Barbara MacLean and Bruce Lerro are co-founders and organizers for Socialist Planning Beyond Capitalism. Follow them on Facebook and Twitter. http://planningbeyondcapitalism.org/ socialistplanningbeyondcapitalism.org OpEd News Member for 434 week(s) and 4 day(s) 90 Articles, 0 Quick Links, 45 Comments, 0 Diaries, 0 Polls
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Saturday, November 2, 2024
Cross-Cultural Comparative Politics: Social Science or Cold War Propaganda? The field of comparative politics took off in the 1950s in Mordor & for 10 years it never lost its anti-communist tinge. It is part of a self-propagandizing triumphalism that includes domestic political science, neoclassical economics & international relations theory. All these fields are ideological smoke screens that keep the West from facing its deep political and economic decline in the face of the rise of the East.
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Saturday, October 19, 2024
The Myopia of Anglo-American Rulers: How They Can't Face Their Loss to the "Eurasian Miracle" China Russia, India & Iran are blossoming in harnessing energy and building infrastructures. Economically BRICS currency will eventually marginalize the dollar. What is amazing is the vast denial system that Mordor and its vassals has hypnotized itself into believing. This article is about how the ideology of Eurocentrism paternalism racism and imperialism keeps the West in a fog about how badly its situation actually is.
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Tuesday, October 1, 2024
Choose-Up Games from the Sandlots of Jamaica, Queens NY My 13-year love affair w/sandlot baseball 7 to 20 years old. Our choose-up games had no managers&no umpires, yet we self-managed the games ourselves. We used rags for bases, rarely had enough players&often had to cover 2 infield positions and 2 outfield positions simultaneously. The field had stones if you were lucky and rocks if you weren't. Our players could have been the East Side Kids where brawling was just an insult
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Friday, September 13, 2024
The Collective Creativity of Workers: From Unconscious Sleeping Giant to Builder of Barricades Part II Romantic ideas about creativity begin&end with individuals. But in capitalist societies when workers engage in collective-creativity such as natural disasters & how workers build workers' councils in revolutionary situations. Workers have always been creative. But they have always done so unconsciously. But under unique circumstances this sleeping giant awakens to produce marvelous social experiments suppressed by capitalists.
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Sunday, September 1, 2024
The Collective Creativity of Workers: From Unconscious Sleeping Giants to Conscious Builders of Barricades Part I In the West our notions of creativity are baked with the assumptions of a romantic theory of art. This usually limits our conceptions of creativity to individuals. But there are forms of collective creativity workers engage in that are unconscious due to the alienation of class society. However in the conditions of natural disasters, social movements & revolutionary situations workers make their collective creativity conscious
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Sunday, August 25, 2024
Absolutist, Relativist and Cynical Thinking Styles: How Yankees are Blockheads Outside of the US despite class the people of Mordor are rightfully seen as not knowing anything about geography history or politics. Our article draws on research that most Yankees cannot clearly think about ill-structured, complex problems. Instead they think in an absolutist relativist or cynical manner. At a macro-level this applies to their political parties & on a micro-level to romance or individual lifespan.
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Monday, August 5, 2024
Holistic vs Analytical Thinking: East vs West and The Ecological, Political and Economic Reasons for Their Differences Why would the ancient Chinese excel at algebra & arithmetic but not in geometry as the Greeks did? Why do the Chinese learn verbs at a faster rate than nouns? Why do Westerners learn nouns at a faster pace? Why are Easterners more conforming to their in-group than Westerners but more hostile to strangers than those in the West? For one author the answer is not religious. Rather, it is ecological, political and economic.
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Saturday, July 27, 2024
"Dictatorship" and "Democracy" as Loaded Language: Anti-Communist Cold-War Propaganda The term "dictatorship" has been used and abused by the Anglo-American Empire for the last 100 years. Believe it or not the Mordor ruling class was sympathetic to dictators in the 1920s and 1930s. Then it was used to tar and feather communism. So too "democracy" was feared by the rulers for most of its history. It was only cleaned up and sanitized after WWII.
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Friday, July 19, 2024
"TOTALITARIAN" ANTI-COMMUNISM: Loaded Language Straight Out of CIA, Neo-Con Playbook "Totalitarianism" has been used & abused by Anglo American elites for the last 100 years. It was looked upon favorably in the 1920s & 30s to restore "order" to capitalist crises. It became a negative word during the WWII to attack both fascism and communism. Cold War liberals in the 50s championed themselves as an alternative to communism. It still comes in handy today even though the word has been declared unscientific.
