I don't know if it was my making fun of them over the past several years but I couldn't find any planned rehashing of the corpses of the Rosenbergs or similar nonsense thought there was lots of such absurdity to be getting nowhere with.
Item One: "Listen Socialists: The Russian and Chinese Revolutions Have Something to Say to You," organized by some obscurity listed as Rajendra Sahai*, the description of which contains this load of shit:
Charles Andrews, ‘Author of The Hollow Colossus’ in ‘There Is No Socialism Without a Communist Party’1 2016 saw the nationwide revival of the word Socialism in Bernie sanders’ campaign for presidency. Sanders qualified it; calling it “Democratic Socialism”, by which he meant that democratic control on capitalism will allow workers to live a life somewhat like a human being with enough income, educational opportunities for their children, affordable medical care and social security. Although he was used and then discarded by the Democratic Party, many of his supporters take socialism more seriously than ever before. The working class in the US has started to rise up after the neoliberal turn enforced by capital manifest in Thatcher-Reagan era and continued by Bush, Clinton and Obama in their own ways. The mass following of Sanders on the left and Trump on the populist right in the follow up of Occupy movement testifies to the fact that the working class is in the mood of claiming it’s place in the political space so constrained by electoral politics.
The idea that Bernie Sanders, who wasn't a member of the Democratic Party until he decided to do a vanity run for president, was "used and then discarded" by a party, much of which wished he hadn't run and whose die hard supporters included those who vocally preferred Trump to Hillary Clinton, is just ridiculous and an obvious lie of the kind that old commies have told to gullible young idiots for decades. I know, I was one of those gullible enough to give them a hearing in my youth, thought not for all that long. If you want to see how ridiculous it gets, the long rambling "abstract" of this panel says:
Socialism today must be the answer to contemporary forms of capitalist exploitations while it draws on the success, not only on the reversal of the socialist projects in the U.S.S.R. and China.
Considering the "success" of "the socialist projects in the U.S.S.R. and China were the murders of tens of millions of people, the total suppression of socialism as anything but the crudest of state-capitalism, the destruction of independent workers organizations, the total obliteration of civil rights, invasions of other countries and the imposition of rule from Russia and Beijing, etc. what a total and complete load of shit.
I could go through one after another of the Left Forum's panels, plenaries, etc. and get enough of the stuff to fertilize a large field. After reading way too many of these things I did a word search on the Left Forum site's search engine and came up with the interesting results that the term "Marx" brought a list of 26 such, um, "workshops" that the term was relevant to. I found only 18 for which "equality" was found to be relevant, almost all of those dealing with race and womens' issues and a paltry 15 for the term "democracy".
This Left Forum, in 2018, at a time when the last vestiges of Communist rule are melting away is still carrying the torch for Soviet and Maoist communism, in countries which gave up any pretense of socialism for what is obviously its natural successor form of government, mafia rule.
I have come to the conclusion, especially from the Nation Magazine style hysteria about "Russiagate" being a Trojan horse for a new cold war instead of a reaction to an attack on American democracy, that there is likely a lot of money from the oligarchs of Putonia going into this stuff. Just as we learned, after the fall of the Soviet Union that the old Communist Party was, in fact, getting money from the Soviet Union. There will, apparently, be adoration of Julian Assange (check out the illustration with this "abstract")
and loads and loads of other bull shit.
Considering Assange was acting as an agent of both Putin's regime which they seem to just lurve and the Donald Trump campaign which they officially hate, AND THAT HE WAS DOING IT TO PUT TRUMP IN OFFICE! - how dishonest and two-faced can the Left Forum get?
The Left Forum is mostly useful as a study in the continued delusion of the play-left, especially its academic division, which is banking on the people of the United States and elsewhere to finally take the words that Karl Marx published in 1848 to heart and foment their fantasy world, workers revolution. That aspiration was understandable (if morally reprehensible) in the 1930s and maybe into the 1950s, that is if you were able to overlook the mountain range of corpses produced by communism. In 2018 when even the Communists in China and the dwindling number of officially Communist dictatorships are dropping the pretense of workers rights in favor of a Victorian era use of workers as disposable and cheap commodities to be used and thrown away, it is utterly delusional. One of the recent revelations of the reality of Communism is the North Korean regime selling slave labor to the mafia oligarchs of the Putin crime family.
The Left Forum and those who participate in it won't change. It's tempting to say they belong on the ash heap of history, but that's too obviously the practice of Marxism in reality instead of pretend theory. I'd say they belong in the custodial care of history's loony bin. The best thing the real left can do with the left forum is mock it and condemn its hypocrisy and dishonesty, its deluded counter-productivity and to question why they've been doing this crap to such counter-productive results for more than a half a century at this point.
Enough was enough a long, long time ago.
* 1. Raj Sahai is an engineer and a socialist, who started his activism during the Anti-Vietnam War struggles in Chicago, IL in 1968- continuing in Berkeley, CA from 1971 onwards. He has published article in India and US, has been member of the Institute for Critical Study of Society at the Niebyl Proctor Marxist Library in Oakland California. He has assisted in translation of the book ‘Khrushchev Lied’ by Grover Furr. His recently published article titled ‘Stalin’s Ghost Haunts Capitalism’ can be viewed thru the following Link: http://www.idcommunism.com/2018/02/stalins-ghost-haunts-capitalism.html
If you're curious to know what "Khrushchev Lied" about, here's the entire title from the listing at Amazon
Khrushchev Lied: The Evidence That Every "Revelation" of Stalin's (and Beria's) Crimes in Nikita Khrushchev's Infamous "Secret Speech" to the 20th Party Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union on February 25, 1956, is Provably False
Yeah, tell that to the young women whose skeletons were found buried in the gardens of Beria's place in Moscow when it was turned into an embassy, the ones he murdered after he raped them. Apparently the Left Forum finds that level of unreconstructed Stalinist to be credible enough to have on its roster of facilitators. If you go to Amazon to check out the listing, read the five star reviews of it, old Commies are as loony as old Nazis.
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