Discussion of the UK Media Landscape & Future Prospects for Left Media (Worth watching even if you don’t live in the UK)

If I get the time I may add my comments here, but in short: Getting serious union support (money) for left media is a great idea. The more unions are democratized and the more radical they become, the greater chance there is of that happening.

The thing that’s missing is an organized left. Could Momentum be turned into an activist movement that doesn’t just advocate for the Labour Party but actually pushes politicians from the left? If so, could they be useful enough to everyday people (I mean actually useful, like providing actual help) that they would join up and grow the left? As an outside (far outside) observer, I would guess not. How could they change that? Or maybe the most left in that organization could branch off and try to start something that tries to go in the direction just described. Right now if Momentum members threw a pound in the pot every month they could fund a lot of left media. See how that works?

Yes, there is an irony, or maybe more specifically a catch-22: In order to have a large effective left media, people have to be educated about politics and more specifically they need to have a solid basis for an analysis. And in order for people to be educated in that manner it greatly helps to have a thriving left media.

A thriving left media can be built out of a thriving radical movement, but we don’t have that. At the moment, all over the world, the left continues to be atomized and essentially refuses to organize itself and unite under one flag. There is a little movement in the right (correct) direction in some countries, but viewed optimistically, the most you could say is that it is nascent. If you listen to left media and left orgs, you can hear brief mentions of the necessity of the left to be an organized international force, but that is putting the cart before the horse because the majority of the left in most countries think they can stay in their own lanes and just get together for protests and specific events – and even worse, there is a conventional wisdom that permeates the left that assumes building a unified left under one flag (say a party or something like a better IWW) is not only not necessary, but is a bad idea. I have no problem with a diversified left, but one that isn’t as organized and unified as capitalists are worldwide can never hope to win, let alone put up a credible fight. When we are faced with actual extinction, not being organized and unified is not an option.

To tie up this non-comment comment, an organized unified left could easily fund left media. Not only that, but a media that is organized and unified worldwide could more easily share information, knowledge, resources, and would definitely help build the left and the movement we need.

Chris Hedges on Death of the Liberal Class

Labour, Socialism, Aaron Bastani talks with Leo Panitch

Discussion: Good
Set: Getting much better
Direction and camera work: Whole nutha level
Elephant in the room: Touched its toenail
What is the elephant in the room? The people, who will have to form a highly organized, radical mass movement to “educate” the politicians and fight the right at every level. Without this, no socialist program administered through the government will work in the long run. A left that relies solely on a government party as its only voice and expression will not survive, or thrive – at least not under capitalism. Labour will have to be pushed (and supported) by an organized left. So, even with a Corbyn win and a majority of MP’s who identify as socialists, the “what is to be done” question will be more insistent than ever. And, not to sound like and old lefty, but, internationalism is a huge necessary component of all of this and it rarely gets a mention.
I know, it was a short talk and there was an attempt at a focused discussion, but this idea of educating “the people” about socialism while governing is not only not easy, but I wonder what it means in theory and in practice (and just saying praxis, is not an answer).

At least 5 million votes essentially thrown in the garbage

Chris Hedges – Concordia University Speech (12/9/2015) [Video]

Political cartoon sketched in words after the Greek vote

The Eurocrats, controlled by the banks, have a noose around Greece’s neck – and they’re using it as a leash as they conduct a forced march down the neoliberal road, kicking at the billions of cans of debt littering their way.

Earthships. Think outside the box. Positive futures. [video]

In many ways, the idea and reality of earthships is the ultimate object lesson.  Earthships were developed to answer key problems we face as a species in a consumer capitalist society and now they exist as a model for dealing with some of its waste in a sustainable, life affirming way.  Mike faced serious opposition in bringing his vision into reality.  Some of that struggle is detailed in the documentary Garbage Warrior. It gives a glimpse into how reactionary and punishing the establishment can be in the form of city and state forces when they are faced with anything outside the status quo.

Though he has made amazing progress in New Mexico and all over the world, the fact remains that poor people and many working people in the so-called developed world still lack the resources to do it for themselves.  It seems that lesson is becoming more and more clear to him, especially after the last manufactured crisis and his experiences in Haiti.  He has developed a much lower cost alternative, but the barriers to achieving even a low cost earthship remain too high for most people and there is still overwhelming state resistance to these ideas.

It’s important to understand the connection between the state and corporations.  As our lives become more corporatized and privatized every day, corporate control over states increases, and vice versa.  That guarantees resistance to projects like earthships will grow because the corporation – and increasingly the state – will see them as a direct threat to corporate profit and taxes.

That understanding and knowledge has to go hand-in-hand for anyone involved or interested in alternatives to consumer capitalism.  You cannot simply withdraw into alternative communities because there is no escape in the long term from the totalizing logic of capitalism.  In fact, regardless of what you’re interested in, if you’re interested in you and your children and their children continuing to live, you will have to confront those forces.

The logic of capitalism commodifies everything.  Increasingly, we can see the absurd and horrific endpoint of that logic in corporations buying up and controlling the thing we cannot live without: water.  They have been taking over utilities, and then selling the water we should own collectively back to us.  Bechtel tried it in Bolivia with pure neoliberal tactics.  Detroit, ravaged by neoliberal high-finance, is shutting off water to its most vulnerable populations.  And now water is under attack in Ireland, again through corporate led neoliberal tactics.   The other side of this coin is the poisoning of our water by corporations involved in fracking and other heavy industrial projects.

Corporate capital is the most powerful force that has ever existed in history and we have to fight it if we hope to sustain any practices that inherently challenge its domination.  This is a system that will not hesitate to cut off your source of life if it deems you a non-productive consumer.  It is a system that is actively working to make citizens into helpless consumers and eliminate humans from the production process or move location and employ de facto slave labor to increase profit.  They did it through states using legal mechanisms like NAFTA, and now the TPP/TTIP is the next stage in that process.  We can see how this decimated whole cities like Flint and Detroit, and now that same logic will work to eliminate the low paying service jobs it left in its wake.

Brilliant ideas like the earthship are beautiful and practical, but they are doomed to reservations and individual projects for people with wealth and education if we don’t organize to fight the domination of corporate capital in all aspects of our lives.

Veteran white collar criminologist @WilliamKBlack says next financial crisis “is certain.” [Video]

“We have created the incentive structures that [are] going to produce a much larger disaster.”