Nicole Colson reports on the aftermath of the chemical spill in West Virginia for Socialist Worker US.

‘Freedom’ Industries

WOULD YOU drink the water coming out of West Virginia’s Elk River?

In a sane world, no one would hesitate to answer “yes” to such a question. In the richest country in the world, access to clean water ought to be a sure bet–even in a more rural or traditionally impoverished area.

But as we know, starting two weeks ago, water from the Elk River–piped to residents of West Virginia’s capital of Charleston and a total of nine counties–was undrinkable for days after a chemical spill, and the long-term consequences of the disaster remain unknown.

On January 9, a tank at a terminal owned by Freedom Industries began leaking 4-methylcyclohexane methanol, or MCMH–a chemical used in the deceptively named “clean coal” process. The leak was only discovered when residents began complaining of a strange odor coming from the company’s facility alongside the Elk River.

When investigators checked out the site, they discovered not only the leak from the tank, but that a containment dike designed to keep chemicals from leeching into the ground and the river was full of cracks and holes, allowing toxic liquid to gush out in 4-foot-wide stream.

Inspectors from the state Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) noticed that someone at the company had tried to stop the leak–by “[setting] up one cinder block and [using] one 50-pound bag of some sort of safety absorbent powder to try to block the chemical flow,” according to the Charleston Gazette.

“This was a Band-Aid approach,” DEP air quality inspector Mike Kolb told the Gazette. “It was apparent that this was not an event that had just happened.”

In other words, someone at Freedom Industries knew that MCMH was leaking out of the terminal–but rather than contact government officials or take immediate steps to shut down the facility and bring in emergency crews to make sure that the Elk River wasn’t polluted, they made a conscious decision that public health was less important than Freedom Industries’s bottom line.

When DEP officials and a local fire coordinator first arrived on the scene, they asked company executive Dennis P. Farrell if there were any leaks or other issues they should be aware of. “As far as he knew,” Kolb said, “there weren’t any problems.”

It was only after an employee pulled Farrell aside for a talk that the inspectors were informed of the 400-square-foot pool of chemicals that had leaked from the tank into a block containment area.

In all, an estimated 7,500 gallons of MCMH was released into the river. And Freedom Industries didn’t bother until January 21 to tell regulators that 300 gallons of PPH, a chemical solvent, were also released by the leak into the Elk River. According to theCharleston Gazette, “[H]ealth impacts of [PPH] remain unclear, and Freedom Industries has claimed the exact identity of the substance is ‘proprietary.’”

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THE BIGGEST lesson of this entirely unnatural disaster should be evident by now: Don’t trust the polluters to police themselves or clean up their messes.

The spill affected some 300,000 residents of the nine counties dependent on the Elk River for their water supply. Bottled water was trucked in after supplies in supermarkets ran low, and at one point, one Wal-Mart reportedly called in armed guards to safeguard a delivery of bottled water because of fears of “riots.” (Naturally, one of the world’s most profitable companies couldn’t be bothered to use its substantial resources to give water away for free to a struggling community.)

Even after the water was declared “safe” by officials and the private utility West Virginia American Water restarted operations, more than 100 people sought emergency treatment at area hospitals after taking ill. On January 15, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention announced that, “out of an abundance of caution,” pregnant women should continue to drink bottled water.

Asked at a press conference on January 20 whether residents could feel safe drinking their tap water, West Virginia Gov. Earl Ray Tomblin–who is well-known among ecology activists for backing legislation favorable to coal and chemical companies at the expense of the environment–had the nerve to reply, “I’m not a scientist. It’s your decision, if you do not feel comfortable drinking or cooking with this water, then use bottled water.”

So much of the media coverage was about whether the water was safe to drink again that important questions remained largely unasked–for example, why was Freedom Industries allowed to store large quantities of a hazardous chemical near a major source of drinking water.

The Elk River facility hadn’t been inspected since at least 2001. It “flew under the regulatory radar,” according to the Washington Post. Randy Huffman, cabinet secretary for the DEP, told the Post: “I think that the loophole that this facility fell into is because it was not a hazardous material, it flew under the radar.”

But how could a chemical that rendered tap water undrinkable for five days be classified as “not a hazardous material”?

More than a year ago, Freedom Industries reported in paperwork filed with the government that it was keeping thousands of gallons of MCMH next to the Elk River, according to the Gazette. But government regulators never questioned whether that was appropriate, or if it could pose a health or safety risk to the thousands who depend on the river for their water supply.

We should also be asking whether Freedom Industries should be trusted to operate in the future. After the spill into the Elk, the company moved its operations to Nitro, a small town along the Kanawha River, some 14 miles to the south. When state inspectors paid a visit, they found five violations at the backup facility.

And don’t expect Freedom Industries to pay to clean up the Elk River mess either. On January 17, the company’s board voted to file for bankruptcy–a move designed to shield it from liability and damages related to the spill–and even from having to pay for environmental cleanup clean up.

In an especially galling move, Freedom Industries’s bankruptcy filings show that two corporate entities called “VF Funding” and “Mountaineer Funding” are offering to lend as much as $5 million to keep Freedom operating during its “reorganization” Mountaineer Funding was incorporated on January 17, 2014–and its sole “member” is J. Clifford Forrest, a Pennsylvania coal magnate and…yes…owner of Freedom Industries when the Elk River accident occurred.

It’s a giant loophole that, if it’s allowed to proceed, will let Forrest shield his “investment” in Freedom Industries while avoiding liability.

Meanwhile, Freedom Industries’s bankruptcy attorneys are already suggesting that the leak wasn’t the fault of the company at all, but perhaps was caused by break in a water line that froze, resulting in “an object piercing upwards through the base” of the tank. AsBusinessweek magazine wondered in a rare bit of skepticism toward corporate power, “Hard to say if the court will buy that. Shouldn’t steel tanks containing dangerous chemicals be able to withstand the consequences of winter weather?”

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DON’T EXPECT the federal government to rush through changes that could prevent accidents like these in the future.

On January 14, House Speaker John Boehner (whose orange hue suggests he’s personally familiar with the effects of chemical accidents) said at a news conference that there are already too many environmental laws on the books, and people shouldn’t use this accident to push for more. Boehner added that the real problem was the lack of inspections at the Elk River plant. But you won’t hear him or any other Republican calling for more federal inspectors or authorizing the funding to make such jobs a reality.

That’s par for the course for a Republican free marketeer. But the Democrats’ hands aren’t so clean. The Obama administration’s focus on promoting “clean coal” has helped create a new and often unregulated “Gold Rush” for companies like Freedom Industries.

Meanwhile, working people in West Virginia are left to pay the price–and worry about the effect on their health and communities. As National Geographic noted, this is nothing new. The Kanawha River Valley has long been known as “Chemical Valley”:

Even before last week’s chemical spill fouled tap water in nine counties in West Virginia…it was not unusual to find black water running from kitchen faucets in homes outside Charleston. Or to see children with chronic skin rashes. Or bathtub enamel eaten away, leaving locals to wonder what the same water was doing to their teeth.

“Welcome to our world,” says Vivian Stockman, 52, a longtime resident of rural Roane County, north of Charleston, the state capital, and an activist with the Ohio Valley Environmental Coalition…

The coal-cleansing chemical that spilled from Freedom Industries’ storage tank into the Elk River…is only the latest insult in what for some has been a lifetime of industrial accidents that have poisoned groundwater, spewed toxic gas emissions, and caused fires, explosions and other disasters that neither state nor federal regulators have been able to protect against.

Nor will they be able to, as long as the bottom line of a company like Freedom Industries is prioritized over the health and safety of ordinary people.

