Saturday 26 December 2009

WE WISH YOU ALL A PROSPEROUS NEW YEAR 2010 !!! Franz J. T. Lee: A Dog's Life

WE WISH YOU ALL A PROSPEROUS NEW YEAR 2010 !!! 
Franz J. T. Lee: A Dog's Life



Long 'before people', before Pavlov trained his consumer dogs,
Before zombies were suffering from perpetual amnesia,
in carpe diem got the thrills,
Before senseless academicians became war tanks,
were preparing the 'day after', ... 'after people' ,
Long, long ago, in the immense savannas of Africa,
in the tall grass,  friendly, natural doggies were frolicking around
At dusk, in circular spacetime, tired , puppies were flattening their green bed,
And were off to dreaming about the next happy dog's day life;
The 'day after',
billions of under-dogs, would not be allowed to daydream anymore;
Across four billion years Mother Earth had lived without us,
As eternal remembrance of human absurdity, irrationality and plain stupidity,
As galactic tumbstone she could deeply bewail our demise
For the next billions of years to come,

Unless ... we reap the wind by global storming;
Finally, in the last second, by making hay
While the proletarian sun still is shining,
So that every corporate blood hound gets his day!

26/12/2009.
-----oOo-----
 

Sunday 20 December 2009

Venezuela: Who is the Proletariat?

Venezuela: Who is the Proletariat? 

By Franz J. T. Lee - September 27, 2004

Currently, in Venezuela, in Latin America, for the sake of independent, authentic journalism, in the daily process of deepening the Bolivarian Revolution, of educating ourselves, and our compatriots, praxical precision and theoretical incision in our popular "missions" and universities have become top priorities.
Always the New, the Original and the Authentic logically necessitate corresponding concepts and notions. Furthermore, in a virulent revolutionary atmosphere, the social contents of concepts like the "workers", the "working classes", "revolution", "proletariat",  "process", "democracy" or "ideology" permanently change. For example, in the second half of the 19th century, Marx, Engels, Lenin and Trotsky, all were "Social Democrats", in fact, Social Democracy was a synonym for Socialism or Communism. Of course, the current usage of this term has changed completely over the last six years. A lot of ADECOS, of Social Democrats, were golpistas; with others, they  directed the "Coordinadora Democrática" against Chávez' legitimate, democratic government. Furthermore, what "ideology" meant during the Napoleonic Wars, and what it connotes nowadays in Bush's "New Wars" is definitely not the very same thing. In fact, the thought "revolution" and the written word "revolution" are not identical.
Since the 1848 revolutions in Europe, all Marxists, also those that were not Anti-Marxists, spoke about the global Class Struggle of the Proletariat against the Bourgeoisie. Till today, across the globe, we witness class struggles against corporate imperialism, against the Fourth Empire", even the "Class War" (Lula) of "proletarian" countries or continents against "bourgeois", global, metropolitan fascism.
Hence, what is to be understood by the "world proletariat"? Who are the workers, the working classes? In how far do they play an emancipatory role in the Bolivarian Revolution? Are these concepts obsolete? Are they to be replaced by concepts like the "nation", "people", "poor" or the "sovereign"? Surely, these are central "ideological" issues that directly concern the Latin American Revolution.
In this short commentary we cannot dive deeply into the turbulent, profound, praxical and theoretical waters of proletarian internationalism and international proletarianism; however, our Bolivarian comrades should think seriously and write scientific analyses about these pertinent issues. Only as such we could transcend bourgeois "ideology", and enter the fertile realms of revolutionary theory.
Now, what or who is the "proletariat", the modern locomotive of social revolution? Let us just throw some light on its historical origins, to indicate that the social content of this concept has changed dramatically over the last centuries, and that we have to find new revolutionary connotations for this world subject of emancipation. We have to identify the real, true revolutionary subject in Venezuela and Latin America. We have to introduce the real, true, authentic Bolivarians to the world. Much has been done, however, much more is necessary.
Obviously, with shabby, revolutionary tools,
with empty words, that lead nowhere, we can only coin weird notions and bizarre ideas, that will end up with myopic triumphalism and activism. Over the last years, in the dominant national and international mass media, we have seen how the "opposition", in its "war of ideas", in its disinformation campaigns, has utilized uncanny and banausic formulations to assassinate Chávez´ character, and therewith, to bedevil the very Bolivarian Revolution itself.

