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My inbox remains a reliable source of vitriolic accusations about the so-called woke mob, as well as more specific accusations that I am myself a member in good standing with the so-called woke mob, so I guess its time for a pertinent question:

Uh, what is it?

The woke thing is fairly ubiquitous and has been for a few years, but its comprehension is decidedly not. Confusion about woke reached a tipping point in the last couple weeks with yet another mindless assertion by Donald J. Trump, specifically that Alabama Congressman Mo Brooks made a horrible mistake when he went woke and stated, referring to the 2020 Presidential Election Scam, Put that behind you, put that behind you.

Brooks, lest youve misplaced your handy roster of Jan. 6 insurrectionists, is the guy who turned up in Washington that day for conspicuous speech-making that somehow required him to wear body armor and carry a Glock.

Today is the day American patriots start takin down names and kickin ass, Brooks yelled as the opening act of the Stop the Steal rally. But now that hes put that behind him, hes felt compelled to point out that hes not woke.

When the (former) president calls me woke, theres not anybody in Alabama with a brain larger than the size of a pea who believes that Mo Brooks is a woke liberal, Brooks told ABC.

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis has warned that Disney will destroy the country if its woke ideology is left to flourish unabated. Luckily, the line to destroy the country is longer than the one for Space Mountain, and I doubt Disney will be cutting the line in front of Ron DeSantis.

This is the first reference Ive seen to a woke ideology, even if I admit the suspicion that if anyone was about to foist some sinister agenda upon America it would be Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. Laugh if you must, but I believe it was Democratic strategist James Carville who told CNN not long ago that some Democrats need to visit a woke detox center.

As it happens, there is an official definition of woke, and its not surprising that its as benign as can be. According to Merriam-Webster, woke means aware and attentive to important facts and issues, especially issues of race and social justice. It has lyrical roots in a 1938 protest song by bluesman Huddie Ledbetter (Lead Belly), who urged listeners to stay woke.

Oooh. So scary.

No one on the left should allow themselves to be defined by the pejorative slang of people whod be hard-pressed to define such terms for themselves, and vice versa. Its the same with the lefts socialist agenda. What percentage of people who throw socialist around can ascribe to it an accurate definition? Id say about 16 percent.

Thankfully, were coming up on the 70th anniversary of that time Harry Truman put the socialist trope to bed for good.

Socialism is a scare word they have hurled at every advance the people have made in the last 20 years, Truman said in a speech at Syracuse. Socialism is what they called public power. Socialism is what they called Social Security. Socialism is what they called farm price supports. Socialism is what they called bank deposit insurance. Socialism is what they called the growth of free and independent labor organizations.

Socialism is their name for almost anything that helps all the people.

And who is the they in all of that?

Not the woke mob.

Gene Collier is a columnist for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.

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Collier: Awakening to misuse of 'woke' - The Columbian

Likewise, contemporary Chabadniks are likely to associate socialism with their inherited memories of Soviet persecution. Thousands can recount stories of grandparents and great-grandparents who were shot or sent to the Gulags for practicing and perpetuating their Jewish way of life. Those who evaded arrest lived in fear, in hiding or on the run. Their refusal to work on Shabbos usually meant that they couldnt find official employment; often, they survived by laboring in home workshops and selling goods on the black market. The stories of this struggle, experienced not only by rabbis and kosher butchers, but also by laborers, homemakers, and artisansordinary men, women, and childrenare the threads from which the collective story of the Chabad community is woven. Take, for example, the story of Sarah Katsenelenbogen (known among Chabadniks as Mumme Sarah). Her husband was disappeared in 1937, and she was left alone with five young children. She insisted on raising them as religious Jews, refusing to send them to government schools. After World War II, she helped mastermind the mass escape of Chabadniks (including Plotkin and his surviving family members) into Poland. She never made it across the border herself, and she died in 1952 while incarcerated by the Ministry of State Security, which conducted surveillance and repressed political dissent. Today, more than a hundred of her direct descendants serve in Chabad institutions all over the world.

Given this background, it is understandable that contemporary Chabadniks often respond to any invocation of socialism with suspicion, or even fear. This reflex is part of a broader matrix of factors that skews political inclinations among Hasidic Jews to the right, so that when it comes to the ballot they tend to be more aligned with political elites than with working people whose interests might appear much closer to their own. Last years Pew study of American Jews showed that those who identify as Orthodox tend to have lower household incomes than those affiliated with other denominations, suggesting that contrary to the pervasive stereotypes, many are workers, modern incarnations of Moshe the carpenter.

As a member of the Chabad community myself, as well as an academic who studies the movements intellectual, social, and literary history, one of the reasons Kaddish Denied grabbed my attention is the way it centers a character whose very identity is a rejection of the false bifurcation between working people and religious Jews. Plotkins story, it seems, might help us cast off this antiquated binary.

