Dissent in the age of Obama

Following on from Sunday's post on Barack Obama's appalling civil liberties record, I have come across an interesting opinion piece by Cindy Sheehan. It seems that Obama's line of dissidents carries echoes of the Watergate Scandal and even the Red Scare.

Her thoughts can be found over on Al Jazeera;

Recently, the Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI) raided the homes of at least eight anti-war/social justice activists here in the US.

I happen to be a prominent anti-war activist myself, and have joked that I am a “little hurt” that I was not raided and perhaps I should try harder. Even though, we have the urge to try and be light-hearted in this time of an increasing police state, with civil liberties on the retreat, it really isn't funny considering that the activists could face some serious charges stemming from these raids.

I have felt this harassment on a smaller scale myself and I know that defending oneself against a police state that has unlimited resources, time and cruelty, can be quite expensive, time consuming and annoying.

There is nothing noble about an agency that has reduced itself to being jackbooted enforcers of a neo-fascist police state, no matter how much the FBI has been romanticised in movies, television and books.

For example, in one instance, early in the morning of September 24, at the home of Mick Kelly of Minneapolis, the door was battered in and flung across the room when his partner audaciously asked to see the FBI’s warrant through the door’s peephole. At Jessica Sundin’s home, she walked downstairs to find seven agents ransacking her home while her partner and child looked on in shock.

These raids have terrifying implications for dissent here in the US.

First of all, these US citizens have been long-time and devoted anti-war activists who organised an anti-war rally that was violently suppressed by the US police state in Minneapolis-St. Paul, during the 2008 Republican National Convention. Because the Minneapolis activists have integrity, they had already announced that they would do the same if the Democrats hold their convention there in 2012.

I have observed that it was one thing to be anti-Bush, but to be anti-war in the age of Obama is not to be tolerated by many people. If you will also notice, the only people who seem to know about the raids are those of us already in the movement. There has been no huge outcry over this fresh outrage, either by the so-called movement or the corporate media.

I submit that if George Bush were still president, or if this happened under a McCain/Palin regime, there would be tens of thousands of people in the streets to protest. This is one of the reasons an escalation in police state oppression is so much more dangerous under Obama - even now, he gets a free pass from the very same people who should be adamantly opposed to such policies.

Secondly, I believe because the raids happened to basically ‘unsung’ and unknown, but very active workers in the movement, that the coordinated, early morning home invasions were designed to intimidate and frighten those of us who are still doing the work. The Obama regime would like nothing better than for us to shut up or go underground and to quit embarrassing it by pointing out its abject failures and highlighting its obvious crimes.

Just look at how the Democrats are demonising activists who are trying to point out the inconvenient truth that the country (under a near Democratic tyranny) is sliding further into economic collapse, environmental decay and perpetual war for enormous profit.

Barack and Joe, the commandantes of this police state, say that those who have the temerity to be critical are “asleep” and just need to “buck up". White House spokesperson, Robert Gibbs, recently stated that we on the “professional left” need to be “drug tested” if we are not addicted to the regimes’ own drug: the Hopium of the Obama propaganda response team.

It seems like, even though some of those that have been nailed to the cross of national security do activism around South America, most of the activism is anti-war and pro-Palestinian rights. Being supportive of any Arab or Muslim, no matter how benign or courageous is a very dangerous activity here in post-9/11 America.

The Supreme Court just decided (Wilner v. National Security Agency) that the National Security Agency (NSA) did not have to disclose if it was using warrantless wiretapping to spy on attorneys representing the extra-legal detention of prisoners in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Obtaining warrants, with cause, and attorney-client privilege were important principles of the US justice system, but even the neo-fascist Supreme Court is undermining the law - talk about “activist” judges!

Not only have activists been targeted here in the States, but Obama has ominously declared himself judge, jury and executioner of anyone that he deems a national security “threat". These are the actions of a tyrant and another assault against our rights and against the rule of law from a person who promised “complete transparency” from his administration.

We have learned that Obama’s first victim under his presidential execution programme is Anwar al-Awlaki, a US-born Muslim who is now in Yemen. Without showing proof of al-Awlaki’s so-called executionable offenses and without a trial in a court of law, Obama has unloosed his hit squads on Awlaki. Is there anyone out there reading this who does not believe, or fear, that this programme could quickly descend into summary executions within the borders of the US?

Al-Awlaki’s father has filed a motion in federal court to stay the execution of his son until he gets his constitutionally guaranteed rights to due process, but Obama’s justice department has refused to cooperate stating that to do so would ‘undermine’ that fabled, exploited and ephemeral ‘national security'.

When Obama behaves like Bush, only on steroids, he amply demonstrates why other people hate our country so much. Persons in other countries are not nearly as blind as Americans. They know that even though Obama went to Cairo to blather about building understanding between the US and the Muslim world, actions speak louder than words and Obama’s actions drip with carnage and pain.

Obviously, the suppression of dissent here in the US, while outrageous and inexcusable, has not reached the level of the McCarthy witch hunts of the 1950’s - yet.

The longer we Americans remain silent in the face of these injustices, the more they will continue to occur and escalate.

Make your voice heard!

I have commented previously on this point. The unwillingness of the centre-left in America to speak out against Obama comes from the same instinct that sees the British left cling onto Labour.

It is the idea - naive or wilfully ignorant depending on your viewpoint - that there exists, or even can exist, a party within the mainstream which can represent "the left." And whilst some in that ill-defined collective might be uneasy about certain elements of this, they are just being "hardline" or "awkward."

I came across a smaller-scale example of this when I attended the PCS anti-cuts rally in Manchester on Saturday. The Labour councillor given a platform there urged against "sectarianism" and "factionalism," the presumption being that these were the only two possible reasons for anybody on the left refusing to work with elected officials of the Labour party.

In power, that translated to exactly the same disdain for the "professional left" that Obama now holds. Indeed, only last month Tony Blair bemoaned the "activist left" being "happy to help" their "right-wing opponents" destroy "left-leaning leaders."

The response to which is that Obama and Blair aren't particularly "left-leaning." For that matter, they are not our leaders. The authoritarian left may demand blind loyalty to a cult of personality, regardless of the effects in the real world - but those of us who act on the basis of solid and consistent principles have other ideas. And rallying behind the (red) flag for the sake of half-baked "unity" is not one of them.

After all, what point is there to unity that isn't reciprocal? Why should those of us who oppose war, imperialism, and capitalism rally around someone who enacts those very things?

The "left-wing" of the mainstream spectrum (that is, the centre-right) are not our friends. They represent the same system as the right do, albeit in a slightly more dovish manner. Their attacks on our right to dissent, as well as on us as a class, will be just as vicious. If not more so.

If pointing this out makes me part of the "professional left" or the "awkward squad," then so be it. I will not rally around the very things I oppose just because they put on a smiley face.

