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Listen to the new song "I Will Spite Survive" by Deerhoof featuring Jenn Wasner. The song was first aired on todays Democracy Now!

Pitchfork has called Deerhoof "the best band in the world." The New York Times described them as "one of the most original rock bands to have come along in the last decade."

A message from Deerhoof:

In this world of tyrants and CEOs seemingly hellbent on achieving the termination of our species, perhaps the most rebellious thing we could do is not die. Should we survive the global warming, the lack of healthcare, and the bombs, a more humane future may await us. Maligned for shirking their capitalist duty, it is the younger generations we center. Safeguarding our consciences is only part of the daily challenge, since we also need to navigate corporate-owned electronic media which both aids and saps our energies. Fans of Wye Oak will be thrilled (as we were) to hear Jenn Wasner harmonize with Deerhoof singer Satomi Matsuzaki, while fans of Gloria Gaynor, Bee Gees, or The Bobby Fuller Four may detect homage in the lyrics:

"I Will Spite Survive" You could outlive your executioners but youre on tv. Youre expendable. Sleep at night, if you can stay alive. Stay alive, if you can sleep at night. City breaks, if you can stay awake. Let her dance, all night long!

The voices of reason and humanity are puzzlingly but systematically iced out of our national conversation by politicians and media bought by large corporations. Whether were talking about money in politics, trade deals, surveillance, bank bailouts, healthcare, climate change, Middle Eastern wars, or wealth equality, the mainstream popular view is dismissed as unrealistically 'far left,' while the views of a small dissenting minority are advanced as acceptably "conservative," "centrist," or "liberal." Thats why news outlets NOT owned by large corporations are so lovable, and Democracy Now! may be the most lovable of them all.

"I Will Spite Survive" will appear on Deerhoofs forthcoming album, Mountain Moves (Joyful Noise).

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Song Premiere: Deerhoof - "I Will Spite Survive" (ft. Jenn Wasner) - Democracy Now!

Rioter in Venezuela. Photo: Federico Parra/AFP/Getty Images

To commemorate the 100th anniversary of the Soviet experiment, the New York Times op-ed page has been publishing a regular series on communism. The overall tone of the essays runs toward wistfulness, and the latest contribution, by Bhaskar Sunkara, editor of the left-wing journal Jacobin, presents communism as tanned, rested, and ready. Sunkara sees a new future for Marxism, only this time without the purges, gulag, mass starvation, and other unpleasant features.

Sunkara argues that the original Bolsheviks had good intentions, but their project somehow took a wrong turn along the way. We may reject the version of Lenin and the Bolsheviks as crazed demons and choose to see them as well-intentioned people trying to build a better world out of a crisis, he argues, but we must work out how to avoid their failures.

Like many Marxist apologias, this fails to grapple with the inherent authoritarianism that is embedded in an illiberal thought system. This is why every Marxist government in history has monopolized power. An ideology that describes a large segment of society as an enemy class that must be eliminated is never going to respect political rights for its opponents. The Bolsheviks had plans to brutalize their opponents from the outset. As early as 1917, Lenin wrote, Only in Communist society, when the resistance of the capitalists has been completely broken only then the state ceases to exist, and it becomes possible to speak of freedom. Lenin may have been well-intentioned in the most abstract sense of imaginingpeaceful egalitarian paradise as the final stage of his vision. But he always envisioned the journey to that destination traversing a river of blood.

Older leftists often defined themselves by their relation to existing communist states. Some Social Democrats maintained a fierce anti-communism, while others defended some or all aspects of the totalitarian horrors in places like the Soviet Union or China.

Jacobin has existed for less than a decade, and Sunkara is young enough that he can confidently assert that his version of Marxism would never descend into the brutality of the 20th-century version.

That does not mean, however, that its disposition toward left-wing authoritarianism is entirely theoretical. There is one experiment in Marxist, or quasi-Marxist, government recent enough to gauge Jacobins tolerance for left-wing repression: the Hugo Chvez regime in Venezuela.

