One of the sad things I learned from the conference here in Buenos Aires is that the city is full of fake socialists. Not directly related to the conference, I was waiting for a bus in front of what turned out to be the headquarters of the Communist Party in Argentina. My friend Rosa, who's living in Tucuy Paj now, pointed the place out to me and ( Read more... )

The heads of agribusiness and agri-government for the entire Mercosur (basically the southeastern half of South America, I can never keep straight which countries are members and which are not) are meeting up in Rosario this week to discuss "development" which is a code word for kicking the indigenous off their land, bankrupting small farmers, and ( Read more... )

What is called "dumpster diving" in the US is called "recycling food" here. I like the Argentine terminology better. I like that it uses the word "recycle" in an active sense, the actual process of taking something that was going to be trash, and putting it to good use. The word is used the same way when we dig through other trash, like ( Read more... )

The religious say - God is love -
The anarchists say - God doesn't exist -
and I worry that they're both right

I recently read Full Spectrum Disorder, by Stan Goff. Goff is ex Army Special Forces, now a socialist. He has some really interesting analysis of the US Empire and how it is already falling apart. I especially like that he understands that dollar hegemony is "a global credit scam" supported by the US military. In the book he tells the story of ( Read more... )

We've been going down to the central market to collect free damaged fruit and making homemade jams and marmelades. This, combined with wholewheat fresh-baked bread makes life worth living, even in a world as twisted as this one. Pear-plum is the winning combination so far.

The trick is used here as well, I'm told. But from the stories I hear it seems more like bad cop, bad cop, bad cop ( Read more... )

Sunday night I went to see Hiphoplogía, a Chilean rap group, at Casa de las Estrellas. Turns out Hiphoplogía doesn't exist anymore; now they're called Red Hip Hop Activista (Hip Hop Activist Network). They do community organizing and popular education, using rap as a distribution vehicle. Their organizing seemed a bit hierarchical, even Marxist ( Read more... )

Sarah posted this Mother Jones article: Dirty WarriorsThe article discusses how the Pentagon increasingly hires private companies to do work that was once handled directly by military personnel and then denies any responsiblity for the actions of the employees of those private companies. After all, they're not US soldiers. I'm reminded of all the ( Read more... )

That's how bell hooks defines feminism in Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center. Absolutely brilliant book. I read the whole thing yesterday, seven hours without a break because I just couldn't put it down. The book is mostly an attack on bourgeois feminism that ignores interconnections between sex, race, and class, and a positive vision of ( Read more... )