CHABAD EMERGED AS A DISTINCT STREAM within the wider Hasidic movement at the end of the 18th century, under the leadership of Rabbi Shneur Zalman of Liadi. His classical work of Hasidic thought, Tanya (1796), demystified Kabbalah and made contemplative mystical practices accessible, empowering readers to overcome spiritual and material anxieties through the joyful alignment of thought, speech, and action with divine wisdom and will. Over the course of the 19th century, Chabad (centered from 1813 in the village of Lubavitch) became the dominant Hasidic group in the region that now encompasses Belarus and stretches south into the eastern parts of Ukraine, north into Latvia, and east into Russia. Chabads heady mix of cerebrality and spirit, combined with a rich tradition of literary and melodic production, was seminal to the development of Eastern European Jewish culture. Modernist figures like the artist Marc Chagall and the playwright and folklorist S. Anskyfamed for his play The Dybbukboth emerged from the Chabad milieu.

In the first decades of the 20th century, Chabad-Lubavitch was led by Rabbi Shneur Zalmans great-great-grandson, Rabbi Shalom DovBer Schneersohn (Rashab). Advocating for the primacy of traditional Torah authority in institutional Jewish life, he successfully competed with the Jewish aristocracy, who sought the acculturation and reform of Russian Jewry, and who had previously dominated representation of the Jewish community to the tsarist government. Rashab celebrated the tsars 1917 abdication, comparing it to the fall of Pharaoh, and in subsequent elections for a new All-Russian Jewish Congress, he mobilized a united religious front that captured a significant share of the vote. By then, however, Octobers Bolshevik Revolution had ended Russias brief moment of emancipation and initiated a bloody civil war.

When Rashab died in the spring of 1920, the networks and institutions he had built had been all but decimated. In the wake of war, pogroms, famine, and disease, the Evsektsiiaaided by other agents of the new statewere beginning to systematically stifle traditional Jewish life. But the students of Rashabs rabbinical school had internalized his vision, and his son, the aforementioned Rayatz, rallied them to resist the Evsektsiias campaign of compulsory secularization.

Kaddish Denied is set in the 1930s and 40s, the darkest and most difficult period for Chabadniks who remained behind the Iron Curtain. Sholemke grows up in the shadow of his most vivid childhood memorythe night that uniformed men ransacked the dank apartment he shared with his parents (halfway underground, halfway a grave) and took his father away:

Do you see? Schneersohn!

They ordered Father to dress and to come with them. Father came over to my small bed, bent over, and kissed me; a powerful and final kiss. A few large tearswarm, hot, boiling like bloodtumbled from his deep black eyes onto my forehead. Then he gave my mother a fiery glance, his eyes now bloodshot. He kissed the mezuzah, opened the door and was swallowed up in the unending darkness of the night.

Sholemke remembers his father as an unhappy kaloshnik, a mender of old galoshes and rubber boots. But as he pieces together the mish-mash of impressions and incomplete images that survive this shattering event, he comes to understand that his father was actually a rabbi forced to abandon his position due to the more recent circumstances. The arrest and presumed murder of Sholemkes father draws on real events with which Plotkin was intimately familiar. On a single night in 1938, 12 of his closest friends and colleagues were arrested, tortured, and later shot. The location of their communal grave, in the Levashovo Wasteland near Leningrad, remained unmarked until 2014.

Amid the horror of this repression, the light in the darkness was chassidusChabadniks term for their rebbes teachings. Reflecting on his own experience as a teenager and a young adult, Sholemke explains how the rich and spirited conceptual forms of chassidus endowed him and his friends with a new life-meaning . . . a glorious inner world, fruitful and divine. The new world that it conjured within gave them the ideological conviction to meet all the difficult circumstances of life with courage, poise, and the capacity to endure.

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The Soul of the Worker - Jewish Currents

Buried underneath the propaganda surrounding the war in Ukraine recently was news that the UNs Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has released the third instalment in its latest report, focussing on the urgent need to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

The IPCCs findings reveal that existing commitments, far from limiting global warming to a 1.5 rise, as agreed at the COP21 summit Paris in 2015, would actually see global temperatures reach 3.2 above pre-industrial averages by 2100. This would have devastating consequences for billions across the world.

Climate inaction, the report concludes, has brought us to a now or never tipping point, whereby global carbon dioxide emissions will need to peak within the next three years and then decrease by 43% by 2030 to stay on target with the Paris Agreement.

UN secretary-general Antnio Guterres went so far as to point the finger at lying government and business leaders, who he said had presided over a litany of broken climate promises, revealing a yawning gap between climate pledges and reality.

Guterres may act surprised. But the fact that the capitalist system is incapable of solving the climate crisis is one that has been increasingly clear to most workers and youth for some time.

