Noam Chomsky has said in the past years, "If you read the polls, it's a dream situation for union organizers and community organizers". I myself don't see any of the institutions mentioned as my institutions. The explanation in the blurb of how these institutions were built up I find as bogus.

I wouldn't use the word Marxist to describe how I look at these things, as I don't think Marx is infallible like Catholics think the pope is, but how I view things is pretty much as he said. I think the central, most important institution in society in the modern world is big business. It is what gets workers out of bed five days a week, it determines if people are employed (I won't go off on tangents like why big business is more important than small business, with examples like how when I grew up there were small, family-run hardware stores and hardware suppliers, a great deal of whom have been put out of business by Home Depots and Lowe's popping up superstores). Organized labor and parties running for Congress can stand in opposition to big business (although that's complex as well).

This central relationship in society, big business or capital, against weaker, newer, less organized organizations such as organized labor, occupy protests, political parties which represent the needs of working people - this can be called the base. Then there is what can be called the superstructure - the institutions which support the base, but indirectly. The chart is full of superstructure institutions - congress, television news, criminal-justice system, newspapers, public school system, presidency, supreme court, churches and police. These are all institutions of the ruling power, big business, but indirectly. It's obvious how congress is. Television news and newspapers are owned by big business - GE, Viacom, News Corp. Churches are more indirect. "Work hard all your life and don't rock the boat, even if your kids are poor and you get nothing except back breaking work, your reward will be in the 'next life'". This and all that type of bullshit is exactly what you conjure up to get a docile working class who will slave away for you without complaint.

The economic system we live in can't handle the economy - just look at Europe, or even unemployment in the US. Marx predicted that capitalism couldn't control the economy a century and a half ago - he said over time, our economic crises would get worse and worse until we have another 1930s type situation where they really break down. You can read Capital to see why this happens. Workers would become *alienated* from their institutions.

He saw a whole history of societies with economic relations - hunter-gatherer bands, Roman and Greek slave societies, Middle Ages feudalism, collapse when superior organizational forces organized a new form of society. Albert Einstein goes into this a little in "Why socialism?" Since it's for a future society no one knows what the post-capitalist society will be like. Only that the majority of the working class will have to be organized to fight for the new idea. What it will be depends - there's even a right-wing variation of this in national socialism and fascism. Social democrats (used to) believe we'd go to socialism, but gradually, without "revolution". Communists believed in organizing Marxist-Leninist political parties and aligned unions, and different strategies, which often included revolution. Anarcho-syndicalists beleive in organizing all workers into one big union who would liberate themselves, without soc-dem politicians or communist party commissars. And so on.

The whole question is, who will be the elite group that organizes the workers to fight against capitalism and for the new system. Or will there be an elite group - will anarchists have workers liberate themselves? What direction will they try to move society in? No matter how weak capitalism is, and how it can't provide for basic needs, with worse and worse crises as time goes on, without some group becoming self-aware, and organizing together to go in a new direction, in a practical way that will work, a group that can eventually win the support of the majority of working people to support them over the capitalists, until that happens we're stuck in the old system. Or perhaps will move to a kind of last-days absolutist Russian monarchy or fascism and national socialism type right-wing thing. The latter might not be so bad for the opposition - all of those reactionary governments were overthrown. Through history, progress has always eventually won.

I did some work on the No Gun Ri article on Wikipedia, which is an incident of Americans massacring Korean civilians during the US war in Korea. It was whitewashed by someone, whose DNS PTR records at the time were 214.13.196.180 host196-180.iraq.centcom.mil . CENTCOM by the way is the organization highlighted in the documentary "Control Room".

Or we have Fort Benning whitewashing all the Latin American death squads that were trained there, that IP's DNS PTR back then was doim1-358.benning.army.mil - it whitewashed the WHISC article as well. Of course, with September 11th, we now have death squads and terrorists trained by the US government now not just killing indigenous farmers in El Salvador, but killing Americans in the US as well. Good going, guys!

It's basically like Orwell's Ministry of Truth in 1984. Well not like it, it is exactly that. My tax dollars go to pay the commissars of the US empire to erase the evidence of their massacres from history. Of course, the purpose of making this stuff disappear from history, like the US soldier who went into a village in Afghanistan recently and murdered many civilians, is so that they can portray the US and its military and its multinational corporations as shining white knights out saving the world, not raping and pillaging for plunder, empire and profit.

