Yeah, that was very strange.
He's running as an independent in the district which he had represented for decades, and he's organising a very impressive grassroots campaign but in the one poll which I know about, he's in second place. People have told me that UK polling is extremely bad, I hope they're right.
Do you remember where you read that?
I'm afraid you're gonna stay a very lonely anti-imperialist in that way.
Here's a quote from Some Points on The Mass Line for you:
Start from where people are at. Since building the struggle is at the core of our agenda, we can then proceed to outline some key principles and methods of work. The first is that our starting point needs to be the felt needs and wants of the masses of people. Good intentions will not do in this case. They might bring us to the demonstration, but we are likely to be lonely there. So to build struggle, we had better have a handle on what these felt needs are and what people are likely to do in order to achieve them. We have probably all been in meetings where some particular is under discussion, and somebody jumps up and says, “The real issue is X or Y.” Maybe that person is extremely insightful or maybe they are dead wrong (more likely). It really does not matter, we need to start from where people are at.
The text below is from Kevin Ovenden, an Irish marxist who founded an organisation to bring aid to Palestine during the 2009 war, and who as aboard the flotilla in 2010 which tried breaking the Israeli Blockade, which was violently attacked by the IOF.
"It's absolutely true that the impact of Israel's killing of seven WCK aid workers casts a harsh light on those who only now complain about this going "too far" after the slaughter of over 30,000 Palestinians and 196 other aid workers.
We should make that point as we seize on this moment to build more widely and to isolate Israel where we are.
But it is not helped by some memes and lazy arguments going around. Those talk of the deaths of "seven white people" at the hands of Israel.
That isn't true. One was Palestinian and a second was Indian-Australian. Not white.
I think some of this comes from not really pausing to think and find out, combined with an extremely annoying habit of people trying to force everything into North American notions of "white skin privilege".
The perversity of that in this case is that it erases the Palestinian-ness of one of the victims and the mixed heritage of another, of the kind that can still raise eyebrows at passport control in parts of the world."
Michael Hudson talked about how he was approached by the State Department to work with them after Super-imperialism was published, and at first he was a bit worried because of his Marxist background. He said that once they learned about his actual family history (his father was a Trotskyist labor leader in Minneapolis and he himself is the godson of Trotsky) they were like, “ok, good, not a threat to us.”
No fucking way. That's incredible. Do you still have that interview lying around?
I second @footfaults@hexbear.net 's point: read the Jakarta Method. The most eye-opening thing about that book was how in every country where it happened, the people living here had the same idea "something that is so outrageous can't happen here".
Since the link goes to the homepage, I didn't believe it at first. Here's the archived version of the article, for my fellow skeptics: https://archive.is/1IdVZ
Half of all economics experiments can not be replicated
Is there an actual study which makes this claim, like the one that exists in psychology? Or is this your intuïtion? Not doubting you btw. As a marxist economist, I'd just like the citation.
Perhaps this is the right time to bring up the fact that Israel gave Ethiopian Jews anticonceptics without their knowledge, to make sure they didn't get to many children, and Israel could remain a very white state.