John Passant

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The 99 Passant
I am about half through compiling the first volume of my most read (readers’ view) or most interesting (my view) articles from this blog.  Keep an eye out for Volume I of the 99 Passant when it is published later this year. I’ll keep you updated. (0)

More threats
As some of you may know I have been censoring the posts of a serial pest who makes anti-Muslim and racist comments and has in the past threatened me. He has posted again saying that the next time he is in my area – he names my street – he’ll ‘drop in to say g’day’. Clearly this is an attempt to further intimidate me. If anything happens to me or my family here are his details to provide to police.  jack 58.96.105.106  He has a druid name email at txc. (0)

Doctors and other bruises
I am having various tests and analysis done with a range of doctors over the coming weeks so may not be as communicative as normal on this blog. Bear with me. Hopefully I will be back in the New Year fighting fit. (4)

Marxism and women's liberation
Sharon Smith from the US International Socialist Organization talks about Marxism and women’s liberation in a very interesting video from Socialism 2012 in the US. (0)

Digital disruption and tax
Me in The Conversation today, with my second piece on the likes of Google and other highly mobile digital companies not paying much tax in Australia. Digital disruption is eroding Australia’s tax base (0)

Giant profits, tiny tax bills
It might well be a case of a stopped clock being right twice a day, but on the very day I had an article in The Conversation called Giant profits, tiny tax bills: time to close loopholes on corporate tax avoidance dealing with multinationals like Google et al and the inadequacies and problems with 20th century tax models for 21st century tax arrangements, Assistant Treasurer David Bradbury appointed the head of the revenue Group in Treasury, Rob Heferen, to develop a scoping paper to ‘set out the risks to the sustainability of Australia’s corporate tax base and look at the potential solutions.’ (0)

Turnover Time and Marx's Law of the Tendential Fall in the Rate of Profit
From Canberra comrade Peter Jones a very interesting paper: Abstract: This paper develops a method for quantifying the influence of four factors on the average rate of profit (ROP): the organic composition of capital (OCC), prices of constant capital, the rate of surplus value, and the average turnover time of variable capital. This is applied to data for the US from 1947-2011. The OCC is the largest influence on the ROP, and outside of periods of crisis, it rises consistently. But during 1947-1966 and 1980-97 the ROP was nevertheless able to rise, mainly due to shortening turnover times and cheapening constant capital. During periods of falling profitability these two counter-tendencies were absent or were reversed, leading to the crises of the mid-1970s and recently. This suggests that Marx correctly predicted the main direction of influence of the tendency and each counter-tendency, but that for the ROP to actually fall, capital cheapening and improvements in turnover time generally have to cease. https://dl.dropbox.com/u/49581464/Jones%2C%20Turnover%20Time%20and%20Marx%27s%20LTFRP%20v1.pdf (0)

Quote from Chomsky
I recently posted a supposed quote from Chomsky about Gaza which I checked before publication and which had been run in Salem-news, giving it some authenticity. The quote is in fact an amalgam of something Chris Hedges said in 2009 and something Chomsky said in 2004. Ceasefire has the details here. Given it is misquote I have removed it. My apologies to my readers and to Noam Chomsky. (0)

The politics of George Orwell
In Canberra Socialist Alternative’s next public meeting is on the Politics of George Orwell. As John Pilger reminds us, ‘Orwell is almost our litmus test. Some of his satirical writing looks like reality these days.’ This talk reclaims Orwell for the left. 6 pm Thursday 8 November Room G 8 Moran building ANU (0)

Labor's tax trickery
The Gillard government refuses to take on the business lobby, John Passant writes http://www.canberratimes.com.au/opinion/labors-tax-trickery-masks-deeper-moral-conflict-20121029-28dnl.html#ixzz2AcotC87J (0)

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Labor – a party of bigotry

Labor has traditionally been a party of bigotry, a party of ruling class bigotry. Its formation after the defeats of the strikes of the 1890s saw many workers and their leaders substitute Parliament for direct action as the motive force of history, as the agency of change.

One of the first acts (and Acts) of the Australian Commonwealth in 1901 was to implement the White Australia policy. This was a policy born of British colonialism and an expression of the role of Australia as a white settler state in Asia.  It was a ruling class strategy to protect British and Australian capital in the country.

The Labor Party supported it enthusiastically against other workers on the basis of their skin colour to supposedly protect wages and jobs here.

Just as ever since it has supported whatever the dominant ruling class position has been on imperialism and war, racism and women’s oppression, homophobia and religious intolerance, and keynesianism or neoliberalism. Occasionally, and mainly in response to the forces of the left and working class mobilising and forcing it to do so, it has taken minority ruling class positions that can perhaps even give it the cover of progressiveness. On rare occasions it is forced to attack capital to buy off mass movements and perhaps even halt their development outside the bounds of the system. 

Attacking unions, privatisation, floating the dollar, attacking single mums, gays and lesbians, racism and sexism, and now accepting religious bigotry – that is what a reformist party, intent on managing capitalism, and looking for ways to ‘Stockholm’ the working class, does.

Labor’s lack of direct links with the ruling class in the past enabled it on occasion to impose solutions on capitalists in the interests of capital.  However the class collaboration that now dominates the union movement, and has done since the Accord discussions in 1982 with Labor, has destroyed the fighting left in the unions and concentrated power almost exclusively in the hands of the class collaborationist retailers of labour to the bosses.

The end result has been an ALP which is thoroughly neoliberal, or as John Quiggin puts it, market liberal, that attacks Aborigines through the Northern Territory intervention to further dispossess indigenous people and help put downward pressure on wages, that blackbirds refugees to concentration camps offshore and onshore, that refuses to recognise equal love and under whose time in Government the gender pay gap has increased and now seems stuck around 17.5%.

Despite the revisionist attempts of former economics professor and current Labor MP Andrew Leigh to reclaim the ALP as a liberal party since its inception, standing supposedly in the tradition of Alfred Deakin, the change is more recent. Andrew’s arguments are an attempt to justify its retreat into and complete surrender to market liberalism. 

There is or should be nothing surprising about this. Labor in government has always adopted the dominant ruling class economic ideology. Indeed it was the Hawke and Keating governments which started the neoliberal project in Australia and laid the groundwork for Howard and the rehabilitation of his right wing ideas, policies and ‘persona’.

The latest example of Labor’s capitulation to bigotry is its Human Rights and Anti-Discrimination Bill. As David Marr put it in the Sydney Morning Herald, ‘It’s a bigots’ charter.’

It allows religious institutions, and the schools and hospitals and other services they run with public funds, to discriminate in employment against people who don’t have the anointed faith. Further it allows them to discriminate against employing gays, lesbians, unmarried people ‘living in sin’, bisexuals, transsexuals and single mothers. These ‘sinners’ have no place in the world of the pure. Just ask some of the paedophile priests whom the Catholic Church has protected and protects.

Labor’s Bill will entrench discrimination by those who claim a higher calling for support for their rotten bigoted positions.

As Marr points it this also means these ‘sinners’ have no employment security in religious institutions.

The ALP was too gutless to even distribute school funding from rich private schools to poor schools. It is too gutless to attack bigotry masquerading as religion too.

OK. Gutless is not the right word. It takes real guts to impose the bosses’ agenda, including its bigotry, on working class resentful in its core to the increasing inequality, pay and other limitations and restrictions attacks on jobs and unions.

Some of Labor’ policies might resonate with the less unionised and class conscience section fo the class.However the problem then becomes the workers, accepting the logic of capital accumulation and all that go with it including racism, homophobia, sexism and religious bigotry might vote for the original rather than the carbon copy.

Thus the social conservatism and reaction are the logical conclusion of the ALP being a party of capital, even if it also has links to the working class though the trade union bureaucracy, that group of vultures hovering over the working class waiting to sell its carcass to the bosses for the best price. Labor is a CAPITALIST workers party.

The first step in fighting this bigotry is to recognise that for 30 years workers have chaffed under the restrictions of neoliberalism. While average wages have increased, the share of national income going to labour is at historic lows. In other words the gains of the last 3 decades have gone disproportionately to capital.

When Te unwritten compact collapses, eg with the spread of the economic crisis engulfing Europe nd North america hot Asia and Australia, that uneasy alliance may be broken.

However what is required then is an organisation with working class roots, with a working class approach and an understanding that the crises of capitalism, economic and environmental, can only be overcome eventually by a revolution of the majority, the working class, in the  interests of the majority.

That’s why it is important to fight every manifestation of Labor’s neoliberalism now, its attacks on workers, its racism, sexism and homophobia, its kowtowing to religious bigotry.

But that will not be enough because any gains, even if won though mass action, itself problematic in today’s environment of class peace, will be under attack as the needs of capital for more and more profit reinforce the attacks on women, Aborigines and the discrimination against gays and lesbians and the acquiescence to religious bigotry of all parties in government, Labor or Liberal.

A revolutionary workers party, big enough to offer an alternative vision of real democracy and production to satisfy human need, is needed now. That is what Socialist Alternative and its unity project is about.

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Bush fires, climate change and the community of hope

The response of communities around Australia to the threats and reality of bushfires over the last few weeks has not only been magnificent. It has given us a glimpse, but only a glimpse, of the basic humanity and cooperation that exists which can address climate change in the long term.

But first the bad news. 

A two degree increase in temperature is almost certainly already locked in; so too by the end of the century is 4 to 6 degrees, according to the respected Global Carbon Project, unless we take action now.