In the 1950s, Afghanistan came more under the influence of the Soviet Union, like Eastern Europe did. In 1973, Daud Khan led a coup d'etat and established a new government, crushing resistance. He invited NATO troops into Northern Afghanistan and began shifting toward the US. A similar thing happened in Cambodia around this time with Lon Nol (coup against old monarchy by pro-US figure). And the same thing that happened in Cambodia happened in Afghanistan - the Afghan communist party was more powerful than the US puppet, Daud Khan was booted and the domestic communists (PDPA) took over. The CIA launched a proxy war against the communist government. The CIA recruited Osama bin Laden, at whose father's house then CIA director George Bush used to stay at on trips to Saudi Arabia. It backed the groups which were later to be called Al Qaeda and the Taliban, working to overthrow this secular, atheist actually, government. When the USSR sent troops to support the PDPA government, US support increased. Sylvester Stallone made Rambo III, where he fights with his comrades of Al Qaeda/Taliban against the evil PDPA and Russians who are trying to secularize and modernize Afghanistan.

In fact, this is what the US is still doing everywhere in the Middle East and Afghanistan. It supported Muslim groups to overthrow secular Libya, and is now working with Muslim fundamentalists to overthrow the secular Syrian government. It of course supports the Saudi government which is more fundamentalist than Iran. It's a strange thing how the US creates bin Laden, Al Qaeda, the Taliban, Saudi Arabia, and the new Muslim fundamentalist forces in Libya and Syria - then turns around and talks about how Muslims are too religious and backward. And not only has done this in the past, is doing it today in Syria. Who is the US supporting against the secular, social democratic Syrian government, Santa Claus?A wide, wide, wide gap between words and deed.

The Franco-Prussian war led to Paris being taken over by communards for two months in 1871.

World War I led to Russia being taken over by communists, in addition to other worrying developments for the powers that be (Hungary established a Soviet Republic until it was invaded and defeated, naval and Spartacus uprisings in Germany, Nivelle mutinies in France, Bienno rosso in the early 1920s in Italy).

World war II led to a communist bloc eastward "from Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic" as Churchill put it. It also more-or-less led to China and North Korea becoming communist. People tend to forget communist influence among the working class in Western Europe - the PCF was the largest political party in France into the mid 1950s, and the PCI came close to winning elections in Italy into the mid 1970s, the "right" included an Italian Socialist Party with a hammer and sickle in its banner. And then of course the decolonization movements from everywhere from Cuba to Indochina to Northern Ireland to Algeria and the rest of Africa.

The feudal, and later capitalist, powers in Europe deciding to go to war with one another has always strengthened the left. Liberal opinion is now war-tired and so forth primarily due to this. As the above poster said, bombing the Serbs and the like did not creep into this supposed war-weariness. Yeltsin bombing his own parliament was hailed by liberals and social democrats, and of course the right, as a triumph of democracy.

The only wisdom that has been obtained by the ruling powers, is that Mario Monti and Lucas Papademos probably both realize that if they tried to set their countries to war against one another, their populations might take up the words of that old song and shoot the generals on their own side. The ruling powers realize war might possibly put their head on the chopping block, and that's the main reason they've become peaceniks, at least amongst other Europeans in the club.

This is completely inane and ahistorical. First off, Germany invaded Russia (and Holland, and France, and Belgium, and so on), as everyone knows. Every move publicly and privately had Stalin trying to avoid war with Germany. You could say that Russia was trying to foment rebellion in Germany, like the naval mutinies at the end of World War I, or the Spartacus uprising at the end of World War I etc. Especially during the Third Period - but a year after the Enabling Act in Germany (1933) this policy was quite over. And the idea of a Russia invasion of Germany was ludicrous - not only due to going against Germany, but how the rest of Europe would have probably sided with Germany prior to Hitler marching into Poland.

As far as the officer corps - during the Russian Civil War (where the US intervened and attacked the nascent USSR) and after, the communists had to make due with any experienced officer who didn't join the whites. By the late 1930s, it had more of a chance to use loyal, trained officers.