Blogger Eric Waggoner, who was born in Charleston and whose parents still live there,captured the gut-level anger that so many people affected by the spill feel today:

To hell with every greedhead operator who flocked here throughout history because you wanted what we had, but wanted us to go underground and get it for you. To hell with you for offering above-average wages in a place filled with workers who’d never had a decent shot at employment or education, and then treating the people you found here like just another material resource–suitable for exploiting and using up, and discarding when they’d outlived their usefulness. To hell with you for rigging the game so that those wages were paid in currency that was worthless everywhere but at the company store, so that all you did was let the workers hold it for a while, before they went into debt they couldn’t get out of.

To hell with you all for continuing, as coal became chemical, to exploit the lax, poorlyenforced safety regulations here, so that you could do your business in the cheapest manner possible by shortcutting the health and quality of life not only of your workers, but of everybody who lives here. To hell with every operator who ever referred to West Virginians as “our neighbors.”

To hell with every single screwjob elected official and politico under whose watch it all went on, who helped write those lax regulations and then turned away when even those weren’t followed. To hell with you all, who were supposed to be stewards of the public interest, and who sold us out for money, for political power. To hell with every one of you who decided that making life convenient for business meant making life dangerous for us. To hell with you for making us the eggs you had to break in order to make breakfast.

Anyone who believes that wealth “trickles down” from rich to poor would be stunned by the latest figures writes Dave Sewell in Socialist Worker UK.

The world’s richest 1 percent own 65 times more than the combined wealth of the bottom 50 percent.

And the top 85 billionaires alone have more between them than the bottom 3.5 billion people.

Poverty kills millions every year through hunger, lack of drinking water and preventable diseases.

And even in Britain more and more people are going without the basics. Some food banks now give out “kettle packs” of dried food for people who can’t afford to switch on the cooker.

Yet the wealth is there to ensure no one goes hungry.

Mega-tycoons such as Carlos Slim, Bill Gates and the right wing Koch brothers have more in each of their pockets than many medium-sized countries.

Far from tightening their belts, the richest 1 percent have seen their share of wealth soar since the financial crash of 2008.

And what did any of them do to earn it?

Business

No one should be fooled by business people who call themselves wealth creators.

Every penny of profit is stolen.

Some of it comes from the centuries old land-grabs of the aristocracy. Some comes from the great crooked casino that is the stock market, and some comes from swindling poor people with loans they can’t afford.

But most of it comes from the work done by the billions of ordinary people.

These workers toil away for the rich in Chinese electronics factories, British supermarkets and everything in between and never see the full fruits of their labour.

Many of these workers are among those struggling with severe poverty. In Britain more than a million people are paid wages so low that they have to top them up with benefits—as bosses laugh all the way to the bank.

The rich like to style themselves as philanthropists, with a few well publicised charity donations.

But their entire fortunes come from the forced philanthropy of workers who provide their profitable labour for a pittance.

Capitalism is making inequality worse. This isn’t an aberration of the system. It is what it’s always done.

As the revolutionary Karl Marx wrote in 1844, labour under capitalism “produces for the rich wonderful things—but for the worker it produces privation. It produces palaces—but for the worker, hovels.”

The bosses who lord over us resent having to part with even a fraction of their cash. They reminded us of this last week, unleashing a tidal wave of miserly scaremongering in response to proposals for a modest increase in the national minimum wage.

But it isn’t their cash. It’s ours. And if we ever want to end poverty, one day we will have to take it back.

Brian Jones in Socialist Worker US explains how Martin Luther King grew to embrace a more radical critique of U.S. society—one that was captured in his 1967 book Where Do We Go from Here?

The History of Black America

EVERY YEAR, the holiday celebrating Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday gives politicians of both major parties a chance to praise King as a hero. His story—or at least one part of it—is told at every level of school.It’s a good thing that King is the object of so much official praise. But we should never forget that this wasn’t always the case. Although he was assassinated in 1968, the campaign to acknowledge King’s special contribution to this country with a national holiday wasn’t won until 1986.In the last year of his life, King actually became the source of much official derision, particularly after his public denunciation–at the Riverside Church in Harlem in April 1967–of the war in Vietnam. King, breaking with many of the more timid civil rights leaders, spoke out forcefully against what he called, “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today: my own government.”

Did the liberal Democratic Party establishment leap to King’s defense? Did they praise his courage?

Not exactly. Consider the reaction to the speech by then-President Lyndon Johnson, who fumed in the Oval Office: “What is that goddamn nigger preacher trying to do to me?”

In 1957, Time magazine had named King its “Man of the Year.” After his 1967 speech, it ran an article called “Confusing the Cause,” which chastised King for daring to speak about something other than civil rights. The article called King a:

drawling bumkin, so ignorant that he had not read a newspaper in years, who had wandered out of his native haunts and away from his natural calling.

Dr. King was murdered exactly one year after the speech at Riverside Church. In that last year of his life, he campaigned for radical, social-democratic reforms that are still far beyond what the Democratic Party is prepared to accept.

Readers of the book will find that King presents a radical analysis of the origin and nature of racism, and a perspective for future organizing that would, if carried out, shake American capitalism to its core.

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BY THE time King sat down to write this book, the civil rights movement had won the major legislation it sought. King recognized that those victories hardly changed the real structure of racism in America, but they did create a mass transformation in consciousness:

To sit at a lunch counter or occupy the front seat of a bus had no effect on our material standard of living, but in removing a caste stigma, it revolutionized our psychology and elevated the spiritual content of our being.

But “Phase Two” of the movement would have to challenge economic inequality:

[D]ignity is also corroded by poverty…No worker can maintain his morale or sustain his spirit if in the market place his capacities are declared to be worthless to society.

Compared to the cost of creating real equality, the civil rights victories were “cheap”:

The practical cost of change for the nation up to this point has been cheap. The limited reforms have been obtained at bargain rates. The real cost lies ahead. The stiffening of white resistance is a recognition of that fact.

The discount education given Negroes will in the future have to be purchased at full price if quality education is to be realized. Jobs are harder and costlier to create than voting rolls. The eradication of slums housing millions is complex far beyond integrating buses and lunch counters.

That “resistance”–the white backlash–against the gains of the civil rights movement began before the ink had dried on the chief pieces of civil rights legislation, signed into law by Johnson in 1964 and 1965. Further, Northern liberal politicians who funded King’s campaigns to desegregate the South were the very ones presiding over the segregated slums in the North:

When, in the last session of Congress, the issue came home to the North through a call for open housing legislation, white Northern congressmen who had enthusiastically supported the 1964 and 1965 civil rights bills now joined a mighty chorus of anguish and dismay reminiscent of Alabama and Mississippi.

So while King thought that riots were counterproductive, and he disagreed with the popular slogan “Black Power,” he rejected the logic of blaming the victim and identified racism as the real root of the problem:

The persistence of racism in depth and the dawning awareness that Negro demands will necessitate structural changes in society have generated a new phase of white resistance in North and South.

Based on the cruel judgment that Negroes have come far enough, there is a strong mood to bring the civil rights movement to a halt or reduce it to a crawl. Negro demands that yesterday evoked admiration and support, today–to many–have become tiresome, unwarranted and a disturbance to the enjoyment of life. Cries of Black Power and riots are not the causes of white resistance, they are consequences of it.

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KING MOVED his family to Chicago and led a campaign there against the manifestations and institutions of Northern racism, but his nonviolent tactics were unable to wrest major concessions from city officials.

A sense of frustration had set into the Black ghetto, evidenced by the urban riots that swept hundreds of American cities from 1965 to 1968. Once, King even spoke before a Black audience and was booed. That night, he tossed and turned, trying to understand what was happening to Black consciousness:

Why would they boo one so close to them? But as I lay awake thinking, I finally came to myself, and I could not for the life of me have less than patience and understanding for those young people.

For 12 years, I, and others like me, had held out radiant promises of progress. I had preached to them about my dream. I had lectured to them about the not-too-distant day when they would have freedom, “all, here and now.” I had urged them to have faith in America and in white society. Their hopes soared.