The left-wing populist government established by Chvez and his successors may not be as brutal as the regimes of Stalin or Mao, but its ruthlessness is beyond serious dispute. Under the leadership of President Hugo Chvez and now President Nicols Maduro, the accumulation of power in the executive branch and erosion of human rights guarantees have enabled the government to intimidate, persecute, and even criminally prosecute its critics, says Human Rights Watch. Human rights defenders and journalists frequently faced campaigns to discredit them, as well as attacks and intimidation. Political opponents and critics of the government continued to face imprisonment, notes Amnesty International. A 2015 State Department report cites, among other human-rights violations, abuse of political prisoners; interference with privacy rights; lack of government respect for freedom of assembly; lack of protection for Colombian migrants; corruption at all levels of government; threats against domestic NGOs. Maduro has neutralized the opposition-dominated National Assembly elected in December 2015 and decimated the judiciarys independence, reports the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

Readers of Jacobin have gotten a very different sense of things. The magazines coverage of Venezuela, at least as far as I was able to find online, dates back to the immediate aftermath of Chvezs death. Even by that relatively late date, when the authoritarian nature of the regime was already clear, Jacobin was defending it against its perfidious neoliberal critics.

The tone of the nearly two dozen Jacobin stories on Venezuela I was able to find ranges from celebratory to defensive. Today we mourn the death of Chvez, tomorrow we return to the grind for socialism, concludes one 2013 piece. Much of Jacobins early criticism of the regime laments that Chavism has not gone far enough. The Jacobin line in 2014 was that, Only a deepening of the Bolivarian Revolution can save it. Or, What is needed today, and what is more urgent than ever, is not dialogue or reconciliation, not harmony and understanding, but a radical commitment to press decisively forward. Indeed, the counterrevolutionary dissidents needed to be crushed: To the extent that the Bolivarian Revolution has problems, the solution to them wont come from chats with those looking to overthrow it, but rather the organization of workers trying to fulfill its potential. There can be no neutral ground between those two positions. The so-called human-rights abuses were merely a pretext for Yankee imperialism.

This is all the same rhetoric Marxists used to justify the bloodshed in Soviet Russia and Maoist China. The revolution is not a dinner party, etc., etc.

As the Venezuelan economy has tumbled into crisis and the regimes failure has grown harder to deny, Jacobins coverage has softened, but only incrementally. Demands for more fervent adherence to Marxist dogma have given way to criticisms of the regimes critics. If you have read the mainstream conservative analysis of Donald Trump, which focuses heavily on pushing back against the media and his opponents, the tone will be familiar.

In mainstream accounts of last weeks protests in Caracas, the opposition is depicted as an essentially peaceful force, complains one story. Strangely missing from the narrative of the Venezuelan oppositions peaceful march to victory over a cruel dictatorship was the small detail of the murder of a Venezuelan police officer by demonstrators Wednesday evening, insists another article, assailing a double standard: In most cases, blue lives apparently matter an awful lot except when theyre serving under a self-declared socialist national government that has been branded an unusual and extraordinary threat by the United States. A procession of stories has dismissed reports of failure in the country. Western journalists are wrong, FiveThirtyEight is wrong, even Bernie Sanders is wrong.

Sunkara may want to work out why Marxist principles failed in the past, but he seems determined not to arrive at any conclusion that implicates the ideological principles that caused those failures.

In his Times op-ed, Sunkara suggests, The threat to democracy today is coming from the right, not the left. That is correct, but only because in the United States today, Marxism represents a minuscule faction with no plausible opportunity to obtain national-scale power. Those on the left who care about safeguarding democracy should work to keep it that way.

The president started raising money for his 2020 campaign with an event held at his own D.C. hotel and the press was forced to crash the party.

In a deal with prosecutors, Brian Encinia agreed never to work in law enforcement again.

The repeal of taxes on the wealthy enacted along with Obamacare is under attack by Senate Republicans. That is a very bad sign for Mitch McConnell.

Three days after the Supreme Court lifted the injunctions against the ban, the U.S. will begin barring visitors from six Muslim-majority nations.

