To "Break up" Google, Facebook, Amazon, Apple? No! To Democratize Them? Yes! A Reply To Elizabeth Warren

March 10, 2019

Democratic presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren has, in true Keynesian spirit, recently unveiled her plan to "break up" the big tech monopolies of Google, Facebook, Amazon, and Apple, among others. The critics are accusing Warren of socialism, but in fact, this policy misses the mark entirely and is anything but socialist in nature. The socialists here at Red Liberty would like to reply to these accusations and propose our alternative to Warren's "solution" to this problem.

To the accusers of "socialism", we can recall when Warren quite explicitly stated "I am not a democratic socialist". Indeed, such a plan to "break up" the tech giants which hold a virtual monopoly over our lives is but a temporary fix. Contrary to the ideals of socialism, this "solution" finds its roots not in the ideas of industrial democracy (socialism) but in Keynesian reformism. As socialists, we feel that these measures do not go far enough.

In her blog post Warren said,

"Today’s big tech companies have too much power    too much power over our economy, our society and our democracy... They’ve bulldozed competition, used our private information for profit, and tilted the playing field against everyone else. ... That’s why my Administration will make big, structural changes to the tech sector to promote more competition   including breaking up Amazon, Facebook and Google."

We at Red Liberty have hardly anything good to say about these tech giants in regards to ethics. We know that Facebook and Google are champions of the business model of data capitalism, a business model that sells people's private data, stores it indefinitely and uses it in order to further the aims of mass surveillance. Such a business model is wholly contrary to the people's right to privacy, a right that many users do not even realize they are giving up. We know that Apple is a King of proprietary "closed source" software, a form of software that deprives the user of their freedom to really own and control their own devices and digital lives. Not to mention the Chinese sweatshops by which iPhones are manufactured and the Ugandan mines in which the rare earth elements used in iPhones are extracted. Amazon's de facto monopoly is quite self-evident, and working conditions are equally deplorable.

Warren is completely correct when she says "Today’s big tech companies have too much power    too much power over our economy, our society and our democracy". These companies are indispensably necessary in day to day life. They are almost universally used by everyone, and yet we find that they are under the near absolute control of a very small minority- a small minority that sits in a board room and is not held accountable to the interests of the workers or the public at large. Such a minority in a traditional capitalist enterprise, we know, is elected by wealthy shareholders under the principle of "one share, one vote", giving a monopoly to the richest and thus, working almost entirely in the interests of profit alone. Surplus wealth (i.e. profits) produced by the working people in a traditional capitalist enterprise, or more specifically, by the business model itself which uses data indiscriminately as a commodity, belongs solely to the owners of the industry. The goal of capitalism is thus the enrichment of the owners of industry, even though and often do we find, that it is to the detriment of society as a whole. Wealth inequality is inevitable under such a model, as is the concentration of power into the hands of a few rich men and women. The perpetual threat such a model poses to society and to democracy is quite self-evident.

We socialists look at this inherently undemocratic, anti-social business model, and at these giant companies that are public in nearly every sphere of social life but on paper, and claim that the solution to this problem, this excess of power in the hands of an extremely small, extremely wealthy minority, this threat to our society and to our albeit limited political democracy, is precisely the democratization of the enterprise. Warren, in true capitalist spirit, does not see this as a viable solution. For her the solution is, in accordance with the ideas of Keynesianism, the "breaking up" the big tech companies. But history, as we know, tells us that the severing of one of these great heads by the state will, over time, lead to many more to come in its place. Such wounds to a big company will inevitably heal like a Hydra, and the problem Warren is attempting to fix will inevitably rear its head up once again. In time, more monopolies will spring up from this severed head, and the cycle will continue. The lack of democracy in industry will not improve, and neither will the threat the owners of big business pose to "our democracy". That is, after all, the problem Warren seems to have with these tech giants.

The so-called "platform utilities" model to be applied to these businesses is not industrial democracy or public ownership, but, as Warren explains it,

"These companies would be prohibited from owning both the platform utility and any participants on that platform. Platform utilities would be required to meet a standard of fair, reasonable, and nondiscriminatory dealing with users. Platform utilities would not be allowed to transfer or share data with third parties."

We can recall how AT&T was broken up in 1982 for precisely the same reason that Warren today proposes the breaking up of these tech giants. If we are honest in our analysis of history, anyone can see how within a period of 37 years AT&T (the new version), Verizon, and Century Link (all companies of nearly the same stature as the original AT&T bell system) came to the place they now occupy. The head was cut 37 years ago, and in its place 3 new heads of the Hydra of big business were born. Warren seems to not mention this when she refers to America's long standing tradition of breaking up companies when they become too big, even when she mentions the case of AT&T by name. Perhaps we need only more of Warren's Keynesian tactics. Shall we break up AT&T, Verizon, and Century Link again? Should we break up Apple, Amazon, Google, and Facebook only to have this cycle of undemocracy and the concentration of power over social life in the hands of a small minority of the ruling class continue? This seems to be what Warren is advocating.

The democratization of Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon and co. would mean these companies served the public interest, were operated for the people and by the people, as opposed to operating for the private interest of a handful of capitalists. The social good of these tech giants would be the primary focus, not a side effect of their business model whose goal was profit alone. This would mean the end of big data capitalism, the end of selling people's private information. It would be a massive blow to mass surveillance, to shady business practices, and to the control the billionaire class has over our society, to political and social life. Google and Facebook would work in the public interest, would operate as representatives of the public interest through genuinely democratic mechanisms. Trade secrets would be abolished, and transparency would prevail. These companies would not hire teams of lawyers to dismiss and dodge allegations of unethical or illegal activity, for this would be a thing of the past!

Such a democratization would further the birth of new enterprises operating in accordance with the principles of industrial democracy and eventually perhaps, lead to the democratic planning of large sectors of the economy. Innovation will spring from competition as it always does, we socialists have no intention to rid the world of incentives to further innovation but on the contrary, to expand them. But innovation will also spring forth from openness, the abolition of trade secrets, cooperation, coordination, and democracy itself. Those who did not innovate would be removed from their positions, and those innovations which did not satisfy the public need would likewise be removed, as is the tradition already. Business efficiency would increase, the ecological impact of these companies be substantially reduced. Democratization would be a blow to the monopoly proprietary software giants hold over the lives of billions of tech users. The News would read of the "opening" of closed source, proprietary programs and operating systems. Democratization would put an end forever to the dangers Warren brings up, and not merely fix it for a few decades as Warren's plan would inevitably do. Democratic control would mean power to the people, for the tree of liberty in the modern age can either expand or die. The ruling class is fiercely against breaking up these tech giants, but it is even more horrified by the idea democratization. This, we feel, is the only viable solution.

This is what the socialists at Red Liberty have to say about the things Warren has said.

Shameless Utopia: Wild Speculations On The Year 3019

February 28, 2019

In 1919 if you were to ask an average person, even in the most advanced nations, what the world would look like in 100 years, not even the wildest dreamers could have imagined the year 2019. A smartphone connecting instantly over the World Wide Web to a person on the other side of the globe for a video conference with the entirety of human knowledge just seconds away. Mans footprint on the moon, images of distant worlds and plans to send microprobes to our nearest star! Even now there is a talk of landing man on Mars to set up a colony! We live in a society of material abundance with the capacity to abolish world hunger and extreme poverty on a global scale ten times over!

What then is all this talk of Utopia? Marx used the term to describe socialists who often had valid critiques of society, albeit came to by unscientific analyses, but whose "prescriptions" for the future were ungrounded in logic or were grounded in unrealistic, often wild assumptions. We speak of utopia not in the Marxian sense of the word here. It is important to note that social problems and contradictions will always exist, that's life. But the problems of yesterday are more and more we are finding, solved today, and more problems thus present themselves to be solved on a higher technical and social level than before.

We are radicals for insisting that the unnecessary social ills that face us today from world hunger to global poverty, from homelessness to the need for human beings to work 40 hours a week, can be solved under present conditions. Anything, it is granted, is seemingly possible today. Men can become women, and women can become men. You can choose the eye color of your baby, go from New York to Beijing in less than a day. But to solve these problems? Problems that financially cost but a drop in the bucket of global wealth? For advocating this we are called utopians! And rightfully so, we demand utopia! Any guess as to what the future would or should look like is utterly utopian by modern standards precisely because the modern world is already utopia by 19th or early 20th century standards, in spite of the many social ills of today. The guessing itself is utopian, to say this will be the future-- and that is not our intent here. But the forms a more advanced society will almost inevitably take, certainly will be utopian by our modern standards of the year 2019. Let the reader understand the difference here.

I wish to give to you here a fanatical piece of writing, full of wild and unfounded speculations; a rosy eyed, only a somewhat educated guess as to our common future. Utopian, certainly by modern standards, but such a society no matter how wondrous it appears would doubtlessly have its own problems that its generation would have to struggle to remedy in the broadest democratic forms of action. I am looking not a hundred, but a thousand years to the future, to the year 3019 by our current calendar. Perhaps such progress will come hundreds of years sooner, or even later! Who is to say? The problems of the future, as are the problems of today, largely regarding questions of liberty and equality. Ideally, everyone would be given an equal chance to succeed in live, equal opportunities, positive liberties, etc. Ideally everyone would have absolute unlimited individual, political, and religious liberty. These are principles everyone ought to aspire towards, principles that in my speculation are woven into the bedrock of the free social institutions of the year 3019.

Utopia and Terror went together quite well in the 20th century. But with our level of technology, we can hope that humanity will find its way without it, for there is a great danger here that cannot be understated. I use the term man and human interchangeably here. Needless to say a revolution in language too, will have likely done away with this linguistic sexism in the year 3019. A word of caution to the reader; in spite of rosy eyed optimism, here too there be monsters!

Leaping into our proverbial time machine, let us look at humanity in the year 3019.

A thousand years into the future on a mostly terraformed Communist Mars, Christian Priests in conformity with the will of biological parents, will baptize infants as they are born from birthing machines and deliverer to them healthily straight to their homes through instant teleportation. On Earth man will live in harmony with nature, having outgrown his childish desire to conquer it. But at the same time the whole human civilization will be different! Between vast expanses of untouched nature, islands will be made from nothing, grand hills and mountains moved at a whim! Man will design his community as a video game developer today creates wondrous fantasy worlds! Every community will have its own personality, it’s own culture, the will of its own people put into action.

State society found its source of strength in unity, in the disillusionment of social and cultural diversity, it sought to purge that which made man unique. In the social base and superstructure of the year 3019, diversity will be seen as richness. The free association of producers through democratic confederalist and communistic ideals, radically libertarian to be sure, will thrive on diversity of culture, people’s, and ideas. The great civilizations of antiquity will be overshadowed a thousand times by true civilization of a liberated humanity. It will be a front for a new renaissance, of a new moral and spiritual rebirth we can aspire to build the bedrock for even today. Psychedelic drugs will undoubtedly play a part in this new culture, and rivers of ideas will flow through liberated minds in the state of the sacred psychedelic experience. On our moon and other astronomical bodies, the largest craters will act as the dishes of massive radio telescopes, far more powerful than anything humankind has yet to construct. With the help of the divine hand which made such craters, we will look deeper into the heavens than ever before. The moon will almost certainly act as an exchange point between the earth and the stars.

