International Socialism 152 out now

The new issue of International Socialism is now online, and as a British-based Marxist journal unsurprisingly making sense of Brexit and its repercussions is of central importance, with pieces including topical pieces including The ideology of Europeanism and Europe’s migrant other by Céline Cantat. Other pieces include Martin Empson on food, agriculture and climate change, Mike Gonzalez on two new books on Cuba and its revolution, historical pieces by Hungarian Marxist GM Tamas on the Hungarian Revolution of 1956 on its 60th anniversary, Talat Ahmed on colonial troops in the First World War and John Newsinger on a forgotten Wobbly leader Marie Equi. There are also many other book reviews, including Michael Roberts's review of Anwar Shaikh's Capitalism: Competition, Conflict, Crises and Alex Callinicos's review of Gareth Stedman Jones's much discussed Karl Marx: Greatness and Illusion. All in all, a great looking issue with something for everyone - and since it is hard to read at length online, surely well worth considering subscribing...  

Marxism and History

The two classic essays by Chris Harman collected together in the very useful volume Marxism and History (1998) are now both freely available online at the Marxist Internet Archive - the 1986 essay Base and Superstructure (which drew comments in response from Colin Barker, Alex Callinicos and Duncan Hallas - you can also listen to a debate on the topic here) - and the 1989 essay From feudalism to capitalism . Those interested in further discussions of Marxism and History might also like to check out these two conferences coming up in London in late June / early July - 'Radical Histories' and 'Marxism 2016'.

Marxism 2015 - Ideas for Revolution

Marxism 2015: Ideas for revolution

A five day political festival: 9-13 July 2015, Central London

www.marxismfestival.org.uk

Book up - Just over one week to go!

New meeting: Tackling the Racist Offensive

Sat 11^th July, 7pm

Marxism Festival is very pleased to announce that Diane Abbott MP will speak alongside Sabby Dhalu and Weyman Bennett (Joint Secretaries of Unite Against Fascism, pc) at this new meeting at Marxism.

Meetings on Greece at Marxism 2015

The crisis in Greece poses sharp questions for the left.

Don’t miss our special debate:

Syriza in power: Whither Greece?

With Stathis Kouvelakis (Syriza Central Committee) and Alex Callinicos (SWP)

Sat 11^th July, 2pm 

Plus

• Greece: keeping the hope for change alive

With Panos Garganas (SEK)

Sunday 12 July, 2pm

• The fight against Golden Dawn in Greece

With Petros Constantinou (Athens Councillor and co-ordinator of the Movement Against Racism and the Fascist Threat) and Kostas Papadakis (part of the legal team representing the victims of Nazi attacks at the trial of Golden Dawn)

Saturday 11^th July, 11.45am

• Fighting the Troika and austerity across Europe

Maria Styllou from Greece will peak alongside Richard Boyd Barrett from Ireland and Christine Buccholz from Germany

Sunday 12^th July, 3.45pm

Plus Panos Garganas will join the Marxism opening rally on Thurs 9^th July at 7pm

Other meetings at Marxism 2015

• After Kobane and the general election: where now for Turkey and the Kurds

 Ron Marguilies will be joined by HDP MP Sebahat Tuncel

Sat 11^th July, 7pm (the time of this meeting may change – please check our website)

• Orgreave: the search for the truth

Gareth Peirce and Mike McColgan from the Orgreave Truth and Justice Campaign

Sun 12^th July, 3.45pm

• The story behind Pride

With Nicola Field and Gethin Roberts, original members of LGSM

Sun 12^th July, 7pm.

And if you missed Pride at the cinemas there is chance to watch the film afterwards.

• Darcus Howe, broadcaster and civil liberties campaigner discusses his political life with his biographers Robin Bunce and Paul Field

The final timetable for Marxism 2015 will be on line from tomorrow . . . to book tickets and for more information go to www.marxismfestival.org.uk or call us on 020 7819 1190

La Lutte Continue

After the generally disastrous general election, the struggle continues...