Why the police are the last people we need to reclaim the streets

Yesterday, HM Inspectorate of Constabulary (HMIC) published a report titled Anti-social behaviour: stop the rot (PDF). As summed up by Chief Inspector of Constabulary Sir Denis O'Connor, the conclusion was that the police need to "reclaim some neighbourhoods." The idea is a troubling one.

In essence, the report claims that uncertainty over "what priority ASB [anti-social behaviour] should ... be given by police forces" has led to"an increasing acceptance or “defining down”" of ASB.

The response to this should "draw on the evidence of the different intensity of the impact that ASB has on particular groups of people and in particular areas, together with ‘what works best’ in police systems." Such a "damage limitation" strategy should run alongside "an early intervention strategy, similar to those in health and education sectors."

Hence, police should focus on "what causes harm in communities, rather than what is or is not a “crime”, or what can be managed out of police systems."

As O'Connor told the BBC, this equates to "feet on the street." It needs to be remembered that "the public do not distinguish between anti-social behaviour and crime. For them, it's just a sliding scale of grief." Moreover, anti-social behaviour "is the precursor to crime - stop this, and a lot of other things will happen."

He's not entirely wrong, and certainly there are a lot of issues around anti-social behaviour that need to be examined in more depth and better handled. But there are ways to do that without reactionary demands for more police. 90% of people may give them primary responsibility, but this doesn't just further disempower communities - it effectively consents to the state monopoly on violence.

The murders of Ian Tomlinson and Jean Charles de Menezes are just the two most high-profile examples of the police being a law unto themselves. They exist, as an institution, to contain and control dissent, and subjugate the working class through force.

As we saw with the (wholly misguided) support for Raoul Moat, an awful lot of people are aware of this and don't trust the police as far as they could throw a Paddy Wagon. And rightly so.

Will this change with Theresa May's promise to "put communities at the heart of the solution" by "mak[ing] police more accountable through elected Police and Crime Commissioners?" It may well. But, in my opinion, it really shouldn't. Especially as it's likely to make the problem worse.

The "more accountable" police will have "the right tools and powers" to "crack down" regardless of whether you're actually breaking the law. This will only make the problem of state violence against the marginalised more acute. Hence it will increase the disenfranchisement and alienation that are at the root of anti-social behaviour.

The elected commissioners need not worry about this affecting their careers. Sensationalist and reactionary election campaigns and media stories will drum up support for this on the back of deliberate falsehoods and misrepresentation. As we see with elected politicians and just about every issue going.

If we want to challenge anti-social behaviour, then the only serious way to do so is through community self-defence. This is something the Independent Working Class Association (IWCA) have tried to put into practice in various areas and achieved some success with.

As such, its programme on this issue is not to be sniffed at;

Antisocial Behaviour

A combination of unemployment, the withdrawal of funding for youth facilities and the selling off of playing fields, drugs, and police indifference has left the vulnerable in many communities frightened to leave their homes. Burglaries, street crime and joy-riding have destroyed morale in many working class communities, making it all too easy for politicians to sit back and manipulate the situation to their advantage.

The IWCA will work for:

• The drawing together of all sectors, including official agencies, toward the goal of the working class ownership of local communities
  
• The reforging of pride in the community by organising clean-ups of estates, removing graffiti, and getting burnt-out cars taken away
  
• The ending of curfews for young people
  
• The proper funding of youth facilities
  
• The isolation by the community of those who persist in making life intolerable for the community

Community Restorative Justice

Community Restorative Justice (CRJ) is a new way of dealing with antisocial behaviour. It is a cost-effective way of tackling the causes behind crime and the resulting breakdown in the relationships which connect people with a community.

It also brings attention to the imbalance of resources within the current justice system. At present the bulk of investment is spent responding to crime on a retributive basis—fines, court orders, prison.

By comparison, when CRJ is used, tiny amounts are invested in trying to resolve problems in a long term way. CRJ works to bring people together to resolve differences within a mediation process. It can play a vital role where the police and local authorities have lost the respect of local communities and where there is a stigma attached to cooperating with them.

• The IWCA will encourage the establishment of Community Restorative Justice
  Schemes within working class communities

Drugs

Nationally and locally the war against drugs has proved disastrous for working class communities in general. In some areas the drug culture has destroyed community cohesion, setting young against old, neighbour against neighbour.

Despite all the talking from politicians and experts, the situation continues to deteriorate. Overwhelmingly, working class communities carry the cost of this failure. At issue is not whether some drugs or all drugs are bad, but how the resulting problems can be managed.

As part of a broader review, the 1971 Misuse of Drugs Act, which introduced the prohibition on buying and selling drugs and the criminalisation of drug users, needs to be assessed to determine what role the criminalisation of drugs may have played in the subsequent massive rise in heroin addiction.

IWCA policy objectives are:

• The isolation by the community of drug dealers who prey on the community
  
• The proper provision of locally based and funded detox centres
  
• The establishment of a social contract with users for the proper disposal of needles etc.
  
• The decriminalisation of cannabis
  
• GPs to be allowed to prescribe heroin in order to administer dosages safely, remove the need for ineffective methadone substitutes and undermine the criminal black market
  
• A review of the 1971 Misuse of Drugs Act

There are issues with the IWCA's programme and the ideas behind it, from an extremely narrow, cultural definition of class to its willingness in some areas to accept the restraints and parameters of capitalist society. Nonetheless, it has done what so many on the left have failed to do.

Self-defence and self-sufficiency for working class communities lies at the heart of a solution to the problem of anti-social behaviour. It is also a viable alternative to the half-baked pseudo-localism of Cameron's "Big Society." And, in a time when the government is looking to make us pay for the frivolity of the ruling class with austerity measures, it reminds people how to stand up for themselves.

On top of which, it means that we don't have to beg the government to give more power to an already violent and oppressive police force.

Iraqi Ministry of Electricity prohibits and shuts down trade union activities

The Iraqi Ministry of Electricity has issued an edict to "prohibit all trade union activities at the ministry and its departments and sites; and to stop all forms of official [ministry and its departments and sites] interaction and communication with the trade unions that operate within the Ministry and its departments and sites."

According to the Iraqi Trade Unions website;

The ministerial order granted the police authority, under the terrorism act of 2005 to arrest any trade union activist who may try to protest against this unjust action, masking this undemocratic action as a pretext to protect public properties from damage may result of any protest. This is clear state intimidation of free independent and democratic trade unions organizations.

However, thankfully, "unions in Iraq are not taking this order passively." They are "are organizing meetings, contacting media and politicians to protest this order." There has been an encouraging willingness to fight, and to work across the boundaries of different union federations.

They are also asking for broader solidarity. TUC General Secretary Brendan Barber has written to William Hague, asking him to "call on the Iraqi Government, as a matter of urgency, to withdraw the order, and allow unions to operate freely, underpinned by a fair, just and ILO-compliant labour law."