Hence, historically, in feudalist and capitalist Europe, who coined such concepts like the "proletariat" or the "lumpenproletariat"? Do they exist in Latin America?
Immediately, the layman, the nerd, the ideologue,  would say: This concept was invented by the "Communists", by Marx and Engels. Well, we humbly genuflect confronted by such implanted ignorance; really, it's bliss.
From the 16th century onwards, here and there, in European writings, the concepts "proletariat" or "proletary" appeared; later, long before the birth of Marx, at the eve of the French Revolution, especially in "worker's clubs", like the "League of the Just", the concept gradually acquired a worker's content.
In 1837, the Swiss economist Jean Charles Leonard Simonde de Sismondi finally adopted this term. Only in 1842, Lorenz von Stein introduced the concept into German; then the famous German revolutionary poet, Ferdinand von Freiligrath passed the concept on to Friedrich Engels, who used it in the first scientific socialist work, in his book, The Condition of The Working Class in England in 1844.
As a matter of scientific-philosophic curiosity, why did the fathers of scientific socialism use this specific term in their works?
After all, concepts like the "working classes", "working men", "labouring classes" were prevalent in that epoch. Surely, we know that Marx and Engels were linguists par excellence. Hence, let's see what the etymological meaning of this concept reveals.
In Ancient Rome, the proletarius belonged to the under-dogs, to the lowest section of the population. In Latin, pro-olescere simply means "growing out of"; in the sense of  mushrooms "sprouting out of the ground", "shooting up". Hence, the proletarius had a derivative, an artificial, a synthetic nature.  Marx and Engels introduced him as follows in the Communist Manifesto:
"The bourgeoisie ... has ... begotten the men who are to wield those weapons -- the modern workers -- the proletarians. ... the proletariat is recruited from all classes of the population."
Seen from an arrogant European standpoint, this means that the proletariat is not primordial, not "naturwüchsig"; it is an amorphous social concoction, a social excrement, lacking "cultural" and "civilized" roots.
In fact, the current "globalized" and "civilized" ideas of Bush and Rumsfeld with reference to the "Arabs" at best explain this original, discriminatory conception of the early proletariat.
According to Marx and Engels the new proletarius adopted the capitalist relations produced by the victorious bourgeoisie, and the nexus between the members of the proletariat and the bourgeoisie became "naked self-interest, callous cash payment".
Here we see the growing class antagonism, the alienating relation between the socially rising, wealthy bourgeoisie and the pauperized nature of the future proletariat.
However, on the other pauperized extreme, we find another class, the "Lumpenproletariat". Why did Marx and Engels use this concept?
Grimm's Wörterbuch described the members of this class of social outcasts, as Lumpengesindel: "a slovenly mob, a pack of scoundrels, a godless pack, vagabonds".
Apart from the semantic similarity, this colluvies vagabundorum, that is, this rotting mass thrown off by the lowest sectors of "modern society", the Lumpenproletariat, in  Marxian terminology, is exactly the negation of the proletariat. Here we see that the Marxian social class analysis was not normative, was not based on "rich and poor", was not even an issue of "white and black", of "race theory" of "race struggle".
In 1845, the concept of the "lumpen-proletariat" appeared in their work, The German Ideology. Furthermore, in that age, the influential, bourgeois, capitalist work, De Cassagnac explained, that the general concept "proletariat" was composed of "workers, beggars, thieves and prostitutes". For example, this is what the German philosopher Hegel understood by his concept, the Pöbel.
On the other hand, in this same spirit of the European Enlightenment, even for Marx, the Lumpenproletariat comprised the "beggars, thieves and prostitutes", the non-productive sector of the lowest classes.
In Class Struggle in France, he described this class as "gens sans feu et sans aveu". However, according to Marx, both classes, the Proletariat and the Lumpenproletariat, had the following in common: both were "free" and both could be "bought" or "bribed". However, the differentia especifica was, that the lumpenproletarians are déclassés; that they lack a "class interest"; that they can't develop a "class consciousness"; in other words, they can't be conscientized for anything whatsoever. More precisely, capitalism has already destroyed their very body and soul. Well, do such social classes exist in our modern world? And can they be revolutionized, conscientized, organized? What about the "stupid, white man" in North America?
Now, we know what Marx and Engels, the fathers of scientific and philosophic socialism, understood by the proletariat, that is, objectively as a class-in-itself.
To become a class-in-and-for-itself, to acquire class consciousness, to enter the global class struggle, Lenin gave us the master-key: without theory, no revolution. And, Trotsky, in the revolutionary spirit of dum spiro spero -- as long as I breathe, I hope -- , as permanent world revolution, formulated for us the infinite realm of the Bolivarian Revolution, that is, our invincible, emancipatory, transhistoric task. Finally, Che Guevara underlined the true, real essence of this immense responsibility: The duty of a revolutionary is to make the revolution. 