They were now booing because they felt that we were unable to deliver on our promises. They were booing because we had urged them to have faith in people who had too often proved to be unfaithful. They were now hostile because they were watching the dream that they had so readily accepted turn into a frustrating nightmare.

King warned that the legacy of racism in America would not be easily or quickly overcome. He recalled the tendency of the country to take “one step forward on the question of racial justice, and then take a step backward,” and drew an historical parallel with the freeing of the slaves:

In 1863, the Negro was given abstract freedom expressed in luminous rhetoric. But in an agrarian economy, he was given no land to make liberation concrete…As Frederick Douglass came to say, “Emancipation granted the Negro freedom to hunger, freedom to winter amid the rains of heaven. Emancipation was freedom and famine at the same time.”

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WHAT DID this history demonstrate to King?

All of this tells us that the white backlash is nothing new. White America has been backlashing on the fundamental God-given and human rights of Negro Americans for more than 300 years.

Interestingly, King stopped short of asserting racism as a universal or permanent feature of American society. He argued, instead, that its origins lay in the economics of the African slave trade. Racism was the result, not the cause of slavery:

It is important to understand that the basis for the birth, growth and development of slavery in America was primarily economic…It seems to be a fact of life that human beings cannot continue to do wrong without eventually reaching out for some rationalization to clothe their acts in the garments of righteousness. And so, with the growth of slavery, men had to convince themselves that a system which was so economically profitable, was morally justifiable. The attempt to give a moral sanction to a profitable system gave birth to the doctrine of white supremacy.

It follows from this understanding of the social roots of racism that, just as it was made, racism can be unmade. Furthermore, the logic of the struggle for economic equality, King argued, naturally leads to the question of multiracial struggle:

Racism is a tenacious evil, but it is not immutable. Millions of underprivileged whites are in the process of considering the contradiction between segregation and economic progress. White supremacy can feed their egos but not their stomachs.

King worried that the slogan “Black Power” cut Blacks off from their potential allies:

In the final analysis, the weakness of Black Power is its failure to see that the Black man needs the white man, and the white man needs the Black man. However much we may try to romanticize the slogan, there is no separate Black path to power and fulfillment that does not intersect white paths, and there is no separate white path to power and fulfillment, short of social disaster, that does not share that power with Black aspirations for freedom and human dignity. We are bound together in a single garment of destiny.

Racism actually retarded the organization of poor whites to challenge their own poverty:

There are, in fact, more poor white Americans than there are Negro. Their need for a war on poverty is no less desperate than the Negro’s. In the South, they have been deluded by race prejudice and largely remained aloof from common action. Ironically, with this posture, they were fighting not only the Negro, but themselves.

Did this mean forgetting about racism and “moving on” to a purely economic movement? No–quite the opposite:

It is, however, important to understand that giving a man his due may often mean giving him special treatment. I am aware of the fact that this has been a troublesome concept for many liberals, since it conflicts with their traditional ideal of equal opportunity and equal treatment of people according to their individual merits…

A society that has done something special against the Negro for hundreds of years must now do something special for him, in order to equip him to compete on a just and equal basis.

That “something special,” King argued, would be a massive reparations program–an Economic Bill of Rights:

However much we pool our resources and “buy Black,” this cannot create the multiplicity of new jobs and provide the number of low-cost houses that will lift the Negro out of the economic depression caused by centuries of deprivation. Neither can our resources supply quality integrated education. All of this requires billions of dollars which only an alliance of liberal-labor-civil-rights forces can stimulate.

In short, the Negroes’ problem cannot be solved unless the whole of American society takes a new turn toward greater economic justice.

We should never forget that King died trying to build a movement to get those billions. He was assassinated in Memphis, where he had come to support sanitation workers on strike for union recognition–the very kind of struggle he felt was central to “Phase Two.”

In the final pages of Where Do We Go from Here? King calls on a bit of Biblical poetry to urge his readers to build the kind of determined movement that could make their dreams a reality:

Our only hope today lies in our ability to recapture the revolutionary spirit and go out into a sometimes hostile world declaring eternal opposition to poverty, racism and militarism. With this powerful commitment, we shall boldly challenge the status quo and unjust mores, and thereby speed the day when “every valley shall be exalted, and every mountain and hill shall be made low; and the crooked shall be made straight and the rough places plain.”

Amen.

First published at SocialistWorker.org on January 19, 2009.

Gilbert Achcar, a veteran socialist who grew up in Lebanon, is the author of numerous books on the Middle East, including The People Want: A Radical Exploration of the Arab Uprising and most recently Marxism, Orientalism, Cosmopolitanism. He spoke with Eric  Ruder for Socialist Worker US in December on the eve of the third anniversary of the Arab uprisings. Achar will be speaking at Marxism 2014 over Easter in Melbourne.

AT THE beginning of 2011, the Arab uprisings generated enormous hope. But today, the euphoria seems to have transformed into its opposite–deep despair–under the weight of recent events in Syria, Egypt, Tunisia and so on. How do you make sense of the Arab uprising three years on?

I THINK the euphoria that was aroused by the events of early 2011 was actually unwarranted–as is the very gloomy perception that one now finds. These are rather impressionistic reactions to present developments.

Of course, the initial moment of the uprising, with its huge mass mobilization occurring in several countries, raised a lot of hope, and that’s understandable. But it was and it remains important to acknowledge that what is at stake is more than a change in the form of the political regime–i.e., a so-called democratic transition. Ultimately, these uprisings are coming up against the challenge of how to carry out much more radical changes in the face of the hard core of the state, which is the armed forces.

This is a much tougher nut to crack than just the removal of a Mubarak in Egypt or a Ben Ali in Tunisia in the first weeks of the uprising. Mass mobilizations managed to topple the ruler in both these countries, but the “deep state”–the backbone of the old regime–is still there, which means that the ancien régime is still very much in place, and there is more continuity than discontinuity between present conditions and previous ones.

In a country like Syria, where the armed forces are organically linked to the ruling family, even this initial step of toppling the regime cannot be realized without defeating the hard core of the state–and thus, we have seen events in Syria evolve inexorably into a civil war after months of bare-handed uprising were met with increasingly bloody repression.

In all three countries, the difficulties are huge, and neither was going to be a short process–and even less a “spring”–that would be completed by the organization of free elections, in the cases of Egypt and Tunisia.

The key point to understand is that what started in 2011 is a long-term revolutionary process, rooted in decades of economic blockage due to the nature of the prevailing social order. We are actually in the early stages of this revolutionary process. It will drag on for many years, if not decades.

So there is definitely still room for hope–as long as the determination of the mass movement persists to achieve the main social goals that initially inspired the majority of the people who took part in the uprisings. But this hope should be a realistic hope, combined with a real understanding of the difficulty of the task.

CAN YOU talk more about the challenges in Egypt?

WHAT HAPPENED in Egypt in 2011 was a superficial change. Only the tip of the iceberg was removed: the Mubarak family and their most narrowly linked cronies, and that’s it. We shouldn’t forget that Mubarak was not overthrown by the mass movement alone, but by a combination of the mass movement and a military coup.

What happened on February 11, 2011, was actually even more of a coup than what we saw on July 3, 2013–in the sense that the military removed Mubarak from power and took power directly in its hands. The Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF) took power as a military junta, so this was a coup in the most classical sense, set against the backdrop of a huge mass mobilization.

Before that coup, even as the euphoria was at its height, I for one was warning about illusions in the army, because the real backbone of the Egyptian state and of the regime that has been in place for several decades is the army. Thus, the idea that the whole state of affairs that the Egyptian population was rising against would be changed by the mere removal of Mubarak was a total illusion–and all the more so in that Mubarak was removed by the very backbone of his regime.

In fact, Mubarak’s removal was aimed at preserving the continuity of the state. It was a conservative coup in that sense. Trying to preserve the regime by sacrificing the head of the regime was possible in the case of Egypt because of a relatively high degree of institutionalization of the state–in other words, the institution is more important than the ruler.

