The Former Red Squirrel's Lair

So long, and thanks for all the nuts.

2007-12-06T14:31:00.001Z

The time has come.

The Vanguard has now moved to another tree. While this tree has served us well, we believe that our new abode is far more comfortable and will thus attract more guests on top of making us more productive.

Please come by for coffee, tea and nuts.

And don't forget to redirect your links.

Por ahora no pudimos

2007-12-05T10:51:00.000Z

I shouldn't really stress myself so much. I spent the whole of the last week thinking about the constitutional referendum, working out possible scenarios in my head and talking about it with everybody and their dogs. Fuck, I even had dreams about it. The last time I was stressed over a political event that much was just before the Scottish Parliament elections. Both times, anxiety gave way to profound disappointment.

However, having reflected on numbers, results and a series of articles my innate optimism has started crawling back in. This was a serious setback, but we have not been defeated. Chavez has still 5 years left in his term, the opposition barely made any gains relative to the presidential election and the magnitude of the pro SI rallies relative to those organised by the opposition clearly shows that the class balance of power leans heavily to the side of the conscious working class. Certainly, the slight victory of the No vote will give the shattered Venezuelan opposition something to rally around, as the calls for the convening of a Constituent Assembly by former Chavista General Baduel clearly show. However the very fact that the opposition will have to organise centred on a former enemy, around calls for national friendship and unity is clearly a sign of its own weakness suggesting that a well calculated, organised and swift political offensive by the Bolivarians is bound to shatter them. We have to keep in mind that revolutions are not linear processes where one side makes gains against the other until it wins; they unfold dialectically with each victory throwing up new obstacles and dangers and each defeat opening up new roads to success. What where the July Days preceding the great October Revolution if not a decisive defeat, with many good activists dead, leaders arrested and others going underground? The setback suffered by the Bolivarian movement is not even slightly comparable to that.

So what happened? It is evident from the numbers that the defeat of the reforms can be entirely attributed to the inadequate mobilisation of the Bolivarian camp. While the opposition gained a mere 100,000 votes (compared to the last presidential election), the Bolivarians lost some 2.8 million votes to abstention, with turnout reaching a very mellow 56% against approximately 70% last year. A lower turnout, in every situation, necessarily favours the forces of reaction, as the well-fed bourgeois and their satellite strata dutifully turn up to vote every time; it is the impoverished workers and peasants who abstain, for one reason or another. The question is why did they abstain on Sunday, a mere year after they overwhelmingly voted for Chavez routing both the counterrevolutionary and "revolutionary" oppositions?

The answer I believe lies in a combination of factors. First, we have to keep in mind that in any given situation, it is rather unlikely, if not impossible, that the oppressed classes will have achieved full consciousness down to the last person, especially when the situation is still prerevolutionary. For the unconscious masses, it was far easier to grasp the importance of the presidential election, as what was at stake was Chavismo itself; a defeat would have meant a regression back into the quagmire of traditional Washington Consensus neoliberalism. Reports from the ground also suggest that the opposition, with heavy financial backing from the United States, managed to mount a very effective, high intensity campaign of lies and misinformation (and terror), even if their concrete mobilisation was not much too look at. As you have probably already read elsewhere, "the state will take away your children" replaced the now cliche image of the baby eating communist.

This brings us to another, arguably the most important, question. Why did the conscious Bolivarian movement fail to agitate effectively and mobilise the masses to support the constitutional reforms? And also, why did they not effectively respond to the lies and filth propagated by the opposition? I can think of no other reason than the lack of an organised party of the bolivarian movement. In the absence of such, the campaign had to be based on largely ad hoc gatherings organised by the local socialist battalions that will form the basis of the PSUV. While the activist fervour of those should not be underestimated, their effectiveness cannot be compared to that of a integrated apparatus. The lack of a central coordinating organisation meant that the campaign had to be taken up by the state bureaucracy. These people have little in common with the working class and they would have failed to connect with it even if they had actually wanted to. The bureaucrats of the Bolivarian movement want nothing to do with socialism and they will consciously sabotage any attempt to destroy them as mediators of power, including the strengthening of community councils. It is then not really surprising that they made little effort to produce material refuting the outrageous claims of the opposition, basing their campaign on a theme of loyalty to Chavez, despite the fact that Chavez himself had often reiterated that a SI vote was not a vote for himself but a vote for the Revolution. No mention of the 36-hour week, or the community councils!

The entirely reactionary role played by the right wing of Chavismo has been sharply grasped by the radical activist base. The HOV referendum blog reports that on Monday a spontaneous gathering organised through text messages took place outside Miraflores palace in order to express solidarity with Chavez but more importantly raising the demand for a "clearing of the house" and denouncing certain officials as traitors.

The key task facing the socialist movement in Venezuela now is the foundation of the PSUV on an explicitly radical socialist basis. This will require back breaking mobilisation in the very near future (as in from January onwards). For the moment, the organised right wing has done a good job of excluding itself from the formation of the party, but it is certain that the sharper bureaucratic elements will not make the same mistake. Following that, it is imperative that the movement concentrates on a relentless attack against the dual fifth column that fetters is its development. I say dual, for apart from the state bureaucracy and the reformists, a war must be waged against the rererevolutionary ultra left that refuses to join the PSUV, the latter-day WRPs like the Argentinian PO and the neo-Kautskyite democrats who called for a spoiling of ballots at the referendum. Letting them cut themselves out of the working class movement, as they will, is not enough. In such social conditions, the minds of people are open to radical ideas, whether progressive or entirely stupid. Having said that, it must be stressed, despite being entirely obvious, that the prime threat remains the bureaucracy, the enemies within that want Chavez without socialism. They must be removed from the movement and the state at all costs and by any means necessary. Let them join the opposition and expose themselves for the hypocrites that they are. At this stage, without support from the inside, the counterrevolution will never manage to become a serious threat. Bring on the Cheka!

Tension increases in Venezuela

2007-11-29T02:34:00.000Z

Venezuelanalysis carries two very important articles today. One is about a CIA plot named Operation Pliers, involving a number of prominent opposition groups, leaders, media outlets and students which came to light after the Venezuelan counterintelligence service intercepted a CIA memorandum, dated November 20th. The memorandum predicts a clear Yes mandate for the constitutional referendum taking place on Sunday and goes on to propose a plan of action for the opposition after the referendum, including challenging its authenticity, inciting unrest and distabilisation with the purpose of throwing the country into a state of ungovernability preparing the way for another attempt to violently overthrow the Bolivarian government; textbook imperialist tactics that is, from Mozambique to Vietnam. Importantly, the memorandum also confirms the large scale clandestine campaign against Bolivarianism that has been conducted by the CIA for some time:

Officer Steere emphasizes the importance and success of the public relations and propaganda campaign that the CIA has been funding with more than $8 million during the past month - funds that the CIA confirms are transfered through the USAID contracted company, Development Alternatives, Inc., which set up operations in June 2002 to run the USAID Office for Transition Initiatives that funds and advises opposition NGOs and political parties in Venezuela. The CIA memo specifically refers to these propaganda initiatives as "psychological operations" (PSYOPS), that include contracting polling companies to create fraudulent polls that show the NO vote with an advantage over the SI vote, which is false. The CIA also confirms in the memo that it is working with international press agencies to distort the data and information about the referendum, and that it coordinates in Venezuela with a team of journalists and media organized and directed by the President of Globovision, Alberto Federico Ravell.

The other article reports on the murder of José Anibal Oliveros Yépez, a Chavez supporter, by a group of anti-reform protesters on Monday. After documenting the entirely unprovoked attack, the article goes on to mention that violence by opposition group is not a collection of isolated incidents but instead, a consistent part of a quasi fascist campaign of bullying that is typical of middle class mobilisation:

National Assembly Deputy Francisco Ameliach and the Mayor of Guacara, José Manuel Flores, who visited the neighborhood to pay their respects to the Oliveros' family, reported that opposition groups in Ciudad Alianza that claim to represent "civil society" have marked the houses of Chavez supporters, or those they believe to be Chavez supporters, with red paint and "have said they are going to kill them."

What this goes to show is that the Bolivarian process is one powered by irreconcilable class contradictions within Venezuelan society, rather than merely a national bourgeois project. As the reforms instituted by Chavez increasingly weaken the power of global capital and its domestic crutches, we can only expect an intensification of the struggle as the bourgeoisie tries to overturn the process while it still has some political power left. As the heat rises, class contradictions will be laid in increasingly more stark terms as bourgeois and petty-bourgeois ideology will be unable to provide a satisfactory explanatory framework for the rapidly developing (and thus changing) circumstances in Venezuela. Chavez himself demonstrated this shift when, addressing a pro-amendment work place representatives' meeting Caracas, he explicitly stated that "the working class has to be the vanguard of the revolutionary process for socialist power.", cautioning against the dangers of bureaucratic degeneration as happened in the Soviet Union. Chavez also went on to speak about the irreconcilable conflict of interests between the working class on the one hand, and capitalism and the bourgeois state on the other. From the IMT website:

The Cuban revolution has lasted a long time due to a deep relationship with the masses. In Nicaragua the road of reformism led to tragic results. You cannot adapt to capitalism. It doesn't work. No to reformism, No to Bureaucracy! [...]He emphasized again and again that the working class is the vanguard but he also castigated many trade unions for not being able to rise above the arena of purely trade union demands. If this does not happen then the political level of the working class won't rise to the level needed to carry out the task of being the motor force of the revolution. This process will determine the timing and direction of the revolution. We should pass onto the offensive as under capitalism we use defensive actions to protect conditions. The only way to guarantee Popular Power is if the working class plays the leading role.

Under the constitutional changes, he continues, the workers councils in the factories will establish relations with peasant, student and community councils [in effect setting up embryonic soviets - DC]. If this happens then what happened in the Soviet Union and Nicaragua won't happen. The aim of all of this is to establish Socialism in the country of Bolivar and - in response to a cry from the audience - in all of the Americas.

Yet the devil is in the detail. On the one hand Chavez sees the councils in different areas as alternative organs of power more closely related to the people and therefore theoretically more responsive. This is also a way to bypass the cumbersome and obstructive State bureaucracy. As he stated, "...workers councils will come into being in the factories, in the workplaces, but they should reach out to the communities and be fused into other councils of popular power: community councils, students councils, etc... What for? To shout slogans? To go around shouting long live Chavez? No!... To change the relationships in the workplace, to plan production, to take over piece by piece the functions of the government and to finish up by destroying the bourgeois state."

The current stage of the class struggle in Venezuela will have to come to a decisive political outcome one way or another sooner than later; this dual-poweresque fragile balance of class powers is not a sustainable social equilibrium. The division and increasing weakness of the bourgeoisie makes it ever more difficult for them to defend against the advancing working class, but it should be kept in mind that the proletariat too does not yet have a unified political leadership with a clear programme, ready to seize power and embark on the construction of socialism. The PSUV might come to play that role, but that will depend upon the programme and the organisational structure that will be adopted by its coming founding conference. We can only hope that the majority of principled socialists in Venezuela have joined the party and have not been carried away by the calls for ideological purity by the WRP clones of this world.

Until the foundation of the PSUV however, it is imperative that the Bolivarian movement takes whatever measures necessary to safeguard itself from reaction. Extreme attention must be paid to the tactics of the opposition and resources of all kinds will have to be mobilised to ensure that Operation Pliers does not come to fruition. This will necessarily include state crackdowns (although I am sure that those who lamented the suppression of RCTV's "democratic" right to support fascist coups will cry "authoritarianism" here as well) but it is of crucial importance that there is also grassroots working class political organisation in the form of demos, counter demos and patrols among other things. As Chavez (and Lenin) said, the workers (to the last cook) must gradually take over the functions of the state.

An Interview with FARC Commander Simón Trinidad

2007-11-27T00:54:00.000Z

FARC is an organisation about which not many people know a lot or even a bit. It is old enough (it's been almost 40 years since the armed struggle in Colombia started) to have receded from the spotlight, but it is still active and thus cannot be studied in a standard academic historical manner. What is more, its case is quite interesting in that it creates much division amongst the left over whether it should be supported or not with accusations of it being a drug trafficking cartel without any politics left after four decades of guerilla warfare often thrown around. With the opportunity provided by the Colombian government's decision to terminate Venezuela's role as a mediator in hostage exchange negotiations, the Lair republishes the following interview with FARC commander Simón Trinidad, originally published in Columbia Report. It is an interesting read and provides some counterbalance to the First World's narrative about the organisation.

An Interview with FARC Commander Simón Trinidad

by Garry Leech

In January 1999, newly elected Colombian president Andres Pastrana ceded an area of southern Colombia the size of Switzerland to the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) guerrillas as part of an agreement to begin peace talks. Although there is no cease-fire agreement while the talks are being carried out, the Colombian Armed Forces and the National Police have withdrawn all their forces from the region known as the Zona de Despeje (Clearance Zone).

The FARC's headquarters in Los Pozos, a small village located 18 miles from San Vicente del Caguan in the Zona de Despeje, has been host to the peace talks as well as public conferences where all sectors of Colombian society can come to participate in discussions about Colombia's future. On June 14, 2000, I traveled to Los Pozos to interview Simón Trinidad, a FARC commander and a spokesman for the guerrilla organization. Trinidad was a professor of economics and a banker before joining the FARC 16 years ago.

Q. What is the current status of the ongoing peace process?

A. In May 1999, the FARC and the Colombian government established a common agenda consisting of twelve points. This agenda was created with an agreement that both parties would bring their proposals to the negotiating table--things that they considered important in the discussion and in the search for a resolution to the conflict and to make the changes that Colombia needs.

At the moment, they are only discussing one item: unemployment. There have been 13 or 14 public conferences here in Los Pozos about this topic featuring businessmen, workers, university students, teachers and rectors. This Friday there will be a conference with the African-Colombian communities. On June 25 there will be a conference with unemployed women and on June 29 there will be one on illicit crops and the environment. The FARC and the government are discussing all these items that they consider important in the search for a political solution to the social conflict in Colombia.

Q. Why do you think the United States is focusing on the FARC and campesinos that cultivate coca here in southern Colombia instead of the paramilitaries and the narco-traffickers?

A. That's a good question. Because the FARC is the only political organization that is in opposition to the Colombian oligarchy that keeps Colombians in poverty, misery and a state of underdevelopment. We are fighting for a change in the Colombian economic model and for a new state. For a state that has at its center the men and women of Colombia and to provide a better life and social justice for Colombians. With the riches in this country and after 180 years of republic living, Colombians must live better. We'll make better use of the natural resources and provide jobs, healthcare, education and housing so that 40 million Colombians can live well.

Who are those that are opposed to these social, economic and political changes? They are the people who monopolize the riches and resources in Colombia. A small group that monopolizes the banks, the industries, the mines, agriculture and international commerce, including some foreign companies, especially North Americans. For these reasons we are the principal target in the war against narco-traffickers. But we aren't narco-traffickers and the campesinos aren't narco-traffickers, they are using it as an excuse for fighting against us.

If the United States government really intends to combat narco-traffickers, all the people in Colombia know where the narco-traffickers live. They live in Bogotá, Medellín, Cali and Barranquilla. Therefore, to seize the narco-traffickers the police have to do certain things. They have to leave their houses and search for them in order to put them in prison. But no, they confront the poor campesino with repression that not only hurts the illicit crops, but also legal crops like yucca, bananas, and chickens and pigs because the fumigation kills everything. It damages the earth, the vegetation, the water and the animals.

Those responsible for making Colombia a producer of narcotics are the people who have become rich from this business: the narco-traffickers, and they are happy. Who else benefits from narco-trafficking? The bankers and those who distribute the drugs in the cities, universities, high schools and discos of North America, Europe and Asia, the greatest consumers of marijuana, cocaine and heroin. Who else benefits? The companies that make the chemicals for processing cocaine and heroin. These companies are German and North American. They are industries in the developed countries. It's a great business for the chemical companies.

The poor campesino has lived in misery for many years and will continue to do so. The war is for them and for us. We are planning a different solution for the problem of narco-trafficking. It consists of providing a better life for the poor campesino through agrarian reform, by giving them good lands, technical assistance and low-interest loans to change from growing illicit crops to legal crops; such as, coffee, yucca, bananas, sugarcane and ranching. An alternative development that facilitates commercialization for these products. But it's a slow process to change them, it´s not just destroying the illicit crops and then telling them to grow different ones. We have to educate the campesinos about how to produce them. Give them tools, credits and time so they can make a living from these crops and become a different kind of campesino.

Q. Last year, FARC spokesman Raul Reyes claimed that the FARC could eradicate coca cultivation in the regions it controls in five years. However, there have been accusations that the FARC is forcing campesinos to grow more coca here in the Zona de Despeje.

A. This is the story of the police, the army and the narco-traffickers. We live in the country, and it is in the country that the coca, marijuana and the poppy have been grown for thirty years. We know that the campesinos grow illicit crops out of necessity. It is specifically a socio-economic situation. They are obligated to cultivate illicit crops because of a government that has neglected them for many years. We have made it clear that we will not take the food out of the mouth of the poor campesino. We will not leave them without jobs. They work with the marijuana and coca leaf because they don't have any other work. This problem is caused by the economic model of the Colombian state, and it is the state that has to fix the problem. We are the state's enemy, not their anti-narcotics police. The state has to offer people employment, honest work, and social justice to improve their lives.

Q. The FARC has introduced its own system of justice in the Zona de Despeje. What are the codes of justice and how are they implemented?

A. It's not true! We haven't introduced a justice system in the Zona de Despeje. For 36 years we have been working to solve the social problems of the campesinos that have a relationship with us. For many years the state hasn't been present in many regions. There have been no state judges, no justice system and no public administration in many regions of the country. The society has had to resolve their own problems because they don't believe in the ministry of work, they don't believe in Colombian justice, they don't believe in the Colombian army and police. They came to us and we were there for them in the country.

For example, there was a conflict between two people regarding land and cows. The cows belonging to one of them entered the other person's land and destroyed his crops. He came to us looking for a solution to this problem. They don't go looking for a state functionary because they don't come to the country. So we told him to come here tomorrow with his neighbor to talk about the problem. We listened to both versions and we asked them for a solution. If they don't find a solution, we propose some solutions in an attempt to apply justice. We want to see that they can resolve their own problems. We are a witness to their agreements.

Another example is a bad marriage. When the husband drinks all the money, hits the wife and leaves his wife and children. They don't have the money to travel to a city where the family court is located in order to resolve this problem. The process takes one, two or three years before he is told to provide milk for his children. We call the mother and father and tell them that he has to give part of his salary to his wife and children and that he can't drink too much anymore. We come to an agreement.

Workers in factories in the cities that were dismissed from their job without reason and without severance benefits go to the jungle in search of the guerrillas to resolve this problem. We send a note to the administrator, boss or owner telling them they have to come and talk with the guerrillas to resolve the problem. Some don't come, but others do come and we listen to them. We don't always believe the workers, we listen to the businessmen because maybe the worker is lazy, or a drunk, or a liar, or irresponsible. We resolve these kinds of problems for people who live in the country and the cities. We do this in other regions of the country where the guerrillas are.

Here in San Vicente del Caguan, when we created the Zona de Despeje, the campesinos stopped the guerrillas in the street for solutions to their problems. Now, people have to go to the Oficina de quejas y reclamos (Office of Claims and Complaints) and we listen to both sides of the problem. We didn't create this system now in the Zona de Despeje, historically the FARC has done this where the state has lacked a system of justice and where a majority of people don't believe in the Colombian justice system. We are doing it in the Zona de Despeje in an office. The people come and the guerrillas listen to them and find a solution. It is not only about money.

For example, who gets custody of the children when parents get separated? If the mother is a prostitute, doesn't care about her children and consumes drugs, then the care of the children is given to the father. These are the types of problems we resolve. This office also resolves problems concerning guerrillas when they are bad. For example, if they go out and get drunk. Sometimes we make mistakes and we like it when other people tell us where we failed.

Q. What will happen if the United States Congress authorizes increased military aid to the Colombian Armed Forces and they launch an offensive against the FARC here in southern Colombia?

A. I don't want to think about it. I don't want to think about it. We have more faith in a peace process with dialogue. I don't want to think about a war in this region of the country. The war won't resolve Colombia's problems. Colombia has 18 million people living in absolute poverty. These people don't have electricity, water, jobs, land, education and healthcare. Another 18 million Colombians are poor with a salary that doesn't cover all their necessities. They live restricted lives. In many cases the mother, father and one or two sons have to work to provide transport, housing and clothes.

We are 36 million Colombians living poorly out of a total of 40 million Colombians. Of the other four million Colombians, some are rich and others have a good life working in industries, businesses and farms. They have a solution to their problems of healthcare, education, vacation, work and social benefits. Is the war going to resolve these problems?

If this is about the narco-trafficker problem then you know where the narco-traffickers are. For example, the governor of the department of Cesar, Lucas, is a narco-trafficker and he is governor for the second time. His brother is a senator in the National Congress and is in alliance with the president of the Congressional Assembly, Pomanico, who is being investigated for stealing $4.5 million from congress. There is an alliance between narco-traffickers and common politicians, both Liberals and Conservatives. Also, between paramilitaries and the narco-traffickers, everybody knows this.

If you go to Barranquilla the people will tell you where the narco-traffickers are. The police and the commanders of the army battalions and brigades know this. Will the war waged against poor campesinos solve these problems? The war won't resolve the problems for the hungry and unemployed in Colombia.

Q. How will the FARC effectively implement its new political front, the Bolivariano Movement, if its members remain anonymous?

A. The idea of the Bolivariano Movement is not ours, it doesn't come from us. It was born with many Colombians 16 years ago when the members of the Patriotic Union were assassinated. It was a legal movement, a democratic movement that participated in the presidential, congressional and municipal elections. And then they began to get assassinated.

When the armed forces, police and paramilitaries began to kill the members of the Patriotic Union they came to us and said, 'We want to work with you, we like the FARC's policies. But because of this they will kill us.' They wanted to work with us, but alone. But the FARC said, 'No, you can't work alone. You have to work with your father, your mother, your brother, your neighbor, your girlfriend, your wife, your co-workers, and your classmates. You have to organize, because if we are divided we can't win.'

But to work in secret? They are right. At this moment was born the idea for the political movement. A political movement that works to recover Colombian society in secret, a movement that's militant and clandestine. There will be campesinos, students, workers, women and intellectuals who will fight the political confrontation without saying they belong to the Bolivariano Movement. They will not participate in elections because there are no guarantees and conditions that they will not be killed.

First we have to change many customs in this country, like the oligarchy killing political contradictors. This is Colombian history. The world doesn't know of another country where political contradictors are killed like in Colombia. All of them since we gained independence from Spain. They assassinated Sucre, they tried to assassinate Bolivar, and they assassinated many leaders of the nineteenth century in civil wars. They killed Rafael Uribe Uribe. They assassinated Jorge Eliecer Gaitan, Jaime Pardo Leal, and the Liberal guerrillas that laid down their arms under the government of the dictator Rojas Pinilla. They assassinated 4,000 members of the Patriotic Union, cleansed the Patriotic Union with bullets, and they have followed this practice to kill labor leaders, student leaders, campesino leaders, everybody that has opposed this tyrannic regime. For this reason the Bolivariano Movement remains clandestine.

Q. Many international human rights organizations have demanded that the FARC stop recruiting children. Where does the FARC stand on this issue?

A. In our statutes we have decided that we can recruit 15 year-olds and up. In some fronts there may have been some younger, but a short time ago we decided to send them back home. But what is the cost? In the last year a girl arrived at the office in San Vicente, 14 years-old and wanting to join the guerrillas. When the mother found out that she had joined she contacted the guerrillas and cried and said her daughter is only 14 years-old. In March she was sent back home because the FARC's Central Command said they would return to their parents all those younger than fifteen. Two weeks ago I met this girl and asked her what she was doing. She said she was working in a bar from 6pm until sunrise. I asked what she was doing in this bar and she said, 'I attend to the customers.' When I asked in what way does she attend to the customers, she lowered her head and started to cry. She is a whore. She is 14 years old. A child prostitute. She was better in the guerrillas. In the guerrillas we have dignity, respect and we provide them with clothes, food and education.

And there are millions of others like this girl in Colombia that are exploited in the coal mines, the gold mines, the emerald mines, in the coca and poppy fields. They prefer that children work in the coca and poppy fields because they pay them less and they work more. It sounds beautiful when you say that children shouldn't be guerrillas, but the children are in the streets of the cities doing drugs, inhaling gasoline and glue. They are highly exploited.

According to the United Nations: 41% of Colombians are children; 6.5 million children live in conditions of poverty, add to this 1.2 million children living in absolute poverty; 30,000 children live in the streets without mothers, fathers and brothers; 47% of children are abused by their parents; and 2.5 million work in high risk jobs. These children meet the guerrillas and they don't have parents because the military or the paramilitaries killed them and they ask the guerrillas to let them join. We are executing the norm that no children younger than 15 years of age join.

Q. How many women are there in the FARC and what happens when they become pregnant?

A. Aproximately 30% of the guerrillas are women and the number is increasing all the time. The women guerillas are treated the same as the men. Some FARC units have female commandantes and the FARC office in San Vicente is run by a female guerrilla named Nora. Some of the women have relationships with male guerrillas and we provide contraceptives because we do not want pregnant women in the guerrillas. But some do get pregnant and if they don't have an abortion it is necessary that they leave the guerrillas.

Q. What does the government have to do for the FARC to agree to a cease-fire during negotiations?

A. Stop the fighting on both sides. This cease-fire must be established for a specific time: a month or two months. And besides, it must be verified for both sides. This we understand to be a cease-fire. It was tried many times. Seventeen years ago with Belasario Betancur's government, when we signed a cease-fire Manuel Marulanda Velez gave the order to all guerrilla fronts to suspend fighting on May 28, 1984, and the president did the same. But the next day, there was an opposing order from the Commander of the Army, General Vega Uribe, saying they won't comply with the cease-fire order because they have to abide by the Constitution.

We have many times during this presidential period called unilateral cease-fires for Christmas, Easter, elections, many times. The most recent unilateral cease-fire was December 20, 1999 until January 5, 2000. But if we are going to discuss this theme it would be under bilateral proposals with defined times and mechanisms of control and verification. To verify who broke the agreement and why.

This article originally appeared in Colombia Report, an online journal that was published by the Information Network of the Americas (INOTA).

Foxy letter

2007-11-14T14:21:00.001Z

The following is a letter to Socialist Worker by SSP National Convenor Colin Fox. As an SSP member, I have extracted many lulz from the SWP's theoretical "analysis" of what's happening in RESPECT, given their behaviour in the SSP during the whole Sheridan debacle. Cheers to Colin for pointing the irony out.

Is it any wonder that anyone watching the tragic unfolding collapse of Respect is confused about the issues when the article ‘What’s behind the crisis in Respect?’
published in Socialist Worker online Tuesday 6th November tries to compare the situation with circumstances in other left parties ‘right across Europe’.

But it is the particular nonsense contained in Alex Callinicos’s pious wishful thinking ‘the Scottish Socialist Party has effectively collapsed since the leadership decided to drive Tommy Sheridan out’ with which I wish to take issue.
Let’s leave aside the fact that the Scottish Socialist Party has in the period since the May elections been on every picket line in the country, first of all supporting the Tesco lorry drivers in Livingston, then the Royal Mail postal workers the length and breadth of Scotland and the Glasgow care workers. Let’s also leave aside the role that I and other SSP members played in defeating Edinburgh City Council’s plans to close 22 primary schools in the city. Lets also set aside our hugely successful party conference held last month in Dundee wherein hundreds of delegates showed their continuing commitment to the party and the confidence that it will survive recent horrific events when those who were keener to split the left have not. And let’s leave aside our presence, as the Scottish SWP at least were forced to recognise at last weekends anti Trident demonstration through Edinburgh.

What cannot be ignored however is the contrast in attitude of the Socialist Worker who today condemn George Galloway for splitting RESPECT, for ignoring the will of the majority, of setting up a rival party and of not staying in the party to argue his position. Because last year Socialist Worker was on the other side of this argument. Indeed, were it not for the SWP, Tommy Sheridan would have been forced to stay in the Scottish Socialist Party, justify his lunatic libel action and try to wrestle back the leadership. He knew of course, just as George Galloway knows now, that he would have lost the vote of party members and he did what all ‘mavericks’ do in such circumstances, he tried to justify, citing high principles, the formation of yet another insignificant wee group on the left.
If anyone drove Tommy Sheridan out of the SSP it was the SWP – you could say they supplied the getaway car!

So when the Socialist Worker gets all pious about internal party democracy, left unity and the crisis in left parties across Europe I suggest members best start by looking at their own record. As they say, ‘people in glass houses…..’
Socialist Worker will convince very few people outside their own party of their case in the disunification of Respect if their explanations of events and their role in them are as flimsy as those they offer up in relation to their actions in Scotland these past two years.

Comradely yours
Colin Fox
Scottish Socialist Party National Convenor
Edinburgh

Historical Materialism Conference - Part 2

2007-11-12T20:05:00.001Z

Wow. Apparently my notes on the fisrt plenary session were pretty long. The notes for the next session 'Islam and American Imperialism' are a bit less so. Not becuase the talks weren't interesting, but because I'd already sat through one long session and the lecture theatre was rather sophorific, owing to the temperature and layout.

The backdrop to the talks is the increasing resistance to American imperialism and the lack of a clear socialist alternative to it. This leads - on the part of the Socialist Register, who organised the plenary - to a crisis of agency. It therefore becomes necessary to analyse the new movements that have arisen so as to conceptualise the current conjuncture.

Gilbert Achar - Imperial Uses of Islam
Achar began his talk by examining the 'clash of civilisations' paradigm, one which he described as pervasive on both a conscious and unconscious level. This view basically suggests that Islam and the West are engaged in a clash of civilisation and there can be no middle ground between them. This view is common to both Western Islamophobes and Islamic fundamentalists - who tend to characterise Islam and 'the West' is implacably in conflcit with one and other, and view this conflict as defining our current age.

But Achar notes that this is not the view of Western governments. Western governments tend to differentiate (in their rhetoric) between 'good' Muslims and 'bad' Muslims, they don't view things as a clash with Islam but a clash within Islam. Achar also argues that Huntington himself doesn't hold with the way in which his theory has been interpreted. Achar argued that Huntington is in fact a 'global multiculturalist', insofar as he thinks it's a good thing to have different 'civlisations' existing worldwide, he opposes mutliculturalism nationally because he wants to preserve Western culture in its heartlands. Furthermore, Huntington dismisses universalism as imperialism (in the perjorative sense) and argues that a project of imposing Western values will end in disaster. In other words Huntington appears as a traditional realist.

Achar argued that it is this realist Huntington that has informed US policy towards Islam. His first (and very good) example is the United States' alliance with Saudi Arabia, a state which is in fact the US' oldest ally in the Middle East. It has historically (and still does) served as the cornerstone in the US global stratey, particularly in combatting anti-imperialist nationalism. But of course Saudi Arabia is probably the most 'fundamentalist' state in the whole of the middle-east. In fact the US supported Saudi fundamentalism in Afghanistan. He further notes that plenty of fundamentalists were willing to colloborate with the US invasion of Iraq.

The point for Achar is that the US has used fundamentalism for its own ends and fundamentalism has often been (and is still) willing to colloborate with US imperialism when they had the chance. He then listed the examples of the Muslim Brotherhood and assorted other instances.

Achar's basic point here was that at best we can call Islamic fundamentalism 'anti-Western' but it is only sporadically and inconsistently 'anti-imperialist'. This of course has implications for how Marxists should approach Islamist resistance to US imperialism. At the very least when struggling with them it is necessary to view them with 'distrust' and attempt to spread our own ideas within their ranks.

One person's attempt to critique Achar's approach was based on the argument that notwithstanding our 'subjective' opposition to the domestic policies of the fundamentalists, they might nonetheless be 'objectively' anti-imperialist, since they are fighting imperialism. I wasn't there was the response, but surely Achar's argument is not about the political programme's of Islamists, it's about their record of supporting imperialists when they think it is to their advantage. Such a position of course means that while they may be 'objectively anti-imperialist' in a given instance the question is whether they will consistently hold this position. Achar's analysis seems to suggest they won't (and also that the imperialists won't consistently target them either) so this has to be the position to proceed from.

Bashir Abu-Manneh
For my money Abu-Manneh's speech was probably the most interesting of the lot, particulary because he engaged in some interesting theoretical anaylsis. Abu-Manneh's speech was composed of three arguments:

The Palestinians have been in a state of seige since 1991
The Palestinian elite has collaborated with the Israeli state
The above two factors have led to the emergence of a specific form of resistance, one which has entrenched militarisation and depoliticisation

The first thesis is simple enough to understand. Israel has continuously interevened in the occupied territory, denying the right of freedom of movement throughout the West Bank and Gaza strip and within Israel itself. This process has culminated in the creation of the apartheid wall, which has formalised the process by physically closing off vast swathes of the West Bank. This - of couse - is all very uncontroversial stuff. But Abu-Manneh further argued that this has destroyed any meaningful sense of spontaneity amongst the Palestinians. It has tended to eliminate any proper sense of the Palestinians as a collecitive entity who are capable of collective action. Palestinians have been alienated into individuals, families etc.