The electricity workers union also ask that people write to the Iraqi Prime Minister Nori Al Maliki to express their opposition, and sign the Iraqi labor campaign’s appeal for a fair and just labour law.

As workers, the greatest weapon we have against the state and the bosses is solidarity. It is vital that we offer it to those in Iraq facing persecution by their government, especially if and when more militant resistance to these measures become neccesary.

It is also important that we spread the word. This turn of events has received no coverage by the mainstream media, or beyond the websites of trade unions and left-wing groups. We need to spread the word not only that the government of Iraq is oppressing the freedoms of its working class, but also that it will not be tolerated.

Whether on Twitter, Facebook, blogs, or even by word of mouth, please publicise this news wherever you can.

Your Freedom is not a privilege to be granted or repealed by the state

"Today is the launch of Your Freedom!"

So proclaims Nick Clegg, unfortunately talking about a website rather than a society where people aren't crushed underfoot by authority. But we can get there - and offering your suggestions to a web "dialogue" moderated by HM government is apparently the way to do it.

This is "a new way of making policy," and "a new way of putting you in charge." But, of course, it's not. The new government is keen on the language of public and collective decision making, but at the end of the day this is nothing more than a focus group exercise. They know what they want, and they want to pretend that they have public assent.

After all, it is easier to get away with causing a 1.3 million rise in unemployment, and misery for the poorest - all on the basis of nothing more than ideology - if you can blame the victims.

It is exactly the same mentality as the "Spending Challenge." Clegg joined David cameron in putting his name to a letter asking civil servants to "tell us your ideas about getting more for less" and "find those savings, so we can cut public spending in a way that is fair and responsible."

They are advised to "be innovative, be radical, challenge the way things are done" - as long as they work within the basic framework that "the biggest challenge our country faces is dealing with our huge debts – and that means we have to reduce public spending." Any idea to the contrary, of course, is unthinkable.

As PCS say, "they are no doubt hoping to set workers in one part of the public sector against workers in another, and 'back office' against 'front line'." After all, if the working class are competing with one another, they don't often look up.

So it is with Your Freedom. The suggestions that fit a pre-determined agenda will be picked up and acted upon. Those that don't will be binned.

Clegg is right when he says that "it is the raucous, unscripted debates that always throw up the best ideas." But this particular debate has a tight script. After all, the advantage of the free market propaganda model over totalitarianism is that it allows debate within a set framework - creating the illusion of freedom.

If we really want to reclaim our freedoms from the jackboot of the state, then the way to do that is to organise and fight back. Direct action is the key to our shackles, whilst reform is all about making us forget that they are there.

Canada's indigenous insurgency emerges at G20 protests

Over the past three days, Canada has hosted the G8 and G20 summits. As is to be expected, the focal point of this event has been the protesters.

The mainstream media were keen to report riots, confrontations, and arrests as demonstrations "turn violent" and police cars are set ablaze. Toronto's media cooperative, meanwhile, were more concerned with the police's illegal searches, the often suprious detention of activists, and the house raids conducted without warrants.
 
RNC '08 reported on repressive border controls against journalists. Obstruction of the press culminated today in the assault and arrest of a Guardian journalist.

The biggest overlooked story in this, however, has been the mobilisation of Canada's indigenous peoples. Toronto Community Mobilisation dedicated Thursday's events to indigenous sovereignty, which drew attention to the government "extinguishing Aboriginal and Treaty rights," and how the Tar Sands was "a violation of Aboriginal and Treaty rights, and the most destructive industrial project on earth."

But most of these issues are not reported or discussed in the mainstream media, except sparingly. In particular, the potential of actions by idigenous people to effect real change lacks incisive attention.

An exception to the rule, Jon Elmer of Al Jazeera offers an in-depth analysis;

But with Canadian soldiers, snipers, commandos and police tactical units representing the sharp end of a security budget that is poised to top $1bn, the most significant threat to business as usual for the summit may turn out to be far-flung rural blockades enacted by Canada's long suffering native communities.

"It's a very dangerous situation," said Douglas Bland, a retired Canadian forces lieutenant-colonel who is now the chair of defence management studies at Queen's University.

In recent years in particular, Canada's indigenous communities have shown the will and potential to grind the country's economic lifelines to a halt through strategically placed blockades on the major highways and rail lines that run through native reserves well outside of Canada's urban landscape.

"The Canadian economy is very vulnerable," said Bland.

"More than 25 per cent of our GDP comes from exports of raw materials, but especially oil, natural gas and electricity to the United States."

"It's undefended and undefendable infrastructure, the pipelines and power lines and so on, and it runs through great spaces of open countryside and they run through aboriginal territories.

"It would take a very small number of people very little time to bring [it] down," said Bland, who is the author of a "barely fictionalised" account of native insurgency in Canada, entitled Uprising.

The G8 and G20 are now over, but the issues facing thigenous do not end with a single summit. They are ongoing.

As I have noted previously, Tar Sands is the most pressing, one of several areas worldwide where companies are "reaping huge profits by ravaging the environment, stealing and destroying the land of indigenous peoples, and even driving up the prices for the working class people who serve as essentially captive markets for their products in the west."

If the aim is to stop it, then militancy must take precendence where reformism inevitably fails. And it seems Canada's "insurgency" know this;

In 2007, the Mohawk community at Tyendinaga, 200 kilometres east of Toronto, blocked the trans-continental rail line and Canada's largest highway in protest at the government's failure to address land rights and basic issues of survival within First Nations - including safe drinking water, which the community lacked.

That episode was a hint of the leverage indigenous peoples in Canada possess, as hundreds of millions of dollars in cargo was stalled by simple barricades placed across a rural stretch of the Canadian National railway's mainline between Toronto and Montreal.

"The message resounded," said Shawn Brant, a high profile Mohawk activist involved in the 2007 blockades.

"We are not going to live in abject poverty, to have our children die, to have our women abducted, raped and murdered without any investigations. We are not going to live with the basic indignities that occur to us daily. We would bring them to an end."

In 2007, Brant characterised the blocking of the 401 highway and CN main rail line as a "good test run".

"We showed that we would meet the severity of what was happening to us with a reaction and a plan, a strategy that would be equally as severe," Brant said.

There has been talk in the Canadian military that experiences fighting the Taliban (!) would be "completely relevant to what might happen here," suggestion that militancy would be met with violent suppression.

Brant doesn't seem concerned at this. He insists that "we've created a unity that they don't have the military or policing capabilities to confront."

Nonetheless, they are comrades in struggle and deserve support and solidarity. As the spectacle of the G8 and G20 disappears, we mustn't let the struggle of Canada's indigenous fade into obscurity.

How the Yicheng "control group" defied the one-child policy

From Al Jazeera, it emerges that when China instituted its one-child policy, it also set up a control group. In the city of Yicheng, parents could have as many children as they want.

