"marxism" via Jack in Google Reader

All Quiet Now

2009-11-08T11:14:24Z

To mark Remembrance Day Radio 4’s Saturday afternoon play was a dramatisation of Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front. I read it years ago and had forgotten most of it except for the last lines:-

He fell in October 1918 on a day that was so still and quiet along the entire front line that the army dispatches restricted themselves to the simple sentence that there was nothing new to report on the western front. He was lying on the ground as if asleep. When they turned him over you could see that he could not have suffered long. His face was so composed that it looked as if he was almost happy that it had turned out that way.

Picture from the German cemetery at Ypres. The British and Commonwealth cemeteries are in white stone with little gardens and look bright and clean, even cheerful except that they represent so many dead. The German cemetery is sombre and shaded with oaks, and the stones are black.

Chris Harman's death a tragic loss for socialist movement - Socialist Alternative

2009-11-08T10:36:00Z

Chris Harman's death a tragic loss for socialist movement - Socialist Alternative

Nécrologie de Chris Harman sur le site de Socialist Alternative (Australie).

9-11 was an INSIDE JOB!!

2009-11-08T09:06:33Z

9/11 Inside Job – The Most Explosive Evidence Yet! An Experiment using Thermite shows for sure that 9-11 was indeed an Inside Job.

A must see video for Professor Steven Jones shows it all, guys we have to republish, retweet & spread this video as much as we can and lets ask now WHO’S THE TERRORIST HERE?!!

University World News - FRANCE: No impact on joblessness

2009-11-08T08:59:00Z

University World News - FRANCE: No impact on joblessness

La revue internationale "University World News" a publié ma lettre sur le chômage et les universités en France. Suivez le lien.

Sommet de Copenhague : RÉCHAUFFEMENT CLIMATIQUE : NE PAS CÉDER À L’ILLUSION TECHNOLOGIQUE | NPA

2009-11-08T08:30:00Z

RÉCHAUFFEMENT CLIMATIQUE : NE PAS CÉDER À L’ILLUSION TECHNOLOGIQUE | NPA

Cet article du NPA explique pourquoi on ne peut pas attendre grande chose du sommet des représentants des riches.

Slideshow: Bedouins in the BEKAA/ Lebanon

2009-11-08T08:27:00Z

Save the Galillee!

2009-11-08T08:05:00Z

don’t usually go for the low hanging fruit, but the other day, I received an advert proclaiming,

Jewish Galilee In Danger

Do you want to do something about it? Be A Partner in Saving The Galilee! Buy A Piece of Israel! "Because it's time to take our country back!"

It had never occurred to me that Jews could buy indulgences, but it transpires that

"One who purchases 4 cubits (amot) in the Land of Israel is assured a portion in the World to Come"

- Midrash Zuta on Megilat Ruth (4:5)

For US$100, you can not only buy a plot in the afterlife, but also 4 square metres ‘of Lower Galilee farming land for B'Ahavat Yisrael's Avoda Ivrit (Jewish Labor) youth farming project’.

That’s right, Hebrew labour is back.

The land will be farmed exclusively by Jewish youths and the more land that is purchased and worked by Jews the better chance we have of ensuring Jewish sovereignty in the Galilee!

But wait, there’s more!

Special Offer: Dedicate your own section of 18 plots for only $1,500!

Not only that, but if you’re a US resident, you little investment in ethnic cleansing is tax deductible.

On his website, beneath the slogan ‘...because it is time to take our country back...’, B'Ahavat Yisrael’s founder and director, Yosef Ben Tzion (Joel Busner), writes,

If you read or see CNN or the BBC or even the more even handed FOX news, you may come away with the feeling that the government of Israel's settlement policy is an illegal impediment to Peace...

He is scandalised that,

...the Arabs are voting citizens...they receive more National Insurance per capita than Jews...they are causing more deadly car accidents per capita...the media, the Judiciary, and the overall control of the 'system' are controlled by self hating Jewish leftists...the Arabs are winning point after point as the base of a Jewish state dissolves with each point...Thanks to Israel's Extreme Leftist dominated Supreme Court the Israeli Land Authority can no longer develop a new community exclusively for Jews...Arabs can now buy homes in Jewish villages...The Negev is being taken over by blatant Bedouin land grabs and there are thousands upon thousands of illegal houses all over the Negev...

If have the stomach for more racist autoparody, follow the link.

3arabawy BookMarx 11/08/2009 (a.m.)

