The Golden Age ii
Posted on September 29, 2008
The world’s most self-important neckbeard and nanosect theoretician delivers his verdict on autonomist Marxism:
We have no interaction with, or rivalry with, Principia Dialectica. They are simply not in our part of the political universe and not in the workers’ movement.
Neckbeard and his two friends are the vanguard. Après moi — le tutorial!
Killing the Goose
Posted on September 29, 2008
Scenario:
A wealthy man opens his office safe and removes the title deeds to your house and those of others. He takes them to the casino to use as collateral and loses everything. He then arrives on your doorstep demanding cash from you to make good the loss — or you will be made homeless. Worse, he plans to reward himself handsomely for setting up such a racket.
In the real world, outwith the quasi-religious cult of the ‘invisible hand’, this behaviour is rightly called ‘extortion’. No, it’s socialism! scream worshippers at the altar of the free market myth, the problem is not enough deregulation.
No. It isn’t socialism. Propping up the bosses and ultra-rich with taxpayer-funded handouts is not socialism, it is capitalism. A deal done between different sections of the ruling class using capital expropriated from the workers. Banks have been playing roulette with the lives of ordinary, working people.
In the USA, where Congress has just voted down Bush’s $700 billion ‘bail-out’ plan 228 - 205, any ‘rescue package’ should be contingent on absolute transparency, complete accountability and the immediate introduction of a universal healthcare system.
Markets are entirely self-regulating, bankers assured us as they stuffed money down the fronts of their trousers. Hands on hearts, they swore they would never be so foolish, or greedy, as to kill the goose that laid the golden eggs.
There’s nothing left of the goose, save its beak and feet.
Instead of accepting that the current financial mess is a direct consequence of their limitless greed, in classic ‘blame the victim’ fashion, the right are casting about for suitable scapegoats and have settled upon the very people at whom they threw money — ‘we would never have lent poor people money they couldn’t pay back … except it made us fabulously rich’.
Sublimate banking.
Oppose Barbarism
Posted on September 22, 2008
There will be counter demonstration against the preposterous Islamic Republic of Iran sponsored ‘Al Quds Day’ march at Piccadilly Circus, this Sunday 28 September at 1300hrs.’Al Quds Day’ was instituted by the Ayatollah Khomenei, supposedly in support of Palestinians, but in reality to promote the backward and murderous clerical fascist Islamic Republic of Iran and their Lebanese surrogates Hizbollah. It does nothing to help the cause of Palestinian national self-determination. The barbaric Tehran régime brutally supresses all opposition, secular organisations, independent trade unions, and murders socialists, homosexuals and children on trumped up charges which are rubber-stamped by religious kangaroo courts. Iranian president Ahmdedinejad repeatedly denies the fact of the Nazi genocide of the Jews and entertains millenarian fantasies of immanent and transcendent destruction. Concentration of Iran’s wealth in the hands of a tiny minority has left the country desitute.This vile and hardline religious conservative régime should be opposed at every turn.
Against Fortress Britain
Posted on September 15, 2008
To its shame, Britain is a state which imprisons without trial children who have committed no crime. Children of people who have applied for asylum are taken from friends and family and locked up without education or proper healthcare in detention centres. The government which launched the Every Child Matters programme should be called to account for the blatant hypocrisy of imprisoning 2000 children annually in the cause of appearing ‘tough on immigration’, pandering to myths about migrants and asylum seekers and straight out racism.
This contravenes Council of Europe Rec(2003)5 of the Committee of Ministers to member states on measures of detention of asylum seekers:
22. If minors are detained, they must not be held under prison-like conditions. Every effort must be made to release them from detention as quickly as possible and place them in other accommodation. If this proves impossible, special arrangements must be made which are suitable for children and their families.
Britain is not the only European nation to treat children in such a scandalous fashion, and the practice is not confined to ‘Fortress Europe’, as this noxious Australian example demonstrates, however the Australian Immigration Minister’s defence of child detention was in the context of a government driven by a hard right and xenophobic neo-liberal ideology, not an administration which presents itself as committed to social justice and fairness.
Since 1 August 2008, provisions in the 2007 UK Borders Act allow the UK Borders Agency to deport any non-British and non EEA (European Economic Area) citizen, if they have been sentenced to 12 months or more in prison — regardless of how long they have lived in Britain and their residential status — without right of appeal.
The automatic deportation provisions of the 2007 UK Borders Act came into force on 1 August 2008. From that date it became possible for the UK Borders Agency to deport any non-British and non-EEA citizen who has been sentenced to a prison term of 12 months or more, no matter how long settled in the UK and no matter how valuable their work is to their local community, unless they can show that deportation breaches their human rights. There is no right of appeal against deportation - only against the decision that human rights are not breached by deportation. Appellants will have to show either that they face persecution, torture or degradation in the country to which they are being deported, or that separation from family members settled in Britain is ‘disproportionate’ to the crime they committed. Both the Home Office and the immigration judges impose a very high threshold on appellants, generally arguing that British-born spouses and children can uproot themselves to live with their offending partner or parent in, for example, Jamaica, Algeria or Sudan without difficulty.
