this, now scandalously abandoned by the Democrats and US Left as Deplorables, and hence voting Trump and Republican in vast numbers. I think the Democrats need to let these folks back into the fold, but we’re too busy screaming at them and calling them bigots and rednecks. Hence we have Trump as President and a Republican Congress. Way to go Cultural Left! Keep electing Republicans!

Alt Left: A Postmortem Autopsy the Journalistic Profession in the US

I’m a journalist. We journalists should all try to be objective, whatever our biases. As a journalist I am committed to only one thing – the truth. If it my side look bad, oh well. If it makes my adversaries look good, oh well.

Most journalists nowadays are whores and stenographers paid to pump out column inches of lies made up by the Deep State and of biased news in favor of the American Oligarchy (the rich and the corporations and the US government they occupy that does their bidding), day in and day out.

I’d venture to say that there are only a few honest journalists out there, and most of those are on the Left. Not liberals. Screw American liberals. I mean the  real progressives and Leftists, who properly despise US liberal Democrats.

All journalists associated with every large US newspaper and newsmagazine and every TV and radio news station except Pacifica and often PBS are nothing but propagandists for the American Deep State, who are the people who ultimately run this country.

I believe that The Interpreter, the Gray Zone, Mint News and Global Research all do excellent work.

Of the big guys, I only respect Seymour Hirsch. Last of a dying breed. Committed to discovering the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, politics be damned.

On the other side of the pond, Robert Fisk is a stand in for Hirsch. There are more too. For some reason the Euro journalists are far less corrupted than our presstitutes.

Repost: “Coal Miners and Company Scrip,” by Alpha Unit

Saw this old Alpha post she wrote seven years ago. Seven years! Jesus. We’re practically a married couple by now! No wait! She’s already married and she’s against bigamy. Plus her husband is a big, badass former Marine named “Big Dog,” if you can believe that.

He’s White. A White guy with some sort of Black chick fetish. And Alpha’s got a “White guy her age fetish.” Whoops, don’t say that!

Panmixia baby! I’m sure Jason approves.

If this site is anything, it’s pro-Black-White integration. And it’s run by a White guy and a Black woman, just to show what integrationists we are. Yay! We are hardcore integrationists here and I personally think Blacks should spend more time with Whites and vice versa provided the Black person is not from that half of the Blacks that are those people, you know.

Alpha’s probably one of the most un-ghetto Blacks I’ve ever encountered. She’s the polar opposite of a ghetto Black. She acts Whiter than I do! She called me up once and she sounded like a librarian. If she’s anything, she’s unfailingly, Southern Belle, graciously proper polite. Which I guess makes sense because she grew up in Mississippi! And I just thought of that!

From what Alpha has told me about him, I really like her husband. He’s seriously chill, and he actually understands women. He’s an ultra-laid back, don’t give a damn, reserved (actually just properly chilled I think), brief, pithy words of wisdom type guy from Polar Bear’s state.

And he totally doesn’t give a damn what anyone thinks about his Black wife. I like that. This guy knows how to not be bothered. I like that. I’ve also heard that he knows how to be bothered if it must come to that, and I would not want to tangle with the guy.

Anyway, to show my gratitude for all the free work Alpha does on this site,* I will repost this post from probably way back when when we first met, which is another story altogether!

*She does all the categories!

St. Peter, don’t you call me, ’cause I can’t go I owe my soul to the company store.

Nobody’s sure who wrote “Sixteen Tons.” People usually attribute the song to Merle Travis, who recorded it in 1946. A singer-songwriter named George S. Davis claimed he wrote it during the Depression. I don’t know if there’s any way to settle that question. But the couplet above sums up what it felt like sometimes to be a coal miner in nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century America.

Before labor reforms were enacted and enforced, the life of a coal miner, like that of sharecroppers and other laborers, was often just one step above slavery.

Coal mining was vital for the widespread industrialization that got underway in the nineteenth century. Before then, there were two types of coal mines: drift mines and bell pits. They were small-scale operations that yielded coal for homes and local industry. But the growing demand for coal due to industrialization made coal mines deeper and mining more dangerous. And there was a lot of money in consideration.

Mining operations were in remote, rugged areas, naturally, so mine owners had to provide housing for their workers. In fact they provided just about everything for their workers, typically. This was because paying the miners posed a problem.

You have to remember that this was before there was a national currency in the United States. Neither was there a sufficient supply of coins. Mining operations were far from banks and stores. Mining companies saw great advantage in the closed economy that resulted from creating the company store and paying in scrip.

Whatever a miner needed he could buy – and often had to buy – at the company store. The tools of his trade he bought there, along with whatever other goods he and his family needed. If the company store didn’t have it in stock, he had to do without it. The company store could charge whatever the mine owner wanted. If wages were increased, the company store could increase prices to make up for it.

Some companies paid exclusively in scrip. Others used scrip as a form of credit that miners could use between paydays. In this case, the scrip amount would be charged against the miner’s payroll account and deducted from his next pay. Some companies let their workers trade scrip for cash, but not always at full value. Some paid as little as 50 cents on the dollar; others paid as much as 85 cents per dollar.

Not only were the supplies for the miner and his family deducted from his pay, but so were his rent for company housing, utilities, fuel coal, and doctor’s fees.

Mining companies were creative in withholding as much money as they could from workers. One practice they engaged in was cribbing. A coal miner was paid per ton of coal that he brought up. Each car brought from the mines was supposed to hold a specific amount of coal – 2,000 pounds, for instance.

But companies would alter cars to hold more coal than the specified amount, so a miner could be paid for 2,000 pounds when he might have actually brought up 2,500. Workers were also docked pay for slate and rock mixed in with coal. How much to dock was left at the discretion of the checkweighman – a company man, of course.

On payday, a miner was given a pay envelope with all the check-off deductions listed and any balance due him inside. Often the envelope contained a few pennies, or nothing at all. The United Mine Workers, a merger of two older labor groups, was founded in 1890.

This organization – whose first convention barred discrimination based on race, religion, or national origin – set about to make mining safer, to gain miners’ independence from the company store, and to secure collective bargaining rights. Among its specific goals:

  • a salary commensurate with dangerous work conditions
  • an 8-hour workday
  • payment in legal tender, not company scrip
  • properly working scales: improper or outright dishonest weighing was a big concern for miners
  • enforcement of safety laws and better ventilation and drainage in mines
  • an end to child labor: “breaker boys” as young as 8 would remove impurities from coal by hand – hazardous work that led to accidental amputations and sometimes death
  • an unbiased police force: mine operators owned all the houses in a company town and controlled the police force, which would evict miners or arrest them without proper cause
  • the right to strike

The UMW was able to secure an 8-hour workday for coal miners in 1898. During its first ten years the UMW successfully organized coal miners in Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois. It finally achieved some recognition in West Virginia in 1902. It spent the next several decades organizing strikes – some of which ended up being deadly – and getting involved, controversially, in politics to further its goals.

Labor contracts and legislation eventually outlawed the use of company scrip. World War II marked a turning point for scrip, and by the end of the 1950’s almost all coal mining operations were paying their workers in legal tender. What a long haul.

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