Citing two big procedural bars to enactment of a single-payer plan, Speaker Anthony Rendon stopped action on it, inviting attacks from proponents.

Trump wont file a complaint against James Comey for leaking (for now), as a gesture of goodwill toward Special Counsel Robert Mueller.

It came out of nowhere, and the backstory was even stranger and more alarming.

Heres how the enticements to wavering GOP senators might be doled out.

The Texas senator has a doppelgnger.

The president implicitly threatens Jeff Bezos with higher taxes, for owning a newspaper that reports critically on the White House.

The real-estate developer cited the financial hurdles to taking out an incumbent.

Marxists say theyve learned their lesson and are ready for another chance.

A new poll finds that only 10 percent of Republicans want a less generous version of Obamacare but Mitch McConnell is trying to pass one, anyway.

The A, B, C, and D lines have resumed, but if you guessed thats with extensive delays, that would be correct.

Nancy Pelosi has done good work. But in an era where Congress is chronically unpopular, 16 years in leadership is too long.

A hair-raising report from the presidents meeting with Republicans enrages Trump.

Putting his inexperienced son-in-law in charge of Mideast policy was a shocking act of nepotism by Trump. Were starting to see the consequences.

Trumps former campaign manager confirms he worked as a foreign agent of a pro-Russia political party.

Hes already misjudged the politics surrounding the Senate legislation, and he might not like the bill if he learns whats in it.

Judging by todays performance, theyre still interested in holding live daily briefings if the press is in the hot seat.

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100 Years After the Bolshevik Revolution, Communism Hasn't Changed - New York Magazine

The Socialist Republic of Romania fell in 1989, early in the life of game developer Cristian Diaconescu. Living under communist rule is a childhood memory, but one that has stuck through adulthood, much like it did in the minds of his friends, colleagues and contemporaries. In 2014, he decided to make something from the recollections.

We were having discussions back then about us as a nation, about how important the communist period was for us as a generation, Diaconescu tells me over the phone. I think a part of what we are today was constructed in the early years of our life. So that's why we thought this could be a great theme for a game. It would give us the opportunity to explore our childhood.

Black the Fall is the result of a collaboration between Diaconescu and artist Nicoleta Iordanescu, along with a team of designers and developers, to work on a project that expressed the realities of communism in Romania. Rather than a documentary, the team at Sand Sailor Studio decided to make a puzzle-platformer video game. And instead of creating a digital simulacrum of pre-1989 Romania, they decided to blend scenes pulled from reality with science-fiction robots.

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In a style reminiscent of Oddworld Inhabitants pioneering platform game, Oddworld: Abe's Oddysee, the player of Black the Fall moves from left to right across a screen, solving puzzles that will extract them from a sinister complex. In Abes Oddysee the player must liberate their character and his fellow slaves from a satirically hypercapitalist meat-processing factory. In Black the Fall, the target is communism, and the player must learn to manipulate others to escape a building lined with pictures of Lenin and Stalin.

We tried to make puzzles that are inspired by manipulation, says Diaconescu. This is something that people used to do back in the day. You didn't have any friends. You didn't know whom to trust. The only way to survive was by manipulating others.

Visually, the game also brings to mind Playdeads 2016 titleInside, another game that took the puzzle-platformer form and used it to tell the story of a lone individual struggling against a vast, mysterious system. Whereas that game shies from iconography that ties it to a particular political ideology, Black the Fall is laden with scenes and images pulled from the developers memories of Bucharest under communist rule. This connection to reality is, according to community manager Andreea Vaduva, part of the games strength.

There is a hunger for authenticity, she says. I think the greatest art is very authentic. There are other big games that are formed around metrics: what people like most, what they play most, et cetera. They're successful and entertaining, and some of them are really good. But the success for an indie game is solely based on authenticity.

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Crucially, both Vaduva and Diaconescu pitch their game as a piece of personal expression. Much of the game is pulled from their own experiences, and from what theyve heard from parents and grandparents who lived day to day under a repressive regime. I ask them why, if thats the case, did they decide to mix this historical authenticity with robotic companions and a visual aesthetic that wouldnt look out of place in Terry Gilliams 1985 film Brazil. Why not keep the whole thing grounded in the realities of communist Bucharest?