2009-11-08T07:30:20Z

Middle East Online – Gamal Mubarak: Egypt’s Next Unelected President

tags: Egypt, GamalMubarak, Dictatorship, Mubarak
Why Vimeo is Better than YouTube | PitelSPOT

tags: Vimeo, YouTube
- From just about every video I’ve seen, the community appears to be pretty skillful at filmmaking as well, a far cry from the annoying 12-year olds that have populated YouTube.
gulfnews : Students among 5 political activists arrested in Egypt

A powerful Reuters photo of Egypt’s banker-turned-pimp. I especially love Suror’s belly dangling in the background screen.

tags: Egypt, Students, Police, Detainees
الحكم بالسجن 5 سنوات والغرامة على الرائد أكرم سليمان | التعذيب في مصر

tags: Police, Egypt, Torture, HumanRights, Trial, Alexandria
4shared.com – تخزين ومشاركة الملفات عبر الإنترنت – تنزيل 7elm eL Mondyal – Lefty-M Ft. ModyRap [EgyRap.Net].mp3

I haven’t heard anything more stupid than this in years…

tags: Algeria, Egypt, Football, Pimps, Wankers, HipHop, A7a, Stupidity
Socialist Workers Party – Chris Harman has died

tags: Egypt, Socialists, Trotskyists, Left, Chris, Harman, RIP
عمــال مطـــاحن مصــــــــــــــــــــر: من المسئول عن عدم دخولى الشركة و يترك الحرامية المسئولين عن خراب الشركة يبرطعوا فيها

tags: Egypt, Workers, GrainMillsWorkers
RevSocialist اشتراكي ثوري: Thank You!!

tags: Revolution, Blogs, Egypt, Left
Chris Harman: a life in the heart of the struggle « Mac Uaid

tags: Chris, Harman, Egypt, Left, Trotskyists, Socialists
- Harman took his role as an SWP leader seriously, but that did not stop him from having a transparent and comradely working relationship with socialists outside the SWP.
Histomat: Adventures in Historical Materialism: Chris Harman (1942-2009)

tags: Chris, Harman, Egypt, Left, Trotskyists, Socialists
- A former pupil of Ralph Miliband at the University of Leeds, it was during the 1960s and particularly the year 1968 while around the London School of Economics that Chris Harman came to prominence as a leader of the student revolt,. It seems he had embarked on a Phd with Miliband when 1968 broke out – but then abandoned this along with any idea of making an academic career – no doubt agreeing with the sentiment of Lenin that ‘It is more pleasant and useful to go through the ”experience of revolution” than to write about it.’
Farfahinne: Chris Harman: R.I.P

tags: Chris, Harman, Egypt, Photo, Left, Trotskyists, Socialists
كريس هارمان | مركز الدراسات الاشتراكية – مصر

tags: Chris, Harman, Arabic, Trotskyism, Left, Egypt, Socialists, Britain

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

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Hamid Dabashi’s Got a New Ditty

2009-11-08T03:10:19Z

Now, don't bother watching this video if you don't want. For what it's worth, it's actually somewhat more interesting than usual, at least for Dabashi. Still, on the flip-side, it's not exactly a first-class primer on how to use the English language [alert, Dabashi: "coagulate" and "coalesce" are both long, impressive-sounding words that begin with "coa" and end with "e," but they mean different things]. Anyway, several points. Dabashi is now speaking of the extent to which the Iranian regime is embedded in society. He also slithers and dances around the existence-or-not of fraud, having dropped the rhetoric of "social facts." [Compare to this article, and responses here, and more generally my fuego here]. He's also dropped the claim of 70 percent unemployment among those under the age of 30. I kind of think someone forwarded him my essays: "Over the last 2 months, I have tried to control my own critical ego and listen carefully. I have been going and reading web-blogs and web-sites and so forth that I didn't know existed." He suggests that he's talking about Persian-blogs, not English-blogs, but doesn't say so explicitly.

What's my stake in all this? The following. The government in Iran is a repressive one and there's no question about that. It's also deeply interwoven in society--as a rentier state, oil money burbles and gushes about, and one way to use it is to pay citizens to be members of security forces. There are also state subsidies that flow to the working-class or the informal proletariat. This is a strong state. US-Israeli assault, unlikely but not impossible, will reduce non-state-based sources of income and social support, increasing reliance on the state, not reducing. Likewise with sanctions, the absurd cosmopolitan euphemism for economic warfare. And guess who supports sanctions, if a diplomatic track fails. No? Guess again. AIPAC? For sure, but we knew that already. And who else? Despite the hedges, qualifications, and verbal feints, J Street.

