By Linda Kintz

…By dismissing arguments that are not articualted in the terms with which we are familiar, we overlook the very places where politics come to matter most; at the deepest levels of the unconscious, in our bodies, through faith, and in relation to the emotions. Belief and politics are rational, and they are not.

I am putting a link here to a “buzzflash” that I hope people will pass along. I also hope people who know the technology will make more of these.

I am reprinting this piece from the latest (invaluable) Black Commentator, with some reservations. It is an extremely good description of the cooptation that takes place inside the Democratic Party with what I believe to be an extremely anemic response. A mere PAC, which is suggested, does nothing to overcome the lack of proportional represnetation combined with white gerrymandering of districts, the wealth primary that selects out insurgent candidates, etc. Nonetheless, the resistance to the rightward trend in Black Democratic politics is interesting, especially the disenchantment with the latest “leader,” Obama. It’s a shame that the Black Radical Congress has suffered (just as the Labor Party did) from the tug and torque of left-sectarian opportunism, and we might hope that the BRC will enjoy a resurgence. We need a party that is openly and consciously for socialism, self-determination for oppressed nationalities, and the kind of feminism that opposes patriarchy at its roots… dedicated to left refoundation and not organizing yet another 20-person ‘vanguard.’

Stan Goff

A Cessna 150 had penetrated the three-mile inner circle of Washington DC’s protected airspace… the most restricted airspace in the country. The wayward pilot turn out to be a man with a minor on board, en route from Souther Pennsylvania to an air show in Lumberton, NC.

By Patricia Williams

The following is from a memo Williams wrote to her law school administrators, regarding the content of law school exam scenarios, some of which she lists, e.g., ” – a tax exam that asks students to calculate the tax implications of Kunta Kinte’s master when the slavecatchers cut off his foot.

Edited by Joy James & Tracy Sharpley-Whiting

Despte agitational movements, the concept of African Americans participating in political decisions has historically been translated through corporate, state or philanthropic channels. A century ago, the vision and resources of the American Baptist Home Missionary Society (ABHMS) allowed wealthy, white Christian missionaries to create the black elite Talented Tenth as a shadow of themselves as influential, liberal leaders, and to organize privileged black Americans to serve as a buffer zone between white America and a restive, disenfranchised black mass.

By Maria Mies

My own questioning wemt further and deeper. Apart from the question of its origin [patriarchy], I wanted to know why such a brutal system did not disappear with modernity, or with capitalism, as both Marxists and liberals had predicted. What was, what is, the relationship between patriarchy and capitalism? Are they two systems? Are they one system? Is patriarchal exploitation and subordination necessary for an economic systembased on extended accumulation? Or could this accumulation also happen without heirarchical, exploitative gender relations? It was obvious that we could no longer be satisfied with the classical Marxist explanation that this relation was only a secondary contradiction whose solution would come after the primary contradiction — the class antagonism between labour and capital — had been resolved.

By Alf Hornborg

In previous chapters I have suggested that the accumulation of machinery at certain points or within certain sectors of the world system is in a sense analogous to the organic growth of biomass. Indeed, our taslk of economic “growth” is a revealing metaphor, for the Old English growan referred to biological processes such as “to produce by cultivation; to raise; to develop naturally.” To “accumulate” (from Latin ad cumulus, “to heap) means “to grow into a mass,” and the word “mass” means “the quantity of matter in a body.” Both biological and industrial “growth,” it seems, are processes of accumulation. We are used to thinking of that which is accumulated as “mass” or “matter,” but Schrodinger and Georgescu-Roegan have demonstrated that is is really a question of orderliness — that is, negative entropy.

By STAN GOFF

Disequilibrium has created the conditions for a powerful idea-shift if we can seize the moment.

The United States government pounced on the collapse of the twin towers to launch a campaign for the complete redesign of Planet Earth’s geo-political architecture. While the monetary and military basis for US power has remained intact–for the time being–the predictability of international relations, even and especially from the imperial point of view, has diminished profoundly.

By Rod Bush

The modern civil rights movement captured center stage in the dramas of race relations in the United States, and dominated civil society for much of the 1950s and 1960s. To the extent that it appealed to white Americans on the basis of the American dream, so long as it sought to complete the great American Revolution of 1776, it was extremely flattering. But the civil rights movement was not the only show in town. Not all Black people held to these integrationist dreams.