The Digger

4 May 2019 It took less than 24 hours for the Macron government’s fabricated story about “yellow vest” protesters attacking the Pitié-Salpêtrière hospital on May Day in Paris to collapse like a house of cards. It has been exposed as yet another lie to cast the protests against social inequality as criminal riots and promote Macron’s build-up of a French police state against the working class. The events in question occurred slightly after 4:00 p.m. on Wednesday, on the Boulevard de l’Hôpital in Paris’ 13th arrondissement. The street was filled with thousands of protesters, a portion of the more than 40,000 people demonstrating in the city that day, when riot police fired tear gas into the densely-packed crowd and triggered a wave of panic. A reporter for the right-wing daily Le Figaro , Wladimir Garcin-Berson, who was present at the scene, tweeted that there was a “wave of tear gas, the air became unbreathable.” Videos posted subsequently on social media show that pr...

May 2, 2019 If the voters in the faking USA are exceptional among all of humanity, it is probably because of the degree to which they seem to insist that it is pragmatic to believe that they can be in two places at once. To enable desired changes, they continue to attempt to reinstall candidates who have proven that they are largely lacking the desire to change the deteriorating system. The vast majority of voters seem to believe that by supporting a candidate who mostly resembles what they say they don’t want, that they have integrity and wisdom. One of the greatest examples of the short-sighted, infantile, desperately spoiled nature of so many supposed liberals/progressives in the various medias and thereby in the commonly heard discourses in the faking USA is the religiously adhered to pronouncement that seemingly everything that is going wrong and every example of the widespread corruption within the supposed exceptional society is “Trump’s” fault. This misguided blami...

May 1, 2019 Yesterday's failed coup attempt in Venezuela significantly hurt the Trump administration's international standing. It delegitimized its Venezuelan clients Juan Guaidó and Leopoldo López. After recognizing that their original 'regime change' plan failed (again) the White House starts to beat the war drums. That wasn't the plan : The Trump administration, which has backed Mr. Guaidó since he first challenged Mr. Maduro’s authority more than three months ago, clearly thought the day would unfold differently. There is no official explanation why the Trump administration believed that the comical coup attempt by Juan Guaidó and his master Leopolo López would work. There are signs though that the government of President Nicolas Maduro set a trap. Several people in the top echelon of the Venezuelan government gave false promises that they would join the U.S. proxy side. They snookered Guaidó into launching his coup to let him fail. ...

"Class, Race and Marxism  collects six important essays by the leading critical historian David Roediger, published in various venues over the last dozen years. He lays out major trends, and some necessary additions, in politically engaged research into labor and race issues both historically and today. In a provocative introduction, Roediger surveys the book’s key themes. He begins with a well-reasoned critique of David Harvey’s misinformed notion that recent black struggles in U.S. cities such as in Ferguson, Missouri, have little to do with anticapitalist resistance and revolt. On the contrary, substantial evidence shows that Ferguson’s black uprisings have involved pro-worker struggles against oppressive conditions imposed by deindustrialization, including the extreme victimization, impoverishment, and shaking-down of black people by the white elite. This oppression has encompassed much government malpractice to protect white interests, including racialized police brutality...

How Intersectionalism Betrays the World’s Muslim Women I attended the infamous “#Feminist” speaking event at the Sydney Town Hall. It was a discussion between Roxane Gay, a Haitian-born intersectional feminist, and Christina Hoff Sommers, a self-described “equity feminist.” I went with the intention of confronting my growing disillusionment with the morally proscriptive nature of intersectional feminism and the broader leftist movement. I harboured hopes that the divisive behaviour I was seeing on social media was disproportionately represented by radicals and that the event would bring some sense to the madness. Instead, I left feeling completely alienated from a movement that once brought me so much hope. It was my second crisis of faith in three years, the first being my renunciation of Islam at the age of 21. Free from the shackles of fundamentalism, I embraced the left-wing movement with open arms. Until only recently, I saw it as a celebration of everything I’d b...

The following is an excerpt from "Omnia Sunt Communia: May Day 2017." Thank you, Mensch, for the suggestion. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ The states ratified this constitution over the next two years in no small part because of the tireless efforts of Alexander Hamilton and James Madison collected in The Federalist Papers . The tenth of these papers tells it all. There Madison expresses his fear of “theoretic politicians,” that is, those who advocated an “agrarian law” or equalization of land, those who favored “perfect equality,” those who were “equalized in their possessions.” In brief, the U.S.A. was to become a massive state against the commons. This was an appeal to the men of property, the men of private property, the men who commanded property as capital. The problem as Madison saw it was that this ruling class failed to unite itself against the commons. It was divided in four parts, or “factions” as he called them – the landlords, the merchants, the m...