Content of The Utopian Vol. 18.3 - 2019

  • The Utopian, Vol. 18, No. 3, October 2019

    Nov 7, 2019

    Cover and contents of The Utopian vol. 18, no. 3 (October 2019). Articles and discussion include: Thoughts on the Left; Reply to Grayzone Slander; Russian Revolution series, Part 5; Why I Feel Sorry for Bernie Sanders; Friends of Utopian News; Who We Are. For previous issues, see "Updates and New Discussion" (vol. 18, no. 2) and Archives.

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  • Thoughts on the Left

    Nov 7, 2019

    Perhaps it is just my old age and my cynicism talking, but I am actually afraid of this movement. Despite the fact that I share many of the current left’s concerns and agree with many of its demands, I do not want this movement to succeed. I don’t want it to grow. For this reason, I have, for some time now, described my political position as being “on, but not of, the left.” I despise the current left, and virtually all its tendencies. This includes the contemporary anarchist movement.


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  • Reply to the Grayzone Slander

    Nov 7, 2019

    A disgusting article by Grayzone founder Max Blumenthal and Grayzone reporter Ben Norton targets the sponsors of the “Socialism 2019” conference held in Chicago in early July -- DSA, Jacobin, and former members of the recently dissolved ISO – and also slams the magazine New Politics and the group Solidarity. It is in the tradition of Stalinist hit jobs; slander truly worthy of the Comintern of the 1930s.


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  • Russian Revolution Part V: The Bolsheviks, Victor Serge, and the Myth of the Commune-State

    Aug 7, 2019

    It has been argued, and believed by some groups on the left, that the Bolsheviks intended to, and did, maintain these [popular, working class] organizations in their revolutionary-democratic form as the institutional framework for discussion among the workers and poor peasants over the “dictatorship of the proletariat” in Russia. This claim is a myth, a fantasy that completely obscures: (1) the kind of state Lenin and his allies in the Bolshevik Party intended to establish in the event of their seizure of state power in Russia; and (2) the nature of the regime the Bolsheviks actually established when they did take power.


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  • Why I Feel Sorry for Bernie Sanders

    Nov 7, 2019

    So, at or near the end of his political career, Bernie Sanders, a long-time socialist activist (I suspect he once considered himself a revolutionary), is on national TV during the recent Democratic debate. It is becoming obvious that he is not going to win the nomination; in this situation, Bernie has lobbed at him, like a huge softball being thrown underhand (the kind almost anybody can hit), a simple question, “What, to you, is 'democratic socialism?'” And Bernie Sanders answers, in what seemed to me to be a very tired voice, “It is what they have in Canada and in the Scandinavian countries….”


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  • Friends of The Utopian Gather

    Nov 7, 2019

    Over the weekend of July 26-28, 2019 Friends of the Utopian gathered in Los Angeles for an exchange of views and opportunity for personal connection. People attended from New York City, Detroit, Santa Fe, New Mexico, the Bay Area and the Los Angeles area.


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  • Utopian Position Statement: Who We Are

    Mar 28, 2024

    The cure for privatization is not to increase the power and authority of the state (be it by regulation, taxation, or nationalization) but to dismantle the state (the standing army and the cops; the nightmare bureaucracies) and to reorganize society, cooperatively and democratically from the bottom up, locally based and with emphasis on mutual aid. We are confident that new mass movements from below will rise again, in a massive surge, as did Occupy in 2011. And we hope and anticipate that, like Occupy (in its initial stages, at least), these movements will reject reformism and statism.


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