The track record for taking action doesn’t look good. Greenhouse gas emissions are now 58% higher than in 1990, the Kyoto base year and sometime goal for reduction of emissions to, and sometimes below. To emphasise, the result of the various climate change talkfests of capital and its politicians has not been a decrease in GHG emissions but a 58% increase.

Which countries are contributing most to this? As Science Daily said about the Global Carbon Report:

It shows the biggest contributors to global emissions in 2011 were China (28 per cent), the United States (16 per cent), the European Union (11 per cent), and India (7 per cent).

Emissions in China and India grew by 9.9 and 7.5 per cent in 2011, while those of the United States and the European Union decreased by 1.8 and 2.8 per cent.

Emissions per person in China of 6.6 tonnes of CO2 were nearly as high as those of the European Union (7.3), but still below the 17.2 tonnes of carbon used in the United States. Emissions in India were lower at 1.8 tonnes of carbon per person.

The decline in US and European rates of emission is in part due to the global financial crisis not any change in policy and direction.

The move of the Chinese dictatorship from state capitalism to market capitalism is fuelling much of the current increase but the US and European per capita levels indicate production societies addicted to fossil fuels, an addiction they have passed to their cousins in China and India. The underlying link in all this is the drive for profit to make more money to reinvest … to make more profit.

The hamster wheel of capitalism is exhausting itself.

The very capitalist accumulation process is the systemic cause of global warming. Fossil fuels are cheaper than the alternatives; capitalism does not factor in costs such as the destruction of nature; entrenched interests and production processes mean a change to alternative, renewable, energy sources would be more disruptive in the short term to profit and accumulation than the creeping but still largely unseen or unrecognised destruction of the planet; capitalists can only focus on the short term and profit making; imperialism and other economic and political rivalries force blocs of capital to grow and gain advantage over their rivals through cheaper fuels, ie fossil fuels; competition between nation states and the stage of their development almost certainly guarantee, as China shows, increasing greenhouse gas emissions.

Capitalism is the problem. It is destroying itself and our environment, driven by its own logic to do so. The last rope maker will soon be lining up to sell the hangman his rope.

According to Professor David Karoly a 1% increase in temperatures since 1960 has contributed to the increasing frequency and intensity and spread of the bushfires. Imagine what a further 2 degrees will do, let alone 4 to 6 degrees.

Few appear to be listening. Prof Corinne Le Quéré, Director of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research and Professor at the University of East Anglia, who led the publication of the Global Carbon Project report said:

These latest figures come amidst climate talks in Doha. But with emissions continuing to grow, it’s as if no-one is listening to the entire scientific community.

Anyone who says there is no link between Human Made Climate Change and Bush Fires raging across Australia  is talking BOLLOCKS!

Capital and its accumulation process mean that much of business and most of its politicians certainly aren’t listening.  For example, as fires ravaged much of Australia, Warren Truss, the acting leader of the Opposition and evidently a climate change expert, said

Indeed I guess there’ll be more CO2 emissions from these fires than there will be from coal-fired power stations for decades.

Real experts described Truss’s statement as ‘utter rubbish’ and ‘ridiculous’. But maybe Truss’s comments play out well to big business or in the back blocks of his rural electorate.

Then again, as the temperature continues to increase and the severity and scope of fires increases in rural seats like his across Australia, maybe not.

The resistance of rural communities to fracking and now unrestricted coal and other mining in prime agricultural areas means that many farmers and their communities are beginning to work closely with environmentalists, the Greens and others to resist coal mines and fracking, for example. The support for Jonathan Moylan’s stock exchange stunt among farmers is strong.

Here is what another group of experts said about the current bushfires and climate change in a paper released recently. The Climate Commission’s key messages were blunt and stark:

  • The length, extent and severity of the current heatwave are unprecedented in the measurement record.
  • Although Australia has always had heatwaves, hot days and bushfires, climate change is increasing the risk of more frequent and longer heatwaves and more extreme hot days, as well as exacerbating bushfire conditions.
  • Climate change has contributed to making the current extreme heat conditions and bushfires worse.
  • Good community understanding of climate change risks is critical to ensure we take
    appropriate action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and to put measures in place to prepare for, and respond to, extreme weather.

Professor David Karoly, the Climate Commission scientific adviser told ABC’s AM on Saturday morning:

What we have been able to see is clear evidence of an increasing trend in hot extremes, reductions in cold extremes and with the increases in hot extremes more frequent extreme fire danger day.

What it means for the Australian summer is an increased frequency of hot extremes, more hot days, more heatwaves and more extreme bushfire days and that’s exactly what we’ve been seeing typically over the last decade and we will see even more frequently in the future.

The problem is that ‘taking appropriate action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions’,  as one of the Climate Commission’s key messages put it, directly contradicts the major driver of capitalist society – to make profit to reinvest to make more profit. That has to be done on the cheap, cheaper than your local and international competitors. Effective action on climate change by Australia would worsen the position in the competitive marketplace for a number of Australian based capitalists.

Addressing climate change is costly – the environment is merely an externality for capital – and any real changes would challenge entrenched interests and impose additional costs on, as it always turns out to be under capitalism when workers are quiet and aren’t fighting back, the working class.

Far better to plod along with the irrelevant discourse, as Earth and paleoclimate scientist Andrew Glikson puts it, from Labor, the Liberals and the Greens, an irrelevant discourse matched in much of developed and imperialist capitalism and its talk fests. Far better to adopt cosmetic changes which give the impression of action without challenging the entrenched interests or imposing the cost of climate change on the big polluters.

A two degree increase is almost certainly locked in; so too by the end of the century is 4 to 6 degrees by the end of the century, according to the respected Global Carbon Project.

What impact will warming of 4 to 6 degrees have? In Australian terms it brings Rockhampton to Melbourne. But it does much more than that. It would wipe out most of the Murrumbidgee Irrigation Area as a food producer. It would mean much more flooding and many more bushfires.

Sea levels could rise over a metre, putting at risk over $220 billion worth of infrastructure in Australia, including many houses. Some Pacific Islands would be wiped out and there peoples would want resettlement before that happens.

Let’s cut to the chase. It isn’t profitable to cut greenhouse gas emissions so it won’t happen unless there is a revolution to do so. That means overthrowing capitalism, not by a small group of enlightened thinkers and environmentalists, but by the working class, the majority class, the only one with the power to stop capital accumulation and through it greenhouse gas emissions.

The ruling class, the petit bourgeois middle classes, the peasantry, intellectuals cannot lead the revolution necessary to overthrow the Sauron of climate change that is global capitalism. Only workers have that power. Only a democratic society in which workers govern through their own institutions, workers’ councils, and plan production democratically to satisfy human need can address climate change now.

In the two major polluting countries, China and the US, workers hold the key to the future. In China the dictatorship is creating its own gravedigger, a massive working class now with more than 300 million workers. In the US the working class is over 200 million. The workers in these two centres of capitalism have the capacity to change the course of history if they can overthrow their rulers and set up a system based on democracy and production to satisfy human need.

Far fetched? So was global warming and the consequent global barbarism a few decades ago.

But there is hope. Communities across Australia have responded magnificently to the threat of and the actuality of the bushfires. People have cooperated on a massive scale, doing all they can to help. They did this not because there was money to be made but because of their essential humanity, their sense of solidarity and care for others.

Partly too this reflects the reality of working class life – that of cooperation in the workplace to make sure things get done.

It wasn’t the market that responded to the fires. It was and is people. The hundreds of thousands of volunteer firefighters have again shown their fantastic commitment to us all by fighting the fires for days without break, desperately trying to hold back the flames of nature. We have joined them, helped them, bought them water, given them breaks, food, shelter and hugs.

Barry O’Farrell on the other hand has cut 260 jobs in the New South Wales Fire and Rescue Service. That is the logic of neoliberalism. Cut services in the face of increasing fire threats. Can privatisation and the idea that only the market can save us from bushfires be far away? In one sense it is with the carbon tax the classic feel good do little market response.

As the Sun-Herald put it in July last year:

Fire and Rescue NSW is being forced to make savings after the Treasurer, Mike Baird, reduced its wages cap by $30 million over the next four years, according to Treasury forecasts. More than $5 million has been cut from overtime and temporary staff in 2012-13 alone.

The cuts equate to 260 staff – about 6 per cent of the 6900-strong workforce.

On top of that the O’Farrell government cut the safety advertising budget from $580 million to $320 million. This is the advertising that tells people how to stay safe when fires threaten.

Now it is true this relates to the fire brigade and house fires in urban areas in the main. But the logic is inexorable. Capitalism can’t afford to fund adequate services so will try to do it on the cheap or privatise government work to the private sector.

The New South Wales Rural Fire Service is a volunteer service. It has 70000 volunteers who work to defend their communities, and do so because they love their neighbours as themselves and their families. They don’t do it for the money; they aren’t driven by greed or lust for wealth. They do it because it is the right thing to do, because they are community minded, not just individuals in a dog eat dog competitive world.

We have responded to the threats of bush fires by coming together, by supporting each other, by caring for each other.

In the reality of community that the bushfires have bought out in us lies our hope for the future; in the working class and its power to turn society on its head lies the reality of the realisation of a future with hope.

Saturday’s socialist speak out

Jenny Macklin has apologised for her ‘insensitive’ remarks asserting she could she could live on the dole of $35 a day. I have some news for this $900 a day Minister. You can’t live on an apology.

There is talk that the Labor caucus or Cabinet is considering a $50 a week increase in the Newstart Allowance. That will put recipients only about $50 below the 2010 poverty line.

Effectively Labor is going to slightly reduce the poverty of those living in poverty, and those 90,000 or so single mums it dumped onto Newstart to save a few hundred million a year and to create a wider pool of desperate job seekers, putting further downward pressure on wages.

