There are few professors with a higher profile than Jared Diamond, whose 1997 Guns, Germs and Steel (referred to hereafter as G, G & S) enjoyed blockbuster bestseller status and whose appearances on PBS have made him an instantly recognizable figure. With his avuncular beard, Diamond is the perfect figure to explain to middle-class television audiences why some people are on top and others are on the bottom. As the PBS Web site on G, G & S puts it, he will answer "Why were Europeans the ones to conquer so much of our planet?"

Read more...

by Eric Ribellarsi

Beneath Everest is a new documentary film depicting the revolution in Nepal. While containing some interesting footage and criticisms of the Nepalese monarchy, this film is an obnoxious, arrogant attack from a western liberal perspective on the oppressed of Nepal and their revolution.

The film’s central thesis is the "Sandwich Theory," or the claim the people are caught between two oppressors. Yet the film’s own footage frequently disproves this claim. Beneath Everest primarily condemns the Maoists for violence, even while admitting most of the violence came via the monarchy.

Read more...

Literally tens of Americans were shocked this week to discover that the United States military likes to kill people. Unsettling news, yes, particularly for those of us who had assumed in good faith that one million Iraqis had accidentally slipped on a banana peel one morning and fallen into a pile of mislaid cruise missiles, but before we leap to all sorts of unsightly conclusions, calling Our Boys "mass-murderers" just because they happen to enjoy the occasional mass-murder, let's remember that in the fog of war with the eggs and the omelettes and the War Is Hell, who can say what's right and wrong, what's good and evil, who's an unarmed pregnant woman and who's a ticking time bomb threatening to produce future foreigners? Our troops have a job to do, after all - defending our country from those countries who would defend their country from our country - and if we hounded and nit-picked them after every little massacre, gang rape or atrocity, they'd hardly get any killing done at all.

Read more...

We are posting the following because we believe it is deeply important to develop a summation of the Student Liberation Action Movement, an attempt to build a radical student movement in New York City. On April 8th, the Radical Study Group at the  University of Houston will be hosting two speakers from SLAM, Kazembe Balagun and Lenina Nadal, to present their summation of those experiences.

By SLAM Herstory Project
Interviews by Suzy Subways

In March 1995, 20,000 students from City University of New York (CUNY) were attacked by police after surrounding city hall to protest a draconian tuition increase. This protest, organized by the CUNY Coalition Against the Cuts, marked an upsurge in student movement activity that continued into 1996, when the group transformed into the Student Liberation Action Movement (SLAM), a multiracial radical organization. Before disbanding in 2004, SLAM established chapters at CUNY colleges in all five boroughs of the city. This roundtable focuses on the chapter at Hunter College in Manhattan and explores SLAM’s legacy of building a left culture in New York City and across the country.

Read more...

The following originally appeared on the Kasama site. It is being reposted here for study

by Mike Ely

I wrote:

“Revolutionary rumblings [in the 1960s] didn’t take the form of “class against class” in the U.S. — and never will.

Bryan writes:

“Revolutionary rumblings will take the form of “class against class,” in this country and around the world….You don’t claim to be Marxists still, do you?”

There is a great transition happening in human society — breaking out of the sharp contradiction between social production and private appropriation. But to think that takes the form of workers gathering over here, and capitalists gathering over there — and then a rumble…. well that is non-materialist and non-Marxist (if you will).

Read more...