The ruler himself was but a product of the institution–that is, the army. This characteristic of the Egyptian state also applied to the Tunisian state. But you don’t find it in most states of the region, such as the oil monarchies or the de facto monarchies calling themselves “republics,” as you had in Libya or Syria–or for that matter in Saddam Hussein’s Iraq before the regime was toppled by the United States.

In Egypt, however, it was clear that the coup wouldn’t end the movement. Indeed, what we have seen is that after a relatively short period of euphoria, the people started confronting the harsh reality of the continuity of the regime. They rebelled against that again, and you had a lot of turmoil by the end of 2011.

The situation was very tense again in Egypt, and then you had the election of the Muslim Brotherhood and Mohamed Morsi as president. Morsi was the victor in the second round of the presidential election because the voters wanted to stop the ancien régime from reasserting itself. Morsi picked up a lot of voters in the second round who didn’t vote for him in the first round–he was definitely not their first choice.

For those, as well as for a large part of the people who voted for him in the first round in the hope that the Muslim Brotherhood would solve the key problems of the country, especially in the social and economic dimensions, Morsi turned out to be a huge disappointment.

Furthermore, the Muslim Brotherhood behaved in such an arrogant manner that everyone became convinced they were trying to seize control of all of the institutions of the state. This raised a lot of fears among other forces–the Muslim Brotherhood even managed to alienate other Islamic fundamentalist currents, such as the Salafists.

Anger at Morsi renewed the mass movement, as well as labor strikes, other struggles and social tensions generally, which culminated in the largest demonstration Egypt has ever seen on June 30, 2013. And again, the same scenario that took place in February 2011 repeated itself. The army intervened to remove the president.

The fact that Morsi was elected in free elections, unlike Mubarak, doesn’t change the fact that in both cases, you had a coup. And it also doesn’t change the fact that Morsi lost legitimacy, even though he was elected in relatively free and fair elections. He was elected under revolutionary circumstances with a mandate from the people, and he betrayed this mandate–therefore, the people wanted to get rid of him. In this sense, his removal was the product of a mass movement carrying out the profoundly democratic right to recall an elected official.

The problem is that in today’s Egypt, there are only two major organized forces. One, of course, is the army, the backbone of the ancien régime, which is at the same time a social and political force and not just a military institution. Second, and in opposition to the ancien régime, is the Muslim Brotherhood, with its huge organizational machine.

The young people of the Tamarod movement succeeded in initiating a gigantic mobilization, but they didn’t have the organized leverage to topple Morsi, who was backed by the considerable political apparatus of the Muslim Brotherhood. So, like in 2011, the popular movement relied upon the army to remove the president.

The army, of course, used the mass mobilization against Morsi as an opportunity to get rid of him because it considered the attempt by the Muslim Brotherhood to extend its control over the state as a major threat–in the same way that the Brotherhood’s grasp for power was felt as a threat by the liberals and all of the left.

The big problem is that now, even more than in 2011, people have illusions in the army again, as if the army is somehow an institution in the service of the people that intervenes simply to execute the will of the people. This is, of course, completely preposterous. The army is definitely not the tool of the people. The army is the tool of the ancien régime in many ways, but it is also, and primarily, defending its own interests.

As an institution, the army controls a huge chunk of the economy–nearly one-third of the economy, according to estimates. It is very keen on preserving all the prerogatives and privileges it has enjoyed throughout previous decades. We have seen this very clearly in the recent debate about the constitution, where the military has been pushing for guarantees of its privileges and an elevated status that would ensure that no other institutions–whether the president, parliament or whichever–would be able to interfere in what the military considers its business.

To get back to our initial point, the euphoria of 2011 has turned very gloomy, to the extent that many started publishing obituaries for the Egyptian Revolution–or even pretending that it was never a revolution. But the idea that what started in 2011 has now ended and we’re back to square one, if not worse, is deeply wrong.

The key issues in Egypt are social and economic, and they carry an explosive potential. But the military has no conception of how to address these demands, except to repress them. So although there have been a lot of illusions in Gen. Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, the head of the military, the belief that this will last is very shortsighted.

It’s clear that tensions will resume. There has been already some resumption in the social struggle, in industrial actions and workers’ struggles, and in increasing conflicts among the vast coalition that opposed the Muslim Brotherhood. Many of those who took to the streets against Morsi on June 30 are now hostile to what the army is trying to impose.

AS YOU mentioned, some Middle East commentators have asserted that no revolution took place in Egypt–or anywhere else in the region, for that matter–because there hasn’t been a transfer of political power from one class to another. How would you respond?

REVOLUTION IS a term that applies to different forms of transition, but revolutions share common features in that they involve the participation of masses of people in overthrowing the institutionalized political forms of the moment.

A revolution takes the form of an upheaval, which in some cases leads to very deep and radical change, including a change in which social class holds predominant political power. But if we place the bar so high, then the term “revolution” applies to only a very limited number of historical episodes.

If a mass mobilization topples a president, even if this is combined with a coup, the perception of those involved that they are participating in a revolution is correct. You can’t deny them the pride that they are engaged in a revolution. The essential point about what is happening in the Arab region is that this is indeed a long-term revolutionary process.

Most revolutions in history are very long processes–all the more so when a whole geopolitical region is involved in the process. But even if you focus on one country, it’s clear that revolutions don’t occur in days or weeks.

The French Revolution or the English Revolution took place in the course of several years or decades, depending on when you believe they ended. It is important to grapple with the whole historical process, and even if you can more or less identify a date when it all started, the point is that it becomes a protracted process of change.

If the key problem in Egypt is indeed that development is blocked by a particular sociopolitical structure, it is clear that there is no way to unblock this situation without overthrowing this sociopolitical structure. Replacing this structure with a progressive sociopolitical power may not necessarily culminate in a socialist transformation, though this could serve as a kind of historical horizon. If the overthrow of Egypt’s crony capitalism leads to the emergence, for instance, of a political order bearing some resemblance to Chavismo in Venezuela, this would already be a major change in the sociopolitical structure.

For now, what’s at stake is the removal of the sociopolitical structure that is currently in power and replacing it with something different. For that to happen, it is essential to be clear about what needs to be changed. The ruling sociopolitical structure, like every social power, is backed by armed force. And in order to remove this obstacle, the mass movement must be able to win over the soldiers in order to prevent their use in defense of the old regime.

But in order to accomplish this, it is necessary to work for the emergence of a mass movement with some degree of organization, coordination and strategic clarity. At present, this kind of organized force is missing, and it won’t be built in a matter of weeks or months. That’s why revolutions are very long processes.

Historically, the Russian experience of 1917–where there’s a revolutionary party like the Bolshevik Party that preexists the revolutionary crisis and is then able to grow very rapidly and seize power–is the exception, rather than the rule. In the Arab countries today, we are not confronted with anything like these conditions.

The organized force for progressive social change has yet to be built. There is maybe only one country in the Arab region where such an organized force already exists to some degree, and that’s Tunisia. The Tunisian workers’ movement is organized and is very powerful, but what is lacking there is strategic clarity on the left.

THE REVOLUTIONARY challenge to the Syrian regime seems to face even more difficult circumstances. What accounts for this?

SYRIA IS a tragic illustration of one of the shared characteristics of the Arab uprisings generally–namely, the challenge of multiple, overlapping counterrevolutions. Revolutionary movements must, as a rule, confront the counterrevolutionary challenge of the old regime, but in this region, this is just the beginning.

In addition to the counterrevolution organized by the state, there is also the regional counterrevolutionary role played by the oil monarchies of the Arab-Iranian Gulf. On top of this, there is the international counterrevolution, which is represented in the region above all by the United States. But in the case of Syria, there is also Russia and Iran, which are the Syrian regime’s chief backers.