Because we wanted to make something that's unique and deeply ours, Diaconescu replies. We decided to let all the cultural aspects that influenced us be part of the game. He mentions the effect of seeing Star Wars as a child, and reading books like George Orwells Nineteen Eighty-Four. For someone who was a child during the final days of the Socialist Republic of Romania, it makes sense for his memories of Bucharest to fuse with those of fiction, of Darth Vader and Big Brother. As a piece of self-expression, Black the Fall is therefore more an impressionistic sketch than a historically accurate document.

Will the games cocktail of fantastic and actual oppression work out? Will it give an insight into a still tender chapter of Romanian history, or will the generalised tropes of dystopian fiction drown out this authenticity? Well be able to tell for ourselves when the game is released on PC, PS4 and Xbox One, on 11 July 2017.

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Playing with Romanian communism in Black the Fall | Alphr - Alphr

During the 2016 presidential election run, as parties candidates were competing for their presidential nomination, now-President Donald Trump lashed out at former Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) to cheering crowds.

This socialist-slash-communist Trump said. I call [Sanders] a socialist-slash-communist, because thats what he is. Hes going to tax you people at 90 percent; hes going to take everything!

It was clever political hit to dress Sanders up as a Cold War-era bogeyman, but it displayed a crude one might say calculatedmisrepresentation of the ideology that the Vermont senator holds.

Although Sanders is not currently running for president, the self-identified democratic socialist has become a guiding light among progressives. And many on the left are now pushing ideas like universal healthcare, raised minimum wages, and taxes on the wealthiest Americansideas that have roots in socialism. As a large portion of the American electorate gravitates toward these ideas, lets take a look at what socialism meansand what it could mean for America.

Socialism is a political ideology that advocates for an egalitarian redistribution of wealth and power in society through a democratic ownership and distribution of societys means of production (or means of making money). Socialism, in the simplest of terms, involves making more of an effort to balance the scales between the rich and the poor.

Nowadays, the term refers to a wide swathe of the left-wing political thought. Some socialists believe that workers or communities should manage businesses as stakeholders, what is known as a cooperative, while others advocate for varying degrees of governmental ownership and administration.

Likewise, throughout history, socialists have disagreed over how this change should come about. Revolutionaries called for a sudden violent overthrow of capitalism, while reformists actively worked to evolve the model of government to a more socialist system.

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The ideology emerged in the mid-19th century as a reaction to the rise of early capitalism and the economic inequality it induced.

Capitalism, or liberalism, focuses on private property and profit. Perhaps the most prominent economic theorist to define modern capitalism, Adam Smith, famously laid out this philosophy in his book,The Wealth of Nations, published in 1776, which described how a free market could regulate itself through competition and with little government interference. This idea would revolutionize how society was structured in the centuries that followed. It began a transition from mercantilismcolonial-era state regulated trade through chartered trading companiesto commercial capitalism.

By the time the 19th century rolled around and industrial capitalism was in stride, working conditions were inhumane. Children were forced into the workplace, workers days were long and difficult. With few rights, workers had no safety provisions and minimal pay. This was reflected in the abject conditions and poverty that working-class people lived in.

Socialism was a reaction to all this, and as an intellectual idea, first found its footing among the French elite,where two schools of socialist thought emerged: utopian and revolutionary. While the former group advocated reform, the latter believed that capitalism could only be overthrown through violence.

In the early 20th century, socialist ideals would change the world, as working people began to organize through trade unions and, later, in political parties. The writings of German philosopher Karl Marx also served to spread and define socialist ideals.

Is socialism the same thing as communism? In short, no. Trumps criticism of Sanders is either wrong or simply exploiting a confusion that stems from the Cold War. At the time, communism and socialism were used virtually interchangeably in U.S. politics to vilify leftist thinkers.