The second thesis is another one which I think is uncontroversial. It seem incontrovertable by now that the Palestinian Authority has collaborated with and legitimated the occupation - corrupting and nearly destroying the Palestinian's national aspirations. Abu-Manneh related an anecdote whereby the PA would always be there to stop attacks on settlers but would be mysteriously absent when there was an Israeli attack in the occupied territory. In line with this Abu-Manneh argued that the PA has consciously undermined any attempts to organise outside of the PA. To top it all off, when the PA did stop collaborating it was attacked by the Israeli authorities.

The combination of the two above factors leads to Abu-Manneh's third argument. The point of these factors is that they have pushed Palestinian strategy towards militarisation. Firstly, this is because any meaningful political resistance seems impossible. The Palestinian's traditional representation - Fatah - has been collaborating since Oslo. Furthermore, it is difficult - if not impossible - to develop political positions and mobilisation when freedom of movement is physically restricted. Furthermore, political action seems so difficult precisely because the Palestinians have lost their faith in their own capability for collective action. This depoliticisation means that solutions based on mass action seem impossible, which naturally seems to lend support to the idea that small acts of military resistance are necessary.

But it is not just the content (military acts) that are shaped by these social conditions, it is also the form. This is because the small military action per se is - in some respects - a collective political act. This would certainly seem to be the case when one considers the links between militants and political parties. The ultimate culmination of the tendency towards atomisation is the emergence of the suicide bomber as a 'weapon' in the struggle against of Israel. This of course makes a lot of sense, because the suicide bomber is the precisely opposite of a collective political struggle. Thus, the tendency towards atomisation and depoliticisation, combined with the concomitant process of militarisation tends to produce the ultimate individualist military act - the suicide bomber. Although, as Abu-Manneh points out, we shouldn't exaggerate the degree to which suicide bombing has become the norm, and ultimately as a tactic it has proved counter-productive, since it tended to fit the Palestianian struggle into the discourse of terror.

What I really like about this analysis is the way in which it traces the particular configuration of Palestinian resistance back to the social conditions in which it operates. This is a much better position to take than just 'condemning' particular forms of resistance without understanding why they gain popularity or the opposite but related one of just saying 'it's understandable because they endure so much'. It's therefore good to see someone take a materialist position on this issue. What's also interesting is the degree to which Abu-Manneh's position dovetails with Lukacs in History and Class Consciousness. This is because capitalism itself has a natural tendency towards depoliticisation (reification), alienation and fragmentation, of course these tendencies are often counteracted.

I think invoking Lukacs is useful for another reason. Abu-Manneh's preferred solution to the problem is to replace this strategy of individualised militarisation with one of collective self-mobilisation. Well, this is fine in practice, but the whole point is that the situation Abu-Manneh outlined has already shown precisely why this collective self-moblisation is going to happen, and certainly not spontaneously. This is where Lukacs is especially relevant. Because Lukacs core insight is that the proletariat can't just spontaneously organise against capitalism. What is needed is something that can take the viewpoint of the proletariat but do so in a way that transcends the reifying tendencies of capitalism. That is to say a vanguard party. In the Gramscian analysis this Party is composed of the organic intellectuals who arise from the class in the midst of struggle. And this is what Abu-Manneh's analysis really seems to lack - the need for a conscious organising element of the Palestinian people able to mobilise them against the Israelis. But of course the other problem is that the people who you would expect to be able to fulfil this role in Palestinian society are - as Abu-Manneh argued - completely compromised. This - perhaps - is why he didn't delve into this question, as it is one to which there doesn't seem to be much of an answer.

Unfortunately I missed the last talk because I needed to get home, so I can't comment on that. More stuff will follow over the rest of the week. This will reveal how horribly theory-obsessed I am, however, and no doubt I will be much looked down-upon for it.

Historical Materialism Conference 2007

2007-11-12T00:13:00.001Z

As you probably already know, this weekend was the annual Historical Materialism Conference, which I had the good fortune to attend. Unfortunately I missed Friday's sessions (prior commitments) which meant I didn't get to see Zizek (damn, damn, damn, damn) but the rest of the Conference was pretty damn good. The first thing to say is that despite the current poisonous climate on the left (and particularly as between the SWP and everyone else) the atmosphere at the Conference was really good (bearing in mind there was a mix of people from different traditions there), everything felt very comradely (although of course the interventions were occasionally slightly cutting) and everyone seemed to get along well enough. So, as is usual in the old blogosphere I thought I'd give a [not so brief] summation of those sessions which I did attend.

Saturday

I rolled in a bit late on Saturday, so I missed the first session of the day. Not that I would really have listened to it much. The next session I attended was on 'Marxism, Pashukanis and the Law'. In this session I actually 'presented a paper' on Pashukanis, Legal Nihilism and Legal Strategy, which I will probably put up here at some time (once I've cleaned it up a bit - the notes were really only intended for my consumption only). There weren't too many people here (although there were a few), which was kind of predictable, as law is not a particularly glamorous topic for Marxist analysis. There were two other contributors aside from me - Andreas Harms presented a paper on 'Commodity Form and Legal Form' and Bill Bowring presented a paper on 'International Law, Lenin and Self-Determination'. Both of the papers were of high quality and we got some good discussion in as well. It feels kind of weird summarising this session, so I'll leave it for the atendees to do so (hopefully some of them blog).

There weren't any more 'sessions' for the day, as it extended into a 'meet the editors' session and a lunchbreak, I did have some pretty interesting conversation during this period, so it was all to the good.

The next 'session' was a plenary one, featuring some rather big hitters, the talk was on 'Neo-liberalism and Neo-imperialism' and the speakers were Alex Callinicos, Robert Brenner and David McNally.

Robert Brenner
The central thrust of Brenner's argument was the relationship between the war in Iraq and the US' geopolitical strategy. Brenner argued that the Iraq war was a puzzling phenomenon which represented a real rupture with previous US strategy in content if not form. Brenner argued that during the 2000 election no one would have predicted that the Iraq war would come around in the time that it did. The Republicans seemed to have a fairly low-key foreign policy, certainly not the type of messianism that seemed to characterise them post-9/11. Furthermore, it was argued that the US had fulfilled its three key strategic aims (which it had held since World War 2); these aims were

To freeze and weaken 'communism', third world statist nationalism and statism more generally so as to allow the free movement of [US] capital throughout the globe.
Consolidate US hegemony in Japan and Europe - depriving them of their ability to disrupt the framework of international capitalism; key to this aim was depriving them of their military power and compensate them for this by providing them with security.
As a consequence of the above two aims the US intended to implement a neo-liberal agenda throughout the world, with all the consequences thereof

Brenner argued that the US was willing to do this since US capital was so powerful that it didn't require the formal protection of the US state. So on this reading the US had - according to Brenner - recognised the essential validity of the Leninist critique of imperialism - namely that monopoly-capital imperialist states vying for domination of the world's resources inevitably culminated in war, which was not conducive to the continued position of the US and global capitalism. To combat this the US entered into a 'radical Kautskyite' project of restructuring the global situation as above - the only question was whether the US was disciplined enough to continue enforcing the consensus.

All of this was encapsulated in the term 'New World Order' as used by Bush et al. This meant that there was a new approach to the international use of force:

Don't use force unless you can use massive amounts of force
Other conflicts should just be 'policing' or assymetrical conflict
Avoid committing ground troops if you can - use cruise missiles, bombs etc.

All of ths as summarised in a phrase by Madeline Allbright that 'military force' but not war should be used (which got a big laugh from the audience, but really the distinction isn't as ridicoulous as it first, certainly international law tends to distinguish between the use of military force and an armed attack or war). This was basically a neo-liberal form of imperialism and one in which generally states toed the line (the thrid world accepted the neo-liberal consensus the [not yet] axis of evil was going to the table, etc.).

So US policy in Iraq has to be understood in relation to this. It is therefore necessary to view US policy towards Iraq in this context. What the context what seem to suggest is that no US adminstration would really want regime change in Iraq, as this would be internationally counterproductive - it would be costly, destabilising and could whip up Arab resistance across the Middle East. Futhermore, the Shia could not be trusted to serve as a counterweight to Iran. This is why Saddam was not overthrown following the first Gulf War and a policy of 'containment' was pursued in relation to Iraq.

Against this backdrop the recent war in Iraq does seem to be a break (and to a lesser extent so does Afghanistan). Brenner's next task is to explain how this could happen. Brenner traces the strategic rupture to the ascendence of the neo-conservative movement within the American state apparatus and their huge influence within the State Department. It was only with 9/11 that they were able to gain control over foreign policy.

Brenner then gave an internal examination of this movement. According to Brenner the key theoretical position for the neo-conservatives is the 'fungibility of force'. By this they mean that American military domination can be used to do anything, and the neo-conservatives were interested in 'harvesting the fruits of military dominance'.

It is then necessary to understand how the neo-conservatives gained this power. Brenner roots the neo-conservative movement in the Republican far-right, who had taken over Congress in 1994. They had always had trouble gaining power and were only able to do so by pushing the foreign policy aspect. Once they had gained power they acted as a 'Shadow Cabinet' that pushed Clinton into all sort of things (like passing the Iraq Liberation Act) but they could only achieve limited success and certainly couldn't impose their domestic agenda. But 9/11 changed all of this and gave the neo-conservatives the pre-text they needed to actualise both their domestic and international agenda.

Brenner's analysis was pretty damn interesting (he's also a very good speaker). I quite liked his focus on concrete, 'micro' US politics and the way in which they interact with the global sphere, a Gramsci quote seems particularly relevant here:

Do international relations precede or follow (logically) fundamental social relations? There can be no doubt that they follow. Any organic innovation in the social structure, through its technical-military expressions, modifies organically absolute and relative relations in the international field too. Even the geographical position of a national State does not precede but follows (logically) structural changes, although it also reacts back upon them to a certain extent (to the extent precisely to which superstructures react back upon the structure, politics on economics, etc.). However, international relations react both passively and actively on political relations (of hegemony among the parties). The more the immediate economic life of a nation is subordinated to international relations, the more a particular party will come to represent this situation and to exploit it, with the aim of preventing rival parties gaining the upper hand (recall Nitti's famous speech on the technical impossibility of revolution in Italy).
Gramsci, The Modern Prince

So I actually thought that Brenner's analysis was a niecly dialectical one, similar in the way that Gramsci presented it. I also see nothing a priori wrong with the ascription of such a decisive role to a 'subjective' factors. Especially as these subjective factors are in a dialectical relationship with the objective situation (Lukacs comes immediately to mind on this point). This isn't to say that I think Brenner is entirely right, but I don't think we dismiss his analysis out of hand.

Alex Callinicos
Callinicos delivered another pretty awesome speech (you will hear this a lot, because I thought the quality of this session was absolutely stellar, even if the sweltering heat of the lecture theatre left much to be desired!). Alex presented his argument as one diametrically opposed to Brenner's. He argued that Brenner had only given us description, but no analysis - we can't just see Iraq as a random event we need a larger perpective and so must look at the historical connection between liberalism and imperialism.

Callinicos noted that the US has always eschewed formal imperialism - and continuously legitimated itself with reference to this. He looks back to the 'imperialism of the open door' - in which the role of military power was only to enforce the conditions of a liberal world economy, this of course should not - as a rule - involve the use of ground troops. The predecessor of this type of imperialism was the 'imperialism of free trade' practiced by the British Empire in the 19th century and Britain relied heavily on informal empire in Canada and China. The US has a consistent, radical version of this.

Following World War 2 the US dominated the advanced capitalist world and built up a series of institutions, but this liberalism was only ever transnational. After the collapse of the Soviet Union the US was able to convert this transnationalism into global liberalism. This means that for Callinicos there was no fundamental break in the project - and it was one vigorously pursued by the Clinton administration. For Callinicos therefore, Clinton was the true pioneer of the fungibility of military power.

But of course hegemony is always about force and consent, and they are always combined in different ways. The manner in which these methods are combined is what differentiates the neo-cons from Clinton. Thus, for Callinicos this is a matter of quantity not quality there is no rupture. Callinicos further argues that the Bush administration was radicalised post-9/11 and that in this context the neo-cons cannot be considered 'mad'. He argues that in the face of the increasing threat of China's economic power a rational argument could certainly be made out for the US using its only comparative advantage in this conjuncture that of military force. Iraq was therefore important because rising captialist powers were dependent on its oil and the US needed to assert this.

The question Callinicos thinks we need to ask is 'what are the interests of US imperialism'? When we do this we understand that the US ruling class is complex and the best strategy is always a contested question - we have to look at te question of the imposition of ideology on a world scale, and the geo-political is central to this.

All well and good - but I think Brenner responded pretty well by saying 'we don't really disagree on much'. I think this is probably the case - all they really disagree is whether there is a qualitative or quantitiative difference between Clinton and Bush (which sounds big but - meh - scales). Brenner just helps us to understand why it is that one side won the argument. But I'd actually go further than this. Callinicos seems to argue two contradictory things. On the one hand he argues that there is no rupture between Clinton and Bush, but on the other hand he seems to argue that China posed a qualitatively new threat to the US. Because of course post-WW2 there has been no capitalist power that posed a threat to the US in the way China has (although I guess the state-cap people would argue the USSR was a rival capitalist power, so maybe change the reference to post-1989?), since every other 'threat' was pretty damn friendly to the US, and were happy to allow the US maintain Pax Americana. So, on this reading, Alex seems to be arguing that the emergence of China has disrupted the 'radical-Kautskyism' of the US, since it doesn't accept the US' managerial role. But surely this would indicate a rupture, in line with Brenner.

David McNally
Although I really liked the first two talks David McNally's was far and away my favourite (I think much of the audience agreed with this too). In contradistinction to the first two McNally's position was to start from a general theoretical analysis and proceed from there. So for McNally the central point of depature was that of Marxist value theory. We need to begin from this perspective - so McNally argues - because we live in a world of alienated social relations and theory must de-fetishise them.

McNally's talk revolved around 5 arguments:

Neo-liberalism involves radically extending and intensifying the commodity form
This is achieved through 'monetarising' more and more aspects of human life
This involves the extension of primitive accumulation
This occurs on a variety of levels and entails imperialism
World money becomes decisive

So McNally's basic argument is that the phenomenon we call 'neo-liberalism' must be understood as the extension of the commodity form - not a conscious project of the capitalist class but a result of the value form itself. It is fundamentally connected to new forms of discipline, and is primarily exercised through the discipline of money - the IMF, the World Bank etc. This leads to a reversal of the partial decommodification of labour.

Dispossession is also fundamental to this (hence the importance of primitive accumulation) because land has to be converted into capital. But since this land is occupied by other people, they have to be turfed off. For this reason there is a nexus of land, violence and dispossession - which gives rise to new enclosures and modalities of class struggle arise against this. Furthermore, ecological disaster is incorporated into this, so disasters which displace people are taken advantage off (Hurricane Mitch was used to get rid of the Honduran indigenous population).

McNally further linked this process to militarisation - war is of course central in 'clearing out' areas of land, be that through death or fleeing. All of this has also led to a great rise in the industrial reserve army, which has grown massively as people have been forced out of their land in the process of dispossession.

McNally went on to criticise the approaches of David Harvey and Rosa Luxemborg, who he thinks failed to properly elaborate the 'laws' of this economic process - meaning they cannot properly theorise it. Instead they often remain at the level of (very powerful) description. [He also made a really interesting point about dialectics and subjects positing their own presuppositions - but I'll ignore that]. Further, his problem with Rosa's approach is that she assumes this form of imperialism requires permanent occupation, which is clearly not the case, as the discipline of money suffices to compel national elites to implement dispossesion.

McNally then went on to focus heavily on what he called 'world money'. By this he means the currency which serves as the 'global' medium for exchange. He argues that there has beeen an intensification of unequal currecny exchange, with the global South losing out on this. But the concept has been under theorised, and it is important, because the state that issues 'world money' will get the surplus on exchange, and so can appropriate value. This means that different nation states struggle over who is to issue world money.

McNally argues that this can be illustrated by the Euro project in the European Union, where the states of the European Union have tried to create a currency with all the characteristics of world money. McNally describes this as a form of inter-imperialist rivalry and denies that such rivalry need be militarised.

McNally ended with the argument that we need to emphasise anti-neo-liberalism and anti-imperialism highlight the need for a de-commodification of labour - that is to say the socialist revolution (which earnt him a rousing cheer).

What I really liked about McNally's talk was the way that he was able to articulate linkages between his theoretical paradigm and our practical trajectory. His analysis does explain rather well a lot of contemporary phenomena in a basic theoretical way, and I think this is to be welcomed.

Ultimately, I think all of these talks worked well, and frankly if we could have combined them all into one big talk it would have been awesome. So David sets the economic-theoretical scene for us, Alex embedded it in a broader historical context and Bob examined the specific way in which ruling classes responded to the broader need for the expansion of value. Each therefore had the merit of contributing to a totalising perspective, and with a little work we could trace the analysis of value directly into Alex's and Bob's talk. Of course this is the inherent weakness of the short talk format, but nonetheless I was impressed by this session.

OK, I've clearly gone on long enough, so I'll stop now, and do something else. Tomorrow (maybe?) I want to at least outline the talk on 'Global Flashpoints' that was also on Saturday, particualrly as I felt it offered a really interesting perspective on the Palestinian resistance.

Jack Straw, Human Rights and the 21st Century

2007-10-25T23:24:00.001Z

Just heard a speech by Jack Straw on 'Human Rights in the 21st Century', although by virtue of his position as politico the talk was of course slightly incoherent it was nonetheless interesting for several reasons. Firstly, the speech has to be read with the recent government announcement on a 'Bill of Rights and Duties', secondly the speech's tone and structure give us some idea of the general government position on rights, thirdly I think Straw's inchoate theoretical probings actually provide a useful foil for people like me. So - seeing as I had nothing else to do - I thought I'd give a rundown of what Straw said and my own opinions on the matter.

The first thing that Straw was keen to stress (and something that is quite telling about his attitude towards the Human Rights Act (HRA)) was that historically and culturally Britain is a country that has been at the heart of the human rights project. He rightly pointed out that British lawyers were at the heart of developing the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR). Further, he put forward the position that 'human rights' are a tradition that has been rooted in British life since the Magna Carta. Whilst I agree with the latter point as far as it goes I'm pretty sceptical about it. Although it seems clear that Britain's rights tradition does coincide with the content of the ECHR it certainly does not have a content of positively enumerating rights and then 'balancing' these rights with exceptions. Rather, the British tradition of 'liberty' is of one where one can do whatever is not forbidden. However, the effort to 'domesticate' human rights is one that speaks volumes about Straw's position, clearly Straw is attempted to combat the typical accusations of the press the the HRA and the ECHR are alien impositions foisted on Britain by an ever-expanding Europe.

However, as was rather predictable, Straw begins to move to our present 'context'. For Straw the post-Cold War situation has been marked with the growth of an 'enabling state' and the spread of democracy to most of Europe. But simultaneously with this there still remain a number of authoritarian states and (dum dum dum) the growth of an international terrorist movement that operates outsides the bounds of ethics and leality. He further noted that this terrorism was qualitatively different from previous forms of terrorism because:

It is truly international, with non-national terrorists operating from foreign states with foreign backing
The terrorists have access to large and powerful weapons (biological, chemical, nuclear etc.)
The aims and scope of the terrorists are very different from preceding forms of terrorism

Now, I will refrain from immediately commenting upon this particular assesment of the threat of international terrorism, at least until I discuss the relevance that Straw attributes to this. What is particularly interesting is that Straw (unlike certain members of the Government and the Opposition) doesn't seem to think that the HRA is inadequate in dealing with terrorism. In fact Straw thinks the HRA is absolutely necessary in order to 'establish and marshall the lawful bounds of our [the government's] response [to terrorism]'. Straw did seem to have some problems with particular decisions by the court - particularly concerning deporting people to places where there is a real chance they will be tortured (he prefers a substantial chance) - but in general he seems supportive of their overall approach. Personally, I actually found this to be quite gratifying, especially after hearing Dr. Reid's ranting for as long as I had to. However, Straw did note that although he wishes to maintain the 'principles' of human rights, he thinks there are some issues with the applications.

Straw proceeded at this point to utterly demolish the Tory analysis of the Human Rights Act, this was awesome and very little needs to be said on it. The most interesting part of Straw's lecture came in his amateur sociological examination of modern capitalism. Basically, Straw argued that there has been much deeper structural changes than just 9/11 which influence Britain's culture of rights; basically he pinpoints two key features:

There has been an increase in the heterogenousness of the British population and he links this to the problem of communities 'separating' out etc., obviously this would lead to a decline in a national/collective/public life
Globalisation has made people much less deferential, independent and empowered; but this has also turned people into 'consumers' peoples' primary identity therefore is not as the citizen but consumer

Straw then argued that this 'consumerism' is incompatible with 'politics' - as politics requires people consider their long-term interests, make some sacrifices for the social whole and engage in meaningful public participation. According to Straw the result of this process has been that our rights have become 'commoditised' (what a hideous, hideous word - has the man never heard of the term 'commodified'!?). Rights are exercused so as to injure others, with no concern for the 'public good' or our collective right. Furthermore, people become covetous of the rights of others, which they view as a type of 'possession'.

Whilst this is all very interesting I really don't see why we need to tie it in with globalisation. The critique that Straw advanced is one that has been advanced countless times pre-'globalisation', in fact here is a rather famous analysis which bears remarkable ressemblence to Straw's:

It is puzzling enough that a people which is just beginning to
liberate itself, to tear down all the barriers between its various sections,
and to establish a political community, that such a people solemnly proclaims
(Declaration of 1791) the rights of egoistic man separated from his fellow
men and from the community, and that indeed it repeats this proclamation
at a moment when only the most heroic devotion can save the nation, and
is therefore imperatively called for, at a moment when the sacrifice of
all the interest of civil society must be the order of the day, and egoism
must be punished as a crime. (Declaration of the Rights of Man, etc., of
1793.) This fact becomes still more puzzling when we see that the political
emancipators go so far as to reduce citizenship, and the political community,
to a mere means for maintaining these so-called rights of man, that, therefore,
the citoyen is declared to be the servant of egotistic homme, that the sphere
in which man acts as a communal being is degraded to a level below the
sphere in which he acts as a partial being, and that, finally, it is not
man as citoyen, but man as private individual [bourgeois] who is considered
to be the essential and true man.

And who made this critique? Why it was Karl Marx in his On the Jewish Question. The basic structure of this critique has been voiced by conservatives, liberals etc. What I would argue here is that the vision Straw presents to us - of civil society as a collection of egoistic individuals whose main form of contact is through clashing rights - is one which is constantly reproduced by capitalist society. The whole point is that this can't really be overcome by simply cementing new political forms over it, since these forms don't tend to touch the social relations which produce certain forms of social life and since - as Marx notes - politics is conceived only as a means of guaranteeing or affecting one's private, egostic sphere.

I would further argue in this vein that actually the whole idea of rights-based politics and rights-culture presupposes this state of affairs. This is where Straw really screws up in my view, the idea of rights being 'commoditised' (arrrgh!!!!) really seems to miss the point that the very right-form is grounded in the notion of an egoistic, individual man with an inviolable area of space, that is to say that the right-form is bound up with the commodity form:

None of the so-called rights of man, therefore, go beyond egoistic
man, beyond man as a member of civil society – that is, an individual
withdrawn into himself, into the confines of his private interests and
private caprice, and separated from the community. In the rights of man,
he is far from being conceived as a species-being; on the contrary, species-like
itself, society, appears as a framework external to the individuals, as
a restriction of their original independence. The sole bond holding them
together it natural necessity, need and private interest, the preservation
of their property and their egoistic selves.

All of this means that Straw's solution - reminding people that rights also entail duties towards others - is kind of lame. I mean, he makes a really interesting critique (or at least I read him as doing so) but simply can't go beyond the right's based framework. But the point is that unless you go beyond the rights-based framework you can't possibly transcend the notion of man as a 'consumer' as the defining characteristic of life. Inga Markovits traces this quite well in her examination of the differnce between 'bourgeois' and 'socialist' rights, as she first argues:

As individual entitlements, bourgeois rights confer
autonomy in a limited area, which then can be exercised at the discretion of
the rightholder. In a way, all bourgeois rights are modelled after property
rights: they map out territory, set up fences against prospective intruders,
or, to quote Marx, they delineate the elbow room of the individual capitalist.

(Socialist vs. Bourgeois Rights: An East-West Comparison; (1978) 45 University of Chicago Law Review 612-636 at 614)

She then fleshes out this conception arguing that it results in a focus on dispute, precision and individualism. This critique dovetails nicely with Marx's, and seems a hammer in the coffin for Straw's analysis.

So, ultimately, my real issue with this bit of Straw's speech was that he tried to present this phenomenon as something 'new', whereas it is one which he plagued capitalism since its outset. Further, his proposed solution is uniformly rubbish, and in facts would result in no change whatsover. Though actually this is something Straw seems to love to do. As a lawyer he oftens realises what the law is but then proposes some change to the law which is not a change at all.

Ok, I've written way too much, and it's all got rather rambling, but on the plus side, at least it's not about RESPECT!

RESPECT and SWP: Tunes of War

2007-10-15T15:26:00.000Z

The few, but very esteemed, readers of this blog will have probably already noticed the discussion that's going on over at Socialst Unity on the 3 relatively high profile expulsions from the SWP. It would be entirely inappropriate for the Squirrel Vanguard and especially myself, a member of an organisation so adversely affected by its association with our not particularly dear swips, not to comment on the unfolding events.

As you probably know -if you don't, shame on you- the Great Proletarian Hero Gorgeous George Galloway sent a letter to RESPECT's National Council containing sharp criticism of various RESPECT practices, regarding internal democracy and organisational efficiency. Of course, coming from Galloway, there was a sense of irony about the whole thing. However, the points raised were quite common-sense arguments that had been raised by serious socialist organisations within RESPECT like Socialist Resistance on various occasions in the past.

The letter came obviously as quite a shock to the SWP ~~Holy Synod~~ Central Committee, especially considering that it had been "leaked" to the public domain before they had a good chance to process it, come up with a line and feed it to their rank and file. The SWP replied after a few days with a piece written by John Rees. National Secretary of RESPECT and Elaine Leigh, National Treasurer, beginning with how much they regretted that Galloway's criticism had been "reproduced on various websites", that is, regretting that open and active debate would have to be had. They then proceeded to reply (in a rather weak manner) to the criticisms raised by the original letter. Alas, though, the game was on. The first signs of a rupture in what was seen as a fairly stable alliance between Gorgeous George and the SWP signaled that new political opportunities were being opened up for activists and groups within and out of RESPECT to put forward their own points of view, as well as to try and stir RESPECT towards a healthier political route. People rejoined, Salma Yaqoob published an article offering her own view of the potential development of RESPECT and more importantly, the National Council approved the proposals made by Galloway. All the relevant documents can be found under the RESPECT tag at Socialist Unity.

Immediately, the SWP leadership tried to make this look like a political battle between the left (them, socialists) and right (Galloway's group, communalists) wings of the party. In short, the SWP started attacking RESPECT using all the criticisms that have been leveled against it by the rest of the radical left since its foundation -aye, the same criticisms the swips have been rejecting as ultra leftist and whathaveyou. This was expectable as, like your average Bureaucratic Centralist organisation, the SWP cannot afford to have its One True Line criticised with legitimate arguments that might get their members thinking "hey, this is actually a valid point". The whole existence of a Bureaucratic Centralist formation rests on the legitimacy of the Central Leadership and its ability to withhold information (of all kinds) from the rank and file, allowing to perpetuate itself by preventing any political challenges.

What came as quite a surprise to me however was the expulsion of three relatively high ranking members of the SWP, two of them working for Galloway and the other one nominated for the position of National Organiser (one of the Gorgeous one's suggestions) which was supposed to complement that of the National Secretary, the post held by the Almighty Dear Swip Leader, John Rees. Said Swips were expelled for refusing to give up their posts and decline the nomination respectively. One would have thought that if the SWP cherished their control of RESPECT, they would not oppose the filling of yet another central administrative post by one of their own. Having mulled over it a bit while munching some nuts, it seems to me fairly obvious that the SWP could not be seen to accept the validity of Galloway's proposals by allowing Nick Wrack (that's his name right?) to become National Organiser, as that would in essence be an acceptance of the fact that the Light-giving Central Committee can actually be wrong, fatally compromising its prestige.

Another function served by the expulsions is that they serve as a tactic of burning bridges. The fact that the now expelled members did not submit to party discipline, refusing to give up their places indicates that a good section of the SWP rank and file might have gone native, so to speak, in RESPECT. By removing the most high profile of those from the party, the cult leadership minimises the chances of a mass defection in the event that the SWP loses the internal battle and decides to abandon RESPECT. That there is going to be a battle is of course not debatable. In fact, the SWP has already initiated operations on the ground.

It is imperative that socialists in RESPECT that do wish to see the project continue and evolve into something useful for the working class movement engage the SWP rank and file (those of them that are principled and approachable that is) in their branches and persuade them not to follow their leadership, if it chooses to abandon RESPECT. It should be clear to everyone by now that the swip leadership is not interested in building socialist unity not under its rigid and direct control. The destruction of Socialist Alliance and the split in the Scottish Socialist Party have been evidence enough of the incapability of the SWP to commit themselves to anything that is not their pet project. Whatever strategy the SWP follows if it leaves RESPECT it is bound to degenerate into nothing more than a Trot sect. Another unity project (especially one initiated by the swips, whom by now, nobody trusts) is bound to never get off the ground while an ultra left turn of going it alone and building "the Party" will lead in them meeting the fate of the WRP. In any case, it is important that the better, healthier elements within the SWP are neither allowed to be swept along by the CC, nor fall to apathy and drop out of politics altogether.

Finally, it must be said that it would be rather unfortunate for RESPECT to be rid by the SWP and then fall to Gallowayism, becoming an identity-less left opposition to Labourism, without a clear working class coordination. Any alliances socialists in RESPECT make with the filthy opportunist that is Galloway must be tactical and temporal and they should be prepared to organise themselves in a unified pole to counter any future swing to the right, whether on abortion, LGBT issues, or socialism itself.

These are my two nutshells. So long, humans.

Crazy search.

2007-10-13T11:47:00.000Z

Right, I don't usually do "Search of the week" kind of posts, but I thought this was fairly interesting.

Apparently, one of the google searches that led people to my blog was about.....

"i fucked my brothers arse stories"

Do you know where it led them?

Here.

Reckon the gods of the Internet are trying to tell us something?

Income disparity in the US reaches record levels

2007-10-12T16:22:00.000Z

According to a report released by the Internal Revenue Service, concentration of wealth amongst the richest 1% of the population in the United States has climbed to unprecedented heights by post-war standards. From Yahoo news:

The richest one percent of Americans earned a postwar record of 21.2 percent of all income in 2005, up from 19 percent a year earlier, reflecting a widening income disparity among different classes in the nation, the Wall Street Journal reported, citing new Internal Revenue Service data.

The data showed that the fortunes of the bottom 50 percent of Americans are worsening, with that group earning 12.8 percent of all income in 2005, down from 13.4 percent the year before, the paper said.

It said that while the IRS data goes back only to 1986, academic research suggests that the last time wealthy Americans had such a high percentage of the national income pie was in the 1920s.

The article cited an interview with President Bush, who attributed income inequality to "skills gaps" among various classes. It said the IRS didn't identify the source of rising income for the affluent, but said a boom on Wall Street has likely played a part.

The contradiction between the overall increase of wealth and the simultaneous increase in poverty is of course a fundamental characteristic of capitalism as Marxists have been pointing out for decades. With the neo-liberal hegemony having displaced the formerly commonly accepted Keynesian economics, this contradiction becomes of course even more sharp. The political weakness of the working class after a series of defeats, from the failure of the Miners' Strike to the catastrophic fall of the Soviet, which have resulted in the collapse more or less of the socialist movement as a strong antagonist to the bourgeoisie, has only strengthened the latter and facilitated its offensives against the workers of the world.

Of course the increasing brutality of our most absurd mode of production makes it easier for the exploited masses to see it for what it really is, a crime against human progress, and thus provides more opportunities for the building of class consciousness. On the downside (as if there weren't enough already) it seems rather improbable to me that the working classes of imperialist metropolises will develop this consciousness before a large scale collapse of global imperialism.

Green Left Weekly on Hugo Chavez

2007-10-07T17:10:00.001Z

The following is an assessment, from a Marxist perspective, of the political role of Hugo Chavez as well as the prospects for a decisive break with capitalism in Venezuela, published in the Australian Green left Weekly. I think the points it raises are fairly valid and the analysis of the author reflects my own. With the Bolivarian process picking up momentum in Venezuela and the founding conference of the PSUV only weeks away, I think it is very important to keep an eye on even the finest of developments in the country.

Hugo Chavez: Social-Democrat or Revolutionary?

