Revolutionaries in Coffee Shops

All too often one hears from conservatives the boring cliche about privileged revolutionaries who sit around in coffee shops doing nothing. How could they ever organize a revolution? Those incompetent idiots who sit around talking ideas all day! Their pie-in-the-sky Utopian whining will go nowhere!

I say: never underestimate what creative and liberated chaff can do. When Victor Adler objected to Berchtold, foreign minister of Austria-Hungary, that war would provoke revolution in Russia, even if not in the Habsburg monarchy, he replied: "And who will lead this revolution? Perhaps Mr. Bronstein [Trotsky] sitting over there at the Cafe Central?" Can you imagine the look on his face when 1917 broke out?

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Ghost Hunting - On the history of ideas about anti-communism

A rough and dirty translation from an article "Gespensterjagd -- Zur Ideengeschichte des Antikommunismus" from Gruppen Gegen Kapital Und Nation (Groups Against Capital and Nation). Original can be found here: https://gegen-kapital-und-nation.org/gespensterjagd-zur-ideengeschichte-des-antikommunismus/ “A specter is haunting Europe - the specter of communism."“ All the powers of old Europe have united in a holy hunt against this specter,” wrote Marx and Engels in the Communist Manifesto — and that, contrary to other claims in that work, is a pretty true statement. Hatred and fear of radical change in civil society is as old as its revolutionary implementation itself. At the latest with the French Revolution, which did not operate in a religious disguise like the Dutch and English revolutions, and which was much more radical in its theoretical justification than the American one, the fear of the “Red Terror” arose (before “La Grande, by the way. “Terreur” really started in ...

The concept of cultural appropriation – a critique of racism on its own foundations

Original here: https://gegen-kapital-und-nation.org/das-konzept-der-kulturellen-aneignung-eine-kritik-des-rassismus-auf-seinen-eigenen-grundlagen/ In recent years, a new form of racism, cultural appropriation, has been criticized in some anti-racist circles . They always discover this where members of a group adopt cultural productions (e.g. certain cultural customs, hairstyles, items of clothing,...) that, according to advocates of the concept of cultural appropriation, come from other groups, namely those who have less power over the acquiring group due to racial discrimination. When criticizing cultural appropriation, respect for these cultures is demanded. This respect should then contribute to combating racial discrimination. There was criticism that a non-indigenous artist in Canada integrated elements of indigenous art into her artwork. 1 Even when “white” 2 people wear dreadlocks or throw colored powder at each other (a practice inspired by th...

A Reader writes to Freerk Huisken: "I am not a nationalist because I fear foreigners taking my job!"

A reader writes: ".... in a recent lecture in.... you framed the fears of fellow citizens for their jobs amid increasing demand from foreigners for work as nationalist. Your 'arguments' were not at all convincing to me. I personally have nothing against foreigners; I just fear for my job. Therefore, I am not a nationalist. I would never vote for the AfD or any other right-wing extremist party. That's why I think it's good when you and others speak out against the AfD. However, I am writing to you so that you reconsider your 'arguments' and refrain from calling harmless fellow citizens nationalists in the future..." Before anything, I'd like to set a few things straight: First, I didn't – directly – oppose the AfD in the aforementioned lecture. More on that in a moment. And second, I didn't call anyone a nationalist. Rather, I tried to criticize the slogan that foreigners are taking "our" jobs, and to point out its flaws and its ...

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