You can call loyal officers "lapdogs", but that is exactly what was desired. Stalin didn't want his officers putting bombs under his table like German officers did to Hitler. As it was, Stalin was not thorough enough in purging bad officers and appointing loyal officers, as lieutenant generals like Vlasov switched sides and began fighting for the Germans. You say Russia did not have "professional military leaders running the show". To a great extent this is true. More importantly it was known back then - to Stalin, to Molotov, to the Politburo and Central Committee. They were quite aware they did not have a large pool of loyal, experienced, professional officers. But they also knew they could not conjure these types of people up with magic wands.

That Russia shelled its own troops to start the Winter War is an old canard. The Winter War was a good thing for Russia - it was a disaster, but it was an impetus to changes in the army that would not have been made if the Winter War had not happened. The army that fell apart in the Winter War was much better prepared by the time Operation Barbarossa happened.

You go on and on for many paragraphs...there are errors in those as well but I'll stop here.

You say you "don't have to look for food". Migratory people look for food, but this doesn't necessarily mean blindly looking. There may be an area in a northern region with many wild berries. South of this area are regions with other foods. A band goes north, gathers one quarter of the wild berries in an area, and kills a few wild deer. Then it heads south. A year later it does the same thing heads back to that place up north and gathers some berries and kills some deer. This area has enough food to feed the band for a month every year, then they move on to some other area. They're not blindly looking for food, they're just migrating from one food rich area to another. Actually, you're right in that the search for food was a little more blind prior to 50000 years ago, but from 50000 to 10000 years ago, it was more in the manner I am saying.

Not security against a bad year. What is safer than having a few dozen good food spots, and carrying some water and food in case there's a problem? If a food spot is wiped out, you either go on to the next one, or go back and pig out on what's left on the last good food spot. Staying in one spot is less safe for famine, a lot less safe, especially with primitive crops.

You don't buy it's less work? It's beside the point, but remaining hunter-gatherers which exist today work less hours than people at Foxconn making iPhones. But it was more work to cultivate pre-domesticated crops from one place and try to live off of that, than to wander from one good food spot to another, living rather easily. They did not even have pack animals pulling plows with modern crops and all of the things you imagine now. Read the literature.

You are right that there are a lot of holes in what people know. There are huge gaps in what is known, and a lot of it is guess work. I didn't say it's impossible to go from hunting and gathering to early farming, I said it was very, very difficult, with no immediate obvious payoff. Obviously, people did do this, the question is, why? Why go from a more leisurely life, to a life with centuries and millenia of toil, with an increased risk of famine, for no foreseeable gains for millenia? This question has not been answered. Early farmers DIDN'T see all the gains that would come up in middle and late agriculture.

I've answered this in more detail in the rest of the thread. You say "Farming produced a surplus (can't be that inferior then)". Um, yes, it can be that inferior and it was. You are thinking of a modern world with modern domesticated animals and crops, but the first farmers had no modern domestication and crops. It was extremely inferior. Not impossible - just extremely inferior. Therein lies the mystery. Also, early farming did not produce surpluses of the type it does nowadays, people would be lucky that a larger sedentary population wouldn't have a bad harvest, which was very common back then, and all starve.

I've already answered this several times in this thread in more detail (although after you posted this) - you ignore my qualifier short-term. You say it is no mystery in the long term, but you go from the A of hunting and gathering to the Z of a full-developed, domesticated agricultural society thousands of years later.

You are completely wrong in doubting that farming was not more work than hunting and gathering, the first farmers had to work much, much, much harder for much, much less of a result than hunter gatherers. You jump from A to Z with considering steps B, C, D etc.

People keep seeming to keep missing this point. My post used the qualifier short-term and talked about the mystery. You point to hunter gatherers from 15000 years ago, and then to agricultural communities of 7000 years ago with domesticated crops and animals. You say "What's more smart - to go hunt wild game, or to find and raise domesticated animals and plants you can eat without having to expend yourself?" and you also talk about a time machine. Yes, a time machine bringing you from 15000 to 7000 years ago might make sense, but what happened between those 8000 years? That is what made no sense. The first farmers had to expend themselves far, far, far, far more than hunter gatherers. You talk about domesticated animals and plants, but there WERE no domesticated animals and plants. THAT is the mystery that has puzzled anthropologists. You say it is no mystery over the long term, but you missed where I said short-term. It may not be a mystery over the long-term, it certainly is a mystery why it happened in the short-term back then.