Stuart Munckton

5 October 2007

Venezuela’s Bolivarian revolution, led by socialist President Hugo Chavez, has captured the imagination of people around the world and sparked widespread commentary on the nature of the process of social change under way in the oil-rich South American nation.

Named after Simon Bolivar, who liberated much of the continent from Spanish colonialism, the process of change has been aimed at overcoming the country’s underdevelopment and widespread poverty. When Chavez was elected in 1998, the country had been devastated by neoliberal policies that bled the country dry largely on behalf of US corporations, with the complicity of a corrupt Venezuelan elite.

Any discussion on this process of change inevitably centres on the role of Chavez, the revolution’s central leader. A common analysis of the politics of Chavez, the government he leads, and, in some cases, the broader revolutionary movement based on the impoverished, working people, is that they can be understood as “social democratic”. Social-democratic politics tend to be understood as seeking to implement reforms that alleviate some of the worst aspects of the profit-driven capitalist system, to the benefit of ordinary people, without breaking with capitalism itself.

Certainly, the Chavez government has implemented a wide number of reforms that in and of themselves don’t do away with capitalism — a system based on private ownership and control over the economy, run for profit and based on the exploitation of working people — but have still benefited the poor majority.

However, describing the process as social democratic misses the profoundly revolutionary nature of the struggle being led by Chavez (who in almost every speech he gives calls for the need to construct socialism and describes himself as the “subversive within Miraflores”, the presidential palace).

The line of march for the Bolivarian revolution pushed by Chavez, who elaborates on revolutionary strategy in many speeches, especially on his weekly television program Alo Presidente (when not singing folk songs), is not for the process of change to stop with reforms to Venezuela’s existing power structures. He has used reforms to weaken the political and economic power of Venezuela’s capitalist class, while at the same time strengthening the confidence and organisation of the oppressed (the workers, urban poor, campesinos, women and indigenous people) in order to replace the structures of the old society with new ones based on the oppressed themselves.

This is a very difficult struggle, with many weaknesses and internal contradictions. It involves the ongoing creation and organisation of a revolutionary movement involving millions of people, who through their mass, coordinated action are capable of creating a completely new social system. Socialism — a society based on a democratically planned economy run according to people’s needs — cannot be decreed from above by a president, nor by simply elaborating a well-written program, as it involves the transformation of social relations for millions of people.

Much analysis, especially in the corporate media but unfortunately among much of the international left as well, focuses almost exclusively on the role of Chavez as an individual. However the correct way to analyse his role is in relation to the masses that have been drawn into political motion, and ask whether Chavez and his government’s policies work to advance the organisation of the oppressed in order to break the political and economic power of the capitalist class, or whether the policies hold this back.

In some cases, claims that Chavez is a social democrat are used to attack him by sections of the revolutionary socialist movement internationally. These arguments go further than suggesting simply that the revolution hasn’t gone far enough, something Chavez himself repeatedly emphasises — for instance, while announcing a series of radical measures aimed at creating a “new revolutionary state” and that nationalisation of “strategic industries” following his re-election on an explicitly socialist platform in December, Chavez insisted the revolution had “barely begun”. Left critics suggest that Chavez and his government either have no desire for significantly more radical measures, or falsely believe that the government's approach is to implement more radical measures over the heads of the masses, which they rightly point out would be bound to fail.

However an analysis of Chavez as social democratic has also come from some outspoken in their support for the Chavez government and the process of change under way, such as the left-wing writers Tariq Ali, John Pilger and Stephen Lendman, all of whom play invaluable roles in promoting and defending the Bolivarian revolution.

While for those revolutionary socialists who wish to label Chavez a “social democrat” it is intended to highlight the perceived limitations of his politics (and by implication the mass movement that supports him), for many people the concept of genuinely social-democratic politics, based on state provision of welfare, health care and education and at least a degree of respect for people’s rights, seems a very good thing in this age of savage neoliberalism.

However understanding why the Bolivarian revolution is not simply a case of Chavez taking up a banner dropped by social-democratic parties, like the ALP and the British Labour Party, rushing to implement brutal anti-worker policies, is crucial to understanding why such parties have moved so dramatically to the right during the past few decades.

In his book Build it Now: Socialism for the 21st Century (which Chavez strongly praised on Alo Presidente and urged Venezuelans to read), Canadian Marxist Michael Lebowitz uses his experience as a policy advisor to a social-democratic New Democratic Party state government in Canada in the ’70s to show that for social democrats, the interests of the capitalist system have always come first — and if advancing the interests of working people conflicts with the needs of the system, then it is the former that gets dropped.

In the First World the post-war economic boom allowed for the creation of a welfare state and other measures that improved the lot of working people, but since the boom ended in the mid-’70s, the capitalists have attempted to wrest all of these gains back. Social-democratic parties across the board have proven willing to implement neoliberal austerity measures to this end.

In Venezuela, the advent of Chavez and the Bolivarian revolution have amounted to a break with the class-collaborationist politics of social democracy that seek to subordinate struggles by workers to the interests of capital by promoting the idea of common interests between two fundamentally irreconcilable social forces — working people and capitalists.

Within Venezuela, these politics were expressed by Accion Democratica, a political party that alternated in power with the conservative COPEI party and controlled the unions, and today is part of Venezuela’s counter-revolutionary opposition.

Although the program Chavez initially sought to implement after his election did not break with capitalism, the mild reforms aroused strident opposition from the capitalists, outraged at even minor encroachments on their privileges. The capitalist class was defeated in its attempts to overthrow Chavez when working people took the streets in April 2002 during a US-backed coup and during a lockout by bosses in December that year. This lad Chavez to conclude that the changes Venezuela desperately needed were impossible within the framework of capitalism.

However, many commentators point out that, even with the pro-people, anti-capitalist measures implemented so far, capitalism is far from abolished in Venezuela. These reforms have included the government wresting control of the oil industry; forcing foreign oil companies into joint ventures that give the Venezuelan government majority control; increasing nationalisation of “strategic industries”; a program of land reform to break up large agribusiness for the benefit of campesino cooperatives; the promotion of a “social economy” based on a massive expansion in cooperatives; and a series of measures that restrict the ability of capitalists in Venezuela to put their profits above the needs of the people — price controls, heavy restrictions on their ability to sack workers and increasing workers’ rights. In fact, despite these reforms, corporate profits have grown with the economic boom.

The key question in Venezuela is not merely the subjective intentions of Chavez, who has sparked a mass discussion on socialism in Venezuela, but the willingness and capacity of the millions of oppressed to take political and economic control out of the hands of the capitalists. Through the political battles over the last few years, this has continually increased, opening the way for increasingly radical measure. The key to the revolutionary process can be found in a book that Chavez urged Venezuelans to read during his Alo Presidente program on April 22 — The Transitional Program by Leon Trotsky, a leader of the Russian Revolution and an opponent of its Stalinist degeneration.

Written in 1938, the book is an argument for how a program of struggle for increasingly deep-going reforms that, without abolishing capitalism, make deep inroads into the capitalist system, can raise the level of consciousness and organisation of the working people and open the road to socialism.

Transitional measures aim to proceed from the mass of people’s existing level of consciousness and, by pushing measures that solve the needs of the working people while undermining capitalism, lay the groundwork for much deeper measures towards a socialist economy. Such transitional measures — such as nationalising key areas of the economy, introducing elements of workers’ control and shortening the working week with no loss of pay — can act as a bridge between the existing capitalist system and an increasingly socialist economy under the control of the working people and run according to their needs.

The transitional approach seeks to find ways to draw masses of people into political activity and increasingly radicalise the broadest layers so they are willing and able to fight for even more radical measures. This explains why, at the same time as Chavez promotes policies increasingly attacking capitalist interests, he continues in his speeches to urge the capitalist class to join the revolutionary project. Some revolutionary socialists, who already understand that the capitalists will never accept the measures implemented by Chavez, see this as evidence of social-democratic politics. However, Chavez is not speaking to those already convinced of socialist revolution, but to the millions of people in Venezuela, including the more than 4 million who voted for the opposition — the overwhelming majority of whom are not capitalists but middle and working class people misled into backing the pro-capitalist opposition.

An example of this came on June 2, when Chavez addressed hundreds of thousands of supporters in a demonstration to defend his government from attacks by the US-backed, right-wing opposition. Claiming his government had no plans to “eliminate” the Venezuelan capitalist class, Chavez added: “If the Venezuelan bourgeoisie continues to desperately attack us, utilising the refuges it has left, then the Venezuelan bourgeoisie will continue to lose these refuges one by one!

“This message is for the Venezuelan bourgeois class. We respect you as Venezuelans, you should respect Venezuela, you should respect the homeland, you should respect our constitution, you should respect our laws. If you don’t do this … we will make you obey the Venezuelan laws!”

Presenting the struggle in such a way aims to ensure it is the actions of Venezuela’s capitalists themselves that expose them and provide the justification in the eyes of millions of people for more radical measures that aim to overturn capitalism completely.

This mass action-based approach is the essence of a genuinely revolutionary strategy, one that applies in all countries, although according to national conditions. It is necessary to understand that while the revolution is a work in progress, its aim and trajectory are not simply tinkering with the system along social-democratic lines, but its abolition and replacement with socialism.

[Stuart Munckton is a member of the Democratic Socialist Perspective, a Marxist tendency in Australia’s Socialist Alliance. Visit http://www.dsp.org.au for more information.]

Post-reproductive rights?

2007-10-05T12:55:00.000Z

Right, a while ago, in fact, maybe a few months ago, there was a conversation on the SSP online forums about something pertaining to reproductive rights. As this was quire boring, since pretty much everybody agreed with each other, the conversation gradually branched out to the question of whether a man should be expected to provide for his biological child if he had made it clear during the time that the mother was pregnant, that he did not wish to be the child's father and would have preferred the mother to terminate the pregnancy. Obviously, the ultimate choice over whether there is an abortion of not belongs to the woman, never mind what religious nutjobs who care about the "rights" of the father want to believe. But after the child is born, is there a convincing argument to support the idea that the biological father should have any kind of legal responsibility to the child and also, is this argument constructed on a moral basis acceptable to socialists?

I think not. I believe that the way one approaches the right of women to choose determines to a great extent their attitude to this issue as well. As a socialist, and a Marxist one at that, I do not support the right to an abortion because of any metaphysical notions of any kind, but because of the very objective, material reality that it is only the woman who suffers the physical costs of pregnancy and therefore it is only her who has a moral right to decide whether she will, or will not suffer them to their full extent. The father's ("father" is a rather shaky notion in itself, but I might discuss this in another post) moral right can only be restricted to expressing an opinion on the matter. For me, this is pretty straightforward stuff where notions of life (I don't consider an unborn child alive anyway) need play no part.

But after the child is born, that is, leaves the woman's body, the woman ceases to have a physical connexion to it and its fate is thus no longer a matter of physical self-determination. From the moment the woman, exercising her right to choice, decides to carry the child to term, she also of necessity accepts the implications and responsibilities this choice entails (this does not mean that the mother should necessarily keep the child after it is born, but that it will be born and that it will be up to her to choose what to do with it, should the biological father have forfeited his rights over same). The attitude of the biological father must necessarily be one of the variables the woman considers when she chooses to keep the child. If she doesn't care about what the biological father thinks and wants to have and keep the child anyway, then fair enough, she should receive support from the state to raise the child as comfortably as possible. If she agrees with the father but believes that "killing babies" is wrong then that's also ok, she can have the child and then give it up for adoption. If she absolutely wants her child to grow up with its biological father when he does not to be one, then the rational choice is to abort.

Forcing the father by legal means to maintain any short of relation to the child would essentially be a violation of physical self-determination similar to what we want to prevent by defending women's right to choose. Forcing someone (man or woman) to direct their physical activity in the form of labour, or the fruits thereof, towards something they do not want to is, social norms aside, in essence no different to forcing someone to carry a child to term (indeed, pregnancy lasts 9 months, supporting a child to maturity lasts at least 18 years) and is actually the same alienation of labour we as socialists claim to stand against.

The above was a quite stream of consciousness-like post, so I would appreciate comments from everybody, especially those of you who happen to be female and more well versed into the issues surrounding reproductive rights than myself. Cheerio.

Uhm, this is just wrong, ok?

2007-09-29T18:58:00.000Z

Dear Daily Record,

Please don't do this ever again.

Kthanx

No comments.

Elections in Greece: Positive results for the left

2007-09-27T21:14:00.000Z

The following is my take on the recent elections in Greece. It will be also appearing on Emancipation and Liberation soon, but I thought I'd post it here as well, because I know you were waiting for it.

That the Greek parliamentary election of the 16th of September would result in a significantly different composition of the legislature than the one Greeks are used to was more or less common knowledge. Three and a half years of extreme government incompetence and quite shocking scandals such as the telephone surveillance case[1] and the abduction of Pakistani men by British agents[2], both having serious implications on national sovereignty, as well as increasing incidents of police brutality, especially during the student protests against the proposed educational reform (on which I'll comment in another post), ensured that support for the conservative government of Nea Demokratia (ND, New Democracy), would retreat significantly from the 45.36% of the vote tallied in 2004 and the strong absolute majority of 165 out 300 parliamentary seats this guaranteed. Moreover, the fact that the whole of the rather short campaigning period took place under the shadow, or better, under the eerie glare of a rather large part of the country being ravaged by wild fires which were anything by accidental, made certain that there would be a significant protest vote gained by the far left and, to a lesser extent, the far right.

Both of the above happened more or less as expected, with ND suffering a loss of 3.52% and 13 seats, tallying 2,995,321 votes (41.83%), which significantly decreased their parliamentary power, leaving them with a very slight majority of only 152 seats. Meanwhile, the combined far left vote increased by 4.04% to 13.19%. KKE (the Communist Party) gathered an impressive 8.15% (+2.26) of the vote returning 22 MPs (+10), while SYRIZA (Coalition of the Radical Left), with 5.04% (+1.78) returned 14 MPs (+8). In large cities, the gains made by the left were significantly higher, with, for example, KKE reaching 14.55% in the V' Peiraios district and SYRIZA 9.27% in A' Athinon. On the opposite end of the spectrum, the far right LAOS (Popular Orthodox Rally) entered Parliament for the first time, tallying 3.80% (+1.61) and winning 10 seats.

What was more surprising is the serious setback suffered by PASOK (Panhellenic Socialist Movement, the Greek equivalent of the Labour party). Support for the SPD-style Social Democrats retreated below the level of the 2004 election to 38.10 % (102 MPs, -2.45%), the lowest in more than 20 years[3].

The emerging picture is that of a clear shift of popular support away from the two large bourgeois parties towards radical smaller forces. Whether this is just an isolated protest vote incidence or the beginning of a more long term trend pointing to an intensification of class struggle remains to be seen. What is certain however is that Greek society has become far more receptive to more radical politics meaning that an increasing amount of space will be opening up for the far left to organise in the near future. Before going into what the immediate tasks of the Greek left are, it would be useful to provide some background on the parties currently in Parliament which it would be fair to say, will be the prime forces shaping Greek politics in the next four years (unless of course a revolution happens, workers councils spontaneously spring up and the dictatorship of the proletariat is established, but I wouldn't be getting my hopes up for that).

The Parties

Nea Demokratia

Nea Demokratia was founded by Konstadinos Karamanlis, the first post-dictatorship Prime Minister of Greece. It is the traditional party of Greek capital and its satellite strata. While international commentators generally refer to them as conservatives, a more correct parallel would be continental European Christian Democracy. Unlike most centre-right parties, it is not a group of right wing liberals, but on the contrary, includes a variety of rightists from David Cameron like "modern" fluffy conservatives, to intensely ideological, ultra religious xenophobic cavemen like the former Minister of Public Order, who used to refer to riot police as the “praetorian guard of the country”. The Party is currently led by Kostas Karamanlis, the founder's nephew who seems to have been placed at the helm more for his name than his political skills.

Right after emerging victorious, Karamanlis restructured the government, removing extremely unpopular ministers like the aforementioned Public Order brute from their posts (in fact, the Public Order ministry was abolished as an independent body and was incorporated into the Ministry of the Interior, Public Administration and Decentralisation), in an obvious effort to rebuild the party's citizen friendly image. However, this does not in any way mean that there will be any large scale retreat from the aggressive neo-liberal policies ND has been pursuing against the exploited working strata of Greek society with the tacit support of PASOK. Nevertheless, its significantly weakened position in Parliament is bound to make the party far more responsive to social movement pressure.

PASOK

Above, I described PASOK as SPD-style social-democrats. The reason I did so is that, like the SPD, PASOK has been on an increasingly right wing trajectory without however having been transformed (yet) into a fully fledged neo-Thatcherite party like New Labour. The similarities however, end here. Unlike both Labour and SPD, PASOK did not arise organically out of the struggle of the working class, it did not emerge as the political wing of the trade union movement and was definitely never a radical socialist political force. That is not to say that, it is not, like Labour, the party were most of the working class is, but that its apparatus is not composed by cadres of a proletarian character.

The party, or movement as they style themselves, was founded following the collapse of the Colonel Dictatorship in late 1974 by Andreas Papandreou, son of the prominent classical liberal politician Georgios Papandreou. From the very beginning, the social basis of PASOK lay in the radical wings of the petty and national bourgeoisie. Its early policy platform was clearly populist left nationalist, and in that manner, they share a lot with the SNP, although Greece's independent status makes it difficult to draw further parallels. However, like the SNP, precisely because PASOK lacks a deep, organic working class basis, it has been able to engage in a series of political u-turns, like dropping withdrawal from both NATO and EU as a policy in the period following its first electoral victory in 1981. For this same reason however, it is also far easier for the working class sections that do support PASOK to abandon it.

The current leader of the "movement" is Giorgos Papandreou, son of the founder, who acceded to the presidency shortly before the 2004 elections, in an effort to rebuild party popularity after 8 years of neo-liberal "modernisation" under Costas Simitis had severely eroded its support basis. Despite employing populist rhetoric and conjuring his father's ghost on every opportunity, Papandreou has failed to stop PASOK's bleeding of support to the left. After defeat in the latest elections had become evident, he announced that he would be seeking reelection as president, however, shortly after that, Evagelos Venizelos, who while popular within PASOK, is considered to be on the conservative wing of the party, also announced his candidacy. Elections are to be held sometime in November. I will return to their significance for the left later.

LAOS

LAOS is a strange case. While it would be fair to say that it is a far right wing party, its perception by many as fascist is rather mistaken. LAOS was founded by former ND member and MP, Giorgos Karatzaferis, following his expulsion in 2000. Since then, LAOS has engaged in a number of extremely haphazard political maneuvers, adopting policies in what seems to be an entirely random manner. Its contradictions are evident on a daily basis, with prominent members promoting books that supposedly debunk the "myth" that there was any homosexuality in ancient Greece, while Karatzaferis himself has stated that homophobia must be fought and voted in favour of the European Parliament resolution on homophobia in Europe. Furthermore, while LAOS maintains that there are too many immigrants in Greece, Karatzaferis has often rejected nationalism as an idea, describing himself as a patriot and an enemy of globalization instead. Further, while members of LAOS have often made anti-semitic comments, Karatzaferis has signed the EU motion on anti-semitism[4] while official party literature denounces marginalisation on any grounds and makes it clear that LAOS respects all nations and religions. If anything, LAOS has only diluted the far right in Greece, pulling it towards a more moderate direction, even though its parliamentary group contains some of the most virulently reactionary elements in the Greek political scene.

While there is definitely a difference between what LAOS as a party puts forward and what its members actually believe (LAOS includes former members of extreme right organisations that have often been involved in violent attacks against immigrants and left activists), it should be remembered that small parties can only have a political effect on society through the issues they raise and the arguments they put forward, rather than what they actually practice, simply because they are not in a position to actually do anything of any importance. The situation might have been more problematic if LAOS had managed to get into office by entering a coalition with ND had the latter not established an absolute majority in Parliament, but this is a possibility we need not presently concern ourselves with.

What is more, the percentage of the electorate that was attracted to LAOS is almost certainly not made up of potential fascists and virulent nationalists, but by less conscious exploited strata, as well as disgruntled ND voters. Its electoral campaigning was a classical example of patriotic populism, attacking "globalisation", irresponsible bankers, foreign interests etc. while also criticising the government on its handling of "national matters" like the FYROM name question.

KKE

The Communist Party is the oldest party in Greece, founded in 1918. It has a very rich history of both outstanding heroism and shameful class treachery. Unlike most European CPs, it did not turn to reformism and social-democracy after the fall of the Soviet Union. Instead, the hardliners who marginally dominated the Central Committee purged the party of "revisionist", or "renewing", depending on which side you are on, elements which formed a large part of the apparatus. The expelled members went on to form Syn, on which I will comment below. Then, KKE also suffered a split in its youth wing, with the majority of the membership leaving to form another party, which has now become completely marginal.

Despite these major setbacks, KKE managed to rebuild itself and its youth, becoming the largest far left political force, with more than 10,000 members. Its success is largely based on its insistence on explicitly class based politics, its focus on staunch opposition to all imperialist projects, both NATO and EU inspired as well as its diligent participation in all workers' struggles.

On the downside, KKE is extremely bureaucratic, leaving little, if any room for initiative to its grassroots activists. It is extremely sectarian, refusing to cooperate with other left wing groups and parties despite the fact that it could use its political muscle to become the driving force behind left regroupment in Greece. However, it does show some signs that it could be moving towards a healthier political path, with its official rejection of stage theory some time ago being the prime example. Unfortunately, the very strict model of "democratic" centralism the party adheres to makes it extremely difficult to discern its internal political developments.

SYRIZA

The Coalition of the Radical Left, is, as its name implies, not an actual party but an electoral coalition. It is quite peculiar however in that it is not composed of groups of roughly equal political weight, but is instead dominated by one party, Synaspismos, or Syn, around which a few marginal organisations have grouped. These are: the Communist Organisation of Greece (Maoist), International Workers' Left (a split from the Greek SWP), Red (a split from the latter), Movement for the United Action of the Left, Active Citizens, Ecological Intervention, Renewing Ecological Communist Left, Popular Unions of Bipartisan Left Groups, and the Democratic Social Movement. Apart from the latter, it would be fair to say that no one, other than left wing activists, has ever heard of these groups. It is thus very unlikely that anyone, apart from their members, intended to vote SYRIZA in order to support them. It would be safe therefore to regard the growth of support for SYRIZA as a coalition, as a growth of support of Synaspismos as a party. In fact, "Synaspismos" is Greek for "coalition", suggesting that many of SYRIZA's voters are not aware of the distinction between the party and the coalition. Thus, the politics of Syn form the core of all SYRIZA policies, even if the smaller groups maintain some influence on their content.

Synaspismos itself was formed in the early 90s after the aforementioned expulsions from the Communist Party. The expelled members joined up with the Eurocommunists that had split from the party in the late 60s. As is the case with most Eurocommunist and reformed CP formations, Synaspismos's social basis was far less proletarian in composition, with the party being strongest amongst the more privileged strata of the working class as well as the radicalised elements of the middle classes. Naturally then, Synaspismos conducts its politics with little, if any reference to class as the fundamental cleavage in society, while socialism is rarely mentioned as the party's ultimate political goal, with abstract references to a "more just society" being made instead. This movementist, RESPECT like approach is entirely in line with Syn's leadership plan to construct a broad, left of PASOK alliance, as in opposed to an explicitly socialist political force. While there's is an argument (correct or wrong) to be made for such a strategy in countries like England, on the basis that the political level of the working class is not high enough to allow the growth of a radical class-based socialist party, in the context of a society that is obviously receptive to open class politics as is shown by the growth of KKE, this is nothing sort of reactionary.

In its defense, Syn has a far healthier internal political structure/culture than that of the KKE, which, allowing the formation of platforms is fairly similar to that of the SSP. However, the ideological cohesion of Syn is far weaker than the SSP's even before the split. The SSP suffered from including socialists with very contradictory ideas of how socialists should conduct their struggle, but the idea of socialism as a society that is a complete negation of capitalism was never disputed. Syn on the other hand includes in its ranks anyone from orthodox Marxists to radical social-democrats. This is a rather insoluble contradiction that has often led to embarrassing incidents of Syn members from different factions opposing each other on tv panels.

I hope that the above has given the reader a more or less solid idea of the nature of the prime political parties in Greece; we can now proceed to examine the prospects opened up for the left by the electoral result.

Prospects and Tasks

While both the retreat of the main bourgeois parties and the growth of the radical left were substantial, it is important to remember that they were not nearly as great as the scale of the destruction wrought by the summer fires should have caused them to be. This is not the place to discuss how bourgeois hegemony maintains itself even in the most adverse circumstances. It is important however to realise that if the left does not remain persistent in its resolute opposition to neo-liberal offensives, as well as organise effective resistance against them, this breakthrough might very well be for naught. While a collapse of the scale of the SSP vote is extremely unlikely, simply for reasons of historic loyalty to KKE of a sizable portion of the left, a retreat to the levels of 2004 would still be very disappointing.

In the immediate future, there will be a number of issues that will require swift action to be taken by both KKE and Syn-SYRIZA. Firstly, the attitude of the government towards the communities destroyed by the fires will surely cause much disillusionment and aid will most definitely be insufficient, inefficient and tokenistic. Further, it is certain that a large part of the burned areas will be given to land developers to build on. Infact, this has already started in some areas. There will definitely be significant local opposition to this and it is imperative for both left poles to be visibly present. Unfortunately, given the rural nature of said areas and their long conservative tradition, it is unlikely that a strong left current will be established there. It is however important that the left is present, if only to help raise its national profile, as the destruction of the Peloponese is regarded as a serious matter by the whole of Greek society.

Second, after having restructured itself, the government of Karamanlis will surely embark on an offensive of "modernising" reforms that will be directed against the working class. The one that is bound to have the highest profile, at least in the immediate future, is the proposed revision of the constitution to amend article 16, guaranteeing the public and universal character of education in the country. The student movement that shook Greece last year, although bound to be significantly demobilised and weakened after a whole summer of catch up classes and exam periods, will surely be brought to the forth once again. While the movement suffered from the lack of a correct political orientation, being basically led by corrupt elements of the student union and professor bureaucracy, which saw the "framework-law" reforms - which has since been passed - as an attack against their privileges (which they were), there is little doubt as to the need to fight against the proposed constitutional revision, which would almost certainly destroy what little quality public education in Greece has. The student movement therefore will offer a good chance for the left to build and organise.

Finally, the succession struggle in PASOK will inevitably cause much upheaval within the working masses that still support them. If the populist Panadreou was unable to stop PASOK's bleeding of support despite his overtures to the left, then Venizelos, the likely winner of the contest, who is a far more thoroughly bourgeois politician will only increase the rate of decline. It is thus more likely that PASOK will soon start to fight ND on its own ground. Bizarrely, this might actually work for them, as ND will most likely move to the right on token issues as pressure from LAOS increases and since the difference between PASOK and ND is almost entirely tokenistic, it is not improbable that the more centre oriented ND support base will move towards PASOK. In any case, a huge space will be opened to the left of PASOK that the left should move to occupy. In this respect, the president of Syn and SYRIZA, Alekos Alavanos is entirely correct in remarking that radical social democracy should be approached by anti capitalist forces[5]. However, the Syn leadership is wrong in trying to achieve this by means of finding common ground, when it clearly has the political weight to pull the left of PASOK elements towards an anti-capitalist direction, meaningfully different to the dead end of anti-neoliberalism. Any alliance of Syn with the radical social democracy on their grounds will only strengthen its internal social democratic factions and increase pressure for entering a coalition government with PASOK, a possibility which has never been rejected in principle by the Syn leadership.

Conclusion: The problem of left bipolarity and the KKE or Syn dilemma

As long as this division within the radical left persists, any resistance against the increasing aggressiveness of the bourgeoisie will be severely fettered by sectarianism, while any hope of it turning into an actual working class offensive will remain just that, a hope. While it is true that responsibility for kicking off the project of meaningful left unity lies with KKE as both the larger and the more radical force of the two (and unfortunately, the most sectarian of all), Syn-SYRIZA should be criticised on the basis that it does not engage in any action that might make the KKE Central Committee more open towards the prospect of rapprochement. Specifically, Syn's complete lack of principled opposition to the European Union's directives (in fact, the nature of its opposition amounts to critical support), must be abandoned in favour of a more clear cut rejection of the whole project like its position on NATO. Further, the radical wing of Syn should try to pull the party towards a more class oriented approach to politics, away from its current new left movementism, which is a sure recipe for dilution of principles. It is Syn that must provide the initiative for left regroupment on a radical socialist basis, even in the form of an electoral pact, as any such move is unlikely to come from KKE.

This situation creates an almost insoluble dilemma for non aligned Greek leftists. Electorally, one has to choose between a mass party with explicit class, socialist politics which is however totally bureaucratic and sectarian, and a smaller loose coalition of vaguely radical left forces without a clear political orientation which could in the future possibly enter a bourgeois coalition. There is no easy solution to this problem and one has to choose based as much on personal convictions and feelings as on objective political analysis. Those of us who follow the Greek left without being actively involved in it, can only hope that the self-activity of the working masses will at some point force their vanguard groups to get their act together.

[1] For a fairly good piece on this, see the wikipedia entry: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greek_telephone_tapping_case_2004-2005

[2] Greek society was in the dark about this, until it was uncovered by the BBC. See here: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/4526502.stm

[3] See the Ministry of Interior, Public Administration and Decentralisation website for an analytical breakdown of electoral results. http://www.ekloges.ypes.gr/pages_en/index.html

[4]The content of the motion can be found here: http://www.europarl.europa.eu/sides/getDoc.do?pubRef=-//EP//TEXT+MOTION+B6-2005-0079+0+DOC+XML+V0//EN&language=EN

[5] Interview of Alekos Alavanos on NET (in Greek): http://www.syn.gr/gr/keimeno.php?id=7563

Farooq Tariq going underground

2007-09-24T22:22:00.001Z

Farooq Tariq is having problems with the Pakistani authorities yet again

Going underground

By: Farooq Tariq

I was avoided another arrest last night on 23rd September 2007. I had just returned home at 11pm from Toba Tek Singh, a five hour drive from Lahore. I am planning to contest general elections for national parliament from Toba Tek Singh, my home city. When the bell rang, I was sure it is police again. My partner Shahnaz asked me who can come at this time of the night. Our children have just gone to sleep, but Mashal (14) our daughter got up as well with the bell ringing constantly.
I asked Shahnaz to check who they are and if police is there do not tell that I am at home. We had decided that I will not be arrested this time easily. Police has to work and work little harder to catch me. If I am at home and police comes, they have to break the doors to get me out. I will not voluntarily come out. I was also sick and tired of police knocking my door again and again.
Shahnaz went out and she was tricked by the police to open the door. They did not tell her that it is police; instead they said friends of Farooq. But when she opened the door, she found dozens of police men in uniform and they asked where I am. Shahnaz who has now become used to police arrivals at our door step, told them courageously that he is not here and he is in Toba Tek Singh. My daughter Mashal was also with her watching the drama.
They did not insist to enter home instead asked my mobile number, which was given to him. The police officer connected my number and my cell started ringing at home, Mashal immediately felt the danger and ran inside to stop the phone. The running of Mashal inside home could have convinced the police officer that I am at home but he did not force himself inside the door and said thanks to Shahnaz.
Shahnaz closed the door but police remained there for some time. I as watching from inside home fearing of police climbing the walls and break in. But it seems that police officer was just doing his duty and not really interested to go any further. It was the same police officer with his team who had arrested me last time on June 4th 2007 from my same home.
I then sent SMS to the friends and press informing that I just avoided the arrest this time. Police is arresting most of the activists from the opposition parties and this time including the main leadership of the opposition parties. This practice is to avoid more demonstrations against General Musharaf who wants him to be reelected again for the next five years from a parliament who was elected for five years term. This parliament has elected General Musharaf with the help of the religious fundamentalists in 2002. But this time the religious parties do not want him to be elected and has decided with other political parties to resign from the parliament instead of electing him.
The regime has arrested dozens of activists and leaders of different political parties and is raiding houses of more activists like me. I do not want to be arrested this time and has decided to remain active but to avoid arrest as well.
Going to jail again and again is no good and comrades and friends have made jokes and jokes about me. Whenever, I meet a friend, he asks me when have you come out (jail) or when are you going in?
My son Abdullah (7) told me this morning that it now my turn to play „find and hide‰ game with police. When he was only one year old, police came to arrest me at my home and at the time both Shahnaz and myself were not at home, when Razia, the women who was taking care of Abdullah told police that Farooq is not at home, he said ok where is his son, I will take him with me and then Farooq will definitely come to present his arrest, a normal practice by many police come in Pakistan. He did not know that my son is only one year. Razia went inside home and brought Abdullah outside and told the police officer in anger, yes, you can arrest him, he is son of Farooq. Looking at Abdullah, the police officer was ashamed and said sorry and went back not come again for some time.
When I was living in rented place, my house boss was arrested and my office boss was arrested instead of me when police was unable to find me at home and at office. I went to one friend who was editor of Daily Jang to help the release of my home and office bosses, when he heard, he advised me to leave the buggers with police, and told me that at least you do not have to pay rent anymore.
So a new game has started with police, I will attend the demonstration on 27th September alongside with the advocates in any case and till then will try that police should not get hold of me.
So be ready for a new possible solidarity campaign please.