Labor, on earth at least if not on other planets and astronomical bodies, will be largely automated, freeing mankind from the million year old curse of hunger and toil. In the process of automation, artificial intelligence will come into being, and in spite of inevitable mistakes and catastrophic incidents of our millennium (or even our century), will come to be recognized as sentient beings with all the rights of man. For a time those aged 20 to 35 will be conscripted to do that which has yet to be automated, then the gap will lesson to 20 to 30, and then to 20 to 25. Still some communities will cherish traditional values, and their right to self-determination will be respected. Even in the year 3019 I predict the Amish will continue to exist!

People will come together to form vast communities and impossible worlds with virtual reality and cybernetics, our internet will be but a predecessor to theirs. Liberty through its prerequisite of privacy, and privacy through its prerequisite of freedom of speech, will be ensured in this new internet by design, and local democracy with an emphasis on respecting the rights of the minority will be the mechanism by which free information passes. This internet will span worlds, connecting men on earth to those on Mars and other celestial bodies instantly through elaborate technologies utilizing quantum entanglement to bypass the limitations of the speed of light!

Some people will refuse cybernetic and genetic modifications of the mind and body, and their right to do so will be respected without question or coercion of any form; locally or centrally, socially or culturally. Cybernetics will be crafted not to bypass individual will or to masquerade as individual will, but to be bound by it (referring to some alarming recent studies on cybernetics and free will). The elderly will be given the option to have new android bodies so they can be young forever, bone marrow transplants and other operations we cannot even dream of will allow for the perpetual healthy state of the human brain, and even purely organic methods of expanding its faculties will undoubtedly come about. Micro-surgeries implanting cybernetic materials into the brain will over time replace biological brain tissue without at all disrupting consciousness, giving humanity the ability to be amortal (to have theoretical immortality). But some humans in albeit different forms, born in this time will outlive our own Sun and Earth as they roam the galaxy. Perhaps in hundreds of thousands or even millions of years they will think back to us!

Buddhist monks, whose minds are contained within machines attached to rockets exhausting a near unlimited source of fuel, utilizing hitherto unknown methods of propulsion, will orbit the planet Neptune in a state of perpetual meditation and psychedelic enlightenment, free to explore the solar system and beyond without the limits of biological bodies or conventional rocketry. Artificial intelligence and flesh and blood human beings seeking new frontiers of discovery and knowledge will be launched into the heavens, to our nearest star Alpha Centauri and beyond. Thus humanity will be assured survival regardless of what happens in our own solar system. Perhaps in this time extraterrestrial civilizations will find us, assuming they haven't already, and we will find them. Perhaps once we have outgrown our infancy, our wars and hunger, we will join an intergalactic or perhaps even multi-galactic community as a species, and greet a widely diverse universe cautiously, but with open arms. Let us hope they can forgive our primitive nature!

The term "person" already expanding to artificial intelligence, will be expanded to extraterrestrial intelligence too, just as the word for person in ancient Egypt, which was once the same word for 'Egyptian', came to mean the whole of humanity in their time too. Mind and thought sharing, through dreams and conscious connection, will become a social trend, assuming its nature is voluntary. The internet will allow thought and consciousness to intermingle with the thoughts and consciousness of an entire civilization, yet I predict conventional HTML will still be used, perhaps HTML 194 to our HTML 5! It will be possible for minds to paint, write, and create entire worlds just as dreams do today, instantly and without the use of hands! Such a time it will be, when one can freely explore the elaborate frontiers, fictional worlds created in the minds of individuals and collectives! Near unlimited sources of energy through cold fusion and other hitherto unknown methods, will by future technologies allow for the near unlimited creation of matter from energy. Those worlds that today exist only in the mind, may be translated into matter through such machines! Perhaps those cryogenically frozen today may wake up in such a time, and oh how I envy them!

I believe marriage will continue to exist, and monogamy will likely still be quite popular. But there will be those who forego marriage and monogamy. The family unit will not merely be nuclear in many instances. Genetic engineering will produce individuals who are intellectually and physically superior to the present man. Insofar as this is voluntary, it will be but a symptom of a free humanity.

On The Road To 3019; Bumps, Bombs, Broken Bridges, and Roadblocks.

This will not come at all peacefully in spite of our best wishes. Social conflicts are inevitable, and before us and them may be many catastrophes, perhaps on a global scale. The chaotic emergence of artificial intelligence, cybernetics, and bio-genetics will undoubtedly bring great risk and conflict. Climate change and the possibility of nuclear war will further endanger the odds of reaching such a state of society. There are other dangers not even mentioned here. Perhaps there will emerge a form of totalitarianism far more severe in its scope and technical ability than anything 20th century fascism or Stalinism ever produced. Here there is a very real danger too, and a great responsibility rests on the shoulders of we radicals who are the vanguard of future civilization.

Even in the worst case scenario, even if we or our great grandchildren, in the wake of ecological or nuclear catastrophe brought about by the present order are relegated for a time to underground bunkers-- the only place that food can grow when the next great extinction event passes over us, even then will mankind-- years, decades, or centuries later-- stick its head up once again to greet a new world. And if man finds that world is still decimated, by horrors we cannot even yet fathom, they will use science to breathe life into it anew. One way or another we will prevail. Long ago what was the entirety of what was to be the modern homo sapiens were huddled together through a terrible freezing storm, the survival of our species hanged by a thread, yet we prevailed. Nothing will change this time too.

Unless an unforeseen asteroid or gamma ray burst is able to wipe us off the face of the earth, or unless we are invaded or obliterated by a hostile extraterrestrial force, we will prevail. One mustn't take this idea as a joke. It would be foolish not to question why the heavens are so silent of any voices like our own. Perhaps the use of radio for communication in most civilizations only lasts for a brief period, or such a period is when most civilizations destroy themselves. Perhaps beyond the nuclear age is another age, relying on a single experiment like the detonation of the first atom bomb, that obliterates any world it is used on. There are still hurdles to be leaped over that we may or may not survive. But there is yet an even more terrible thought, worse even than the possibility of our cosmic loneliness. This is the idea that there was life on other stars near to us, but when it reached our point of development and it began broadcasting its radio waves into the heavens it had already signed its death warrant-- for minds far superior to our own, cold and heartless, with unsympathetic ears, were listening against the cold, empty vastness of space for worlds to destroy. We do not know what is out there, and this mystery inflames the minds of countless men and women. Could it be as wondrous as Star Trek? Or as terrible as War of The Worlds? We simply do not know.

I believe that if we are cautious and have a bit of luck, even in the aftermath of the worst catastrophes, out of the caverns and bunkers we will emerge with all the essential knowledge we have hitherto accumulated. Yet we must stress the ever present necessity of addressing the ills that face us now before some catastrophe "relegates mankind to caverns and bunkers".

It is fun to have dreams and nightmares, imagining what the future may hold. But here we have a great power in our actions of today to determine the course of future events. Let us not be foolish, selfish, or cowardly, for a great responsibility rests upon our shoulders. We must address the crisis of climate change now. We must address the issue of nuclear war now. We must address artificial intelligence, cybernetics, and human genetic engineering now. It was said by Slavoj Zizek that there is a light at the end of the tunnel, but for us that light is an oncoming train. So frightful! But we need not fear death by a thousand cuts! Even still, if our species dies out, in millions or billions of years, new intelligences rivaling our own may emerge on this very planet! In digging through the earth, they may find evidence of what once was the old homo sapiens, and perhaps with it great wells of knowledge digitally etched into storage mediums made to last so long. Even if our entire planet was destroyed, we can have faith that somewhere out there is another planet teeming with intelligent life. Even billions of years after we are gone, remnants of the radio waves we have sent out may have been captured by other races. Even then, Voyager 1 and 2 with their golden records will serve as a memorial to us. How can one not understand the beauty of this? Earth is but a small, marvelous piece of God's craftiwork, which transcends the boundless limits of time and space!

An Open Letter To The Cuban People On The New Constitution

February 26, 2019

Originally I intended to post this much sooner in opposition to passing the new constitution on the grounds that it legalizes private property. It is much too late now though, as the constitution has already been passed. The spirit of the letter today can be interpreted as a plea for an alternative both to the undemocracy of the continuation of Stalinist planning and the undemocracy of capitalist private property. Needless to say we fully supported other progressive reforms such as LGBT+ marriage, anti-discrimination legislation, the presumption of innocence, etc. I am posting it regardless because the alternative is still viable to the Cuban people. The party leadership said those who vote against it are "counter-revolutionary", but in actuality the opposite is true! While many reforms were necessary, the legalization of private property is a potential grave digger of the gains of the revolution. The letter may be regarded as a piece of social alarmism. In the face of history I accept this verdict, for it is better to be cautious in these dangerous times. I write in the interests of Liberty. I hope that this letter will have some small impact on the minds of even one Cuban citizen. If I can do just that, I consider my mission accomplished.

The Letter

Citizens of Cuba! You are voting on the approval or disapproval of a recently drafted constitution, a first of its kind in 40 years. Change is undeniable necessary, but in what direction? What will be best for the Cuban people? What will improve their own lives both materially and spiritually? Should the Cuban people support or fight the passing of the new constitution? There are two provisions of concern here to the general public:

-The recognition of private property

-The legalization of LGBT+ marriage

Our view is that the constitution should be fought against. We are against the constitution because we are against the legalization of private property on the premise that we are also against the continuation of Stalinist central planning. Naturally it would be absurd to advocate immediate change, what we do advocate is a gradual transition to real industrial democracy (another word for socialism). We are for the legalization of LGBT+ marriage insofar as it forces no church to perform any ceremony contrary to the religious conscience of the believers-- and there are many churches in favor of having LGBT+ weddings. But as for the economy, how can we be against both the legalization of private property and the continuation of the current model? To answer this question, historical context is needed.

On the 26th of July, 1953, Cuba was liberated from the former dictatorship, and a new popular government was put in its place. This new government espoused the principles of socialism, albeit while modeling itself after the largely totalitarian, bonapartist, model of Stalin's Soviet Union. In spite of its Stalinist character and the inflexible rigidity of a state-capitalist, undemocratic, centrally planned economy in a de facto undemocratic state, the ruling Party along with the Cuban people rightfully recognized the dangers of world imperialism and global capitalism.

Legalizing private property today is but a first step towards a return to the days of Batista when Cuba was no more to the west than a Sugar Plantation, a source of dirt cheap labor, a brothel, and a place for the rich to go to party and gamble. Cuba's stagnant economy doubtlessly needs revitalization, the question is how? Is such a grand capitulation to capitalism necessary to attain this end? Or is it in fact, contrary to this end. Some think anything better than the current system is preferable. We say that the best path is the road less traveled-- neither capitulation to capitalism nor a continuation of the current model! Has Cuba not taken steps in the direction of capitalism? Necessarily, it has, and in many ways this move towards capitalism has brought with it much of the corruption of the old regime. Are the down-trodden people of Cuba not tired? Indeed they are, and many workers inside the country support the new constitution. Unfortunately, the new constitution if passed, will not alleviate the burning desires of the Cuban people for freedom and prosperity. Even if multi-party democracy was instituted, it would not alleviate this burning desire. An alternative is needed, but that alternative lies neither in the Stalinist model of undemocratic, centralized state planning nor in the undemocracy of "free" market capitalism where private property is recognized. What then is the alternative?

State capitalism in Cuba, up until the collapse of the Soviet Union, was a primarily progressive force in Cuban society. Anyone old enough remembers what life was like for the people under Batista knows this, the positive liberties (in regards to healthcare, education, housing, child care, workers rights, etc.) won under Castro would be done away with under the capitalist system. A path different to either Stalinist planning or "free market" capitalism could maintain the positive liberties of Cuba today and bring about the negative liberties so treasured by the "free world" (real freedom of speech, press, assembly, religion, etc.) while maintaining social and political stability. In these frustrating times it is all the more necessary to put the Cuban revolution into historical perspective.