I say that considering things in the short-term back then - and I stress that idea of "short term" which I mentioned - going from hunting and gathering to agriculture makes no sense - it is a mystery. Yes, in a long, long, long-term view, going from A to Z might make sense, but it made no sense from back then in the short term. One must also keep in mind that my example of teosinte grass cultivation took place in Mesoamerica, so explanations of this must encompass things like that happening as well.

You say "Why the heck would the agricultural revolution be a mystery?" This makes me assume you are about to explain the answer to the mystery which has puzzled anthropologists for over a century. But you don't, you say "it seems inevitable". This is not really a satisfactory explanation of all the issues involved that satisfies me.

The anthropologist Marshall Sahlins has written some interesting things about early society. One thing he notes, is that there was an "original affluent society" of sorts - hunter gatherers from 40,000 years ago often worked less hours a week than, say, a worker in a Foxconn factory making iPhones, or even say a network administrator being paged at 3 AM because the network is down. From the hunter gatherers of then, to the few surviving bands in South America, Africa and Asia today, the hunter gatherers often have to work less hours per week to provide for themselves than the people with their hands on the most sophisticated technology we have available today. One may ask why the wheel should be invented in the first place.

Another interesting thing Sahlins points out is this. Occupy Wall Street and the like protests against "the 1%", which in many cases are heirs of the type portrayed in the documentary "Born Rich" or the like. People, like say, the UK's royal family, where it has been so many generations since anyone worked, that those ancestors are lost in memory. In other words, there are people who do no work, and are living (and often living quite a high life) off of the wealth they take from the work time of those who do work. This would not be possible without surplus. If I am a hunter gatherer, and all of the work I do is to feed myself, my children, and perhaps the very elderly in my band, there is no surplus left over. But once the agricultural revolution happened, there was inevitably surplus, and thus the possibility of a class of priests, kings and such who did not need to work. Sahlins point is the agricultural revolution was not needed for this surplus to exist. Hunter-gatherers CAN work 80 hours, and support idlers who do not work. But hunter-gatherers simply don't do this - everyone able bodied works. And as many anthropologists etc. have pointed out - the agricultural revolution is a mystery, because the techniques of hunting/gathering had advanced sufficiently by 10000 years ago that they were far superior, in the short-term back then, then farming. Farming back then was a much worst way of getting food than hunting/gathering. It took many, many years to breed say teosinte grasses into maize/corn, domesticate animals and that sort of thing.

Why should the wheel be created. I am watching the TV debates and hearing about "job creators", which I guess are rich people. Then I watch birds flying around and realize they don't need anyone or anything to create jobs for them, they are self-sufficient. It's the majority of humans who in are social structure are dependent on these wealthy "job creators" to create jobs so that they can survive. A bizarre concept which early hunter-gatherers didn't have to worry about either - they were as free as birds in being self-sufficient and not dependent on these technology-empowered "job creators". No wonder the wheel wasn't invented for so many years.

With the unemployment rate in states like Michigan over 9%, with all this talk about how the US has to cut spending, how it can't afford it's social security commitments - why is the US spending a ton of money to pay Boeing, Northrop Grumman, Martin Marietta etc. billions of dollars to develop a whole new line of bombers (and aircraft carriers, and so on)? If China is such a threat, why is the US opening factories there left and right, it's hard to buy a smartphone (or anything else) not made in China?

Big weapons systems are always suspicious. There was talk in the 1980s about how the US needed to spend billions and trillions on Star Wars SDI military satellite stuff - just before Russia imploded. Going after Al Qaeda takes a lot of man power and is hard to make a buck off of. Building a new class of aircraft carriers, which is happening, building a new type of bomber - the blood money flows freely for this. What's the threat anyhow? China is going to invade the US? There's a laugh. Right before 9/11, the US Air Force was playing chicken with Chinese pilots on the Chinese border, killed one of them, landed in Chinese territory, and then the US media began howling that Chinese engineers were investigating the "top secret" plane. With such incredible hubris, it's no surprise a 9/11 happened.