As fires ravaged much of Australia, Warren Truss, the acting leader of the Opposition and evidently a climate change expert, said

Indeed I guess there’ll be more CO2 emissions from these fires than there will be from coal-fired power stations for decades.

Real experts described Truss’s statement as ‘utter rubbish’ and ‘ridiculous’. But maybe Truss’s comments play out well to big business or in the back blocks of his rural electorate. Then again, as the temperature continues to increase and the severity and scope of fires increases in rural seats like his across Australia, maybe not.

Here is what another group of experts said about the current bushfires and climate change in a paper released recently. The Climate Commission’s key messages were blunt and stark:

  • The length, extent and severity of the current heatwave are unprecedented in the measurement record.
  • Although Australia has always had heatwaves, hot days and bushfires, climate change is increasing the risk of more frequent and longer heatwaves and more extreme hot days, as well as exacerbating bushfire conditions.
  • Climate change has contributed to making the current extreme heat conditions and bushfires worse.
  • Good community understanding of climate change risks is critical to ensure we take
    appropriate action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and to put measures in place to prepare for, and respond to, extreme weather.

Here is what Professor David Karoly, the Climate Commission scientific adviser told ABC’s AM this morning:

What we have been able to see is clear evidence of an increasing trend in hot extremes, reductions in cold extremes and with the increases in hot extremes more frequent extreme fire danger day.

What it means for the Australian summer is an increased frequency of hot extremes, more hot days, more heatwaves and more extreme bushfire days and that’s exactly what we’ve been seeing typically over the last decade and we will see even more frequently in the future.

The problem is that ‘taking appropriate action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions’,  as one of the Climate Commission’s key messages put it, directly contradicts the major driver of capitalist society – to make profit to reinvest to make more profit. That has to be done on the cheap, cheaper than your local and international competitors. Effective action on climate change by Australia would worsen the position in the competitive marketplace for a number of Australian based capitalists.

Addressing climate change is costly – the environment is merely an externality for capital – and any real changes would challenge entrenched interests and impose additional costs on, as it always turns out to be under capitalism when workers are quiet and aren’t fighting back, the working class.

Far better to plod along with the irrelevant discourse, as Earth and paleoclimate scientist Andrew Glikson puts it, from Labor, the Liberals and the Greens, an irrelevant discourse matched in much of developed and imperialist capitalism and its talk fests. Far better to adopt cosmetic changes which give the impression of action without challenging the entrenched interests or imposing the cost of climate change on the big polluters.

A two degree increase is locked in; so to is between 4 and 6 degrees by the end of the century, according to the respected Global Carbon Project.

In Syria the butcher Al-Assad, a man responsible for bombing his own cities and killing upwards of 60,000 people, talked of reform but refused to talk to the rebels. As the revolutionaries gain more control of more areas of Syria, the time for him to be swinging from a lamp post and for Syrians to piss on him approaches.

In the US the next fiscal cliff approaches with discussions about the debt ceiling due in the next months. The agreed solution is likely to be more attacks on social welfare.
And there were more shootings. The bankruptcy of a nation that kills others with impunity is being repaid with massacres of its own citizens by its on citizens.

Comments (see the link under the heading) close after 7 days.

Jonathan Moylan, stunts, the working class and fighting climate change

Front Line Action on Coal member and environmental activist Jonathan Moylan issued a fake press release from ANZ Bank that they had withdrawn their $1.2 bn funding for Whitehaven’s Maules Creek coal project.

When a media outlet published the email the share price quickly fell from $3.52 to $3.21 before trade was halted. Once the hoax was exposed the shares traded at normal market prices, regained almost all the price lost and yesterday were selling at one stage at pre-hoax prices.

There have been headlines about $300 million lost. Let’s be clear. Market capitalisation may have dropped by that amount. In other words the fall in price from $3.52 to $3.21 meant a fall in market value of the company by about $315 million. But the losses on the drop of share price would only become real if investors had sold their shares on the basis of the fake press release.

Trades did increase but the level of the trading indicates any losses would have been in the order of $100,000. And was it Mum and Dads who suffered any loss? 

Many traders have automatic stop loss orders in place. A not insignificant fall in price will trigger them. Investors with margin loans may also have lost a little. But working class Mums and Dads? No way, unless they have a hedge fund or are day traders. 

Super funds? Well, maybe they panicked and sold, but their portfolios are so large and varied the impact is likely to have been insignificant for most contributors.

The reaction of the media and right wing has been apoplectic. For example the Sun Herald the day after the hoax had a headline which said ‘Hoaxer Jonathan Moylan cost Nathan Tinkler $180 million after Whitehaven share plunge’

The article makes no mention whatsoever of $180 million but mentions $50 million based on a drop in price from $3.52 to $3.21. So the ‘loss’ is a market capitalisation one, not a real one. It was on the writer’s estimates $50 million not $180 million and because the shares almost went back to the pre-hoax level after Whitehaven exposed the hoax and are now trading at normal market levels, Hinkler in fact has lost $0 as a consequence of the hoax.

So the hoax hasn’t produced any major loss. Indeed it is a zero Sm game. The losses fo some would be offset by the gains of others who for example bought at $321 and saw the price rocket to $3.50 or thereabouts.

On the other hand the share price of Whitehaven has fallen since 18 April 2012 from $6.03 to today’s $3.41. Mum and dad investors who bought at the high of $6.03 have lost $2.62 per share since then. This is a loss in market value of 43% in just 9 months. Where is the outrage and outcry about that on behalf of Mums and Dads? Should the people overseeing this fall in value be charged with an offence too?

The difference of course is that it is ‘the market’ pricing the loss and you can’t jail people for the ‘normal’ operation of the blessed market. Or can you? Unfortunately not.

The rage of the right against Moylan is because his action challenged the dominance of the market over human relations, even if just for a moment. That is his real crime.
That and exposing the market for what it is – a casino that runs on rumour and innuendo, an anarchy that destroys lives, an unseen all seeing Sauron, master of the living wasteland.

The Australian Securities and Investments Commission is investigating the hoax. According to an ABC News Report Moylan could face charges dealing with false and misleading statements made in respect of securities under section 104E of the Corporation Act, and have a maximum penalty of up to $765,000 and 10 years in jail imposed on him

The wolves of capital are baying for Moylan’s blood. In the last 6 months there have been two other major hoaxes. One was McMahon holdings where fake emails suggested a takeover might be brewing. The other was David Jones where UK based “EB Private Equity” launched a supposed takeover bid. its share price went up 20% before the hoax was exposed.

Both of these hoaxes were done for private gain.

No one has been prosecuted for them. Perhaps it is because of the fact they reflect the good morals of the share market nothing has been done. Maybe too if those hoaxers were prosecuted questions might be raised about all the other dealings based on innuendo, rumour and insider trading. It looks like ASIC is the regulator you have to keep the robber barons safe from environmental activists but not from themselves.

It also appears that despite the fact Whitehaven denied that ANZ had withdrawn funding one media outlet published the fake ANZ press release knowing of this denial and may have started the run. If Moylan is guilty of anything then that media organisation looks as if it should bear a major responsibility for its actions. Unfortunately you can’t jail corporations. You can only fine them.

It appears that no Mums and Dads in the colloquial working class sense were harmed in the making of the hoax. So the moralistic and market left have no grounds for condemning Moylan’s actions.

Why did he do it? Moylan told Reuters:

The future of our farmlands, our forests, our health, our climate, these are the biggest threats humanity faces and they are far more important than concerns over liability.

Moylan also told Reuters that ‘he was head of a little-known group called Frontline Action on Coal that has been camped out near the proposed mine for five months to protest its development and would continue to pressure ANZ Bank over financing of coal mines.’

The mass media is too busy telling us the travails of the former billionaire Nathan Tinkler and current billionaires Gina Rinehart and Clive Palmer, that protests like Moylan’s camp to save Leard State Forest from three planned coal mines never gain a wider audience.

There are two reasons for this. Obviously the media aren’t interested in small protests which don’t threaten production, at least while they are ineffective. Moylan’s stunt changed that, at least for a while. It put the plans to destroy the Forest for green house gas producing coal on to the agenda of the public, for a short time at least.

There is another reason why the message about climate change and coal mining and protest haven’t won an audience. Much of the working class as working class isn’t listening.

This isn’t because in the abstract they aren’t interested in the future or climate change and what to do about it. In an objective sense they are the future.

Partly it is because workers are disengaged from the political process. The day to day routine of work or looking for work, plus families, does that to many workers. So they look to others to do the politics and mostly the industrial work for them.

They are led rather than leaders.

On top of that the destruction that the Accord and the class collaboration it set in train has wreaked on workers and their unions has reduced even the ideas and practice of defensive actions to mere platitudes from union bureaucrats on most occasions. What is good for capital is good for labour is widely accepted.

So the destruction of the environment through mining, the destruction threatened and in train through green house gas emissions, and the combination of both in mining and exporting coal, are left to politicians to deal with.

On top of that the unions that could defend the environment from coal mining and global warming and develop policies and actions to do so and convince its membership of this (with consequent threats to mining jobs) are, not unreasonably, defending jobs rather than the future.

That is because under capitalism that is the choice.

It might be trite to suggest that socialism provides the answer because it replaces production for profit with production democratically determined to satisfy human need. But as global warming of 4 to 6 degrees by the end of the century now appears locked in, what is trite is becoming more and more a necessity.

The contradiction between the short term of profit and the long term of defence of the profit system, and the systemic disengagement of workers short and long term may make solutions to climate change within capitalism impossible.