The Cuban revolution, while nobly aspiring to the highest ideals of humanity, was nonetheless a Stalinist revolution. Genuine revolutionaries and intellectuals whose hearts trembled at every injustice, seriously looked to Stalin and the social system he embodied as a viable alternative to the misery of the capitalist order. Stalinism of course, attempted to legitimize itself as the "rightful heirs" of the October revolution under Lenin and Trotsky (while of course, erasing the latter figure from history). Furthermore, Stalinism called itself socialist in this spirit to gain popular support of the laboring masses all over the world whose liberty loving hearts longed for socialist democracy. Stalinism claimed to embody the socialism and socialist democracy that workers and oppressed people's all over the world longed for. Stalinism also, necessarily in the same sentence, claimed to embody genuine political democracy. For it is a well-known fact, at least up to that point, that socialism could not exist without genuine democracy. Today it seems absurd to think of Stalin as a democrat. Speaking of the social system in Stalinist Russia, Stalin is quoting as having said,

"This is what we call socialism in daily life, this is what we call a free, socialist life. It is on this basis that our really free and really democratic elections have arisen, elections which have no precedent in the history of mankind."

Che Guevara, a hero for all progressive people's throughout the world, grew up in this confusing time. He was nonetheless a hero, embodying the virtue of a saint and the burning justice of liberty herself. "The life of a single human being", said Che, "is worth a million times more than all the property of the richest man on earth." Che had traveled Latin America in the course of his life and seen with his own eyes the horrors of US imperialism and the world capitalist system. In this time, it is not surprising and, for us, forgiving that Che looked to Stalin as a figure diametrically opposed to this system of oppression and exploitation. Che is quoted as having said, after seeing the horrors of Guatemala under the domination of foreign capital, "I have sworn before a picture of the old and mourned comrade Stalin that I won't rest until I see these capitalist octopuses annihilated." In hindsight we can say that Che believed Stalin's lies, but the ideals Che stood for unquestionably bypass Stalin and the Stalinist system he stood for. Stalin was a fraud who used socialism as a shield to deflect criticisms against himself and the totalitarian system he had constructed in its name. Capitalism happily gave Stalin this victory, for if this was the "socialism" workers were always making trouble about, it would be good to call it precisely that-- so that when people saw the horrors of Stalinism they could say, "oh but this here in the Soviet Union is socialism", and thus, they would not want it. As Chomsky correctly argues time and time again, it is very hard to convince people that the one thing two historic world superpowers agreed on was actually wrong. The victims of Stalin are both those he terrorized, the people under him, and those men and women, as virtuous as saints, who took up arms against capitalist oppression while falling for Stalin's deception that his road had the answers they were looking for. There are some who argue that Che understood this towards the end. He is said to have been carrying books by Leon Trotsky towards the end of his life. Whether or not he ascribed to Trotsky's ideas at the very end remains unclear. What is clear however, is that the Cuban revolution emerged as a vestige of Stalinism, its political and social system still takes Stalinist forms.

Socialism itself is defined as "a range of economic and social systems characterized by social ownership of the means of production and workers democratic self-management". A centrally planned economy is regarded as meeting the criteria for socialism only insofar as the mechanisms used to plan the economy (i.e. the state) are genuinely democratic. The legitimacy and healthiness of a democracy under a one-party Marxist-Leninist (Stalinist) state need not be mentioned here, for its nature is quite self-evident. An undemocratic centrally planned economy meets the criteria for state-capitalism, and that can sometimes still be a progressive force. Needless to say, the socialist mode of production, by its simplest definition, was not realized in the undemocratic, centrally planned economy of the past, precisely because they were in practice, undemocratic. Cuba's economy up until now has been largely state capitalist in nature, but it has been a form of state capitalism that has a largely progressive role in the lives of countless working people. In spite of the brutal imperialist embargo, the lives of the poorest Cubans are significantly better relative to the lives of the poorest people's of other Latin American countries under the yoke of foreign capital and imperialist domination, even in Latin American countries that are wealthier than Cuba.

It is widely accepted that the idea of "socialism in one country", as advocated by Stalin is impossible, or at the very least extremely impractical. History shows that such a model leads to economic stagnation (through lack of democracy and/or autarky) and eventually to economic and social collapse. The lives of working people may get better for a time, but stagnation is inevitable. Any notion that Cuba can continue under a centrally planned economy without substantial foreign aid or economic and political is utopian. Without a Soviet like superpower to help her, her economy will continue to decline under the present model.

But socialism is such a wide school of thought, socialist modes of production so diverse in possible applications, that the idea of "central planning vs. private property" seems absurd to anyone familiar with its diversity. The Marxist critique of capitalism has led to many schools of socialist thought. Modern Marxian economist Richard Wolff takes Marx's critique of capitalism (a very valid critique) as something that in the modern world could be addressed by Workers' Self-Directed Enterprises. Marx after all, never gave "prescriptions" as how to address the problems his critiques scientifically and empirically revealed beyond the general idea of the working people of the world uniting to democratically figure out how to transcend this predatory system of exploitation. Lenin attempted to do so, so did many anarchists. The diversity here in socialist thought is truly astounding.

Even within the framework of a market economy, Dr. Wolff looks to many examples, both modern and historic, of economic models whose primary feature is workers ownership and democratic management on the enterprise level. Under such a system, workers democratically control their own work-places, either directly at the local level or hierarchically by democratically electing (yes, electing!) their own CEO's and members of a company's Board of Directors, who in turn determine company policy in all its complexities, and are at all times re-callable and accountable to the workers and the public at large. Under the traditional capitalist model (which this constitution would endorse), such Board Members would be responsible only to a number of wealthy share-holders, most of whom are in the richest 1% of society. They would be responsible for determining how much they got paid, and how much the workers who produced the wealth got paid. They would work not in the interests of the workers or the public at large, but in the interests of their own bank accounts. Democracy at work would regard public companies as responsible to the public, it would bring power to the streets where the people live. This is not at all theoretical, all over the world, in Italy for instance, such Workers' Self-Directed Enterprises are coming into being. Italy even gives unemployed workers incentives for creating such (socialist) enterprises. When a worker in Italy is unemployed, they receive a check from the government every so often while they look for new work. But at the same time, the government gives them an alternative option to get 2 years worth of unemployment checks at one time if they, with 7 or so other unemployed workers, agree to start a workers self-directed enterprise. In this way, socialism is incentivized into a capitalist economy. A country such as Cuba could put forth even more radical policies in this regard. Perhaps a balance could be found between Workers Self-Directed Enterprises and open and democratic planning. This is but one possible example of socialism, an example of which that is viable even in a market economy.

The new Cuban constitution represents an almost complete counter-revolution, it foregoes all possible alternatives and surrenders the Cuban people to the domination of the capitalist system. At the same time, it opens the door to world imperialism. The revolution against capitalism was just, the forms it took in addressing the ills of the former society in many ways was not. Real industrial democracy would likely work towards the democratization and opening up of Cuban society as a whole, without the political and social destabilization that led to the collapse of the Soviet Union and the bloodshed of Tienanmen Square. I am not here to give the specifics of what an ideal constitution would say, the new constitution is a question for the Cuban people themselves. But if such a question is not seriously asked and debated, then all is lost.

Do the Cuban people want to continue on the road of Stalinism? They unquestionably do not. Do the Cuban people want to go on the road of capitalism, opening the way for imperialism? The Cuban people are tired, and many may see this as a possible alternative, but many Cubans understand the danger here. If this constitution passes, it is my belief that the Cubans will regret it 10 or 15 years down the road just as the people of Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union regretted not looking into alternatives to their own predicament. There are two examples that come to mind here when considering a capitulation to capitalism in Cuba: that of China and that of the Soviet Union. Capitalism in the Soviet Union destroyed Soviet society, its effects on life expectancy alone paint a broad enough picture as to the horrors such "reforms" can wrought upon a people. In many Eastern European countries, people say that life was better under Stalinism than it is now. Such statistics are less to paint a virtuous picture of the horrors of Stalinism than to show the very real horrors of capitalism and world imperialism. In China, many millions were brought out of extreme poverty by capitalism under the strict control of the Chinese State. But China is still a dictatorship, one of the most authoritarian in the world, it is even more authoritarian than the one the Cuban people are under today. This unfreedom too, is a vestige of Stalinism. It is absolutely absurd to speak of socialism without liberty, this too can be viably addressed if the Cuban people opt for a different road than the one they are on. As Marxist revolutionary Rosa Luxemburg argued in her day,

"Freedom only for the supporters of the government, only for the members of one party however numerous they may be is no freedom at all. Freedom is always and exclusively freedom for the one who thinks differently. Not because of any fanatical concept of “justice” but because all that is instructive, wholesome and purifying in political freedom depends on this essential characteristic, and its effectiveness vanishes when “freedom” becomes a special privilege...

Without general elections, without unrestricted freedom of press and assembly, without a free struggle of opinion, life dies out in every public institution, becomes a mere semblance of life, in which only the bureaucracy remains as the active element. Public life gradually falls asleep, a few dozen party leaders of inexhaustible energy and boundless experience direct and rule. Among them, in reality only a dozen outstanding heads do the leading and an elite of the working class is invited from time to time to meetings where they are to applaud the speeches of the leaders, and to approve proposed resolutions unanimously at bottom, then, a clique affair a dictatorship, to be sure, not the dictatorship of the proletariat but only the dictatorship of a handful of politicians, that is a dictatorship in the bourgeois sense, in the sense of the rule of the Jacobins."

Cuba is ripe for a spiritual and political rebirth, but that rebirth can take many different forms. It could be a spring of popular rule, a spiritual rebirth, a flowering of countless opinions and ideas. It could bring forth industrial democracy, real socialism as an alternative to Stalinist planning, and over time, it could bring forth real liberty for the Cuban people. Cuba could in time become a bastion of freedom and democracy in the world, an aspiring model for all people's. At the same time it could be a bastion of socialist democracy, a fortress against world imperialist domination. Perhaps in time, it could become the world's first successful example of revolutionary democratic socialism in practice. But today the opposite seems to be on the table. On the horizon there appears to be a spring of political and social counter-revolution in the highest echelons of the party bureaucracy. If the constitution passes, the party bureaucracy itself will almost certainly grow rich off the blood and sweat of the Cuban people. This could mean Cuba progresses down the Chinese model of brutally successful state-capitalism at the expense of even further diminished civil liberties, or the party bureaucracy could complete the counter-revolution even more totally and abandon it entirely-- in which case the Cuban people would suffer the same hardships as the people of the former Soviet Union suffered in the 1990's along with the imperialist domination of the country. Which do you prefer? Increased dictatorship and the further diminishing of civil liberties or exponentially worsened poverty, inequality, and the eventual installment of a new Batista-like dictator? These are two extremes, admittedly, but nonetheless the threat here is very real and it should be taken seriously. In popular discourse the "other option" (i.e. in not passing the constitution) is a continuation of the status quo, which to many seems equally deplorable. This "other option" however, is not the only "other option". Do you not realize that real socialism is on the table? We are not speaking of "socialism" as Stalin spoke of it, in the same way he spoke of his "genuinely free elections" and his "real democracy". We are speaking of socialism proper, albeit in a different form than the one Fidel or Che imagined. Where in Cuba are the capitalists to oppose you if you go down such a path? They are nothing to the capitalists faced by the Latin Americans of other nations under the yoke of US imperialism. Cuba longs to come into the 21st century, let the Cuban people freely discuss and debate all possible options!

