It was dark and eerie all day as smoke from wildfires all the way from upper Washington down through Oregon and Northern California hovered over Oakland. A young woman told me “it feels like the end of the world.” Here’s a video of how it felt:
Categories: environment, Oakland, videos/documentaries
The important things regarding the fire I think are as follows.
1) The capitalists know that the fires are being exacerbated by climate change, yet they refuse to take even the smallest actions on climate change. This can be summed up by Nancy Pelosci’s response to a Green New Deal, “It will be one of several or maybe many suggestions that we receive. The green dream, or whatever they call it, nobody knows what it is, but they’re for it, right?”
2) The Democrats are silent on this, and have not shown themselves to be a real opposition to the Republicans regarding climate change. Both parties are guilty, as they are on other climate, environmental and energy issues like oil, fracking, coal etc.
3) There is no real opposition party or organization in the United States, and almost none of the “Marxists” in the United States besides myself are actually interested in doing the practical work of organizing with other Marxists to build an opposition organization. So who is going to build it? No one. John Reimann believes that this is a spontaneous process that grows out of a spontaneous movement. Many “Marxists” have taken this position. However, they have been proven wrong over and over again with every spontaneous mass movement. WTO, Occupy, BLM, the Women’s Marches..the teachers strike wave, the pandemic strike wave, etc.
4) So how can we get the dialogue going? We should start with Reddit, a neutral place for long term discussion and communication. I recommend, r/Marxists_USCA and I was recommended r/BreadTube. Other subreddits have had criticism for censorship by moderators, a problem we will have to tackle with time. But with the recent Facebook crackdown, I think Reddit could work for national and international discussion and coordination.
First of all, this video is meant more as an expression of something close to agony. Most of my videos have a program and an urging to fight, but I just didn’t have it in me in this one.
One comment in reply to AF: He seems to equate an “opposition party or organization” with something that Marxists can build. I think a serious look at history (and the present situation) shows that a real “opposition party” in the US will be a class based party, in other words a mass working class party. Millions of workers won’t wait to be convinced of Marxism to build such a party in my opinion. Such a party will arise from the struggle itself. As far as Marxists playing a role: The 20 or a couple of hundred of us will hardly play an objective role, whether we like it or not.
AF continually raises the issue of building a Marxist organization. But based on what? On those who call themselves Marxists? On a few abstract “principles”? Marxism is a method of analyzing human society, and that’s where we should start – by trying to clarify the nature of this (very dangerous) period in which we find ourselves and what may come out of it. That is the main to which this blog site is devoted. It would be useful if AF – and other self-proclaimed Marxists – would spend more time doing that and less simply issuing calls to build a revolutionary organization, but based on what? “Marxism” in the abstract?
Finally: AF comes from a tradition of support for Stalinism. If I am not mistaken, it was support for Enver Hoxha, the hated dictator of Albania, in fact. Years a go I urged Art to take a serious look at that history, at the history of how Stalin and his various offshoots, including Hoxha, completely perverted and distorted the very method of Marxism. I urged him to reconsider how the Russian Revolution degenerated so. In other words, I urged him to reconsider what Trotsky stood for historically. To my knowledge, he has not done so, nor have I ever seen him express his view of what happened historically. He may have done so but I’m not aware of it. But history is not some dry, dusty matter that has no relevance to the present. A superficial approach to the history of the socialist movement inevitably leads to a superficial approach to understanding the present. I once again urge Art to reconsider his view of this history, or start with writing down how he sees these matters.