And on top of this combination of local, regional and international counterrevolutionary forces, there’s something even more pernicious: namely, a segment of the forces that emerged in the course of the uprising and appeared to be participating in the revolution had a reactionary agenda. I’m here speaking of the Islamic fundamentalist forces. Whether they are the Muslim Brotherhood or the Salafis or any of a number of jihadist elements, these forces have proliferated in the region since the 1970s and ’80s.

They have managed to tap into the major part of the popular resentment, because of the decline of the forces of the left–the left nationalists, the communists and the rest. This vacuum has been filled by Islamic fundamentalist forces, which are actually reactionary, not progressive forces. In those circumstances in which they oppose existing regimes, they oppose them not with a progressive agenda, but with a reactionary agenda based on religion, which translates into a socially reactionary ideology.

From the beginning of the uprisings, the United States was faced with the thorny question of how to respond, especially when the uprisings targeted their allies, such as the Mubarak regime in Egypt. Generally, Washington has tried to renew the kind of relationship that it once had with the Muslim Brotherhood from the 1950s to the 1980s, when these two entities partnered in opposition to any force regarded as left or progressive in the region.

In 2011, the U.S. essentially placed a bet that these conservative forces would be able to act as an ally in the effort to undermine the revolutionary dynamic from within–since the local regimes failed to stop it from without through repression, reform, cooptation or some combination of these.

In the case of Syria, the United States has deployed the same strategy as it has in Egypt and everywhere else, which is to prevent the revolutionary movement from getting too radical–to try to keep it within prescribed limits.

In this regard, they invoke the lessons of Iraq. In Iraq, the option rejected by the Bush administration was the right one, as far as the aims of U.S. imperialism were concerned, or so it is believed in Washington today. That option was Saddamism without Saddam–in other words, the preservation of the Baathist state and the various structures of the old regime but without Saddam Hussein at the top.

Today, this is the U.S. blueprint for Syria–Assadism without Assad. In fact, this is what they contemplate for every country in the region where the movement reaches a level that makes the continuation of the old order no longer possible.

This is basically what they tried to get in Egypt, and you see all the contradictions that entailed. They, in fact, accomplished this in Yemen, by means of an agreement brokered by the Saudis, which meant aborting the basic aspirations of the young people, the masses and the workers who were part of the Yemeni uprising. That’s why the mass mobilization is continuing nevertheless in that country.

In Syria, they see imposing some kind of agreement to preserve the key structures of the regime as their preferred outcome, but with the minimum condition to preserve credibility that, like in Yemen, Bashar al-Assad steps down. And let’s be clear–”democracy” has nothing to do with it.

What you have in Syria is a convergence of interests of the regime and of the oil monarchies that together seek to divert or dilute the democratic character of the uprising and subsume it under the dominance of Islamic fundamentalist forces.

For the Gulf monarchies, a democratic and progressive uprising in Syria–or anywhere else, for that matter–is extremely dangerous. So whenever they can oppose such an uprising by supporting the regime itself, they do, as in Egypt–or, of course, in Bahrain where they even intervened militarily to uphold the monarchy.

But in cases where they can’t back the regime directly, the next best option is to try to control the movement and defuse its progressive potential, and Islamic fundamentalist forces are well suited for this because they represent absolutely no threat–ideologically at least–to the oil monarchies, especially the Saudis, whose official ideology is the most reactionary fundamentalist interpretation of Islam.

The Syrian regime, too, wished for such forces to dominate the uprising because they constitute its preferred enemies: they are the best way to dissuade a sizeable section of the population as well as Western powers from supporting the uprising. This explains why the Syrian regime released from jail more than 1,000 jihadists a few months after the beginning of the uprising in 2011. The regime’s intent was to allow the Islamic fundamentalist currents to become a major force in the uprising in order to discredit it.

Thus, even though the Syrian regime and the Gulf monarchies had different purposes, they converged on the strategy, and the result is the same. Both have an interest in some way in seeing such forces become dominant in the uprising.

And for the Syrian regime, this was a way of dissuading the United States from supporting the uprising. This strategy was efficient in the sense that we can see how little inclination Washington has shown to provide any real support, beyond vague verbal statements and very limited material means, to the uprising.

More than anything, Washington fears further radicalization of the situation and the potential destabilization of the Gulf, where the major interests of the United States lie–due to oil, obviously. For this reason, the U.S. is perfectly happy to see the Syrian regime survive intact.

CAN ANYTHING change this dynamic in Syria?

THE SITUATION in Syria is definitely a very tragic one. The Syrian population is absolutely exhausted. In addition to the 200,000 people killed and the huge number maimed, there are millions of people displaced and refugees living under appalling conditions. All of this has become a humanitarian tragedy of immense proportions.

The progressives in Syria are rather isolated while the other forces have their various patrons: the regime is heavily backed by Russia and Iran, and the fundamentalist forces receive funding and support from the Gulf. We have seen an evolution in the situation that is definitely worrying, one in which gloomy assessments seem legitimate.

But even in Syria, it is essential to think beyond the present moment. We shouldn’t forget that the reversal of the military situation is relatively recent.

Until a few months ago, the Syrian regime was losing ground, and losing ground in such a way that it prompted Iran to intervene massively to rescue it. This included sending thousands of fighters from Hezbollah in Lebanon and from Iraq to fight alongside the regime in order to rescue it. This allowed the regime to reverse the tide militarily and to go on a counteroffensive, which was accompanied by the growing visibility, if not dominance, of Islamic forces within the armed opposition.

There is still a potential for a democratic and progressive movement to manifest itself again, as it did in the first year and beyond of the uprising. This movement is still there. The Syrian population is definitely not seduced by the prescriptions of the fundamentalist forces.

As long as there is an armed conflict, those who have the means will prevail on the ground. But at some point, the armed struggle will stop, and the socioeconomic crisis will reassert itself, as will the social aspirations of those who made the uprising in the first place. This potential in Syria–the progressive potential, the democratic potential–is fairly strong, as it is throughout the region as a whole.

Ultimately, these are but phases in a long-term revolutionary process, and from that angle, I think the key point is that the whole despotic and reactionary order that has ruled over the region for decades and looked as if it would remain there for eternity has since 2011 been set on fire. The flames of revolutionary change have been unleashed, and it won’t be easy to put them out.

Of course, various reactionary forces have also been set loose. There is, alas, no certainty that all this will end with victories and progressive outcomes all over the region. There can also be major defeats and reactionary setbacks, if not historical regressions, but the key point is that the process is ongoing for now, and it’s a time for action, for organization, and for political and strategic clarification.

So many observers from afar merely reflect the most recent developments and speak of them as if they represent the final outcome. It is essential to resist this impulse, engage with the process as it unfolds and strive to steer it toward progressive outcomes.

Australian socialist Tad Tietze responds in Socialist Worker US to a debate on privilege and oppression.

I’VE FOLLOWED with interest the debate on “privilege theory” in response to Bill Mullen’s article at SocialistWorker.org (“Is there a white skin privilege?”). Arguments about privilege have not only become more prominent within various struggles and radicalizing milieus over the last couple of years, but also won influence among many socialists as a way of addressing perceived gaps in Marxist theorizing on oppression.

It’s in this context that I want to take issue with Brian Kwoba’s attack on Bill that was posted on the CounterPunch website, which claimed that Bill was, in fact, defending white skin privilege (and, effectively, racism) with his words.

In my view, Kwoba’s position represents something more than just a particularly uncomradely approach to debate. Rather, it reveals one of the central problems with ideas around privilege–that they also entail a particular theory of knowledge (and consciousness) that sees competing explanations of oppression as both products of, and perpetuating, oppressive hierarchies. The response to this tends to be little more than a process of restating its claims and “calling out” other theories as being part of the problem.

I think it is a deeply flawed approach that Marxists should reject outright.