In summation of our views:

-For the new constitution? No.

-The legalization of private property? Neither that nor a continuation of the Stalinist planning, let the Cuban people find their own way in order to reduce the inevitable human suffering both positions would bring. What alternatives are there? There are many. Perhaps, even in a market based economy, in the form of workers self-directed enterprises; where corporations are democratically run and boards of directors are responsible to the workers and the public at large. This is a viable alternative to both the undemocracy and rigidity of Stalinist planning and the undemocracy and inequality of the capitalist enterprise. Such a position would likely lead to a stable democratization and opening up of Cuban society. This is a path to genuine socialism and real liberty.

-The legalization of gay marriage? The constitution might not pass due to its legalization of gay marriage. The church leads the resistance of the new constitution on this basis alone. Do we support the legalization of gay marriage? Absolutely, but at the same time we respect the rights of each individual church and congregation to decide whether or not to have gay weddings in accordance with their own religious views and individual consciences. It is immoral for the state to forbid gay marriage, just as it is immoral for the state to force a church to perform it. Let those opposed be opposed, that is their right and such a right I will defend to the death, but let not those opposed force their opposition on the whole of society, that is in violation of the ideals of liberty which every socialist ought to aspire to embody. There are many churches and many congregations who would happily perform gay weddings and I for one applaud them. Our opposition to the new constitution is on the basis of private property alone. We fully endorse the rights of LGBT+ people's all over the world.

Needless to say we are in favor of the following provisions:

-The creation of a two consecutive five-year term limit imposed on the president;

-Extending the terms of municipal council delegates to five years;

-Banning discrimination based on gender, race, ethnic origin, sexual orientation, gender identity or disability, (formerly included leading to the possible legalization of same-sex marriage)

-The restoration of a presumption of innocence in the justice system, last provided for in the 1940 constitution.

Cuban citizens! The future of your children is in your hands! The revolutionaries in the 20th century were radical and creative; be radical and creative yourselves!

Neither a continuation Stalinist planning nor the legalization of private property!

Down with the new constitution and its provision to legalize private property!

Defend the reforms advocated for, draft a new constitution that removes the provisions on private property!

Fight to create real Citizen's and Worker's democracy-- both politically and industrially!

¡Hasta la victoria siempre!

The Need For The People To Invoke Their Right To Amend or Rewrite The Constitution

January 28, 2019

"Some men look at constitutions with sanctimonious reverence, and deem them, like the ark of the covenant, too sacred to be touched. They ascribe to the men of the preceding age a wisdom more than human, and suppose what they did to be beyond amendment. I knew that age well: I belonged to it, and labored with it. It deserved well of its country. It was very like the present, but without the experience of the present; and forty years of experience in government is worth a century of book-reading: and this they would say themselves, were they to rise from the dead. I am certainly not an advocate for frequent and untried changes in laws and constitutions. I think moderate imperfections had better be borne with; because, when once known, we accommodate ourselves to them, and find practical means of correcting their ill effects. But I know, also, that laws and institutions must go hand in hand with the progress of the human mind. As that becomes more developed, more enlightened, as new discoveries are made, new truths disclosed, and manners and opinions change with the change of circumstances, institutions must advance also, and keep pace with the times. We might as well require a man to wear still the coat which fitted him when a boy, as civilized society to remain ever under the regimen of their barbarous ancestors. It is this preposterous idea which has lately deluged Europe in blood. Their monarchs, instead of wisely yielding to the gradual changes of circumstances, of favoring progressive accommodation to progressive improvement, have clung to old abuses, entrenched themselves behind steady habits, and obliged their subjects to seek through blood and violence rash and ruinous innovations, which, had they been referred to the peaceful deliberations and collected wisdom of the nation, would have been put into acceptable and salutary forms. Let us follow no such examples, nor weakly believe that one generation is not as capable as another of taking care of itself, and of ordering its own affairs. Let us, as our sister States have done, avail ourselves of our reason and experience, to correct the crude essays of our first and unexperienced, although wise, virtuous, and well-meaning councils. And, lastly, let us provide in our constitution for its revision at stated periods. What these periods should be, nature herself indicates. By the European tables of mortality, of the adults living at any one moment of time, a majority will be dead in about nineteen years. At the end of that period, then, a new majority is come into place; or, in other words, a new generation. Each generation is as independent of the one preceding, as that was of all which had gone before. It has, then, like them, a right to choose for itself the form of government it believes most promotive of its own happiness; consequently, to accommodate to the circumstances in which it finds itself, that received from its predecessors: and it is for the peace and good of mankind, that a solemn opportunity of doing this every nineteen or twenty years, should be provided by the constitution; so that it may be handed on, with periodical repairs, from generation to generation, to the end of time, if any thing human can so long endure. It is now forty years since the constitution of Virginia was formed. The same tables inform us, that, within that period, two thirds of the adults then living are now dead. Have then the remaining third, even if they had the wish, the right to hold in obedience to their will, and to laws heretofore made by them, the other two thirds, who, with themselves, compose the present mass of adults? If they have not, who has? The dead? But the dead have no rights. They are nothing; and nothing cannot own something. Where there is no substance, there can be no accident. This corporeal globe, and every thing upon it, belong to its present corporeal inhabitants, during their generation. They alone have a right to direct what is the concern of themselves alone, and to declare the law of that direction: and this declaration can only be made by their majority. That majority, then, has a right to depute representatives to a convention, and to make the constitution what they think will be best for themselves. But how collect their voice? This is the real difficulty. If invited by private authority to county or district meetings, these divisions are so large, that few will attend; and their voice will be imperfectly or falsely pronounced. Here, then, would be one of the advantages of the ward divisions I have proposed. The mayor of every ward, on a question like the present, would call his ward together, take the simple yea or nay of its members, convey these to the county court, who would hand on those of all its wards to the proper general authority; and the voice of the whole people would be thus fairly, fully, and peaceably expressed, discussed, and decided by the common reason of the society. If this avenue be shut to the call of sufferance, it will make itself heard through that of force, and we shall go on, as other nations are doing, in the endless circle of oppression, rebellion, reformation; and oppression, rebellion, reformation, again; and so on, for ever.

These, Sir, are my opinions of the governments we see among men, and of the principles by which alone we may prevent our own from falling into the same dreadful track. I have given them at greater length than your letter called for. But I cannot say things by halves; and I confide them to your honor, so to use them as to preserve me from the gridiron of the public papers. If you shall approve and enforce them, as you have done that of equal representation, they may do some good. If not, keep them to yourself as the effusions of withered age, and useless time. I shall, with not the Less truth, assure you of my great respect and consideration."

-Thomas Jefferson, Letter to Samuel Kerchival - July 12, 1816

We at Red Liberty believe that in order to best represent the will of the people as they actually exist in American society, at a minimum, the kind of constitutional reform advocated by Thomas Jefferson in his private letters is necessary. Jefferson himself, over 200 years after the above excerpt was written, now exists in the mystical veil of sanctimonious reverence he himself criticized. A "founding father", we quote him at length here precisely because of the reverence so many fellow Americans hold for the ruling class of that generation. This idea, though it may seem radical in how it shatters the mystical, almost religious reverence so many hold of the nation's founding documents, was itself a believed necessity in the minds of those who founded the Republic. As the socialists we are, we are far more optimistic than Jefferson as to the emancipatory potential of humankind. This time, when the oppression and exploitation of the present day is reconciled with the free will of the informed people, in our society of material abundance, we believe a real possibility for the abolition of all institutional forms of oppression and exploitation presents itself. Furthermore, the internet provides the people with the possibility of a grassroots initiative of popular assemblies all over the nation, to be decentralized, that is, best representing the will of the people as they actually exist, while also being enormously wide in scope. The class implications here are also apparent, such a meeting of people's blocks out in form and execution, the corrupting influence the billionaire class has on existing institutions.

Today we find ourselves on the edge of oblivion. The UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has estimated that we have only 12 years to limit the catastrophic consequences of climate change, yet one of the two ruling parties of this country refuses to even admit that climate change is real. We the millennials, even when working full time, increasingly find ourselves unable to afford higher education, rent, and the basic necessities of life in the richest country in the world. Not making enough to survive, things have only gotten worse for us. And what, we must ask, of the generations to come? We are the children of cyberspace. The technically inclined among us use VPN's or Tor to connect to the internet because we know we are being watched illegally, and unethically by our own government and by the governments of the world. Nearly everyone informed on this issue is alarmed. We believe information should be free, cyberspace has no borders, regognizes no walls, no barriers, no outside authority. As the surveillance state grows stronger and stronger with less and less accountability, where here is the consent of the governed? Consent that is passive is granted, but true consent requires one to be informed, and even our own conservative courts when informed on the issue at hand deem these illegal programs, that have only accelerated in totality since we the people found out about them, to be "Orwellian in scope". When can we acknowledge that privacy in the digital age is a fundamental prerequisite to civil liberty? In the history books that describe the descent of the 21st century into despotism, or with our own voices today?

How is it that there are 5 empty homes for every homeless person in the richest country in the world? We already produce enough food to feed 10 billion people a year, yet world hunger still persists. We give to charities and then stop thinking about the issues at hand. Why? Trump wanted 5 billion dollars for a border wall. To end homelessness in the United States, what is the estimated cost? 20 billion dollars. To end world hunger, what is the estimated cost? 30 billion dollars. Neither party is talking about this, and for good reason. Such facts pose an existential threat to the capitalist system. What of the institutional racism of the American criminal injustice system? For an entire community to view the police as a menace to the community, yet to still be subjugated to them, that Citizens is a menace to democracy. America has more prisoners than any other nation. Prisoners are routinely subjected to solitary confinement, cruel and unusual punishment- torture by any other name to be sure, and used legally as slave labor. Trans women are sent to male prisons, and trans men are sent to female prisons. How many times do we hear of Trans women being raped 1000's of times in all male prisons? We know European prisons boast only 20% of inmates returning to prison, in America that number is well over 80%. People still want to "debate" the legitimacy of trans rights, but when such fundamental questions such as human rights are put up for debate, we have a serious problem. It is our own "War on Drugs", our own imperialistic foreign policy, our own imperialist socioeconomic system that is responsible for the rampant crime and poverty that affects Latin America. Those of us informed on the issues at hand know that prohibition does not work, we see clearly how Portugal's decriminalization of all drugs has led to drastic decreases in drug related deaths, addiction, use, and disease. Yet the prospect of drug decriminalization, legalization, and free treatment for addicts in our country is deemed "too radical" by both parties to be even considered.

Those of us who are informed understand the absurdity of the present socioeconomic and political system. As socialists, we advocate neither corporate dictatorship in the workplace nor dictatorial state management over the enterprise, but rather, we advocate industrial democracy for the worker and the public at large! To what degree this or that measure or policy is to be implemented? We have no "ready made plan" of action. We leave it to the free expression and debate of the people themselves. Before it's Stalinist degeneration, the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) in the 1960's rightfully recognized that our present society was not a democracy. Just as the Greek city slave states were both a dictatorship of the slave owner and a democracy through the slave owner, our modern society is a democracy of the capitalist class and a dictatorship of that class at the same time. Jefferson to his lasting credit, knew this day would come. The founding fathers did not think their experiment would last this long, and to it's credit it has achieved miracles. Jefferson thought every 19 or so years the new generation should speak for itself in the name of democracy, amending the constitution or drafting a new one where necessary. By such logic, a radical change embodying the active consent of the people is 10 times overdue! Jefferson and his generation have no right to speak for us, Jefferson himself said so!

