The Digger

If you’re anything like me, you’ve been absolutely apoplectic this past week watching the United States orchestrate a coup in Venezuela. It has been truly horrifying to watch these things play out in real time. How bold and brazen these thugs have become! They are doing this right out in the open, they hardly even try to hide it. Sure, they try to whitewash it with their typical propaganda. They obfuscate key facts. They paint Maduro as a criminal. They pass around cheap slogans. Where once we heard, “You’re either with us, or you’re with the terrorists”, now it’s, “either you stand with the forces of freedom, or you’re in league with Maduro and his mayhem”. It’s disgusting. It’s disgusting and horrifying and saddening, but if there is one thing we gain by watching this tragedy unfold, it is a certain clarity about the state of affairs in the world. It makes it clear that conflict is inevitable. I’m not talking about conflict in Venezuela, although conflict is likely to unfold th

In a recent  interview with  The Corbett Report , the  Ron Paul Institute ’s Daniel McAdams spoke disdainfully of those ostensibly anti-interventionist libertarians who picked this moment of all times to loudly and aggressively condemn Venezuela’s president Maduro, just as the US power establishment is ramping up its campaign to topple the Venezuelan government. “All of a sudden now there are millions of Venezuela experts in America, and many of them could not point Venezuela out on a map five days ago,” McAdams  said . “And everyone has to have this disclaimer, ‘Well, I know it’s probably worse than North Korea, but the US government shouldn’t get involved.’ It’s cowardice, because once the war starts, they can say ‘Hey I never called for US intervention!’ No, but you’re a conveyor belt for propaganda. You’re a conveyor belt to get the machine ginned up for war. And so you’ve got to stand up and take responsibility.” McAdams has for years consistently operated in th

Canada's New Democratic Party has failed to take a principled stand against the Trudeau government's pro-US regime change agenda in Venezuela, argues Yves Engler What should the leader of Canada’s left wing party say about what’s happening in Venezuela? Here are a few suggestions: “Canada should respect international law in its dealings with Venezuela.” Or, “Canada shouldn’t select the president of Venezuela.” How about, “The US has a long history of overthrowing governments in Latin America and Canada should never take part.” Any (or all) of these statements would be clear, reasonable positions for a social democratic party that claims to be in favour of international law and to represent the interests of ordinary people, rather than billionaires, to express. Instead, NDP leader Jagmeet Singh has issued vague, contradictory words about the Liberal government’s aggressive effort to topple Venezuela’s elected president. Over the past two years, Justin Trudeau’s gover

Cloud Atlas and Marvin Harris Memories of graduate level anthropology from the 1970’s seem now like they are from some parallel universe. Being like something from out of the Australian shaman dream time. It was a era full of Lorenz and Leaky and rational thought about human behavior based on biological observations and physical archeology. One of the books students were forced to buy was Cannibals and Kings by Marvin Harris. The book may have remained forgotten in my large collection had it not been for a movie called Cloud Atlas . After watching the movie I immediately started thinking about Marvin Harris. Thus stimulated I found myself digging out his book Cannibals and Kings and rereading it. So like real-life Cloud Atlas characters in a long chain of bearers of some ancestral wisdom let us rediscover Marvin Harris in the context of Cloud Atlas . The book Cloud Atlas was of course written by David Mitchell and he has mention little concerning his inspira

There is a role for intellectuals in these new movements, certainly, but it will have to involve a little less talking and a lot more listening. via  La Monde by David Graeber Our full coverage:  Yellow Vests Movement Rocks France If one feature of any truly revolutionary moment is the complete failure of conventional categories to describe what’s happening around us, then that’s a pretty good sign we’re living in revolutionary times. It strikes me that the profound confusion, even incredulity, displayed by the French commentariat—and even more, the world commentariat—in the face of each successive “Acte” of the Gilets Jaunes drama, now rapidly approaching its insurrectionary climax, is a result of a near total inability to take account of the ways that power, labour, and the movements ranged against power, have changed over the last 50 years, and particularly, since 2008. Intellectuals have for the most part done an extremely poor job understanding these changes. Let

This is a long, but quite (or hopefully) provoking essay by the anthropologist and activist David Graeber, published in 2012.  Read it all at  Of Flying Cars and the Declining Rate of Profit  Here are a few excerpts: Might the cultural sensibility that came to be referred to as postmodernism best be seen as a prolonged meditation on all the technological changes that never happened? The question struck me as I watched one of the recent Star Wars movies. The movie was terrible, but I couldn’t help but feel impressed by the quality of the special effects. Recalling the clumsy special effects typical of fifties sci-fi films, I kept thinking how impressed a fifties audience would have been if they’d known what we could do by now—only to realize, “Actually, no. They wouldn’t be impressed at all, would they? They thought we’d be doing this kind of thing by now. Not just figuring out more sophisticated ways to simulate it.” That last word—simulate—is key. The technologies t

Published: 25/11/2006 Written by: Tom Bramble Socialist Alternative Socialists argue that the working class needs to make a revolution to bring about a socialist society. But as soon as you say this you encounter an obvious objection: that the working class does not appear to be in a mad hurry to make a revolution. The supposed reasons for the apparent passivity of the working class are many and varied. That the working class in the West is too well-off. That the working class is trapped in a fog of media lies. That, with the decline of the blue-collar workforce, the working class doesn't exist in the way that it did in Marx's day. What often underpins this pessimism is a romanticised idea of the past. People think of the Russian Revolution of 1917 or the stirring struggles of Spanish workers in the 1930s and believe that workers then were constantly itching to fight and that society was in a permanent state of turmoil. This objection is nothing new. In 1907, the