The Cold War is over. Long live the Cold War.

by William Blum, Foreign Policy Journal, July 6, 2010

I recently attended a showing of Oliver Stone’s new documentary film, “South of the Border”, which concerns seven present-day government leaders of Latin America -– in Venezuela, Bolivia, Ecuador, Argentina, Paraguay, Cuba and Brazil — who are not in love with US foreign policy. After the film there was a discussion panel in the theatre, consisting of Stone, the two writers of the film (Tariq Ali and Mark Weisbrot) and Cynthia Arnson, Director of the Latin American Program of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, in Washington; the discussion was moderated by Neal Conan of National Public Radio.

It perhaps was not meant to be a “debate”, but it quickly became that, with Arnson leading the “anti-communist” faction, supported somewhat by Conan’s questions and more vociferously by a segment of the audience which took sides loudly via applause and cries of approval or displeasure. Twenty years post-Cold War, anti-communism still runs deep in the American soul and psyche. Candid criticism of US foreign policy and/or capitalism is sufficient to consign a foreign government or leader to the “communist” camp whether or not that term is specifically used.

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First As Tragedy, Then As Farce by Slavoj Žižek

Nicholas Lezard: Something rotten in society? Time to revive communism

• • Nicholas Lezard
  • The Guardian, Saturday 24 October 2009

I remember when, in this paper’s excellent Weekend magazine’s Q & A, Slavoj Žižek was asked to “tell us a secret”, he replied: “Communism will win.” I don’t think anyone familiar with Žižek’s writings will think he was joking, but just in case you thought the matter needed clarification, here it is, in book form. We know something is rotten with society, as the financial crisis shows, but what to do with it? The answer, he says at the close of his book, is simple: revive communism.

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Castro to US – Cuba will stay communist

Times Online, Aug 3, 2009

Tim Reid in Washington

(AP)

Raul Castro speaking at the Cuban National Assembly

Raúl Castro, the Cuban President, vowed to a standing ovation in parliament yesterday that the country would never give up communism, in what appeared to be a direct response to the Obama Administration’s calls for reform.

Mr Castro, the younger brother of the ailing Fidel Castro, also defended impending austerity measures amid a sharp economic downturn in the country. He announced that Cuba would cut spending on education and healthcare and called state spending “simply unsustainable”.

The Government would reorganise rural schools and scrutinise its free healthcare system in search of ways to save money, he said.

Nevertheless, the political ideology of the regime was not in question, Mr Castro declared.

“I wasn’t elected President to return capitalism to Cuba, or to surrender the revolution,” he said, referring to the armed uprising led by his brother that toppled the US-backed dictator Fulgencio Batista half a century ago. “I was elected President to defend, build and perfect socialism, not destroy it,” he said.

President Obama has been trying to engineer a thaw in relations between the United States and Cuba. Hillary Clinton, his Secretary of State, said recently that Washington wanted to see economic and social reforms in Cuba before the Washington Administration would do more to improve bilateral relations.

Mr Castro reiterated his willingness to improve relations with America and acknowledged “a decline in the aggressiveness and anti-Cuban rhetoric” since Mr Obama took power in January.

The Cuban President made an unusual mention of the mortality of his 82-year-old brother Fidel, something top officials in Cuba almost never do in public.

He scoffed at those who thought that Cuba’s political system would crumble after “the death of Fidel and of all of us”.

He added: “If that’s how they think, they are doomed to failure.”

Raina: Commemorating T.K. Ramachandran

Some notes from my visit to Kozhikode

By Badri Raina | ZNet, July 31, 2009

Badri Raina’s ZSpace Page

[Contribution to the Reimagining Society Project hosted by ZCommunications]

As everything natural has to come into being, man too has his act of origin–history—which however is for him a known history, and being as an act of origin, is a conscious self-transcending act of origin.”

(Marx, Critique of Hegelian Dialectic and Philosophy as a Whole, EPM)

“Both for the production on a mass scale of this communist consciousness and for the success of the cause itself, the alteration of men on a mass scale is necessarily an alteration which can only take place in a practical movement, a revolution. . .it can only in a revolution succeed in ridding itself of all the muck of ages, and become fitted to found society anew.”

(Marx, German Ideology.)

Teekay, who was professor of English at Calicut university in Kerala, was more importantly one of the relentless critics of stultifying orthodoxy, including, most of all, with respect to India’s  Left parties and politics. Besides being erudite in Marxist theory well into its frontier extensions and amplifications upto his day.

Never one to compromise the integrity of his perceptions, he knew both the opprobrium of dogmatists, and the inside of an Indian jail.

He died at the age of 57, but left behind him a committed following, both among Kerala intellectuals and intelligentsia alike.

It was a great honour, thus, to be asked to deliver the first Teekay memorial lecture on the 21^st of july, 2009 at Kozhikode on “the State of Left politics: Theory and Practice.”

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