The results were very interesting;

Without the draconian legislation affecting the rest of China, the population growth rate is actually less. Most importantly, there is also no aversion to having girls, whilst the rest of the country is experiencing an overwhelming gender imbalance.

One can only wonder how much more dramatic the results would be if there was any kind of sex education worthy of the name in China. Or if the quality of life improved for the working class and peasantry of the country from the presently horrendous labour conditions. Indeed, without the education and quality of life proven to reduce birth rates, freedom alone has done a bang-up job.

The sooner this is accepted, the sooner we can put an end to practices like this;

Lunacy in West Yorkshire shows the need for a defence against the police

Via comrade and fellow blogger Hannah Kay, this particularly disturbing story emerges from West Yorkshire;

A COLNE VALLEY shopkeeper told of how he locked himself and customers in a shop as armed police swooped to arrest people in the street outside.

Shazad Nazim, the 29-year-old shift manager, shut the doors of Linthwaite Co-op on Manchester Road last night as what he described as a big police operation unfolded.

And a pregnant young mum told how she watched in horror from the passenger seat of her dad’s car across the street as three vehicles braked to a halt and armed men appeared in the road.

“My dad, Arthur, had gone into Didi’s takeaway across the road when I heard brakes,” she said.

“When I looked there were men in the road wearing balaclavas. Three other men came out of a big BMW and I was really scared.

“The cars were all unmarked and I didn’t realise they were police.”

On its own, this is sinister enough.

However, the incident appears to have precedent. Hannah has witnessed this kind of behaviour before, although last time the cops were uniformed.

As she notes;

Both times there was no fight put up by the suspects and they did not appear to be armed. Both times the suspects were held down on the road with boots with rifles pointed at their heads. Even Dirty Harry wasn't this nuts.

This is indeed an extremely worrying development. It appears to follow a trend set by the metropolitan police with the incident which led to the death of Jean Charles de Menzies.

Alongside Theresa May's plans to "untangle the knot of health and safety rules" for police, the potential for harm is untold. Especially when you consider that, already, police have used or threated to use taser guns - which can be lethal - against teenagers and the elderly, and the police brutality at the London G20 protests which led to the death of Ian Tomlinson.

Add that to already ongoing police surveillance of "domestic extremists," the (illegal) police powers granted by the Terrorism Act, the fact that unmanned drones previously used in warzones are coming to Britain, and the precedent for criminal trial without a jury, and what you have is a recipe for state repression that has been brewing for over a decade.

The West Yorkshire incident will perhaps be the first of many. As such, I'll second Hannah's call that "it's time to start campaigning against" the police. Allegedly, they exist to protect us. In reality, organisation and action may be the only things that protect us from them.

The attack on the Gaza freedom flotilla

There isn't much that I can add to the already-published analyses of the Israeli attack on the Gaza Freedom Flotilla.

For a full analysis of what has happened so far, the best port of call is Rady Ananda in Dissident Voice. Chris Marsden and Jean Shaoul are also worth reading on WSWS. Whilst Amnest International provides excellent background on the effects of the Gaza blockade.

Lenin's Tomb offers an explanation as to why the attack took place. Slackbastard not only draws attention to the attack but to foreign minister Avigdor Lieberman blaming it on anarchists.

Craig Murray can't believe the BBC's "balance" on this issue and Left I is outraged at the New York Times' editorial. Ten Percent has written the article you're sick of reading on this event. Cindy Sheehan condemn's Israel's terrorist actions.  A-Infos reports on the Israeli radical left's protest against the attack.

And, on Twitter, you can follow the ongoing debate through the #flotilla hashtag.

To all of which there is not much to add. It's impossible even to offer a solution when 60 years of US-supported rejectionism have made Israel invulnerable to both international law and world opinion. Israel is most useful to the US when embattled and fearful of destruction at the hands of the Arabs, and that is not likely to change any time soon.

On the question of how the impossible horror of the Palestinian (and especially Gazan) people may be ended, I have no answers. I can only hope that someone does.

Whilst the state exists, we need the Human Rights Act

On Tuesday, one of the first acts of the new coalition government was to create a commission to review the Human Rights Act. A day later, Home Secretary Theresa May admitted that the point of this was to reconsider the shelved Tory plan to scrap the act.

The ostensible reason for this is the court victory of two "al-Qaeda operatives" against their deportation. As the Daily Mail foamed, "yet again, the law has turned justice on its head, protecting the guilty and exposing the innocent to mortal danger." Abid Naseer and Ahmad Faraz Khan "permission to remain in the Britain they want to destroy" and "there are no prizes for guessing which statute we have to thank for this perversity."

Ignored is the fact that Operation Pathway, in which the men were arrested, has "not been able to present sufficient evidence to the Crown Prosecution Service on which it could lay charges against any of the 12 arrested." No explosives, no bomb-making equipment, just hype.

Instead, Douglas Murray of the Telegraph demands that someone explain to the government "that it matters far far less to us whether Mr Naseer is tortured than it does that the British people are safe from being blown up." His is a common complaint, and a central point in the charge against the Human Rights Act. As the Daily Mail blog puts it, "the ghastly Human Rights Act twists the principle of 'rights' into 'privileges for criminals,' and HM's law-abiding subjects find their ancient rights have been swept aside."

Pushed for specifics, however, nobody can tell us exactly what "ancient rights" we have lost due to the Act.

Over the last thirteen years, there can be no doubt that civil liberties have been severely encroached by the police and state powers granted in the Terrorism Act. Section 44 allows for police to stop and search anyone without the previous "reasonable grounds" requirement, and "we have seen Section 44 powers used against anti-war, anti-weapons and anti-capitalist protestors." Not to mention that "there was a three-fold increase in the use of the power, but fewer than 0.1% of those stopped were arrested for terrorism offences" and "if you are black or Asian, you are around four times more likely to be stopped than if you are white." There are also "unacceptably broad speech offences," which amount to "criminalising careless talk and banning non-violent political organisations."

With the Human Rights Act, there are instances where liberties are curtailed, but they are unlikely to be cited by the right. For example, the fact that Article 15 of the European Convention on human Rights (on which the Act is based) allows states to derogate from guaranteed rights in conditions of "war or other public emergency threatening the life of the nation," or that Article 16 allows states to restrict the political activity of "aliens."

Whilst these real examples are ignored, the examples continually touted as proof that the act is easily abused turn out to be right-wing myths. The common tactics of attributing something done for entirely different reasons to "human rights" and of citing cases that were actually rejected by the courts rear their ugly heads. As Liberty point out (PDF), the very nature of the Act is also subject to myth and deliberate misunderstanding.

