[Space in NYC. Same ole story.]

Dear friends,

I have been avoiding writing this letter for quite some time. For the past couple of months I’ve attempted to write a few lines but I just couldn’t do it. Where do I begin? How can I write in one single letter all I want to say to you about Carlitos? And how can I tell you that it has come to an end? But, it’s getting close to our final days so here it is……

It is with so much sadness and tons of tears that I write to let you know my Carlitos, your Carlitos, our Carlitos Café y Galeria will closing on November 29th. I have given everything I am and everything I have to this small entrepreneurship and although it is breaking my heart to let the space go, our lease is up! It is time to move out. I know Carlitos will re-open somewhere, some day, once we find the right place, but its current location is where it was born and took shape, and is and will always be its first home, and will always be special. The owner is either selling the building empty or has decided to rent it for a ridiculous amount of money, taking advantage of the money and time we have invested in renovating the space and the business traffic that now exists.

by Lizzie Widdicombe, from The New Yorker - October 22, 2007

The fortieth anniversary of Che Guevara's death went by quietly last week unless you count a party at the Brecht Forum, in the West Village, where skirmish erupted between the organizers over mojito pricing. Colin Robinson, Brecht Forum board member and an editor at Scribner, found himself on th losing side of a philosophical rift. "I told them, 'When we sell the drinks, let' sell them at decent prices, so we break even,' " said Robinson, who, in 1995 published Che Guevara's "Motorcycle Diaries" and will publish Fidel Castro' dictated autobiography this December. "They said, 'But people can't afford decent prices!' So we ended up just giving away the mojitos for free and asking for donations.

Notes on the Ecological Dimension: Marxists and the Environment: Is Marx’s Critique of Science and Technology Radical Enough?

By Mitchel Cohen

“O, pardon me, thou bleeding piece of earth,
That I am meek and gentle with these butchers!”
- William Shakespeare, Julius Caesar

For years, as I’ve been active in social justice movements I’ve worked with people who call themselves Marxists. I taught an underground course at Stony Brook for 15 years called “Marxism for Beginners”. And the group that I founded with other students at Stony Brook in the late 1960s, the Red Balloon Collective, saw itself as an anarcho-marxist direct action organization.

And yet, as I became more and more involved in environmental and related issues, I found that the Marxists with whom I marched in antiwar demonstrations and social justice protests were nowhere to be found on certain issues and indeed were hostile to my attempts to raise these issues with them. I also found that as I wrote about these issues for various Marxist journals they would invariably be rejected, even though many of my articles and essays were being published by other publications and books. I had to find out why.

The WSF was smaller than usual. It was dominated by NGOs (the stalls) and the churches (the opening march). Some Christian fundamentalists even protested demanding that a statue depicting a pregnant young woman be removed from the cross it hung upon (the statue was in support of reproductive rights for women). The latter incident prompted some comrades to include in the statement of the social movements that organizations not in line with the WSF politics should not be allowed to attend.

The WSF was visibly commercialized with the cellphone company Celtel doing the registration and linking this to comrades buying a Celtel simcard. Celtel adverts were all over the show. The worst part is that it is more expensive in Kenya to use Celtel than the other cellphone company Safaricom. The restaurants inside the WSF precinct were pretty expensive and there were many vendors selling water that at times cost at least double the usual Kenyan price.

There's a good discussion going on over at NYC Indymedia on the UFPJ sponsored march in Wash DC, on Jan 27th.

[Incidetally RedFlags is having the same discussion, with many of the same posts]

Of particular interest is this comment from Max at Left Turn magazine:

Getting serious about building the anti-war movement
Jan 29, 2007 02:09PM EST
max@riseup.net http://www.leftturn.org

"I appreciate what WCW is doing trying to spearhead an upsurge around impeachment. But I think the question of how different the EFFECTS of its demands end out being from UFPJ's involves a move from protest to resistance."

Just got back from DC, been following the conversation above but have not been able to slip away from work to comment.

I have to say that it feels a little bit like im living on bizarro world, trying to figure out how my friend BM tries to re-package the message of the WCW campaign into something that has not already been said a million times before (all by good and sincere people).

By Loren Goldner

[Goldner is one of the most prescient commentators on the left, and a brilliant Marxist of the "autonomous" vein - TFGC]

“We were living in times innocent of world war, of fascism, of nazism, sovietism, the Fuehrerprinzip, the totalitarian state. Nothing we were talking about had ever been tried. We thought of political democracy with its basic rights and freedoms as good things permanently secured. Planting ourselves on that firm basis, we proposed to climb higher to industrial or “real” democracy.”

Max Eastman
Love And Revolution (1964)

Thus did Max Eastman describe the climate of the pre-World War I era of The Masses magazine, which he edited in its heyday.

In these bleak times, it is still remarkable how the international revolutionary surge of 1917-1921, right after World War I, can still resonate as a moment of almost apocalyptic hope. 90 years on, this moment—in retrospect the high-water mark to date of the international working-class movement, with revolutions and insurrections and general strikes in 20 countries—retains an ability to inspire like no other. All across the left spectrum, whether Social Democratic, Stalinist, Trotskyist, left communist, anarchist or Third Worldist, militants (whether they know it or not) are still shaped by questions set down in that period and its immediate aftermath. The Russian revolutionaries (more revealingly than they knew) constantly checked course by consulting the history of the (bourgeois) French Revolution, and however much contemporary “new social movement” activists and post-modernists wish to treat the working-class radicalism of the 1910’s and 1920’s as ancient history, we have not yet fully exited, for better or for worse, the magnetic field of those years.