If you want to understand the schisms on the left... understand that the CPUSA went apeshit attacking Dylan as a traitor for this performance.

If you 

Music video for Grup Yorum's "Gazi Marşı". Grup Yorum is a famous socialist political folk band in Turkey.

(Thanks to Kathleen for sharing this)

From Noam Chomsky, April 26, 2013:

Obama's attacks on civil liberties

"...go well beyond anything I would have anticipated, and they don't seem easy to explain. In many ways the worst is Holder vs. Humanitarian Law Project. That's an Obama initiative and it's a very serious attack on civil liberties. He doesn't gain anything from it – he doesn't get any political mileage out of it. In fact, most people don't even know about it, but what it does is extend the concept of "material assistance to terror" to speech....

"if you look at the way it's been used, it becomes even more abhorrent (Nelson Mandela was on its [terrorist list] until a couple of years ago.) And the wording of the colloquy is broad enough that it could very well mean that if, say, you meet with someone in a terrorist group and advise them to turn to nonviolent means, then that's material assistance to terrorism. I've met with people who are on the list and will continue to do so, and Obama wants to criminalize that, which is a plain attack on freedom of speech. ...

"The NDAA suit ... The only protest that's being raised is in response to detention of American citizens, but I don't see why we should have the right to detain anyone without trial. The provision of the NDAA that allows for this should not be tolerated. It was banned almost eight centuries ago in the Magna Carta."It's the same with the drone killings. There was some protest over the Anwar Al-Awlaki killing because he was an American citizen. But what about someone who isn't an American citizen? Do we have a right to murder them if the president feels like it?"

Thanks to Stephanie McMillan for the amazing cartoons.

A lot of people were reporting an annoying bug where when they logged in, the site would say "Invalid token." This problem should now be fixed. If anyone still experiences this or has any other bugs, please let us know.

the bold, clear, powerful, unapologetic voice for freedom at Woodstock.

Oppressed peoples and communities can and will only be secure in this country when they are organized to defend themselves against the aggressions of the government and the forces of white supremacy and capitalist exploitation. “Let Your Motto Be Resistance: A Handbook on Organizing New Afrikan and Oppressed Communities for Self-Defense”, is the latest contribution of the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement (MXGM) and the Every 36 Hours Campaign that seeks to strengthen organizing initiatives within Black or New Afrikan communities for self-defense, by presenting these initiatives with a comprehensive analytical framework and practical organizing tools to ground and unite them.

As the extrajudicial killing of Kimani Gray and the more than twenty other Black women and men by the police in the first two months of 2013 clearly illustrate, it is imperative that New Afrikan communities get organized and defend ourselves. As the real economy continues to contract, corporations become more vicious and exploitative, our communities are gentrified and displaced, public goods and services continue to be eliminated or privatized, and the national security state continues to grow and become ever more invasive, the attacks on New Afrikan and other oppressed and exploited people are only going to escalate. We must defend ourselves, and we have every right to do so by any means necessary.

Could "Bitcoin'" be our dream currency? I think it shows socialist nature of economy -goes beyond borders, do not requires bankers or middle agents and are seen openly (not covertly overprinted). Put your thoughts , comrades!

More on claims some make of having (and promoting) "the science of revolution":

Marxism (at its best) is scientific.

But there is not some "science of revolution" lying in the spoon drawer of sciences (along side the science of biology, and the science of evolution, and the science of physics.) That picture is a misunderstanding of science, and a misunderstanding of Marxism.

Historical materialism is the part of Marxism that aspires to a scientific approach to history and the liberatory potential within society... while dialectics (another part of Marxism) concerns philosophy and methodology, and while the larger world of communist works form (within Marxism) a kind of bulging tool-chest of experiences, political strategies and analyses.

I have often said that I think it is possible for communist thinking to be scientific -- but most that I have encountered is not.

