En Passant

The way to defeat the parties of austerity is to fight back on the streets and in the workplaces, not to cosy up to them.

The underlying neoliberalism of the Greens and their enthusiastic support for cutting workers’ living standards through a carbon tax may well mean they have little appeal to many workers. This may halt the Greens’ political momentum.

Universities have tight control over all aspects of life in academia to enforce and enhance the commodification of education, the proletarianisation of the academic workforce’s wages and conditions, the precariousness of employment conditions, the sausage factory approach to students.

US intervention will occur, if it does, not to stop the killing but to stop the revolution.

The real intervention that can win is of Libyan workers as workers taking over their workplaces and running society democratically and winning the lower ranks of the armed forces to the side of the revolution.

Castro’s silence on the murderous response of the Gaddafi regime to the mass uprising of the Libyan people will echo loudly down the halls of history. The best antidote to US imperialism in the Middle East and North Africa is the Arab revolutions and the conquest of power by the masses.

So the Green-Labor carbon tax has moved closer and the neoliberal greens are ecstatic that workers will have their living standards cut. What for? Little reduction and a continuation of the system that produces greenhouse gases. Meanwhile across North Africa and the Middle East the Arab masses have challenged their dictatorships. Gaddafi may well fall [...]

So there will be a carbon tax. Labor and the Greens announced an agreement for a price on carbon – undetermined as yet – with unspecified compensation for the poor and big business. In other words workers will pay the increased costs because profit of course is sacrosanct. This is a neoliberal solution. It condemns [...]

At tonight’s socialist alternative meeting we will have a discussion of the revolts in the Middle East and the massive fightback against attacks on unionists in the US State of Wisconsin. We hope to have a live hook-up with an activist who has been at the heart of the struggle in Madison, the capital of [...]

From revolutions to demonstrations and protests, countries across North Africa and the Middle East are aflame.  Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Algeria, Morocco, Yemen, Jordan, Bahrain, Sudan, Iraq and Lebanon have all seen protestors taking to the streets and in some cases revolutions have overthrown decades long dictatorships.  The demonstrations are spreading beyond the region. There have been protests in Djibouti, [...]

The meeting shows the necessity for SDA members to continue to build up the kind of networks and organisation that will be necessary to affect broader change within the union and hold the “democratically elected leadership” accountable.