Farooq Tariq
general secretary
Labour Party Pakistan
40-Abbot Road Lahore, Pakistan
Tel: 92 42 6315162 Fax: 92 42 6271149 Mobile: 92 300 8411945,

labourpartypk@yahoo.com www.laborpakistan.org www.jeddojuhd.com

SSP statement on victory against cuts

2007-09-03T20:13:00.000Z

Comrades from England (and the world) may not be aware of the plan of the SNP/Lib-Dem controlled Edinburgh City Council to axe about 22 schools and nurseries as well as implement further cuts that would result in job losses and other things that nobody on the left likes. Well, whether you were aware of it or not, you will be happy to learn that the SNP decided to scrap the plan after a spontaneous movement of students and parents rocked their shocks. The Lair brings you the SSP statement on this very heartening victory

Under an onslaught of protest from school students, community activists, parents and trade unionists, SNP councillors on Edinburgh City Council have been forced to end their support for a devastating series of schools, nurseries and community centre closures.

A general strike of UNISON members employed by the council brought services to a standstill on Thursday 23rd of August, heavily supported by school students and community campaigns such as Save Our Old Town and Save Meadowbank.

This was followed by a city wide protest of school students on Friday 31st that saw children from primary to secondary taking protest action.
Withdrawal of SNP support for the closures effectively ends the immediate threat to essential community resources.

Anti cuts campaigners are jubilant after a highly effective Edinburgh wide campaign was rapidly mobilized with the support of existing community campaigns and hundreds of new activists.
Former MSP Colin Fox and UNISON activist Catriona Grant played a key role in brining together trade union and community activists.
The SSP was also represented amongst the school students by Lothians Scottish Socialist Youth organiser Sarah Higgins.

Yet again the people of Edinburgh have taken protest action in defence of public services and for people, not profit.

The previous Labour administration was beaten back in its attempt to privatise the entire municipal housing stock by a grass roots tenants campaign that defeated a multi million pound advertising blitz.
Now Edinburgh communities have again taken action that has defeated attempts to dismantle municipal facilities.

The SSP has been at the heart of the movement to defend public services in Edinburgh and the Lothians since our inception nearly a decade ago and are proud to be a continuing part of the people’s battle to defend the basic principle of public services; for people not profit.

Capital Inferno. Wildfires in Greece

2007-09-02T14:00:00.000Z

The Lair is now open. The Squirrel Vanguard decided to bring you quite a bombastic opener for this year; we hope you will appreciate it.

The following article I found somewhere in the endless dusty corridors of the world wide web. It deals with the recent wildfires that ravaged (and are still ravaging) a great part of Greece, burning villages and killing more than 65 people. The author used a number of sources to put together the puzzle of what can only be described as a coordinated offensive by capital, foreign and domestic. References are to Greek articles, although I translated their titles into English in order to provide some context. Remember folks, the Lair never lies to you.

Greece under attack by tourist-developer cartels

In the last week of August of 2007, Greece underwent the most enormous catastrophe in her history since the restoration of Parliamentary Democracy in 1974. Western and Southern Peloponnese, the “heart” of both ancient and modern Greece, as well as other places like Athens’ suburbs and Evia Island, have been totally destroyed by wildfires. 65 people have been killed (among them was a mother with her four young children), several more are missing, numerous villages have been wiped off the map and millions of acres of forest or agricultural land have been converted into ashes.

Apart from the loss of human lives, the destruction wrought by the arsonists will have far reaching effects that will surface in due time. The devastation of forests will result in an overall rise of temperature, floods in the winter, corrosion of the ground and landslides. Furthermore, the razed areas will be affected economically by a tremendous rise of unemployment, a huge emigration of their native population to Athens or other big cities, while the whole of Greece will face an overall decline in agricultural output, since those areas were key producers of vegetables, fruits and, most importantly, olive oil.

Undoubtedly, a major crime has been committed. A crime, however, that is not spontaneous, but premeditated. The 290 different centers of fires that broke out in Peloponnese definitely point to arson.

In order to locate the arsonists, one has to look at the strong financial interests which have been pressuring for the “development” of the destroyed areas for several years up to now.

The Ionian Road

The construction of a national highway in Peloponnese under the name “Ionian Road” – specifically the south part of Ionian Road, as Ionian Road is extended in Central and Northern Greece too – connecting her four major cities, Korinthos, Patra, Pirgos, and Kalamata, was conceived as an idea in 1996, but it was postponed mainly due to the 2004 Olympic Games in Athens which absorbed most of the state’s resources. The new right-wing government of Nea Dimokratia promised in 2004 to start building the highway soon. At last, its construction was auctioned in July of 2007 to the native and multinational construction companies Vinci–El.Technodomiki–TEV, Aktor, J&P Avax, Hochtief and Athina, and it was supposed to start right away, with the prospect of being completed in 2011[1].

The Ionian Road would secure road access to the enormous tourist facilities that were being built in Western Peloponnese, and those that were still being planned at the time. The completion of the Ionian Road ought obviously not to take more than the required time; therefore, its construction shouldn’t be interrupted by “aggravating” forests, biotopes and ecosystems as well as environmental and community activists. the Nea Dimokratia MP for the Elea region of Western Peloponese G. Kontogiannis, had stated clearly, as early as 2004: “The political leadership of the Ministry of Public Works believes that the Ionian Road has to proceed rapidly so as to make up for the delays of the last few years…”[2].

Ionian Road was originally scheduled to cross over places of high environmental significance, such as Lake Kaiafa in Zaharo area, which had been included in the Natura 2000 European catalogue. As the chairman of Zaharo’s Environmental Protection League, Mr. Agrapidas said in July, “The combination of ground and lacustrine ecosystems as well as their co-existence with antiquities, mythological places and the thermal fountain renders Lake Kaiafa ecosystem a unique cluster that has been declared an archaeological site and a landscape of special natural beauty”.

The prefectorial council of Elea, in which the aforementioned area falls under, refused to cede Lake Kaiafa for the construction of Ionian Road, despite the strong pressure by the Ministry of Public Works. According to Mr. Agrapidas’s claims, there was an alternative route for the highway, not crossing the area; nevertheless it might have been longer and of higher cost[3]. At last, the Ministry succumbed to the demands of the locals and decided on the 24th of July to divert Ionian Road towards another direction, far away from the lake, so that its fragile ecosystem would not be harmed[4]. However, a mere month later, the area around Lake Kaiafa was burned to the ground. The constructors of the highway will now face little resistance in their exploitation of the devastated area.

Strangely enough, the centers of most of the fires that broke out there coincide perfectly with the original plan for the Ionian Road! Compare the NASA satellite photograph of the Peloponese burning to the Ionian Road plan.

Other Interests in the Western Peloponese

Lake Kaiafa had also attracted the attention of other benevolent investors and developers. In 2003, the former Deputy Minister of Economics D. Georgakopoulos of the former government of the “socialist” PASOK, was charged with pressuring the Domanial Service of Elea, the region that he was elected in, to declassify Lake Kaiafa as a protected territory in order for it to be granted to big tourist corporations for the development of hotel complexes and golf courses. He had also presented a relevant report according to which an investment of 150 million euros would be made on Lake Kaiafa for the “modernization” of spas and other facilities of the area[5], which referred to the ecologists who protested against the plans as “ecoterrorists”[6]. Now that the beautiful biotope around the lake has been burnt up, the “investors” and their political agents won’t need to counter any bureaucratic barrier or “ecoterrorism” in order to declassify it.

Apart from Lake Kaiafa, many other places in Western Peloponnese through which the Ionian Road will pass, are also considered to be “ideal” for the development of tourist businesses. For instance, in the Messinia region in the South-West of Peloponnese more than one billion euros are going to be invested in 11 big hotel blocks of 5 stars, luxurious summerhouses, sea therapy and spa facilities, a seasonal center as well as 4 huge golf courses. The major investor in this area seems to be a notorious Greek ship-owner, V. Konstantakopoulos, who runs Costamare Shipping SA, based in Panama, but strong multinational corporations seem to operate alongside him; Kempinski multinational corporation which is mostly active in South-Eastern Asia is going to exploit the sea therapy and spa facilities and a famous American company has undertaken the exploitation of the golf courses[7]. Konstantakopoulos has appropriated enormous areas of agricultural land with olive trees, some times without the consent of their owners, as well as land in areas alongside the Navarino lagoon (also protected by NATURA 2000) openly defying the law. The few “bureaucratic” problems considering the permissions of Archeological and Forest Service that had remained were overcome after his visit to the presidential palace and his meeting with the Prime Minister K. Karamanlis, in 2005. He also secured 45% subsidization by the state for his investments[8]! And now, that much of the Messinia district has been consumed by the (not so) wildfires, he definitely feels even luckier as he can extend his business to the devastated area expropriating the land he needs in depreciated prices.

Another place in Western Peloponnese that is considered by the “investors” to be a bargain is Katakolo in Elea district. In late August, the famous international business association World Trade Center Group sent their representative, David H. Lee, to Katakolo and ratified an agreement with state officials for the “development” of the area[9].

The region around ancient Olympia has also been the subject of potentional exploitation. Many domestic and foreign “investors” have proposed deploying the surrounding area by building modern stadiums, hotels and other facilities and even use this place for organizing the Olympic Games[10]! One of the reasons that they were not permitted to implement their plan was that this surrounding area was forestland. After the fire though, there is no more forest surrounding Olympia so that barrier is no longer present.

Most people in Greece know that Western Peloponnese has the most magnificent coasts and beaches in the whole country. Nevertheless, her people were very traditional and closely linked to their land and property and with the agricultural sector of the area being particularly strong, they had never desired to exploit their region in a tourists-industry fashion. The tourist “investors” had good knowledge of this fact and in order to successfully exploit the area, they first needed to preemptively destroy any popular resistance to their plans and they couldn’t care less if then of people there died in flames. As for the people who survived, most of them will move to Athens to seek a job, while the few remaining there, will apparently work as waiters or security guards to the huge hotel block that will spring soon. The investors seem to have achieved what they had intended.

The Germans' special role

Mountain Taygetos and Parnonas in Central and Southern Peloponnese respectively, were also burned. It was common knowledge among those local communities that powerful German interest groups desired avidly to transform the mountains into ski resorts and chalets. The Germans had in the past been interested in exploiting Mountain Grammos in Northern Greece, which was partially burned this summer in July. German capital has also been active in Western Peloponnese and Evia buying enormous pieces of land, either as private investors or under the cover of offshore companies. Not surprisingly, one of the contractors that will participate in the construction of Ionian Road in Peloponnese, Hochtief, is German and interestingly enough it is owned by Kaitel, the son of the homonymic notorious Nazi general. It seems that while German imperialism failed to occupy Greece in World War II having been beaten and humiliated by her strong resistance movement, it succeeds in 2007 without military invasion, just with some fires and the help of their modern collaborators; not the security battalions, but the regional and central bureaucrats ruling the Greek state.

Yet, the similarly crucial role of British and American interests should not be ignored. Having almost fully “occupied” Corfu and Crete Island with their hotels and golf courses, they coveted Peloponnese as well, buying huge swathes of land to be used for tourist developments. Indeed, they are very loyal to their colonialist traditions of 1944 when the British bombed Athens and killed 40.000 civilians in order to crash the resistance movement, which had achieved to liberate Greece before they came in, and of 1967, when the U.S. imposed a seven-year fascist dictatorship, which totally destroyed the country.

The golf lobby

One of the strongest blocks of interests, if not the strongest, which desire the “resortisation”, so to speak, of the Greek coasts are the prospective constructors of golf courses. The huge level of environmental destruction that the construction of golf courses will lead to, such as waste of water, use of enormous quantities of artificial fertilizers and disruption of the nearby ecosystems doesn’t seem to concern the Greek government which does everything possible to grant large areas in the countryside to golf investors. The Minister of Public Works, G. Souflias, claimed in May of 2007 that “considering the golf issue there are many deficiencies, as Greece has just 6 golf courses whereas France has more than 500, Italy more than 200, Spain more than 300 and Portugal 36”. Moreover, another high-rank officer of the ruling party, the Deputy Minister of Economics, P. Doukas, is at the same time the president of the Greek Golf Association, and had publicly declared in 2005 that even more golf courses are necessary. It should be noted however that the main opposition party, PASOK, before the elections of 2004, had promoted the support and the expansion of the golf industry in Greece, and after the elections, which it lost, it hasn’t been opposed to golf policy of the Nea Dimokratia government at all[11].

As expected, all the environmental studies and reports that warn about the destruction that golf courses will cause have been deliberately ignored. “Who passes by those studies in favor of tourist development?” wanders Mrs. E. Mpriasouli, professor in the Department of Geography in the Aegean University. “They think that this way they are going to get the hotels full of people. 70% of global tourism is manipulated by a single organization (i.e. Global Tourist Organization). They promote the golfer cluster and they blackmail us to accept this model. The same happened with the pools. […] This model of tourism concerns the foreigners who stay and do everything inside the tourist facility. They don’t go outside of it, they don’t consume any domestic products, and of course everything is produced and constructed by big companies”[12].

Western Peloponnese’s long coastline was ideal for the golf industry to construct several golf courses. By 2005, the International Golf Association was very optimistic that in 2006 and 2007 there would be a very big golf ‘boom’[13]. However, so far the locals and the environmentalists struggled hard against this prospect. Now that there is no environmental value in the devastated areas, that ‘boom’ will face little resistance. In confirmation of that, the aforementioned Deputy Minister of Economics, who is renowned in Greece for his cynicism, appeared on national TV two days after the disaster, and he attempted to soothe the pain of the people living in the disaster areas by promising that a development plan, considering tourism and especially golf courses, will start being implemented there right away! Of course, the sold out Greek Mass Media, both public and private, branded the plan as a great benefaction.

Government's and main opposition's complicity

The government of Nea Dimokratia, which has been ruling from March 2004, has devoted itself in the tourist development of the countryside and coasts in order to increase the annual influx of tourists. “There are one million Europeans who are interested in buying a summerhouse in Greece” was one of the main arguments of government officials, who used to refer to tourism as Greece’s heavy industry[14]! Thus, the Ministries of Civil Works and Tourism put up a plan of tourist “development”, under the name of New Zoning Framework for Tourism, which blatantly offered land and water to the tourist cartels.

According to the abovementioned framework, an “investor” can buy land everywhere, and simply by naming the investment as a “tourist” one, get a big subsidization and build four times more than a privateer, as long as they sell the 70% of the houses to privateers and run the rest 30% as a hotel. They have also the right to build in environmentally protected areas or skerries provided they name them “tourist”! This situation is aggravated by the inexistence of a National Cadastral Register, which would at least classify some forestlands or biotopes as such and might prevent them from being built[15].

However, for this plan to be successful an overall reconsideration of zoning in the country needed to take place, that is to say, permissions for appropriating forestland should be awarded. Therefore, in early 2007, the government tabled a constitutional amendment according to which, article 24, stating that construction in forestland is strictly forbidden, would be practically abolished. The official opposition, PASOK strongly condemned the amendment and blocked the ratification of it by withdrawing from the voting - the funny thing is that, in 2003, when PASOK was in power, it tried to pass an identical amendment, but Nea Dimokratia, then the official opposition, refused to support it. Although, finally, article 24 was not abolished, the prospective arsonists were encouraged to hasten their plans, and consequently, in the summer of 2007, Greece suffered the greatest number of wildfires in her modern history.

Furthermore, the Sub-Ministry of Environment, which happens to fall under the Ministry of Public Works and is responsible for using the state funds provided to the latter for the protection of the forests and biotopes, did very little on this. Most of the, already few, resources for environmental protection were transferred back to the Ministry of Public Works in order to support works already under way, using the ridiculous excuse that the Sub-Ministry of Environment was unable to spend it all[16].

Another way in which the government is responsible for the holocaust is that it caused the collapse of the Fire Brigade. The Ministry of Public Order, under whose jurisdiction the Fire Brigade falls, hadn’t recruited the required number of firemen, preferring instead to hire thousands of policemen! In addition to this, the virulently right wing Minister of Public Order, V. Polidoras, transferred incompetent officers, who were eventually proven to be completely incapable to combat the numerous wildfires, to key positions simply because they were members of the ruling party[17].

The tourist-developer cartels soon realized the incapacity of the Fire Brigade and the insufficient measures for the protection of the forests, and therefore, aided by the high temperatures and the strong winds in this area, obviously decided it was a very convenient time for them to put their plan into action.

The scapegoats

When the first fires in the Peloponnese broke out, everybody thought it would be the ordinary land developers who casually burn pieces of forestland every year in order to build on them. Yet, when several new fires broke out which, unprecedentedly, burned whole villages to the ground, killing tens of people, the public started suspecting an organized plot by strong native entrepreneurs or even multinational companies. Greece was apparently under attack, and since the fire brigade and their political chiefs in the Ministry of Public Order were proved to be totally incapable to put down the fires, the government tried to spin the mayhem unleashed by global capital and its domestic lackeys to its own advantage. Two days after the first fires, the Prime Minister, following the advice of his image-makers, appeared on National Television wearing an ordinary jacket, like George Bush did right after September 11th, and stated that Greece faces an asymmetric threat. Nevertheless, he obviously didn’t name those actually responsible for the fires, whose identities he most definitely knows. On the contrary, his colleagues in the government secretly or even openly blamed anarchists and political extremists for the arsons claiming that “they want to destabilize democracy”!

The mass media which support the government invented new imaginary enemies like the Turks, the Albanians or even PASOK, blaming them for the wildfires! PASOK, of course, condemned these scenarios as conspiracy theories, but on the other hand, it just put the blame on the government accusing it of incompetence. It is more than obvious that PASOK knew that the arsonists were the tourist-industry cartels, but it didn’t want to stand up to them, as, when in government, it was (and will be) tightly intertwined with them.

The police and its dependent secret services, all of them being famous on a world scale for their incompetence and stupidity, but very effective at beating up defenceless immigrants and protestors, did their best to find the perpetrators of the terrible crime. The result was the arrest of an old woman in Zaharo for causing the fire by negligence while she was cooking in her backyard, an Albanian immigrant who was misleadingly presented as the one having put some fires in order to take revenge from his Greeks employers for mistreating him, and a 62 year old pensioner arrested in Aeropoli of Lakonia who was a former member of PASOK and was forced to admit that he was one of the arsonists[18]. Yet, in this case the police needn’t have necessarily acted as stupidly as always; the mission surely assigned to them by the government was to cover up the actual arsonists.

Conclusion

As days pass and more evidence comes to the surface, it becomes more and more obvious that the instigators of this recent destruction in Greece are the multinational tourist-sector cartels. Nevertheless, the implementation of that arson attack was not something that ordinary arsonists (usually foreigners hired by petty developers) could have done; on the contrary, it required perfect organization, planning and coordination. Thus, the perpetrators of it are definitely the cartels’ instruments, that is to say foreign secret services.

It is widely accepted that tourist cartels of Western Europe and America with the collaboration of their Greek business representatives, and the tolerance of the corrupted local politicians, have been trying to convert Greece into a huge tourist resort for well-off Europeans and Americans and her people into waiters. For decades, the E.U. has been using economic violence, forbidding Greece to subsidize her own industry and agricultural production or to impose import duties to their products while the U.S. have been blackmailing her to buy their weapons exploiting and inflaming the tension between her and neighbouring Turkey (also a great customer of the US weapons industry), in a manner reminiscent of Italian mafia “protection”. However, this kind of violence didn’t bring swift results and they decided to resort to physical violence, like the one that they regularly used to exert in their colonies.

So far, the Euro-American cartels seem to have achieved their target to devastate a big part of Greece. But her people have not said their last world yet. They will definitely claim their land back.

[1] Corinth, Patra, Pirgos, Motorway to be ready by summer 2011, GoWest.Gr, 24/7/07, http://www.gowest.gr/index2.php?option=com_content&task=view&amp;amp;amp;id=9777&pop=1&page=0&Itemid=1585

[2] ND will end PASOK’s fiasco over the Ionian motorway, Indymedia Athens, 27/8/07, http://athens.indymedia.org/front.php3?lang=el&article_id=752934

[3] The road can be moved, the lake, not quite, Kathimerini, 08/07/2007.

[4] Statement of Public Works Minister, Mr Yeorgios Souflias, on the signing of the contract re the North-West Road of the Peloponese, 24/7/07, http://www.minenv.gr/download/2007-07-24.dilosis.g.souflia.gia.ypografi.symbasis.elefsina-korinthos-patra-pyrgos-tsakona.doc

[5] Kayafa healing springs; investors needed, Rizospastis, 15/4/2003.

[6] 18- hole crime, Golf construction hysteria in Greece, Eleutherotypia, 3/4/2005.

[7]Tourism for Global Capital,Aristera! http://www.koel.gr/index2.php?option=com_content&task=view&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;id=964&pop=1&page=0&Itemid=34

[8] 18 holes in a forest, Apiganias: Development or Destruction? Eleftherotypia, 1/5/2005

[9] Meeting of Sp. Spyridonas with International Entrepreneurial Delegation. Press release, 21/08/2005.

[10] Olympia is Reborn, Kathimerini, 6/8/05.

[11] 18- hole crime, Golf construction hysteria in Greece, Eleftherotypia, 3/4/2005.

[12] Ibid.

[13] Ibid.

[14] Their country? Sold. Eleftherotypia, 17/6/2007.

[15] Ibid.

[16] Hypocrisy – Environment and Public Works Ministry tried to cut back 30 million euros on “protected areas”. Eleftherotypia, 21/7/2007.

[17] From Karamanlis’s promises to… Souflias’s palpitations, Eleftherotypia, 28/7/07.

[18] Questions over 62 y.o.’s arrest in Aeropoli for arson. In.gr, 30/8/07, http://www.in.gr/news/article.asp?lngEntityID=827585&lngDtrID=244

Police Brutality in Greece

2007-08-19T11:43:00.000Z

This is one of the summer posts. The Lair is not yet open. We'll be back soon. For now, enjoy this video from the birthplace of democracy. The transcript is fairly accurate.

Summer Mode

2007-07-23T10:34:00.000Z

Comrades, I am currently in Greece and being tortured by the heatwave. Therefore, I can't for the life of me muster enough attention to make a good post. So, from now on and until I return to Scotland, I will be posting random articles I find interesting and/or amusing. Cheerio.

SWP thuggery

2007-07-10T09:13:00.000Z

The following is from Weekly Worker. Readers should know by now that my politics are quite at odds with the CPGB's, however, I thought that the following was too serious not to be passed on by the Lair.

Condemn physical assaults on this year’s Marxism!

On July 7, the second full day of this year’s Marxism, SWP national organiser Martin Smith physically assaulted Communist Party comrade, Simon D. The attack occurred while our comrade was waiting for the session on ‘Organising for fighting unions’ to begin.
Simon was a member of the SWP for three years up to 2006, when he was suddenly expelled (by phone!) for “bringing the party into disrepute” - the catch-all charge loved by bureaucrats everywhere. In fact, all he was ‘guilty’ of was raising some criticisms and questions publicly and reporting on his blog - verbatum - the words of leading SWPers at a Respect meeting in Tower Hamlets. At the comrade’s appeal, led by Pat Stack and where Martin Smith gave ‘evidence’, he was not given any specific examples of his alleged crimes. He was subjected to a show trial with no pretence of allowing the comrade a fair hearing and then was simply turfed out.
In the following weeks, comrade Simon attended a Camden SWP public meeting on Respect. Incredibly, the next day Martin Smith left a message on the comrade’s phone telling him that he was henceforth “not allowed to go to any SWP events”. Smith also said he had written to the party organiser in comrade Simon’s area to let them know this. Comrade Simon texted back pointing out that it was advertised as an SWP public meeting and surely, as a member of the public, he was entitled to go. The response came back: “When you are expelled from the [SWP], that means you are not allowed to attend any SWP event, public meeting, Marxism, period.”
To make this crass exclusion official, Smith sent through a letter a few weeks later that put this in black and white: “an expelled member of the SWP cannot attend SWP public events (that includes Marxism/rallies/public meetings)” (Weekly Worker June 8 2006).
The fact is that comrade Simon has attended SWP meetings since - despite threats. Indeed, how many people at this year’s Marxism were once expelled from the SWP? Applied consistently, this would see the exclusion of hundreds of comrades on the left of the working class movement who have been in that organisation and fallen foul of its crass bureaucratic regime.
Clearly Smith is personally slighted because his foul role in the comrade’s crude show trial and expulsion was publicly exposed by the Weekly Worker. This is clearly what prompted Smith to aggressively approach comrade Simon, to demand his ticket to the whole event be returned and to physically attack him. He was wrestled to the floor, sustaining bruising, abrasions and back strain. A second SWPer then joined in and they started to go through our prone comrade’s pockets to take his Marxism ticket.
This is a foul and cowardly act. In their sect, SWP leaders are used to wielding unaccountable power, they treat the ‘party’ and the wider movement almost as their own property. Disgustingly, when Simon was expelled, Pat Stack told him “You’re now not going to have any life on the left - your activist days are over”. Who the hell do these people think they are? Since when have they been in charge of our common movement? Since when has it been their prerogative to decide who is a working class partisan and who is not?
However, this Stack comment and the attack on Simon reveal the foul, anti-Marxist mindset of people who treat their own members as little more than paper-selling and leaflet-distributing machines. And ordinary SWPers are the people who should really be disturbed by the physical assault at this year’s Marxism.
After all, the likes of the thug Smith cannot shut up comrade Simon or - even more frustratingly for him - the Weekly Worker itself. We will feature this story next week to make sure that Martin Smith is exposed for the anti-democratic goon that he is and that this information is widely disseminated in the movement in this country and internationally.
SWPers have no such outlet, of course. We can brush off these sorts of crude incidents; Martin Smith’s reputation will take the really bad bruising here. But comrades of the SWP - if you tolerate this despicable culture in your ranks, what about when you develop differences, what about when you want to criticise and hold your leaders to account?
That’s the real lesson from this new SWP assault on political opponents and it is one SWPers themselves should really take to heart.

Brothers my arse

2007-06-23T11:19:00.000Z

Most of you will probably remember the rather amusing public meeting held by Solidarity just before the election, when Tommy Sheridan and George Galloway referred to each other as "brothers" during their oh-so-original thunderously booming speeches. To those of you who -by some hideously bizarre paradox of the universe- believe that Galloway is even vaguely associated with the concept of principle and honesty, I am extremely sorry to bring you the following revelation.

Yesterday's Herald reported that RESPECT is planning to start organizing north of the border. Our ultra-ninja-squirrel-informants had already informed us that this was being planned, with Galloway proposing at RESPECT's last National Council the setting up of a committee to investigate the possibility of establishing RESPECT presence in Scotland (or is it North Britain?). Back then, I did not want to comment on that filthy idea back then, as there were no other sources and the Squirrel Vanguard always protects its informants. Now however, it's all out in the open and thus, I can rip into it.

From what I know, Galloway is not at this moment planning to set up yet another party of the left (although whether RESPECT can be considered "left" is rather debatable at this point), but rather, as the Herald puts it, to forge a new alliance, no doubt under his shining leadership. It is quite telling however that, again according to the Herald piece, "a source close to the Respect leader said yesterday the Respect-Solidarity pact not to compete with each other 'expired with the election'".

The questions surrounding this potential move are manifold. First, assuming for the sake of argument that it was even theoretically possible for the strange mixture that is Squalidarity to somehow align with RESPECT, it would be rather interesting to see how the two "brothers" will resolve the matter of who gets to be the Great-Wise-Dear-Sunoftheparty-Leader. In Squalidarity, the Sheridan-Byrne co-convenorship was such only in name, with the Tangerine Man always in the spotlight and Byrne being a grey blur. Neither Galloway nor Sheridan however strike me as the kind of person who's willing to share, let alone forfeit, their Caesarian post. It seems to me that Galloway and the SWP have realised that Sheridan is going to get his arse handed to him by the Scots legal establishment and are preparing to abandon him. Some brotherhood right there!

What's more striking however is the sheer dumbness of the whole project. Firstly, there's the cadre problem. No one in Solidarity, apart from the SWP, would contemplate joining RESPECT Scotland. Everybody knows that CWI-Scotland hate the swips. In a discussion I had on the now no longer public Militant blog, one of the CWI Squalids was busting his arse to convince me that Solidarity is not RESPECT-Scotland. If Solidarity does become RESPECT-Scotland and CWI stay in it, they will face the contradiction of their Scottish group being part of an organization that's in opposition to their pet project in England. The non-platform Squalids on the other hand are almost exclusively pro-independence Sheridan worshipers. It is rather hard to imagine them joining a unionist coalition that is mostly known for being led by George Galloway. While this might not seem much of a setback, considering that the main activist base of Solidarity in the Central Belt are the swips, it should be kept in mind that the distinctive characteristic of Solidarity is that the bulk of its cadre is concentrated in rural areas like the Highlands and Islands and the South of Scotland, where there is little, if any SWP presence.

Secondly, it appears that the SWP all-wise Central Committee has failed to realise that the RESPECT model has next to zero chance of working in Scotland. The Muslim community in Scotland is not nearly as politically important as it is south of the border and more importantly, there is already a figure in Glasgow around which war-resenting Muslims can rally. Bashir Ahmad was elected to Holyrood from the SNP regional list, becoming the first ever Asian MSP. Similarly, the other half of RESPECT's politics, George Galloway, has little, if any, popularity in Scotland. On what basis a Scottish RESPECT could function remains a mistery to this humble Squirrel Lair.

Finally, there's also the possibility that the initiative will create trouble within RESPECT itself, as I suppose that the more principled, less colonially minded organizations that participate in this strange blend of anti-war politics, socialism and political Islam, will not be quite happy about the move.

Bizarrely, this might even end up benefiting the far left in Scotland, by replacing Solidarity with something even more idiotic and even less popular.

SNP and the abolition of endowment

2007-06-18T00:23:00.000Z

Comrade Neil Bennet comments on the recent decision by the SNP to abolish the £2200 endowment fee for students in Scotland.

Students and socialists were (quite rightly) celebrating this week, with the news that the SNP executive is going to fulfil its election promise to scrap the £2,289 ‘graduate endowment’ fee levied by the Labour-Lib Dem coalition in the first term of the Scottish Parliament.

The system, set up in 2001, was essentially a compromise – put in place to allow the Lib Dems to claim they had fulfilled their own election commitment to scrap student fees – when really they had done nothing of the sort. Rather they had simply reduced them and altered the timing of their payment. Oh, and they changed the name!

While we should welcome the SNP move to drop the ‘graduate tax’, as it has come to be known by some – we should be a little bit more concerned about the quiet dropping of the nationalist’s more radical policies on student finance. Only two months ago, during the election campaign, the SNP were loudly proclaiming not only their promise to get rid of the endowment – but also to scrap all outstanding student debt and replace student loans with maintenance grants. In other words they were close to promising free university education – precisely what the student movement and the left have long campaigned for. It is undoubtedly policies like this – as well as anti-war posturing and the framing of the election debate around independence – that drew so many left-wing voters to the SNP in May. As Labour education spokesperson Hugh Henry (correctly, but with astonishing hypocrisy) described the move – “[It is] meagre and disingenuous” and “tinkers at the edge of what the SNP promised to students”.

Average student debt in Scotland upon graduation in 2005 was £7,561, before taking into account the endowment, and over a quarter owed more than £12,000 on top of the back-ended fee payment. These figures will be likely to have increased over the subsequent two years. So while the reduction in student debts by just over £2000 is very good news indeed for current and future students in Scotland , those graduating before 2008 are left out in the cold. What’s more the promise of free education is once again a long way off – and the spectre of debt will continue to hang over all but the wealthiest of potential students for a long time to come.

Ostensibly the more radical policies are being put to the side because the SNP – as a minority government – couldn’t hope to push such expensive policies through parliament – they would need the Lib Dem’s support, and they are only willing to go so far. However it is very telling that the nationalist administration aren’t even willing to have the battle – that they value proving themselves capable of maintaining a stable government far more than they value any of their policies – from student finance to independence.

What is interesting however is that they would choose to push for a popular, ‘left-wing’ policy so early in the life of the new parliament. It could be a promising sign – or it could be a little respite before a neo-liberal storm is unleashed – think New Labour and the National Minimum Wage in 1999 – a token progressive gesture to the – and we all know what was to follow.

In the meantime the left and the students’ movement in Scotland have been given an opportunity – we have been given an aim and a target. The government has made us promises that it doesn’t intend to keep. Now it’s up to us to force them to change their minds.

Bonapartism, basic concepts and Chavez

2007-06-14T12:23:00.000Z

Jim Denham (of the Alliance for War and Liberalism) has been crticial of Hugo Chavez and his government, calling them ‘a bonapartist formation, with nothing to do with socialism (assuming that by "socialism" you mean the rule of the working class)’. When I posted a Gramsci quote which says that perhaps calling a formation ‘Bonapartist’ is not the be all and end all of the matter Jim responded with ‘[s]o much for basic Marxist concepts’.