New Jewish Lobby? New Israel Lobby.

Technorati Tags: "Making Shit Up", Ahmadinejad, green movement, Hamid Dabashi, Iran, Iranian class structure

A Riposte to Hamid Dabashi Hamid Dabashi has had a remarkably consistent line about what’s...
More Iranian Fantasies Despite the previously blossoming rhetoric about “social facts,” “fraud,” and...
Iranian Fantasies It looks like no one voted for Ahmadinejad. Stipulate that...

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O Carrie-Da

2009-11-08T05:22:00Z

Bonsoir, mes amis. That's all the French you're getting; that's all the French you need. Back to the language of Empire. I'm in Montreal - where Jesus was from, dontchaknow? - but what matters to me now is the latest episode in the scandal-plagued life of ex-Miss California, Carrie Prejean. As you will recall from previous updates, Prejean was dumped after invoking her Christianity to support her opposition to same-gender marriage. Overnight she went from pun-up girl to conservative pin-up girl.

Last time I mentioned her, she had launched a lawsuit against the pageant organizers for leaking the fact they paid $5,000 for her breast implants. Now it seems that she's dropped her alleged $1 million dollar lawsuit in the most dramatic of circumstatnces. It's alleged that the pageant owners' lawyers found a video of Carrie, uh, enjoying herself:

When the video started playing, Carrie's first reaction was "that's disgusting" ... and Carrie denied it was her. Then, the camera angle changed ... and panned up to her face. She was caught red-handed ... so to speak.

Carrie was rendered speechless and immediately began talking with her lawyer. We're told it took about 15 seconds for Carrie to drop her $1 million dollar demand.

Doubts have been expressed over the validity of the story, as you would expect. It is, afterall, a little too convinient, don't you think? If the video exists, it will only be a matter of time before it surfaces on line, I suppose. Until then we will have to speculate. Speculate, analyze and theologize.

You see, we could say that Carrie's act of self-love models God's love for the world, despite the theological complications of such a position. Or, we could say that Carrie's public life models the hypocritical trainwreck that is American civilisation. Yeah, I think I'll go with that one.

Celebrate the 101st anniversary of the birth of Comrade Enver Hoxha!

2009-10-17T03:56:30Z

The following article is from the Communist Party of Great Britain (Marxist-Leninist), marking the 100th birthday of Enver Hoxha, 1 year ago: Celebrating the 100th birthday of Enver Hoxha: Architect of socialist Albania, anti-revisionist fighter, and one of the great Marxist-Leninist heroes of the 20th century Born in Gjirokastër, southern Albania, on 16 October 1908, Enver Hoxha was [...]

Abdel Qader Yassin عبد القادر ياسين

2009-11-08T02:34:26Z

Palestinian Marxist writer Abdel Qader Yassin,
Cairo’s Press Syndicate…

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Guevara جيفارا

2009-11-08T02:08:47Z

El-Borollos community activist and left-wing artist Mohamed el-Nahass showing a portrait of Guevara, made of rice and lentils… Cairo’s Press Syndicate…

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Chris Harman RIP كريس هارمان

2009-11-08T02:02:04Z

Tribute to Chris Harman: A poster by Comrade Gaber, based on a pic I took, made out of Harman’s influential article, The Prophet and the Proletariat…

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Kamal Khalil كمال خليل

2009-11-08T01:27:26Z

Kamal Khalil, at Cairo’s Press Syndicate, devastated
by Chris Harman’s death…

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Chris Harman RIP

2009-11-08T01:24:17Z

The portrait of the leading British Marxist Chris Harman made of his article “The prophet and the proletariat” dedicated to his soul wishing for him to rest in peace..

If anyone want the portrait in high resolution for printing purposes please contact me and i will email it to you.

New G.A.S. Round…

2009-11-07T23:24:45Z

G.A.S. or graphics against system is a project I started in working on it long time ago, exactly when I started to feel that I can do real designs that’s more powerful that million words, GAS goal is so simple making designs that have the beauty of the art & the power of swards in order to agitate the people against the capitalist systems every where on this planet.
I ask all the graphic designers (in Egypt as a start) to make more effort in making some awareness graphic designs that have the conditions of high quality & artistic content.