http://narcosphere.narconews.com/notebook/franz-jt-lee/2004/09/venezuela-who-proletariat

Saturday 19 December 2009

H1N1 vaccine liquidation sale now on: Hurry while supplies last!

H1N1 vaccine liquidation sale now on: Hurry while supplies last!
Millions of useless vaccines
Polluting the environment with H1N1 vaccines

COMMENTARY

Friends,
 

thought you dId have escaped the swine flu vaccines? 

Think twice. 

The vaccines will be coming back to haunt you, contaminating drinking water, crop fertilizers and thus the food you will consume tomorrow, in sort of a chain of reaction of "DNA pollution". Here is an interesting article by Mike Adams concerning the destiny of millions of totally useless swine flu vaccine doses.
Regards,
Jutta

******

H1N1 vaccine liquidation sale now on: Hurry while supplies last!

by Mike Adams, the Health Ranger, NaturalNews Editor / http://www.naturalnews.com/z027766_H1N1_vaccines_swine_flu.html


(NaturalNews) All of a sudden, H1N1 vaccines are available all across America. Walgreens and other pharmacies are pushing the vaccines as if there were an "everything must go" liquidation sale under way. Hurry, get your swine flu vaccine today before everybody figures out they're useless!

The marketability of vaccines has a strict time limit. They're only in demand during the fear phase of a pandemic, and that fear phase has long since faded for H1N1. Virtually everyone who wants an H1N1 vaccine has already received one, and the rest of the population is beginning to notice something quite curious: People who got the vaccine are no better off than those who skipped it . In fact, there's no difference in mortality between those who were vaccinated and those who weren't, indicating yet again that the swine flu vaccine was a medical hoax to begin with.

If you don't believe me, just ask the potentially hundreds of thousands of parents who gave their children one of the recently recalled H1N1 children's vaccines. These vaccines were recalled because they were found to be so weak that they were medically useless. But observant parents are noticing a curious fact: Children who received the "useless" (recalled) vaccine have been no worse off than those who received a full-strength vaccine.

The strength of the vaccine, in fact, appears to be entirely irrelevant to the health outcomes of children. Vaccine or not, strong or weak, children's reaction to the pandemic has virtually nothing to do with any treatments offered by conventional medicine.

In fact, the greatest determining factor in the health outcomes of children has most likely been their blood levels of vitamin D . But that isn't tracked by medical professionals... nor even prescribed by them. So we'll probably never know the exact correlation between vitamin D and H1N1 prevention.


Millions of useless vaccines


So now we have a situation where the U.S. government has spent billions of dollars acquiring H1N1 vaccines that, by the time they were delivered for consumption, were already irrelevant to public health. Does anybody really believe at this point that swine flu is a deadly pandemic that will kill you if you don't receive a vaccine? You'd have to really look hard to find someone so uninformed (and brainwashed) that they're making the H1N1 vaccine a priority in their life right now.