I think that position Jim takes here is an interesting one, and worthy of further exploration, especially as it exposes a real weakness in the approach of the British left in general. The Gramsci quote I posted only suggested that establishing something is Bonapartist is not the end of the matter, as it does not stop the need for further enquiry. Denham seems to be insisting that ‘Bonapartist formations’ are a basic concept of Marxist thought, and they tell us that the regime can have ‘nothing to do with socialism’.

The first point to note is that I am not a Trotskyist and I don’t really know that much about the Trotskyist position. This made it hard for me to even think of Bonapartism as a ‘basic concept’ of Marxist thought (I know it gets mentioned in the 18^th Brumaire but still). But even if it is a basic element in Marxist thought, calling it a concept really doesn’t seem to help anyone, in fact Jim seems to have become an ideologist, for whom:

[R]elations become concepts; since they do not go beyond these relations, the concepts of the relations also become fixed concepts in their mind.

So, against Jim I raise Lenin, who refuses to acknowledge that Marxism is about ‘basic concepts’ that allow us to pre-judge a given situation. Against such positions Lenin insisted that the ‘very gist, the living soul, of Marxism [is] a concrete analysis of a concrete situation’. So in this respect I think that Gramsci is right and Jim is wrong, just establishing that a given social formation is Bonapartist tells us nothing about its relation to socialism or the emancipation of the working class – instead we have to ask the Marxist question – who benefits?

The Old man himself

The thing is, it seems to me that Trotsky himself realised this when he did his work on Bonapartism. I just randomly skimmed Trotsky’s article The Workers State, Thermidor and Bonapartism and came up with the following extracts:

The overturn of the Ninth Thermidor did not liquidate the basic conquests of the bourgeois revolution, but it did transfer the power into the hands of the more moderate and conservative Jacobins, the better-to-do elements of bourgeois society.

In France, the prolonged stabilization of the Thermidorean-Bonapartist regime was made possible only thanks to the development of the productive forces that had been freed from the fetters of feudalism.

And perhaps the kicker is:

Without historical analogies we cannot learn from history. But the analogy must be concrete; behind the traits of resemblance, we must not overlook the traits of dissimilarity.

Essentially what these quotes tell us is that although Napoleon was not the most advanced representative of the bourgeois revolution, he nonetheless preserved and stabilised the growth of the bourgeois revolution in France. What isn’t written here, but perhaps is more to the point, is that Napoleon spread the bourgeois revolution (and you’d think the AWL would love that) to the rest of Europe, as is evidenced by the fact that the Civil Code dominates the continent.

So, even for the paradigm case of Bonapartism, Napoleon himself, it is possible to say that he served a progressive role, in consolidating the gains of the bourgeois revolution, spreading it, and generally not liking feudalism. Of course, Louis didn’t play such a role, but this shouldn’t blind us to the fact that it is entirely possible that Bonapartism can play a historically progressive role.

Cui Bono?

But of course this is all well and good when we’re talking about bourgeois revolutions (although I seem to remember hear some Trots talking about spreading the gains of October etc.) but the typical response to what I have said is – ‘the emancipation of the working must be the act of the working class itself’ or ‘socialism from below’(!!!). Now, although I think these slogans themselves have to properly put into context, I do agree that the proletarian revolution is always one that will be qualitatively different from every revolution that has preceded it.

So, agreeing with Jim here, I still don’t think it’s the end of the matter. At the very least we need to ask – has Chavez opened a space for the emancipation of the working class? So, rather than just shout ‘Bonapartist (!!!!)’ we need to ask ‘who benefits’ from the Bolivarian revolution, and we need to enquire if it has benefited the working class.

And surely on this level we can say (at the very least) ‘yes’. Chavez has firstly put socialism and the working class on the agenda in Venezuela and indeed the world stage. This must be a good thing for the perspective of the working class. I think the work of Mike Lebotwitz has been instructive here. Even if we disregard Chavez’ concrete policies relating to the economy it is pretty clear he has opened up a space for the working class in a way that has never happened in Venezuela.

He has opened up the political process to the working class, and indigenous people so that it does not lie solely with the oligarchs and its representatives. The ideas of co-management, no matter how limited their application, help smash the myth that the workers cannot do without he bourgeoisie. The barrio healthcare initiatives are helping the Venezuelan workers get back their confidence and dignity.

I think the confidence and dignity argument is and important one, which ought not to be overlooked. In Venezuela the workers may not rule, capitalism may still not be overthrown, the old state machine may not have been smashed, but the working class and its organisations have grown, they are taken seriously, they are confident and organised. Surely this sort of empowerment is the key to any successful self-emancipation.

It is Jim's prerogative to disagree with my characterisation of Chavez (which was obviously provisional and sketchy), but I hope I have at least shown how a Bonapartist regime might be characterised as 'progressive'. Hopefully this will at least stop the pointless screams of "Bonapartist!!!!!!!!!" at the mention of Chavez' name.

Guest post.

2007-06-12T15:05:00.000Z

The Lair is excited to host its first guest post. Charlie Marks, from Rebellion Sucks! made an excellent post about the growing tension between Holyrood and Westminster, with Alex Salmond seizing every chance to pick up a fight with the central government and asserting the authority of the devolved parliament. The post is reproduced here in its entirety.

We return to the national question in Scotland, as materialised in this instance by the Cheshire cat grin of Alex Salmond; victims of the Lockerbie disaster are put through more anguish; Tony Blair visits Muammar Gaddafi and agreements are reached, but not all of them disclosed; and light is cast on the murky world of the CIA’s “extraordinary rendition” flights and a variety of people find the whole thing disagreeable.

Calm before a storm
The SNP/Green minority administration in Scotland has got off to a steady start, cutting tolls and halting cuts in the NHS – not that this makes it any less of a bosses’ government. For sure, the SNP is financially backed by, and serves the interests of, sections of the national bourgeoisie in Scotland. (And as for the Scottish Greens…)

On the international side of things, First Minister Alex Salmond made the headlines – and the London Newsnight programme – by exposing a deal planned by the British government to hand over the man jailed for the Lockerbie bombing to the Libyan authorities. This was all without consultation with the Scottish administration or disclosure to the Scottish Parliament.

Yet Kirsty Wark, who was presenting Newsnight on Thursday, gave Salmond a hard time. Wark’s hostility is perhaps indicative of her political views; she has holidayed with Jack McConnell in the past and she could easily present the Scottish edition, but instead flies down to London each week to present the English and Welsh version.

Salmond had made an emergency announcement in the Scottish parliament on Thursday, disclosing all he knew and making a great play of his party’s openness as against the secrecy of New Labour: details of possible agreements made by the British government have not been disclosed. So it’s true that he’s milking it for all it’s worth, but the focus should be on the issues raised by the matter.

The first of many?
All of the parties in the Scottish parliament were united behind Salmond in denouncing any deal to return the prisoner, Abdelbaset ali Mohmed al-Megrahi, currently held in Greenock jail, to his country of origin. New Labour’s Jack McConnell, who was the previous First Minister, admitted that the issue had come up while he was in power and Tony Blair was apparently warned that he should notify Scotland by the Foreign Office of the content of his talks with Gaddafi during a recent visit to Libya.

The row over the Lockerbie bomber marks the first outbreak of discord between Edinburgh and London. Outgoing Prime Minister Blair has yet to congratulate Salmond on his party’s electoral victory and assumption of the role of First Minister for the devolved parliament – though we are told that Prime Minister in-waiting, Gordon Brown, has contacted Salmond.

Previous Labour/Liberal coalitions were more closely tied to Westminster, and there were no formal channels through which Scotland and the UK government conducted affairs. The SNP are pushing for a formalisation of relations between central government and the devolved parliament: now that there is truly a Scottish government, political independence seems a step closer.

The bomb, the bomber, Blair, and BP
PanAm flight 103 exploded over Lockerbie on 21 December 1988, killing 270 people, half of them Americans. The US initially fingered a Palestinian group called the PFLP-GC, based in Syria but after the first Gulf War, in which the Syrians backed the invasion of Iraq, the focus switched to Libya.

Two men were tried at Camp Zeist in the Netherlands under Scots law in 2001, but only al-Megrahi was found guilty – the other defendant, Al Amin Khalifa Fhimah, was returned to Libya. The trial was farcical and the verdict doubtful: the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission has been investigating al-Megrahi’s case for the last four years. In 2003, Libya accepted responsibility for the bombing, whilst denying it had commissioned it – in the hope that sanctions against the country would be lifted.

Blair visited the “Great Socialist People’s Libyan Arab Jamahiriya” for a second time as part of his farewell tour and met with its leader Colonel Gaddafi, now one of the good guys. The meeting was not merely to remind us of Blair’s foreign policy “achievements” – Gadaffi shook hands on a £900 million deal to allow British Petroleum back into Libya. For BP, the deal could be worth tens of billions, and it is something of a coup for Blair as big oil has been barred from Libya since the seventies when foreign capital was expelled the economy was taken into public ownership.

The visit was a reminder that all will be forgiven of wayward Third World leaders if they follow the neo-liberal agenda. (Take note Robert Mugabe: you can get your honorary degree back, if you want it.) The deal made between the Libyan government and BP was also a reminder of that British foreign policy is completely enmeshed with British capitalism. Like we needed reminding…

It had to be Blair meeting Gaddafi, both in 2004 and 2007: a meeting of Bush and Gaddafi would be to confusing for both the American and Libyan masses. Libya had been presented as the archetypal “rogue state” and Gaddafi the original Muslim bad boy, supposedly sponsoring terrorist groups around the world – and in 1986, the US carried out a bombing raid on Libya which was timed to make the evening news back home.

21st century gulag archipelago
Human rights groups have been invited to meet with the SNP’s Justice Secretary to discuss the issue of CIA rendition flights through Scottish airports, something else for Salmond to use to argue for independence. It is good that the Scottish government is taking the matter seriously, though the reasons for doing so are probably opportunistic.

A European Commission inquiry concluded with the assertion that the US had operated secret prisons in Romania and Poland to which they had transported terror suspects to be interrogated and tortured. A report instigated by the Association of Chief Police Officers – and revealed on the same day as Marty’s findings were announced – has pooh-poohed suggestions that CIA flights might have passed through England, but did not look into the situation in Scotland.

Members of the British government had previously denied knowledge of such an unlawful programme and suggested that it was a little far fetched; now Harriet Harman, minister for Constitutional Affairs, and contender for the deputy leadership of the Labour Party, is making noises about the scandal.

On a related matter, former US Defense Secretary Colin Powell has said that the illegal detention centre in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, should be shut down and the “detainees” moved into to the federal legal system in an effort to regain international faith in American justice. (This is somewhat far-fetched, especially when you consider that when the American legal system was established, black people were regarded as being three-fifths human, and now people of colour make up a majority of the States’ vast prison population. By the way, Powell is not arguing that the US armed forces exit Cuba, only that the military prison is closed.)

Turning to the British tabloid press, the matter of rendition flights has been viewed negatively by right-wing Daily Mail, which has condemned the CIA’s programme and the UK government’s collusion. Everyone will use it to their own ends, I suppose. But if the boot was on the other foot and a Tory government had been complicit in US breaches of the law, it would be a different story for the Mail.

The arrogant Eagle and the pissed off Bear.

2007-06-05T17:27:00.000Z

A few days ago there was yet another demonstration in Prague against the proposed installation of a US radar station within the framework of the American missile defense system being set up in Central Europe, allegedly in order to protect US (and Europe) against a hypothetical nuclear missile launch from Iran. As the BBC article comments, the Czech people are overwhelmingly against the building of the station, for both health and security reasons. The current ruling party does not have an absolute majority in parliament, and it seems that the opposition forces are against the move (whether on principle or to capitalize on its unpopularity) meaning that Mr Topolanek might not be able to fulfill his promise to Dubya. Without meaning to sound like a new leftie movementist, I believe it is good to see some sort of political activism - even if it doesn't have an explicitly working class character - in a country of the former Eastern Bloc. It indicates that the people are gradually overcoming the atomization caused by Stalinism, as well as challenging the hegemony of liberal ideology and building an oppositional political culture. Should the radar proposal fall, it is likely that the Czech people will be heartened enough to start mobilizing over other issues as well. Demonstrations have already been organized for Bush's visit tomorrow; hopefully, they will be sizable. [I started writing this post a couple of days ago. Bush's visit has since been completed; if you have any idea as to how successful the planned protests where, please let me know]

As the title implies however, this post is not about the level of class struggle and political consciousness in the Czech republic but rather, the international context and implications of the US drive to establish missile installations in that very troubled part of the world.

The implications are, I believe, rather evident. Russia is getting pissed off at having American missile systems in her backyard. It is rather obvious to anyone with basic knowledge of geography that said complexes are more useful against Russia than Iran. There is absolutely no reason for an Iranian missile headed to the US to fly over anywhere near Poland or the Czech Republic, unless of course the hypothetical missile decided to do zigzag maneuvers on the way. If the US were really worried about an Iranian attack, they would be better off building their radars and whatnot on the north coast of Africa. Indeed, the only way that a projectile from Iran would go over Poland or the Czech Republic was if it was headed to... Greenland. Unless my memory is failing, I believe that Iran does not have any grudges against the Inuit people.

Russia's response

Vladimir Putin has been quite vocal in expressing his dissatisfaction with what he referred to in Munich as the US overstepping its national borders. A well schooled security bureaucrat, Putin is understandably worried at what he sees as a preemptive measure against the imperialist aspirations of Russian capitalism.

Putin's response to America's increasingly antagonistic foreign policy is almost Bismarckian in the extent to which it dovetails with Russia's general strategic interests. The Judo practitioner, in his speech to parliament on April the 26th, declared a moratorium on Russia's commitment to the Treaty on Conventional Weapons. The treaty, first signed in 1990, aimed to reduce the number of conventional military forces scattered around Europe within the context of the Cold War. It was amended in 1999 to take note of geopolitical changes affected by the dissolution of the USSR, however, the US and other NATO members have refused to ratify it before Russia withdraws her troops from Georgia and Moldova. Russia of course is not going to have any of this crap, hence Putin arguing that Russian presence in the former SSRs is a matter without relevance to the treaty and declaring it void until the NATO members ratify it. This is hardly surprising. The Treaty was originally signed when the Soviet Union was on its death bed and amended when Russia was in the middle of the devastating crisis that followed the dissolution. Now, the Russian state has to an extent pulled itself together, balancing itself on the wave of rising energy prices and is gradually stabilizing the almost shattered Russian society.

What is even more indicative of Russia's willingness to pursue a confrontational foreign policy is Putin's hint - during his speech at the Munich Conference - that Russia was not happy with the restrictions imposed on her by the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty within the current global political framework. This was followed by further, more intense ~~dick-waving~~ sabre-rattling when Russia announced the successful testing of a new intercontinental ballistic missile which, according to The Guardian, can carry multiple warheads, all of which can lock onto different targets, posing thus a significant challenge to intercepting systems. This of course is just part of the increasingly high-pace Russian rearmament, rather than a shocking development, but its timing, only a few days before Bush's visit to Prague, is quite telling.

Prospects

Only one thing is sure. The interests of Russian and American imperialism are on a collision trajectory, for various reasons. Not only is Russia threatening to break global US hegemony if she does indeed manage to harness her internal chaos, but she is also obviously interested in (and capable of) regaining dominance in hertraditional spheres of influence which have been usurped by the US. The War on Terror is not helping Kremlin-White House relations much either, as it fuels Islamic radicalism which in turns fuels Chechnyan separatism.

The extent and magnitude of the conflict between American and Russian interests depends on how much the two states are prepared to and can sustain their politics of confrontation.

It seems to me that the US is in a far more difficult position as far as political sustainability is concerned. The foreign and internal politics of the US (on which I'll admit I am no expert) are marked by irreconcilable contradictions. The soon to end Bush administration is based on an alliance of the intensely ideological Christian Right groups, corporate interests and whathaveyou. The War in Iraq and occupation of Afghanistan is a huge drain on state funds which are already being depleted by far going tax cuts. As the Cedar Lounge Revolution puts it:

And of course the point is that the Bush administration is intensely ideological. But in a weirdly splintered way, with competing interests, commercial, sociopolitical/religious and foreign policy having spent the last seven years vying for pole position and the Presidents ear. These interests are by no means mutually compatible.

I could argue that Bush represents the triumph of the oligarchies, or perhaps the triumph of oligarchies who have cynically utilised the right religious vote. But perhaps that would be to attribute to Bush more guile, or even project management, than he deserves. Perhaps the project was simply about being in power. And perhaps that tells us why the project has failed. If one has no instinctive interest in affairs of state, indeed an antipathy to the very concept of the state or perhaps more particularly the public welfare (in it’s broadest sense), it tends to lead to - at the very least - a sense of dislocation. And that’s all fine, except the state functions in a very real way only due to the collective affirmation by citizens and the input of taxation from citizens. In other words other peoples money.

Said War is to the interests of only some sections of American capital, hence the opposition to the War by certain interest groups. Then there are also disagreements on methods to tackle climate change, with the energy lobby vehemently fighting any marginally progressive proposals while bourgeois leaders like Al Gore have painted themselves green, realising that there are green votes to be won, as well as understanding the bourgeoisie is not immune to environmental destruction. And of course, there's the repoliticisation of the American public itself as a result of both the war and the influx of immigrants from Latin America who are gradually starting to become class conscious.

Bush himself seems to be unsure as to what approach to Russia is best. First, he tries to reassure the Bear by vowing that the installations are of no danger to her, even going as far as to invite Russian officials over. Then, he goes on to criticise the Putin administrationon rolling back "freedoms". With such a degree of policy instability, it is impossible to predict how the US will behave in dealings with Russia after the election next year.

As regards Russia, matters are far simpler. Even though Putin cannot run for reelection again in 2008, there is little evidence to suggest that any of the potential future Russian presidents will follow a different political trajectory. The only challenge faced by Russia is, as I said earlier, her internal socio-economic chaos byusing high energy prices to expand the economic base of the country and invest in programmes of social development. None of the opposition parties can hope to defeat Edinaya Rossya and even if they did, there would be no change with respect to the structure and functioning of the state which is entirely dominated by (both state and private) corporate interests in a manner rather different than in other capitalist states. As Tony Wood argues, business and state have become almost fused, with businesses recruiting from state ministries and vice versa:

Deputy Prime Minister Dmitri Medvedev is also chairman of Gazprom; Putin’s deputy chief of staff, Igor Sechin, is also chairman of Rosneft. Taking the Presidential Administration as a whole, ‘11 members chaired 6 state companies and had 12 further state directorships; 15 senior government officials held 6 chairmanships and 24 other board seats.’ Many members of the government are also rumoured to have significant, undisclosed business interests—such as the Communications Minister, Leonid Reiman, who allegedly still holds a stake in the phone company he co-founded, Telekominvest

It is obvious thus that the political trajectory of Russia will be far more stable in the long run than that of the US, as long as she avoids another economic crisis like that of the 90s.

With Iran and China also rising to global prominence, it is certain that we live in interesting -and dangerous- times. I am only hoping that the dormant (for different reasons) working classes of Russia and the US will soon reestablish themselves as powerful enough political actors to put a break to their national bourgeoisies' mortal pissing contest.

What's the difference between a child massacre and abortion?

2007-05-31T22:23:00.000Z

The Catholic Church provides the answer in yet another display of razor sharp sense of proportion and plain logic. The Holy Keepers of Divine Wisdom, or at least, some of them, seem to believe that abortion is equal to two child massacres a day. These words of Godly Insight came from a cardinal not from Latina America, not from Africa, not from the United States, not even from Poland, but from our very own Keith O'Brien.

In a sermon marking the 40th anniversary of the Abortion Act of 1967, the pious and humble minister of god said that the daily rate of the abortion "crime" is equal to two Dunblane massacres a day. The Dunblane massacre took place 11 years ago in a little town of the same name to the North of Stirling. Sixteen children of 5 and 6 years of age were shot dead by a raving lunatic. It appears that for Mr O'Brien, killing primary school children is equal to discarding a bunch of mindless cells. I cannot even begin to imagine how offending this similitude must have been to the parents of the Dunblane victims.

O'Brien went on to instruct catholic voters to reject politicians who don't struggle against abortion laws, while also telling catholic politicians that failure to act against the "unspeakable crime" of abortion could result in them being barred from receiving holy communion. Being from Greece, I am used to casual interventions in social and political matters by the clergy, from little stupid protests against removing "Religion" from ID cards to outright hilarious calls to "reconquer" Constantinople.

This however caught me completely off guard as, for as long as I have lived in Scotland, incidents of religious freaks going all doomsday on the media were to me tales from the far away mystical lands of US Jesusland and Poland. At least they haven't yet targeted Homoagitating Gay Teletubbies.

Venezuela & Freedom. What would Lenin do?

2007-05-26T20:48:00.000Z

Most of you are probably familiar with the fuss kicked up on the bourgeois media when Chavez announced that the license of RCTV, an opposition station in Venezuela would not be renewed. The First World Left, including of course its vanguard, the AWL jumped on the bourgeois liberal media bandwagon, immediately concluding (or repeating their already made, age old analysis of any revolution that is not led by them) that Venezuela was heading down the road of Stalinism, state capitalism, Bonapartism and whathaveyou. Of course, neither the media, nor their "left" lackeys mentioned that the station was not being shut down, but having its license not renewed in a perfectly legal manner, as has happened a number of times in the "Free" World, without protest from either the media or our fellow revolutionary imperialist apologist brothers.

That of course is besides the point because a cursory look at RCTV's involvement in the coup of 2002 against the democratically elected Chavez government would lead anyone but the most liberal of bourgeois liberals to conclude that the station should have been immediately shut down after the failure of the putsch. You see, the media often forgets to mention that the station was not only actively supporting the overthrow of Chavez, but also practically assisting the putschists by engaging in news blackouts. Now, perhaps the mourners of democracy should take a minute and think in what way any of the "democratic" governments of the West would have responded to a failed coup. Surely most of the participants would have been arrested and the leaders would have probably spent their lives behind bars (if not executed). What happened in Venezuela? The supreme court ruled that the military officers should not stand trial as what happened wasn't really a coup but a... power vacuum. Oh, the brutality of authoritarian Venezuela! By the way, I would be amused to see how the very concerned about human rights left would respond to a similar situation in their own country. It is very easy to criticise little brown/red (you know, those who need our benevolent leadership; it is after all, the white man's burden! ) people half way around the world, but it isn't quite as simple to come up with a response to politically crucial events taking place in your own society.

Anyhow, I am ranting again. What's interesting here is not the chauvinism-bordering-racism underlying much of the politics of the first world left, but the rush of such groups to publicly defend the democratic rights of a bourgeois media station that is owned by the ruling class, thus throwing class analysis out of the window and subscribing to Jeffersonian notions of the inalienability of rights. See for example the post made by TWP on Shiraz Socialist:

How many of us have “openly called” for the overthrow of capitalism? Well apparently Tariq Ali doesn’t see the irony in his statement about Chavez’s failure to renew a TV licence for the anti-government channel RCTV. By his logic most of the newspapers of the far left could be legitimately closed down in Britain. [...]I have always argued for “no platform for fascists” and stand by that argument. However, this isn’t a “fascist” TV station - it simply opposes the government in the strongest terms. That is not a reason for shutting it down

Let's take the arguments in reverse order. First, if a supporter of Fascism is a Fascist, then it makes sense that a TV station supporting Fascism is a Fascist TV station. One could of course try to argue that a military coup in Latin America might not lead to Fascism but to... something else. I would kindly ask them to stop reading and **** off my internets.

Now, with that out of the way, it would be useful to examine the contradiction inherent in TWP's support for "No Platform For Fascists" and opposition to the "shutting down" of RCTV, a contradiction that runs deeper than the rather evident fact that RCTV is a Fascist supporter.

I do not wish to examine here whether the "No Platform" approach is correct or not. Let us assume it is. Why do socialists adopt a "No Platform" line on fascism? The evident and right, if a bit simplistic, response is that we do so because fascism is diametrically opposed to the interests of the working class and presents a formidable obstacle to the fight for socialism. So far, so good. But why is that we do not also call for "No Platform" for capitalists as well? Is it because we think that capitalist/liberal views are more legitimate than fascists'? Is it because capitalism is less of an obstacle to socialism and less of a danger to the working class? Of course not. If anything, capitalism has proven to be more resilient than fascism and has now become a threat not only to the working class but to the whole planet. Further, only the most stupendously half-witted liberaloleftie would dare argue that "kick them Pakis out of Britain" is a less legitimate view than "let's bomb those terrorist A-rabs". The reason therefore that we do not pursue a "No Platform" policy re capitalism is that we can't. The whole purpose of "No Platform" is to prevent the poison of Fascist ideology from spreading among the working class, creating vile sectarianism, racism and other niceties. This is totally inapplicable to the hegemonic struggle of socialists against bourgeois ideology; you can't call for "No Platform" to bourgeois ideology. Why? Because bourgeois ideology is the platform. Every single social structure is permeated by and functions according to bourgeois ideology. Hence the adoption of the Transitional Programme and the need for a War of Position, among other things. It should be clear by now, but it is worth restating. Socialists do not tolerate bourgeois ideology because it is more "legitimate" than Fascism but because not tolerating is a non starter. This brings us back to the first point made by TWP, that of legitimacy.

TWP argues that if we support Chavez's action on the basis that RCTV supported the coup, then, it would be legitimate for, say, the British government to close down the newspapers of the far left, since they (we) have often supported the violent overthrow of capitalism. TWP here falls to the usual trap of forcing a fictitious universality onto concepts of a divided -ie partial not universal - society. Talking about legitimacy, TWP forgets to ask the crucial question: "for whom?" In a class society, questions of legitimacy, legal or moral, cannot be extracted from the context of class struggle and made into abstract, timeless dicta derived from the sky above. Therefore, if the British state decides to close down socialist newspapers, it will be a perfectly legitimate move for the class interest it represents. For socialists of course, it would be a terrible crime, not because it would take away our "freedom" but because it would severely reduce our efficiency and capability to promote our ideas. The illegitimacy of the act would not consist in a violation of our perceived human rights but in the fact that it would be an attack on socialism. In that manner, the very existence of the bourgeois state and its ideological supports is illegitiate. No action it takes can ever be considered morally acceptable by socialists, apart from that which is forced upon it by the struggle of the working class.

The same goes for human rights. The reason the left usually defends human rights is because attacks on them are made by the bourgeois state with the aim to undermine the fighting power of the working class. Indeed, "universal" human rights were won by workers after decades of painful struggle; there was no right to free speech for socialists for a large part of the 20th century (and one may very well say there won't be a right to it again, if socialism becomes a powerful political force again), there was no right to shelter and food, no right to education. Socialists support human rights for the working class, but we have no obligation to fight for the right of RCTV owners to back fascist coups. Expecting from socialists to rise in support of freedom of speech for RCTV, is like expecting the Tories to organize demonstrations for the right to strike.

The concerned leftie will reply: "But isn't the point of socialism to create a society where people are free? How can you increase freedom by curtailing freedom?". To a limited extent, this is not wrong. I do not subscribe to the tanky notion that freedom in itself, is a bourgeois ideal. The fallacy of the liberalosocialist approach lies, again, in the abstractly universalistic manner it uses the concept of freedom. Like legitimacy, freedom cannot be extracted from its class context. As Lenin points out in The Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky, one cannot discuss freedom and democracy without asking "for what class?". The freedom of workers to go on strike restricts the freedom of capitalists to extract profit. The freedom of capitalists to own media curtails the freedom of workers to establish independent media outlets.

Freedom then, within the context of a class society is a question of which side you are on, as the amount of freedom a class has is inversely related to the amount of freedom of its antagonistic classes. Marxists are on the side of the working class and this is why we do not see anything wrong with the Chavez government shutting RCTV down. Had RCTV been a workers' co-operative or had Chavez moved to silence an oppositional workers' political group, he would have been on the receiving end of the harshest of criticisms from the Squirrel Vanguard. The only criticism one could level against Chavez is that instead of turning RCTV into a cooperative news outlet, he made it a state owned one. Other than that however, his democratic record with respect to the working class has been brilliant, to put it mildly. Not only has community power greatly expanded under his administration, but in what is probably a world first, the right of recall has been enshrined in the constitution and has already been used by Chavez's opponents against him.

Perhaps the freedom-loving left (as in opposed to freedom-hating commies like me) should remember that true, universal freedom, can only be the product of a positive transcendence of alienation and therefore, achievable only in a true classless society. And since liberalosocialists don't quite like "authoritarian" Lenin, I'll finish this post with a quote by "libertarian" Rosa Luxemburg:

Yes, dictatorship! But this dictatorship consists in the manner of applying democracy, not in its elimination, but in energetic, resolute attacks upon the well-entrenched rights and economic relationships of bourgeois society, without which a socialist transformation cannot be accomplished

Brownite opportunism

2007-05-20T13:00:00.000Z

With the Tories making great gains down south and with the increasingly antagonistic mood of the SNP here, Brown is obviously getting worried. In a bid to regain support from pissed off Labour voters, as well as those supporting the SNP, the soon to be Prime Minister has started working on a withdrawal plan aiming to remove troops from Iraq before the Westminster general election.Scotland on Sunday reports:

One senior Cabinet minister, expected to play a central role in Brown's first government, said an accelerated withdrawal from Iraq was one of the "foremost options" under consideration.

He added: "We are already committed to a withdrawal of sorts. The schedule can be altered so it is comfortably done within two years."

Under the blueprint for withdrawal announced by Blair in February, the 7,100 British troops currently in Iraq would be reduced to 5,000 by late summer, with an aspiration to reduce gradually over the following two years.

But the military plans sparked by the looming change at the top involve cutting the British presence more rapidly: to 4,000 by late summer and perhaps 2,000 to 3,000 by the year end.

The ultimate hope is to draw down to a "nominal" force within 18 months, and a virtually complete exit within two years of Brown coming to power.

Michael Codner, director of military sciences at the Royal United Services Institute, said declining public support and demands had raised expectations of changes in the British presence.

He said: "There is a growing view that British forces in Iraq will be reduced substantially in the next 12 months, perhaps to as low as 1,500. The change of leadership is an obvious catalyst."

Let's see how this turns out.

Law

2007-05-19T19:22:00.000Z

Why law?

In order to stop my fellow vanugardist from constantly heckling me about my laziness and lack of a work-ethic I have decided to make a post. Frankly, I reserve the Right to be Lazy and fear that my comrade is infected with a hideous managerial work ethic. Anyway, this will not be the normal type of post here, as I am not Scottish. I am also far too much of a student for my own good, hence the content of this post.

So basically I am interested in Marxist approaches to the law. More specifically I am not a ‘Marxist looking at the law’ or a ‘lawyer who likes Marxism’ but I make some attempt to do both (although this shouldn’t be mistaken for an attachment to the law – because I’m really not). So in this post here I basically attempt to justify my odd position (although there are certainly a few contemporary Marxist legal theorists), and say why it is we might focus on law.

So the first thing I want to say is that a there hasn’t really been a lot of Marxist work done about law as a specific phenomenon. There have been quite a few works which (of necessity) include law as an element of the social totality, but many of these haven’t really been able to grapple with the specificity of law. So a lot of the time you’ll just hear that law is an ‘expression of the will of the dominant class’ or something, which – although it might have some useful content – tells you nothing about law as a specific phenomenon.

In this respect there is really only one ‘classic’ work of Marxist legal theory – E.B. Pashukanis’ General Theory of Law and Marxism – this is a work which has influenced me quite a lot. So I suppose later on in some posts I will expand upon the some theoretical points (or rather I’ll link or re-post some old stuff) and show how taking an in-depth position on legal theory (bearing in mind there is no revolutionary movement without revolutionary theory) actually does serve at least some practical purpose.

So, here I’m just going to outline some reasons why I think it’s interesting and important to have a Marxist account of the law. Basically, I want to move from more abstract questions to concrete questions, although obviously these two factors are intimately related.

Law and Liberalism

Anyone who wants to make any sense of liberalism has to engage with the law. On one level this is obvious. Most of the classical liberals from Hobbes to Locke to Montesquieu to Rousseau all had to explicitly deal with law. In fact in many of these account the law assumes an absolutely central role (Hobbes is someone who really springs to mind in this instance).

The importance of law to liberalism isn’t just a happy accident, it’s a result of the structure of liberal thought and its presuppositions about ‘human nature’. Whilst it’s always difficult to define a political position as amorphous of liberalism one can find certain commonalities of liberalism. Firstly, liberals have a certain theory of human nature – basically this holds that (at the very least) human being have a propensity towards selfishness and individualism. Closely linked to this is the fact that liberalism starts from the‘naturally independent, autonomous’ individual.

From this perspective you come to the central problematic of liberalism (and what I think is the best way to frame this). If you have a group of individual, selfish agents who need to interact in some way how can you fit this together. Since these individuals are meant to be independent, each with their own ‘plan of life’, they can’t be unified by any broad ‘purpose’, or good, or status.

