House of Paine

why does this strike me as obscene ???

read this parallel history 

 its like a  90 year old guy beating off 

no no

thats human
and he's prolly thinking of dolly parton 


but this 


what is  it for christ's sake  ????

  and 
 why does it make me want to puke ???




==============================


Red Butterflies Flap Their Wings:a Parallel Twentieth
Century

Those of you who are coming of age in the early 21st
century need to know your world's recent history, so
you can build upon it and meet the new challenges
facing you. Here is a thumbnail sketch. As you of
course know, the October Revolution in 1917, born of
the carnage of the Great War, ushered in a new post-
capitalist era -- the defining transition of our time.
Surrounded by enemies determined to crush it and
saddled with centuries-old cultural and technological
backwardness, the Soviet Union nevertheless held its
ground. The Soviet Premier, V. I. Lenin, lived until
1933, when he died at the age of 63. In the late 1920s
he formulated a comprehensive vision for socialist
construction in insufficient conditions, with two main
pillars: first, the absolute importance of harnessing
the religious feelings and consciousness of the vast
majority of peasants and workers to the socialist
project, and isolating the authoritarian upper levels
of the Church hierarchy; second, placing ground-level
mobilization and a culture of critical debate and
controversy at the core of socialist development.

The first of these led to the famous Red Priests
movement in the USSR, which captured the imagination of
people in many parts of the world and led to a
Christian-Marxist dialog in Western Europe, the USA and
Latin America, as well as the massive jami'a allah wa
ijtamiya ('Society of God and Socialism") movement in
the Islamic world. The second was embodied in many
aspects of early socialist construction, including
direct election of enterprise managers, team councils
in both industry and agriculture, continuous referenda
and systems of negotiated coordination in the political
sphere, and the use of television (first introduced in
the USSR in the 1930s) for ongoing debate and mandate
formation in the preparation of annual and five-year
plans. The result was both rapid industrialization and
social transformation. While there were of course
pressures from the old authoritarian traditions -- one
Georgian Party leader,

J. V. Dugashvili, tried to take control and turn the
country in a bureaucratic and repressive direction, but
his bid for power was thwarted -- the Soviet commitment
to a participatory and critical process kept socialist
development dynamic and constructive. The favorable
intellectual environment and principled financial
support for research led many of the world's scientists
and intellectuals, among them Albert Einstein, Norbert
Weiner, Wassily Leontief and Marie Curie, to emigrate
to the USSR, where they formed Akademgorodok, the
Siberian Science City in Novosibirsk. This center of
learning became the cradle of major scientific advances
and gave rise to the information technology revolution
of the 1940s and 1950s (about which more below).

All this, in turn, fired the imagination of working
people around the world.

Although some sections of the socialist left in the
West had early misgivings and threatened to divide the
working-class movement, the most influential socialist
leaders, such as Norman Thomas in the USA, convinced
their followers to pursue the socialist commitment to
individual liberty while supporting socialism in power.
The Socialist Party and the Workers (Communist) Party
-- the latter having been formed out of the Communist
Labor Party and the Communist Party of America in 1925
-- merged in 1928 to form the Peoples Communist Party
USA, an organization that became a mass movement and
embraced a diversity of socialist positions, from A. J.
Muste and W. A. Domingo to William Z. Foster, Elizabeth
Gurley Flynn and James P. Cannon. Similar formations
appeared in Western Europe and in the southern
hemisphere.

In October 1929 the stock markets of the advanced
capitalist countries crashed, ushering in what came to
be called the Great Depression. The massive chaos and
suffering caused by this general capitalist crisis of
overproduction brought working-class forces into power
in several countries, and close to power in the major
capitalist centers. Fascist movements, which
demagogically turned people's anger and fear against
ethnic and religious minorities and inflamed national
passions, had taken power in Italy and in some central
European countries. When Adolph Hitler came to power in
Germany in 1933, he encountered widespread opposition.
Anti-Semitic atrocities, especially the Krystalnacht
rampage of the Nazi stormtroopers, forced the Nazis to
call an election in 1938. A Social Democratic-Communist
coalition contested the election, and supported by
massive street demonstrations won power and forced the
Nazis to retreat -- although not without ushering in a
period of violent rebellion, the German Civil War.

In the United States and Western Europe, the depression
triggered powerful political forces pressing for major
relief and reform. In the USA, this took shape as
President Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal. Forced to
retreat, the capitalist ruling classes sought refuge in
the only form of state intervention ultimately
acceptable to them: military spending. Seeking to
demonize the Soviet Union for this purpose, they
unleashed a massive disinformation drive, but popular
support for the USSR stood in the way, and the people's
movement pushed the New Deal forward, toward a point of
qualitative transformation.

Similar developments occurred throughout Europe. In
Spain, a Republican electoral victory in 1936 spurred a
fascist backlash and civil war; however, with German
and Italian fascism in crisis and about to be deposed,
external military support for Generalissimo Franco was
limited, and the Spanish Republicans, with the aid of
international volunteers from many countries, were able
to prevail. Dolores Ibarruri, 'Las Pasionaria," was
elected President of the Spanish Peoples Republic in
1939.

