Author: hallblithe

Some conflicting explanations for war

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 If you wish to have some understanding of what is happening and how the 99 percent are suffering in Gaza, Israel, Sudan, Ukraine…who should you call? 

Dr Kate Davison?   ‘..a self-described ‘queer historian of sexuality, psy-sciences & Cold War’, who is also a lecturer in history at Edinburgh, not only tweeted that ‘Palestine & trans human rights are the litmus test and most of you are failing half of it’, but also expressed support for a statement by faculty members at Berzeit University — an institution in the West Bank — which celebrated the Hamas attacks as ‘guerilla war tactics’ by ‘resistance fighters’.   
Dr Sarah Liu?   ‘.. a senior lecturer in gender and politics, also at Edinburgh, liked a tweet on October 7 that asked: ‘Did some people just think Palestine had to like file paperwork or something to be freed [?] this is what oppressed fighting the oppressor looks like.’


Such comments make the Daily Wail seem like the voice of reason: 


Black Rose Anarchist Federation?   ‘The road ahead requires sustained organization and effort, and will not be easy. Nevertheless, this is a moment in history where our action or inaction will be keenly remembered and judged. It is imperative that we seize this moment—against genocide for all and forever, for the end of Israeli settler colonialism, and for a free Palestine. 
Stop the genocide! 
Down with imperialism and settler colonialism from Palestine to the Americas!
Long live internationalist solidarity!
Long live Palestine!’

Anarchists calling for a ‘free’ Palestine!   Utterly clueless!


‘We are the only ones willing to defy the repressive attacks of the authorities and their media mouthpieces, and raise a revolutionary perspective for the people of Palestine.   That is why we say: Intifada until victory!’


ISRAEL KILLS GAZA CHILDREN
#Free_Palestine   ?

But ALL LIVES MATTER and as Marxist-Lennonists amongst us say:
Imagine there’s no countries
It isn’t hard to do
Nothing to kill or die for
And no religion, too



They, unlike many others, have seen beyond the false dichotomy of either Israel or Palestine and been castigated for doing so:

On her Instagram Story, Gomez shared her thoughts about the Israel-Hamas conflict, a conflict that has led to the deaths of thousands since its start a few weeks ago.    Gomez penned, “I’ve been taking a break from social media because my heart breaks to see all of the horror, hate, and terror that’s going on in the world. People being tortured and killed or any act of hate towards any one group is horrific.”
Selena Gomez Under Attack By Fans For ‘Sickening’ Statement On Israel-Hamas War.

Angelina Jolie Says Hamas Terrorist Attacks in Israel ‘Cannot Justify the Innocent Lives Lost’ in Gaza.   “Palestinian and Israeli lives — and the lives of all people globally — matter equally,” the Oscar winner writes on Instagram:

NB:


But the horrors of the siege of Gaza and ongoing conflicts elsewhere pale compared to the war that is waged through poverty: 9 million die every year or 25000/day from unnecessary starvation while food rots or is destroyed.


Thought for the day

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FACT 

On October 31, the Colorado Times Recorder highlighted a locally-made video interview with District 51 School Board candidate Barbara Evanson in which Evanson says that if schools teach what is scientifically known about the origins of the universe, then they should also have to teach creationism alongside that information so kids can decide on their own what’s true.   Creationism is the religious belief that God created the universe. It is a wholly religious construct with no scientific proof behind it.

v. FICTION


Mike Johnson’s head, as a young Earth creationist, is filled with fiction rather than fact.   He is also an anti-abortionist, Christian fascist, climate skeptic, homophobe, and, as US House speaker, second-in-line to White House – in short, an utterly odious character but no threat to USA Inc.




A stateless socialist world

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 ‘Karl Marx utilized Hegel’s philosophy as the foundation of The Communist Manifesto and Das Capital. On those philosophical underpinnings were formed the Communism of the Bolsheviks, the Socialism of Benito Mussolini and the Fascism of Adolf Hitler. Ideal State theory demands the sacrifice of individual rights that are then absorbed into the higher rights of the “Ideal State.”’

Marx: ‘The existence of the state is inseparable from the existence of slavery’ (Vorwärts, 7 and 10 August 1844).   He famously turned Frederich Hegel on his head, arguing that the explanation of the social world lay not in the development of ideas but in the development of the material conditions of life.    And in the Manifesto he concluded: ‘In place of the bourgeois society, with its classes and class antagonisms, shall we have an association, in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all.’