This serves the same propaganda function as "political correctness;"

The ideology of the ruling class is power and profit, and dissent threatens that. That’s why they mobilise it in reactionary, controllable ways. It doesn’t harm their interests to have people rally against political correctness, or an imaginary “left-wing bias,” because those things don’t really exist. As long as we’re dissenting against the irrelevant, that’s fine. We’re controllable. But when we dissent against their hegemony of power, we’re a threat.

The double-whammy, of course, is that having a populist campaign against the Human Rights Act gives the government a constituency not merely distracted but actively supporting its own oppression.

The Tories want to replace the Act with a British Bill of Rights, but we have no idea what this entails. One point, noted by Charlotte Gore, is that it is likely "foreign nationals – including illegal immigrants, asylum seekers and people on temporary visas would have no protection from our Government at all. Murder, torture, punishment without law, unfair trials – even preventing them getting married – all these options suddenly become available to the Government of the day."

The other major point of contention is that conservative opposition to the Act centres upon the fact that the rights enshrined therein are universal and that they cannot deport terrorists to face torture. But, as we have see in the case of extrordinary rendition, such torture often takes place on our behalf and for our benefit. We also know that, in the hands of governments, words such as "terrorist" and "extremist" can have very lax definitions which allow for the suppression of free expression and dissent.
The Human Rights Act has its limitations. It is certainly not a catch-all guarantee against violations of civil liberties and basic freedoms. But it offers people away to challenge the abuses of the state and other sectors of established power. And as long as the state exists, the Human Rights Act will remain neccesary.

Workers rally against the strike-busting agenda of the courts

Today, the National Union of Journalists (NUJ) joined the British Airways Stewards and Stewardesses Association (BASSA) in having their rights pissed on by the anti-worker stance of the High Court.

As they report;

The NUJ has been forced to call off industrial action scheduled to take place across several Johnston Press titles tomorrow (April 19) and re-ballot 550 members at the group.

Incredibly, Johnston Press ran to the High Court on Friday afternoon to block the planned action, arguing that it doesn't employ any journalists.

Johnston Press spent enormous time and effort putting together a 600-page submission to prove that -- despite the JP stamp on the pay slips of staff working on their titles; the JP company handbook issued to all staff; the Johnston Press plc intranet that publishes company-wide procedures including policies on grievance, disciplinary procedure and health and safety; despite the group's claims in the  annual report, in company bulletins and external publications that it employs 1,900 journalists and more than 7,000 employees -- that JP “employ no journalists”.

Johnston Press has made this claim, despite making group-wide decisions on the recent pay freeze, pensions, and employment terms and conditions.

NUJ general secretary Jeremy Dear said: “Johnston Press management’s claim that it employs no journalists would be laughable, did it not have such serious implications for industrial relations in the UK. It’s clearly part of an emerging trend amongst employers to derail democratically agreed industrial action by skilfully exploiting the anti-trade union laws. In this case, by creating a web of subsidiary companies set up as multiple employers, JP management has been able to argue at the High Court that our dispute around group-wide pay and the introduction of a new content management system across the titles is, in fact, a series of identical disputes with JP's multiple subsidiaries.

“Unfortunately, given the threat of injunctions, legal costs, individual members losing their protection against unfair dismissal and punitive damages being imposed, we have been forced to call off Wednesday’s strike action and will re-ballot members.

“Our members at Johnston Press share the frustration that workers at Network Rail and BA have felt recently, where overwhelming ballot results in favour of strike action have been successfully ruled out of order by managements exploiting the technicalities of the anti-trade union laws.

“Johnston Press plc closed the group-wide pension scheme. Johnston Press plc imposed the group-wide pay freeze. Johnston Press plc imposed the group-wide introduction of the ATEX content management system. Yet Johnston Press plc has worked hard to ensure that under the anti-trade union laws, we are forced to have a dispute not with it, but with each and every one of its wholly owned subsidiaries. It is patently unfair and the law is an ass."

Members of the train drivers' union, Aslef, face a similar decision in the near future. Maintenance firm Tube Lines have "said there were concerns about the validity of the strike ballot and asked the union to withdraw it." Although union leaders are insisting that "the strike still stands," this is the clearest indication yet that challenges to the legality of strike ballots are becoming the norm in corporate union-busting.

Fortunately, it seems that the first sparks of the fightback I urged yesterday are beginning to flare up.

Unite will hear the result of their legal challenge to the injunction on Thursday. Meanwhile, the Alliance for Workers' Liberty have produced model motions which workers can put forward to their union branches as a pledge of solidarity;

Model motion: FREE OUR UNIONS!

This union believes

1. The use of the courts to block strikes by Network Rail workers and now, twice, British Airways workers is an absolute disgrace.

This union further believes

1. That court injunctions are now becoming the bosses' default response to any big strike.
2. That the Tory anti-union laws kept by New Labour mean that trade unionism is only semi-legal in Britain - and that judges can overturn an overwhelming vote by many thousands of workers to strike, while the bosses continue to push through sackings, wage reductions and cuts in services without consulting anyone.
3. That we may now face new anti-union laws from the Lib Dem-Tory government.

This union resolves

1. To campaign for the repeal of the anti-union laws and for positive legal rights: to strike, picket, take solidarity action.
2. To affiliate to the United Campaign for Repeal of the Anti-Trade Union Laws.
3. To send this motion to the national executive, and request that they i) raise this at Labour Party conference by submitting a motion for repeal of the anti-union laws; ii) raise this issue at TUC Congress by proposing a cross-union campaign, including industrial action, to abolish the anti-union laws.

[Obviously adapt as necessary for non-Labour affiliated unions.]

***

Model motion: FREE OUR UNIONS!
(Version for Unison branches)

This union believes

1. The use of the courts to block strikes by Network Rail workers and now, twice, British Airways workers.

This union further believes

1. That court injunctions are now becoming the bosses' default response to any big strike.
2. That the Tory anti-union laws kept by New Labour mean that trade unionism is only semi-legal in Britain - and that judges can overturn an overwhelming vote by many thousands of workers to strike, while the bosses continue to push through sackings, wage reductions and cuts in services without consulting anyone.
3. That we may now face new anti-union laws from the Lib Dem-Tory government.

This union resolves

1. To campaign for the repeal of the anti-union laws and for positive legal rights: to strike, picket, take solidarity action.
2. To affiliate to the United Campaign for Repeal of the Anti-Trade Union Laws.
3. To send this motion to the national executive, and request that they raise this issue at TUC Congress by proposing a cross-union campaign, including industrial action, to abolish the anti-union laws.
4. To mandate the Labour Link officer to: propose to our next APF meeting that the union nationally should seek to raise this issue at Labour Party conference by submitting a motion for repeal of the anti-union laws; and attempt to promote this policy through the APF structure.

Hardly the most radical motions, but they at least offer a beginning. TUC-affiliated trade unions have been lacklustr-to-inactive in terms of challenging Thatcher and Tebbit's anti-strike laws, and any move to rectify that is more than welcome.