The secret history of Monopoly

The capitalist board game's left wing origins

Where is Syriza going?

From Panagiotis Sotiris via Alex Callinicos:

First major negative reaction against the Eurogroup agreement from inside SYRIZA comes from Manolis Glezos, Member or European Parliament of SYRIZA, and a living legend of the Resistance against fascism (in 1941 along with Lakis Santas they took down the German flag from the Acropolis)

Here is a rough translation of his statement

Statement by Manolis Glezos

Before it is too late

The fact that the Troika has been renamed ‘the institutions’, the Memorendum has been renamed the ‘Agreement’ and the Creditors have been renamed the ‘Partners’, in the same manner as baptizing meat as fish, does not change the previous situation.
And you can’t change the vote of the Greek People at the January 25 election.
The Greek people voted what SYRIZA promised: that we abolish the regime of austerity that is the strategy of not only the oligarchies of Germany and the other creditor countries but also of the Greek oligarchy; that we abrogate the Memoranda and the Troika and all the austerity legislation; That the next day with one law we abolish the Troika and its consequences.
A month has passed and this promise has yet to become action.
It is a pity indeed
From my part I APOLOGIZE to the Greeκ people for having assisted this illusion
Before the wrong direction continues
Before it is too late, let’s react
Above all the members, the friends and supporters of SYRIZA, in urgent meetings at all levels of the organization have to decide if they accept this situation
Some people say that in an agreement you must also make some concessions. By principle between the oppressor and the oppressed there can be no compromise, as there can be no compromise between the slave and the conqueror; Freedom is the only solution
But even if accept this absurdity, the concessions that have already been made by the previous pro-memoranda government with unemployment, poverty and suicide, are beyond any limit of concession...

Manolis Glezos, Brussels 22-2-2015

Edited to add:ISJ Debate on 25th February  in London on Syriza and Socialist Strategy with Stathis Kouvelakis from Syriza and Alex Callinicos from International Socialism journal

Edited to add: Commentary from other Left wing members of Syriza Stathis Kouvelakis and Costas Lapavitsas 

What a difference being a political careerist makes!

'Today, the power, incisiveness and passion of Engels's polemic remain undiminished. Far more so than Charles Dickens's Hard Times, Benjamin Disraeli's Sybil, or Thomas Carlyle's Past and Present, Engels's The Condition of the Working Class is the defining text of the British industrial experience. And, 150 years on, it speaks to our age with painful prescience - not only in its critique of the instability of the free market and the structural inequalities of British society, but in its unrivalled depiction of the inhumanity of capitalism ... Engels was relentless in charting the "social war" waged by the middle class on the operatives of the industrial city. Workplaces - mills, mines, factories, farms - resembled crime scenes. "Women made unfit for childbearing, children deformed, men enfeebled, limbs crushed, whole generations wrecked, afflicted with disease and infirmity, purely to fill the purses of the bourgeoisie." He was inflamed by the Manchester middle classes. "I once went into Manchester with a bourgeois, and spoke to him of ... the frightful condition of the working people's quarters, and asserted that I had never seen so ill-built a city. The man listened quietly to the end, and said at the corner where we parted: 'And yet there is a great deal of money made here; good morning, sir.'" ... Like Marx we can at last return to The Condition of the Working Class [by Frederick Engels] and appreciate the work on its own terms. To do so is to discover in its economic critique of unfettered markets, condemnation of capitalism's social injustices, angry reportage, and analysis of politics, poverty, feminism and urbanism all the power, passion and incisiveness which Marx rightly heralded'
Tristram Hunt on Engels's The Condition of the English Working Class, The Guardian, 9 May 2009.