Moylan has substituted himself for an inactive and mainly uninterested working class. His action might wake up some but it won’t change the world. It won’t challenge in any fundamental way the power that wants to mine state forests, that wants to frack New South Wales and wants to export more and more coal to the polluting industries offshore.

Moylan himself identified part of the problem when he said, after an ASIC investigator raided his campsite and confiscated his computer and phone:

I have no experience of ASIC, but then I don’t think they have any experience of activism with just cause, or civil disobedience, like this situation. They usually deal with millionaires who try to cheat other millionaires.

It is the democratic overthrow of those millionaires and the system that creates them that offers the hope for the future. This means, to me, that our focus needs to orient to the one class in Australia with the power to turn society on its head and stop mining, exporting coal and other fossil fuels and to develop mass renewable energy sources to make Australia a totally renewable energy country. That class is the working class.

This is no easy task. Convincing the CFMEU, one of the few unions in Australia prepared to defend it members, and convincing its membership that they should end their support for mining when mining workers are an important section of the union, appears not only mad but impossible. True, but in the day to day struggles of the union across Australia over bread and butter issues of pay and conditions, especially safety on site, the opportunity to win some over and then the majority exists, at least intellectually.

To address the jobs issue, it seems to me that a campaign around taxing the rich to make Australia a totally renewable energy society by 2023 is the way forward, with guarantees of more jobs for mining workers than currently exist in mining. That would also mean a massive retraining program, guarantees about current income continuing and paying for relocation costs where needed. Only massively taxing the polluters and increasing income tax on business can do that.

That might seem utopian in the extreme. But as the barbarism of climate change under capitalism begins unfolding with little challenge to the powers nd drivers that have generated it the choice becomes more stark – socialism or climate change barbarism.

Stunts like Moylan’s will draw attention to the issues at least momentarily and I defend his actions. But to really address climate change, to stop the mining of fossil fuels and to move rapidly to a totally renewable energy society requires the working class entering on to the stage of history and overthrowing the impediment to real change – capitalism. The working class has to be our focus for fundamental change.

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Why we should boycott Sri Lankan cricket

In recent weeks a campaign has developed momentum calling for a boycott of Sri Lankan cricket matches to protest both the Sri Lankan regime’s genocide of Tamils and the Australian government’s attacks on Tamil refugees.  Andrew Cheeseman in Socialist Alternative explains why.

Chettikulam internment camp, 2009.

Outside of the Australian Tamil community, little is known in this country of why so many Tamils are fleeing Sri Lanka and of the history of oppression that they have endured. With Gillard so hostile to Tamil refugees today, this is a history that must be shared.

Colonial Domination

Sri Lanka was seized by Portugal in 1505, marking the beginning of nearly five hundred years of colonial domination. Prior to this, the island had long been divided into a Tamil kingdom in the northeast, and two Sinhalese kingdoms in the south and west. Tamils and Sinhalese spoke different languages, mostly followed different religions (with most Sinhalese following Buddhism and Tamils mostly following Hinduism with a large Christian minority), and had totally separate state structures throughout this time.

The Portuguese colonialists, and also the Dutch after they seized the colony, maintained this separation and treated the island as multiple colonies. Things would change greatly, however, when the British seized control in 1815.

The British colonialists forcibly amalgamated the disparate kingdoms into what they termed British Ceylon, then from 1827 imported large numbers of additional Tamils from India to work on tea plantations. Today their descendants are generally referred to as “Indian Tamils” while the descendants of Tamils from the pre-colonial Jaffna Kingdom are called “Sri Lankan Tamils”.

In response to agitation for reforms by the Ceylon National Congress, a united Sinhalese and Tamil organisation, British governor William Manning went out of his way to stir communal tensions and to turn Tamils against Sinhalese by encouraging communal representation. In a cunning move the British granted proportionally more representation to the minority Tamils and underrepresented the Sinhalese majority. Partially this was an attempt to get Tamil support for the colonial project, but more important for the British was the way it turned the Sinhalese against Tamils. As in many other countries dominated by colonialism, the seeds of hatred sowed to divide and rule would in time lead to a war that would outlast the colonialists by decades.

Independence

Sri Lankan independence in 1948 did not heal the tension that had been building – in many ways it heightened them. Sinhalese chauvinist parties quickly came to power and enacted several extremely discriminatory laws.

Within a year, the Ceylon Citizenship Act was passed. This law denied citizenship to Indian Tamils, taking away their right to vote and eventually leading to the mass expulsion of six hundred thousand people. The regime’s motives here were political – denying citizenship and voting rights to such a large number of Tamils allowed the Sinhalese chauvinist parties a significant majority in parliament and dramatically reduced Tamil representation.

Worse was to come.

In 1956 the Sri Lanka Freedom Party’s S.W.R.D. Bandaranaike became Prime Minister and quickly legislated to make Sinhalese the only official language of government. This resulted in a nearly-complete purge of Tamils (very few of whom were fluent in Sinhalese) from the civil service. It also made it nearly impossible for Tamils to access government services for almost all of the 1960s.

When protests were organised against the Sinhala Only Act by the fairly moderate Federal Party, Sinhalese chauvinists including a government minister organised counter-demonstrations that led to riots and looting in Colombo. Days later, as news of these disturbances spread and were exaggerated with every retelling, Sinhalese chauvinists massacred an estimated 150 Tamils in the Gal Oya valley. Local police watched as the rioters murdered Tamils with knives, sticks and by burning them alive. Similar events would be repeated in 1958, alongside the first organised violent retaliation by Tamils – which led to the banning of the Federal Party and the arrest of a majority of Tamil parliamentarians.

Over 20 years of oppression led to the formation of the Tamil United Liberation Front which stood for secession from Sri Lanka and the formation of a new state, Tamil Eelam, in the majority Tamil north and east of the country. It stood for election in 1977 and won the support of most Tamils. In response Prime Minister Junius Jayewardene gave all police a week’s leave and mobilised armed supporters to Tamil areas. His supporters burned houses of leftists that supported Tamil rights, and killed hundreds of Tamils in a week of pogroms.

Predictably, this spelled the end of mass support for peaceful change among Tamils and the beginning of mass support for armed resistance. The Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE or Tamil Tigers) rose to prominence during this period. Their popularity only increased when Sinhalese policemen burned down the Jaffna Public Library in 1981, killing four and destroying irreplaceable artefacts of Tamil history. Throughout this period it was widely accepted that police and the military could kill Tamils with impunity.

Black July

The Black July massacres of 1983 would ensure that that year would become the worst year for Tamils until 2009. The Black July massacres are documented by many groups, particularly the Canadian Tamil Congress, who set up a website as a memorial to those murdered. There were various other government provocations such as the banning of Tamil language newspapers and the following extraordinarily vile statement from (by this time President) Jayewardene:

“… I am not worried about the opinion of the Jaffna people [Tamils] now… Now we cannot think of them. Not about their lives or of their opinion about us… The more you put pressure in the north, the happier the Sinhala people will be here… really, if I starve the Tamils out, the Sinhala people will be happy… “

In response, the LTTE attacked a military convoy and killed thirteen soldiers. This was exactly the opportunity the regime had been preparing for. Within hours, roadblocks had been set up by Sinhalese chauvinists, at which cars were searched. In one incident witnessed by many tourists a bus containing Tamils was torched and all of its passengers burned to death.

Eyewitnesses reported the active military involvement in the massacres, including officers using electoral rolls to determine which houses held Tamil families and then directing rioters to burn them down and kill anyone inside. One harrowing account from survivor Shanthi Sachithanandam described the terror of the pogrom in Colombo:

“In the lane there were about 50 to 75 people in a mob carrying all kinds of sticks and clubs and knives. They were shouting; it was like the sound of an ocean, a chilling sound.”

After Sachithanandam got into a car, the attackers banged on the windows demanding to know if there was a Tamil inside. Luckily she escaped. Her husband also escaped, hiding at the house of a Sinhalese friend who was brave enough to tell the pogromists who held a knife to his throat that there were no Tamils in his house.

During a week of nationwide race riots Jayewardene made an address to further stoke communal hatred. When the pogrom finally ended, an estimated 3,000 people were dead and most Tamils in Colombo had fled to Jaffna or out of the country. In the aftermath over 100,000 Tamils fled to Canada, and many more went elsewhere.

The Civil War

As a result of the Black July pogrom, the previous banning of the mainstream moderate Tamil opposition parties and the LTTE’s ruthless attempts to absorb or destroy its political rivals, the LTTE became the main organisation of Tamil resistance. A protracted civil war developed, punctuated by intermittent ceasefires. The LTTE used a combination of conventional warfare and terrorist tactics, while the government used airstrikes as its form of terrorism. During this period the LTTE was essentially the government of the north and east of the island.

In the context of the US “War on Terror”, the Rajapaksa regime in 2008 began a serious military offensive in the north. This culminated in the horrific concentration camps and massacres of May 2009 that made even the Black July slaughter look tiny.

It is impossible to know how many Tamils are still in concentration camps in the north and how many are dead – particularly as aid groups are still denied access. Most estimate that 40,000 were killed, with as many as 10,000 killed on the night of 9 May 2009 when the Sri Lankan military shelled one of the “safe zones” civilians had fled to.

Rajapaksa, the man responsible for the massacres in 2009, is still running the country. Political dissidents are still tortured whether they are Tamil or Sinhalese. Attending a protest march means putting your life at risk, and supporting the right of Tamils to secede from Sri Lanka to form their own country will get you labelled an LTTE terrorist.