Marx’s collaborator, Fred. Engels: “But neither the conversion into joint stock companies nor into state property deprives the productive forces of their character as capital. In the case of joint-stock companies this is obvious. And the modern state, too, is only the organization with which bourgeois society provides itself in order to maintain the general external conditions of the capitalist mode of production against encroachments either by the workers or by individual capitalists. The modern state, whatever its form, is then the state of the capitalists, the ideal collective body of all the capitalists. The more productive forces it takes over as its property, the more it becomes the real collective body of the capitalists, the more citizens it exploits. The workers remain wage-earners, proletarians. The capitalist relationship isn’t abolished; it is rather pushed to the extreme. But at this extreme it is transformed into its opposite. State ownership of the productive forces is not the solution of the conflict, but it contains within itself the formal means, the key to the solution” (Socialism: Utopian and Scientific,  1880).

 Tellingly, Lenin wrote of Russia in 1918: ‘reality says that State capitalism would be a step forward for us; if we were able to bring about State capitalism in a short time it would be a victory for us’ (The Chief Task of Our Time)


Originally, fascist referred to the followers of Benito Mussolini, who was dictator of Italy from 1922 to 1943. Racism and anti-Semitism, though it did exist, did not play a prominent role in Italian fascism, unlike the German Nazi variant. Fascism was — and is – an authoritarian, nationalistic and anti-socialist political ideology that preaches the need for a strong state ruled by a single political party led by a charismatic leader. Hitler and the Nazis came to power with the support of more than ten million workers. 

The first concentration camp to be opened was for the incarceration of officials of the Communist and Social Democratic Parties. And on May 10th 1933 in Berlin banned books were burnt openly by students from the Wilhelm Humboldt University, all of them members of right-wing student organizations and watched by some 70,000 people. Marx’s friend and distant relative, the poet Heinrich Heine wrote some one hundred and ten years earlier ‘where they have burned books, they will end in burning human beings.’

Workers have no country

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Foreign Minister Pandor made a similar sttement last year: ‘As South Africans, we find similarities in our past with the Palestinians, and now I remember the funeral of Shereen Abu Akleh and what happened to her coffin. It reminds me of the gravesites that we had to carry out under the persecution of the apartheid soldiers’ (South Africa calls for holding Israel accountable for ‘inhumane conditions’ Palestinians live under, Middle East Monitor, 17 June, 2022).

In May that year Nokuthula Mabaso, an Abahlali baseMjondolo (AbM) leader was buried following her assassination in front of her children. She was the third activist of the shack dwellers’ movement to be killed in less than two months.    To date, 24 Abahlali activists have been killed.   Members of AbM are thus well acquainted with the state as a coercive machine of class oppression and likely know the fairytale Freedom Charter adopted by the ANC in 1955 envisaged a post-Apartheid South Africa where ‘The police force and army… shall be the helpers and protectors of the people’, ‘the right to be decently housed’ enshrined and ‘Slums shall be demolished …‘.   AbM are credited with starting UnFreedom Day, which coincides with the official South African holiday called Freedom Day, the orthodox annual celebration of the country’s first non-racial democratic elections of 1994. On the 16 August 2012 17 workers were killed and 78 wounded by the police in the Marikana Miners’ Massacre, the most lethal use of force by South African security forces against other workers since 1976. Worse still, former President Mbeki’s support for alternative remedies such as vinegar rather than antiretroviral drugs saved the state’s funds at a cost of at least 300,000 lives. 

And ‘More than two decades after South Africa ousted a racist apartheid system that trapped the vast majority of South Africans in poverty, more than half the country still lives below the national poverty line and most of the nation’s wealth remains in the hands of a small elite’ (NPR, 2 April, 2018) led by billionaire Ramaphosa.

Must do better

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 In an article titled The USSR flag and student communism: a controversial combination, we read:

‘The ideological concept of communism originated in 18th-century Western Europe as a result of the work of German philosopher Karl Marx.’


Marx lived and died during the 19th century, 5 May 1818 – 14 March 1883.


‘The brutal totalitarian practices initiated by the USSR’s leaders, particularly Joseph Stalin, lead to enormous suffering.’


Indeed, but they had nothing to do with socialim/communism.


Marx wrote; ‘the existence of the state is inseparable from the existence of slavery’ (Vorwärts, 7 and 10 August 1844).   Speaking about the modern state Engels, Marx’s collaborator,  pointed out:      ‘The more it proceeds to the taking over of the productive forces the more does it actually become the national capitalist, the more citizens does it exploit. The wages workers remain wages workers—proletarians’ (Anti-Duhring)    Lenin wrote of Russia in 1918: ‘reality says that State capitalism would be a step forward for us; if we were able to bring about State capitalism in a short time it would be a victory for us’ (The Chief Task of Our Time).


It was Lenin who instituted severe censorship, established one-party rule and resorted to terror against his political enemies.    Stalin took these measures to further extremes.