Of course, the US "pivoting to the Pacific", as if it hadn't done that already trying to push heroin on China during the opium wars over a century and a half ago, is going to obviously have China build up their military more, starting an arms race, just what the military-industrial complex in this country that Eisenhower warned about wants.

The way this was done is a little silly, Megaupload has operated in the open for years, and Kim has been a very public figure. Then the New Zealand government swoops in on them for the US government which says it is a criminal conspiracy and wants to extradite everyone associated with Megaupload to the US for criminal conspiracy charges. Seems like overkill to me, and the timing is very suspicious with the SOPA/PIPA going-ons. Look how MF Global ripped off people to the tune of $1 billion, can you imagine Jon Corzine or any of the banksters cuffed and called part of a criminal conspiracy? Investors will be lucky if they get their money back, never mind jail time for the high mucky-mucks.

I have heard that there are e-mails from one or two of the Megaupload people which sound incriminating, but extraditing anyone remotely associated with Megaupload to the US, as a so-called member of an international criminal conspiracy, is overkill and absurd. It's why the US government loves conspiracy charges - you can go to jail for a long time for crimes someone else committed, however loosely associated they may be with you. The news is showing the mansions, the helicopters, the expensive cars - it is talking about incriminating e-mails. Did everyone arrested live that large, did they all do incriminating things? I think not, but with the MAFIAA gunning for their heads the government will use the conspiracy charge to spread the doings of one or two to anyone remotely associated with Megaupload.

The Slashdot community is for the most part logically and scientifically oriented. We believe in the scientific method, and an understanding of the universe built on an accumulation of experiments built on logical and testable explanations for empirical data, observable phenomena and so forth. And in many fields of endeavor, there can be general agreement about things. For example, it's accepted almost by consensus that the nearest know star is the Sun, and that the next nearest known stars are the three in the Alpha Centauri system. Aside from a handful of cranks like Gene "Time Cube" Ray, virtually everyone accepts this. If somehow we found a star nearer than the Centauri ones, which was too faint to notice before, or right next to a much brighter star and unnoticed or whatnot, if the measurements were good and clear enough, I'm sure soon again everyone would be in agreement that this new star was the next closest one to the earth. It is far away, affects little here, and there's no reason for people to argue over it.

On the other hand, ExxonMobil is the most profitable company in the country. It made $30 billion in profits last year, off of $354 billion in revenues. It is #2 on the Fortune 500 after Wal-Mart (which had more revenues, but about half the profits in 2011). Chevron and ConocoPhillips are #3 and #4 on the list.

If hybrid cars were effective, that would dent the revenues of these three companies whose revenues were collectively three quarters of a trillion dollars. Does anyone think that this fact might possibly, conceivably hurt the objectivity of an article, released in a very partisan political magazine like the American Spectator?

Honestly, it doesn't even warrant attention, other than debunking. These types of articles belong in actually objective magazines like Consumer Reports or something, which could tell you which hybrids were good or weren't. Just from anecdotal evidence, people I know with hybrids have been telling me they are spending less at the pump. Which is exactly what worries magazines like American Spectator, which work to protect monopoly capitalism over actual economic growth in capitalism. We see these forces at battle all the time - the RIAA and MPAA want to go from a world where friends lent records to one another to one where that is impossible. The oil companies want us stuck on oil reserves until they run out and junky old gas-burning cars - and this also hurts industry, which would be helped by cheaper energy. AT&T and Verizon are more concerned with preserving their monopolies than having a growing wired and wireless network. Karl Marx said capitalism starts out as a progressive force, economically and socially, but eventually tends to get more and more mucked up in defensively protecting trusts and monopoly instead of smashing shibboleths to allow growth and scientific advancement. I'd say there's plenty of evidence around nowadays that he was right about that.

If you want a parallel universe, go to Freedom House's web page and look at their maps of China. In their world, all of southwestern China is an independent country called Tibet. That would kind of be like me drawing a map of the USA like this, and still be expected to be taken seriously as a moderate and rational voice when issuing reports on attacks on freedom in the USA, like SOPA. Thanks, I'll stick with Amnesty International, or something a little more neutral.