Much more vital in the short term are direct actions of solidarity against the courts. The first such action is the Flying Bike Picket being organised by Workers' Climate Action;

On Saturday 22 May, Workers’ Climate Action will be organising a critical mass bike ride in solidarity with the BA cabin crew workers’ struggle and in defence of the right to strike.


...


Our critical mass will go ahead as a protest in support of the right to strike.

Because of the way that the BASSA/Unite pickets are laid out, using bikes to get around and visit them is the most efficient way of showing solidarity. It’s also a more creative and innovative way of showing our support than more traditional methods.

Those wishing to attend can contact Workers' Climate Action on 07985 201 350 for more info and can RSVP via Facebook here.

We need to keep building momentum. Whether or not the campaign in defence of the right to strike will grow into an unstoppable force remains to be seen. As does whether these initial actions will catch the attention of the bosses so keen to crush us underfoot for their profits. I would urge everyone to keep this issue alive, to push it forward in their union branches and other organisations, and to publish news of actions taken on every available forum.

What is clear is that, no matter what the bosses will not relent. The democratic rights of BASSA and the NUJ are not the first victims of their class war and they will not be the last. But capitulation will only bring their attacks on harder and hasten the backwards trend which will consume every single right and privilege we have fought for and won over the past two centuries.

If we want any other outcome, then we must echo the sentiments of August Spies when told by a judge that he faced the gallows after struggling for the eight-hour working day;

If you think that by hanging us you can stamp out the labor movement, then hang us. Here you will tread upon a spark, but here, and there, and behind you, and in front of you, and everywhere, the flames will blaze up. It is a subterranean fire. You cannot put it out. The ground upon which you stand is on fire.

Fighting back against the High Court is the best way to rebuild a culture of solidarity and direct action

The High Court has granted British Airways an injunction to prevent a planned 20-day strike by Unite members. Although many expected it, this is another nail in the coffin of the right to strike and the ability of the working class to defend themselves.

The grounds for the injunction were flimsy at best. According to BBC News, "the decision was based on a technicality and whether Unite followed rules in contacting its members with strike result details." That's right. The ballot itself wasn't the issue, but the way it was announced was. It's hard to know whether to laugh or cry at the transparency of this charade.

As Django notes for LibCom;

What these rulings demonstrate is that the right to strike doesn't really exist in the UK anymore, because they impose an onus on unions and consequences which don't exist for other kinds of organisations. It is unimaginable, for instance, that a council could be prevented from collecting its council tax payments due to inaccuracies in its database of residents, or that the results of the general election could be annulled due to irregular voter registration (which certainly does happen – evidence of electoral fraud arises at every general election, including this one.) In this way, smaller organisations with smaller resources like trade unions are obligated to meet higher standards of record-keeping than exist elsewhere.

The idea that we live in anything approaching a "fair" society is a myth. Those who organise to resist injustice and fight for just such fairness are attacked and crushed by those for whom it is just a vote-winning buzzword. We should be in no doubt that such attacks will only intensify.

There is, however, a way to resist them - if we have the will. As Django continues;

All of this paints a bleak picture – the inability to legally strike, unions losing any vestige of being organs for struggle and taking on the cowed, corporatist role they have in China, or held in the ex-Soviet countries.

But unions are permitted to exist within capitalism for a reason; they function as a pressure valve, allowing anger and militancy to be channelled down restricted, legalistic paths. Unions are able to represent workers to the employer, and negotiate the cost and terms of their labour. The only other alternative form conflict can take is workers organising their own action through mass meetings, without official union mandates.

We saw a glimpse of what this looks like during the wave of oil industry walkouts last year. Though there is no definitive split between the 'workers' and the 'union' in cases like this, with shop stewards often taking leading organisational roles, the strikes worked without a legal mandate and ignored every piece of anti-strike legislation since the 20s. There was no ballot, and secondary action took place on a huge scale. Whatever reservations we may have about the initial motives behind the strikes (which are best addressed here), they showed that it is possible to take successful, large scale illegal industrial action without repercussions. There have been a number of wildcat strikes at the Royal Mail in recent years too.

It is entirely possible that should there be enough of an appetite for action amongst workers in the coming years, we may see more action of this kind. After all, in countries where striking is illegal, such as China, it happens frequently on an illegal basis. On the other hand it is entirely possible that we could see a demoralised and cowed working class incapable of breaking with the unions and the official restrictions on strike action which now prevent it from taking place. Either outcome is possible, but only one stands any chance of fending off the massive attacks on our living conditions which are in the pipeline. 

If we want to see this kind of militancy return, though, we need to rekindle the culture of working class solidarity and collective self-defence. The weakness of labour organisations (and not just in terms of mainstream trade unions) and the constant bombardment of propaganda has made people believe the capitalist lie. The dogma that hard work will see you justly rewarded and that "the markets" are self-regulating (rather than just a short-hand for parasitic employers getting rich off the labour of others) actually holds weight.

This needs to be challenged. Not with academic drivel that nobody but student Marxists will read, but by tying the problems we can all see for ourselves to tangible struggles in the real world.

The first target of any such action has to be the High Court. We cannot simply wait for the next issue to come along and try to get things right then. We must fight back now. The High Court has shown itself, in three separate injunctions cases, to be unequivocally on the side of the bosses. It is an instrument of the class war being waged against us, the most powerful weapon in use at this point, and it needs to be taken out.

Not only this time, but every time that there is an injunction against workers' actions, the High Court must be picketed. Ideally, there should be a blockade, but at the very least there should be some presence from working class activists. Likewise, we need to find ways to demonstrate our solidarity with the workers in the British Airways cabin crew. The ‘I support the BA cabin crew strikes!’ Facebook group is here, and the 'An injury to one is an injury to all! Defend the right to strike!’ group is here.

If demonstrations at airports are not practical, handing out leaflets there is. Talking to the union stewards and the members is. Raising awareness and public support is vital in keeping up morale and encouraging people to continue the fight. Whatever happens, we need to remember that the struggle of BA workers, as of any other workers, is our struggle. An injury to one is an injury to all!

How Labour’s friends are ‘securing your world’

From Open Democracy, the following article exposes the murky world of private security contractors in Britain and how they are involved not only in the detention and abuse of migrants but also the erosion of civil liberties under the umbrella of "civil contingencies." The writer, Clare Sambrook, is a co-ordinator of End Child Detention Now.

At the bustling Counter Terror Expo in London’s Olympia this week they are giving top billing to the security industry’s favourite politician. ‘The most experienced cabinet minister of modern times’, they call him: Dr John Reid.

Home office colleagues say Reid — Labour hard man, former secretary of state for health and defence, and home secretary — is the minister who brought business in from the cold. These days relations are warm and cosy. Marketing their wares as vital to the war on terror, while dreaming up everyday applications for intrusive high security kit, Reid’s friends have quietly advanced deep into the public sector — running schools, GP clinics and police investigations.

