Anti-Fascism

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The Beijing Olympics and class struggle

The Olympic spectacular in August this year is likely to be another step on China’s march towards great power status. For sure the media will marvel at the incredible stadia, the clean streets of the capital and the immensity of the country. So spare a thought for the workers on Beijing’s Olympic construction sites, working for about US$5 a day, often not getting paid until the end of the year and sometimes not at all. To bring the sporting showpiece to the world, workers are toiling at least ten hours a day. They don’t get weekends off, nor any paid holiday, and most have no contract or...

An anti-capitalist party for France?

After winning 1.5 million votes in the April 2007 French presidential election, the Ligue Communiste Révolutionnaire launched a call for a new “anti-capitalist party” to bring together activists from across the spectrum of the far left in a joint organisation. This unity effort in some ways echoes the LCR’s previous efforts to turn to other parts of the left, for example in their support for former leading Communist Party member Pierre Juquin in the 1988 presidential election. At present it is unclear what exactly the LCR plans to do – bring together the revolutionary left, or just everyone to...

Capitalism is crazy: private profits, social losses

Will the stock-market crash of 21 January continue, or ease? We don't know. But what about the monolines? The monolines? They are a fairly specialised part of the financial sphere. Yet their current crisis could have huge repercussions. That is how capital works. Hiccups in the tricks and speculations of tiny cliques of financiers can wreck the livelihoods of millions. In early 2007, low-security, high-interest mortgage lending in the USA went into crisis. By the end of 2006, those "subprime" mortgages totalled about $1.5 trillion, of which $600 billion had originated in 2006 alone. A lot of...

An insurance society for the ruling class

An editorial in the Financial Times (21 January) summed up well the Government's new plan for the collapsed bank Northern Rock. "The plan is this. Northern Rock will issue billions of pounds in new bonds... and repay its debt to the Bank of England. Private investors will [take over the bank]. And to make it work the bonds - all £30 billion or so - will carry a government guarantee... "The package amounts to a subsidy [from the Government to the Northern Rock shareholders and its putative buyers] and it may be worth billions of pounds... "[But] the political attractions are obvious. The...

REPORT TO A FRIEND WHO DIED FOR IRELAND.

REPORT TO A FRIEND WHO DIED FOR IRELAND. (Peter Graham, 1945-'71) Your bullet-holed young neck was not in view, Nor tortured flesh, nor rope-burned stiffened wrists: You looked unpained, a self-possessed young priest In the coffin; and your beard, I saw, still grew. Twenty years, Peter — twenty! Mid-life flew For me, was bullet-stopped for you: earth-kissed In a Dublin graveyard, rags now wrap your quest. I'm ageing, grey; you are no longer you. Twenty years! The North's dim war still halloes the gun; Against our Red, Orange and Green prevail; The South, thank God's at peace: you blazed no...

Capitalism is the problem, but what is the solution?

A critical exmaination of Joel Kovel’s eco-socialism as set out in his book The Enemy of Nature . That book has recently been updated and republished to include more emphasis on the effects of global warming, which Kovel argues has “become the defining issue of the ecological crisis as a whole”. Joel Kovel is probably the world’s best known eco-socialist. In 1998, he was the Green Party candidate for US Senator from New York and in 2000 sought their presidential nomination, losing to Ralph Nader. He is the editor of Capitalism, Nature, Socialism — a leading journal of green socialist politics...

The Lies Against Socialism Answered

For most of the 20th century, the common image of "socialism" was the USSR and the other states modelled on it, China, Cuba, and so on. There were always socialists who were critical of Stalin's or Khrushchev's USSR, seeing it as an unacceptably bureaucratic version of socialism, and keen to create a more democratic version in their own countries. By the late 1960s or early 1970s, a big majority even in the official Communist Parties was highly critical of Brezhnev's USSR. But most of those who criticised the USSR clung to the idea that some other USSR-model state - China, Vietnam, Cuba.... -...

Albert Einstein explains why he was a socialist

Click here to download pdf. "The oligarchy of private capital cannot be effectively checked even by a democratically organised political society. The members of legislative bodies are selected by political parties financed or influenced by private capitalists. Moreover, private capitalists control the main sources of information (press, radio, education)." - Albert Einstein Is it advisable for one who is not an expert on economic and social issues to express views on the subject of socialism? I believe for a number of reasons that it is. Let us first consider the question from the point of...

Marxist texts and Marxist method (part 2)

Part One ... And Argentine nationalism? Argentina suffered British and French intervention some 140 years ago. Modern Argentina, however, has essentially taken shape over the last 100 years. Argentina had no war of liberation. Its population is, to within one per cent, of European immigrant origin — most from immigration within the last 100 years. Its mass popular nationalism dates from the 1920s. This nationalism was, especially in its labour movement manifestations, shaped and consolidated by Peronism. Peronism was not and is not fascism. But corporatism and fascism are its essential...

For the United Front against Hitler

Oskar Seipold was a member of the Prussian Diet, elected on the official Communist Party ticket, who later defected to the Left Opposition. He delivered this speech in March 1932. It has been abridged slightly. The nations of the entire world and especially we in Germany are living under such conditions that every serious conversation turns directly to the questions of high politics — to that of the revolution. Thirteen years ago, after the overthrow of the Hohenzollerns, the working class was factually master in the German household. The state based itself on the workers’ and soldiers’...

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