In 1940, the Baltic States -- Latvia, Lithuania,
Estonia -- together with Finland and Sweden, voted to
join the USSR. There was, however, strong internal
opposition in these countries, based mainly on
historically rooted national and cultural identities.
In what subsequently came to be seen as a watershed
display of socialist principle, the Soviet government
rejected the application, and instead urged the
countries involved to form their own federation. Thus
the Alliance of Northern European Socialist Republics
(ANESR) was born. In the meantime, a low-intensity
Civil War had been raging in China for several years.
Without significant Western support, the Chinese
Nationalists, under Chiang Kai-Shek, held their ground
until 1941, when the Communists took power. The federal
principle increasingly took shape worldwide, and within
a few years developments elsewhere in Asia brought
about the South East Asian Socialist Alliance,
consisting of Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Malaysia,
Indonesia and the Phillippines. SEASA, ANESR, USSR and
People's China held prolonged talks, and agreed to form
a global international agency, which came to be called
the United Nations (UN). To emphasize the intent to
make this a truly worldwide deliberative body, the
founding convention was held in San Francisco in 1945,
over the opposition of powerful ruling class forces in
the United States but with the nominal support of the
U. S. government and true enthusiastic support from
labor and community-based popular movements there.

In the United States, capitalism, buttressed by similar
forces retreating and regrouping from Europe and Asia,
held onto power, but not without granting major
concessions in the form of New Deal-type programs. The
battle for the actual social content of these programs
defined the political process at mid-century.

The various agencies of the New Deal were progressively
merged into two umbrella organizations -- the Agency
for Social Production (ASP) and the Industrial Recovery
Administration (IRA). These eventually merged into the
(conveniently acronymed) ASP-IRA. The drive for
vertical trade union organization crystallized into the
Congress of Industrial Organizations, which came to
recognize the need to incorporate community and
neighborhood forms of working-class organization as
well, thus becoming the Congress of Workers'
Organizations (CWO).

The old American Federation of Labor withered and
eventually disappeared, holding its last convention in
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania in 1949.

The embattled capitalist classes sought breathing space
by uniting with every manner of precapitalist oligarchy
and despotism, in all countries. Their base in the
United States was in the south, where racism and
segregation kept an elite in power with historical
links to slavery. Under pressure from a region-wide
anti-racist popular front, led by Benjamin Davis,
William Patterson and (later) Dr. Martin Luther King,
the worldwide reactionary 'southern strategy" took
form, as capitalist elites formed alliances with
landowners, latifundists, oligarchs and dictators in
South America, parts of Africa and Asia -- what came to
be called the Second World.

In the second half of the 20th century, the capitalist-
agrarian axis was able to find material bases in some
strata within the Second World, and from there to
launch a series of wars and conflicts, with the United
Nations trying to contain aggression and lend support
to popular resistance. A particular focus has been on
the Islamic countries, especially in the Middle East
and Central Asia, where the dangers of 'Second
Worldism" and reversion to precapitalist fanaticism and
terror have loomed large.

These struggles continue today.

The South African Communist Party became a major force
in the African National Congress, which by 1952 was
able to overcome the apartheid regime, unify a number
of countries under the banner of the Southern African
Peoples Union (SAPU). Nelson Mandela, a charismatic
young leader who had been imprisoned briefly by the
apartheid regime, was freed by popular pressure and
became the first President of the new Southern African
Peoples Republic (SAPR). He was installed in an
inspiring ceremony that was televised worldwide; this
was held in Johannesburg in July 1963, with the father
of the Pan-African Movement, Dr. W. E. B. Du Bois, on
the platform with him, just weeks before Du Bois' death
at age 95. The most recent breakaway from Second World
domination has been the formation of the United States
of Central America, a union of Nicaragua, Honduras,
Costa Rica, the Chiapas region of Mexico, and Cuba. The
latter country had a popular revolution and socialist
transition beginning in 1959, and the Second World axis
had long sought to strangle that revolution, but
without success. So today, the sphere of cooperation
among socialist countries and federations is slowly
growing, amid considerable debate about the proper
balance between coordination and autonomy, between
common social goals and the enormous diversity of
conditions, including those involving earlier forms of
property, income distribution, and so on.

As the new millennium commences, the process is
advancing, although not without major resistance and
sabotage from the Second World powers. Some of these
powers have threatened to get ahold of thermonuclear
technology to deploy a massive bomb -- a weapon of mass
destruction -- but so far, with the vigilance of the
peoples of the United Nations and socialist
federations, this threat has not been realized. One key
goal at present is to maintain the base for massive
popular support for the Socialist Federations/UN. This
requires firm and increasing confidence that the
material living standards of the most advanced
socialist countries can be achieved throughout the
world by a leveling-up process, within the constraints
imposed by planetary resources. This is by no means
certain, but there are two factors that permit us a
cautious optimism. First, industrial development in the
progressive countries (the 'First World") has increased
the scope of the Demographic Transition -- the falloff
of population growth as people come to believe in and
share the socio-political contract guaranteeing
medical, survivor and general retirement support
throughout an individual's lifetime. While population
pressure continues, mainly in the Second World, with
continued social progress scientists now project that
world population will stabilize at six billion around
the year 2015.

Second, the information technology revolution, centered
at Akademgorodok but subsequently spread around the
world, continues to open up new vistas for democratic
planning and coordination. The conflict between local
autonomy and macro stability will never disappear, but
it is increasingly possible to use Internets and
Intranets to coordinate diverse production and creative
activities, without bottlenecks, cycles, waste,
polarization, bureaucratism, and the other evils long
associated with either spontaneous capitalist market
coordination, or authoritarian planning from the
center.

The new culture of participatory socialism was the
subject of a major symposium in one of the world's
leading theoretical journals, Science & Society; this
was called 'Horizons of Democratic Mathematics," and
appeared as the journal's 75th anniversary issue (Vol.
75, No. 1, January 2010; press run 200,000 copies). So
while capitalist power and exploitation have not yet
been uprooted everywhere in the world, there is good
reason to hope that this final dispensation will occur
in the not-too-distant future. Your generation, then,
will be able to take major new steps in pursuit of a
principled, egalitarian and democratic society that
promotes unlimited human development, both material and
spiritual, within the natural resource constraints of
Planet Earth.

Hey, we are entitled to dream, aren't we? 
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