Leader of Leftist Front makes gains in French presidential race but François Hollande and Nicolas Sarkozy still likely to top polls.Trotskyist sounds almost quaint these days.
Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the charismatic far-left firebrand whose anti-capitalist stance has seen him rise sharply in the French presidential polls, on Sunday told a vast Paris street rally that France should rise up in a “civic insurrection.”
Mélenchon’s symbolic open-air rally at the Place de la Bastille, emblem of the French revolution, attracted tens of thousands in an important show of force for France’s “Left of the Left”, buoyed by the financial crisis and disillusionment with the main political parties.
The MEP – who is famous for his scathing, banker-bashing rhetoric – is running for president representing a coalition of leftists which includes the once-powerful Communist party.
A one-time Trotskyist and former teacher, he spent 30 years in the Socialist party, where he served as a minister and senator, before leaving to form his own Front de Gauche or Leftist Front....MORE
See also:
Zeitgeist: "Cornel West Predicts Fight for Entitlements in 'the Streets'" (and how it ties in to Presidential politics)
Back in 2007 I was poking a bit of gentle fun at the Marxist-Leninists-Trots:If you do a Google search for -make ungovernable- (no quotes) you'll see that it's recent use as a political term is most common in Africa. On the first couple page of hits you'll find Nigeria, South Africa and Ghana with LDC's in other hemispheres also represented.The thinking has a long informal history, though some intellectual heft was afforded to it, in the context of actual poverty, with the 1966 with the publication by The Nation of "The Weight of the Poor: A Strategy to End Poverty".
It's also starting to pop up in the developed world, here's a British anarchist website back in March:
To fight the cuts, make the country ungovernable
I've mentioned the Cloward-Piven Strategy a few time and probably will again.
At it's base the strategy requires pigeonholing people into groups and classes to divide and sub-divide the populace, the intellectually laziest criteria being race. I'l have some links after the jump....
"International Day of Direct Action Against Climate Change and the G8":
Oh happy day!
I haven't heard this kind of lingo in a while: "The 8th of June International Day of Action Against Climate Change and the G8 has been called by the International Rising Tide Network. This is a call for autonomous, decentralized actions appropriate for your town, city, or local area. Use this international day of action to support local struggles against oil refineries, gas pipelines, strip mines and coal-fired power plants. Disrupt the financial backers of the fossil fuel industry. Organise workshops to spread sustainable post-petroleum living skills. Find a weak point in the infrastructure of resource exploitation and throw a literal or symbolic wrench in the works. It’s time to visit your local polluters and give 'em hell!" From RisingTide.org
From reasoninrevolt.net.au: the 70's Australian broadsheet Direct Action.
From the French version of Wikipedia: Action directe (AD) est un groupe clandestin (aux influences anarchistes et communistes...)
From Wikipedia: Action Directe was a French Maoist/Marxist-Leninist militant group which committed a series of assassinations and violent attacks in France between 1979 and 1987.
I knew something was up when Desmogblog linked to "politicalaffairs.net-Marxist Thought Online" for the story "Talking about a revolution: Calls for action on global warming, inequality",
which was originally posted at Peoples Weekly World.
I've missed PWW's take on local self-determination such as this story from Estonia, "Estonian gov’t desecrates anti-fascist history"--"On April 27, the Estonian government removed a monument honoring the 270,000 Red Army soldiers who gave their lives in the fight against Nazism in Estonia from a central square in Tallinn, the country’s capital, and moved it to a cemetery two miles away."
Time to brush up on the Dialectical Materialism (nobody told you this was going to be easy):
Lenin's elements of dialectics
Lenin made some brief notes outlining three "elements" of logic after reading Hegel's Science of Logic in 1914. They are:
| “ | 1)
The determination of the concept out of itself [the thing itself must
be considered in its relations and in its development]; 2) the
contradictory nature of the thing itself (the other of itself), the
contradictory forces and tendencies in each phenomenon; 3) the union of analysis and synthesis. Such apparently are the elements of dialectics. | ” |
— Lenin, Summary of dialectics
|
Lenin develops these in a further series of notes, and appears to argue
that "the transition of quantity into quality and vice versa" is an
example of the unity and opposition of opposites expressed tentatively
as "not only the unity of opposites, but the transitions of every
determination, quality, feature, side, property into every other [into
its opposite?]."
"There's battle lines bein' drawn..."
See you June 8th.