'I’m enormously enthusiastic about businessmen and women making money, about delivering shareholder return, about making profit ... We have heard from some businesspeople. We have got 5 million great businesses working really hard across Great Britain, making money, as I say, and Labour is on their side. What is the problem our economy faces? It is a productivity challenge and that means the state has to play its role alongside business. What is the challenge for our business as well? It is markets. Only the Labour party is committed to ensuring we have got a successful UK working in Europe delivering those markets for modern British business. So we are a furiously, passionately, aggressively pro-business party.'
Tristram Hunt, now Shadow Education Secretary, quoted in The Guardian, 8 February 2015 - recall also that Hunt crossed a UCU picket line back in 2014 to give a lecture on Marxism

Day School: China, World Capitalism and Workers' Resistance

A one day Conference Hosted by International Socialism

Saturday 28 February 2015
10.30am – 5pm
Central London

Sessions on:

• The Political Economy of China Today
• China in the World
• Labour struggles, the umbrella protests and new movements for democracy

Speakers include:

Tim Pringle, lecturer at SOAS and author of Trade Unions in China: The Challenge of Labour Unrest 

Jenny Chan, lecturer at Oxford and expert on labour in China and the workers at Foxconn in particular. 

Jane Hardy, professor of political economy at University of Hertfordshire and author of Poland’s New Capitalism 

Adrian Budd, lecturer in politics at London South Bank University and author of Class, States and International Relations: a critical appraisal of Robert Cox and neo-Gramscian theory

For more details and how to book see here

How Capitalism Survives: Historical Materialism Conference 2014 in London

How Capitalism Survives - Eleventh Annual Historical Materialism London Conference - 6-9 November 2014 - Vernon Square, Central London provisional programme available and registration open.

New Book: Deciphering Capital

Book Launch and Discussion
Deciphering Capital: Marx’s Capital and its Destiny
By Alex Callinicos
Discussants: Christopher Arthur and Michael Roberts
Chair: Gilbert Achcar 

Monday, 10 November 2014, 7pm, Khalili Lecture Theatre (KLT) at SOAS

Alex Callinicos’s new book deals extensively with the question of Marx’s method and its relationship to Hegel’s Science of Logic. It emphasizes Marx’s understanding of capital as a set of relations constituted by two separations – that of workers from the means of production, giving rise to the exploitation of wage labour, and that between capitals, from which arises their competitive struggle. This understanding also informs the book’s presentation of Marx’s multi-dimensional conception of crises. Marx strove to make Capital a study of capitalism as a global system, and not merely a portrait of the mid-Victorian British economy: the cycle of financial bubble and panic that he investigated has come in the neoliberal era to regulate the world economy, with the devastating effects witnessed in the 2007-8 crash.

Alex Callinicos is Professor of European Studies at King’s College London and editor of International Socialism. His recent books include Imperialism and Global Political Economy, Bonfire of Illusions, and most recently Deciphering Capital (Bookmarks, 2014)*.

Christopher Arthur taught philosophy at the University of Sussex. His books include Dialectics of Labour and Marx’s Capital and the New Dialectic.

 Michael Roberts is a Marxist economist who blogs at: http://thenextrecession.wordpress.com/

 * £14.99 - £10 special offer for book launch

Callinicos and Harvey on Piketty

Two critical contemporary Marxist thinkers - Alex Callinicos and David Harvey - reflect on Thomas Piketty's bestselling work Capital in the 21st Century

A New Nursery Rhyme

A New Nursery Rhyme by Tom Maguire

Sing a song of England,
Country of the free,
Sing her teeming millions,
Rulers of the sea;
Sing her trade and commerce,
And her "vales serene",
Isn’t it a dainty dish
To lay before the Queen?

Sing a song of England,
Shuddering with cold,
Doomed to slow starvation
By the gods of gold;
See her famished children
Hunger-marked, and mean,
Isn’t that a dainty dish
To lay before the Queen?

Sing her House of Commons,
Sitting all at ease,
While the ring of coal-lords
Fasten like disease
On the helpless toilers,
Hollow-eyed and lean;
Faith! it is a dainty dish
To lay before the Queen.

Mammon in the counting-house,
Counting out his money,
His Lady in the parlour
Eating bread and honey.
The worker on the highway,
Short of food and clothes -
God bless happy England!
And save her from her foes.