A poem written in the aftermath of the 1979 Sandinista Revolution of Nicaragua, written by Sandinista militant and celebrated poet Gioconda Belli. The original Spanish version can be found here.

The mornings changed their familiar sign.
Now the water, its warmth, its drowsy magic
is different.
Now I hear so deeply that my skin can tell that it is daytime,
songs of clandestine times
ringing boldly, loudly from my nightstand
and I get up and walk outside and see the compas at work
shining their boots and preparing themselves for the day
under the sun.
There is no longer darkness, nor barricades,
nor the abuse of the rearview mirror
to see if they are following me.
Now my eternal air is even more so
and this scent of wet earth and the lakes over there
and the mountains
it appears that they have returned to stay,
to sink roots, to plant themselves anew.
It no longer smells like burning,
and death is not a familiar presence
waiting at the turn of any corner.
I have recovered my yellow flowers
and those malinches of May are much redder
and they scatter with joy
bursting against the red and black of our flags.
Now we go forward wrapped in beautiful slogans,
fighting poverties,
wielding our wills against bad omens
and this smile covers the horizon,
it is shouted in valleys and lagoons,
it washes away tears and protects itself with new rifles.
History has been united with the triumphant pass of our warriors
and I invent words with which to sing,
new ways to love,
I return to be,
I am once again,
at last once again,
I am.

Translation by Natalio Pérez

The interview below is one of the better ones I've read about communization and the aesthetics of occupy.  It is, however, written in the obscure, academicized language of art theory -- but I still think it's largely accessible.  The beginning includes one of the better explanations of the misapprehension of communization theory among many on the left.

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[SOURCE]

Interview with Daniel Spaulding on Communization, Occupy, and the spectre of aesthetics.

Daniel Spaulding is a graduate student in the Department of the History of Art, Yale University. He works on postwar and contemporary art in Western Europe. With Jaleh Mansoor and Daniel Marcus he coauthored a response to a questionnaire on Occupy Wall Street for a special issue of the journal October in the fall of 2012. (http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/abs/10.1162/OCTO_a_00122)

C. Derick Varn:  What are the basic links and limitations you see between art and radical praxis?

Daniel Spaulding:  It’s senseless to answer this question except with reference to concrete instances of relations between the two. I’m not interested in defining the role of art in bourgeois society as such in the manner of, say, Peter Bürger. At the same time real instances of the interface between art and politics are unquestionably determined by the general forms of capitalist society – the commodity, the wage, exchange, and so on. From this basis one can indeed claim to deduce the category of art from the determinations of the value-form or more broadly from the whole complex of relations that make up the capitalist mode of production. The role of a Marxist art history as opposed to a Marxist aesthetic theory, however, must be to mediate between form-determination and form itself, between category and material artifact.

In that spirit I’m also going to be a bit unsatisfying and refuse to give a programmatic answer to your question. I will venture to say that the standard modes of “critical” post-60s art won’t cut it. This seems widely acknowledged even in the bastions of that very model: see for instance recent meditations on the “postcritical” impulse and the failure of the “anti-aesthetic” in journals like October and Texte zur Kunst. I’m afraid lot of this is just chewing the cud of “left” art history’s academicization. The impasse is real, however.

The vital question is how to articulate the totalizing impulse of critique – which I’d argue is still as important as ever, in the face of capitalism’s own totalizing force – with a poiesis necessarily fixated on the smallest point of ingress to the materiality of everyday life, or to put it differently, the smallest unit of affect or event in its difference from a reified situation. Art small-a. I’d be willing to bet that a materialist lyric mode is the closest thing to an avant-garde we currently possess. It’s no longer very interesting to say: “Look, I’ve divested myself of my subjectivity, I’ve laid bare the mechanism through critical mimesis, I’ve taught the petrified social forms to dance by singing them their own song.” Better for artists to ask: “How can I make something that speaks to my experience in all its fucked-upness and seeming inevitability; how can I produce anything at all without immediately reproducing capital; what representational or anti-representational claims can I make with regard to my own place in the violent hierarchy of class society?” But this is a kind of lyric that opens onto epic to the extent it necessarily folds totalization back into subjectivity, or history into experience.

