In my September, 2009 post; EVERYTHING YOU’VE BEEN TOLD ABOUT COMMUNISM IS WRONG; Capitalism is a failure…Revolution is the solution the video and the event takes on the mountains of horrific lies and Orwellian double-think about China’s Communist Revolution epitomized by the anti-intellectual pile of steaming garbage; Mao: The Unknown Story by Jung Chang and Jon Halliday. Here are six wonderful books presenting a strong research basis for basing a well-informed understanding of China’s Cultural Revolution. These are also tremendously passionate human dramas of unprecedented scale and importance to the future of this planet and the emancipation of humanity.
I am posting this for my friends, family and all you who have been lied to about the history of Communism….and then repeat those lies. Please comment here and let me know what you really think and where your understanding comes from.
But wait a minute…isn’t communism a totalitarian nightmare? Don’t all the textbooks and experts and memoirs agree? No, you’ve been fed distortions about communism…By the same people who told you that the war in Iraq was about weapons of mass destruction…And by liberal and even some progressive scholars who don’t want to see the world turned upside down.
This fall teams of revolutionaries will be hitting campuses around the country—challenging those who have been lied to about communism, those who have been told that the horror of this capitalist-imperialist system is “the best of all possible worlds.”
A centerpiece of these efforts to bring revolution to the campuses will be a major speech by Raymond Lotta. Lotta’s speech will be substantive and potentially transformative for all who hear it, and it must be made a VERY BIG DEAL. The buzz should spread about a revolutionary who is serious about overturning the verdict on communism and has the facts, the analysis, and the passionate commitment to humanity’s liberation to back it up. Those who are attracted to the idea of communism but who’ve been told “it can never work” should know this is the place to come and ask their toughest questions. Opposition from reactionaries should be turned around and made part of the growing controversy and sense that Lotta’s speech must be heard and engaged. All those who consider themselves progressive critics of the current order but who use their “radical” or even “Marxist” credentials to rule real revolution off the table should be compelled—by the overall atmosphere and expectations created campus-wide—to bring their best arguments and put them up against what Lotta will have to say.
Listening to Pacifica’s Berkeley affiliate KPFA this week, I heard a surprising interview by labor reporter David Bacon with author Jeffery B. Perry on his new biography on Hubert Harrison. I downloaded the program and edited the interview to make it easy. Here is the mp3. This :26 minute audio sums up the importance of perhaps the foremost African American intellect of the period and what some call the father of Harlem radicalism. Perry says at the beginning of the interview;
He was a brilliant writer, orator, educator, critic and political activist…a key figure in much of 20th century black radicalism…a brilliant intellectual…
He is at the center of the birth and development of the socialist and communist movements in America…
Listening to Pacifica’s Berkeley affiliate KPFA this week, I heard a surprising interview by labor reporter David Bacon with author 