Yet many socialists have been attracted to privilege arguments because they involve familiar-sounding talk about consciousness as determined by social being. This theory of consciousness–that one’s location in a hierarchy of privilege determines one’s ideas–is used to argue that people from oppressed groups have a better ability to understand oppression and how to fight it than those “higher up the food chain.”

In superficial ways, the structure of the argument seems similar to the Marxist idea of “class consciousness”–consciousness of the totality of capitalist social relations–as only capable of being grasped from “the standpoint of the proletariat,” in Lukács (in)famous words.

But in fact, the consciousness of privilege in this theoretical conception is an anti-totalizing view of society, where relationships to a single hierarchy of oppression must first be analyzed separately from the social totality, before (at best) later being reintegrated into a more complete view. In many cases, it is not even the hierarchy as a whole that is considered, but simply a comparison of privileges held by one individual and another to decide whether or not the more privileged one has the authority to even hold a particular view.

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A SECOND confusion is that for some socialists, “class consciousness” has come to mean its vulgar, reductionist variant: consciousness only of the exploitative (“economic”) relationship between the capitalists and workers, and so Marxism appears deficient in challenging oppression, a gap that privilege theory seems to fill.

This kind of economism was certainly a feature of Second, Third and Fourth International Marxism at various times. But a view that runs closer to Marx’s own method is that class consciousness is consciousness of the total (and simultaneously) economic, political and ideological aspects of the social relations of production, and how exploitations and oppressions operate as a product of that differentiated, contradictory totality.

Marx didn’t start from the totality because he was oblivious to “bottom-up” experiences of exploitation and oppression, but because he recognized how these are produced depends on how whole societies are structured. This is the kind of theorizing that Lise Vogel did in her recently republished book on women’s oppression, and which Sue Ferguson has tried to extend to other forms of oppression in a very interesting and suggestive talk at Historical Materialism in London last November. I know that UK-based socialist Colin Barker has worked on this issue a lot also.

On the other hand, the approach Kwoba argues for actually takes people further away from understanding how their place in a system of exploitation and oppression is formed, how it changes, or how it affects consciousness.

I think it is entirely fair to say that Marxists have not yet produced a foolproof “grand unified theory” of how the capitalist mode of production produces various oppressions alongside and intertwined with the capital relation. Because capitalism is a constantly mutating system, such a task anyway involves new theoretical challenges in response to changes in the material world. But that is different to thinking that what we need to do is simply add aspects of privilege theory to our existing theories to fill in gaps and resolve problems.

That would mean abandoning a Marxist approach at the outset, rather than seeing if we can use Marx’s method to work through these complex mediations. In particular, it would mean ditching one of the most important insights that runs through all of Marx’s work–that at the center of the social relations of any given society (mode of production) is how production itself is organized (not just technically, but socially). He writes in the third volume of Capital:

The specific economic form, in which unpaid surplus-labor is pumped out of direct producers, determines the relationship of rulers and ruled, as it grows directly out of production itself and, in turn, reacts upon it as a determining element. Upon this, however, is founded the entire formation of the economic community which grows up out of the production relations themselves, thereby simultaneously its specific political form. It is always the direct relationship of the owners of the conditions of production to the direct producers–a relation always naturally corresponding to a definite stage in the development of the methods of labour and thereby its social productivity–which reveals the innermost secret, the hidden basis of the entire social structure and with it the political form of the relation of sovereignty and dependence, in short, the corresponding specific form of the state. This does not prevent the same economic basis–the same from the standpoint of its main conditions–due to innumerable different empirical circumstances, natural environment, racial relations, external historical influences, etc. from showing infinite variations and gradations in appearance, which can be ascertained only by analysis of the empirically given circumstances.

Even the more “anti-capitalist” variants of privilege arguments tend to reject this method–of trying to find the concrete mediations between the “core” social relations of production and systematic oppressions. Exploitation and oppression tend to be seen to have an external relationship rather than an inner connection. This also tends to strip any sense of capitalism as a profoundly contradictory and unstable social system out of discussions of various oppressions, which are instead seen as stable and functional systems in which people find themselves trapped (or trapped into perpetuating because of advantages conferred).

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THIS HAS major ramifications for any privilege-centric theory of consciousness, because a pretty crude correspondence is posited between one’s position in the hierarchy and one’s ideas, to the point that it becomes hard to see how ideas can change at all. You can see Peggy McIntosh struggle despairingly with exactly this conundrum in her famous article, which Bill quoted from.

In the absence of a materialist explanation of how people can have ideas at odds with their privileged social location, calling out, consciousness-raising and moral exhortation then become how ideas can be shifted, if at all.

This is quite different to Marx’s approach to ideas. He argued that consciousness is never simply the passive product of social circumstances but is shaped by practical activity; that it is always a practical consciousness as real people make and remake their world. He famously addressed this in the third of his critical theses on Feuerbach, who was a radical left-wing materialist philosopher from Marx’s circle and whose theory of the relationship between material reality and ideas was striking similar to modern privilege arguments. Marx wrote, “The materialist doctrine concerning the changing of circumstances and upbringing forgets that circumstances are changed by men and that it is essential to educate the educator himself. This doctrine must, therefore, divide society into two parts, one of which is superior to society.”

That is, by seeing the correspondence between the material world and ideas as passive, Feuerbach could not account for how he was able to break from the conceptions his social position would predict. Similarly, Brian Kwoba seeks to “educate” Bill Mullen that his Marxist critique of privilege theory is part of a defence of white privilege itself without asking how “privileged” whites who agree with Kwoba’s position could possibly manage to overcome their reactionary ideas (except maybe on a purely moral basis, after getting educated by people of color).

That is why Bill’s list of instances of Black and white unity against racism is so important–because it highlights how practical activity can destabilize structurally shaped racist ideas, whether or not the protagonists are initially conscious that is what they’re doing. It is precisely because capitalism (including the oppressive hierarchies it promulgates and relies on) is not in fact a set of impersonal structures, but of living human beings acting in the world in determinate relationship to each other, that it is inherently contradictory and therefore also produces contradictory consciousness.

This explains why most people accept a mix of racist and anti-racist ideas, sexist and anti-sexist ideas, etc. Because their practical activities both fit within and strain against the limits of the social system, those limits are always unstable and open to challenge. As Marx continues in the third Thesis, “The coincidence of the changing of circumstances and of human activity or self-changing can be conceived and rationally understood only as revolutionary practice.”

Marx calls the working class a “universal class” not because it its most oppressed or exploited but because its location at the heart of capitalist production means it is in a position to transcend the capitalist system through its own self-activity in a way that no other social group can. That implies an understanding of “class consciousness” as consciousness of the contradictions of the system as a whole, including how and why various groups are oppressed, and not just of narrow “economic” class relations.

For him it is not a moral judgement, but a consequence how he sees society working. His approach crucially includes a theory of consciousness that explains ideological contradictions as the product of a contradictory world, and which demonstrates how society (and ideas) can be changed through practical activity.

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I WANT to make a final, more specific, point about the unsuitability of “privilege” as a concept to explain what goes on in hierarchies of oppression. The question always gets raised as one of privilege in relation to others in that hierarchy, not one of privilege in relation to the social system as a whole (because to do the latter would automatically expose the concept’s problems). It is thus highly reductionist because it denies from the outset the possibility of explaining oppression socially, and instead effectively focuses on the unequal distribution of political rights as the root cause of the problem.

Marx criticised such “political” thinking in early works such as “Critical Notes on ‘The King of Prussia’” because it lent itself to seeking solutions via the state rather than understanding that the state is little more than the concentrated expression of social ills, and so is incapable of ridding us of them (even if it might be capable of administering them differently).

Indeed, while Peggy McIntosh doesn’t directly call for state regulation of privilege, her long list of white privileges (some of which Bill quotes) reads more like the basis for affirmative action policies than a program of radical transformation in social relations between whites and people of color. What comes across in most privilege arguments I’ve read recently is despair that human beings can themselves transform their social relationships, and so it is not surprising that for all their superficially radical bluster, the arguments tend to be socially timid.