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Saturday, July 6, 2024
The Dark Side of Left-Brain Operations: Part II Schizophrenia, Modern Art and Western History Part II In Part I of this article I showed how when the left brain gets out of control the results can be either schizophrenia or modern art. In Part II I show how the worst aspects of the Reformation, the Enlightenment and Industrial capitalism can be linked to habits of the left brain gone haywire and manifested in material structures.
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Friday, June 21, 2024
The Dark Side of Left-Brain Operations: Schizophrenia, Modern Art and Western History Part I Until now scientific comparisons between brain hemispheres appear as functionally interdependent. But Iain McGilchrist's great book, The Master and His Emissary, argues that there is also a power struggle between the hemispheres. When the left brain gets control results include schizophrenia & modern art. In Western history the Reformation, the Enlightenment & the Industrial Revolution had left-brain tendencies gone amuck.
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Friday, June 7, 2024
Dogmatic Neoliberal Democrats: An Authoritarian Party and Their Upper-Middle Class Loyalists The word dogmatism is usually associated with working-class people who are assumed to be ignorant & uneducated. This is contrasted to the open-minded upper middle-class liberals. This article aims to show that upper middle-class Neo-liberal Democrats are every bit as dogmatic & authoritarian in their reasoning & loyalty to groups. They possess all 14 dogmatic traits as well as 3 authoritarian characteristics.
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Saturday, May 25, 2024
Aryan Idols and the Search for Indo-Europeans: The Prehistory and History of Fascist Mythology Part II In Part I of our article we explored the origins of Indo-European through the study of language & culture with India being the most likely candidate. But by the end of the 19th century these explorations turned to racial anthropology for answers.Now potential Indo-Europeans were identified by the land they occupied their physique and their brain size. Why the change in methods & why was India abandoned for Nordic origins of IE
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Saturday, May 11, 2024
Aryan Idols and the Search for Indo-Europeans: The Prehistory and History of Fascist Mythology Part I The search for "Indo Europeans" seems a particularly lost cause. Why hypothesize a culture, language and geographical region and a time older than the Sumerians when there is no concrete evidence? In spite of this, the English and German linguists and archeologists were particularly determined to find one to discover such a culture, not in the name of scientific objectivity, but for political and economic reasons.
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Thursday, May 2, 2024
Neocon Realists and Global Neoliberals Dead on Arrival: A Theoretical Autopsy The Western world is disintegrating. But the capitalists&deep state agencies that are failing are not chickens with their heads cut off. Myopic&inept political actions are driven by the bankrupt theories that inform them. Journey the cesspools of the most conservative fields in academia, International Relations, infested by CIA agents&jackals. See why Neoconservative Realism&Neoliberal globalism theories are dead on arrival.
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Saturday, April 6, 2024
Jean Houston's Psycho-Historical Recovery of the Self: Sacred Psychology in Western History Can we draw any meaningful connection between the macro world of the evolution of societies & the micro world of individual development? Jean Houston argues that both macro and micro-worlds go through crisis and pathology that can be overcome through group rituals as they have existed throughout Western history.
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Friday, March 22, 2024
Monotheistic Roots of Nationalism Part II: Commonalities in Socialization Between Monotheism and Nationalism Monotheism and nationalism are far from opposites in how they use propaganda. Both use sacred texts; mark social time with special occasions; mark social space with territories and each expects people to make pilgrimages. Conversion methods are similar and loyalty and exclusivity are demanded. A lifetime membership is expected and leaving is punished with exile.
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Sunday, March 10, 2024
The Monotheistic Roots of Nationalism Part I: What Nationalism and Monotheism Have in Common Anthony Smith and George Mosse have pointed out how nationalism has built itself up using the same techniques as religion. However, it is not any religion. It is no accident that ancient pagan societies never had nationalism. Neither has Buddhist or Taoist China. It is the characteristics of monotheistic religions that contain the key.
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Thursday, February 29, 2024
Nationalism as the Religion of the Modern West If anyone from a tribal society had heard that a piece of colored cloth could motivate people to kill others and give up their own lives they would say we were crazy. When did nationalism start? What are the phases it has gone though. What other kinds of loyalties must nationalism overcome?
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Sunday, February 11, 2024
Out on a Limb With Dialectical Materialism As a dialectical materialist I have always felt that the categorization of schools of philosophy into "idealist" and "materialist" was too narrow and reductionist. In the work of Steven Pepper & Andrew Reck I identified 5 schools of philosophy, not 2. Come join me in high adventure into ontology and epistemology. |