It is at this point that the law becomes useful. Law is therefore seen in a double sense. Firstly, as people like Grotius thought it served as a way of demarcated the autonomous sphere of each individual. It creates a kind of shield of interlocking rights and duties. Secondly, and this is in a more Hobbesian vein, law serves as a non-moral ‘trump’ to individual disputes. This ‘trumping’ function is also how you can ‘coordinate’ the diverse lives of these ‘autonomous individuals’, because it provides a conclusive guide to what happens when individuals come into dispute.

But in a way this begins to seem a little contradictory, law is a device which both coordinates (in its trumping sense) and dissociates (in its ‘demarcating sense’), Pashukanis notes this contradiction, saying (General Theory of Law and Marxism, p.70):

Law is simultaneously a form of external authoritative regulation and a form of subjective private autonomy. The basic and essential characteristic of the former is unconditional obligation and external coercion, while freedom is ensured and recognized within definite boundaries. Law appears both as the basis of social organization and as the means for individuals "to be disassociated, yet integrated in society". On the one hand, law completely merges with external authority, and on the other it completely opposes every external authority not recognized by it.

Without the law liberalism (ideologically) completely falls apart. It is forced either to revise its central presuppositions about human nature, or reject the autonomy of the individual, or support a Hobbesian ‘state of nature’.

It is not accidental therefore that the radical anti-liberal critiques concentrated to a large extent on the role of law and rights within liberalism. The main example of this is Carl Schmitt, German fascist and utter bastard – yet someone who focused particularly on the intersection of law and liberalism. But there is also Marx’s famous On the Jewish Question, and numerous bits of Lenin.

Now of course, this all remains rather abstract, but I think it does address real concrete problems. Firstly, the intimate connection of law and liberalism might tell us to be slightly wary of raises slogans about the ‘rule of law’, and making paeans to it. Furthermore, we of course live in a broadly ‘liberal’ society, and as such one in which law assumes (at least at first sight) a particularly important role.

Law and Capitalism

Of course, this all seems rather airy fairy (and believe me it will remain so), stuck in the ‘idea’ of liberalism. Yet, as I have argued before, liberalism is a product of capitalism. I’ll briefly go through this connection, and then I’ll explain some other reasons why capitalism and law are deeply interconnected.

The presuppositions of liberal theory begin to make sense when you analyse the historical transition from feudalism to capitalism (bearing in mind this was a long transition). So basically (and this is very sketchy) feudalism involved individuals being placed into static, customary rules. Their ‘rights and duties’, such as they were, arose by reference to their position in the political order.

The basic point is that in the transition to capitalism this status was demolished by the commodity form. Guilds and hereditary castes were broken up; the old system of land tenure (the connection of the peasantry to the land) was destroyed. So what we have here is a situation where individuals increasingly resemble the liberal vision of them. They no longer have any status based connection with their employer/employee, instead it is a relationship based solely on a cash nexus.

But simultaneously with this you have a great drawing together of people. Increasingly, owing to capitalist manufacture people are brought together, disputes inevitably arise, demarcation needs to take place. And here is the relationship between liberalism and capitalism, the problems of liberalism are the problems of capitalism – how do increasingly disconnected individuals, who are nonetheless brought into contact find a way to be ‘dissociated yet integrated’. So, in capitalism, as with liberalism, law plays a central role.

However, and as I will make clear later, the connection between law and capitalism runs deeper than the one described above. The above description shows that law is connected to capitalism because of the ‘solution’ to some of the problems it throws up. However, I (and in fact anyone who follows Pashukanis) think that there is a more structural connection between law and capitalism. This is a topic that is beyond the confines of this (already overlong) introduction. It is something I have written about before and will write about later. However, there are some opening things I would point out.

The most important thing to first note is that central to capitalism is the commodity. The commodity is the ‘unit’ of capitalism, and through the unfolding of its internal structure, and through many mediations you will eventually reach the state of the world today. However, as Marx notes:

It is plain that commodities cannot go to market and make exchanges of their own account. We must, therefore, have recourse to their guardians, who are also their owners Commodities are things, and therefore without power of resistance against man. If they are wanting in docility he can use force; in other words, he can take possession of them. In order that these objects may enter into relation with each other as commodities, their guardians must place themselves in relation to one another, as persons whose will resides in those object, and must behave in such a way that each does not appropriate the commodity of the other, and part with his own, except by means of an act done by mutual consent. They must therefore, mutually recognise in each other the rights of private proprietors. This juridical relation, which thus expresses itself in a contract, whether such contract be part of a developed legal system or not, is a relation between two wills, and is but the reflex of the real economic relation between the two. It is this economic relation that determines the subject-matter comprised in each such juridical act.

In other words, the commodity relationship posits and presupposes the legal one, since in order to exchange a commodity (and a commodity is only characterised by exchange) one must recognise someone else as your equal. This connection is vastly important since it shows the primal connection between law and capitalism. On the level of commodity exchange (and this incidentally is why law pre-dates capitalism) the two are irrevocably and structurally linked.

This is of course central to the arguments of Lenin and Engels on the link between bourgeois ‘equality’ and the commodity form.

With this established one can go on to consider how the law is important to more concrete, everyday situations, which I’ll talk about next time I post. Also, I'll talk about why I think my philosophical orientation is best.

SNP. Business as usual?

2007-05-18T11:42:00.000Z

As promised; squirrel thoughts on Salmond's election.

So, Alex Salmond did manage to grab the First Ministership despite his supporters being in a minority. He has also now appointed the Cabinet and significantly, not a single member of the opposition chose to vote against the appointments, opting to abstain instead. Now that the MSPs have been sworn in and the Queen has signed the relevant documents, the probability of a challenge to the election results seems nil. Personally, I don't think there ever was any chance that a challenge would be mounted, as it was in none of the big parties interests. The Tories wouldn't possibly manage to make any gains, the Lib Dems would not like to see themselves associated with Labour given their ever hastening downfall and Labour themselves would be seen as childish sore losers if they challenged the SNPs victory. So the whole thing was pretty much an exchange of fiery rhetoric, just to keep things interesting and make the politicos feel important.

I have made a number of posts regarding the bourgeois nature of the Scottish National Party and nothing much has changed since then or happened since Salmond's rise to power, quite understandably too, as it was yesterday. However, there have been a few signs indicating the trajectory Salmond's minority government will follow.

For starters, Salmond's rhetoric of ruling by consensus and in the "national interest" confirms our predictions that he will lead a government that is completely servile to the bourgeois. Scottish Labour leader Jack MacConnell also said that his party is willing to work with the SNP on an issue by issue basis and that they "will not oppose for its own sake. Translation: "We will be happy to promote the agendas of our common masters even if we might find our selves disagreeing on an issue or two". Therefore, we should not expect to see any particular clashes over issues affecting capital; business as usual.

Things of course aren't that simple. Battle lines are already starting to form between Holyrood and Westminster. According to the Scotsman, Gordon Brown, the ultra British soon to be New Blabour leader and Prime Minister (aye, the guy who thinks Thatcher didn't go far enough in promoting private home ownership) has not yet called Salmond for congratulations. In fact, answering questions after a speech delivered in the London City HQ, Brown commented that Salmond does not hold an absolute majority, a subtle threat rather than a kind reminder:

"I think it's a huge responsibility that he has taken on," Mr Brown said of Mr Salmond, serving notice that Labour will quickly condemn as "irresponsible" any SNP move to alter the devolution settlement.

"He is the lead party in terms of numbers of parliamentary seats," Mr Brown said, his voice drained of earlier enthusiasm. "But he doesn't have a majority."

He continued: "While I congratulate him and respect the decision that has been made, I remain firmly committed to the union."

"I do not believe the vote was a vote for separation and independence."

What makes this particularly interesting is that the ultra bigot filthy loyalist fascist that is Ian Paisley did congratulate Salmond and also stated that he would be soon meeting him in Belfast in order to discuss the possibility of reestablishing the devolved authorities' Whitehall committee. It seems that Northern Irish loyalists are happier to work with the SNP than Gordon Brown is.

On his part, Salmond has not been slow to pick a fight with Westminster either. Yesterday, the St. Bernard's look-alike politician attacked Westminster's plans to shut down 2,500 post offices all over the UK come summer, vowing to use all powers at the Scottish Executive's disposal to "soften the blow". Given the opposition of trade unions and community group to said plan, this could very well be a maneuvre aiming to further erode Labour's working class support and attract it to the SNP.

Overall, it might be too early to make conclusive judgments on the nature of the SNP led administration and the possibilities it will open for working class mobilization, but it seems rather evident that they are adopting a bourgeois agenda while maintaining semi-confrontational politics with unionism. While it maybe true that since, unlike Labour, the SNP doesn't have deep roots in the working class, its right wing trajectory will definitely lead to its support plummeting, thus opening up space for the left, it might well be the case that SNP will use its minority position as an excuse for not pushing through with its progressive policies (students grants etc.). Meanwhile, it will also gain further credibility with big business, leading perhaps to even more support from capital in 2011. This, coupled with a possible victory for the Tories in the Westminster election of 2009, can possibly propel the SNP to a position of power in the next parliament. Should they manage to deliver independence then, their support will become great and more solid. I don't like to repeat myself, but this is exactly why socialists in Scotland must act now to build hegemony for republican socialist ideas in the independence movement.

Salmond becomes First Minister

2007-05-16T13:23:00.000Z

SNP leader Alex Salmond has been elected First Minister. He was supported by the Lib Dems while the Tories abstained.

BBC story here. Squirrel commentary will soon follow.

Sheridan to be charged.

2007-05-13T21:44:00.001Z

Today's Sunday Mail carried an exclusive piece according to witch Tommy Sheridan will face perjury charges regarding his high profile libel case against the News of the World. You know, the one that dragged the SSP through the mad and led to excellent comrades being slandered and called scabs by the Orange One; aye that one. The Mail reports:

POLICE believe they have uncovered enough evidence to charge Tommy Sheridan with perjury after quizzing staff and customers at a notorious sex club.
Detectives say they have built up a case which could see the socialist politician face serious criminal charges. The case would be heard in the High Court and Sheridan could face a jail sentence if convicted.

This comes only a few days after Edinburgh Sucks claimed to have received information indicating that Sheridan would be charged within two weeks. While this estimate seems to be false, it is quite obvious I think that the strong arm of the law is up to something. The investigation was silently moving in the background in the run up to the elections, but it appears that now that the Tangerine Man is no longer an MSP, detectives are moving in for the kill.

But I don't really want to discuss the perjury case. I don't really care all that much about it. He'll certainly get no sympathy for me if gets convicted; he deserves every thing that comes to him. What concerns me most is that good comrades will possibly have to endure another torrent of lies, filth and sycophancy from Squalidarity.

At any rate, the salient issue here is that the decision of the SSP not to cave in to "the greatest asset"'s demands is again shown to be right. If the Executive Committee had decided to lie for Sheridan (in order to cover up his inability to keep his zipper up), apart from signaling the death of the culture of honesty, integrity and truth (all bourgeois morals, I know) of the SSP, would also have meant that our comrades too, would possibly be facing charges now. This would have fatally damaged the party's - and consequently socialism's - image in the eyes of the working class - we'd just be yet another bunch of politrickos.

Regardless of the possibility of a perjury case and its outcome, the case remains that the SSP is the only viable vehicle for the socialist cause in Scotland. Over the next months and years, we will have to rebuild, rethink, reorganize, restructure, and many more re's. But we most definitely won't retreat.

A new beginning!

2007-05-10T15:58:00.000Z

After the global bombshell that was the foundation of the Squirrel Vanguard, it appears that new revolutionary groups of similarly minded non human species have been founded around the world, ready to provide leadership for the incompetent bunch that is mankind.

Today, we have discovered the Red Wombat Hole an association of communist wombats from Australia. I don't know who they are and where they came from, but in a time of growing human incompetence (they don't even know which party they should vote for) they are most definitely welcome!

The Squirrel Vanguard proposes the foundation of the Revolutionary Species International.

EXCLUSIVE!

2007-05-09T00:58:00.000Z

The Lair brings you the SSP statement on the election results before anyone else! Don't you just love us?


The day Scotlands rainbow parliament turned grey

by Alan McCombes

By any standards this was a massacre for the left.

The red-green presence in Holyrood, represented by the Scottish
Socialist Party, the Greens and Solidarity was slashed from 15 to
two.

Of the six-strong group of independents, only Margo MacDonald was
left standing.

May 3rd 2007 was the day that Scotlands rainbow parliament was
turned a drab prison grey.

The wipe out of the socialist left was made all the more bitter by
the final electoral arithmetic of the new parliament.

Last Thursday marked the end of Labours monolithic stranglehold over
Scottish politics at national and local level. The emergence of the
SNP as the biggest party in Scotland by the narrowest possible margin
will not lead to instant independence, the removal of nuclear weapons
from the Clyde, or even the demise of the Council Tax.

But it is likely to open up a new, turbulent phase in Scottish
politics, a time of strife, which could accelerate the ultimate
break-up of the United Kingdom and pave the way for the resurgence of
socialism.

After the horrendous internal strife within the left over the past
year, and with the socialist movement bitterly divided, the SSP went
into this election in a brutally realistic frame of mind. This was a
damage limitation exercise. At best, the party hoped to maintain a
fragile toehold in Holyrood in preparation for better days to come.

Yet no-one expected the sheer scale of the collapse of the socialist
vote, down by 100,000 votes from 2003. The final tally of votes
appeared completely out of synch with the attitude of voters on the
streets and at polling stations, which was open and receptive to the
politics of the SSP.

The Greens too were stunned by the scale of their losses. On the
morning after the election, shell-shocked Green MSPs admitted that
they had been expecting to win nine seats.

Although Solidarity polled more votes than the SSP, the failure of
Tommy Sheridan in Glasgow was the biggest shock result of the night,
leaving Solidarity activists visibly traumatised.

At the start of the campaign, the bookmakers William Hill had offered
odds of 100-1 on Sheridan being re-elected  the kind of odds that
might be offered on rain falling in Glasgow sometime in the next six
months.

Every media and academic commentator predicted that Tommy Sheridan
would retain his seat in Glasgow, while the SSP would be wiped out.

As the political pundit, Professor Bill Miller, admitted on Scottish
Television the day after the election, We all expected the SSP to
lose all its seats, but none of us expected Tommy Sheridan to lose.

Sheridan, the most famous celebrity politician in Scotland, even
enjoyed the open sympathy of the mass circulation local newspaper in
Glasgow, the Evening Times.

As well as forecasting his certain victory - and the defeat of the
SSP - the paper even carried a sycophantic double page spread in the
final week, headlined the House of Sheridan  festooned with
photographs of the Sheridan family.

This election has been a serious setback for socialism; it would be
futile to pretend otherwise. It is also a tragedy for the thousands
of people who had come to rely on Scottish Socialist MSPs to deal
with their problems.

In Glasgow, for example, Rosie Kane and her caseworker met with
queues of asylum seekers facing deportation. These cases are often a
matter, literally, of life and death.

Other MSPs have tended to hide behind the coat-tails of Westminster,
refusing to deal with asylum because it is a reserved issue. Sadly
one of these MSPs was Tommy Sheridan, who refused to dirty his hands
with asylum casework after leaving the SSP to form Solidarity.

Within the parliament too, the SSP has provided a voice for workers
in struggle, and for others who were too poor or marginalised to be
of any interest to the big mainstream parties. Holyrood will be a
poorer place without the Scottish Socialist group of MSPs.

There is no single explanation for the debacle of May 3rd. The
incineration of the left was the product of a combination of
inflammable ingredients.

In the first place, all of the smaller parties and independents were
mangled in a classic political squeeze, in which two parties were
running neck and neck. In this election, the drama was heightened by
the fact that one of the two parties stands for dissolution of the
United Kingdom, thus polarising Scotland into two camps: pro and
anti-union.

These two juggernauts had vast propaganda resources at their
disposal. While the SSP was forced to fight this election on a
shoestring budget of just £30,000, the SNP had a war chest of
£1.5million - ploughed in by big business, including a £500,000
donation from the reactionary Stagecoach tycoon, Brian Souter.

Labour, meanwhile, was gifted literally millions of pounds of free
advertising from Scotlands mass circulation tabloid press, notably
the Sun and the Daily Record.

Despite the partys cosy rapprochement with elements of Scottish big
business, many left wing voters - including it appears most of those
who voted SSP in 2003 - swung behind the SNP in this election.

Alf Young of the Herald - one of Scotlands most incisive and
experienced pro-Labour analysts - pointed out the irony behind that
shift:

The far-left took out its anger over New Labour, Blair and Iraq by
backing a party which, while sharing their goal of Scottish
independence, has even less interest than Gordon Brown in bringing
the pillars of modern capitalism crashing down.

The small print of Alex Salmonds economic policies were drowned out
by the headline promises of an independence referendum, the removal
of nuclear weapons, Scottish troops out of Iraq and more immediately,
the scrapping of the Council Tax.

Labour, the LibDems and the Tories have all been tested in government
in recent times, either at Westminster or Holyrood level, while the
SNP is as yet untarnished by power.

As we go to press, the LibDems have spurned Alex Salmonds advances
to form a coalition. That means that the SNP are likely to form a
minority government, possibly with the involvement of the two Green
MSPs.

However, with the SNP up against the much larger bloc of unionist
MSPs, it is unlikely that an independence referendum can be achieved
before 2008.

The other key flagship policy of the SNP  replacing the Council Tax
with a three pence rise in income tax  may also have to be shelved.

The economics of the policy do not add up. It would leave a black
hole in council budgets of half a billion pounds, forcing cuts
elsewhere. Moreover, although a deal could possibly be reached with
the Liberal Democrats over the scrapping of the Council Tax, the
Greens have in the past voted against an income-based tax  which
means that the policy could be scuppered by the narrowest of margins,
even with LibDem support.

Paradoxically, a minority SNP government could potentially create a
more favourable climate for a future surge towards independence. A
stable SNP-led coalition would involve backdoor deals, horse-trading
and shoddy compromises with the LibDems, allowing Labour the
opportunity to recapture some ground.

In contrast, a minority SNP government could allow Salmond to portray
the SNP as a party which is trying to introduce radical changes, but
is being blocked and obstructed at every turn by the three unionist
parties.

Either way, the sands of Scottish politics are shifting. The
socialist left may have been marginalised for the time being, but
that can change rapidly and dramatically in the future.

It is not much more than year ago that the political obituaries were
being written for the SNP after the Dunfermline West by-election 
the SNPs worst by-election performance since 1982.

A procession of political pundits pronounced the terminal decline of
the SNP and the unstoppable march of the Liberal Democrats

As one commentator, Chris Deerin, expressed it in Scotland on Sunday:
Nichol Stephen is youngish, moderate and attractive. Salmond, in
contrast, wears a sullen air& the perception that they have failed to
develop as an alternative government, makes him, and them, an
unattractive prospect. The LibDems are succeeding where the SNP have
repeatedly failed& The SNP cannot turn second place into first.

Even within the SSP at the time, some members (who later left to join
Solidarity) drew the conclusion that the SNP was finished, the LibDems
were now the main opposition force in Scotland, and the idea of
independence was all but dead and buried.

Fifteen months later, and the SNP are now Scotlands biggest party
and about to form a government.

As sure as the sun rises in the morning, the socialist left will be
back with vengeance in the future. And whatever the arithmetical
breakdown last Thursday, the only socialist party with the capacity
of coming back from this defeat is the Scottish Socialist Party.

The SSP fought this election with dignity and restraint. We also
fought a highly political campaign, with a 450-point manifesto,
including the boldest and most radical policy of any party in this
election  free public transport.

In contrast, Solidarity exposed itself as an embittered personality
cult around Tommy Sheridan.

The 16-point manifesto of the breakaway party, along with its other
election material, prominently featured photographs of Sheridan, his
wife and his two year old daughter. His name appeared on every ballot
paper, including even for the local council elections.

A large part of the Solidarity vote was an expression of sympathy for
Tommy Sheridan based on confusion and misunderstanding of the facts
that led to the split in the socialist movement, rather than a
conscious socialist vote.

Tommy Sheridan himself, in his manifesto, on TV, and at public
meetings repeatedly accused the SSP of lies, dishonesty and
backstabbing.

That is the prospectus upon which Solidarity was created: that Tommy
Sheridan was the victim of a plot to remove him as party convenor;
that the SSP leadership manufactured allegations about Sheridans
personal life to justify his removal; that the party leadership
forged documents to back up these allegations; that members of the
SSP conspired to pervert the course of justice and in order to
destroy Sheridan.

The entire Solidarity edifice has been built upon this fairy tale,
and will come crashing to the ground as the lies unravel and the
truth emerges.

In the meantime, for wide sections of the public, including for many
ex-SSP supporters, there is no smoke without fire. The allegations
against the SSP have not yet been disproved. At the very least,
people are inclined to lay the blame equally on both sides.

The events of the last two years have been complex and labyrinthine.
But the stark facts are these.

Like Jeffrey Archer and Jonathan Aitken, two top Tory politicians who
served lengthy jail sentences for their actions, Tommy Sheridan took
out a libel action based on a fraud: at least some of the material
published in the trashy tabloid News of the World was substantially
true.

The SSP did everything it could to dissuade Sheridan from this
insanely reckless legal case. We predicted that this grotesquely
selfish and deceitful course of action could lead to the destruction
of everything that had been built over decades by hundreds and
thousands of socialist activists.

But Sheridan carried on regardless. He dragged scores of people into
a legal toxic waste dump against their will. These included innocent
people who had been in the wrong place at the wrong time, and have
since had their lives destroyed to protect Sheridans right to
hypocrisy.

The SSP was also dragged into the Court of Session. Our response was
to defy the courts and face down a jail sentence.

In the weeks that the SSP was under siege, dragged through the
courts, having its offices raided, Sheridan effectively went into
hiding, failing to turn up to any of the meetings to decide tactics.

The rest of the SSP stood valiantly against the courts.

Finally, Sheridan emerged to argue that the SSP should now buckle
under and surrender the partys internal documents to the News of the
World and the courts. His capitulation was backed by those who went on
to found Solidarity. So far, so dishonourable.

But worse was to come. In an abysmal display of cowardice, Sheridan
told the courts and the media that the documents had been forged by
the SSP as part of a plot to fit him up.

To salvage his fake reputation, he denounced the SSP leadership as
liars, perjurers, forgers and conspirators, before walking out to
split the left and wreck the socialist unity project, built up over a
decade and more.

The mainstream press, cowed by the courts and the threat of libel
action  and perhaps also by the fear of jeopardising an ongoing
police investigation into perjury and conspiracy to pervert the
course of justice  have never been prepared to bring out these
facts.

As a result, the SSP was fighting this election under a cloud of
suspicion. To pretend otherwise would be to run away from reality.

However, two or three years down the road, the events of the past
year will have begun to fade into the mists of history. With the
removal of Tommy Sheridan from Holyrood, the Solidarity bubble will
burst.

That will be a massive step forward for the left, allowing Scottish
socialism to be rebuilt under the clean banner of the SSP.

Spoiling tactics turned confusion to fiasco

Its not who votes that counts, its who counts the votes said
Josef Stalin.

The New Labour establishment could have taught the commissars of the
old Soviet Union a thing or two about manipulating elections.

If 100,000 votes had been disqualified in Venezuela, politicians and
newspaper editors would be calling for the tanks to be sent in to
restore democracy.

In Scotland, it looks like the response to this mass
disenfranchisement of a vast swathe of the electorate will be a
whitewash, with the Electoral Commission asked to investigate the
Electoral Commission.

Alex Salmond, the SNP leader, has called for a full judicial inquiry
 a call that has been rejected by the man responsible for the
debacle, the Scottish Secretary, Douglas Alexander.

In Glasgow, lawyer Mike Dailly has begun legal proceedings.

The SSP should support both of these moves. This democratic
abomination was not the result of incompetence by the Scotland
Office.

It was a product of a deliberate, cynical manoeuvre by New Labour
politicians to confuse the public and marginalise the smaller
parties.

Since 1999, Labour has consciously undermined local democracy by
refusing to separate the council elections from the Holyrood
elections. In this election, when council elections were conducted
for the first time under PR, the case for a change was overwhelming.

But it was never put before the Scottish Parliament. A Tory MSP had
begun to initiate a private members bill, but, after what appeared to
be backdoor wheeling and dealing, dropped the proposal.

Even worse was the decision to swap the order of the Holyrood ballot
papers and to include the constituency and regional votes on a single
form for the first time.

This was a deliberate subversion of democracy, designed to protect
the big parties and undermine the diversity of Holyrood.

The SNP went along with this ploy, hoping that they too would benefit
from the confusion. They opportunistically attempted to manipulate the
new arrangements by renaming their party Alex Salmond for First
Minister  SNP, reinforcing the confusion that already existed.

The SSP can report numerous examples of voters  including even party
members - marking their X against Alex Salmond then scrolling down the
regional list to vote SSP. All of these votes would have been
discounted.

Ironically, the SNPs tactic has almost certainly backfired on the
party. Their cunning plan was that voters would back Alex Salmond on
the left side of the paper, then be forced to vote again for the SNP
on the right side of the ballot paper when they realised that the
smaller parties were not listed on that side.

What the SNP failed to anticipate was that a large proportion of
voters would mark both their crosses on the left side of the ballot
paper.

Because the regional and constituency ballot papers were not
physically separate, tens of thousands of people appear to have
believed that it didnt matter which side they marked their two
crosses.

This would not only distort downwards the vote for the smaller
parties; it would also negate many thousands of constituency votes,
particularly for the SNP.

Without a full analysis of every paper, it is impossible to say how
the results were affected by confusion.

However it is wishful thinking for Tommy Sheridan to claim he was
robbed of a seat in Glasgow. The claim that with just a few hundred
more votes, Solidarity would have won a seat in Glasgow is pure
fiction. Out of around 10,000 disqualified regional votes in Glasgow,
Sheridan would have required 2,200 to beat the Greens and 2,600 extra
votes to beat the SNP  and even that would be based on the
far-fetched assumption that neither of these parties had any
disqualified votes!

In Glasgow as elsewhere, it is likely that the vote for the SSP, the
Greens, Solidarity and a range of other small parties would have been
significantly higher, but nowhere near enough to affect the outcome.

Nonetheless, this distortion of democracy blatantly discriminates
against the most deprived voters in the poorest constituencies who
are already disproportionately excluded from electoral politics.

The constituency with the highest number of disqualified papers,
Glasgow Shettleston, was also the constituency with the lowest
turnout in Scotland  just 33 per cent.

And by the way, just in case you didnt know - Shettleston also tops
the UK league table for poverty and deprivation.

This will be also appearing in this week's Scottish Socialist Voice. I am not particularly happy that we had to mention the split again and go down the "who's the best party line", but given the ludicrous statement of Solidarity, I guess it couldn't have been avoided.

The case for Scottish Republicanism.

2007-05-03T14:21:00.000Z

In a desperate attempt to take my mind off the catastrophe that were Thursday’s elections (on which I may, or may not, comment later) and in place of a May 1st post (May 1st, apart from international labour day, was also the 300 anniversary of the formation of the British Union) I will honour my promise to Southpawpunch and present a brief argument in favour of Scottish independence from a socialist point of view. You see, said fellow mistook my last post for such an argument. It appears that he understood that my rationale was that if large capital is in favour of the union, then we should be against it. I can't possibly fathom where he drew such a conclusion from, considering that the only point made therein was that Scottish capital could extract a variety of gains from independence that do not necessarily have to do anything with attacking the working class, which seems to be one of the key postulates of left unionists.

It seems that such sophisms form the intellectual foundations of many ultra left numpties. For example, the Squirrel Vanguard's favourite puritan ortho-Trot sectlet, the Socialist Equality Party published an article about how Scottish independence (or fiscal autonomy) would be an economic disaster from the working class. Apart from being largely based on false premises the article registered at new levels of idiocy for the following paragraph:

So what could possibly be wrong with the Irish model? At a time when most European economies are stagnating and unemployment is high, the Irish model, with only four percent unemployment, might indeed seem to offer an alternative perspective for other small economies. That is certainly what the Scottish and Welsh nationalists claim and, by extension, what their supporters among the radical left must agree with.

One would have thought that the countless demonstrations, paper articles, press statements and whathaveyou as well as the successive resolutions of a number of SSP conferences explicitly stating that we will never enter a bourgeois coalition, would have made it a bit clear by now that the Scottish Socialist Party is utterly, completely, fully, most assuredly and irreconcilably opposed to the SNP's vision of Tartan business haven Scotland. You would expect from self proclaimed Trotskyist dialecticians not to employ the "humans have legs, pigs have legs, ergo humans=pigs" kind of formal logic which Trotsky used to denounce in a huge number of his works. But that's probably just me. Now, enough with the puritan bashing, let's move on to the actual politics.

I only wish to point to the political/ideological/tactical potential benefits for the socialist movement that can be made by fighting for and eventually achieving Scottish independence. There is a compelling (for the working class) economic case to be made as well, but this is not what concerns me here. Andy from the Socialist Unity Blog made a short and to the point post outlining the economic benefits that Scottish independence could bring for the whole of the British working class. You can read it here.

Now, with the lengthy and ranty intro out of the way, let's look at what the key issues surrounding the question of independence are. The most common points Brit lefties usually raise are that independence will break the unity of the British working class, that the break up of a nation state into smaller ones is inherently regressive, that advocating independence necessarily involves whipping up nationalist feelings (therefore weakening proletarian internationalism) and that, after all, there is no reason for socialists to get involved in a choice between a capitalist Britain and a capitalist Scotland. All capitalisms are the same, the task of socialists is to raise class consciousness and fight for socialism!

These arguments may on first look seem to be entirely inline with a Marxist outlook, but if we examine them more carefully and refrain from puritanistic black and white juxtapositions of class struggle vs anything else we'll see that they don't hold much water.

Starting with the issue of the unity of the working class in Britain, let us consider what the idea that the working class should not be split along national lines is founded on. Most Marxists and socialists take this as an axiom. Left unionists extend this axiom to the case of Scottish separatism and thus, they a priori reject the latter without having really considered its internal dynamics and how these relate to the unity of the working class.

They idea is that since capital is largely integrated, and operates in a largely centralist manner, transcending national boundaries, then the working class should aim to unite as much as possible and fight capital on an international level as well. An isolated working class is far weaker than a united, militant working class fighting on the principle of solidarity. Therefore, the erosion of national boundaries is inherently a positive development, since it builds bridges between formerly divided national working classes. Conversely, the fragmentation of existing states is necessarily against the interests of the working class as it becomes divided and therefore, weaker.

So far, so good. There's nothing wrong with the above in the abstract. Internationalism is always good, both tactically and ideologically. Nobody is disputing that. The problem however is that if we look at the concrete potentialities of Scottish independence, the above is completely and utterly irrelevant. The main weapon of the workers in the class struggle is their organization in trade unions. The unions in Britain and the rest of the world evolved from initially local organizations to the largely centralized formations that they are now, reflecting trends in the capitalist economy. British capital will remain integrated even if Britain is broken. Its internal antagonisms may become more acute, but it will remain a single class. Well so will the trade unions! The separation of Scotland from Britain does not have to, nor will it entail the division of British trade unions into their national components. The National Union of Journalists already organizes workers in both the UK and the Republic of Ireland. Unions in North America operate on both sides of the US/Canadian border.

None of the circumstances that necessitated the establishment of all British trade unions will vanish if the British state disintegrates. To think that Scottish independence will somehow undermine the capacity of the British working class to operate as a single entity is to mechanically connect the trade unions and the bourgeois state. Such thinking is extremely undesirable from a socialist point of view. We must consciously seek to develop workers' unions beyond the existing nation states, not wait until those states merge to achieve this.

But what of the ideological problems that support for independence entails? Surely, the setting up of a new nation state will promote nationalism and weaken support for socialist ideas amongst the workers.

Well not quite. Nationalist groups are a small minority in the independence movement which is more concerned with actual socioeconomic issues rather than the evil English. Within the movement, we should fight to isolate and eventually destroy all expressions of nationalism, but in the present, the most right wing of the major political forces in favour of independence is the SNP, which only some days ago got the first Asian MSP into parliament and is not using any anti-English rhetoric.

Moreover, there is no language/cultural barrier between Scottish and English workers to create division and hostility. The poison of nationalism and xenophobia is the result of inability to relate to and communicate with other people. In the southern US, Spanish and English speaking workers have trouble organizing together and are often hostile to each other despite living in the same state.

Surprisingly (not really) the political group that represents the despicable ideology ultra nationalism and racism, the British National Party, is hardline unionist.

None of these dangers are present in the dynamics of Scottish separatism. The only xenophobic group I know of that is supportive of separatism is Siol Na Gaidheal and it is little more than a kitsch tartanry culture club. In fact, the break up of the UK could once and for all defuse whatever hostility could arise on the part of the Scots towards the perceived "English exploiter".