We need to make Sri Lanka a pariah state until Rajapaksa has faced justice for the 2009 atrocities and Tamils are free to make their own decision as to whether to remain part of Sri Lanka or to secede. Boycotting Sri Lanka’s cricket team is a small step in that direction.

The Australian Boycott Sri Lanka Cricket Campaign will be holding a protest at the first day/night match at the MCG tomorrow (Friday) at 1 pm. Activists will then embark on a “Freedom Ride” to Adelaide on Saturday before protesting at the match at the Adelaide Oval on Sunday.

In the streets against rape

Tithi Bhattacharya, recently returned from India, reports in Socialist Worker US on protests against rape and sexism that are shaking the country–and why the left should welcome them.

IN A crime that sparked sustained and angry protests in several cities in India and around the world, a 23-year-old student was gang raped and beaten in Delhi, India, on December 16. She died from her injuries 13 days later.

The outrage caused by the case has helped to spark a larger discussion about rape, sexism and women’s rights–in India and elsewhere.

Even how to refer to the slain woman has become a subject of vigorous debate. Since the media, under Indian law, cannot reveal the name of a rape victim, she has been given a variety of pseudonyms–including “Jagruti” (Awakening), “Amanat” (Entrusted), “Nirbhaya” (Fearless) and “Damini” (Lightning)–by the media and protesters alike. People have come out in the thousands to rally in her defense and against sexual assault more broadly.

Recently, for the first time, the victim’s family released the young woman’s real name to the public. In an interview with a British newspaper, her father defiantly asserted that he was “proud” of his deceased daughter and that “[r]evealing her name will give courage to other women who have survived these attacks.”

“They” he said, “will find strength from my daughter.”

These are powerful and important words to start any discussion of this terrible event. After all, rapes are not uncommon in India. In 2010 alone, there were 22,000 cases of rape recorded nationally. In Delhi, the national capital, 660 cases were reported in 2012. It is also widely acknowledged that the ratio of the actual number of rapes to reported cases is at least 5 to 1 and probably often higher, thus making the above figures far more alarming.

So did the recent protests erupt because this was an unusually violent case of rape? Were the demonstrations, as some leading activists, including Arundhati Roy, have claimed, largely composed of middle-class men and women who had come out to rally for one of their own? Lastly, as some Western journalists argued, is this brutal sexual violence an indication of the particular backwardness of India as a country?

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Sexual violence in India

“In India, there is a woman raped every 20 minutes,” a young female student at Delhi University told me at the massive protest near India Gate in New Delhi on New Year’s Day.

“This was the last straw,” said Kavita Krishnan, the secretary of All India Progressive Women’s Association, who has been leading various sections of the protests in the weeks following the attack. “We must understand that there has been a long build up to this moment.”

According to Krishnan, women from Adivasi (indigenous people) and Dalit (lower caste) communities, women working in non-unionized workplaces, sex workers and transgendered people have been particular targets of such violence.

Rape in such cases is used as a terrifying method of social control, and the authorities frequently turn a blind eye to it. In 2006, for instance, a Dalit mother and her daughter were brutally raped and then lynched to death over a land dispute in Kherlanji–a village in the state of Maharashtra. The rapists were powerful local men from a socially dominant caste. The police, in league with the rapists, denied any incidence of rape, and the men were never tried.

Similarly in 2010, Delhi police refused to respond to a phone call from an eyewitness who saw her friend being kidnapped and gang raped on their way back from their night jobs at the local call center in Dhaula Kuan.

The rot goes deeper than the police. It is a long tradition of the Indian ruling class to both support rapists and use rape as a disciplinary tool against politically vulnerable communities.

In 2009, Indian army personnel in Shopian, Kashmir, allegedly raped and murdered two Muslim women, Neelofar and Asiya. While this particular case became well known mainly due to what many believe to be a cover-up by the Indian state, Neelofar and Asiya remain two among several women who have been raped and killed by the Indian army in Kashmir.

In these matters, British colonial history has proved to be a great teacher for the postcolonial Indian ruling class. Draconian laws that the British crafted to target freedom fighters have now been revamped to attack dissidents. One such law, the Armed Forces Special Powers Act (1958), modeled after an old British law, allows non-commissioned army officers to search and arrest citizens without a warrant and even shoot to kill.

In 2004, in one of the worst cases of extrajudicial killings, army officers stationed in the North Eastern state of Manipur raped and killed the 32-year-old Thangjam Manorama Devi for her alleged involvement with the Peoples Liberation Army. Her killers remain free since the law gives the armed forces virtual impunity.

Riots and pogroms against minorities serve as virtual laboratories of misogyny. In the now-infamous anti-Muslim pogrom by Hindu nationalists in Gujrat in 2002, rape and sexual violence were routinely used against Muslim women as a way to “dishonor” the community. Further, in a sickening institutionalization of rape culture by the state, several men who have rape charges pending against them remain important public figures and leaders of right-wing parties, while some even serve in the Indian parliament.

While these horrors of recent memory may serve as the immediate background from which these most recent protests sprang, the global context is just as important. People who gathered in various Indian cities to protest over the past several weeks could not but be influenced by the rise in gender violence on an international scale. From the defense of rape by Republican senators in the U.S. to the attack on reproductive rights by the Tory government in Britain, women’s bodies are increasingly becoming a global battlefield.

It is precisely the international scale of these attacks that explains the international scope of these protests–from Delhi to Dhaka and from Chennai to Chicago.
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The origin of the protests

One only needs to look at some of the contours of neoliberal India to understand the deep structural connection between the crisis of capitalism and the assault on women’s rights. Rape apologists in India have repeatedly blamed women for being out “late at night,” claiming that they deserved their violent fate.

In court, a defense attorney for three of the five men accused in the case of the women raped and beaten on December 16 stated that “respectable” women are not raped. “I have not seen a single incident or example of rape with a respected lady,” Manohar Lal Sharma told the court, instead blaming the victim for being out at night with a male friend to whom she was not married.

The woman attacked in Dhaula Kuan and the woman attacked on December 16 both worked at call centers providing cheap labor for Western outsourcing firms. The integrated nature of the market meant that the women’s working hours had to keep pace with business hours in the West, thus imposing a regimen of very late night shifts for them and forcing them to navigate nighttime streets and cafes with minimal support from their employer or the government. To then blame them for being out late is viciously hypocritical from a system that provides so little support for women.

At the other end of the spectrum, the opening up of the Indian market for global capitalism has meant a glutting of public imagination by the worst kinds of sexist representations of women from leading capitalist brand names, where female sexuality is used to sell everything from saris to cell phones. Hence, when we look for the origin of the recent protests, we need to look wider than just within India.

While it is true that we have not seen protests of such ferocity and scope in recent times in India, it would be wrong to call them entirely new and without any legacy. That would be discounting several decades of political activism by Indian women’s groups and the Indian left.

Protests led by women have a long and proud history in the subcontinent. According Kunal Chattopadhyay, a leading historian and activist from Kolkata, the massive public protests led by women’s groups in the 1970s against the case of custodial rape of a 16-year-old girl named Mathura by two police officers inspired and “heightened” for the first time “the political consciousness of many of us male activists.”

The sheer size of the protests in the Mathura rape case forced the Indian Supreme Court to overturn its initial decision that found the police not guilty and instead convict them. Since then, there have been similar examples of robust organizing by women’s groups for demands such as changes in rape laws, against dowry deaths and for more representation in local and national government, to name a few.

The recent protests are tied to the wave of fightbacks against the system on an international scale. The women and men who have been filling the streets of various Indian cities have seen, in the last few years, dictators fall and public spaces be occupied. We need to see these protests as not just standing in the tradition of past women’s movements in India, but also as echoes of Tahrir, Tunisia and Zuccotti Park–and inspiring, in their turn, a new cycle of protests for women’s rights.

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Is India backward?

Despite the tremendous display of solidarity and strength by Indian women and men in these protests, the tragedy of December 16 has created a disgusting response from the mainstream Western press.

A New York Times editorial singled out India as a country that “must work on changing a culture in which women are routinely devalued.” Similarly, London Times columnist Libby Purves demanded that India change itself forthwith if it wanted to be “allowed to hold its head up in the civilized world.”

It is particularly ironic that such imperial dictums are coming from the U.S. and Britain, two countries that, despite their vast material resources, have an abysmal record of gender injustices and victim-blaming within their own national borders.

This racist rhetoric, thinly cloaked in the discourse of “women’s rights,” has not gone unchallenged. In a letter published in the London Times, several academics and activists called Purves’ essay an exercise in “chauvinist finger-wagging” that presented “the West as an advanced culture in relation to a backward and savage India.”

Such selective feminism of the global ruling class–which allows them to bomb Afghanistan for the “sake” of Afghan women or institute Islamophobic laws in France in the name of “freedom” for Muslim women–should be resisted in all its forms.

Any real change in gender justice in India can only come from a strong popular movement from below. For that movement to be able to sustain itself long enough to withstand state repression and wrest change will require intense international solidarity, not racist moralism.

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Who is protesting?

For the above reasons, it should be clear that the protests in India against rape and sexism are about rejecting the culture of misogyny and moralism imposed by the Indian state and the global free market alike. They are not about the narrow interests of any particular class of women.

It would be wrong to condemn these protests as “middle class.” Unfortunately, that is what Indian author and radical activist Arundhuti Roy recently did, stating that the outrage and protests in India were a result, in large part, because the victim in the December 16 case belonged to the affluent “middle class.”

