Matt's blog

Today we lost one of the best. An irreplaceable loss. Hazel Dickens gave voice, her own inimitable voice, to working people and especially the miners and hill folk of her native Appalachia. A partisan of the class war, a fierce working class feminist and a link of steel in the chain, she will remain a voice of the workers and her community for as long as there are ears to hear and voices to sing. Still, it is a heartbreaking loss and a sad thought to know she will not sing again, she has passed and no longer with us.

Wounded Knee, December 29th, 1890 is full of meaning. Not just for the Miniconjou and Hunkpapa Lakota who were victims and perished in their hundreds, but for the course of imperial America. Its violence an echo of the violence that was the settlement of this country. The expropriation of the land from Native Americans necessarily involved a genocidal struggle, something evident very early in the history of Europeans on this continent. That genocidal war was also bound up with an economy based on private property and in irreconcilable conflict with the economy of native peoples. The Dawes Act of 1887 makes perfectly clear that the struggle against native peoples was also a struggle against native notions of collective property. And look how the land itself reels from that war!

I don't know whether to call it a rash or not, but the recent reporting of the suicides of young gay men should certainly raise alarm bells. I would be interested to know if this was a cluster or just an average that is finding the light of day because of the higher profile of some of these tragedies. In any case, it stands in stark contrast to the popular version that official Hollywood, the mainstream Gay movement and the current administration currently pedal where gays are widely accepted and on their way (if not in this election cycle, the next) to full equality.

As a person of the left, a partisan of the working class and an anti-imperialist about the only positive thing I can say about Lord Blair of Kut al-Amara is that my feelings of, well something bordering on hate, is that those feelings are shared by millions around the world (and some with an intensity that makes mine pale and unsure by comparison). Perhaps hate is the wrong word, I despise Blair. His schmaltzy English sentimentality, his zealous faith only a convert knows, his bag of lawyers tricks he deploys in debate made absolute by his total lack of self-doubt (certitude is not an argument), his wounded paternalism, his post-PM windfall as honorary member of the genuine ruling class; all this and I haven't even gotten to his politics!

I wrote this after watching more youtube vidos of speeches from today's Gaza demos than I probably should have...

The current situation has again raised the issue of Israel’s legitimacy and the power of its American lobby. Here are some thoughts in response to some of those issues. And again, they are thoughts not meant as a full analysis.

The Israeli lobby obviously exists. AIPAC and the ADL being the most prominent examples. They have huge resources and influence. You cross them in bourgeois politics at your peril. However, and I think this is so often overlooked as to make me wonder why, the power that the lobby holds stems not simply from its money and the influence that brings, and certainly it doesn’t stem from any supposed “great love of the Jewish people” on the part the good citizens of the United States. It has the influence it does because its aims, more or less, are the aims of US imperialism. Even when the aims momentarily diverge, the logic doesn’t. That their actions often undermine their aims is only testimony to the illegitimacy of their aims.

While the post-modern assertion that all things were only relevant to themselves, and therefore categories were false and constraining, has been given a good battering by the post-post Cold War world, there remains a real aversion to thinking about systems with their laws and categories. The thing about categories is that they are not fixed (at certain times they are necessarily arbitrary), nor are the elements characterized by them. They, like everything, are part of processes in motion. Beyond general agreements, all evolutionary biologists know that the taxonomy of species is a bit of a ‘let’s place the marker here, no let’s place it here’ exercise. But understand evolution without them? Impossible.

We await the Obama administration’s decision to follow one escalation in Afghanistan with another.