So what we're going to end up with here is a huge stockpile of H1N1 vaccines that nobody wants . Sure, the pharmacies, clinics and hospitals will try to push as many of them as they can (even offering free vaccines sooner or later, just to get people into their stores), but in the end, they're inevitably going to be sitting on millions of extra doses of vaccine with nowhere to inject them.

There are two solutions for this, from Big Pharma's point of view:

Strategy #1 - Drum up more fear with the aim that it will boost consumer demand for vaccines. This can be accomplished by getting the mainstream media to highlight the few isolated cases of infants or children dying from H1N1 infections (all of whom are almost certainly vitamin D deficient, again).

Strategy #2 - Mandate mass vaccinations. This is unlikely to happen now that H1N1 appears to have fizzled out. The public won't go for mandatory shots unless the situation gets a whole lot worse. Of course, Big Government can always force such mandates upon the public, but in the current political climate, such an effort would be met with a backlash of public protest.

So that leaves the last option: Flushing H1N1 vaccines down the drain , and this is exactly what will eventually be done with millions of unsold doses. After all the hype, all the empty promises, all the billions of dollars spent and all the fear mongering, a huge portion of these drugs are just going to be flushed down the toilet, essentially, because that's how hospitals, pharmacies and even drug makers get rid of excess pharmaceuticals.


Polluting the environment with H1N1 vaccines


There's a huge environmental concern in all this, of course: What's the effect of dumping millions of doses of H1N1 DNA / RNA into the public sewer system? No one really knows. It's yet another grand Big Pharma experiment. And how about the chemical additives, preservatives and adjuncts added to the vaccines? What impact will all those chemicals have on the environment?

It's a startling fact that the sewage expelled by one city ends up in the public drinking water of the next city downstream. Sewage is treated, of course, to achieve EPA-regulated "safe" status before it's dumped back into the rivers, but the EPA doesn't regulate something called "DNA pollution." DNA and RNA can be dumped into the sewage systems in virtually unlimited quantities, without any regulatory oversight (the FDA doesn't regulate drug disposal either).

If you think about it, then, this whole swine flu fiasco has been a huge scam of paying money to the drug companies in order to flush swine flu genetic material down the drain . This is the brilliance of government-led health policy, by the way: Spend good money to pollute the planet with potentially dangerous genetic material that might one day end up recombining with some other opportunistic viral candidates circulating in the wild.

What a clever way to help cause the next great pandemic, huh? It's almost a perfect recipe for vaccine repeat business: Take today's most virulent pandemic strain, replicate it in pharmaceutical labs around the world, then dump it into the environment for mass distribution. That's essentially what's happening here. It sounds insane, but it's exactly what's about to take place when the H1N1 liquidation sales are over and medical retailers just start flushing all these vaccines down the drain.


No EPA regulations

There are no EPA regulations that limit the dumping of vaccines directly into the public sewage system, by the way. Dumping excess pharmaceuticals down the drain is routine in modern medicine . Hospitals, clinics, pharmacies and patients routinely flush pharmaceuticals down the drain. This is why you can now find HRT drugs, antidepressants and blood pressure drugs in the fish near any major U.S. city.

So many drugs are now dumped into the sewers that rivers have become Big Pharma runoff zones that poison the fish and destroy aquatic life. No wonder the world's oceans are dying -- they're all being bathed in Big Pharma's chemical waste!

But that's not the end of this story: In places all across America, sewage waste is used to make fertilizer that's spread on crops . The solid sewage waste is called "biosolids" or "black gold," and it's used by farmers and gardeners as a soil additive. What the people using this toxic sludge don't realize is that it's contaminated with Big Pharma's toxic chemicals. And soon, it may be contaminated with H1N1 vaccine material from all the millions of unused doses that pharmacies couldn't manage to peddle to consumers.