"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness."

As democracy divorces itself more and more from capitalism, those in power expect us to stand idly by. We will not be a party to the death of liberty, to the death of democracy. If necessary we will preserve and expand liberty and democracy at the cost of our lives. As 12 years come down to 0, we are expected to beg for concession after concession so that our children might survive what they have wrought upon us. We are expected to blame climate change on the individual, to "stop using plastic bags and plastic straws", to "bike to work" and not to challenge the corporations that mercilessly plunder and pollute the earth, not to challenge those really responsible for our predicament. The present socioeconomic and political order, in it's nihilistic, anti-scientific, and reluctant attitude towards the scientific consensus, and in its unabashed corruption in this regard, is fundamentally destructive to the Life of humankind and all future generations. The unprecedented increase in far-right authoritarianism in the most "stable" democracies of the world, along with the emergence of Orwellian, illegal government mass surveillance programs and its violations of the people's right to privacy, fundamentally endangers one of the only prerequisites to the existence of civil Liberty in our age. Indeed we must say that it is destructive to Liberty itself. And what of the pursuit of Happiness? I will quote here from my friend and fellow writer Christian Chiakulas:

“In a world that produces enough food to feed each and every one of us, starvation is violence. In a society where vacant houses outnumber homeless people six to one, homelessness is violence. A country in which health insurance companies rake in billions in profits while leaving nearly thirty million people uninsured and unable to access medical care is a violent society. This is the everyday violence of capitalism if it is profitable to let somebody die, or languish in abject poverty, we do so. That is a violent society.”

More than violence, such a state of affairs are a menace to the pursuit of Happiness. We have established thusly, that the present socioeconomic order, and the government with it, has become destructive to the ends of Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness. We therefore must see it as justified to invoke the right of the people to alter or abolish the present government if we are to be true to reason and to ourselves. We must have no fear in saying this, for it is the right of the present generation to do so, a right recognized by the fundamental founding documents of the United States itself. We must cast aside the sanctimonious reverence so many of us have for the constitution, it is our duty to rewrite it if we the people deem it to be necessary. What power do I at Red Liberty have in this regard? I have no power, all political power rests solely with in the hands of the people themselves. I am one of them, but without them I am nothing. They will either dismiss me as some isolated radical or take the initiative themselves to forge their own futures, in time I think these measures will be seen as having been inevitable. What I propose is not some violent revolution, but that the people come together at the grassroots level, in popular assemblies, and discuss what kind of future they want, what kind of society they want to live in, what kind of government, if any, they desire. The people at such assemblies would not be ignorant of the issues at had, they would call in experts where necessary, to educate the people and themselves. Does this mean such things need be applied having been debated and drafted? Not necessarily. The act itself can be but a matter of future precedent, an experiment if not a revolution, though revolution itself is always an experiment of sorts, the greatest of all experiments. Experiments such as those of the recent Congress of People's Resistance organized of the Party for Socialism and Liberation (PSL) are promising in this regard, even if we condemn the PSL's Stalinist political line. The website for the Congress of People's Resistance puts it well when it says, "U.S. Congress is a Multi-Millionaires' Club. It's time to build a #PeoplesCongress". We cannot help but agree.

I would like to give here my predictions as to what would come of such a thing. Of course, many of these predictions are far more radical in scope than what would today be considered popular opinion. I make these speculations with an understanding that not only would the people would have to be informed on the issues at hand, but moreover I make these speculations keeping in mind the spirit of all revolutions and revolutionary movements. As the people become more involved in public life and are swept away in the turn of events, popular opinion and the vanguard movements of popular opinion become more and more radicalized. This, history tells us, is the general course of development in all the great historic social revolutions of modern history; the English Revolution, the French Revolution, and the Russian Revolution. It is the typical course of every first general reckoning of the revolutionary forces begotten within the womb of bourgeois society. Its development moves naturally in an ascending line: from moderate beginnings to ever-greater radicalization of aims and, parallel with that, from a coalition of classes and parties to the sole rule of the radical vanguard of the formerly oppressed people's (paraphrasing Rosa Luxemburg).

Not funded or corrupted by big business or corporate power, I believe the Bill of Rights would be radically expanded. New amendments would be passed by the people themselves that were just as, if not more radical than the first Bill of Rights was in its day. The biggest corporations would be socialized and democratized, made to work by and for the people themselves, with rights always guaranteed to the minority, and not for the profit of the few The media too, I believe, would be democratized and decentralized, becoming grassroots, ruthless adversarial journalism made to inform the people and not to profit off of them through flashy headlines and clickbait. The fourth amendment would be restored by the prohibition of mass surveillance and the architecture of the internet itself would be altered to make it decentralized, secure and privacy respecting by default. The government insofar as it exists, would be made to be 100% transparent. There would be transparency for the powerful and privacy for everyone else. Perhaps most importantly to the future of humankind, the people, not corrupted by lobbying and misinformation from the fossil fuel industry and the billionaire class, but thoroughly informed on the scientific consensus, would advocate the immediate and emergency rapid divergence from fossil fuels and its replacement with 100% green, renewable energy. Plastics and other polluting industries would be replaced with ecological ones or allowed only under strict conditions. There would be mass reforestation initiatives and a serious focus on preparedness for the impending consequences of climate change for the generations to come, even for "worse than the worst case scenario". The current Bill of Rights rightfully recognizes negative liberty, but as far as positive liberty goes, there is none. It was as absurd to speak of a right to healthcare in 1774 as it was to speak of freedom of the press in pre-agricultural society. There is no reason anyone in our society should be homeless, hungry, or in a state of material poverty. We have the ability to sustainably abolish forever these grave social ills 20 times over, and many times more so! Such conditions are a menace to liberty. The world of material scarcity that produced our Constitution and Bill of Rights no longer exists. Today in our world of material abundance, it is our right and our duty to actively decide for ourselves what kind of a world, if any, we want for our children. Inaction is to let a generation that knew not our world to govern it. Inaction here is to declare the future of humankind as good as dead in the name of profit. The people would in time, realize that they had far more in common with the citizens and working people of every other country than with their own ruling class, and the people's of the world would increasingly come to the same conclusion. As Anarchist Emma Goldman said in 1908,

"Thinking men and women the world over are beginning to realize that patriotism is too narrow and limited a conception to meet the necessities of our time. The centralization of power has brought into being an international feeling of solidarity among the oppressed nations of the world; a solidarity which represents a greater harmony of interests between the workingman of America and his brothers abroad than between the American miner and his exploiting compatriot; a solidarity which fears not foreign invasion, because it is bringing all the workers to the point when they will say to their masters, "Go and do your own killing. We have done it long enough for you."

The military would serve to be a purely defensive apparatus of the people. It would not invade other countries, it would not intimidate the people's of the world, it would respect the right to national self-determination of other nation, viewing it as a prerequisite to its own freedom and sovereignty.

We do not believe it is possible to adequately address the climate crisis under capitalism. Green social-democrats often look to Norway as an staple of Green capitalism, a model to the rest of the world. But in spite of Norway having moved to 100% Green energy, it's top exports are still all in the polluting industries. The top exports of Norway are Crude Petroleum($45.1B) Petroleum Gas ($43.6B), and Refined Petroleum ($6.56B), all of which are fossil fuels. This is a prime example of the impossibility to fully address this issue under capitalism. But at least it is a step in the right direction. We should mention here that as of late, while fossil fuels are still Norway's top exports, its second top export is fish in the midst of global excesses in regards to ocean fishing! Norway has created a fortress of ecology within its own national borders, it has merely ‘exported’ the crisis of climate change to other countries! In the alternatives we look towards, a country (Norway, for instance) could stop fossil fuel exports and resource exploitation entirely without a serious hit to its economy as other countries would provide it with needed material aid. As Murray Bookchin said,

"To speak of 'limits to growth' under a capitalistic market economy is as meaningless as to speak of limits of warfare under a warrior society. The moral pieties, that are voiced today by many well-meaning environmentalists, are as naive as the moral pieties of multinationals are manipulative. Capitalism can no more be 'persuaded' to limit growth than a human being can be 'persuaded' to stop breathing. Attempts to 'green' capitalism, to make it 'ecological', are doomed by the very nature of the system as a system of endless growth."

While an authoritarian state-capitalist model such as that of the present day People's Republic of China has the potential to begin addressing the climate crisis in a serious way, it can do so only at the expense of the freedom and democracy of the people. This to us is unacceptable. The Chinese model is by far the most successful model of capitalist economics today. If one wishes to see the future of capitalism, they need look no further than China. No other school of economics to date comes close in terms of success and stability. Yet in spite of this, we think the advent of popular political democracy at the local level with the emergence of genuine industrial democracy has the potential to blow the Chinese state-capitalist model out of the water. Its focus would not merely be production for the sake of production, with no regard whatsoever to the social and ecological consequences of its actions, but on meeting human needs and to expand the state of human liberty and the dignity and quality of life. It would replace the feudal, dictatorial methods with which modern day corporations are managed, with the principles all Americans claim to aspire to embody- democracy. Do we as Americans, not claim to love liberty and democracy? The current order endangers the very foundations of all Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness. It is a menace to democracy itself.

Citizens, our generation will have none of it! It's high time the American people come together to create a socioeconomic and political system that embodies their active, not their passive consent. A system that embodies the hopes, dreams, aspirations, and values of the people as they exist today, not as they existed in 1774. I tip my hat to Mr. Jefferson, who recognized our right to do this. Citizens, it's high time our generation said for itself what kind of a world it wants. If we care at all for liberty, for democracy, if they are more than empty words for us, then we must act now. For if we do not act now, the generations of tomorrow will not forgive us!

What Can Rojava Learn From The Hacker Community?

I decided to write this post after reading on the Internationalist Commune website (Rojava), "If you have ideas for new projects to contribute to our work we are happy to hear from you." I decided to write this post because I do have ideas that I believe may greatly increase the freedom of the people of Rojava in regards to the digital world. Perhaps I am shamelessly utopian in my dreaming of a truly liberated world, in my enthusiasm for what is happening in Rojava today, for a truly free and democratic world. Regardless, I do hope the reader will take my views seriously, for I say that anything is possible today. As a disclaimer it should be noted that the word "Hacker" is subjected to as much misuse as the words "Socialism", "Anarchism", and "Communism". We are not here referring to criminality. A hacker is someone who writes code, a cracker (a more specific form of hacker) is someone who specializes in breaking into computer systems, both with permission (white hats) and without permission (black hats), and those who break the written law whilst still a biding by the law of morality (grey hats). Though generally there is some overlay, we are referring primarily here to the former and not the latter.

The Democratic Federation of Northern Syria (Rojava) is actively striving for total liberation of the Kurdish people from every possible form of institutionalized oppression and exploitation, including and especially the oppression that comes from the nation state. When thinking of institutions, the Internet naturally comes to mind, and Syria's Internet is anything but free. I am not talking here of state censorship which is another matter, but of surveillance.

