En Passant

In India, we are seeing how this process of rapid-fire development on the quick has crossed the line that divides the development from the spectacle. Now not only are dissidents and workers endangered, the athletes themselves are imperiled as well. For the first time since the Second World War, the show may not go on. But this time, the war is the show and the show is the war.

The ABCC is not about stamping out lawlessness but stamping out building unions, the one group of unions still committed to defending their membership by sometimes taking industrial action over shoddy work and safety practices and defending jobs and wages.

The ‘crime’ these unions commit is being real unions.

The capitalist press is a mouthpiece not just for the media barons, but for the whole ruling class. It plays a role in promoting bourgeois ideology and suppressing ideas that challenge the system. This is neither straightforward nor conspiratorial, as bourgeois ideas are necessarily fragmented and contradictory.

Australian troops are the armed wing of Australian imperialism. They are in Afghanistan to further the interests of the Australian ruling class, that tiny minority that live off our sweat.

Zionism is not interested in peace with the Palestinians. It has only one goal – the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians from Palestine. It wants nothing less than the destruction of the Palestinians as part of the ultimate gaol of Zionism – an expansionist Jewish state across the region without Palestinians or their memory

Bashing Indians verbally and physically seems an Australian pastime. The Empire Games – quick change the name to Commonwealth games – reflect an era of colonialism and racism that continues in various guises to this day. None of this is to excuse the Indian elite who tried to build a Commonwealth games on the back of [...]

Ultimately, only the ideas of socialism from below offer a way to break down the “muck of ages” and to produce a new society without class divisions. Only through the mass participation of the working class in a revolution – as the central actors, not just as passive supporters – can the working class become fit to rule. As it was put in the charter of the First International, “the emancipation of the working classes must be conquered by the working classes themselves”.

The Cuban government of Raúl Castro announced last week that it would push 500,000 workers out of state jobs next year. According to the official trade union at least half of the 500,000 workers would be given new licenses for self-employment, and another 200,000 would be absorbed into cooperatives. The layoff announcement marks the latest [...]

Julia Gillard is delivering death to those seeking liberty. Close down the detention centre concentration camps.

Labor’s ‘light on the hill’ was a lie in 1949; it is a lie now.