Originally published by Rose City Antifascists

Shortly after midnight on Saturday, March 27, a man was brutally attacked in the heart of downtown Portland. His attacker shot him and left him lying in the street. He is currently fighting to overcome extensive injuries.

It is no secret that this man, Luke Querner, is a long-time anti-fascist activist. He has devoted over a decade of his life to opposing the most vicious elements of our city’s white supremacist movement. Rose City Antifascists, the Portland chapter of the Anti-Racist Action Network, believe that the local neo-Nazis whom Luke has opposed for years attempted to murder him on Saturday morning.

Luke is proud to be an anti-racist skinhead. The true skinhead movement has always been anti-racist, tracing its origins to the cultural intersection of Jamaican immigrants and working class whites in England during the 1960s. After racists and the far-Right attempted to hijack the skinhead movement in the late 1970s and ‘80s, a movement known as SkinHeads Against Racial Prejudice (SHARP) emerged in 1987 to reaffirm the anti-racist roots of the subculture. As with many other anti-racist skins, Luke is deeply committed to racial equality and social justice. This commitment has caused Luke to be targeted in the past.

Editor's note:
Chris puts this piece forward as a tentative position. It is our hope that this piece will spark a hearty debate on a subject around which Chris states,"I actually think they're the only thing resembling a social 'movement' right now."

by Chris, AZ
At the first tea bagger convention this weekend in Nashville Tom Tancredo – noted white supremacist and former Congressional architect of scads of anti-immigrant legislature – opened with a speech that would have made David Duke or Bull Connor proud. He called for a return to segregationist policies using all of the thinly-veiled white-supremacist rhetoric that he and his ilk are known for, letting the tea baggers know that “because we don’t have a civics literacy test to vote, people who couldn’t even spell vote, or say it in English, put a committed socialist ideologue in the White House named Barack Hussein Obama”. This, of course, can be read as “because we let people of color vote, we ended up with Obama” and the ‘therefore’ is “we should not let people of color vote”, but the subtext is so obvious that I need not point it out.

from:
http://threewayfight.blogspot.com/2010/01/barack-badiou-and-bilal-al-has...

Don Hamerquist

I wrote a draft of this in early December that had some limited circulation. This version moves the focus away from criticisms of the left responses to the Obama Afghanistan policy towards the policy itself. In some ways it’s a restatement of arguments I made about Iraq five years ago that tries to incorporate the impact of a global economic crisis and of a different political face for the ruling class. I hope to open up two discussions: the first concerns the origins, objectives, and implications of the policy - particularly with respect to the ruling class flexibility to reconsider and change it. The other concerns the development of a more useful conceptual framework for the left.

Obama has made his speech on Afghanistan and we should think about what it entails and implies.
The majority of the U.S. left looks at these issues in the context of classical conceptions of imperialism, emphasizing the interests of U.S. capital in maintaining and extending its dominant position: in the first place against popular anti-imperialist movements; but with increasing frequency also against purported imperialist rivals.
Two examples:

The following debates have developed on various forums over the past months. Both Hamerquist and Harvey argue that the crisis Capitalism currently faces is not merely a cyclical (or self-correcting) crisis, but a one reflecting Capitalism running up against the limits imposed by its internal contradictions. Their arguments hold drastic implications for the priorities and tasks of those who see the need for systemic alternatives, and are worth examination.

David Harvey,"Organizing for the Anti-Capitalist Transition:

http://davidharvey.org/2009/12/organizing-for-the-anti-capitalist-transi...

Don Hamerquist,"Lenin, Leninism and Some Leftovers"(and various responses):

http://threewayfight.blogspot.com/2009/09/sketchy-thoughts-drawing-lesso...

by Erinn

So, I went to see a movie called “Collapse.” I read about this movie a little bit before seeing it (full disclosure: I get caught it weird Internet spaces and was reading an article about Mein Kampf. This movie was mentioned in the article for some reason). The premise of the movie is pretty simple: Michael Ruppert believes that he know how and why the US and global economies are currently collapsing (Get it? That’s the movie title…and the country…). The ticket was like $4, which in LA is pretty much like highway robbery.

What is Repeal?

The Arizona Repeal Coalition is an organization committed to repealing over 60 anti-immigrant laws and bills that have been passed or considered by Arizona politicians in the past few years. We demand the repeal of all laws—federal, state, and local—that degrade and discriminate against undocumented individuals and that deny U.S. citizens their lawful rights. We demand that all human beings—with papers or without—be guaranteed access to work, housing, health care, education, legal protection, and other public benefits, as well as the right to organize. Our strategy is to help build a grass roots social movement that can repeal these laws, change the terms of the national debate on immigration, and expand the freedom of all people—documented and undocumented.

originally posted at Imagine2050.org

By Joel Olson

I recently reviewed The Rise of the Ku Klux Klan by Rory McVeigh (University of Minnesota Press 2009) for the academic journal American Studies. The book is a little dry, but there were some notable lessons in it for understanding anti-immigration organizations today.

The Klan originated after the Civil War to restore white supremacy by terrorizing ex-slaves and antislavery whites during Reconstruction. This generation of the Klan ended when Reconstruction did in the 1870s. McVeigh’s book studies the second generation of the KKK, which started in 1915 (coinciding with the release of D.W. Griffith’s famous pro-Klan movie The Birth of a Nation) and exploded in growth from 1920-1924, with a membership of over four million people at its peak.

McVeigh argues that this version of the Klan emerged as a white Protestant response to the rise of large-scale manufacturing and retail, which squeezed small businesses and farms, diminished the political influence of the heartland, and strengthened the power of the cities—and the ethnic communities that lived in them. Klan organizers successfully mobilized White Anglo-Saxon Protestants (WASPs) by playing on their fears of losing their economic, political, and social power as a result of these economic and political changes.

originally available at: http://www.counterpunch.org/maher11242009.html

November 24, 2009

By GEORGE CICCARIELLO-MAHER

Berkeley.

This was bound to be a big week in California regardless, as the threat of a 32 percent tuition and fee increase across the University of California system made a crashing entrance into reality with Wednesday’s vote by the UC Board of Regents. Perhaps the Regents and UC President Mark Yudof expected that their diversionary tactics--lament the crisis and direct blame to Sacramento’s budget cuts--would pay off. But this was not to be.

Aided in no small part by the explosive exposé published by UC Santa Cruz Professor of Political Science Bob Meister, the student, faculty, and workers’ movements the length and breadth of the state were no longer willing to accept privatization disguised as crisis-imposed budget cuts. As Meister explained in no uncertain terms, the proposed (and now passed) tuition increase has nothing whatsoever to do with budget cuts, but the cuts merely provided the pretext for a long-planned drive (and Reaganite wet dream) to privatize public education in California once and for all.

Anti-Capital Projects

Part 1 embedded above. View parts 2-8 on the Phoenix Class War Council's YouTube Channel.

This is a transcription of Mike Davis’ speech and closing remarks at the ISO’s “Socialism” conference which took place in San Francisco this summer. Originally published at Advance the Struggle

I took my 15-year-old son last night to the movies in Berkeley to see the remake of The Taking of Pelham 1-2-3. I kept thinking: is this set in Sacramento?

Here you have the governor and his gang of Republicans, and they’re holding the people captive and threatening to shoot them one by one unless their demands for budget cuts and a new stage in the Republican fiscal revolution occurs. And then on the other hand, you have the leadership of the Democratic Party in Sacramento, Karen Bass and Darrell Steinberg, and they’re saying “Oh, no, no, no, don’t shoot all the passengers, just shoot half the passengers.”