Out of government but still a serving MP, Reid has been taking £50,000 a year from G4S — the Group 4 Securicor giant.

He has been hosting ‘business breakfasts’, and talking up the scary threats and looming crises — cyber attacks, pandemics, global warming, energy shortages, mass migration — that spell opportunity to his friends.

(They’ve made him honorary professor at the shadowy new Institute of Security and Resilience, at University College London; staff aren’t allowed to say whether industry is paying the bills.)

Life is good for G4S whose annual revenues have doubled to £6 billion in the past five years. Last month they picked up contracts for guarding foreign office buildings in the UK and in Afghanistan. They can afford to pay chief executive Nick Buckles (pictured) £3,835 every day.

G4S — slogan ‘Securing Your World’ — runs prisons, secure training centres and immigration centres including Tinsley House, where last year an asylum seeker who had been forcibly arrested and locked up, let go, arrested and locked up again, got predictably distressed — she was only ten years old — and tried to strangle herself.

Former Ghurkas-turned G4S personnel train British soldiers in mine clearance and ambush drills as part of their (increasingly outsourced) training before deployment to Afghanistan. John Whitwam, the former lieutenant colonel managing privatised Ghurkas, explains: ‘On Monday and Tuesday, they would be wearing Army uniform or dressed as the Taliban, by the end of the week they would be working elsewhere in G4S.’

Taking over core public services, G4S people monitor 12000 electronically-tagged offenders, run hundreds of police and court cells, tackle anti-social behaviour and transport half a million prisoners every year — as well as doing things like covert surveillance for insurance companies.

They are aggressively expanding the market for intrusive high security kit, touting number plate recognition technology to retailers so they can tell how frequently customers drop by.

They’re installing CCTV in schools — giving parents ‘an added sense of security’ — and more cameras in shopping centres, harvesting information about how we shop.

They’re promoting biometrics to help employers catch workers trying to cheat the clock-in system.

Their newest division screens and vets employees, not just at recruitment, but all through their working lives.

That’s G4S, ‘Securing Your World’.

All sorts of questions spring to mind. Do we want our world secured this way? What on earth was G4S doing locking up that little girl? Is the rise in surveillance evidence-based? Or is it Nick Buckles and his mates chasing five grand a day? Whose interests has John Reid been serving all these years?

And . . . are environmentalists so very dangerous that G4S had to deploy Ghurkas — battle-hardened in Iraq and Afghanistan — to protect ‘sensitive utilities’ ahead of last year’s London Climate Camp? Were they serious? Or was that a sales-boosting stunt?

G4S has even got a ‘police business unit’, whose managing director said late last year: ‘We have a team of 30 of our guys in one force on a major investigation right now, practically doing all of the roles except that of the senior investigating officer.’

Does that make us feel secure? Or would we rather have real police officers, trained for public service?

G4S isn’t the only gigantic security company doing surprising things.

There’s Serco, ‘Bringing Services to Life’ and misery to thousands of children who have passed through the company’s Yarl’s Wood detention centre in Bedfordshire.

Business is brilliant. Shortly after celebrating record annual results — profits up 30 per cent to £177 million — chief executive Chris Hyman (£3,233 every day) spent one recent bright spring day down at Silverstone, test-driving his team’s Ferrari F430 ahead of the new racing season.

Besides locking up asylum seekers ‘with respect and understanding’, Serco brings its ‘deep public service ethos’ and ‘commercial know-how’ to defence, transport, civil government, science, the private sector and, with rising excitement, education and the NHS.

They have got an awful lot under corporate control.

Serco trains RAF helicopter crews, helps run the National Nuclear Laboratory and the Atomic Weapons Establishment.

They sell intelligence systems to law enforcement agencies including the National Crime Squad and the tax-man.

They help police forces connect intelligence with number plate recognition in systems so fast and flexible they can easily adapt to new police powers.

Serco supplies the rising numbers of covert surveillance vehicles that police forces demand, builds and runs prisons and youth offender facilities, monitors electronically tagged offenders, enforces curfews.

They’re running state schools in Bradford, Walsall, Stoke-on-Trent, they’ve got their fingers on 3,500 Sure Start children’s centres.

They provide out-of-hours GP services in Cornwall, employ ‘community matrons’ in Newham, they manage stacks of PFIs and will take more than £250 million from the NHS over the next ten years for pathology services alone.

They’ve got 7000 security-cleared staff working on ‘significant elements’ of the government’s counter-terrorism strategy.

And guess who has won the freshly privatised cabinet office contract to run the Emergency Planning College at Hawkhills in North Yorkshire? Yes. From Friday, Serco controls the training of the people who would take charge during emergencies and disasters when the Civil Contingencies Act — the one with all those alarming arbitrary powers — kicks in.

‘The challenges we face are unprecedented,’ says Serco. ‘They call for a seamless, holistic approach to security and civil contingency.’

Yikes.

For someone who gets so much business from the UK government, Chris Hyman seems surprisingly unruffled by the election. ‘We have very significant business with local authorities,’ he told CNBC’s business channel earlier this year. Regionalisation, ‘has gone very well with us.’

And anyway, ‘It’s pretty much, we work for the civil servants really. There’s not much that we do that has to go through Parliament for decisions.’

If that’s the case, then we must rely on civil servants to fight our corner should conflicts arise between the interests of society and the security industry.

Conflicts like this one, maybe.

For years, doctors working among asylum seekers noted disturbing numbers of injuries to people being moved about by private security companies. Two years ago, doctors and lawyers from Medical Justice published a report about it — called Outsourcing Abuse.

The government asked former Northern Ireland police ombudsman Dame Nuala O’Loan to make independent inquiries. Reporting last month she said there was, ‘inadequate management of the use of force by the private sector companies’, and made 22 recommendations for change.

The civil servant nominally in charge of the companies is Lin Homer, chief executive of the UK Border Agency. Responding to O’Loan’s criticisms, Homer spoke not a word against her commercial partners. She saved her reproach for the doctors and lawyers who had brought these troubling matters to light. Their offence? ‘Seeking to damage the reputation of our contractors’.

Why class, not race, defines South Africa's turmoil.

In a video provocatively titled "Kill all the Black People," YouTube poster R3NDI3R makes the argument that "Kill the Boer, kill the farmer" - the ANC's anti-apartheid struggle song - is of no relevence to the present and is in fact racist. His argument, strongly worded, seems to have merit. BBC News has reported that "South Africa's ruling African National Congress (ANC) has told its members to refrain from singing the anti-apartheid struggle song "Shoot the Boer"."

Of course, this new development can hardly be attributed to a single man or a single video on YouTube. Racial tensions have been rising recently, and the murder of white supremacist leader Eugene Terreblanche has only further ignited this. "His supporters have blamed ANC youth leader Julius Malema for inflaming the situation by singing the song," as the BBC tells us. Indeed, this is the point of R3NDI3R's rant.