There is, however, a distinct difference. Although Marxs writing was a school of far-left socialist thought, it was also a rejection of it and denounced many socialists as part of the problem. Marx instead imagined the ideals of socialism absolutely as communism. Marx believed communism, in which all class boundaries and notions of private ownership would eventually end, was the endpoint of all socialism.

Communism required the state own and manage the distribution of wealth and property according to need. There were many countries throughout the 20th century that tried to implement communism, from the Soviet Union to Vietnam, Cuba to China. When economic difficulty continued, however, the dream of a classless utopia often fell to a violent authoritarian regime in which an opportunistic ruling political class and, often, a dictator commanded all material wealth and violently oppressed dissenters.

Socialism is a more moderateyet still radicaleconomic philosophy that seeks to empower the worker through co-ownership of industrial and production capacity and through consensus, whether governmental mechanism or through smaller syndicates.

Within current European democracies, however, socialisms principles exist alongside capitalism. In these countries, citizens pay higher tax rates to the government but benefit from universal pre-paid healthcare, free college tuition, and social welfare programs. This broad social welfare system exists complementary to a free economy with lightly regulated businesses that sometimes pay lower corporate tax rates than U.S. businesses.

This is the kind of democratic socialism that Sanders professes. He has consistently praised Denmarks model of government. In 2013, he wrote an essay praising the extraordinary security and opportunity that the Danish government offers its citizens, describing it most recently as a very different understanding of what freedom means ending the enormous anxieties that comes with economic insecurity.

In a way, its already taking hold. Sanders stands as the most successful democratic socialist ever within American politics; his race to become the Democrat nominee drew the support of more young Americans than Trump and party rival Hillary Clinton.

For the generation without memory of the Soviet Union, socialism is not a dirty word, and Sanders nuanced political perspective holds strong appealespecially to those who came of age in the economic insecurity and injustice caused by the 2008 financial crisis.

A 2016 poll by Pew Research Centershowed that while only 31 percent of Americans overall viewed socialism positively, almost half of those aged 19 to 29 viewed the ideology positively. The statistics were backed up by a separate Harvard survey, which found that within that same age group, half of young adults rejected capitalism.

However, holding socialist views remains a risk for U.S. political candidates. The Clinton campaign and her supporters attempted to attack Sanders socialist ideas during the 2016 Democratic primary season. And Republicans viewed an election against Sanders as nothing short of a gift.

Republicans are being nice to Bernie Sanders because we like the thought of running against a socialist. But if he were to win the nomination the knives would come out for Bernie pretty quick, Ryan Williams, aformer spokesman for Republican Mitt Romneys 2012 presidential campaign, told Bloomberg. Theres no mystery what the attack on him would be. Bernie Sanders is literally a card carrying socialist who honeymooned in the Soviet Union. Thered be hundreds of millions of dollars in Republican ads showing hammers and sickles and Soviet Union flags in front of Bernie Sanders.

Still, more than 12 million people voted Sanders during the 2016 Democratic primary, about 3.8 million fewer than Clintons primary vote total.

So, is socialism about to sweep the U.S.? Not likely. But the fact that those interested in socialism or socialistic ideas constitute a large minority in American politics, its clear that Americans are beginning to question the fundamentals.

Original post:
What is socialism? - The Daily Dot

I would see you unwearied in activity, aglow with the Spirit, waiting like slaves upon the Lord; buoyed up by hope, patient in affliction, persevering in prayer; providing generously for the needs of the saints, striving to show friendliness to strangers. Bestow a blessing on those who persecute you; a blessing not a curse. Repay no one evil for evil, having in mind what is noble in the sight of all humanity; if it is in your power, be at peace with all people; do not avenge yourselves, brethren, rather give wrath the place for which it is written: Retribution is mine, I will repay, says the Lord. But if it be that your enemy hungers, feed him. If he thirsts, give him drink. For by doing this, you will heap fire upon his head. Do not let evil win over you; but with good win over evil. (Romans 11-14, 17-21)

But when you give to the needy, do not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing., so that your giving may be in secret. And your Father who sees in secret will reward you. (Matthew 6: 3-4)

These days some wealthy people make a big show of caring for and helping the needy. Indeed, our nation is probably bankrupt because our politics has become an extension of this self-promoting generosity. Its gotten so that even the Republicans, who used at least to pretend that they frowned upon this abuse of government power, are given to promising tax cuts the way the ancient Caesars promised liberal donatives to the legions that helped them to power. Many Americans dont realize how ironic this is. The Caesars bribed their legions with money they derived from confiscating the property of opponents they proscribed. Our elected officials achieve the same effect by gifting people a larger share of what is theirs in the first place.