None of what I have written should be interpreted as a lack of interest in fighting for the political rights of oppressed social groups. Indeed, following Lenin’s arguments on this question, I think the struggle for such rights–directed against the state which denies them–is vital because (a) it destabilizes that state and (b) it reveals the limits of winning purely political equal rights when capitalist social relations continue to produce social inequalities that underpin oppression.

As Lenin wrote in 1916:

Marxists know that democracy does not abolish class oppression, but only makes the class struggle clearer, broader, more open and sharper; and this is what we want. The more complete freedom of divorce is, the clearer will it be to the woman that the source of her “domestic slavery” is not the lack of rights, but capitalism. The more democratic the system of government is, the clearer it will be to the workers that the root of the evil is not the lack of rights, but capitalism. The more complete national equality is (and it is not complete without freedom of secession), the clearer will it be to the workers of the oppressed nation that it is not a question of lack of rights, but of capitalism. And so on.

Such a struggle promotes a non-reductionist, totalising class-consciousness that can unite struggles against oppression and exploitation against the whole rotten social system that depends on them.

There is no other way

I am old
Not wizened in the ways
Of turpentine trays
And analytic days

Where paint is a past time
And thinking
A game of rhyme
For the old man singing in C
What is there but to be?

Veggies live too
Do they sprout for you?
Or dragged out, survive?
Is this alive?

The slow steady humdrum
Of fiery tedium
Means we strive strive strive,
For their medium
And having reached the best,
Average the less, away

There is no other than the shoe worn walk
To the place that talks
of work and other things
We see the rings that others hear

And in our fear
Remove the eyes of yesterday
There is no other,
There is no other way

(c) John Passant

Will Indonesia start to turn back Australia’s boats? By sending 3 boats to the border between Australia and Indonesia, and with a frigate on the way, the Indonesians are upping the ante against the racist anti-refugee Abbott government. Co-operation on asylum seekers is dead.  Can Indonesian trade embargoes be far away?

In its desperation to give life to slogans, tow back the boats has become a reality, a reality of diplomatic disaster on the road to soft Konfrontasi between the two countries.

Australian Navy vessels have breached Indonesian sovereignty and one of the boats towed back may have been towed back from near Christmas Island (Australian territory) all the way to Indonesian shore. 

True

The Abbott government has issued a half-hearted apology saying the breaches were ‘inadvertent.’ The modern Australian Navy and Customs boats with their up to date navigation systems don’t know where they are? All of them?  Seriously? it looks to me as if this was the Navy or Customs following the Government’s policy of towing back [aka turning back, nudge nudge, wink, wink] the boats.

The only ‘illegals’ I see are Abbott and Morrison.

According to the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade:

Australia’s two way trade with Indonesia was worth $14.6 billion in 2012, making Indonesia our 12th largest trade partner. Two-way trade in goods decreased to $11.1 billion in 2012 (down 1.9 per cent from 2011). Australia’s major merchandise exports to Indonesia are:

• wheat ($1.3 billion in 2012)
• aluminum ($296 million)
• copper ($247 million)
• crude petroleum ($2.5 billion)
• gold ($788 million)
• iron, steel and aluminum structures ($303 million)
• refined petroleum ($203 million).

Indonesia is also Australia’s third largest agriculture market, with exports worth $2.3 billion in 2012. Australia’s main agricultural exports to Indonesia are: wheat, cotton, live animals, meat, horticultural products and sugar.

Two way trade in services reached almost $3.6 billion in 2012. Australian services exports to Indonesia grew by 2.5 per cent in 2012, and reached $1.26 billion, while services imports from Indonesia to Australia grew by 3.5 per cent to reach 2.2 billion.

Australian investment in Indonesia is growing. In 2012, it grew by 35.5 per cent to reach $6.7 billion. Indonesian investment in Australia was around $600 million in 2012.

There are presidential and parliamentary elections this year in Indonesia. I could imagine Indonesia raising health concerns about the live animal and meat trade for example, hitting  National Party cattle and sheep producing voters in revenge. I am sure populist politicians in Indonesia will make such calls.

It is not only some Coalition supporters whose livelihoods might be threatened who could be getting the jitters about these bumbling idiots upsetting our most important neighbours. These foreign affairs fools are also alienating sections of the bourgeoisie over this.   As Tony Walker in the Weekend Australian Financial Review says: ‘This is what happens when a focus group-approved political slogan becomes national policy…’ 

It may become a choice between trade or jingoistic slogans.  These children in the play pen may choose jingoism. Of course they’ll search for some solution that saves face but I can’t see one that won’t be a massive back down by Abbott and co if they want to keep important trade and investment flows between the two countries continuing rather than pretending to’ stop the boats.’

Of course the Colonel Blimps now in charge of Australia and playing at a war on refugees also reflect white man superiority and the real interests of Australian imperialism of not only co-opting Indonesia but also dominating it. Indonesia’s recent moves to a closer relationships with China (e.g. Indonesia pushing ASEAN with China in it rather than the TPP without China in it as the way forward for trade in the region)  mean that Abbott’s bullying strategy is guaranteed to fail.

It is not only incompetence towards Indonesia this mob of political juveniles are displaying. Foreign Minister Julie Bishop said, while in Israel for the burial of war criminal Ariel Sharon, ”I would like to see which international law has declared [Israeli settlements] illegal.” As George Browning in The Age wrote:

According to the Fourth Article of the Geneva Convention, to which Australia is a party, it is a war crime for an occupying power to ”transfer parts of its own civilian population into the territory it occupies”.  In 2004, the International Court of Justice ruled that ”the Israeli settlements in the occupied Palestinian territories (including East Jerusalem) have been established in breach of international law”.  It is in upholding this ruling that the United Nations and, until the election of the Abbott government, Australia have opposed the construction of Israeli settlements.

This isn’t about legality. It is about a major shift in Australian government policy to support Israel right or wrong. It is no surprise that one colonial settler state supports another and in doing that shores up support for its own disgraceful treatment of the indigenous inhabitants.

South Eastern Australia has been experiencing an extreme heatwave.  Here’s what the Climate Commissions says, via Oliver Milman in The Guardian:

Heatwaves in Australia are becoming more frequent, are increasing in intensity and are lasting longer, according to an interim report by the Climate Council.

The report, which will be released in full in February, finds that climate change is having a key influence on a trend that has seen the number of hot days in Australia double and the duration and frequency of heatwaves increase in the period between 1971 and 2008.

It will worsen as climate change continues unchecked. I am becoming more and more convinced that capitalism cannot address the climate change challenge and that there are now two medium to long term options for humanity – barbarism or socialism. I am not alone.  Some scientists have come to the conclusion that radical cuts to CO2 emissions are needed now and the current political and economic system cannot deliver.

Official unemployment remained steady at 5.8% because more people gave up looking for work. Unemployment will pass 6% in the next six months, according to the Treasury, and the Budget in May will add further to it with its cuts, cuts, cuts for the poor and working class and benefits for the rich.

Real unemployment is much higher.  According to Roy Morgan Research unemployment in December was 11.2% (not quite double the official rate) and with another 8.6% of people wanting to work more hours.

To have your say on this or any other topic hit the comments button under the heading. Like all posts on this blog comments close after 7 days.

John Passant calls on newly appointed ‘Freedom Commissioner’ Tim Wilson to represent all sides of the political divide.

 Yours truly in Independent Australia on Friday.

Independent columnist Mark Steel points out that “the war to end all wars” didn’t.

Education Secretary Michael Gove

NOW THAT the centenary of 1914 has gotten going, we should do as the British government’s Education Secretary Michael Gove suggests and celebrate the First World War, instead of taking notice of “left-wing academics” who complain it was a regrettable waste of life.