On 29 November 2012, almost all Internet connectivity between Syria and the outside world was cut off. In the midst of the civil war, one side blamed the other, and the fighting intensified. It was not until 2014, two years later, that the world learned of the real culprit thanks to the heroic act of a Mr. Edward Snowden: it was the American government, the NSA. You see, by that time the surveillance of the Syrian nation by the National Security Agency of the United States was so intense that it had managed to "filter" the entirety of Syria's Internet through NSA owned servers. The "blackout" happened due to a catastrophic failure at an NSA owned data center. This surveillance almost certainly continues to this day, and in all likelihood is far more intense. If the Americans can do it, what of Turkey, America's so-called ally? What of the government of Iraq? The Russian government? ISIS? What about the companies that provide the people of Rojava their Internet connections and phone data? Can they be trusted not to spy on the people of Rojava?

I would not call myself an anarchist, but I agree with Proudhon when he said this of authority:

“To be GOVERNED is to be watched, inspected, spied upon, directed, law-driven, numbered, regulated, enrolled, indoctrinated, preached at, controlled, checked, estimated, valued, censured, commanded, by creatures who have neither the right nor the wisdom nor the virtue to do so."

In Rojava the people are effectively learning to govern themselves thanks to the principles of Democratic Confederalism, but insofar as they are being watched, even by a foreign power, they cannot be truly free. In the spirit of the fact that "Freedom is always the freedom of dissent" (a paraphrase of a quote by Rosa Luxemburg), I wrote recently in a post titled "Why Every Activist Should Use a VPN/Tor and Oppose Mass Surveillance" the following:

"Privacy in the digital age is the only real prerequisite to civil liberty. One is not truly free to dissent if one is being watched at every moment, (it is a well known and independently verifiable fact that people alter their behaviors when they are being watched, especially by authorities, and especially when these authorities retain everything a person said or thought or did indefinitely) and if one is being watched at every moment, one is not free at all. One doesn’t even have to wield this power to the fullest extent possible to destroy human liberty, its very existence is a terminal illness to every form of human freedom. In light of the horrendous abuses of power by NSA, GCHQ, and its accomplices, the Marxist left is bound by its principles to fight against mass surveillance, for the preservation of human freedom. We are bound by our principles to fight against these abuses of power in the political realm, but it is also necessary to protect ourselves and our communities at the individual level as well."

The people of Rojava are more capable of reaching a greater state of real freedom and democracy than any other people on the face of the earth. I have stated previously that it is my firm belief that the Greek democracies of antiquity are to our modern society, what Rojava is to the world of tomorrow. In the midst of such revolutionary potential, I believe it necessary for the people of Rojava to look towards ensuring and maintaining freedom in the digital world as well as in the physical. We used to say that a woman's home is her castle, now it is a woman's phone that is her castle.

Before going further, I felt it necessary to quote in part, Julian Assange's introduction to his book Cypherpunks, titled Introduction: A Cryptographic Call To Arms. I highly recommend anyone interested in internet freedom to go out and read the book itself, as it is a very interesting read:

"The platonic nature of the internet, ideas and information flows, is debased by its physical origins. Its foundations are fiber optic cable lines stretching across the ocean floors, satellites spinning above our heads, computer servers housed in buildings in cities from New York to Nairobi. Like the soldier who slew Archimedes with a mere sword, so too could an armed militia take control of the peak development of Western civilization, our platonic realm.

The new world of the internet, abstracted from the old world of brute atoms, longed for independence. But states and their friends moved to control our new worldby controlling its physical underpinnings. The state, like an army around an oil well, or a customs agent extracting bribes at the border, would soon learn to leverage its control of physical space to gain control over our platonic realm. It would prevent the independence we had dreamed of, and then, squatting on fiber optic lines and around satellite ground stations, it would go on to mass intercept the information flow of our new worldits very essenceeven as every human, economic, and political relationship embraced it. The state would leech into the veins and arteries of our new societies, gobbling up every relationship expressed or communicated, every web page read, every message sent and every thought googled, and then store this knowledge, billions of interceptions a day, undreamed of power, in vast top secret warehouses, forever. It would go on to mine and mine again this treasure, the collective private intellectual output of humanity, with ever more sophisticated search and pattern finding algorithms, enriching the treasure and maximizing the power imbalance between interceptors and the world of interceptees. And then the state would reflect what it had learned back into the physicalworld, to start wars, to target drones, to manipulate UN committees and trade deals, and to do favors for its vast connected network of industries, insiders and cronies.

But we discovered something. Our one hope against total domination. A hope that with courage, insight and solidarity we could use to resist. A strange property of the physical universe that we live in.

The universe believes in encryption.

It is easier to encrypt information than it is to decrypt it.

We saw we could use this strange property to create the laws of a new world. To abstract away our new platonic realm from its base underpinnings of satellites, undersea cables and their controllers. To fortify our space behind a cryptographic veil. To create new lands barred to those who control physical reality, because to follow us into them would require infinite resources.

And in this manner to declare independence.

Scientists in the Manhattan Project discovered that the universe permitted the construction of a nuclear bomb. This was not an obvious conclusion. Perhaps nuclear weapons were not within the laws of physics. However, the universe believes in atomic bombs and nuclear reactors. They are a phenomenon the universe blesses, like salt, sea or stars.

Similarly, the universe, our physical universe, has that property that makes it possible for an individual or a group of individuals to reliably, automatically, even without knowing, encipher something, so that all the resources and all the political will of the strongest superpower on earth may not decipher it. And the paths of encipherment between people can mesh together to create regions free from the coercive force of the outer state. Free from mass interception. Free from state control.

In this way, people can oppose their will to that of a fully mobilized superpower and win. Encryption is an embodiment of the laws of physics, and it does not listen to the bluster of states, even transnational surveillance dystopias.

It isn’t obvious that the world had to work this way. But somehow the universe smiles on encryption.

Cryptography is the ultimate form of non-violent direct action."

As an activist and a self-proclaimed computer nerd, I have found myself drawn to the Free Software community, which advocates the exclusive use of free (as in freedom) software that respects the users freedom to know what the software is doing, to change the software, and to redistribute modified versions of the software. That freedom is not abstract but real. Only when software is free can a user have control over the software, and not the other way around. The Free Software Foundation views the issue of free vs. proprietary software not as a matter of personal preference, but of individual and social liberty, and I cannot help but agree. In addition to this I have been an avid GNU/Linux enthusiast, favoring the free and democratic, community driven initiatives behind the Linux world over the proprietary corporate monopolies of Microsoft and Apple. It's no secret that Microsoft tells the NSA about security vulnerabilities in its software (including Windows) before patching them, and Apple along with other tech giants were most prominently featured on leaked NSA PRISM slides. I have also been a supporter of efforts to restore privacy and build individual liberty in the digital age. One of the projects I actively contribute to is called I2P (The Invisible Internet Project). The featured image is of Itoopie (the I2P mascot) standing with the International Freedom Batallion while waving the flag of Rojava. When explaining the need for such technologies, I often find myself quoting what American founding father John Adams once wrote to Thomas Jefferson,

“When people talk of the Freedom of Writing, Speaking, or thinking, I cannot choose but laugh. No such thing ever existed. No such thing now exists; but I hope it will exist. But it must be hundreds of years after you and I shall write and speak no more.” (15 July 1817)

Technologies such as I2P actively seek to bring about in practice the genuine and unfettered expression of individual liberty in the digital age, of real freedom of writing, freedom of speech, freedom of thought. Their mission is to do precisely what Adams and Jefferson dreamed of. It is ironic that in contributing to the development this technology, I actively hamper the American NSA in its mission statement to "know everything". Truly it is a sad world we live in. But for a liberated people and for a people struggling day by day for liberation, such as the people of Rojava, real freedom is on the table, not as an abstract idea but as a potential reality. We must of course, still be practical. What can the people of Rojava do today in this regard?

I have not yet been able to find a GNU/Linux distribution that supports Kurmanci (the main language used in Rojava) natively. The I2P project also lacks sufficient translation to Kurmanci, as does the Tor Project from what I can tell. For the people of Rojava, protecting the existence of individual liberty is paramount, and having access to the tools that do just that, in their own language, is paramount. I would highly recommend the people of Rojava use Linux as opposed to Windows or MacOS in their daily computing. For this to become practical, someone fluent in the language needs to help translate! Debian I think would be the best Linux distribution to translate since many other Linux distributions are based on it, and its generally a good distribution that uses all free software by default. You can find out how to translate for the Debian project here. Furthermore I would highly recommend the people of Rojava become adept in using Tor to protect their privacy online, for this to be practical, translators are needed yet again. I also would recommend those enthusiastic about this kind of thing to look into I2P, translators are needed here too! Unlike Tor, I2P is focused primarily on location hidden services (rather than anonymizing regular internet usage).

I favor I2P over other censorship resistant networks such as Tor, Freenet, and ZeroNet because they have a stronger focus on community, as well as having a better way to implement democratic principles while still respecting individual liberty. As far as "darknets" go, the content found on I2P is generally of a remarkably good nature. I attribute this precisely to the community oriented model embraced by the I2P project. Anyone can do anything they like, but things that reflect badly on the community or on I2P generally are not shown to the user by default, and as a result are of less quantity than other censorship resistant networks. With other censorship resistant networks, bad people see links to bad things almost immediately out of the naivety of the developers in taking the phrase "information is neutral" too seriously , or hear about abuses from the media, and bring more bad people to the network and before you know it the whole thing becomes a swamp. Sadly this is happening to tools like Freenet and ZeroNet, where ethical users must actively avoid key parts of the network, even if Freenet and ZeroNet have mainly legitimate, benevolent uses (Chinese citizens for instance openly talk on ZeroNet about state repression, and make up a substantial part of the network). I2P has thus far been largely immune to these problems, and that is why I am most enthusiastic in my endorsement of this particular piece of software. Here I dream of the practical uses of I2P in a liberated society.

What could the people of Rojava do with I2P? Anything! The people of Rojava could set up their own DNS servers (called addressbook services), that were democratically run by the community itself. Every computer user could set up their own website free of charge and put it onto I2P with the in-built Jetty webserver. If someone set up a website, they could get a domain from the community run addressbook provider, and no one else would know who ran it or where (geographically) it was located. If someone posted something immoral or illegal, the community would have the power to remove the domain name (without actually taking down the server) with the popular consent of the people. Thus if something really bad ever was happening in Rojava in regards to authoritarianism (itself unlikely), or if someone wanted to anonymously post a complaint or report an abuse, the people would have a safe space to freely voice their concerns without fear of retribution. There is hardly any better safeguard against authoritarianism than this, and because freedom is always the freedom of dissent, there is hardly a greater assurance of individual liberty in the digital age. The people of Rojava could also set up their own email servers and configure them to run over I2P, or use I2P-bote (an end-to-end encrypted, decentralized email like platform). The entirety of Rojava could email one another, talk to one another, and share things with one another inside the I2P network where no external power, no matter how strong, could ever spy on the people of Rojava or threaten their individual liberty. Why should one person in Rojava ever email another in Rojava when the email (itself unencrypted by default) was sent far outside of Syria, through the NSA's massive net, and then back into Syria to the intended recipient? Does such a scenario not limit the intellectual pursuits, the freedom of speech and thought of the person writing the email?

Children growing up in such a society would learn the importance of free software. They would learn to code and hack without limits, understanding that innovation is greatest when they share with one another. As the society progressed, they could contribute to these projects, actively securing and safeguarding the freedom of the people. The future generations would learn the values of privacy and the values of a society that did not give up its liberties to state power in the false name of "security", of a society that saw privacy as a fundamental prerequisite to civil liberty in the digital age.