The underlying premise in both cases is that winning control of the government gives the victors the power to take what they want from whomever they please, and give it to whomever they favor, expecting favors in return. What distinguishes our politics from the tyranny of the Roman Imperators? The victors in our elections expect us to be grateful for the fig leaf of appearing to keep some of our own money; and to show our gratitude at the polls.

Not content with having all our earnings subject to their generous rapine, they aim, like the Biblical Pharaoh, to bring our bodies also under subjection. This is the strategic aim of their similarly generous efforts to make sure our entire health care system is made to depend on U.S. government funding. I can understand why people who believe that material life is the be all and end all of human existence are blithely falling in line to advance this strategy. But when I read about or listen to people who profess to be followers of Christ, who are now professing to believe that this government takeover is a test of Christian charity and lovingkindness its difficult to believe. I almost find myself ready to intone the fake news mantra, since no one even slightly familiar with the consequences of the Word Incarnate in Jesus Christ, could rationally pretend that government power is a suitable instrument of Christian love, even when it is deployed for the sake of justice.

Thats because salvation, in the sight of God, was Christs mission, and his first concern. As Christ preaches it, love is not love when we find coercion at its heart. From Christs perspective, what is done for love is done with a good will, freely, and for the sake of God and God alone. To be sure, we are, in the second place, called to love our neighborbut as we love ourselves, not as we love God. So, what is the truest love we can have for ourselves? The love that we freely give to God, with our whole heart, soul, mind and strength. Thus we do not love our neighbors for our neighbors sake, but for the sake of abiding in Gods will and bearing its fruit, becoming, as it were a vine for others as Christ is the vine nourishing and upholding us.

But the key thing missed by people who pretend that government money and enforcement power are suitable for charitable use, is that the whole relationship with God and Christ requires a free determination of our will. It must not arise from fear or favor. It must be the simple reciprocation of the love God shows to us, preserving and supplying our very existence. This He does before we can know of our own existence in any way. His love continues even though we turn away from Him to sin. And rather than requiting the Love so perfectly, freely given, we abuse the freedom He represents in us, by choosing to transgress the only limit His Love imposes, which is to safeguard the sublime order of Creation by which He especially makes way for our life in Him.

Thus, what we do for the love of God, we also do for love of ourselves, for to love us is the love of God, which our very existence proves, especially when we live in Christ. For Christ makes us what we are, and were forever meant to be, in the intention of God. But if we are to love our neighbor as ourselves, according to that intention, what room is there, in our display of love, for anything but the freedom of God. So our love must be freely given, sourced the Kingdom of God within, and acted out with no trace of worldly coercion, and no motive except the good will of God to preserve and sustains our wholesome existence.

Though these days it seems entirely forgotten, this is the reason liberty matters to one who strive to live in Christs way. It is not because of pride in our own freedom, or our own responsibility for what, by dint of our work and will, we achieve. It is because the love we share is not the love of God if fear or desire of some selfish consequence determines our action. The sphere of true liberty is the sphere of voluntary choice, in which we use the freedom God instills in our nature to serve the love by which that nature comes to be.

But the whole purpose of government is to organize coercion, so as to constrain, with force and fear, people whose love of power, money or prideful pleasure, impels them to transgress the limits God has prescribed for the good of all. With this in mind, any socialist scheme for health care, (or for anything else) infringes the meaning of Christian love. That said, what sense does it make for Christians to promote it?

Read more from the original source:
Socialism: Where's The Christian Love? - The Daily Caller