NM's blog

Restoring US pre-eminence in the Western hemisphere “In 1973 the White House supported Pinochet’s coup. ‘I don’t see why we need to stand by and watch a country go communist due to the irresponsibility of its people,’ Henry Kissinger had said a few years earlier . Now, decades later, the current US president has hailed the victory of Kast, whom he says he endorsed.” The intereference in Honduras last hear and now in Venezuela. The recent CIA operation in the latter has not “ provoked no response from Western governments, which are usually quick to pounce on instances of military aggression and electoral manipulation, as long as they can be attributed to Moscow.” “Ahead of Argentina’s parliamentary elections on 26 October, Trump conducted economic and financial blackmail similar to the attempt to ‘persuade’ Hondurans. “Washington has many tools for pressure and retaliation against Latin American countries, all of which help facilitate its redeployment across their region. Governments ca...

The doubts raised after Mamdani's victory were legitimate. As  Eric Blanc writes , “ history is  full  of examples of movements demobilizing and subordinating themselves to their friends in power. It would be a tragedy if that happened in New York City…” But, Blanc suggests, “a  more useful and important debate is how to organize enough New Yorkers to win Zohran’s agenda — and to counteract the inevitable pressures on him from capital and the political establishment…  Effective Left strategy always should combine an openness to criticism of electeds with a rigorous  power analysis . More specifically, the intensity of our criticism of Left politicians on a given issue should correlate with our degree of power.

How the right seized the narrative

“ There are too many whose idea of ‘critical’ is limited to saying some development was problematic but some was quite good, if only there had been more of that ‘good’ development. The most stunning imperial formation was that the War in Afghanistan was unquestionable–whether as an act of revenge and/or care (for Afghan women). The friend/enemy distinction has been marked on to women’s bodies playing out in a fundamentalist logic of either supporting education or not supporting education, supporting the Taliban or condemning them. The Kite Runner  made everyone feel they knew Afghanistan. Like white people who watched the TV serial  The Wire  that came out about the same time as the beginning of the US war and occupation of Afghanistan.  Suddenly white liberals felt they knew the deep struggles of racialized people in Baltimore, and elsewhere, because they watched  The Wire , and liked the character Omar. The critique was only of the withdrawal, not of the ...

The culture war

“Several decades after its exhaustion, the communist experience does not need to be defended, idealized, or demonized. It deserves to be critically understood as a whole, as a dialectical totality shaped by internal tensions and contradictions, presenting multiple dimensions in a vast spectrum of shades, from redemptive élans to totalitarian violence, from participatory democracy and collective deliberation to blind oppression and mass extermination, from the most utopian imagination to the most bureaucratic domination — sometimes shifting from one to the other in a short span of time. Like many other “isms” of our political and philosophical lexicon, communism is a polysemic and ultimately “ambiguous” word...” Coming to terms with communist history

“What relevance does it have for you or me that a long-dead French thinker believed neoliberalism offered a possible escape hatch from the particular problems of normative power? “Do Not Ask me Who I am”

I have just read a review of Gareth Stedman Jones' book Karl Marx: Greatness and Illusion.  Then I've found a good comment. Timothy Shenk quotes Gareth Stedman Jones as saying that ‘the left ought to give up the idea that there’s some other system waiting in the wings instead of capitalism’ and that ‘there’s going to be some end of history where there’s some magical transformative solution and a completely different system takes over’ ( LRB , 29 June ). I will shortly be 68 years old and have been a Marxist all my adult life, yet I have never heard anyone on the left express these ideas. Stedman Jones is using an old ploy: attribute to the target of your criticism a viewpoint that they don’t actually hold, then proceed to knock it down." — John Cunningham The review itself requires a subscription (institution or university one).