In 2006, the Home Office detained and attempted to deport 23 year old Shetlander Sakchai Makao, who had lived in Lerwick since he was 10, after he served a 15 month sentence for fire-raising in 2004. Sakchai was allowed to remain after an appeal and a vocal campaign by Shetland Islanders and immigration rights activists. Under the new law, Sakchai’s appeal would not have been heard. Even if an appellant is able to demonstrate their human rights will be breached by deportation, they can be ‘designated’ by the Home Office, removing their right to work or access to social services or medical care — leaving them and their families effectively destitute and unable to support themselves.
There is a tacit assumption that the immigration laws have always been in place, but despite the current obsession of the reactionary press and the right, with the numbers of migrants and policing borders — which are of course arbitrary themselves — Britain’s first immigration law was the Aliens Act 1905, enacted to prevent ‘undesirable immigrants’, ie Eastern European Jews, from entering the country. The law was passed in an atmosphere of hysterical antisemitism, claims of people being turned out of their homes to house Jewish ‘invaders’ and echoing the ‘poisoning the wells’ libels, hints that Jewish bakers laced bread with arsenic. In July 1906, the Clarion newspaper described Jews as
a poison injected into the national veins … unsavoury children of the ghetto … unclean.
The Alien Registration Act 1914, supposedly enacted as an emergency wartime measure, was amended and extended in 1919, preventing the entry of thousands of Jewish refugees from the Nazis. One racist law deserves another, and with staggering chutzpah, and sickening and bitter irony, the Commonwealth Immigrants Act 1962 was enacted to prevent the ‘threat’ to the British ‘way of life’ posed by the entry of descendants of slaves, coolies and indentured workers who had been grist in the mill of British imperialism. Current laws which discriminate against people on the basis of their country of origin or perceived ethnicity are no less racist or toxic than these earlier antisemitic and racist laws. Entry to Britain and leave to remain, despite a fistful of legislation proscribing racial discrimination, still depends to a very large extent on skin colour and country of origin.
The Golden Age
Posted on September 3, 2008
The disastrous Shiraz Socialist website is the hobby horse of a pathetic Drudge-like gossip, who is interested in little more than attempting to embarrass his former comrades in the AWL and cheer-leading for the Democratic presidential candidate. It is a train-wreck in progress and rubbernecking is inevitable and irresistable. Recently this creepy figure, who styles himself ‘Voltaire’s Priest’, published a 2000 word diatribe by an AWL ‘dissident’ who, having stormed out of the AWL in a huff one day (claiming to have been ‘expelled), in a truly Stakhanovite effort, had a new party and website ready to launch the next. The article alleged bureaucratic malfeasance and anti-democratic practices, and when it was patiently pointed out that the allegations were distortions, it was comedy central as a succession of cranks and rank hypocrites lined up to lecture the AWL about party democracy. The AWL may reasonably be characterised as ‘dotty’, however one thing they cannot be fairly accused of is intolerance of dissenting opinion, as they freely allow factions within the party.
David Broder was not so much a dissident as the disloyal opposition, a conceited public schoolboy who attempts to fake gravitas and profundity by means of an extravagant neck-beard, who joined a Trotskyist sect with whose platform he fundamentally disagrees — when he’s not not even a Trotskyist!
What happened when AWL members went to attend a public meeting advertised on ‘the commune’s’ website?
« go back — keep looking »On the evening of Monday 1 September, the new group the Commune/Group of International Communists (two of whose three known supporters are recently ex-AWL members David Broder and Chris Ford) attempted to ban the AWL from their first public meeting.
When we arrived at the venue for their — publicly advertised — meeting on workers’ struggles in 1968-74, we were told by Chris Ford, before we had opened our mouths, that it was not a public meeting, that we had come to disrupt and that we should “fuck off”. After ten or so minutes of arguing, David Broder, to his credit, let us in; that was followed, however, by repeated attempts to get us to leave; we were told by the third Commune supporter that if we didn’t she would “make a scene”. After very calmly and reasonably refusing to be banned, we were allowed to speak; but whenever one of us raised an issue that the comrades didn’t like, the chair attempted to shut us up (aided by the person who had promised to make a scene leaping up and, well, making a scene). The same happened when one of our comrades began her contribution by objecting to this sort of behaviour.
The building of a healthy left requires a culture of free and open debate; not the replication on a micro-level of the SWP’s practice of bans and exclusions. It is particularly weird coming from a group whose members claim, falsely, that they were subject to bureaucratic suppression in the AWL.
