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Showing posts with the label history
"A fractious Europe, a failing currency, a challenged economy, populist parties on the rise, a divided left, migration from the east, an atmosphere of fear combined with social and sexual liberalism. The parallels between Britain today and Germany in the 1920s may well make this a compelling moment to revisit those postwar German thinkers who gathered in what was known as the Frankfurt school for social research – something akin to a Marxist think tank, [...] Little wonder, given the history of the 20th century, that the Frankfurt school gave us intellectual pessimism and negative dialectics.  Jeffries’s biography  is proof that such a legacy can be invigorating."   –  Lisa Appignanesi,  Guardian
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Sometimes you find surprises in the gutter press " But not every part of the resistance was grateful. De Gaulle’s supporters in Paris  feared either a communist seizure of power or a mirror of the bloodbath that was befalling the August 1944 Warsaw Uprising. Through the Swedish consul they negotiated a truce with the German military governor on 20 August, but this was not observed by the insurgents who threw up barricades in a revolutionary reflex and continued guerrilla warfare, seizing weapons from the panicking Germans." The forgotten heroes of Paris, 1945
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"Marx the Moor" There is an interesting reading of Marx on Islam and Muslims in History of Islam in German Thought by Ian Almond “And without total abandonment of the law of the Koran [argues opposition MP Cobden], it was impossible to put the Christians of Turkey upon an equality with the Turks.” We may as well ask Mr Cobden whether, with the existing State Church and laws of England, it is possible to put her working-men upon an equality with the Cobdens and the Brights? —Marx, The Eastern Question , p. 260 
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The Revolutionary Projects of Two Lebanese Communists Note: you may need a free subscription to download the PDFs file.
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"One of the most important questions regarding political parties is their “opportuneness” or right-ness for the times”; that is to say, the question of how they react against “habitude” and the tendency to become mummified and anachronistic. In practical terms, political parti es come into existence [as organisations] in the wake of historical events that are important for the social groups they represent, but they do not always know how to adapt to new epochs or historical phases, or they are unable to develop in accordance with the ensemble of the relations of forces [and therefore with congruousm forces] in their particular country or in the international sphere. In this analysis, one must make distinctions: the social group; the mass of the party; the bureaucracy of general staff of the party. The latter is the most dangerous in terms of habitude: if it organises itself as a separate body, compact and independent, the party will end up being anachronistic. This is what bring
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" All human societies, whether tacitly or overtly, assume that nature has ordained their social arrangements. Or, to put it another way, part of what human beings understand by the word ‘nature’ is the sense of inevitability that gradually becomes attached to a predictable, repetitive social routine." Those who create and re-create race today are not just the mob that killed a young Afro-American man on a street in Brooklyn or the people who join the Klan and the White Order. They are also those academic writers whose invocation of self-propelling ‘attitudes’ and tragic flaws assigns Africans and their descendants to a special category, placing them in a world exclusively theirs and outside history—a form of intellectual apartheid no less ugly or oppressive, despite its righteous (not to say self-righteous) trappings, than that practised by the bioand theo-racists; and for which the victims, like slaves of old, are expected to be grateful. They are the academic ‘libera
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