En Passant

The true crisis in Labor is not that leadership strife is preventing it from effectively promoting and implementing its policies. It is that these policies run directly counter to the interests of the party’s historic base: the working class, the poor, the dispossessed. Labor is proving is that it is no alternative to the ruling elite, but its willing instrument. This has always been the case. Labor MPs, like all other parliamentarians, serve power, and serve it adamantly. It is just that no one remains in the party to argue against this or to offer a vision of an alternative. This is why Labor’s membership has crumbled. This is why its electoral support is dissipating toward record lows. This is why voters find it harder and harder to distinguish between Labor and Liberal. This is the true crisis for Labor, a crisis that no simple leadership spill will solve.

David Whitehouse explains the backdrop to the ratcheting up of conflict in the Korean peninsula–and the role the U.S. government is playing.

And that was just the first 2 hours! With speakers like John Pilger, Billy X Jennings from the Black Panther Party, Gary Foley, Gerry Rivera, Brian Jones and a range of other international and local speakers the next 3 days of Marxism promises to be very exciting. If you are on the left, if you are a socialist, then if you can come to Marxism 2013. The next 3 days promise to be informative and inspiring. If you want to fight back against capitalism and all its ills, consider joining Socialist Alternative.

In a short piece published after his death, Marx pointed to the importance of theory and action, and how they are intertwined in the process of struggle, writes Todd Chretien in Socialist Worker US.

These are notes for a talk Peter Jones did at Marxism 2012 on the ABC of Marxist Economics.

These two actions – appointing former mining maggot and climate change denier Gary Gray to the resources portfolio and merging Climate Change with the Environment – are good examples of Labor’s bankruptcy; of its complete capitulation to neoliberalism and the idea that the market is the best way to organise society and profit the only god to be worshipped.

Strike; nationalise; tax the rich. Fight back against the one sided class war the bosses have waged against workers and the poor over the past 3 decades for a more just and humane society in Australia here and now.

What is missing in all of this, in Australian politics, is a socialist alternative here and now to mobilise workers to defend their interests in Australia. The Marxism 2013 Conference over Easter in Melbourne is bringing together a thousand people that, with unity as one of its main foci, may lay the groundwork for building just such an organisation.

The ALP has lost its working class heartland, not because of who leads it but because of its rotten neoliberal policies. Abandon the neoliberal policies and personalities, Labor.

An upsurge of class struggle will be about increasing real wages and improving the living standards of workers by getting back some of the surplus value we create for the bosses.

In doing that a more progressive tax system can be put back on the agenda. Strike to make the rich pay for better government services.