Tag: social class

You all, I hope, have read Paul Street’s and Anthony DiMaggio’s piece on MRZine, “What ‘Populist Uprising’?”, about the actual identities of the participants in “Tea Party” movement.  This actually reveals something interesting about Street himself — that someone who actually wants to “resist empire” is willing to admit that the only resistance to make it to the TV screen is, in fact, a charade.  

(crossposted at Orange and at Firedoglake)

Now here’s a subject I don’t see hardly anywhere in the blogosphere: education politics.  Given that education politics is a matter of students, teachers, and parents in communities of lower-class children versus the political class, the educational corporations, and its Veal Pen, though, it’s no wonder.  But if “progressives” really wish to have some degree of autonomy from the business interests, and to be “with the people” on this one, they’d better pay attention to educational politics.  The most important struggle, as I will discuss below, will be that of empowering lower-class parents by improving their socioeconomic status, rather than by testing their kids and blaming their teachers.

(Crossposted at Orange)

In honor of the diary queue which is going on now on Orange, I’ve decided to put this diary together, perhaps too quickly.  Its thesis is this: if we are to find an effective solution for the climate change situation, we will have to end the division of humanity into social classes.  This won’t take overnight; but its main impediment at present is a lack of unity across social classes, and that can be resolved.

(Crossposted at Orange)

To celebrate the revolutionary spirit of Martin Luther King Jr. Day, I’ve decided to look at a newer volume; Chris Harman’s A People’s History of the World.  This newer book takes off from Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States, which indeed covered the particular impacts of people’s movements (including the one participated in by King) throughout American history.  A People’s History of the World, unfortunately, has to cover far too much ground far too quickly, and so Harman puts out a series of historical explanations which follow his script too closely, and thus misses a lot of the content of people’s history.

A People’s History of the World is nevertheless a fun read which ought to stoke some anti-capitalist fires in the hearts of readers, even if it doesn’t do so thoroughly.  My review will conclude by discussing the import, to activists, of the issues Harman brings up.