Across the board, noises from establishment politicians about climate action have turned out to be little more than hot air.

Capitalist governments boast of public and private investment plans to tackle the impending crisis. Yet researchers at Climate Action Tracker have found that of 40 countries surveyed in 2021, none had sufficient policies required to meet the Paris Agreement. In fact, 21 countries had policies that would actually increase emissions.

At the same time, the OECD (a club of advanced capitalist countries) found that, in 2019, only $80 billion of the $100 billion annual transfer from rich to poor nations pledged in the Paris Agreement had been made available a figure that has likely dropped further since. Oxfams own investigation suggests that the real figure is closer to $19-23 billion.

Even this money is being used deceitfully, with some countries classifying development aid (already dubiously used by the imperialists as a means of soft power) as relevant to climate goals, even when it clearly isnt.

That the Paris Agreement itself is insufficient to solve the crisis is an inconvenient truth glossed over by the establishment. The capitalists wont let any mere laws, regulations, or accords get in the way of their profit-making. This is the elephant in the room that none of these big business politicians dare mention.

Elsewhere, supporters of the market have boasted about the Glasgow Financial Alliance for Net Zero (GFANZ), created at COP26. The intention is to mobilise private capital for the decarbonisation of the world economy, with 450 firms valued at a combined total of over $130 trillion signing up to the initiative.

One small hitch with this proposal is that there are no plans, commitments, or deadlines attached. Instead, ordinary people are expected to take the bosses at their word when they say that they will fork over their cash in a timely and orderly manner.

Such hollow promises and greenwashing are clearly designed to throw dust in our eyes an attempt to distract us whilst the capitalists continue to destroy the planet for the sake of their profits.

The lack of private investment in tackling the climate crisis is not the result of a few ignorant politicians and business leaders, but is embedded in the logic of capitalism itself.

At the end of the day, the capitalists invest only in order to make a profit, not to address the needs of people or the planet.

And with most climate-related investment opportunities deemed either too risky or too unprofitable, they are far more interested in pouring their money into speculative bubbles, demonstrating once again the inability of capitalism to take society forward even one inch.

The latest IPCC report naively suggests that the aftermath of the pandemic would provide governments with the opportunity to rebuild their economies on a sustainable basis. Similar hopes have been voiced in relation to the Ukraine war and the potential to wean the global economy off fossil fuels. This is nothing but wishful thinking.

The anarchy of the capitalist market is a fetter on any transition away from oil and gas, and towards renewable alternatives.

Already, for example, left to the invisible hand of the market, increasing demand for materials needed for low-carbon technologies, alongside tightening regulations, are resulting in greenflation, pushing up the costs of decarbonisation compared to initial calculations.

Similarly, although the cost of solar panels and wind turbines has fallen dramatically over the past decade, as the IPCC report notes, the deployment of green technologies is being hindered by the profit motive.

On the one hand, renewable energy is still not as profitable as fossil fuels; and on the other, large upfront costs are needed to develop a 100% clean energy sector.

The IPCC therefore laments that current attempts at climate action amount to incremental change, rather than system transitions.

Such a widespread, systemic transformation requires large-scale planning, with mass investment in new infrastructure and technology, and huge transfers of labour and capital across entire industries and nations.

The wealth and resources for this clearly exists. But you cannot plan what you dont control; and you dont control what you dont own.

At the same time, we live in an epoch of immense, deepening capitalist crisis, fueling protectionism and trade wars hardly prime conditions for the international cooperation that is required to solve this inherently global problem.

Once again, we see the fundamental barriers that the capitalist system imposes on progress: those of private ownership and the nation state.

Despite the IPCC ringing the alarm bells, the capitalist class is not breaking into a sweat. After all, whilst billions suffer from drought, flooding, and heatwaves, the billionaires are already living on another planet from the rest of us.

It is workers and the most vulnerable who will face the consequences of the climate catastrophe. The super-rich, meanwhile, are far removed from this destruction. And if all else fails, and things get too hot on Earth, they will shoot off into space.

The climate crisis is therefore ultimately a class question.

The technological, scientific, and productive capacity needed to mitigate global warming and adapt to its worst impacts already exists. But this can only be successfully deployed on the basis of a rationally-planned socialist economy, under democratic workers control.

Only on this basis can investment and resources be allocated according to the needs of society, rather than the profits of the capitalist class.

As disaster looms, the burning necessity of overthrowing this rotten system has never been stronger. And the choice facing humanity has never been clearer: socialism or barbarism.

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Capitalism and the climate crisis: IPCC appeal falls on deaf ears - Socialist Appeal

The Socialist Ideal in the Labour Party: From Attlee to CorbynMartin R BeveridgeMerlin Press 14.99

IT IS easy to forget in more pessimistic moments and Keir Starmer is banking on us doing so that despite Labours recent forced march back towards the right, since 2015 the party has been living through one of the most ideologically fecund revivals in its history.