Anti-Capitalism by The Girl 78

Freedom by ~darq

violence_ by ~2a7la

Egyptian Rumpways by ~gharbeia

Child Soldiers in Africa by ~eslamvito

Day of Anger For Al-Aqsa by ~artstuck

Boy with bombs by ~SmurfPoet7

Save Palestine by ~42nd

sticker free palestine by =issam-zerr

Make Peace Not War – Anti War by ~CaptainCarisma

Lenin by =monsteroftheid

Che Nasrallah by ~Noor-Arts

Gandhi by =monsteroftheid

Iggy In Tailspin As Liberals Take Fast Train To Loserville

2009-11-07T23:30:00Z

"Let me explain how screwed we are..."

IT SEEMS THAT MICHAEL IGNATIEFF'S LIBERALS ARE SPINNING APART faster than a Wall St. investment bank. Advisors and key staffers are slipping out the back door, caucus members are voting however the hell they want and support for the Liberals is stuck like an oxcart in the mud.
How is this possible? The Tories have been shown to be incompetent, mean spirited and not a little bit crazy. The economy is in the tank with unemployment rising, while labour force participation is falling. The Tories were caught spending extra stimulus bucks in their ridings to shore up the vote and then tried to cover it up in the most ham-fisted fashion by first giving only the most minimal information. Then, when Kevin Page, Parliament's independent budget watchdog, requested more info they passed along 4,476 pages of documents rather than the electronic spreadsheet on the computer of the Transport and Infrastructure Minister, Chris Day. Then they attacked Page as a Liberal lackey - even though they created the office and appointed him to the job.
In the foreign policy department, the Afghan mission is going south at high velocity with generals openly talking about losing, and the Americans abandoning the countryside to insurgents. Canadian generals are already beginning plans for a pullout - in other words a surrender, after losing 133 soldiers. For nothing.
In other words, the Tories should be sitting ducks, fish in a barrel. They are the proverbial broadside of a barn. Yet, Ignatieff has singularly managed to miss every time for the simple reason that he is fundamentally a neo-conservative. He can't fight the Tories because he doesn't disagree with them on anything of substance. And because of that, the only thing Ignatieff has to build support for the Liberals is his charm (ahem) and spin. And he has the political instincts of a june bug. Why a june bug? I don't know but I don't imagine you would want your political party to be led by an insect that continually flies into closed windows. Crap, I can't help but think that the Liberals must be truly screwed if they chose him as the "strong leader" after what's-his-face-green-shift-guy: Droopy Dog.
Iggy is now discovering an inexorable law of politics, that a leader of a political party who can't provide leadership, who can't demonstrate an alternative to their political opponents - especially when they are on the bottom, such a leader is doomed to decay. Sooner or later the loyalty that bound his team to him will wear thin and they will head for the exit doors. That's what's happening here. It's the sign of a sinking ship. My prediction is that Iggy's days are numbered - and not a very high number either. My second prediction is that his shoes will be filled by perennial traitor and ego maniac, Bob Rae.
Rae is a sharper political fish than Iggy. He will pull a chunk of people from the NDP into the Liberal camp (perhaps enough to make the difference when an election rolls around). That will send the NDP into a panic and they will (my third prediction) try to stem the flow by accommodating to the pull rightwards - thus proving that the Liberals are a more rational choice for the centre-left than the perennial vote losers of the NDP.* He will pull in Green voters, most of whom are disaffected Liberals anyway. And Rae will be a much harder, much smarter, opponent than Harper is used to. He also knows how to run a caucus. I predict that Bob Rae will be the next Prime Minister of Canada. God help us.

* Hey, don't get me wrong, I hope that the NDP pulls left and focuses on grassroots mobilization behind some real issues - as opposed to stupid bank charges. And I hope they stop voting for the Tories. But I'm too cynical to hold my breath on that one.

Last Call at the Tin Palace

2009-11-07T22:59:54Z

At the risk of using a cliché, I would describe Paul Pines as the ultimate writer’s writer. Despite what might be seen as a modest output in terms of quantity, the quality is always superlative. His last work was a memoir titled “My Brother’s Madness” that I reviewed in November 2007. Here’s an excerpt from my [...]

Slide Show: Chris Harman in Cairo 2007-9 كريس هارمان في القاهرة

2009-11-07T22:58:45Z

Click above to watch a slide show of pictures I took of Chris Harman, during his visits to Cairo, 2007 and 2009…

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