First, Roy is factually wrong about the victim who, according to a recent report in the Wall Street Journal, was the daughter of an airport worker on a monthly salary of 7,000 rupees (about $130). She was also “the first from her family, which hails from a caste of agricultural workers, to have a professional career. She was on the cusp of achieving it. She had enrolled in a year-long physiotherapy course in a city in the foothills of the Himalayas. To afford it, she worked nights at an outsourcing firm, helping Canadians with their mortgage issues.”

Roy would be wrong, however, even if the woman did come from an affluent family. Mass movements need to be seen in their full course of development, in which numerous factors come together to produce confidence and mobilization. It is not a matter of checking whether these protesters were there to stand in support of Neelofar, Manorama or any other individual rape victim, but to see how these past cases were part of a slow build-up of anger that finally came to a head in the aftermath of December 16 in Delhi.

According to Kavita Krishnan, women at the protests were very open to arguments about the state and army in holding up structures of violence. “People here are not just talking about the rights of middle-class women,” said Krishnan. Indeed, she said that “loads of young women spoke to me about the complicity of the police in cases of rape of Dalit and Muslim women.”

Some activists have been horrified by the efforts of the Hindu right to co-opt the protests, others by the demands for death penalty made by some protesters. As with any movement rooted in largely spontaneous mobilizations, there will be different views on these and other questions, such as whether different laws would benefit the victims of sexual assault. While it is important to debate these issues within the struggle, we cannot afford to stand aside from it.

Soma Marik, a historian and long-time activist in the women’s movement in Kolkata, put it excellently:

[The term] “middle class” and its association with “Westernized,” dress-code-violating, “permissive” women has been part of the stock imagery used by right-wing forces in their attempt to trivialize and dilute rape cases. There is no reason for anyone on the left to join that chorus. What has been significant is the scale of protests, and their persistence. Lacking, in many cases, political experience, anger and emotion has led to demands for hanging…That has to be discussed, but only by participating in the struggles.

This is why it is an urgent task for the left to actively intervene and try to shape the movement–and the broader struggles for a future society free of rape and women’s oppression.

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Women must fight to win equal pay

An article of mine in Thursday’s Canberra Times on the gender pay gap and the need for women and their unions to take militant industrial action to overcome it.

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Is there only one Slipper?

The Crown case against Peter Slipper, former speaker of the House of Representatives in Australia, seems clear enough.

The Crown alleges that Slipper used his Commonwealth Cabcharge and vouchers to pay for 3 day trips to wineries near Canberra, presumably to binge on booze and food.

Allegedly he was not entitled to claim these trips on Cabcharge. Allegedly Slipper submitted various vouchers to disguise the facts.

For example 4 vouchers for the travel for one day, read ‘Travel from Parliament House to suburbs’, and another from ‘suburbs to suburbs.’ The Crown alleges this was deliberate, to disguise the reality of the ‘ineligible for funding’ trip and to receive the money to cover the private expenditure.

The amounts involved for the 3 days are about $1000.

He has been charged with dishonestly causing ‘a risk of loss to a person, namely the Department of Finance and Administration’.

The penalty for that crime is up to five years in jail. This is important because if Slipper is found guilty no matter whether or not he receives a custodial sentence, he would be ineligible under the Constitution to continue to sit in Parliament. He is one of the votes that helps the minority Labor Government to remain in power. 

However it is likely that the decision in his case will only be finalised well after the 2013 election.

These Slipper expense matters only came to light as a consequence of the tight political situation in the House and Slipper’s defection from the Liberal National Party to become the speaker.

Opposition leader Tony Abbott has attacked Prime Minister Julia Gillard for her lack of judgement in appointing slipper as the Speaker. Slipper was at the time the alleged offences occurred a member of Tony Abbott’s Liberal team.  

In the run up to the 2010 election, Tony Abbott defended Slipper’s large travel bills in 2009. According to the Sunshine Coast Daily Abbott said at the time:

I’m satisfied (Mr Slipper) has acted within his entitlements. My understanding is that he’s acted within his entitlements.

Here is what the Sunshine Coast Daily also said:

In the second six months of 2009, Mr Slipper spent $75,990.23 on airfares, private car, Com Cars, hire cars, taxis and publications.

By comparison, National Party leader Warren Truss spent $62,567.26, Member for Longman John Sullivan spent $32,892.16 and member for Fairfax Alex Somlyay spent $25,328.64.

It would of course be scurrilous to suggest that Abbott supported Slipper back then because he was the Liberal National Party candidate for the seat of Fisher in what was going to be a very close action. It would also of course be scurrilous to suggest that he only changed his public view about Mr Slipper after he deserted the Opposition.

The case against Slipper raises wider questions. Is he the only parliamentarian to have abused his entitlements? Certainly he is under the spotlight because of his defection from the Conservatives, his resignation as Speaker and the numbers in the almost hung Parliament. Oh, and the fact he has a long record of high levels of spending on airfares, private cars, Com Cars, hire cars, taxis and publications.

Perhaps other Parliamentarians should receive the same level of scrutiny. As an old ATO man, a risk management approach might help here. Who has large travel claims? Who has paid back overpaid claims in the past on more than one occasion?

I know some of you will see me as deeply cynical in arguing for a more thorough investigation of parliamentarians’ spending on travel and other matters. If it did happen then all it really shows is one bad apple. Well, in Victoria, Liberal Party MP Geoff Shaw has been accused of using his government car for his business. The Age said:

Victorian Ombudsman George Brouwer found Mr Shaw had used his taxpayer-funded Ford Territory and fuel card to run his hardware business, and had provided misleading information about it under oath.

Victoria Police are investigating.

The Baillieu Government has a majority of one in the Parliament and polls show it would be defeated if an election were held now.

OK, maybe I am cynical. After all there are no records elsewhere of systemic rorting by parliamentarians. Are there?

Well yes. The British Parliament was found to be full of rorters a few years ago. An FoI request started the rot. It revealed the extent and nature of some of the MPs’ expense claims. It did not reveal those claims not authorised.

Before these documents were released The Daily Telegraph published details of all expense claims. Hell soon broke loose.

The claims covered abuse of second home claims, renting out homes, over-claiming for council tax on their second home, subsidising property development, evading tax or avoiding tax on reimbursements, claiming expenses just below the £250, when no receipt is required, claiming the full food expense limit irrespective of whether any money had been spent.

Now it may be that Australian Parliamentarians aren’t rorters by and large unlike some of their UK counterparts. But given that both do much the same sort of job, face the same challenges and have the same privileged and powerful positions, who knows what a thorough investigation of MP expense claims would reveal.

Their position in society may make some of them believe they are above the law, entitled to rewards because of their hard work, not needing to justify themselves. Certainly any investigative and transparent system might correct these delusions of grandeur and spending some MPs may have.

I doubt Peter Slipper is on his own. So where to start?

DOFA produces the figures for expenditure. Parliamentarians are also asked ‘… to certify that their entitlements usage was in accordance with the provisions legislated for each respective entitlement. Commencing from the period January to June 2011, information regarding Parliamentarians’ certification of their entitlements usage is published.’

As at 7 January this year, 8 parliamentarians had not made certifications for the period 1 January to 30 June 2012. I am not suggesting any wrong doing but why not make the statement? The explanation for some is easy enough. They have left the parliament. But some are still there. So why haven’t they made the certification?

An intrepid reporter might go through the expense claims from DOFA to see if any standouts (apart from Peter Slipper) exist and ask them to explain why their claims are so much larger than their contemporaries.

But surely that should be the realm of the DOFA system. And why isn’t the system transparent so each claim and evidence is available for public viewing?

Even then, it might also be worthwhile trying to find out information through the cracks in the system – for example who has made repayments of excess claims and why. Freedom of Information might help here.

An FoI claim might be very useful here, to help us understand how our politicians do behave. And god forbid a newspaper might get access to such a list.

To win back our trust maybe the Parliament should open up all the expense information it has to public scrutiny. It could set up an expense investigation committee to go over all the claims of the last few years with a forensic fine tooth comb.

We have a good role model. The equivalent of the Australian Building and Construction Commission and its draconian powers could be set up to smash alleged rorting by a small group allegedly holding the rest of us to ransom through their allegedly criminal behaviour.

Dave Oliver from the Australian Council of Trade Unions, Dave Noonan from the building workers’ union and Julian Assange might be good nominees to carry out the investigation.

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Support colleagues striking for press freedom at the Southern Weekend Newspaper, Guangzhou

To: Media Entertainment and Arts Alliance Federal Secretary

Please add my name to the Media Alliance letter to show my support for my colleagues at Southern Weekend in their fight for press freedom and the fundamental principles of journalism.

John Passant

From:Federal Secretary
To: Federal Secretary
Sent: Tuesday, January 08, 2013 5:30 PM
Subject: Special Media Alliance Bulletin – Support striking colleagues at the Southern Weekend Newspaper, Guangzhou

Dear member,

Our colleagues in China need our help. In a historic – and courageous step – the journalists at Guangzhou’s Southern Weekend newspaper have gone on strike over censorship of their work.

Here’s how you can make a difference: the Media Alliance is asking you to reply to this message, including your full name, so that we can add your name to a letter the Media Alliance will send to Chinese Communist Party General Secretary Xi Jinping. The letter will demonstrate the concern of Australian journalists in this vital press freedom issue and it’s a way you can play your part in helping fellow journalists in China.

The background to the strike is straightforward. On January 1 2013 the Southern Weekend’s editorial calling for the protection of individual rights was secretly changed from “China’s Dream, the Dream of Constitutionalism” to “We are now closer to our dream than ever before.” The striking journalists believe the Chief of the Guangdong Province Tuo Zhen changed the article to echo the direction of the Central Authority.