However, it is worth arguing that the issue of this song is nothing more than a distraction.

Not because inflammatory anti-white songs are acceptable, far from it. The controversy surrounding the song represents a distraction because it is superficial. Not only does it fail to strike at the heart of the real injustices of ANC rule in South Africa, which I've covered previously, but also because - as apartheid itself did - it throws up race as a dividing line whilst the country is suffering heavily on the basis of class.

On LibCom, Chris Rodrigues sheds more light on this little-analysed perspective;

A hat tip to Mphutlane wa Bofelo for pointing out the subtext to the ANC’s claim to the “shoot the boer!” song: For is it not the case, as wa Bofelo points out, that the attempt to establish a heritage status for the song locates the struggle in the past? And what of the new songs that the poor sing today? Songs like, “amabhunu amnyama asenzela i -worry” — “black boers cause us worries”. Does this current storm in Julius Malema’s teacup not also divert attention from this reality?

Part of the problem resides in the fact that the media tends to follow the blindingly obvious — in this case, the day-to-day pronouncements of those who hold political office. The body politic is, however, capable of other forms. The University of Abahlali baseMjondolo — the University of the Shack Dwellers — is a case in point. University? Shack dwellers? What kind of politics is this that doesn’t seek parliamentary representation? Still, it’s unforgivable that in a country where protests occur with such frequency — there is no ink spilt analysing contemporary idioms.

Anthems, as the Uruguayan essayist Eduardo Galeano says, are often full of “threats, insults, self-praise, homages to war, and the honourable duty to kill and be killed”. The archetypal Marseillaise, for instance, warns that the Revolution “will water the fields with the impure blood” of the invaders. Terrifying stuff but once institutionalised, as Messrs Malema and Motlanthe are arguing, these songs of death and victory are sentimentalised and tamed. They are no longer sung outside the Bastille but inside the Stade de France. In the ANC’s case — we could draw a distinction between singing near Casspirs, and singing in the vicinity of parking lots full of SUVs.

It is, rather, the adaptation of a song, or a new song sung by the excluded that is, as the philosopher Slavoj Zizek argues in First as Tragedy, Then as Farce — the truly revolutionary anthem. Working from the premise that “universal humanity is visible at the edges” — a phrase he borrows from Susan Buck-Morss — he describes how the newly self-liberated black slaves of Haiti faced down the French soldiers sent to crush their republic, by singing the Marseillaise. As Zizek suggests, in that moment, they were asserting:

“In this battle, we are more French than you, the Frenchmen, are — we stand for the innermost consequences of your revolutionary ideology, the very consequences you were not able to assume.”

Could we not say the same with the “black boers cause us worries”? Not only are the poor demonstrating their non-racialism (a black person can also be a boer — a metaphor for an oppressor), they are simultaneously radicalising, through differentiating class from race, what the ANC’s theorists would call the national democratic revolution.

Indeed, it must be somewhat unsettling for the ANC (as in Zizek’s example, the French), who once held a revolutionary initiative, to hear new analyses of the struggle — like the following from Abahlali:

“It is the community organisations and poor people’s movements who are protesting around the country who are true to the spirit of the struggle against apartheid. The politicians who try to herd the people into stadiums to tell them that the politicians in their cavalcades are the true inheritors of the spirit of that struggle have made themselves our enemies.”

All it seems the ANC can say is that we once sang a seditious song and what is now required is — as represented by our regime — obedience to that heroic heritage. Regrettably, a judicial ruling has breathed new life into what is an anachronistic farce for, as Karl Marx might have said, the ANC “only imagines that it believes in itself and asks the world to share in its fantasy”.

Sixteen years of neo-liberal economics dressed up in leftist drag means that a new generation are singing real songs again. These old-new freedom songs are, routinely, met with rubber bullets. It underscores one of wa Bofelo’s points — that people have always known that “it does not only take a white skin to install or perpetuate a system based on unequal allocation of power and inequitable distribution of wealth and resources”.

Here, however, we enter a more thought-provoking terrain and, again, Zizek is useful. He inverts Marx’s old definition of farce by insisting that “contemporary cynicism” as regards ideology (post-modernism, if you like) only imagines “that we do not “really believe” in our ideology [for] in spite of this imaginary distance, we continue to practice it”.

In other words, is not all this attention on Malema, and on a long-in-the-tooth song, not an illusory fight that both the black and white bourgeoisie would prefer to a real one over, dare we say it, communism of some sort? Is it not that the bourgeoisie believe in capitalism so much that they would rather chose a Janus-faced soap-opera (with its empty posturing and hysterical condemnation) than confront the ideological challenge posed by the new anti-capitalist movements? Is it not the case that a clown prince is (even to the SACP) preferable to a real communist?

A few years ago, the Financial Mail, wrote something particularly telling in regard to the then president-in-waiting. It was in the edition entitled, “Be Afraid”. “It’s not the corruption and rape charges that investors and SA business think about when they think of Zuma,” said feature writer Carol Patton, “it’s the simple fact that he has a far more radical support base than Mbeki”.

That someone could be radical — let alone a class for itself — is the spectre haunting South Africa’s rainbow elites. The “shoot the boer!” song represents then, in a Freudian sense, only a symptomatic return of this repressed fear.

“But what about farm attacks/killings”, someone could ask? Are these not, as AfriForum and the Democratic Alliance assert, a literal enactment of that song?

This question also masks its ideology. We should first ask what a farm attack/killing is? And once both phrases also include the attack/killing of farm workers by farm owners, we should ask what motivates farm owners to attack/kill farm workers? The answer to that question will, no doubt, extend the initial inquiry well beyond the three words of a song.

There is, of course, a more obscure question — one that proves that the blind are leading the blind — and it’s whether the murder of an abusive white supremacist, like Eugene Terre’Blanche, is attributable to others’ “hate speech”?

Let’s stop changing the topic. South Africa has been dubbed “the protest capital of the world”. The recent Kennedy Road attacks, which left two dead and Abahlali activists hiding in safe houses, are harbingers of an intensifying class struggle. As one of its members said: “The ANC regards [Abahlali] — not the other official political parties — as their true opposition, because we are closer to the pain on the ground.”

The situation in South Africa is more intense than elsewhere only because the great injustice that was apartheid only institutionalised the illusion that injustice was entirely based on race, with class playing no part. The ANC have been keen to maintain that illusion, even as it is shattered by the sight of poor blacks rising in protest against rich blacks.

Race is an issue, of course, and will continue to be an issue. But it is not the central one. The end of apartheid did not bring about the end of poverty or injustice. South Africans (or anybody else) will not realise such a goal until they tackle the one issue that subsumes all others. That is, the issue of class.