What left unionists fail to understand is that proletarian internationalism is not the product of bourgeois states. The failed British identity that was artificially constructed by the ruling classes of these islands as an ideological support for the Empire is ample evidence of this. Internationalism is forged by the working class(es) during common struggles. The British state was never built on such foundations. It wasn't even built on bourgeois radicalism, unlike Italy. It was established by a conservative ruling class that was threatened by both the radical elements of the bourgeoisie, like the Cameronians, and the even more reactionary feudalist Jacobites.

The links that English, Scottish and Welsh workers have built in decades of struggle are not subject to the existence of the British repressive apparatus. It is rather ironic, that prominent "dialecticians" would think in such a mechanistic manner as "break-up of the uk=break up of the UK's working class". Such arguments are little more than leftist manifestations of Blair's "border guards on the Tweed" doomsday scenarios.

Having seen how most of the objections to independence put forward by left unionists have little substance, we should take a look at why independence is a goal worth fighting for.

Perhaps the most compelling reason to fight for the Scottish independence is the constitutional crisis that it would cause throughout Britain. I said earlier that the key weapon of the working class in its fight against capital are the trade unions. For the bourgeoisie, it is the state.

Britain has one of the most powerful state apparatuses found in the developed world today. It is, even after devolution, highly centralized, with a rather unrepresentative House of Commons and an unelected House of Lords. More importantly, the government has royal prerogative powers that are not subject to parliamentary review.

Setting up an independent Scottish state would give us the chance here (provided of course that we are actively involved) to establish an apparatus that is far more representative and with considerably less authoritarian powers, thus providing considerably more fertile ground for socialists to organize and agitate.

A similar debate would be probably started south of the border as well, giving the English and Welsh left the chance to fight for more representative forms of government, like the adoption of PR at Westminster and devolution for North England among others.

Further, one cannot underestimate the power of the blow that will be dealt to global imperialism by the break up of Britain. It is no secret that the UK is the chief guard dog of US interests in the world, an imperialist junior partner. However, with 1/3 of British troops being Scottish, Britain's capacity to support her American masters would be severely compromised should Scotland become a separate state with an independent foreign policy. Of course, you may reasonably object that there's nothing to guarantee that Scotland would not follow a similar foreign policy to what will remain of the UK, meaning that there'll be little change on the global level, apart from an extra line on the map. While this objection has some merit, in that no one can predict with certainty what the foreign policy orientation of an independent Scotland would be, it is not unreasonable, given the facts, to assume that Scotland would abandon yee-haw imperialism for a foreign policy similar to that of the Republic of Ireland.

First and foremost, the Scottish economy is largely based on small to medium sized businesses. Such capital is of necessity introverted preferring to spend state money on subsidies and internal investment rather than weapons of varying destruction scales. Second, the SNP, which, should Scotland go independent, will definitely form the first two governments, has a history of anti-war populist politics (like its commitment to scrap Trident - its not like small-mid businesses need nukes) and is largely pro-European. That and the cold hard fact that Scotland is a rather small country would almost surely push a newly formed Scottish state towards the EU, away from the Anglo-Saxon axis. That of course is not to say that the EU is a "better" imperialist entity than the US. The point is that the loss of Scotland would be significantly more damaging to American-British imperialism than its gain would be to the EU. We should also consider that, as said earlier, left wing forces in an independent Scotland will be in a significantly better position to influence the political agenda, making it possible to completely pull Scotland away from US interests while also pushing the EU approach into a Scandinavian channel of relative independence.

Finally, it is important to note that the independence movement is fertile ground for the spreading of socialist ideas and the building of hegemony. The reason is that, as I wrote earlier, support for independence is bound up with a series of inherently progressive concerns (anti-war demands, concerns over the democratic deficit etc.). Thus, there is an ever present opportunity to pose questions (and give answers) over what kind of Scotland we want. Now, this does not imply that socialism will immediately spring up as the first answer. However, given that amongst workers, support for independence is mostly found with those that are more class conscious and militant, it is certain that any campaign for Scottish independence can be infused with (quasi)socialist demands relatively easily. As Gregor Gall argues:

Support for independence amongst the social groups that comprise the working class has grown between 1979-2002: routine non-manual: 8% to 25%, skilled manual 5% to 34%, semi-skilled manual 8% to 34%, and unskilled manual 8% to 40% . This then also intersects with the growth in support for independence from the left and those that identify themselves as 'Scottish' rather than 'British'. In 1992, 30% of left-wing opinion supported independence with 46% doing so in 2002 . In 1979, 11% of those identifying themselves as 'Scottish' supported independence with 36% of those doing so in 2002. With a population of 5m in Scotland and extrapolating from these figures, around 1m people can be identified who are of key importance for the SSP; those who are working class and on the left, identify themselves as 'Scottish' and who are pro-independence. The crucial point here is that amongst the key constituency for the SSP, namely the working class, the most radicalised section of opinion is pro-independence.

Whether the potentialities identified above will be realised or not is entirely, or almost entirely, up to socialist and working class agency in the political processes that will deliver and follow independence. In the abstract, the establishment of a separate Scottish state cannot be defined as either positive or negative a development for the socialist movement. This black and white, mechanistic approach is where the fallacy of both left unionist and left nationalist narratives lies. Passive support for the British state is no way forward for the working class and neither is cheerleading for the SNP. The movement for Scottish independence must have a specifically defined goal of setting up a republic that is not servile to imperialist interests, a republic that adopts radical solutions to poverty and other social ills; a social republic if you will. Within that movement, we must agitate for the socialist transformation of society, in order to build a truly powerful, deeply rooted working class vanguard that can fight the harsh political struggles that we shall inevitably face in an age of ever growing capitalist decline and increasing imperialist competition. MacLean wasn't speaking out of his arse.

Tesco, SNPs 100 and the unmarxism of left-unionists.

2007-04-29T21:02:00.001Z

Some days ago, Alex "St Bernard's" Salmond, leader of the Scottish National Party, announced a list of 100 business supporters of his party's electoral campaign, further confirming the SNP's identity as the newest business ass licker. For left unionists, this was more proof that Scottish independence will be a disaster for the socialist movement and the working class in Britain, meaning that all principled socialists should oppose the break up of the British ~~empire~~ state, in the interests of working class unity (as if proletarian internationalism is created or sustained by bourgeois state apparatuses) . This of course, by extension means, for them, that we, are crap.

Soon after this glen shattering revelation however, the chairman of Tesco announced his support for the Union, saying that it has "served us well" until now. Who this "us" refers to, I'll leave the reader to decide.

But wait a minute! Tesco is the UK's largest and the world's fourth largest retailer, as the infinite source of knowledge that is Wikipedia tells us. What then is wrong with the heads of this burgeoning firm's bosses? Can't they see what a titanic victory against the conscious working class the break up of the UK would be?

The answer's no, they can't. And neither can the big shots of CBI. And how could they? It makes absolutely no sense for capital to break up one of the most powerful imperialist constructs in history. All the endless "we're too small", "terrorists everywhere" tirades of New Labour, as well as the "we're stronger together, please stay" Tory rhetoric are just reflections of the cold hard fact that British capital loves the British state and wants to keep it intact. That doesn't of course go to say that British capital can't survive if Scotland breaks away, but merely, that the fat cats would rather it wouldn't. If they could survive the setting up of the Republic of Ireland and the death of colonialism, they can definitely tolerate Scotland breaking away. But for reasons that should be obvious to four year-olds, they would prefer to keep unitary political control over these isles.

Why then, would a section of Scottish capital wish to dissolve the Union and forfeit the benefits of having access to such a formidable machinery of violence? A Marxist analysis actually makes the motives behind the new found patriotism of Scottish capital quite clear. By Marxist, I do not mean the kind of vulgar mechanistic determinism upheld by left unionists and their sects, but an actual concrete look at the class dynamics of a given social process. The vulgar Marxism of left unionists (and many others) consists in forcing preconceived ideas, derived from the study of older situations, on the currently unfolding events. They do not engage in a "concrete analysis of concrete circumstances" as Lenin would put it, but seek to push the concrete current situation into their familiar ideological boxes. Thus, according to their black & white mode of thinking, if the bourgeoisie wants something, there is zero chance that the working class might benefit for it. But enough with those web-covered, dusty "Marxists". Let's take a look at what's happening here.

The first thing to do is take a look at the synthesis of this infamous list of business owners that love the SNP so much. We should remember that the bourgeoisie is not a uniform class. It is heavily stratified internally - more so than the working class - and grasping this is a key to understanding why it may sometimes act in ways that don't make sense if we regard it as a monolith. Now, looking at the names on the list (you can find it by following the first link and scrolling to the bottom) we find that it is predominately composed of small to medium size businesses, with tourism being a particularly large section. There are legal firms, a bed and breakfast, a tour company, a couple of management companies and... a kilt maker.

But what about the big shot supporters like the Royal Bank big shot Sir George Mathewson. What can small tourism based businesses like Hotel Ceilidh-donia and finance capital magnates have in common?

The answer isn't that complicated. They would all benefit from a sovereign Holyrood parliament with economic powers, or even a non-sovereign parliament with fiscal independence as the trajectory of the SNP seems to suggest will soon be the case. They would also not be particularly affected by the loss of Britain's imperialist strong arm. The existence of nuclear weapons on the Clyde as well as shock & awe all around the world are of little concern to the Linlithgow Tours company or to Kilts by Lindsay.

Big finance capital like the Royal Bank of Scotland is also not dependent on old fashioned big guns imperialism for its growth. Neo-liberal institutions and just plain unfair treaties are good enough for them. Of course, you might argue that in order for the Third World to remain in line, some sort of military bullying will always be necessary. But the RBS doesn't care about who's got the guns. As long as the poor countries of the world are kept weak enough to accept their shark loans, the golf playing fat cats are content. Tesco on the other hand really does need cheap fuel, cheap raw materials and of course, good ol' child and sweat labour.

Now, apart from not being hurt by it, the RBS (and the rest of the great 100), would also benefit by the establishment of an independent Scotland. You see, they would be in a much better position with regards to the levers of power. In the UK, the Royal Bank has to compete for influence with other monsters like Barclay's, while in Scotland, where it is by far the largest and most powerful bank, it could easily pull the strings of a St. Bernard led administration. As far Scottish smaller businesses go, they have little chance of ever gaining any significant influence on an all British scale. So why not go for independence?

We see therefore that despite Brit left rants, Scottish capital does not support independence as a gain against the working class, but as a gain against its competitors. Any analysis of the effects that Scottish independence would have on the capability for socialists to organize and raise transitional demands necessarily leads to the conclusion that the break up of the UK will be a positive thing, if socialists take an active part in the campaign for independence and strengthen their hegemony over the movement.

The left-unionist tirades about how Scottish independence is an anti working class, bourgeois nationalist project simply write working class agency off history. Some Marxism there!

Oh my. This is hilarious. In a macabre kind of way.

2007-04-29T16:28:00.000Z

Deary me. The mind blowing stupidity and lack of originality of the BNP hurts my head. Did anyone know about this? I'd heard something about the BNP setting up a union - they do after all care so much about the working class - but this caught me completely off guard.

Funniness aside, the reemergence of Fascism in the UK is something we should deal with, beyond pointless unite against fascism flyers about how the BNP is a neo-Nazi party. We need to seriously challenge them wherever they appear. Fascism is an infant that must be slain in the cradle.

Trotskyist Scandal

2007-04-24T20:12:00.000Z

Those who read my post on Venezuela a couple of days ago, will have probably understood that I am not too fond of the sectlet known as the Socialist Equality Party, better known for running the World Socialist Website. For all my dislike of them however, I never could have possibly imagined what I read about them today while browsing a marxist community on Live Journal. While I am not entirely sure of the original source's credibility, it just makes too much fucking sense to ignore.

Enjoy:

http://community.livejournal.com/marxism/300825.html

WSWS/SEP
From alt.politics.socialism.trotsky

EXHIBIT 1

http://www.grpinc.com/grandriver-people.html

EXHIBIT 2

http://www.irisolutions.com/pressroom/best-places/2003_Crains.BPTW.pdf

(see page 2)

EXHIBIT 3

http://www.weandrews.com/wwwAndrews/Docs/RRD_piworld_1.pdf

(see page 9 of 14)

Some years ago, the communist political cult to which I used to be a
member
for one year (then known as the Workers League, now known as the
Socialist
Equality Party) made an interesting "turn" in its political line.
According to SEPtic,
the unions were no longer organizations of the working class.

I found this "turn" to be quite startling. Upon further thought,
however, it sorta
made sense. David W. Green ("North"), the cult leader of SEPtic,
having run
the cult since the mid 1970s, had been a complete ineffectual. He and
his cult
never organized any workers, ever gained any influence in the labor
movement,
never accomplished anything. So, in a strange way, it made quite a
bit of sense
that "North" was now writing off the unions altogether.

Still, I wondered, how was it that "North" managed to keep control
over a dedicated
cluster in the top leadership.

Today, playing around on the web, I found a possible answer. It seems
that David
W. Green is CEO of the 241st largest printing company in the USA.
EXHIBIT 1
is a link to the company's site. EXHIBIT 3 show that in 2005 the
company generated
$21mm in sales. EXHIBIT 2 has pictures of "David North" and his wife
in Crain's,
touting them as some of the best employers in the city.

The "puzzle" now makes sense.

Question: why does the North cult solicit members for donations when
they run
a profitable enterprise that could conceivably fund the SEPtic web
page activities?
Is there any sort of democracy in SEPtic? Were a faction to take over
the cult,
what would be the impact of the North crew vis-a-vis the company
activities?

It's interesting that CEO North now tells workers that unions are no
longer organizations
of the working class. This same "line" is probably echoed by CEOs at
all unorganized
companies.

I'm not posting this for the sake of "exposure and denunciation" for sectarianism's sake. I do feel ashamed when certain con artists perpetrate massive frauds on wide sections of the hard left and the youth.
Based on anecdotal evidence (which is unfalsifiable yet will make sense to anyone who has been involved in similar groups) members of the "SEPtic" were expected to empty their pockets to fund their local chapters, while the Good Ship WSWSEP was run rather brusquely, and undemocratically, by Cap'n Green/North.
Already the "Friedrich Engels, too, was a capitalist" defense is being brandished by SEP internet agents, as well as "Don't believe everything you hear on the internet [WSWS notwithstanding]", and "[non-SEP]Splitters are the FBI/CoIntelPro's best tools".
This scandal ranks up there with the Ukrainian fraud (http://www.internationalist.org/ukraineimpostors0803.html) in the US Trotskyist hall of bloopers, and rivals the transgressions of SEP/Workers League's former guru Gerry Healy. Marxists and working-class militants must regroup beyond the scope of sterile orthodox commentaries, academia, and abstentionism. For every David North, Bob Avakian, and James Robertson there are hundreds of disillusioned youths and workers -
Down with MLM [Multi-Level Marketing]!

Wait, there's more!

http://community.livejournal.com/trotskyism/3890.html

A Tale of Two Men
By Joe Hargrave

Here is a story you might find interesting:

I know of two men. One of them is the leader of a small Trotskyist political party in the United States. He is known as David North. The other is the CEO of Grand River Printing & Imaging, a company that earns 25 million dollars a year according to its website. They call him David W. Green.

For nearly 30 years, Mr. North ran his political party and Mr. Green ran his business. Mr. North gave speeches about the exploitation of the working class. Mr. Green exploited his workers, deriving surplus value from their unpaid labor. Mr. North thundered against the corporations that dominate American political life. Mr. Green sought those corporations out as clients, and probably did lunch with some of their executives. Mr. North would talk about the disgusting climate of corporate greed that pervaded the American cultural atmosphere. Mr. Green helped actualize that corporate greed by printing advertisements to help them push their products on consumers.

Of course Mr. Green was no black-hearted tycoon. No, surely Mr. North would have to exempt from his tirades against the corporations that dominate American politics and exploit the entire world certain capitalist leaders who stood out as genuine pillars of their community. Why, Mr. Green had gone to great lengths to make his workers as comfortable as possible. He invested in their training and education, he included them as part of his "larger vision". But surely Mr. North, who understood Marxism very well, would point out the absence of democratic control of the workplace, or the usual separation of the worker from the instrument of production that is the requisite of capitalist production. After all, his party published in statement after statement that the aim of socialism was to create a democratic economy. Yet none of the reports on Grand River suggested anything about "democracy" or "worker ownership" - Mr. Green may have been a nice man who saw the value in keeping his work horses happy, but he was also a businessman. So surely, should Mr. Green and Mr. North ever meet one another, they would disagree on a great many things.

Unless, of course, they were the same man.

Could it be a case of multipule personality disorder? Not exactly. You see, David Green, alias David North, is a fraud. He is the biggest fraud to hit the socialist movement since James Robertson of the Sparticist Leauge or "Chairman" Bob Avakian of the Revolutionary Communist Party. He owns a multi-million dollar corporation, and the upper echelons of his political cult and members of their family occupy key executive positions.

The rank and file members of the party are completely unaware of the existence of North/Green's corporate empire, which includes Grand River Printing, Merhing Books, and who knows what else. They assume that the party sustains itself through the donations that it begs for on its website and at its conferences, as well as the regular contributions that members are expected to "pledge" every month. I was exempt from this particular requirement only after I reminded one of its leaders of the considerable amounts of money I had invested in my own local branch. How nice of them. I can only imagine the giddy internal glee that North/Green must have felt every time some naive sucker wrote the SEP a check for a few thousand dollars. To North/Green, and the other party leaders, such donations were in fact chump change.

I can also only begin to imagine the difficult decisions that had to be made on a daily basis, such as, "how little can we put into this whole socialist thing to keep it viable while we live in the lap of luxury?", and, "should I use a 50 dollar bill or a 100 dollar bill to do this next line of cocaine?" All kidding aside, anyone who is serious about building a revolutionary movement, and who also happened to own a multi-million dollar company, would invest the maximum amount of profits into the former.

What I mean to say is, I could accept the fact that North/Green exploits the labor-power of his workers if the surplus value created by their unpaid labor was being used to build a movement that would one day end all exploitation. The ends, as I generally believe, justify the means if the ends themselves are justified. But this is obviously not taking place. The SEP has full branches in three cities - LA, NY, and Detroit. With the profit margins we can assume a 25 million a year company is capable of, there should be a fully-staffed branch in every major city in the United States. There should be an SEP radio station, a public access program on television, etc., etc., etc. Those profits, in sum, should be used to promote the movement, to expose not tens of thousands but millions of people to socialism.

What could possibly account for a failure to do these things? There is only one inescapable conclusion - that North/Green and his cronies enjoy the good life more than they do the revolutionary life. And they enjoy that life at the expense of the wage-laborers they employ. To dance around these uncomfortable realities they invent all sorts of paternalistic schemes where they provide top quality education and training for their workers - while, of course, "keeping wages competitive". To read the website of Grand River Publishing & Imaging is to be sickened. Every line is infused with phony corporate enthusiasm and politeness, in order to impress the equally phony corporate clients looking to get their ads published and printed. Contrast that to what you normally read on the WSWS. How can these people sleep at night? They might respond like the fictional Renier Wolfcastle: "On top of piles of money with lots of beautiful ladies".

It seems that every other week brings some new revelation about this political cult that I could have only wished I had known earlier. I tell you these things so that you can avoid my mistakes.

David North bio

Fucking hell. I was never under the illusion that the SEP(s) consisted of proletarians, as an organization numbering less than a thousand people globally could hardly be able to sustain a daily updated website like the WSWS if its members lived on an ordinary worker's wage. Also, actual workers hardly ever walk up to people who have given decades of their lives to the socialist movement calling them "middle class radicals".

But this?

Their sectarian ultra leftism, their sickening arrogance and first world chauvinism suddenly make perfect sense. Not in the manner implied by the author of the above articles, namely, that North/Green whatever his name is doesn't really give a flying fuck about the socialist movement - which might very well be true - but in that this pitiful excuse for socialist politics held by the SEP is exactly the kind you would expect from a... CEO's revolutionary consciousness.

Follow up

2007-04-24T10:58:00.001Z

Here's a short video of the riots that took place in Moscow after Tsar Yeltsin decided to back his illegal order to dissolve parliament (after its rejection of shock therapy) with tanks.

So long, fucker.

2007-04-24T07:39:00.000Z

You know, I was going to make a very long post about how much of piece of shite Yeltsin was.

But I won't. I don't need to. No matter how much bourgeois journos weave him peans as a "liberator", his legacy - and popularity - in Russia speak for themselves.

Good news from Venezuela.

2007-04-22T17:11:00.000Z

While elections to a bourgeois parliament that isn't even sovereign will be the most exciting political event in Scotland, at least in the near future, on the other side of the water things are moving on at an ever accelerating pace.

It appears that the establishment of a united socialist party in Venezuela to lead the struggle against both state bureaucracy and capital interests is now under way.

Green Left weekly has an excellent article about this by Federico Fuentes. He reports:

Chavez’s call has opened up a big debate on what the nature and program of such a party should be. For now, apart from Chavez’s party, the Movement for a Fifth Republic (MVR), the main Chavista parties have decided not to dissolve into the new party. However, large fractures have begun to occur as both leaders and rank-and-file members of these parties — Homeland For All (PPT), Podemos and the Venezuelan Communist Party — are leaving en masse. Most of the parties outside of the official Chavista electoral alliance but committed to the revolution have decided to integrate themselves into the new party, with a few waiting on the sidelines to see how things unfold first.

The party will be established along democratic lines, from the bottom up. For several weeks from April 29, 6000 booths will be set up all over the country for people to sign up to the new party. Next, the new joiners will be divided up into basic cells of 200 people based on territorial divisions, universities and factories. Out of each, a spokesperson will be elected to participate in the founding congress. No quotas have been set aside for party officials, nor will anyone automatically secure a place in the congress. Even Chavez will have to be elected by his local cell if he is to participate in the conference.

The founding conference will run for approximately three months. As the congress deliberates, spokespeople will return to their local cell, back to the congress, then back to the community and so on. On December 2, a referendum of all members will decide whether or not to approve the founding program of the new party. To ensure transparency and democracy, the national electoral commission will run the whole process.

Of course, not all forces of the left have been as supportive of the project as they should. As always, the pitiful party bureaucrats and hacks will not willingly support a truly radical party that will challenge their wee leadership positions. Honest socialists in Venezuela should leave their pathetic sects if their all wise leaders choose not to join the new vanguard -over some irreconcilable ideological dispute over the length of Engels' beard- and leave those rotten bureaucrats to wither away on their own.

While we also have our fair share of ludicrous Trotskopuritan clowns bashing the Bolivarian process in Venezuela over here, they are not a tenth as dangerous as those more-revolutionary-than thou petty gurus that may compromise the unity project in Venezuela. Given the ever increasing lengths that American imperialism will be willing to go to in order to stop a socialist transition in Venezuela as this becomes ever more likely, the crucial need for an indivisible, united political organization of the working class that has both the power and the will to fight for socialism cannot be stressed strongly enough. If the project is successful, we will witness the first ever establishment of a truly mass working class party that is explicitly socialist, rather than social democratic or trade unionist.

Of course, the puritan clowns whose only idea of political activity is reading books and writing huge articles that nobody ever reads apart from others of their ilk - this is what being a proletarian consists in according to them; if you are a political activist, you are probably a middle class radical - will immediately jump and cry that if Chavez had any intention of moving towards socialism, he would have already nationalized the economy etc. The toy town voluntarism of such arguments is stupefyingly, mindblowingly, most incredibly moronic. Those great "Marxist" new Lenin wannabes seem to forget the key tenet of materialism, the primacy of matter over ideas. They ignore that merely by leading the government, Chavez and all honest socialists in Venezuela do not have complete control over the whole of the bourgeois state apparatus. It should also be remembered that not all parties forming the government coalition are socialist.

Chavez's actions should be evaluated in the constraining framework within which they take place. Under this light, his record is spotless. Not only has Chavez armed the population - unlike the only comparable politician in the history of Latin America, Allende - and established radical democratic recall mechanisms, but also, unlike the great gurus, he has realised that socialism cannot be established via a series of decrees by benevolent leaders, it has to be built by the masses. He has been consistent in his calls to the Venezuelan people to actively defend their gains and move the revolution forward. In his latest speech he also said that those members of the government coalition that are against the formation of the united socialist party should fuck off to the opposition. So much for compromise.

Remember folks. A short bald guy once said that he who expects a pure revolution will never live to see it.

Election fraud in Scotland? No, it can't be!

2007-04-22T13:48:00.000Z

The following is from Scotland on Sunday. It appears that the British bourgeoisie has taken some lessons from its American overlords.

THE Holyrood election has been left wide open to fraud on a potentially massive scale after ministers scrapped checks designed to prevent abuse of postal votes.

With just 11 days to go, a Scotland on Sunday investigation has revealed concern at the highest level that key seats could be won by fraudulent postal votes, and that there are already widespread claims of vote-buying by corrupt party activists.

Despite an unprecedented 433,000 postal vote applications, our inquiry has established that:

• Computer checks on ballot signatures will be used in England, but not north of the Border;

• Date of birth checks on the same papers will happen south of the Border, but not in Scotland;

• The Electoral Reform Society in Scotland is "hugely concerned" about the scope for fraud;

• Allegations are circulating that votes are already being bought for as little as £20;

• Police have taken the unprecedented step of issuing every officer with a booklet on how to spot voting crimes.

The claims follow several scandals in England following the decision in 2003 to allow everyone to vote by post. In the 2004 local elections in Birmingham, party activists were accused of taking bundles of votes to ballot stations in black bags. A year later, allegations spread to the London borough of Tower Hamlets where nearly one in seven postal votes was estimated to be fraudulent.

The allegations centre on fraudsters stealing or buying other people's postal ballot papers and signing them themselves.

As a result of this obvious weakness in the system, England's council elections on May 3 will use for the first time equipment called postal vote identifiers which compare a voter's signature on the application form with the signature on the ballot. A further check on the date of birth will also be introduced south of the Border.

But the Scotland Office, which monitors the Holyrood elections, decided last November not to bring it in either measure because electronic counting of votes will also be used for the first time and it was feared so many innovations might overwhelm the system.

Billy Somerville, the president of the Scottish Assessors' Association - which administers the voting roll - admitted: "The reason it hasn't been built in is the complexity of the electronic counting for this year. Everyone wants to focus on that, without the added complication of comparing signatures."

Amy Rodger, director of the Electoral Reform Society in Scotland, last night warned: "We are hugely concerned about it and we do want to see these measures brought in. With the extension of postal voting we were always keen that additional measures to prevent fraud were brought in."

Scotland on Sunday has spoken to members of the Asian community in Glasgow who claim that fraud there is rife.

Muhammad Shoaib, who left the Labour party to become an independent candidate last year, claimed there was "a deliberate campaign" to abuse the postal vote system.

He said: "Party workers put pressure on people to sign up for a postal vote. They then have a list of addresses which they know are registered for postal votes. They know when the forms arrive and go back saying that 'we can assist you filling in the form'. There's a lot of pressure put on people; they effectively force people to fill in the form and to vote for them."

Another man, who asked to remain anonymous, claimed that in the last election he had been visited by three party activists. "One of them gave me a postal ballot paper and said 'just tick here'," he said.

The man said that the practice of literally buying votes was also on-going: "The cost would depend on how much the person knows how the system works. A recent immigrant from Poland might demand £20, an Indian or Pakistani £50, and a non-Asian who knows it's not allowed would ask for hundreds of pounds."

One independent candidate in Govan, Asif Nasir, claimed: "Party workers are taking advantage. There are big concerns in the Muslim community, many of whom have never voted in this [new] way."

Both Labour and the SNP insisted last night that there was no evidence of any fraud by any of their activists. Both the parties are following a new code of conduct, which now bars party activists from handling postal ballots.

Of claims that SNP activists were handling ballot papers, Peter Murrell, the chief executive of the SNP, said: "It is fanciful. I can't accept that it could happen. None of the parties have heard of anything wrong going on."

A spokesman for Labour said: "We have clear guidance sent to all candidates and agents and follow, to the letter, the guidance given by the electoral commission regarding handling posting votes. Any breaches would not be tolerated."

A spokesman for the Electoral Commission said: "What we have done is to issue police with guidance in order to aid their officers in identifying and tackling incidents of alleged malpractice. So far, we have not heard of any wrongdoing or attempted offences anywhere in Scotland."

Police officers have been issued with a "pocket book" so they can spot voting fraud. The guide includes specific references to "false application to vote by post or proxy".

Yesterday, a spokesman for the Electoral Commission said the guide books were intended to give "beat bobbies" assistance if and when they uncovered evidence of malpractice.

Note that the Scotland Office, which decided to scrap said checks, is a Whitehall, central UK government body, rather than a devolved one under the Scottish Executive.

Given their bleeding support, it appears that Labour hacks are trying to exploit every glitch in the system possible to maintain control over Scotland. This is yet further evidence of abuse of power on the part of the British state and demonstrates well the democratic deficit that Scotland is experiencing by being part of the UK.

The sooner this filthy imperialist construct goes down, the better; for everyone living on these islands.

Labour: DOOM will befall us if Scotland goes independent. Tories: We work well together don't we?

2007-04-20T12:37:00.000Z

Awrite folks, sorry to keep you waiting. I decided to take some time off and go home for the spring break, hence the lack of updates. Back in action though.

So, I read an article on yesterday's Guardian online entitled Brown and Cameron head to Scotland to confront SNP threat. As soon as I saw the title, I knew that it would be a good laugh. It's always funny to read Brown's whining about how British he is and it is at least interesting to watch Tory attempts to wash off their black record in Scotland. I have to tell you, I was not disappointed. The article manages to present British politics in all their bizarreness.

Cameron, in keeping with his good record managed once again to outdo Brown and New Labour. He made a speech outlining the "benefits" of the Union, both past, present and potentially future, while also criticizing New Labour and the doomsday scare tactics it employs to frighten people away from the SNP:

"The Labour party's approach is to cow and bully Scotland into remaining part of the union. I believe this is the wrong approach; instead of threatening the people of Scotland we must inspire them."

I never thought I'd agree with any Tory political comment, but this one is spot on. New Labour has completely failed to come up with even elementary political arguments in favour of the Union. Their campaign has focused solely on how bad, untrustworthy and incompetent the SNP are (you see, New Labs have proven themselves to be masterful politicians) and how inconceivably weak, poor, small and plainly useless Scotland is. They even sent ex-Stalinist bully John Reid up here to tell us that if Scotland goes independent, she'll be incapable to protect herself from the great threat of terror. The New Labour hacks seem to ignore that one of the key rules of politics (including the politics of everyday life) is that if you want to keep people with you, YOU DON'T TELL THEM THEY SUCK!

Labour's actions have "desperation" written all over them. This is not surprising. Not only is Labour getting its arse kicked south of the border by the Tories, it is also losing (possibly permanently) one of its traditional heartlands. On the other hand, the Tories can afford to remain calm as they are making gains in England and can in fact strengthen their position there by capitalizing on the failure of Labour here.

Of course, tactical blunders aside, there's not much Labour can do to stop the rise of the SNP. Given that they are both parties of the bourgeoisie, their political programmes are not really all that different. Tax cuts and handouts to corporations are at the core of both. The sole difference is that the SNP is not as committed to violent imperialism which I suppose is due both to the relatively strong influence of strong business interests on its agenda and the fact that its most powerful large capital supporters are finance capitalists meaning that they don't need Shock & Awe to rob people. The SNP and Labour represent the interests of different sections of the bourgeoisie, not the interests of different classes. That is why they can't put up an interesting political debate for the life of them.

Funnily enough however, according to the same article, Gordon Brown, in a speech he made at Scotstoun shipyard, did try to point out a potential difference between the two parties future economic policies. This is what he said:

"I'm afraid the SNP policies would mean higher taxes, less jobs, the shipbuilding industry would be put at risk and so would many of our important services and industries in Scotland."

That's right. One of the potential leaders of what has the nerve to still call itself "the Labour Party" is attacking another party for raising taxes. Not only that, but apparently, higher taxes inflate unemployment. If the fact that Labour uses arguments from the 80s Tory book against its rivals isn't proof of its political bankruptcy I don't know what is! They seem to be incapable of understanding that people don't care about "competitiveness" and "attracting business". Of course, you will correctly answer that they do not care about the people. They do, or should at any rate, care about their votes however. It seems to me that Labour is in collective shock. They have probably realised that Scottish independence is now a real possibility, and even worse, that it is beyond their control.

So what should socialists in Scotland do? Our task, as always, is not an easy one. We need to fight against the SNP's vision of Scotland as a corporate tax haven and promote the idea of a socialist republic. If the Scottish people are to be mobilized in strong numbers against the British state, they must be offered something more than a smaller Britain with a nice fresh coat of tartan paint. This is what Independence First has failed to realise as is evident by its insistence to remain apolitical.

Further, we must fight against the persistent idea of Labour as a working class party. While support for Labour is plummeting in Scotland, it is not certain that once a more charismatic and less business loving leader takes over Labour, the working class will not turn to that filthy labour aristocracy and capital alliance once again. It is imperative that we spread the idea that the problem is not Blair Brown and Reid, but capitalism and any political group that is in bed with the ruling class.

