Getting started with Marx and Engels by Todd Chretien

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Image via Wikipedia

by Todd Chretien
SocialistWorker.org
February 8, 2011

Todd Chretien begins a new series that goes through the works of Marx and Engels.

“PHILOSOPHERS HAVE only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it.” So wrote Karl Marx in his Theses on Feuerbach when he had reached the ripe-old-age of 27.

Yet Marx and his collaborator Frederick Engels spent their lives interpreting the world, covering page after page, year after year. Their Collected Works fill up 50 volumes, which average about 600 pages each.

The Egyptian revolt is coming home by John Pilger

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Updated: 10 Feb, 2011; added a video

by John Pilger
http://www.johnpilger.com
9 February, 2011

The uprising in Egypt is our theatre of the possible. It is what people across the world have struggled for and their thought controllers have feared. Western commentators invariably misuse the words “we” and “us” to speak on behalf of those with power who see the rest of humanity as useful or expendable. The “we” and “us” are universal now. Tunisia came first, but the spectacle always promised to be Egyptian.

As a reporter, I have felt this over the years. In Cairo’s Tahrir (Liberation) Square in 1970, the coffin of the great nationalist Gamal Abdul Nasser coffin bobbed on an ocean of people who, under him, had glimpsed freedom. One of them, a teacher, described the disgraced past as “grown men chasing cricket balls for the British at the Cairo Club”. The parable was for all Arabs and much of the world. Three years later, the Egyptian Third Army crossed the Suez Canal and overran Israel’s fortresses in Sinai. Returning from this battlefield to Cairo, I joined a million others in Liberation Square. Their restored respect was like a presence – until the United States rearmed the Israelis and beckoned an Egyptian defeat.

[…]

via The Egyptian revolt is coming home

US Double Standards Over Diplomat Killing in Pakistan Puts Another “Important Ally” at Risk by Finian Cunningham

by Finian Cunningham
Featured Writer
Dandelion Salad
9 February, 2011

The US has threatened to cut off a multi-billion-dollar aid package to Pakistan if an American diplomat being held on murder charges is not immediately released from custody.

The case has sparked widespread public fury across Pakistan, with accusations that it is yet another example of American personnel having a “licence to kill” in their country. Also, the rapid diplomatic intervention by senior US officials in the case, which has now raised the threat of immediate suspension of aid from Washington to Islamabad, is in stark contrast to the refusal by the US government to cut off similar aid flows to the Mubarak regime in Egypt where more than 300 civilians in pro-democracy protests have been killed by state forces.

Coming Home: E.F. Schumacher and the Reinvention of the Local Economy

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Image by Dandelion Salad via Flickr

by Christopher B. Bedford
Vimeo

COMING HOME: E.F. Schumacher and the Reinvention of the Local Economy, is a new 37 minute film that tells the story of a series of revolutionary innovations by the community of Great Barrington, MA to address, at the local level, some of the economic challenges of our nation’s current hard times.

Law of Value 7: Production and Exchange by Brendan M. Cooney

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brendanmcooney | February 08, 2011

Law of Value 7: Production and Exchange

Production- Exchange script

We get into trouble anytime we try to understand something in isolation. The true meaning of things exist not buried inside them but in their relation to other things. Take money for instance. The meaning of this rectangular piece of paper covered in strange hieroglyphics can only be understood when we look at the role money plays in the complex coordination of modern capitalist production. Take away capitalist production and this rectangular piece of paper loses its meaning.

House Blocks Parts Of Patriot Act Extension by Bruce Gagnon + Kucinich: Give Me Liberty Or Give Me A Wiretap!

by Bruce Gagnon
featured writer
Dandelion Salad
Organizing Notes
February 9, 2011

The House GOP leadership allowed only 40 minutes of debate on the extension of certain provisions of the PATRIOT Act today, and brought the bill up for a vote under a rule allowing no amendments and requiring two-thirds of the body to vote YES in order for it to pass.

The House measure which was sponsored by Rep. Jim Sensenbrenner (R-Wis.) failed on a 277-to-148 vote. Twenty-six Republicans voted with 122 Democrats to oppose the measure, while 67 Democrats voted with 210 Republicans to back it. Ten members did not vote.