On January 6, the authorities claimed an editor had made the amendment but a statement co-signed by Southern Weekend’s editorial board, journalists, and others denied this and accused the authority of exerting pressure on the editorial board. Subsequently, Southern Weekend’s journalists went on strike to express their outrage and demand editorial independence.

The Central Propaganda Department has issued an order that no media are allowed to report, comment or forward any messages related to the article or the strike at Southern Weekend. At the same time, all related online messages have been deleted and journalists’ social media accounts have been interfered with.

The journalists at Southern Weekend have taken a courageous stand to uphold the ethics of the journalism profession. This brave action demonstrates their commitment to strong, ethical journalism that respects the truth and the public’s right to information – the same principles that are enshrined in the Media Alliance Journalist Code of Ethics.

The Media Alliance is joining the journalists on the Southern Weekend in calling on General Secretary Xi Jinping to stand Tuo aside, investigate what took place at Southern Weekend and make clear that all levels of government in China will respect journalists who seek to do their job without having their work tampered with and censored.

I urge you to reply to this email so that we can add your name to the Media Alliance letter and show our support to our colleagues at Southern Weekend in their fight for press freedom and the fundamental principles of journalism.

Thank you for supporting our colleagues and my Best Wishes for the year ahead,

Christopher Warren

Federal secretary

Here is a link to the MEAA site on this.

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Why we need a socialist revolution

Contrary to the popular stereotype, revolution is a result, not of the mass of the population spontaneously becoming Marxist revolutionaries, but of the failure of the allegedly “more realistic” project of reforming the system write Tom Bramble and Ben Hillier in Socialist Alternative.

Twenty-first century capitalism has globalised squalor and inequality. The Global Wealth Report published by financial giant Credit Suisse estimates that the richest 0.6 percent of adults own nearly 40 percent of the world’s total wealth. The poorest 70 percent of adults own less than 4 percent. According to the United Nations Development Program more than 850 million people are undernourished.

The inequality appears worst in the Global South where millions of landless labourers in Asia, Latin America and Africa fight for the right to work for a pittance. In these regions 1.4 billion people live on less than $US1.25 per day. Factories producing components for Western export markets employ millions of workers for a fraction of the retail price of the goods that they make. In the Middle East and North Africa entire generations of young university graduates complete their studies only to find no jobs left for them. In India, where more than 400 million peasants and landless labourers live in poverty, the countryside is scarred by an epidemic of suicides amongst farmers who cannot repay their debts.

In Western countries economic crisis has devastated whole sections of the population. Unemployment in the European Union now tops 26 million. In the worst hit countries, Spain and Greece, joblessness has hit Depression rates. Austerity has slashed social security and pensions. Diseases wiped out decades ago are now reappearing, and mental illness and suicides have become more widespread.

In the United States, for so long capitalism’s poster child, almost 50 million live in poverty and more than 12 million are jobless. Millions have been forced out of their homes while the government has shovelled billions of dollars to the wealthy in bank bailouts. Marino Valensise, chief investment officer at Baring Asset Management, told the December Reuters Investment Outlook Summit that “The US has never been as unequal as today. The American dream has become an American nightmare over the past 20 years.”

A global fightback

The slogan “One world, one pain” fits the experience of billions of people around the world. The system simply cannot meet the basic needs of vast sections of the population. Much of the time discontent or anger at their situation doesn’t lead anywhere. It can appear that there is no way of fundamentally changing the world. Yet where capitalism globalises injustice, it also spreads resistance.

In country after country there have been mass demonstrations, strikes and riots fuelled by opposition to the effects of the five year long economic turmoil triggered by the financial collapse of 2008. Widely accepted political certainties have been thrown into doubt – the virtues of the market, the idea that our rulers know how to manage the system and the benefits of “shared sacrifice”.

Greek workers have held no fewer than 20 general strikes in recent years and the political situation has shifted sharply leftwards. In Spain, there have been two huge general strikes in eight months. And for weeks, Spanish students and young workers, the indignados, occupied city squares demanding “Real democracy now!” The indignados in turn helped inspire the Occupy movement which started in Wall Street in September 2011 but spread quickly to hundreds of cities across the world.

In 2012 the momentum slowed in some quarters, but not decisively. Workers across Southern Europe staged a serious coordinated general strike against austerity involving millions of workers. In Eastern Europe there have been big protests and strikes in Romania, Slovenia and the Czech Republic.

In China there has been no economic crisis. But the breakneck pace of economic growth has simultaneously raised the expectations of the population and left many living in a state of economic despair. The number of what the government calls “mass incidents” has been rising rapidly – from 40,000 in 2002 to 180,000 in 2010. They involve anything from marches to strikes to sit-downs to riots to kidnappings of bosses and lower party officials. Everyone from peasants to school students to migrant workers to factory labourers has been drawn into the struggle for land, for better wages, union rights, a curb on environmental destruction and the right to live a life free of state harassment.

In Indonesia the workers’ movement is beginning to stir after years of severe repression, while workers in India organised the biggest strike in world history in February 2012 – a massive 100 million downed tools to fight for better wages and more employment protections.

Democratic revolution in the Arab world

Socialists argue that only a revolutionary movement can seriously challenge the inequality and injustice of capitalism. And the last two years have shown that revolutionary movements can score dramatic victories.

It was a desperate act that unleashed the pent-up rage of the Arab workers and poor. On 17 December 2010, Tunisian street vendor Mohamed Bouazizi burned himself to death in protest at constant police harassment in the town of Sidi Bouzid. Bouazizi’s martyrdom led quickly to a mushrooming of protests. Militants in the trade unions took up the call for mass resistance, and general strikes followed. Within one month the dictatorship of Ben Ali, who had ruled since 1987, was over. Mohamed Sghaeir Saihi, spokesperson for the teachers’ union, explained:

“The revolution was born in the poor neighbourhoods, in the marginalised towns and villages. These places had nothing – no transport, no health services, no schools and no work. Anyone who opposed the regime could be stopped, interrogated, followed and files would be kept about them. People rose up because they wanted a dignified life, and a fair distribution of wealth, but also because they longed for the smell of freedom.”

Illustrative of the shared experience of working people across borders, the Tunisian Revolution became the Arab Revolution as millions across the region were inspired by the successful mass actions. Uprisings and protests erupted in Egypt, Yemen, Bahrain, Syria, Libya and Morocco. In Egypt millions flooded into central Cairo and Alexandria. As in Tunisia, Egyptians were not just venting their rage at state repression and crushing of democratic rights but also at the denial of economic rights – bread and fuel were becoming luxuries for the poor.

Tens of thousands of industrial workers went on strike, spelling the death knell for the hated dictator Hosni Mubarak. The army chiefs turned against the president in the hope of saving the system from which they derived their own enormous wealth and power.

For a period it looked as if dictators would be swept aside across the region. Savage repression and Western intervention held back the tide for a period. The brave revolutionaries of Bahrain were battered into submission. In Yemen the dictator Saleh fell, but only to be replaced by his own vice-president in a power transfer deal. In Libya the popular mobilisation was derailed. But the people of Syria battle on despite the deaths of tens of thousands.

And if the revolutionary wave today ebbs in some countries, in others it continues to advance. In Tunisia and Egypt the masses continue to struggle and grapple with the question of how they will forge a better future for themselves and make good the demands of 2011. Everywhere the mass of those turning out onto the streets are united in their opposition to dictatorship, economic hardship and attempts by the regimes to foster sectarian divisions within their own ranks.

Clearing the “muck of ages”

British historian Lord Acton famously wrote, “All power tends to corrupt; absolute power corrupts absolutely.” But the Egyptian and other mass democratic revolutions show that power in the hands of the mass of workers and the poor leads to a sense of social responsibility. It is their lack of power the rest of the time that is the cause of so much corruption, passivity, and social decay.

A revolution is a process through which power is transferred and old certainties are shattered – certainties about how people are supposed to follow the orders of their leaders, how people are impotent in the face of the market or state police and military institutions, and about who can have a say in the running of the world.

In Egypt, society was turned upside down. The most important debates were no longer those being conducted by the establishment behind closed doors. Now they were had out in the public squares and in workplaces. The least “important” people, like cleaners, taxi drivers, students and manufacturing workers, became the most central. What the mass of workers and poor decided – and they decided to fight back the police, to shut down the centre of the city, to take back the streets from the state, to strike until their demands were met – changed the face of not just Egyptian society, but world politics, in the course of just weeks. The rich and privileged were forced into the role of spectators to the creation of a new order.

The subordinate status of women to men was challenged in the midst of the struggle, the divisions between Muslim and Christian were overcome, and a new collective spirit was forged. A KFC outlet was taken over and turned into a makeshift medical centre to treat injured demonstrators. Managers were chased from factories by the workers they had long oppressed. Thousands volunteered to cook, clean, teach and do whatever was required to ensure that hundreds of thousands could permanently occupy downtown Cairo until the regime fell.

One question that has been asked (countless times) of revolutionaries is: “But who will collect the rubbish after the revolution?” The transformative effect of the Egyptian revolution gives us an insight into how people might conduct themselves in a future society. Once the revolution was underway, thousands spontaneously began sweeping the streets and cleaning up the neighbourhoods around the demonstrations. One volunteer told the Daily News Egypt, “We are here cleaning our country Egypt, which is our property and not anyone else’s.” Another journalist observed:

“This feeling of Egyptian pride is contagious as people are encouraging others to come outside with brooms and bags, voluntarily cleaning the streets. Muslim women have been taking their scarf pins to help attach ‘Keep Egypt Clean’ signs to men’s shirts; men themselves embrace one another with smiles, with hope and a love for the maintenance and environment of their country.”