In the end, all those unused vaccines will eventually end up as crop fertilizer. It's yet another reason to avoid monoculture crops and grow your own food using biodynamic gardening methods, huh?

http://news.google.com/news?source=ig&hl=en&rlz=1G1GGLQ_ENVE326&q=H1N1+vaccine+liquidation+sale+now+on:+Hurry+while+supplies+last!&um=1&ie=UTF-8&ei=NBEtS7erI9GflAfdt9WmBw&sa=X&oi=news_group&ct=title&resnum=1&ved=0CA4QsQQwAA
http://www.naturalnews.com/the_environment.html
http://www.naturalnews.com/H1N1.html

Saturday 5 December 2009

Venezuela: Philosophic historic glimpses of a possible Fifth International

Venezuela: Philosophic historic glimpses of a possible Fifth International

By: Franz J. T. Lee 

 



The darkness of the fleeting moment.
Nobody really lives in the here and now.
Thinking means venturing beyond.
The cat falls onto its four paws; who has
never learned to think falls into eternal yesterday.


(Anticipatory flashes from the Marxist, 

internationalist, philosophy of hope of Ernst Bloch.)

Many comrades are excited about the foundation of a Fifth International in 2010. Others, like Martha Harnecker, are warning that a conditio sine qua non for such a gigantic step is the creation of a 'new left culture', more precisely, of excellent Marxist praxis and theory, a global tradition of scientific and philosophic socialism, free of bureaucracy, elitism, sectarianism, Stalinism, revisionism and reformism. We need a historic, international, proletarian class consciousness and emancipatory praxis.

A New Workers' International in the epoch of globalization has to recognize all previous Marxist Internationals, to study them, to venture beyond them. This is a very serious emancipatory endeavor. All sorts of historic experiments are warning us to be very careful. We had already a "Two and Half International", also many calls for a  "Fifth International". For example, the Argentine Trotskyist Liborio Justo had called for a Fifth International already in 1941. Some current existing Trotskyite groups have founded their own Fifth International already. Furthermore, we had and still have Bandung, the Socialist International, the Non-Aligned movements, etc.

Global terrorism will react against us with all its brutality, by means of its arsenals of sophisticated arms of mass destruction. Internationalism is part and parcel of one's own life process. We live the international, we are the International.

For a change, in this special case, allow me to be personal, to refer to some experiences and lessons of my own political biography, to my international struggle against exploitation, domination, apartheid and fascism, to verify what we just stated.

Between 1962 and 1965, as a philosophy student at the University of Tuebingen, Germany, I became acquainted with genuine Marxist praxis and theory. I attended the Advanced Philosophy Seminar of Ernst Bloch. Like the other students, to obtain grades, I had to present various papers on Marxist Praxis and Theory, the Concept Anticipation of the Principle of Hope and on the category Possibility. Luckily for me, for the continuation of my scholarship, my short papers and expositions were evaluated by Bloch as excellent endeavors.

Well, ever since, it was the genesis of my militant optimism and optimistic militancy, of socialism, that guided me for nearly half a century already. Of course, it is very difficult to understand Bloch; he himself gave us the key towards this venturing beyond: to understand your teacher implies to surpass her or him.

What fascinated me was his stringent, Kantian and Hegelian dialectical logic, the scientific incision and philosophic precision of Bloch's concepts and categories: praxis, theory. ideology, religion, revolution, utopia, matter, possibility, novum, totum, experimentum, ... Of course, as Bloch underlined, one thing is to be a brilliant, erudite teacher of philosophy, another matter is to be a philosopher, who per definitionem is an emancipator par excellence. He did not fail to identify himself by stating that nowadays, in the epoch of globalization,  a philosopher could only be a Marxist, and that a Marxist could only be a philosopher. Bloch defended the revolution in South Africa, in Chile and elsewhere.

In our anti-apartheid struggle, in the sixties, I became acquainted with the Fourth International and collaborated with some of the then still living secretaries and close collaboraters of Trotsky ... like Joseph Hansen, Ernest Mandel, Pierre Frank, George Novack and James P. Cannon. Our fight against apartheid they supported with the organization of international campaigns, publications and the collection of funds in Europe, Canada and the USA.

I discovered a long tradition of Marxism and internationalism in South Africa, even direct contacts which we had with Trotsky, and that a Fourth International organization was founded already as early as 1934 in South Africa.