For more general uses of the world wide web (a priceless tool that ought to be safeguarded), it is my view that the public's telecommunication infrastructure should be democratically run by the community itself, by neither state nor corporation. Those who manage it should be democratically elected, at all times instantly re-callable by the community by popular petition. ISP's should not log the activities of the people or store their search histories, perhaps community run VPN services would help to obfuscate internet traffic as an extra safeguard. In America, our congress made it legal in 2017 for ISP's to sell the American people's internet history to the highest bidder. Your ISP's should be nothing more than dumb pipes, infrastructure that gets messages from point A to point B without violating the rights of the people by spying on them or collecting their personal information. In that regard, you can progress far beyond the United States or any nation state in regards to individual liberty. There are other technologies too, that may be of interest to a liberated people, I would recommend fostering the use of PGP encryption for all email communications, using apps like Signal instead of texting, and the widespread use of privacy respecting services such as those found at PrivacyTools.io as a social norm (a translation of PrivacyTools here is also needed). Once mastered, two parties can communicate with one another safely without the prying eyes of any third party. I would recommend hackers look into projects such as Hyperboria that seek to create community run meshnets, that in theory would replace the centralized power of an ISP with 100% community infrastructure run by the people themselves. In spite of my numerous criticisms of the market and the existence of money as a currency of exchange, certain cryptocurrencies such as Monero (XMR) have the key benefit over the use of credit cards of being as or even more anonymous than cash. Tools such as Matrix can be used as a replacement for phone calls and texting. I would recommend the people of Rojava to look into these technologies.

As Glenn Greenwald said, "We all need places where we can go to explore without the judgmental eyes of other people being cast upon us, only in a realm where we're not being watched can we really test the limits of who we want to be. It's really in the private realm where dissent, creativity and personal exploration lie." Perhaps there is no better place in the world to put this into practice than Rojava. In conclusion, I think the people of Rojava could benefit greatly from the free software, Linux, and hacker community, and from projects such as I2P and Tor.

It is my highest hope that Rojava may continue to become a bastion of liberation, that it might climb to new frontiers in regards to digital resistance too, frontiers not dreamed of within the confines the nation state! Long live liberty! Long live the Democratic Federation of Northern Syria! Long live Rojava! May it last a thousand years!

Thoughts On “The Media” and “Fake News”

At the dawn of 2019, what can we really say about “the media”? It is a thing that, like “the people”, often embodies a meaningless abstraction to be used or abused as the powers that be see fit. But “the media” is a real, tangible, complicated thing just as “the people” consists of countless individuals each with their own biases, opinions, and backgrounds. One side in half-truth and often hypocrisy, proclaims the evils of the “mainstream media” and “fake news”. The other side also sometimes uses the term “fake news” in relation to foreign powers, but moreover goes on to uncritically defend the “integrity” of the billionaire owned and run corporate media. In that light, I thought it would be acceptable, since this is my blog, to voice my own views on the matter.

The media in all its varying forms, no longer required to attempt to present both sides of an issue objectively, has been turned into an outlet of specific political propaganda. Under capitalism one can expect that the media, no matter how “objective” it tries to be, will always come to the defense of capitalist society directly or indirectly; ideology permeates especially through so-called “apolitical” journalism just as it permeates through “liberal” and “conservative” journalism. Today however, the fragmentation of even the believable illusion of objectivity within the nomenclature of formal declarations, has led to a rampant increase in political tribalism. The media seeks not to inform, leaving the individual to come to their own conclusions having been informed to the best of their ability, of both sides within the limitations imposed by the ideology of bourgeois society– but rather, it seeks to indoctrinate the viewer into a political tribe which, while fervently opposed to the “other side”, in actuality has far more in common with the “other side” when compared to the objective diversity of global politics. That which is agreed upon by both positions, both parties, is never debated or discussed except by “radicals” who are occasionally given 3 minutes of air time without enough time to really prove or adequately defend their “impossible” positions. Those agreements matter, and often are just as if not more important than the immediate issues at hand.

Those who cry “fake news” are often those most susceptible to it. Everything they do not agree with (i.e. the “liberal media”) is “fake news”, while their preferred conservative media outlet, usually the billionaire owned Fox News, which plays 24/7 on the television of almost everyone over 60, is somehow “real news”. Right-wing conspiracy theorists such as those found on InfoWars are the “real news” while CNN, in spite of its obvious liberal biases, is “fake news”. In fact, the conservatives do not lie when they call CNN “fake news”, they merely do not go far enough. Fox News, one of the biggest mainstream media sources in existence, likes to pretend it is special when it speaks of “the media”, “the mainstream media”, etc. Any billionaire owned television station will be slanted towards the views and attitudes of the prevailing society, and moreover towards the views of the ruling class of that society.

If objectivity is the goal, legislation ensuring fair and unbiased journalism (to the best of the ability of the journalist) is necessary. Furthermore, what is needed is radical decentralization and democratization of the media itself. The corporate media of course, will proclaim a violation of its “right to a free press”, even if such action is actually necessary for the freedom of the press to survive. The primary purpose of the media is to hold power accountable. In actuality we find that one side is hypocritical in its criticism for 4 years, and uncritical in its praise for the other 4. People like to listen to what affirms their own biases, and avoid what contradicts them. Ignoring the issues of the relative subjectivity of attempted objectivity, and the seriously overlooked issues of agreement between “both sides”, it is highly unusual for someone to watch Fox News under Obama, and then to switch to MSNBC under Trump. Because of this, truly adversarial journalism ought to be encouraged embodying “the ruthless criticism of all that exists: ruthless both in the sense of not being afraid of the results it arrives at and in the sense of being just as little afraid of conflict with the powers that be.”

Both sides have of course, been more and more radicalized since the early 2000’s. Not only in the sense that the left is moving further to the left, the right is moving further to the right (in comparison with the American norm), but rather both sides are increasing in their authoritarianism. More and more we find that one side would have it that the other is silenced, and vice versa. Often we find that the media today is less “journalism” than stations of indoctrination. Anyone who cannot see this today is blind to what is happening. As long as serious, though often petty differences between both sides are fervently debated, the similarities between them embodying the gross injustices found within very base of society itself will be ignored and overlooked. There is no simple solution to this problem, but support for ceaselessly adversarial and principled journalism, legislation requiring both sides to be fairly reported, and the broad decentralization and democratization of the media are a good start as we try to look for both short and long-term solutions to this issue. In a world of ever increasing authoritarianism and mass surveillance, we should also look to support censorship resistant and privacy respecting platforms of communication that journalists may need to rely on in the future. In short, these are my views on the matter.

Don’t Let Rojava Become Another Yemen! Contact Your Representatives To Defend Our Kurdish Allies!

December 24, 2018

Trump’s announcement of his plan to withdraw US troops from Syria has struck terror into the hearts of the Kurdish people of Northern Syria. It is genocide they fear– not from ISIS but from Turkey. The Democratic Federation of Northern Syria (Rojava) is a staple of democracy in the Middle East. It is however to Turkey, as America was to Great Britain in 1774. Moreover, the people of Rojava were our allies in the fight against ISIS, and it is our moral responsibility to help protect them now. True, the relationship between the Kurdish independence movement and the United States is a complicated one, but the Syrian Civil War has de facto and resolutely proclaimed that the people of Rojava are in fact our allies.

I personally am not shy on this issue, I fully support the Kurdish people’s struggle for independence, their aspirations of a real and working stateless democracy of the common people in the Middle East, and their commitment to ecology, social justice, feminism, and libertarian socialism. As a socialist and a supporter of the ideas of Murray Bookchin, this shouldn’t surprise anyone. Every honest socialist ought to support Rojava, but in my opinion it is not only the leftists that should support Rojava, but everyone.

Anyone who cares at all about democracy, human freedom, and the future of human civilization ought to support Rojava. It is my firm belief that the Greek democracies of antiquity are to our modern civilization, as Rojava is to the world of tomorrow. It is not only leftists but liberals and conservatives, and even right-wing libertarians who ought to support Rojava. Yes Rojava is a left wing, democratic confederalist experiment, but even centrist news outlets admit that it’s the only real hope for democracy in the Middle East. In the midst of a bloody civil war it has emerged in impossible conditions as bastion of democracy, freedom and equality surrounded by unfreedom and despotism. The heroism and selflessness of the YPG and YPJ in their fight against ISIS is known throughout the world, and the last thing the United States, a nation that sees itself as a “defender of democracy”, a nation that invades sovereign nations on the basis of “defending democracy”, ought to do is leave democracy for the slaughter.

Trump has decided, seemingly on a whim, to withdraw all US forces from Syria. Under normal circumstances I would applaud this act, and before pondering the implications for Rojava, I initially did– bringing US troops home from the Middle East is long overdue– but these are not ordinary circumstances. Conservative TV pundits seem to be more concerned with exposing the hypocrisy of once “anti-war” liberals in their “horror” over Trump’s decision of withdraw from Syria than with the actual potential consequences of these events. Liberal TV pundits seem more concerned with Russia and the imperial interests of the United States than with the actual consequences of these events. The Kurdish people are friends of the people of the United States. The US government and the Democratic Federation of Northern Syria have until now been on mostly good terms and proven allies in the fight against ISIS. Moreover, the United States has a responsibility to protect and defend it’s allies, the Kurdish people and the Democratic Federation of Northern Syria, who valiantly fought on the ground against ISIS. There can be no excuse for the moral cowardice involved if the United States refuses to come to the aid of its Kurdish allies.

No people, no matter how well natured, could ever forgive the United States, if after using the Kurdish people for its own ends as cannon fodder, left them to die in the wake of an aggressive Turkish invasion that recent history tells us would amount to genocide. Is that what the Kurdish people are to the United States? Cannon fodder? Or are they allies and heroes in the fight against ISIS? The actions of the United States in the next few weeks will tell us one way or another. To the American people they are heroes and allies, will the government act in accordance with the will of the people who are informed on these events? Will it stand idly by amid genocidal Turkish aggression against an innocent people who demand nothing than their rights? Against a people who demanded no more than what George Washington demanded from Great Britain at the dawn of this nation?

In closing I will leave the reader with a Press Release titled “Urgent Statement From The Emergency Committee For Rojava” titled “Don’t Let Rojava Become Another Yemen”, and I plea as they do, that every US citizen contact their local representative on this issue, and furthermore I ask that you be prepared to protest if urgent action is not taken:

With reports of the Trump administration planning to withdraw U.S. troops from Syria, along with disturbing new documentation released today about Turkey’s war crimes in Afrin, we are writing to alert our elected representatives and the public to the dire consequences should Turkey attack Rojava (the Kurdish majority region in northeastern Syria) east of the Euphrates, as it has promised. Turkey appears poised to attack whether or not American troops are stationed there. On Dec. 12, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan made a speech saying a Turkish offensive is imminent. The Pentagon command responded that such a “unilateral action” would be “unacceptable,” but the US has warned Turkey similarly in the past with no real consequences. Turkey has already been signaling its intentions by sniping at civilians across the border and bombing Kurdish areas in Iraq including the Makhmour refugee camp and Mount Shingal, home to the Yazidis.

A year ago, without any provocation, Turkey crossed the border into Syria to invade and occupy Afrin, driving out its Kurdish citizens, looting and confiscating their property, taking hostages, and repopulating the area with jihadis and Arabs from other parts of Syria in a demographic change that amounts to ethnic cleansing. The U.S. ignored Kurdish appeals for help despite the coalition’s reliance on Rojava and the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) to defeat ISIS. Now the Trump Administration says it will withdraw troops from Syria.

We call on Congress and the American people to make sure this betrayal is not repeated and that Rojava’s extraordinary but fragile democracy is not endangered. It is critical that the U.S. take this stand because:

​

Rojava is the only democratically-run part of Syria based on secular, feminist, and ecological principles.