Street-sweeping might seem just a curiosity, and irrelevant in the context of a dictatorship crumbling. But this small example is illustrative of a broader phenomenon. The mass of the population wanted to “cleanse” their society of the corruption and decay of dictatorship. As they realised their power, the cleansing process began to spread to all areas of life. There was a newfound sense of ownership felt by masses of people who were ordinarily denied a say over how their city was run. This translated into a newfound sense of respect for themselves and their environment. People wanted to show their neighbours – and the world – that they could make their city and their lives far better if they had real control.

This is the sort of transformation Karl Marx had in mind when he wrote: “Revolution is necessary not only because the ruling class cannot be overthrown in any other way. But because the class overthrowing it can only in a revolution succeed in ridding itself of all the muck of ages and become fitted to found society anew.” The experience of revolution, of shared struggle, transforms the participants in an outpouring of common humanity.

The need for socialist revolution

All the fightbacks around the world bear many differences in detail and intensity. Yet when we see photos or video footage of strikes and demonstrations – whether mass demonstrations in Egypt, Occupy encampments in New York or textile strikes in Bangladesh – each share familiar characteristics: appeals for unity in resistance, the consciousness of an “us” and a “them” in terms of social privilege, and a determination to hold the line against attacks from the state. Everywhere there is yearning for a decent life, which butts up against the reality of capitalist exploitation.

In this system all the wealth of society is created by working people, yet the world’s productive resources are owned and controlled by a minority who don’t work. All of the most important decisions – like how the land is used, what gets produced, where it gets produced and who works to produce it – are made by this minority on the basis of what will help them to make more money and increase their power. The business competition between these elites is ruthless. The first capitalist to show a human heart in the business world will be the first filing for bankruptcy. This is the basic logic of the system. And it is the root of the problems the mass of humanity faces.

We need a new system where the earth’s resources are collectively owned and decisions are based on human need rather than profit. To achieve such a world we need a socialist revolution – a revolution led by those who produce all the wealth of society, the working class. We are often accused of being utopian dreamers on this front. But contrary to the popular stereotype, revolution is a result, not of the mass of the population spontaneously becoming Marxist revolutionaries, but of the failure of the allegedly “more realistic” project of reforming the system.

When people’s expectations of how the world should be are so dramatically at odds with how they actually experience it, they are propelled to do something to change things – write letters of protest, demonstrate in the street, strike in their workplace or vote in elections. Often minor things can be changed and reforms won with patient effort. Yet at certain places and in certain times, those who are simply seeking a reasonable life can also come to find that the system refuses to concede even basic things like a living wage. In so many parts of the world this is the case today. In these instances people can be pushed to more militant actions – the voter becomes a protester; the one day strike becomes a general strike.

When those who are supposed to be in charge, the politicians and the business leaders, prove themselves incapable of dealing with the problems that the mass of the population endures, people can be pushed further. Complete failure at the top of society poses the question not just of replacing one politician with another, but of running things in a different way. For example, in Greece and Spain workers have been told year after year that things will get better if only they sacrifice. But the politicians have only made things so much worse. Among huge sections of the population, there is nothing but hostility to the mainstream political parties and the existing political process. That is the basis for the slogan “Real democracy now!” Many don’t know what real democracy would look like, but they know that what they have now is not it.

When the combination of unmet expectations and impotent capitalist institutions coincides with a severe economic or political crisis there is the prospect of a socialist revolution. When all the avenues of reform have seemingly been exhausted, workers can start to bypass the existing institutions like parliament, the courts and the pro-capitalist political parties to create their own assemblies to decide how to run things. In Bolivia in June 2005, such an assembly was convened in the most dramatic of circumstances. Luis Gomez, who was present in the capital La Paz, described the event:

“The most combative sectors of the social movements (the urban and rural Aymara [Indigenous people], the miners and El Alto [a city adjacent to La Paz] university students, among others) have expanded their siege of the centre of State power: there have been clashes with the police for hours in attempts to take the Plaza Murillo. This morning there were more people in the streets than before… Perhaps half a million people, perhaps more, according to the calculations of a leader from District 8 of El Alto.

“The public school teachers arrived earlier…they went out alone to shut down central La Paz. A half hour later the two immense marches from El Alto arrived, one made up of the city’s southern districts and another from the north. The mineworkers’ federation arrived, as did the factory workers, the students, followed by the peasant farmers… together [they] held another great council like the one last week…

“The council’s decisions, approved by hundreds of thousands of raised hands, came out around noon: 1) Total hydrocarbon nationalisation, and the occupation of gas and oil wells. 2) Out with Mesa [the President] and the National Congress.”

Hundreds of thousands of raised hands – that was “real democracy now”. In the ensuing weeks, the strike and protest movement deepened. The country was completely shut down, the president resigned and the oil fields were occupied. The most reactionary sections of the ruling class and the most militant sections of the movement were calling for civil war – a war between the rich and the poor, the robbers and the robbed – in order to settle things once and for all.

Of course, a revolution does not neatly fit any schema. Nor does major crisis and privation necessarily lead to socialist revolution. If that were the case half of the world would surely be living under socialism by now. In Bolivia, the political crisis abated and much of the struggle was channelled into electing a popular left government. Subjective considerations like the traditions of struggle, the expectations of the population, the calibre of the union leadership, and the arguments of revolutionaries – to convince more people of both the need for fundamental change and how to achieve it – are important determinants in whether and how a movement progresses.

There is, however, an elementary dynamic that is driven by the failure of the system itself.

It can be seen in the Arab Revolution, even though it has not (yet) become a socialist revolution in any country. In some cases the movements started out by tentatively demanding a few modest reforms of the constitution. But faced with state repression, people quickly radicalised. “Reform” was replaced by “The people want the fall of the regime” as the chant that rang out in the streets of hundreds of towns and cities in the region. The new demand posed a strategic question: “How to achieve it?” The simple answer was greater militancy, actions that defied the law and the state and strike actions that began to shut down the system.

But the case of Egypt also shows why the revolutionary movement cannot stop halfway in hope that institutional reform will address the masses’ problems. The millions who filled the squares of Cairo and Alexandria two years ago believed that the country’s army could be trusted to bring justice to the people who had been abused by dictatorship for 30 years. Within months many were forced to change their minds as the generals attempted to consolidate power.

In the elections of 2011 and 2012 many supporters of the Muslim Brotherhood voted for the party hoping that it could settle scores with the old regime, only to find it making peace with the generals and the big corporations that profited from Mubarak’s crushing of dissent. Anger at this state of affairs has brought hundreds of thousands back to the squares in recent months.

There is continuing frustration about the fact that much of the old regime is still in place, the lack of jobs, the abysmal level of the minimum wage, the poor health and education systems. The political and economic issues are inseparable. Egyptian capitalism has been built on low wages and state support for industry, rather than support for workers. To address the problem of poverty the entire structure of Egyptian capitalism needs to be challenged. That can only seriously happen by power being transferred into the hands of the mass of the population.

The working class is central to the revolution because workplaces are key sites of power. They are where all the things society needs are produced. They are the source of all the profits of the system, therefore the source of the ruling class’s power. When workers take over the factories, the mines, the telecommunications facilities, the docks and the power stations, they take the heart of the system.

While workers taking control of production and using society’s resources to meet human need is a key goal of a socialist revolution, the main task is to smash the existing state apparatus. While the capitalists still have in their control the police, the army, the courts and the prisons, any gain of the revolution can be put under threat. The full might of repression can be unleashed against the population – as in Syria and Bahrain, where tens of thousands have been killed. Even without unleashing mass repression, the existing state proves an obstacle to progress. For example, in South America a “factory recovery” movement was born in the midst of the 2001 economic crisis in Argentina. Several hundred companies have been put under workers’ control. But the cooperatives are partially hamstrung as they are forced to operate to a certain degree in accordance with capitalist norms and within the capitalist legal system, which privileges private property over human need.

A socialist revolution, then, is one that is thoroughgoing. It does not stop halfway, but totally transforms society, putting power directly in the hands of workers through democratic assemblies elected from workplaces. It defends itself by disbanding the old state and organising a new one, constructed out of the workers’ assemblies, the trade unions, factory committees, the revolutionary party, and workers’ militias that replace the old police force. Where exploitation is the basis of capitalism, the revolution rewrites the legal and moral code so that it is now made a crime.

Death, taxes and revolution

At the height of the French Revolution, Benjamin Franklin wrote to his friend, the scientist Jean-Baptiste Leroy, and quipped, “In this world nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes.” He might have added revolution to the short list. Rebellion is a constant feature of our world. Every decade a revolutionary movement breaks out somewhere. So the question is not “Can a revolution happen?” but “Where will it happen next?” and “How can it win?”

The scale of the crisis in Europe, the continuing revolutions in the Middle East and Latin America, the mass discontent and social explosions in China – the preparedness of peoples all over the world to fight – suggests that the next decade will see more revolutions. Millions will be drawn into the streets and into political activity, many for the first time in their lives. This will to fight and the politics that informs it will shape world politics in the next decade.

There is no guarantee that our side will win. But it is clear that under this system poverty, war and oppression will continue, and that they will provoke resistance. In the process of struggle and defeat the world working class will learn how to create a society where the fruits of our labour will be enjoyed by all, where no child need fear for their education, no worker need worry about whether or not they have a job tomorrow, no sick person need be anxious about the cost of medical care and no elderly person need fear impoverishment in their old age. That’s a world worth fighting for.

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