In his absorbing profile of the writer Alex Haley (author of “Roots” and “The Autobiography of Malcolm X”) in the New York Times Book Review a year ago, Michael Patrick Hearn made a familiar mistake. He wrote: “Politically [Haley] he was a moderate, philosophically more Martin than Malcolm.”
Source: Opinion | A True and Visionary Radical, Martin Luther King Jr. Was No Moderate | Common Dreams
We have suggested a dozen times ways for Venezuela to proceed but the problem is the failure of the left to have ever produced a real path to real socialism/communism. The left has no path to soci…
We have commented on Venezuela many times here, with the criticism that it is a democracy, of sorts, that should become a democratic market socialism after the model of our DMNC. In any case, the stance of the US is almost pathetic and after so many fascist interventions in South American states the idea the US can preach democracy to anyone is ridiculous.
https://redfortyeight.com/?s=venezuela+DMNC
Regardless of US efforts to overthrow the government and cause the populace to turn against their elected officials in the face of punishing sanctions, President Maduro has endured and resisted. Even the follow-the-flag Washington Post must acknowledge that “a recent poll from Andrés Bello Catholic University and pollster Delphos indicated that more respondents would vote for Maduro than Guaidó.” Of course, no one ever voted for Guaidó in the first place because the US-anointed “interim president” had never run for national office.
Source: Washington’s “Democracy Promotion” Fails Spectacularly in Venezuela – CounterPunch.org
We started last week to consider the left and the various new age movements. This essay below has done a lot of our work for us, an useful history. We see only Marxism now and not the many other contributions to socialism from a religious perspective. It is an understandable situation in some ways: Marx wanted to create a secular socialism, one that was scientific. But he failed to find a science and much of the complexity of ‘spiritual’ subjects and their histories was simply eliminated from discourse, a form of ‘cancel’ culture. Continue reading “Commentary:…//How socialism helped to seed the landscape of modern religion | Aeon Ideas”
Religion might be the opiate of the people, but socialism helped to seed the landscape in which modern religion flowers
Source: How socialism helped to seed the landscape of modern religion | Aeon Ideas
Useful,, but scholarly takes on both the New Age and socialism are likely to miss core issues. Indeed, socialism is already (post)socialism. The core themes are simple: the nature of consciousness, meditation in action as the common denominator, and social justice as a post-buddhist reconstruction of Mahayana.
A blending of the two is entirely possible and relevant as long as New Agers can find a core issue with universal (and secular) significance and socialists can transcend their narrow socialfocus
Published in Religion, State and Society (Vol. 32, No. 4, 2004)
1848+: The End(s) of History 