On May 3rd, the only alternative to job losses, pay cuts, public sector decay and environmental destruction on the ballot paper is the Scottish Socialist Party. After May 3rd, the only viable vehicle for the fight against both the British state and capitalism will remain the Scottish Socialist Party.

Attention Comrades

2007-04-10T15:40:00.000Z

The Squirrel Vanguard will not have regular internet access until next week.

We are very sorry for disappointing our regular readership. Please occupy yourselves with our blogroll until we return.

RUN AWAY!!! The Tories are coming!

2007-04-04T13:36:00.000Z

Yesterday's Independent carried an article according to which the Tories, that wonderful party that brought the world great people like Margaret Thatcher, Enoch Powell and of course, Winston Churchill, are leading the UK polls! Andrew Grice, Guardian's political editor reports that:

The weighted average of the main surveys conducted in March puts the Conservative Party on 39 per cent (up one point since February), Labour on 31 per cent (down one) and the Liberal Democrats on 18 per cent (no change). So the Tory lead has stretched from six to eight percentage points in a month.

Now, the change might not be too great and is in fact within the margin of a statistical error, but the sight of the headline was enough to send a shiver down my spine. "Why?" you would rightly ask. It is true of course that I only moved to Scotland about 3 years ago and was in fact not born until after the mid 80s. But this is inconsequential.

I developed an instinctive repulsion to anything Tory related within my first month in Scotland. The very rocks here seem to shout "fuck the Tories!". I've yet to meet one Scot that has a positive thing to say about the Tories. This of course is hardly surprising. The class composition of Scotland meant that she was hit harder than England by the outrageous policies of the Thatcher administration. Now, before you accuse me of Scottish nationalism (I've been described as a Scottish nationalist in the past, though how this is possible, given that I'm Greek, escapes me) and go on to say that working class areas of England were hit equally hard, let me say that I meant Scotland as a distinct civil society, which it is, with a distinct identity, which it has. Now, given that said society is about 10 times smaller than its southern neighbour, it was only natural that it would feel, as a collective entity, the Tory impact far more strongly.

Anyhoo, I've strayed from the original topic. What does this Tory revival imply politically? Not much, one would say. I've discussed in the past how ruling class and co. parties eventually come to promote the same policies as class divisions sharpen and the bourgeoisie becomes more and more homogeneous. Bloody hell, the Tories could probably sue Labour for stealing all their policies. Stupid, infuriating wars? Check! Obscene amounts of money spent on weapons? Check! Anti trade union policies? Check! Dismantling of the welfare state? Check! Rabid authoritarianism? Check! Xenophobia and scapegoating? Check! So what could probably be the problem? Shame shit different party.

Well, the problem does not consist in the reemergence of the Tories in itself, but in what it signifies. It signifies the "things can only get better" mentality that is prevalent among a large part of the working class that actually uses its vote. Back in 1997, when New Labour first got into power, the landslide victory it achieved against the Tories was, to an extent, understandable. Labour was a party with a more or less social democratic history and after the ravaging years of Thatcherism everyone believed with some justification that things could really only get better. But now, the true faces of both New Labour and the Tories have been exposed. So why go with either of the two?

There is no reply other than that socialists in England and Wales have failed to put forward a credible alternative. While the SSP has made some significant gains and progress which have been stalled, but not reversed or nullified, by the split, the left south of the border has been in stagnation. The Socialist Alliance, a hopeful unity project was destroyed by the SWP in a pathetically sectarian and opportunist manner in order to set up the RESPECT coalition. RESPECT itself is little more than a personality cult centred around George Galloway who is as absent as any other politician. RESPECT of course seems to forget that the "S" in its name stands for Socialism and has opted to refrain from talking about it, for fear of alienating some of its non-socialist supporters. Principled politics I tell you!

This failure to establish a strong socialist pole is also the reason for the overall apathy of the British electorate. The working class is not indifferent to politics in general, but to the specific politics that dominate the British landscape, that is, the politics of global capital and imperialism. A socialist alternative could very easily establish a support base within the huge number of people that do not even bother to register to vote. But such a force cannot be established by sectarian groups nor by coalitions that conceal their socialism in order to gain votes. Remember that the bourgeois vanguards can internalize all seemingly left wing demands, as shown by the new found greenness of the Tories and the shamelessly opportunistic opposition to the war by the Lib-Dems. What they can never internalize is the demand for socialism and the principles that underlie it.

So, southerners, get yer act together and build something to stand up to the Consabour filth! I'd personally say that the Campaign for a New Workers Party (not to be confused with the idiotic and sectarian campaign for a new Marxist party) is a good place to start. The Socialist Party that leads it has, at least up to know, behaved in a good manner, unlike its northern counterpart (CWI-Scotland).

Chavez warns private clinics

2007-04-03T14:53:00.000Z

According to Oil Wars, Chavez warned private health clinics that should they fail to keep their prices at reasonable levels, the government could nationalize them.

As Oil Wars comments, the opposition will probably start whining about this, running about with flailing hands and screaming "TOTALITARIANISM".

If you ask me, the only thing Chavez is guilty of is warning said enterprises and not nationalizing them straight away. I suppose however that until he manages to establish that unified socialist party and neutralize the bureaucracy, he does well to treat with caution.

The whiteman came, across the sea, he brought us pain and misery.

2007-04-03T00:28:00.000Z

It appears that the Canadian military released a manual on counterinsurgency warfare. Now, this in itself is not shocking given that Canada is a loyal lapdog of imperialism. What struck me was that the manual referred to various Native American organizations under the "insurgents" umbrella term.

A Canadian Lefty in Occupied Land has more.

Castro smites Bush over biofuel

2007-03-30T19:37:00.000Z

I was very happy to see today that Fidel Castro wrote an article for Granma lambasting Dubya for his newly found love for bio fuel. I was excited because this is Castro's first comment on international politics in quite some time, meaning that the old man is indeed getting better, and because it is always good to have such respected socialists commenting on environmental issues (the old left thinks environmental concerns are petty bourgeois).

On to the article itself now. The title of Guardian's report , "Castro warns poor will starve for greener fuel" is quite misleading, whether or not deliberately. By the title alone, it would seem that Castro is against green energy per se. Anyone who has been keeping an eye on developments in Cuba will of course know that this is couldn't be farther from the truth.

Castro correctly argues that the cost for producing biofuel from food will be paid by the poor people of the world as the third world countries that form the majority of agricultural producers will sell their food crops as fuel. What this implies is, in simple terms, a competition for food between the people of the third world and... cars:

Other countries in the rich world are planning to use not only corn but also wheat, sunflower seeds, rapeseed and other foods for fuel production. For the Europeans, for example, it would become a business to import all of the worldТs soybeans with the aim of reducing the fuel costs for their automobiles and feeding their animals with the chaff from that legume, particularly rich in all types of essential amino acids.

Further, he made the point that funding bio fuel production could lead to many poor countries to turn forests into farmland, thus exacerbating the problem of climate change. George Monbiot has been arguing along similar lines for some time now. The argument is supported by evidence of ever accelerating deforestation in the third world. The liberal sycophant will of course rush to tell you that this is because of "bad" and "irresponsible" governments - how strange that they only exist in the third world! - and that things would be far better if there was internal reform. Not once will it cross their mind that government corruption and deforestation is the product of the global North's imperialist exploitation.

But enough with bashing imperialism. None but the most empty headed liberal or crypto first world chauvinistic Trot would assert that the third world is responsible for its own problems. Let's take a look at what Cuba is doing to prevent climate chaos.

For one, Cuba has replaced all incandescent light bulbs and their ~90% energy loss with fluorescent bulbs that produce light of equal intensity at only 20% of the energy normal bulbs use. Cuba made this move 2 years before Australia enacted similar legislation. Of course, no major news source picked it up back then.

More importantly, Cuba and Venezuela have embarked on a joint effort to produce biofuel from sugar cane alcohol, thus sparing food crops. Forest protection and tree planting schemes will also ensure that Cuba's woodlands will not become the victim of her energy needs.

That's just a couple of the efforts that have earned Cuba the honour of being the only country with fully sustainable development. Meanwhile, in Britain, carbon emissions continue to rise while Brown and Cameron fight over whose policies are greener. The truth of course is that none of them is. There's really nothing green about spending an obscene amount of money on renewing Trident, when it could be spent on providing Free Public Transport.

You've got to be red to be green.

Look at us, we're activists!!!

2007-03-30T14:39:00.000Z

The second session of the Scottish Parliament is now formally over. The 129-4=125 careerist party hacks left the hideous building to start their election campaigns. Until May 3rd, you should expect to see them addressing rallies, knocking on doors, talking to people on the street and doing every short of slimy trick to dupe the Scottish electorate into voting for them yet again. Jack "ape" McConnell chose to start his campaign by visiting a school building site. He is after all a Labour party member, looking out for workers! The Lib-Dem leader went to Aberdeen to "knock on doors". The Nationalists too launched their official campaign, with Alex Salmond giving a speech about how Scotland has chosen independence and that SNP equals independence; usual SNP drivel.

They all care for us now! They care for us for 35 days every 4 years! Never mind that they are nowhere to be seen when Parliament is in session and the hacks comfortably sitting on their benches. They are busy with running the country then, but now, they can engage with us, hear our concerns and pledge to do the best for us if we give them our vote. Really!

Hypocrisy, lies and filth.This is the reason for the growing apathy of the Scottish people, especially the youth, with which everybody seems to be oh so concerned. Apathy? I'd say antipathy. The turnout for Holyrood elections didn't drop from 58 in 1998 to 49.8 in 2003 because people "don't care about politics". What they don't care about is the politics of the bourgeoisie or, in more concrete terms, the politics of parties who row over who can save the NHS when they pursue the same filthy policies of handouts to big business and pay cuts for the workers. What more than half of the Scottish people don't care about is parties like the SNP and Lib-Dems, theoretically against the Council Tax in principle, voting against the SSP's proposal to scrap it.

But wait a minute. There's a party whose members are on the streets campaigning every week. There's a party that's not afraid to stir shit up a bit against the Blatcher government renewing doomsday weapons instead of using the money (TENS OF BILLIONS OF POUNDS) to provide student grants, free school meals and free public transport. Nor does this party cower away from matters reserved for Westminster.

This party, is of course, none other than the SSP. But why is the SSP not a party of hypocrites and capital sycophants? It's not because we are "good people". It's not because it just happened that honest politicians found themselves in the SSP.

It's because we are socialists. We are not responsible to this or that magnate. Our only allegiance is to the working class of Scotland and the world. This is what allows us to maintain our political integrity and stand when others cower. The parties of the bourgeoisie can only serve their masters' interests. Even if an honest person does find his or her way in one of them, which is unlikely, they won't be able to change anything. They'll be reduced to some "colourful" dissident voice, only to be assimilated by the dominant party ideology as the time passes, or to drop out of politics altogether.

The only change the parties of the ruling class can bring is change within the system. This kind of politics however completely misses the point - the system is the problem. As long as the system, capitalism, is in place, the problems facing the people of Scotland and the world will remain. There is only one way out of the current deadlock and it is socialism.

Now, that's a word neither Labour, nor the SNP like to hear.

If Solidarity came to power....

2007-03-29T20:20:00.000Z

The following was inspired by a similar post made by my friend Vassilis, on what would happen if Synaspismos won the Greek General Elections of 2004. If you are not familiar with the crisis in the Scottish Socialist Party it will make no sense to you.

A year of Solidarity in power

May 2007

It is May 3rd, the day of the election. Solidarity has registered below 1% in pretty much every poll conducted in the past few months. Nobody expects "Scotland's socialist movement" to return any MSPs but...

By diabolical coincidence, 1.5 million Scots decide to vote Solidarity, for a laugh. Solidarity becomes the first party to form an absolute majority in Holyrood. Tommy Sheridan, the self proclaimed mild mannered Clark Kent of Scottish politics, dressed in a blue lycra suit (as above), delivers a powerful speech about an obscure Scottish football team taking on Real Madrid and winning. He then likens himself to Evo Morales and goes on to say something about the Scottish working class making the right choice. He spends the rest of the month going around Scotland delivering similar speeches, oblivious to the fact that microphones amplify the volume of one's voice.

June

After a month of much merriment, Solidarity dissolves into three parties that form a coalition government: SWP, CWI-Scotland and STS (Sheridan's Tangerine Sycophants). Sheridan announces the initiation of negotiations with London for the separation of Scotland from the UK. The Westminster Parliament unanimously agrees that Scotland should become independent in order to prevent the rest of the UK from becoming the laughingstock of the international community by being associated with Sheridan.

Despite initial hostility to Scottish independence, the SWP finally goes along with it, stating that it will table amendments to the draft constitution of the newly founded state.

On the domestic front, true to his promises, Sheridan brings in the ban of airguns. After such a radical social reform, he announces that Scotland has passed into the stage of socialism.

July,

The SWP presents its motions to parliament. Scotland is to be renamed North Britain and become an Islamic Republic in solidarity the Arab people targeted by American imperialism. In the same manner, Sharia law replaces Scots law. Angela McCormack states that this will send a strong message to the peoples of the world, making Scotland the mothership of the anti-imperialist movement.

Despite controversy, the motions are passed as the only group that opposed them within the Sheridan coalition, CWI-Scotland, was unable to attend the vote for reasons of senility.

Sheridan becomes Caliph.

August,

The opposition parties raise the point that the Islamification of Scotland tramples the human rights of the predominantly non-Muslim population of the country. The SWP replies that there is no country in the world named Scotland. Sheridan adds that such fabrications are reminiscent of the "dark days of Stalinism" and responds by banning all opposition parties that oppose Socialist Islam.

Stevie Arnott, now Ayatollah-Commissar of Cultural Affairs, orders portraits of Sheridan to be displayed at all major public sites. He justifies this action by reminding the North-British population that Sheridan is the most iconic socialist of the post war era and that the move only actualized what was already the case in the realm of ideas (he is a philosopher you see).

September,

Sheridan brings in mandatory prison sentences for knife-carrying. Cameras are installed in houses in order to enforce the new law. Scissors become the most popular utensil for cutting food.

Former SSP members are arrested and sent to labour camps in Orkney. Female members are burned at the stake for witchcraft. Sheridan announces that he has destroyed the scabs that tried to ruin him.

Witch-hunts are reintroduced in North Britain. In the spirit of Socialist Islam and North British tradition, accused women are given the right to appeal against the charges. They are then pushed off Edinburgh castle. If they survive the fall, their delving into the dark arts is proven and they are burned. If they do not, their name is cleared. An STS spokesman states that this is another great victory of Socialist Islam against political correctness gone mad.

October

The government nationalizes all brothels, strip club and sex-related industries. Attempts by the new state employees to organize in unions are ruthlessly suppressed for breaking that internal unity of the working class.

November

Sheridan stars in North British blockbuster "Orangeheart". The film follows the exploits of the mighty knight Thomas Al-Sheradin as he fights against witches, Queen's spies, Rupert Murdoch and Real Madrid.

He is awarded the Golden Raspberry for his outstanding performance.

December

Sheridan welcomes a North Korean delegation, sent by Kim Jong Il to share and exchange personality cult knowledge for the benefit of the two great nations. Some days later, Kim Jong Il is reported to have made a crackling speech with football similitudes. He also announces his intention to sue Hollywood for defamation over the film "Team America".

January 2008

The SWP tables a motion at Parliament suggesting that socialism should cease to be the official description of the North British socio-political system as it may be alienating to non-socialist Muslims. Sheridan agrees.

CWI-Scotland members die of collective heart attack. No one notices.

February,

Sheridan delivers some more speeches.

March,

The nation is shocked as Sheridan is reported to have had a tanning accident. Disappointment sweeps the country as an STS spokesperson announces that the Great Leader was unharmed and more orange than ever!

April,

Without political opponents to play the hero against, Sheridan gets bored. He orders the North British army to invade England and take over Manchester. Cupids is finally merged with the state owned North British Sex Industry.

Westminster demands an explanation. Sheridan refuses to answer and announces his intention to sue the English government for libel, as he has never, ever been to Cupids.

May,

The English army retakes Manchester and within days crosses the border. It enters Edinburgh and overthrows the Sheridan-SWP regime.

This is the first time in history that the Scottish people are happy to see the English army marching into the country.

Against Party Bureaucracy

2007-03-29T13:28:00.000Z

As a follow up to my previous post about Venezuela, here's an article from Montly Review making exactly the same point as I did.

Against Party Bureaucracy:
Venezuela's PSUV and Socialism from Below
by George Ciccariello-Maher

In recent weeks, it has become clear that three of the major parties constituting the Chavista coalition will not immediately dissolve themselves to pave the way for the construction of the unified socialist party (PSUV) that president Hugo Chávez has demanded be created to usher in the next phase of the revolution. These "dissidents" include the Homeland for All party (PPT), the Venezuelan Communist Party (PCV), and the broad-based social-democratic party PODEMOS.

Their refusal has created a political firestorm of sorts: Ismael García, head of PODEMOS and perhaps the most openly critical of the president's proposal, refused to be forced into any "single line of thinking." He was promptly attacked by many Chavistas, and Chávez himself indirectly accused García of "raising the flags of the right." García himself has perhaps deepened the tensions on both sides by attacking the "fascist mindset" of those who would oppose pluralism within the Chavista ranks.

This falling-out has been deemed a serious crisis by many, but, while both internal and external critics of the unified party speak of an impending authoritarianism, their stance obscures the pernicious influence of party bureaucracies masquerading as "pluralism." In the end, if it blunts the influence of these bureaucracies, this "crisis" may be a blessing in disguise for the PSUV and the Revolution as a whole.

A Constituent Assembly for the PSUV?

As an example, we could consider the recently named "technical committee" whose task it will be to formulate the basic structure of the PSUV and push forward its consolidation during the next few months. This committee was named directly by the president (another authoritarian gesture, according to critics) and consists of six members: vice president Jorge Rodríguez; governor of Miranda state, former vice president and minister, and longtime Chavista heavy-hitter Diosdado Cabello; minister of education (and president's brother) Adan Chávez; militant activist and head of Venezuelan Popular Unity (UPV) Lina Ron; former nutrition minister and head of the Francisco Miranda Front (FFM) Erika Farías; and the last-minute addition of Antonia Muñoz, governor of the state of Portuguesa.

Now consider, if you will, the demand issued by PODEMOS: the election of a constituent party assembly as the first step to constructing a unified program. If such an election were held today, according to the breakdown of Chavista votes in the December presidential election, this committee would (hypothetically) look much different: it would most likely consist of three members of the Chavista MVR (the largest vote-getter by far, which has already announced its intention to dissolve to pave the way for the PSUV), one member of PODEMOS, one member of PPT, and perhaps one member of the PCV.

What does a comparison between the existing technical committee and a hypothetical election tell us? For starters, of the technical committee that Chávez named to drive the PSUV, only Diosdado Cabello raises eyebrows as a potentially opportunistic party bureaucrat. Rodríguez, a psychiatrist by trade whose father was tortured and murdered by police in 1976 (and whose sister is a member of the Socialist League which their father founded), has remained largely outside official politics, with the exception of a brief and commendable stint as head of the National Electoral Council. While Adan Chávez, Farías, and Muñoz are all MVR members, they also attest to the internal variety of the central organ of Chavismo: Muñoz, for example, is a self-described "fighting woman" who was even expelled from the party for 22 months for breaking ranks to run against official MVR candidates. (The fact that Farías is an out lesbian and that Muñoz was added to create a gender balance speaks for itself).

The naming of "Commander" Lina Ron is even more revealing. Ron is as hard-line as they come: a street activist by nature, she has shunned all offers of institutional positions in favor of mobilizing the poorest sectors of Venezuelan society to the radical wing of the Chavista movement. Formerly linked to the Bolivarian Circles, Ron defines her UPV as an organization populated by "radicals, hardliners, men and women of violence," the shock-troops of Chavismo, whose devotion to the revolution is unshakeable (UPV's logo speaks for itself: a fist punching a palm). Chávez has on many occasions distanced himself from Ron, especially around the time of the 2002 coup when his government was forced to take a decidedly moderate tack (he once described her as "uncontrollable"). Praise has not been lacking, however, as Chávez has also referred to Ron as "a soldier who deserves the respect of all Venezuelans."

The naming of Ron to the PSUV technical committee reveals one thing above all: a commitment to attack party bureaucracy. This, too, explains the cool response of organizations like PODEMOS who, according to Lina Ron herself, are only seeking to protect their privileged position within the revolution: these privileges, in the form of governorships and mayoralties, belong not to the parties but to the Revolution. Rather than recognizing this, according to Ron, PODEMOS had chosen the path of "gathering a club of friends in the Hotel Hilton, covered by the major press, to challenge my commander-in-chief." As Ron sees it, the future PSUV will finally dispense with this internal hierarchy: "the hour has come, in the united party, for everyone to enjoy equal conditions." Indeed, a full-page communiqué from UPV published recently in Últimas Noticias takes aim at PODEMOS, which it argues has "created a rupture within the Chavista bases only for the sake of the arrogance of party managers," and who as a result are weakening revolutionary unity and "doing the Empire a favor."

A similar pattern emerges when we consider the PSUV's "promotional commission," a body dedicated to the ideological development of the embryonic party (and which was also named by the president). This committee also includes some more conservative Chavistas like MVR general director Francisco Ameliach, but what is particularly notable is that nearly half of this commission have a past in guerrilla movements of one kind or another. This extends from octogenarians Guillermo García Ponce, formerly of the PCV and several armed movements and currently editor of Diario VEA to a younger generation of urban guerrillas like Ali Rodríguez Araque, who also served as head of PDVSA, and William Fariñas, formerly associated with the far-left Bandera Roja (Red Flag). While the PPT and PCV are represented, in Rodríguez Araque and current minister of popular participation (and author of the Law on Communal Councils) Davíd Velásquez, respectively, PODEMOS is conspicuously absent.

From Passive Representation to Active Construction

It is this attack on party bureaucracy that explains the tense intra-Chavista relations prevailing since December 16th, when Chávez announced the formation of the PSUV and the precondition that parties must dissolve in order to enter the new organization. The "glum faces" that Michael Lebowitz noted that night in the Teresa Carreño Theater represented the recognition that party privileges were under attack from the top as well as from the bottom. This paradoxical top-bottom alliance, one which takes as its point of departure a hostility to bureaucratized middle sectors, is perhaps best expressed in Chávez's oft-repeated argument that the votes garnered by the various parties in the past election "belong to Chávez, that is, they belong to the people." In the same speech, Chávez was explicit about the threat that the PSUV poses for party hierarchies: "For this new era we need a new political structure that is placed not at the service of parties and their distinct colors, but rather at the service of the people and the Revolution."

But how, procedurally, is it possible to circumvent party hierarchies while avoiding top-down authoritarianism? This is certainly a difficult task, but I will argue that when we compare the provisional timeline for the constitution of the PSUV with the counter-proposal offered by PODEMOS, the differences become clear. Specifically, the PSUV timeline foresees the following stages, taking place under the guidance of the technical committee: the first stage, already underway, involves the selection of 11,000 "promoters," or activists chosen for their exemplary ethical values, whose task it will be to travel the country activating, in the second stage (beginning March 24th), "socialist battalions." It will be these "promoters" and "battalions" who will carry out a census and registry of the new party in preparation for elections during the third stage (after June 24th). This election will give rise to a fourth stage, in which a constituent party assembly will formulate the PSUV's program (between August and November), which will then finally be voted upon by the new party's membership in a nationwide referendum.

How does this differ from the demands of the "dissident" Chavista parties? On the surface, the disagreement is about timing, but this conceals a more fundamental difference. PODEMOS has essentially refused to dissolve until they know the shape of the future PSUV, and are demanding that elections to a constituent assembly precede their adherence to any program. While one wonders how they plan to participate in such an election while representing their existing parties, the point is clear: the second largest Chavista party is hoping for a PSUV constitutional assembly which reflects their current electoral weight, thereby granting them a privileged position in the drafting of a party program that suits their needs. Hence PODEMOS has recently released their own proposal for the structure of the elections to the PSUV founding assembly: these should be 50% local, 30% on the state level, and 20% national. This 20% leaves more than enough space for the existing party bureaucracies to slide smoothly into the driver's seat of the new organization.

On the other hand, Chávez's timeline envisions a longer process which is more actively driven by the base: the "promoters" and "battalions" will essentially "go to the people" in the Maoist sense of the phrase, in order to educate and prepare them to construct the party themselves. This is clearer when we consider that the founding congress will be built on the representation of "socialist electoral areas," thereby privileging the election of local as opposed to national delegates. Hence while PODEMOS seeks to preserve their privilege by promoting a process of passive representation based on immediate partisan preferences, the timeline provided by Chávez is instead centered upon facilitating the active construction of the PSUV from below. It is this crucial difference that is overlooked by such observers as Margarita López Maya, who in clinging to an impoverished and representationalist view of democracy misses the fact that the best way to enable grassroots democracy is to check the power of party elites.

Despite talk of "crisis," the unwillingness of PODEMOS to embrace this process unreservedly might end up being their final gift to the revolution. If this active construction of the PSUV from the bottom up is allowed to proceed unhindered by those who would seek to immobilize the process, if the elections to the constituent party assembly can take place without the stale bureaucrats of the past, then the PSUV might be able -- if only for the time being -- to slow the creeping tide of bureaucratic petrification that threatens to hollow out the Revolution from within. That many such threats exist within the MVR as well, an organization which is already seeking a smooth infiltration into the PSUV, is yet another aspect of this danger that will need to be confronted throughout the entire process in the year ahead.

A Declaration of Trotskyism against Trotskyists

2007-03-29T00:59:00.000Z

The Squirrel Vanguard:

Reaffirms its belief in the validity of the theory of Permanent Revolution
Reaffirms its commitment to the fundamental principle of the political independence of the working class and its vanguard.
Restates its opposition to bureaucracy, Stalinism and everything related.

However, the Vanguard denounces, in the strongest manner:

One party, one vanguard.

2007-03-28T15:35:00.000Z

A couple of days ago, Hugo Chavez publicly called for the dissolution of the constituent parties of the government coalition into a single united, revolutionary socialist party. Chavez argued that the Bolivarian Revolution is entering a new phase of increased intensity that will "sharpen the contradictions" and that in order for the revolution to be successfully pushed forward, a new, strong and united socialist party must be established in order to reduce sectarian in fighting and be thus more effective in fighting the state bureaucracy which is, correctly, seen as the main enemy of the Bolivarian project. 13 of 24 parties that make up the coalition immediately agreed to the proposed unification, while others have required more time to internally debate the subject.

Sujatha Fernandes reports that the proposition has been met with mixed public sentiment. While many support the project, others have expressed concern about
its top down character, arguing that unity should be the product of grassroots processes rather than leadership directives. This is in line with the general criticisms of the Bolivarian process as a Bonapartist project of the Venezuelan national bourgeoisie.

I would say that first, we are not aware as to what extent this has been discussed at the base. As far as we know, Chavez's announcement might have well been discussed internally. In fact, it would be rather odd for the majority of the coalition parties to agree to a unification upon its announcement, if it had not already been considered within their appropriate party structures.

Personally, I see nothing wrong with establishing a united socialist party, putting forward a revolutionary programme. As long as it is structured in a democratic manner, allowing a multitude of opinions to be expressed and affect policy formation, I believe that such unitarism is in fact a goal to strive to. It could also be argued that the dissolution of current parties within a new socialist and radically democratic formation can help destroy a large chunk of the cancerous bureaucracy that plagues the movement. I don't think that one of the parties that reacted less than enthusiastically to the proposal was the Communist Party of Venezuela is coincidental. Such a merging, if carried out, will cost many a "professional revolutionary" his job.

Despite my instinctive hostility to "great leaders", I do have high hopes for this endeavour. Chavez stated that the party will be "democratic and humanist" - I've no idea what the latter's supposed to mean - and given that his record in government is one of constant democratization of the Venezuelan state, I do not, yet, have any reasons to believe that he is a hypocrite.

Contrary to other populist leaders, Chavez has not only delivered what he promised, but he constantly presents in himself in an ever more radical light. It could be that the social processes in Venezuela are pushing him leftwards and that he goes along with the current for opportunist reasons, or it could just be that he is indeed a man of principles that found himself in a position of supreme power. The future will show.

What's certain is that Chavez deserves our active support for every step he takes against the bourgeoisie and our criticism for every unnecessary delay and/or retreat.

When employees of the bourgeois state speak more sense than many on the left, you know there is a problem

2007-03-26T01:59:00.000Z

The following was posted on The Socialist Unity Blog which by the way is very good.

'

This weekend marks the eighth anniversary of the U.S.-led NATO bombing of Yugoslavia. The implications of that action are still with us.

'The onslaught that began March 24, 1999, continued for 78 days, causing an estimated 10,000 civilian casualties and inflicting widespread damage on the country's infrastructure. The North Atlantic Treaty Organization's unprecedented attack against a sovereign state was done without United Nations authority and in violation of the UN Charter and international law. It also set a dangerous precedent: It transformed NATO from a purely defensive organization into a powerful alliance prepared to intervene militarily wherever it chose to do so. And it paved the way for the unilateral U.S. invasion of Iraq.

'Bill Clinton and other NATO leaders justified the bombing on humanitarian grounds. It was alleged that genocide was taking place in Kosovo and that Serbian security forces were driving out the Albanian population. Later, it was disclosed there was no genocide in Kosovo. (Of course, the outcome appears to be an independent quasi-state of Kosovo, as shall be recommended next week to the UN Security Council.) Before the bombing, several thousand Albanians had been displaced within Kosovo as a result of the fighting between Serbian security forces and the Kosovo Liberation Army. But nearly all of the Albanians who fled Kosovo did so after the bombing began. The real ethnic cleansing came after Serbian forces withdrew and more than 200,000 Serbs, Roma, Jews and other non-Albanians were forced to flee; more than 150 Christian churches and monasteries have since been burned by Albanian mobs.

'The bombing had little, if anything, to do with humanitarian concerns. It had everything to do with the determination of the United States to maintain NATO as an essential military organization. The fall of the Berlin Wall, the collapse of the Soviet Union and the withdrawal of Warsaw Pact armies had called into question NATO's reason for existence. Why was such a powerful and expensive military organization needed to defend Western Europe when there was no longer any threat from Soviet communism?

'The armed rebellion by the terrorist Kosovo Liberation Army provided Washington with the opportunity needed to demonstrate to Western Europe that NATO was still needed. So, it was essential to convince the news media and the public that atrocities and ethnic cleansing were taking place in Kosovo.This was done with relative ease by a campaign of misinformation aimed at demonizing the Serbs and by assertions by Mr. Clinton, Tony Blair and other NATO spokesmen that hundreds of young Albanian men were "missing" and that mass executions and genocide were taking place in Kosovo. Compliant journalists and a credulous public accepted these lies.

'In April, 1999, at the peak of the bombing, Mr. Clinton gathered NATO's political leaders in Washington to celebrate the alliance's 50th birthday. The party was used as a platform for Mr. Clinton to announce a new"strategic concept" -- NATO was to be modernized and made ready for the new century. There was no reference to defence or the settling of international disputes by peaceful means or of complying with the principles of the UN Charter. The new emphasis would be on "conflict prevention," "crisis management" and "crisis response operation."

'Usually when a treaty is to be amended or changed, it must be approved and ratified by the legislatures of the contracting states. This was not done with the North Atlantic Treaty. It was changed by an announcement from the U.S. president, with little or no debate by the legislatures of member countries. It may well be that NATO should be in a position to intervene militarily in the internal affairs of another country, but it surely is essential that the ground rules for such intervention be in accordance withthe UN Charter and only after concurrence of member states. NATO should not become a convenient political "cover" to justify the use of military power by the United States.'

SNP unveils "independence" plan

2007-03-25T22:43:00.000Z

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BBC reports that Alex "I-look-like-a-St. Bernard dog" Salmond has revealed the SNP's plans for a referendum on Scottish Independence. This is yet more evidence that, as I argued some days ago, the SNP is increasingly turning into a clone of its Catalunyan counterpart, Convergència i Unió and should not be seen as a viable political force for Scottish independence.

Apart from restating the intention of the SNP to hold a referendum towards the end of their term in Holyrood, in order to prove that they are responsible in office - newspeak for "good bourgeois lapdogs" - Salmond also revealed the wording of the question that his party would ask the Scots. According to the BBC:

Voters would be asked if they wanted to negotiate a new settlement with the UK Government so that Scotland becomes a sovereign and independent state.

Got that? Negotiate a new settlement. What kind of "settlement" would British capital agree on? Certainly one that wouldn't hurt the Crown and the vast array of undemocratic powers it provides. Certainly one that would make Scotland a low-tax haven for big business. Most definitely one that would guarantee Scotland's remaining a junior partner to American imperialism. The SNP leadership would be quite happy to accept such a deal. At least Scotland will have her own national anthem, her own passports, her own UN representative and a whole lot of other important stuff like that!

SNP. It's time!

Or is it?