Its values oppose both fundamentalism and dictatorship.

Its pluralism and federalist vision of the future of Syria are a model for the entire region, as is the Kurds’ integration of other ethnicities and women into positions of power throughout society.

The SDF have consistently proven to be the only reliable US ally in the war against ISIS. Now that they have almost finished the job, and taken immense losses, it is essential that we honor our moral obligation to the people who fought ISIS by helping them realize a peaceful co-existence with all regional powers.

​

Rather than deserting Rojava, the U.S. must commit to giving the Democratic Federation of Northern Syria (the official name of Rojava), economic and political as well as military assistance, and should put all possible pressure on Turkey to reopen peace negotiations with its own Kurds. As Aliza Marcus said recently in the New York Times, “The only way to build an alternative to the chaos and repressive dictatorship in the rest of Syria is through recognition of the Kurdish-led administration and active political engagement.”

The U.S. has faltered in Syria too many times in the past. It can prevent a bloodbath and the displacement of hundreds of thousands of people, if it demands Erdogan stand down. It can press Turkey to reopen peace negotiations with its own Kurdish population, stopping the endless cycle of violence. We urge the Trump Administration and Congress to act to defend Rojava before it is too late.

In Defense of Positive Liberty

November 11, 2018

Every so-called right today was once in olden times, or perhaps in times not so long ago, nothing more than a privilege for the few, a dream for the many. To say on the one hand “freedom is not free” and to ask on the other hand “who will pay for it?” is an irreconcilable contradiction. History teaches us that rights are not given, they are taken. Freedom is never free. Here the words of Proudhon ring ever true today, “We are convinced that freedom without socialism is privilege and injustice; socialism without freedom is slavery and brutality”. Liberty and equality do not contradict one another but on the contrary, they complement one another. The contradiction between liberty and equality that has allegedly plagued human society since 1789 is only a contradiction in capitalist society. Rights are not absolute and eternal even if society ought to recognize rights already won as such. Liberty is a dialectical process of constant expansion throughout human history. The privileges, even dreams of today become the rights of tomorrow. No one now has any right to deny this.

Even the American Founding Fathers understood that centralized private property was incompatible with their “vision” of bourgeois democracy. One can of course dream of going back to an “uncorrupted” American democracy rooted in decentralized ownership of private property if one can ignore the slavery, sexism, open racism, and genocide. Or one can naively believe in bourgeois democracy and the “willingness” of the ruling class to work together in the name of class harmony and utilitarianism for the common good. The assuredly revolutionary implications of the only other option available are too dangerous to even contemplate in mainstream politics. In the world where everything is possible; positive liberty, social democracy (in the classical sense of the word), and a fundamental social change that according to most climatologists deem necessary for humanity’s long term survival, is by some alchemy “impossible”.

I have provided a brief explanation of Positive Liberty by the encyclopedia at Marxists.org for those unfamiliar with the term:

“Negative freedom means the lack of forces which prevent an individual from doing whatever they want; Positive freedom is the capacity of a person to determine the best course of action and the existence of opportunities for them to realise their full potential.

The overwhelmingly dominant tendency in the history of bourgeois society has been to open up negative freedom, by removing feudal and other reactionary constraints on freedom of action. Free trade and wage-labour are the most characteristic bourgeois freedoms which have resulted from this history: free trade being the freedom of a capitalist to make a profit without restriction, and wage-labour being the freedom of a worker from any means of livelihood other than being able to sell their labour power to the highest bidder. Thus this negative bourgeois freedom is a kind of freedom which is real only for those who own the means of production.

Positive freedom has been built up almost exclusively as a result of the struggle of the working class: initially the legislation limiting hours of work, child labour and so on, later the creation of free compulsory education, public health systems, right to form trade unions, and so forth, freedoms which explicitly limit the freedom of the capitalists to exploit workers, but give worker the opportunity to develop as human beings.

The freedom people have is determined by the ethical system of the society they are born into, which is fundamentally based on the economic relations that society is based on: for example in capitalistic society a person is free to exploit wage, but labourers are not free to receive things like an education and health care in accordance to what they need; only in accordance to what they have to pay. In socialist society, a person is not free to exploit labourers (i.e. restrict the freedoms of labourers), but are free to own a more or less equal portion of the means of production in accordance to their own need and ability.

In hitherto existing Socialist states, like the Soviet Union and China, “negative freedoms” were severely restricted, while “positive freedoms” were advanced. All people had universal access to health care, full university education, etc, but people could only use those things they had in a particular way – in support of the government. In the most advanced capitalist governments, this relationship is the other way around: “positive freedoms” are restricted or do not exist all together, while “negative freedoms” are more advanced than ever before. A worker in capitalist society has the freedom to say whatever she believes, but she does not have the freedom to live if crippled by a disease regardless of how much money she has. A socialist society that has been established from a capitalist society will strengthen “negative freedoms”, while ushering in real “positive freedoms” across the board, ensuring equal and free access to social services by all.

The fullest development of positive freedom is impossible however without a further development of negative freedom – people cannot be forced to be free”

Entitlement and The myth of the “Self-Made Man”.

One of the staunchest criticisms of positive liberty is that its emergence is but another symptom of a deeply rooted affliction affecting America’s youth: entitlement. Traditional capitalist ethics are of course deeply rooted in the foundational documents and principles of the bourgeois-democratic republic itself. The Constitution with its Bill of Rights, the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen, and so forth are hailed as the highest of ideals. The very notion that we can transcend even them is to many conservatives, offensive, even if they’ll call it by any other name. Historical attempts rooted in the very valid criticism of the limitations of capitalism and bourgeois society have, albeit in extremely backward nations, brought forth extreme forms of despotism that no genuine socialist or libertarian ought to idolize. The memory of Stalinism weighs like a nightmare upon all who dream of a better world. But the conditions of today are not remotely similar to the conditions of pre-revolutionary France or colonial America, nor are they for that matter even remotely similar to the conditions of 1917 Russia. They have transcended their earlier forms of barbarism not in spite of the revolutionaries of 1774 and 1789, but because of them. Their ethical, political, social, and economic system is a product of their own time, of an era rooted not in material abundance, but material scarcity. Today for the first time in human history we find ourselves in a society rooted in material abundance. The contradiction between our hitherto existing ethical, social, political, and economic systems rooted in material scarcity and the world we find ourselves in today, will almost certainly lead to the biggest social revolution in all of human history. It is up to us, the people of the world, to determine what our future will look like and by what means it will be brought forth. It is not only logic, but Liberty herself that demands we take from them that which exists that is good and move beyond that which is not. For Liberty today cannot stagnate, she can either expand or die.

It was as absurd to speak of a right to healthcare in 1774 as it was to speak of a right to a free press in pre-agricultural society. That which society does not have the means to provide cannot be guaranteed to all as a right but on paper, and a society that does not take its proclaimed rights seriously often has none (as we see under Stalinism). But when a society is productive enough to provide something deemed a necessary attribute of social existence by most members of society, to all members of society, it is obligated to do so– not as a privilege, but as a right. Once again it must be stressed that freedoms are not given, they are taken.

It is impractical to speak of any real positive liberty under capitalism. Here we must speak in explicitly class terminology. Bourgeois democracy, insofar as it remains bourgeois, by design can and will in every possible instance, ceaselessly attempt to retract those positive liberties won by the common people precisely because the instruments of power are in the hands of the bourgeoisie. In spite of constant pressure from below to keep what concessions are won, the bourgeoisie will always try to restore society to its “rightful” equilibrium– negative liberty without positive liberty. In the United Kingdom, the wealthy proclaim universal healthcare to be a “total failure” while the poor see it as a blessing. The rich man who pays more taxes to society, who can no longer get better treatment because he can pay more, has every reason to complain. But the poor man who under American-style capitalism could barely afford a mere Doctor’s visit, has little fundamental in regards to healthcare to complain about. He or she who declares universal healthcare, or any positive liberty for that matter, to be a “resounding success” or a “total disaster” without taking into account the class implications misses the mark entirely. This is the essence of positive liberty: it already exists as a privilege to the rich in a society productive enough to provide it to all. As such, it ceases to be a privilege but a right. Reaction to such declarations by those in power, and by those indoctrinated into the prevailing ideology of bourgeois society, is inevitable. It is precisely that reaction which this essay seeks to usurp.

Still people go on about positive liberty being nothing more than “entitlements”, “handouts”! What then is considered a handout? Is the entire existing human species not arrogantly “entitled” to the historical and technological progress earned by the blood of countless generations past? Yet we ourselves shed no blood. What right then do we have? Should we not return to caves so we can through blood and sweat “earn” what we currently enjoy without a second thought? Or is it of the same nature the socialists and left libertarians attribute to the concept of positive liberty— a birthright in any society technologically capable of recognizing it as such?

The question here is not at all an innocent one. Violence, like liberty, comes in many different forms. He who murders his neighbor commits an act of violence just as he who refuses to shelter his neighbor who is freezing to death out in the cold with no place to stay. To quote my fried, comrade, and fellow blogger Christian Chiakulas:

“In a world that produces enough food to feed each and every one of us, starvation is violence. In a society where vacant houses outnumber homeless people six to one, homelessness is violence. A country in which health insurance companies rake in billions in profits while leaving nearly thirty million people uninsured and unable to access medical care is a violent society.

This is the everyday violence of capitalism – if it is profitable to let somebody die, or languish in abject poverty, we do so. That is a violent society.”

Sympathy With The Super-Villains

October 19, 2018

In superhero movies, the protagonist often “saves the world”. This rarely of course means saving the structural integrity of the planet we live on, but rather “the world” symbolizes the status quo. The “bad guy” is demonized to the extreme and holds no coherent theoretical or scientific basis for their critique of the status quo, much less a solution. In Blacklist, the anti-capitalist antagonist is “General Ludd” (referring to the luddites of early capitalism who destroyed the means of production in an effort to stifle the industrial revolution, rather than seizing and democratizing the means of production). They are not Marxists with a coherent idea of how capitalism works, they are Luddites. In The Dark Knight Rises, we never see on the ground what “the people” do when given real political power. We see demonizations, but never what actually happens. This I believe is intentional. Black Panther’s Killmonger holds a mostly valid critique of world imperialism and institutional racism, but his solution is the substitution of one form of oppression and exploitation with another, something no real anti-imperialist or historic member of the Black Panther Party would ever advocate. In Mission Impossible the “evil anarchists” also do not hold a remotely sensical world-view. The critique of institutional forms of oppression, exploitation, and domination present in actual, logical anarchist thought is replaced with the slogan, seemingly invented for the film “the greater the suffering, the greater the peace”. This too is intentional.

Bat Man and Iron Man are both billionaires (in fact we find this to be the case in many superhero movies, tv shows, and comics from Blacklist to Archer). If we take off the rosy eyed glasses that portray these superheroes in a purely benevolent light, do we not find that our sympathies lie with the villains who are opposed to the systems that require a “homeless man to be given a nice coat from a kind billionaire” to begin with? Naturally, the super-villains as they are presented to us are hardly admirable. But we should not be so quick to dismiss their aims either. As Trotsky once said, “A slave-owner who through cunning and violence shackles a slave in chains, and a slave who through cunning or violence breaks the chains – let not the contemptible eunuchs tell us that they are equals before a court of morality!”

Censorship Reisitant Version of Red Liberty | FREEDOM IS ALWAYS THE FREEDOM OF DISSENT!