While the demonisation of Jeremy Corbyn by his successor and parliamentary partners in crime sowed the disunity that Labours right then employed as the chicken-and-egg narrative to unseat him, the former leader achieved something remarkable.

Corbyn was able to restore social democratic ideals and ethical socialist principles, invigorated by the participatory enthusiasm of 21st-century social movements, to the heart of Labours identity something Starmer has been singularly unwilling to build upon.

This was energising, forging a new politics according to author Martin Beveridge that sought radical change through an exciting array of new and old democratic forms, and helps to explain the strong fraternal bond that formed between Corbyn and the membership.

And in case we find ourselves confusing electability with ideological integrity, as the right is wont to, it had a stunning, concrete outcome at the polls: Labours achievement in the 2017 election, when its 12.9 million votes signalled the remarkable possibilities of this new politics for Britain.

As Beveridge shows, the originality of the ideas advanced by socialist thinkers supporting the Corbyn left in areas from worker ownership and public banks to land trusts and municipal energy companies is thrown into sharper relief by understanding the history of the beliefs that motivated earlier generations within the Labour movement.

This book, then, is primarily a history of the diverse ways the socialist ideal has been understood since the 1930s, when depictions of working-class life formed a backdrop to Labours emergent agenda.

Efforts since to resolve ambiguity over policy and practice have translated into a succession of ideological conflicts that have redefined the idea of socialism.

The author begins with influential notions about the day-to-day struggles of workers expressed in the interwar novel The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists, then traces the complex and often contradictory understanding of socialism within the party thereafter.

From Attlee to Corbyn, he demonstrates that in a key difference with Marxist thought the socialist ideal within Labour has not developed out of its own internal logic but has been reshaped through social struggles and historical events absorbed into its political culture.

As a result, this book is a good tonic for socialists feeling gloomy about Labours future, under its current leadership or beyond, because it reminds them of the rich, radical traditions to which they belong that have never disappeared and are endlessly being revived.

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The Socialist Ideal in the Labour Party: from Attlee to Corbyn - Morning Star Online

The Party Flag has been a Red Flag with the leaping tiger and a hammer and sickle since the Chandanagar convention when the party had split to underline its belief in 'scientific socialism'.

Bhubaneswar: The All India Forward Bloc, has resolved to change its party flag, jettisoning the hammer and sickle symbol which was inserted in 1948, while retaining the 'leaping tiger' symbol selected by its founder Subhas Bose.

The decision was taken at the two-day National Council meeting, which culminated here on Saturday. The Party Flag has been a Red Flag with the leaping tiger and a hammer and sickle since the Chandanagar convention when the party had split to underline its belief in "scientific socialism".

The party will now give more emphasis a "Subhasism, the ideology of Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose. The Council meeting observed that keeping the hammer and sickle and proximity to Communist Parties has lent credence to the propaganda that Forward Bloc was more a Communist Party than a Socialist Party. It also observed this propaganda somehow blocked the path of the Forward Bloc to grow as an independent Socialist Party, a resolution passed in the meeting said.

The council also noted that the size and character of the working class had also changed. A large number workers are now engaged in the service sector. With fresh developments in science ad technology, the Service Sector now has a larger share of the the GDP than Agriculture and Industry, which the hammer and sickle symbol represented.

G. Devarajan, Secretary of the central committee placed the constitutional amendments and the organizational report in the meeting earlier in the day.

As many as 46 delegates from 19 states have participated in the discussion. Debabrata Biswas, former MP and General Secretary of All India Forward Bloc summed up the discussion and announced the future course of action.

The National Council of All India Forward Bloc has decided to hold the 19th Party Congress (National Conference) in the month of February 2023. Prior to the Party Congress all the lower level conferences will be organized. It was also decided to start people's movements against price hike of LPG Cylinder, Petrol, Diesel, Medicines and other essentials commodities.

The Council also decided to start a nationwide campaign to propagate the ideals of Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose.An Eight Member presidium consists of P.V. Kathiravan (Tamilnadu), Debabrata Biswas (West Bengal), G. Devarajan (Kerala), Naren Chatterjee (West Bengal), G.R. Shivashankar (Karnataka), Govind Roy (West Bengal), Surendra Redy (Telengana), Jyoti Ranjan Mohapatra (Odisha) controlled the proceedings of the council meeting.On the occasion of the national council of All India Forward Bloc, a Statue of Netaji was unveiled in the premises of Netaji Bhawan, the state committee office of the party Odisha state committee.

The National Council meeting also strongly opposed the Government's move to curtail the freedom of Press. In many states including Odisha, the Governments are taking stringent measures to strangulate the Independent character of the Media, the resolution said.

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Forward Bloc to remove hammer and sickle from party flag - Firstpost