‘Future society will be socialist society. This also means that with the abolition of exploitation, commodity production and buying and selling will also be abolished and, therefore, there will be no room for buyers and sellers of labour power, for employers and employed—there will be only free workers… Where there are no classes, where there are neither rich nor poor, there is no need for a state, there is no need also for political power, which oppresses the poor and protects the rich. Consequently, in socialist society there will be no need for the existence of political power’ (Anarchism or Socialism? 1906).

Ironically, the author of this piece would thirty years later, in a complete volte-face, declare the USSR to be socialist. That same year, on the 28th August, Pravda proclaimed him divine: ‘O Great Stalin, O Leader of the Peoples,Thou who didst give birth to man, Thou who didst make fertile the earth, Thou who dost rejuvenate the Centuries, Thou who givest blossom to the spring… ‘ And a mere mortal observed:

‘There are in the USSR privileged and exploited classes, dominant classes and subject classes. Between them the standard of living is sharply separated. The classes of travel on the railways correspond exactly to the social classes; similarly with ships, restaurants, theatres, shops, and with houses; for one group palaces in pleasant neighbourhoods, for the others wooden barracks alongside tool stores and oily machines… It is always the same people who live in the palaces and the same people who live in the barracks. There is no longer private property, there is only one property – State property. But the State no more represents the whole community than under preceding régimes’ (What the Russian Revolution Has Become, Robert Guiheneuf, 1936).

And today, ‘Russian elites and oligarchs are probably some of the best in the world at hiding their wealth…’ (Washington Post, 11 April, 2022).



And finally, this howler:
‘Trinity College Dublin Students Union (TCDSU) President…offered his perspective: “I am from Eastern Europe. I am a communist. I am not offended by the display of this flag … [The hammer and sickle] is a symbol of the communist movement globally, and this is a movement of equality, justice and the liberation of humankind.” ‘


Verily, ‘flags are bits of colored cloth that governments use first to shrink-wrap people’s brains and then as ceremonial shrouds to bury the dead. When independent-thinking people (and here I do not include the corporate media) begin to rally under flags, when writers, painters, musicians, film makers suspend their judgment and blindly yoke their art to the service of the “Nation,” it’s time for all of us to sit up and worry’ (Arundhati Roy, c. 2008).








New audio recordings added to Party website

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The following talks have been added to the audio section of the website:

‘European Developments’ – by Andy Davies, 11th August 2023

‘Poverty’s No Joke: Eva Torf Judd and Working Class Memory’ – by Darren O’Neil, 18th August 18 2023. (Unfortunately the discussion was not recorded)

‘Human Nature’ – by Adam Buick, 25th August 2023

‘Labour Theory of Value: Some Misconceptions’ – by Adam Buick, 8th September 2023

‘What right-wing social media does to you’ – Mike Foster, 22nd September 2023

‘Ideas about human nature’ – Howard Moss, 29th September 2023



Some notes on Hamas and the ongoing capitalist conflict

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The origins of Hamas have their roots in the Muslim Brotherhood, led in Gaza by Sheikh Yassin. Not only was he allowed to openly spread his Islamist message while Israel was conducting assassinations of members of the PLO, but Yassin was also permitted to form Mujama al-Islamiya as an official charity that would eventually evolve into Hamas (on.wsj.com/3wDFzfV).



‘..Hamas was a legitimate government, democratically elected a year before the violent events of 2007, getting 76 seats out of the 132-seat chamber. But not for Mohammed and many other residents of the strip, who throughout the years staged multiple protests against the Hamas government.   “Democracy was over soon after the elections. First of all, they expelled the officials of their rivals to make sure that another round of elections will never take place again and, secondly, in the process of doing so, they killed dozens of people, many of whom were civilians. They never had the right to act this way”  (Mid East Discourse, 10 June 2020)





‘Some 2.54 million people in Israel, including 1.118 million children, live in poverty, according to a report released yesterday by the Latet non-profit aid organisation. Nearly 652,000 families – nearly 25 per cent of households in the country – are living in poverty, the study found’ (Middle East Monitor, 21 December 2021).




Neither Israel, Nor Palestine: No War but the Class War.



Vauxhall ward by-election result

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 Here’s the result announced just after midnight;


LAMBETH Vauxhall


SWAINE-JAMESON, Tom Simon (Labour Party) 595

ALDERECHI, Fareed (Liberal Democrats) 395

BOND, Jacqueline Rose (The Green Party) 256

ROTHERHAM, Lee Stuart (Conservative Party Candidate) 160

LAMBERT, Daniel Peter (The Socialist Party (GB)) 9


Vauxhall (Lambeth) council by-election result:


LAB: 42.0% (-11.1)

LDEM: 27.9% (+16.8)

GRN: 18.1% (-2.1)

CON: 11.3% (-4.3)

SPGB: 0.6% (+0.6)


Votes cast: 1,415

Promoted by the Socialist Party of Great Britain, 52 Clapham High Street, London, SW4 7UN.

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