Let us look at this particular contribution of South African Marxism to internationalism a little closer to see the magnitude and responsibility to form a New International.

As we know, after Stalin's victory over the 'Left Opposition' and Trotsky's banishment from Russia in 1929 the Communist parties in the various countries expelled the 'Trotskyites' from their ranks. In 1930 the Trotskyites thus excluded from the 'South African Communist Party' (SACP) founded the 'Lenin Club'. Before long two different political tendencies, represented by the Marxist leaders Bullac and Averbuch, emerged in the 'Lenin Club'. They appealed to Trotsky in an attempt to try to resolve their theoretical differences with regard to the South African Revolution. Trotsky replied to the theses of the 'minority faction' of Bullac.

Of relevance for us is that Trotsky's 'Letter to South Africa', dated April 20, 1933, touched off a heated discussion among South Africa's Socialist groupings. 1) The problem of the international workers’ movement also came to be drawn into this discussion. A critical assessment of the Second and Third International took shape. Thus the 'Lenin Club' on the 1st of May, 1934, issued a pamphlet 2) calling for the foundation of a Fourth International. It stated:

"...as there is no longer room for the rotting Second International, and no longer hope for the resurrection of the Third, we must start a new.

We shall start, richer from the experience of the past, to build a new Revolutionary International and a new Revolutionary Workers Party, a party which will be true to the best traditions of Marx and Lenin and their achievement in the October Revolution ..." 3)

When soon after, the 'Lenin Club' broke up, a victim of its own internal contradictions, the active members of the ‘majority’ faction, led by Averbuch (pseudonym for A. Mon), Schoor, ‘Babeuf’, Jaffe, Peters and others, drawing their inspiration from the Lenin Club’s call for a Fourth International, named their newly founded organization of 1934 the Fourth International Organization of South Africa (FIOSA). A newspaper entitled 'Workers’ Voice' became its theoretical organ. 4) Hence, the FIOSA antedates Trotsky’s Fourth International (1938) by four years.


For us, who are attempting to organize a new Fifth International, it is pertinent to note that socialists and philosophers, feminine and masculine, do not spring up like mushrooms overnight, they always find themselves on the front of the world process, on the anticipatory horizon of the fierce, global class struggles, on the slippery edge of historic time and space.  Their proletarian vanguard sows wind and logically must reap diatribal thunder, terrorist hail storms and gigantic mortal tsunamis. Internationalism is in the global air, it negates globalization. Like 'prophets' Marxists and Internationalists are seldom recognized in Athens or Jerusalem, in their homeland; they fall under the ax of ruling class culture, morals, fascism, ostracism and exorcism. Their thoughts, their works land on the furnaces of censorship; they themselves are being burned at the stake of 'terrorism', in the 'axis of evil', by ruling class justice, at The Hague.

What obscurantist rulers, inventors of the mental holocaust, of 'education', 'culture', ideology and hoaxes never can comprehend is that ideas, theory and philosophy cannot burn, they are social by nature: personified as Phoenix, Giordano Bruno or Guaicaipuro; every century they return and regenerate themselves a millionfold. From the ashes of decadent, global accumulation of capital, ideas, thinking, thought, theory, philosophy and society, ... in brief, Knowledge and Truth, as the pillars of  hope for humanity ... are rising as the Damocles Sword hovering over imperialist, corporate capitalism. The Truth is what capitalism fears most. The Truth is the emancipatory quintessence of proletarian internationalism, of international proletarianism, of any real, true Workers' International. This is why we stated in a previous commentary that to launch a Fifth International, under the revolutionary auspices of President Chavez of Venezuela implies the discovery, invention and construction of the New per se: a new logic, language, science, philosophy and society.
*****
1) See: Franz J. T. Lee, Südafrika vor der Revolution?, Fischer Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 1973, anexo C, "Trotsky's letter on the national and agrarian struggles in South Africa, 20th of April, 1933, page 185-188.

 2) A copy is to be found at the Library of the British Museum in London.
3) 'May Day Manifesto', A "Lenin Club Publication", Cape Town 1934, p. 4.
4) The British Museum holds several numbers of this paper.