Interview with author of "Necropolis: Disease, Power, and Capitalism in the Cotton Kingdom".

https://slate.com/human-interest/2020/08/immunoprivilege-yellow-fever-new-orleans-covid.html

Astra Taylor talks with Rutgers faculty union president Todd Wolfson about organizing academic communities in the age of COVID-19.

http://bostonreview.net/class-inequality/todd-wolfson-astra-taylor-beyond-neoliberal-university

This base-building is aimed at politically unsophisticated or cynical Leftists who join around the banner of being “anti-woke.” Meanwhile Greenwald, Taibbi, and Ball cultivate this anti-wokeness with the great good guidance of the likes of Walter Benn Michaels and Adolph Reed. These “normie socialists” are not “Red/Brown,” far from it. However, there is a path dependence, a tendency in organized social democracy to go towards the lowest common denominator, tail reaction, and turn on one’s comrades. The cultivated anti-wokeness has brought us to a point in which the distinction between the “normies” and the “red/browns” is one of degree, not kind.

https://spectrejournal.com/from-the-socialism-of-fools-to-social-democracy-in-one-country/

The Second Wave of the COVID-19 Counterrevolution

On the ruling class strategy in the current conjuncture, its inner contradictions and the perspectives of the workers and popular resistance

By Michael Pröbsting, 20 July 2020

https://www.thecommunists.net/worldwide/global/the-second-wave-of-the-covid-19-counterrevolution/

 

Contents

 

Introduction

The localized version of Lockdown policy is spreading

New information concerning severity (or not so severity) of the pandemic

Telling figures for Europe, Sweden and Ischgl

The worst pandemic in Africa? Really?

Capitalism and care homes as deadly traps for old people

The real nature of the ruling class bonapartist offensive under the cover of COVID-19

Why is the ruling class opting for a local lockdown strategy?

Excurse: A crisis characteristic for the present period of capitalist decay

The nature and inner contradictions of the local lockdown strategy

Preparing for a new counter-revolutionary offensive

The Lockdown Left: a never ending embarrassment

The shameful example of the PSTU/LIT-CI

The imperialist aristocratism of the Lockdown Left

Building a Revolutionary World Party

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Tel./SMS/WhatsApp/Telegram: +43-650-4068314

Comrades,

Saw Alice Coltrane (harp) must have been late '60s, early 70s with a three piece group headlined by McCoy Tyner at Howard Rumsey's 'The Lighthouse' in Hermosa Beach.  It was a venerable institution whose Jazz was complimented by the folk artists who played Ed Pearl's 'The Ashgrove' (torched three times by gusano right wingers).

While there I took to cribbing notes onto the paper napkins on the table.  There was a Jazz critic from the LA Times (not Leonard Feather) who saw me and asked if I was a writer.  I had never thought of myself as such but I nodded affirmatively.  I later transcribed those notes into an article for a small local newspaper.  It began "Six dollars and a two dollar drink.  Damn.  That's gonna break me."  The rest is lost in the fog that is the memory.

We lost so many, so early during those times:  Trane, Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix...the list is long, far too long, and deeply sorrowful.  But the music they created gave a sense of being to our places as radicals during those times.  The music was experimental. spiritual, militant, universalist, free.  And like those times, gone too soon, gone far far too soon.

Today we have times that we, as the old guard, have been waiting for for nigh on half a century.  And if we are to sustain the momentum that the BLM movement, and its associated allies, have created then we must have that revolutionary culture that inspired us and that we in our turn inspired.  Seek out, find, attend and support the artists that are coming, the ones already here.  Artists who will sound a clarion call with their art, their music, their efforts so outside the bounds that bind us, that they will inspire us to throw off these shackles.  Artists, who in turn, must step to the front of the lines of the class struggles going on before our eyes.  Artists who will follow us and who we can follow in a ceaseless dialectic of culture and struggle.

JAI

Spectre editor Kate Doyle Griffiths reflects on Kim Moody’s rank and file strategy in this first part of a three-part essay. In subsequent installments, they will consider the rank and file strategy in relation to both social reproduction theory and ongoing strategic debates on the US left.

https://spectrejournal.com/the-rank-and-file-strategy-on-new-terrain/

This is the best film about transgender issues.

https://mailchi.mp/cinematropical/the-garden-left-behind-press-release

https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/oureconomy/remembering-john-weeks/

https://readingmarx.wordpress.com/
@edwardbgeorge

Daniel Tutt writes on German Marxist Ernst Bloch’s engagement with the Islamic scholar Ibn Sina and its potential for revitalizing materialist philosophy. The Marxist philosopher Ernst Bloch was marginalized in his own time, branded a renegade idealist by the Stalinist regime, exiled in America from the Nazi war machine, and barred from the Frankfurt School …

https://cosmonaut.blog/2020/08/05/the-materialism-of-warm-stream-marxism-ernst-bloch-on-ibn-sina/