The goal of
Red Letter Christians is simple: To take Jesus seriously by endeavoring to live out His radical, counter-cultural teachings as set forth in Scripture, and especially embracing the lifestyle prescribed in the Sermon on the Mount.
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posted by No Robots
on May 16, 2013 -
317 comments
Political Identification: communist
Your problem:
I have recently started seeing a communist woman, and I really like her, but my problem is that I still have overwhelmingly strong feelings for the communist woman I had a thing with in the summer, and who has gone to fight the good fight in other lands. Should I tell the comrade I’m currently seeing about my divided affections? As we are not yet in full communism, I fear I may not have enough to go round…
From: Bloody Red Heart"
"Dear Bloody Red Heart, Always remember that information is power, and functions as such."
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posted by the man of twists and turns
on Apr 2, 2013 -
35 comments
Or, why is there still socialism in the United States? Why, then, would we look for evidence of socialism only where a state seized by radicals of the Left inaugurates a dictatorship of the proletariat? Or, to lower the rhetorical volume and evidentiary stakes, why would we expect to find socialism only where avowed socialists or labor parties contend for state power? We should instead assume that socialism, like capitalism, is a cross-class cultural construction, to which even the bourgeoisie has already made significant contributions – just as the proletariat has long made significant contributions to the cross-class construction we know as capitalism. What follows?
posted by the man of twists and turns
on Feb 13, 2013 -
46 comments
Richard Seymour has a new book out:
Unhitched: The Trial of Christopher Hitchens. It is reviewed in
In These Times:
Christopher Hitchens Stands Trial That said, Hitchens’ later years and the enormous celebrity he enjoyed during that period are a case study of just how handsome the rewards are for those willing and able to serve as attack dogs for the dominant powers of their place and time. Hitchens’ main service to the American elite was to employ a combination of innuendo and character assassination to cast aspersion on virtually every high-profile figure critical of American foreign policy after 9/11—a roster that includes Julian Assange, Noam Chomsky, George Galloway, Michael Moore, Harold Pinter, Edward Said, Cindy Sheehan, Oliver Stone and Gore Vidal.
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posted by the man of twists and turns
on Jan 21, 2013 -
140 comments
"The lofty vision of a stateless, marketless world faces obstacles that are not moral but technical, and it’s important to grasp exactly what they are." Seth Ackerman for Jacobin Magazine on
"thinking concretely and practically about how we can free ourselves from social institutions that place such confining limits on the kind of society we are able to have. Because of one thing we can be certain: the present system will either be replaced or it will go on forever."
posted by davidjmcgee
on Jan 7, 2013 -
30 comments
The US does not have a spending problem, we have a distribution problem "Forty years from now, America will be twice as rich on average as we are today. But most of that wealth will go to the very richest households. We only have a budget crisis if they refuse to pay higher taxes... So the real point isn't that we can't afford Social Security and Medicare. It's that some people don't want to pay the higher taxes necessary to maintain Social Security and Medicare. This is a question of distribution, pure and simple."
posted by bookman117
on Nov 20, 2012 -
53 comments
From the mid 40s to the mid 50s
Coronet Instructional Films were always ready to provide social guidance for teenagers on subjects as diverse as
dating,
popularity,
preparing for being drafted, and
shyness, as well as to children on
following the law,
the value of quietness in school, and
appreciating our parents. They also provided education on topics such as the connection between
attitudes and health,
what kind of people live in America,
how to keep a job,
supervising women workers,
the nature of capitalism, and
the plantation System in Southern life. Inside is an annotated collection of all 86 of the complete Coronet films in the
Prelinger Archives as well as a few more. Its not like you had work to do or anything right?
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posted by Blasdelb
on Nov 1, 2012 -
41 comments
It has been a bad week for contemporary Marxist scholarship [
earlier this morning].
This past Saturday, the geography world lost Neil Smith,
versatile theorist,
advocate for social justice,
LA Times Book Award winner, and founder of the
Center for Place, Culture and Politics at CUNY. Best known for
his theory of the uneven spatial development of capitalism and
for changing the way we think about gentrification, his numerous contributions to the field of critical human geography include a
sustained critique of neoliberalism,
a history of American empire, and the declaration that
there's no such thing as a natural disaster. Here's Neil on
Occupy Wall Street,
urban securitization,
deconstructing USA Today in 1984, and
singing the Socialist ABCs.
posted by avocet
on Oct 1, 2012 -
12 comments
"
He would sit in this most incredible bath that had a swan-necked mythological figure with a with a lady of his choice, not with water in it, but with champagne in it, and I guess they would both sit there and listen to the sound of his father spinning in his grave.” - on King Edward VII and his voracious appetites, and his favorite mistress, Daisy Warwick.
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posted by the man of twists and turns
on Jul 2, 2012 -
48 comments
Who, exactly, represents the left extreme in the establishment blogosphere? You'd likely hear names like Jane Hamsher or Glenn Greenwald. But these examples are instructive. Is Hamsher a socialist? A revolutionary anti-capitalist? In any historical or international context-- in the context of a country that once had a robust socialist left, and in a world where there are straightforwardly socialist parties in almost every other democracy-- is Hamsher particularly left-wing? Not at all. It's only because her rhetoric is rather inflamed that she is seen as particularly far to the left.
Freddie De Boer on the
lack of left wing discourse in the blogosphere.
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posted by ennui.bz
on Jan 18, 2011 -
84 comments
Distributist Review promotes
distributism (wiki), a
"third way" of economics between
capitalism and socialism, inspired by
Catholic social teaching. Popularized by
G. K. Chesterton (
more,
more),
Fr. Vincent McNabb (
more,
more),
Hilaire Belloc (
more,
more), and
E. F. Schumacher (
more,
more,
more), as well as through
the pages of the Catholic Worker (
more,
also), distributism seeks to put "productive" property into the hands of the many, with implications for
urban homesteading and
agricultural reform, as well as
the rebirth of the guild as an idea.
Distributism is not merely an economic system -
it is wholly fused with Catholic teachings,
fusing the left and right,
standing against modern, liberal political and sociological thought.
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posted by Sticherbeast
on Nov 28, 2010 -
33 comments
It is not our role to take power. It is our role to make the powerful frightened of us. And that's what we've forgotten. Give up that dream! Chris Hedges talks neoliberalism and neofeudalism, the civil rights movement, Camden, Obama, Clinton, Tea Parties, moral nihilism, inverted totalitarianism and corpocracy, NAFTA, welfare reform, health care, labor, poverty, Yugoslavia, post-industrial capitalism, economic crisis, imperial collapse, socialism, and democracy, among other things.
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posted by gerryblog
on Apr 24, 2010 -
51 comments
The Obama Coalition "
These general findings suggest the possibility that the political strength of voters whose convictions are perhaps best described as Social Democratic in the European sense is reaching a significant level in the United States. With effective organization and mobilization, such voters are positioned to set the agenda in the Democratic Party in the near future."
posted by Glibpaxman
on Apr 4, 2010 -
37 comments