But on the morning of January 8, they played a radio interview with Harry Patch, the last man alive who fought for the British in the war. Harry said: “Politicians who took us to war should have been given the guns and told to settle their differences themselves, instead of organizing nothing better than legalized mass murder.”

Who let him on Radio 4, the dirty, unpatriotic, left-wing academic? It was all right for Harry, swanning about the Somme with his Marxist intellectual friends, lazing in the trenches and discussing “peace studies.” But to really know what went on, you have to rely on those with firsthand experience, people like Michael Gove. Because as he made clear, he’s read a book on the subject and an article in a magazine.

It’s the same with these other pretentious academic types who criticized the war, like Wilfred Owen and those poets. Just because they spent a few years being gassed and shot at, they thought that gave them a right to criticize it. Well, if they’d joined the real world, like Michael Gove, they might not be so full of airy-fairy pacifist nonsense.

Hopefully, Michael Gove will now remove these left-wingers from the school curriculum and replace them with proper poets of the time, such as the one who wrote: “I’ve been shot in a trench somewhere Belgian or French / I’ll not walk again say the medics / But I’ll go home in glory as one day / A Tory can use this to bash leftie academics.”

Gove insists it is time to reverse the “myths” spread about the war by relentless left-wing propaganda. The evidence he gives for this tide of pacifist mythology is an episode of Blackadder. And it is hard to see how anyone can counter a constant barrage of brainwashing, such as a half-hour of situation comedy broadcast 25 years ago.

A few brave souls over the years have tried to counter this tyranny. There are Remembrance Day parades, and the insistence that anyone on television has to wear a poppy during the month before, or be denounced as a gargoyle. There are prime ministers posing in tanks, and hymns, comics and computer games that glorify the war, and statues to the generals, including one of Commander Haig in Whitehall. But that can hardly be expected to make an impact in the face of a comedy show from 1989.

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SO THE fightback has begun, with Gove attacking the academic Sir Richard Evans, for saying: “The men who enlisted in 1914 may have thought they were fighting for a better world, a war to end all wars…They were wrong.”

I wonder which bit of that statement Michael Gove disagrees with. Presumably he thinks that those who insisted the war would end all wars were right, and it did end all wars. He must think that the First World War was the last war ever fought and must even be puzzled as to why it’s called the First World War, seeing as there haven’t been any since. He’s going to feel so disappointed when he finds out.

His next point is that those who joined up “were not dupes, but conscious believers in king and country, committed to defending the Western liberal order.” Well, yes, that’s what they were told they were fighting for. So his case seems to be they can’t have been fooled because they believed what they were told. This means all those who’ve been mis-sold payment protection insurance shouldn’t be compensated. They can’t have been fooled, because they were conscious believers that they were buying an insurance that would make them better protected.

Those who fought were told that the war was against tyranny, dictators, terrorists, and to defend “brave little Belgium”–all the usual stuff that justifies wars, as well as the “war to end all wars” line. Most of the survivors spent the rest of their lives feeling they’d been duped. But if only they’d read that magazine article, like Michael Gove, they’d have known the nightmares and missing limbs were worth it.

The war was “plainly a just war,” says Gove, because of the German attitude toward expansionism. And we certainly couldn’t stand by while another country fancied a bit of expansionism. Luckily, the one thing that you can say about the British in the century before 1914 is that at no time did it consider expanding or taking over anywhere or swiping anything from abroad.

The one disconcerting element to Gove’s article is that it contains no facts and no evidence, and it is based on prejudices such as “left-wing academics.” If it were handed in as an essay by a 12-year-old, it would be handed back as a piece of nonsense. But it was written by the Education Secretary.

So we should suppose that the next exam system he brings in will be one in which you’re no longer marked for research or making a case, but for how patriotic you are. If you want top marks for an essay on how water turns into steam, just put “Ingerland, Ingerland, Ingerlaaaand, two world wars, one world cup, boils and then goes floating up. Academics, academics, you’re not fit to wipe my arse, you’re not fit to wipe my arse.” Then you’d be guaranteed an A-star.

First published in the Independent and re-posted from Socialist Worker US.

Like all posts on this blog, comments – see the link under the heading – close after 7 days. 

The corporate media and football (soccer) officials this summer have launched a hysterical campaign against football fans write Benjamin Solah and Steven Chang in Red Flag.

They have been especially keen to demonise independent and passionate fans of the Western Sydney Wanderers and Melbourne Victory clubs.

The latest barrage of headlines and sanctions against fans and clubs escalates an ongoing campaign to stifle “active support” – a section of fans who usually stand and sing for the whole game, lead chants and hold up banners in support of their team.

“Active fans” feel like they are not just spectators but active participants in helping their club win. They are often referred to as the “twelfth man” on the field. The campaign is also a smokescreen for the wider law and order agenda and a green light for disgusting racist and anti-working class attacks.

Collective punishment

The media-driven hysteria has culminated in collective punishment being doled out by the Football Federation Australia (FFA). Victory and the Wanderers have been charged with “bringing the game into disrepute” over a brawl that occurred miles from an A-League ground as well as the lighting of flares in the bay of travelling supporters.

The governing body has imposed sanctions on both clubs in an attempt to turn other fans against active fans who organise independently of the club.

The vocal and organised nature of football supporters distinguishes the game from other sports in Australia. The willingness of supporter groups to articulate a different vision of football culture – against the designs of the official corporate structures – is what gives them a certain edgy, rebellious quality that some find invigorating and many in the media and government find so concerning.

A recent Herald Sun piece outlined why the police and corporate officials are so concerned: “Briefing notes for [police] officers … describe soccer fans’ behaviour as ‘totally different to AFL and cricket’. It states they have a ‘touch one, touch all’ mentality” – a reference to the solidarity shown by different clubs’ supporters campaigning to defend other clubs’ fans against unjust bans and evictions.

For many years now, the presence of riot police, the public order response team and “anti-terror” security firm Hatamoto has increased at matches, with riot police marching into active support bays and evicting people.

Fans are filmed and monitored by police and security before, during and after games. Bans that cannot be appealed are handed out arbitrarily. Fans have been pepper sprayed by police. One Victory fan was punched in the face by security in December for holding up a banner reading “Football = freedom”.

Restrictions have been placed on Victory fans in the active support group North Terrace – which gives “European style” active support at the north end of the stadium, with a “capo” or captain leading chants on the megaphone.

They’ve been isolated from the rest of the crowd by tarpaulins on the wings. Scanners are used at entrances to heavily regulate entry into the active support areas. Banners for sub-groups within North Terrace have been banned, removing the right to freedom of association.

In Sydney, tifos, which are big banners held over the top of fans at the beginning of games, have been banned at what the police deem “high risk matches” because they want to monitor fans more easily. This is particularly the case for Western Sydney Wanderers fans.

Protests

Supporters groups like the Red and Black Bloc (Western Sydney) and North Terrace have not taken the attacks and intimidation lying down. The FFA and clubs have been all too happy to use these fans to sell the sport, so fans have held silent protests that starve the games of atmosphere.

Multiple games last season had portions played in silence as fans held up protest banners. One read “Corporate ties = media lies” and another “Hatamoto out of football”, referring to the security firm.

North Terrace fans have held up banners reading “1984”, chanted against the FFA and police, boycotted the designated section and boycotted giving active support. This response resulted in officials lifting sanctions.

Although the FFA’s punitive measures supposedly target the “anti-social behaviour” of a minority of “troublemakers”, it is the players and mass supporter base who suffer.

The language of “strong action” to protect the majority against an extreme and dangerous minority will be familiar to anyone who has witnessed the divide and rule approaches used against union militants, protest movements and migrant communities.

At the heart of the issue, a range of agendas are at play. These include Melbourne Victory’s insistence on control and surveillance, as well as the FFA’s determination to reduce the football experience to a sanitised, middle-class, so-called “family-friendly” environment.

But the spectre hanging over all of this is the imposition of law and order politics in the cultural sphere of professional sports.