There was a moment during the Oscars where Seth MacFarlane made some crack about not being able to understand what Selma Hayek says, but liking to look at her... And it suddenly dawned that the evening had been one long stupid drumbeat of racist and sexist jokes.

Here is part of what Margaret Lyons wrote in her article in New York Magazine:

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Earlier, a debate arose around a particular handbill being used by some radical organizers in New York working around the bus drivers' strike.  Recently, Advance the Struggle has pointed to the debate as a signal of Kasama as such (alongside "communization") being capable of abstract critique but incapable of more focused proposals.  I take issue with that claim, primarily because they seem to be offering the false equation that Mike Ely = Kasama, and are very much missing the fact that within Kasama there are varying degrees of engagement with on-the-ground organizing (including the organizing that the handbill-at-issue refers to) and there were, within Kasama, varying opinions within that debate.

So, as a member of Kasama (and a proponent of communization theory, for that matter), I wanted to offer a real alternative drawn from real experience as a counter-example.

I did organizing in a former workplace in the food service industry.  This organizing ultimately resulted in the threat of a strike against the ownership and the ownership's concession to a contract which directly tied production to wages, as well as raising the entry-wage paid to new employees.  It also resulted (after I left) in the maintenance of an independent workers' council at that workplace which is now bringing NEW fights to the ownership as well as pressuring them to hold to their contract.

The article below is reposted from Indybay,  though I originally read it on Bay of Rage.  These attacks on squats in Oakland are happening concurrently with a massive assault on squatted buildings in Greece, including what sounds like an attempt at a full assault by the police on Exarchia.  More info on the situation in Greece is available here.  In Seattle, a network of squats arose around Occupy last year as weather got bad, all eventually being evicted by force.  More on the Seattle story here.

I thought this article would give us a good opportunity to discuss squatting as a political tactic -- the situation is Oakland is very different from what it was in Seattle and both are worlds away from a Greek Exarchia, but all seem to share similar presumptions.  In the US, however, squats are much harder to sustain than in most parts of Europe.  Does this mean we ought to encourage squatting as only a tacit of creating a counter-power "spectacle," similar to the spectacular image of the black bloc?  Or is it possible to sustain above-ground squats as they do in parts of Europe (and Asia, for that matter) in order to create some freedom of movement and semi-autonomy within an urban space?

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[SOURCE]

Communique on Immanent Squat Evictions in Oakland

In our time squatting we’ve learned unconventional methods of survival. A blurring of means and ends. Not least of these is the ability to adapt, to disappear from one circumstance and hold our ground in others. To understand the difference between defensive and offensive actions.

This is reposted from the Red Spark blog: www.redsprk.org

The new film Long Distance Revolutionary, the latest documentary on Mumia Abu-Jamal, is coming to Seattle on Friday, February 22nd through the 28th. It features a list of noted radicals and people of conscience and has received great reviews. 

Mumia is the world’s most famous political prisoner. He strikes me as an example: A revolutionary who the state tried to kill and crush but who never gave in and continues to contribute to the cause of common freedom.

 We definitely want to invite people to attend this important new film.

Not too long ago comrade Eric, in the Queer Re-groupment group, asked if anyone would be interested in putting together a reading cluster of queer relevant documents. Fufilling his request I have cobbled together a collection of texts pertaining to many aspects of Queer history, life, politics and working class activity within the United States. Please note that there are a few links which take the user outside of Kasama (though remedying this would be easy). In addition this is not something I claim to be a perfect list. Meaning it is still under construction in the sense that while I have provided all I can for the moment if any other comrades have suggestions please comment below and I will edited.

So without any adue here is the list. What the Kasama admins wish to do with this list is up to them.