From The Labour Champion, 11 November 1893. 

David Cameron - Tory slave driver

Mr Cameron, too, is revealed to have slave owners in his family background on his father's side. The compensation records show that General Sir James Duff, an army officer and MP for Banffshire in Scotland during the late 1700s, was Mr Cameron's first cousin six times removed. Sir James, who was the son of one of Mr Cameron's great-grand-uncle's, the second Earl of Fife, was awarded £4,101, equal to more than £3m today, to compensate him for the 202 slaves he forfeited on the Grange Sugar Estate in Jamaica. 

 Another illustrious political family that it appears still carries the name of a major slave owner is the Hogg dynasty, which includes the former cabinet minister Douglas Hogg. They are the descendants of Charles McGarel, a merchant who made a fortune from slave ownership. Between 1835 and 1837 he received £129,464, about £101m in today's terms, for the 2,489 slaves he owned. McGarel later went on to bring his younger brother-in-law Quintin Hogg into his hugely successful sugar firm, which still used indentured labour on plantations in British Guyana established under slavery. And it was Quintin's descendants that continued to keep the family name in the limelight, with both his son, Douglas McGarel Hogg, and his grandson, Quintin McGarel Hogg, becoming Lord Chancellor. 

Dr Draper said: "Seeing the names of the slave-owners repeated in 20th‑century family naming practices is a very stark reminder about where those families saw their origins being from. In this case I'm thinking about the Hogg family. To have two Lord Chancellors in Britain in the 20th century bearing the name of a slave-owner from British Guiana, who went penniless to British Guyana, came back a very wealthy man and contributed to the formation of this political dynasty, which incorporated his name into their children in recognition – it seems to me to be an illuminating story and a potent example." 

Mr Hogg refused to comment, saying he "didn't know anything about it". Mr Cameron declined to comment after a request was made to the No 10 press office.
Britain's colonial shame - see also this piece by historian Catherine Hall.

 Another reason then to detest Cameron - and a good time then for those fighting back against the Tories - whose workfare programme amounts to forced 'slave labour' for the poor - to remember figures from history such as Toussaint Louverture, leader of 'the only successful slave revolt in history'...

 

Edited to add: William Dalrymple on Cameron and the Amritsar massacre

International Socialism # 136

The new issue of International Socialism is now online, and includes Alex Callinicos, Alexander Anievas, Adam Fabry and Robert Knox on Obama, his foreign policy record and the upcoming US election, Panos Garganas and Richard Seymour on Greece, Donny Gluckstein on what real democracy looks like, Nicola Ginsburgh on Owen Jones's Chavs, Paul Blackledge on autonomist theorist John Holloway, Esme Choonara and Yuri Prasad on the crisis of black political leadership in Britain exposed by the 2011 riots, and Laura Vooke on the impact of the crisis on the working class in Britain, as well as other material on for example, debates in political economy, Paul Levi and the Bradford riots of 2001.

Guest post: Elaine Hirsch on Karl Polanyi and Haute Finance

[This blog is open to guest posts (contact histomat@hotmail.co.uk but prepare to be very patient), and Elaine Hirsch (elainehi86@gmail.com) has got in touch with a timely post about Karl Polanyi, author of among other works The Great Transformation (for more on Polanyi see the recent work of Gareth Dale - reviewed here) and Polanyi's theories about how "haute finance" is subordinating society.]

Haute Finance and the Post-Financial Crisis Economy
Elaine Hirsch

In the first half of the 20th century, philosopher/economist Karl Polanyi began charting economic progress and financial growth since the Industrial Age, especially focused on the laissez faire market conditions of the early 1900s and the impact they had on the world. It seemed to Polanyi that a mysterious, international force had developed during this time, an intangible yet powerful institution that called no single organization or government home, but existed more in the minds and emotions of financiers or investors across the first world. This system subordinated traditional society in the name of financial and economic growth, a process which Polanyi viewed as backwards. He called this force haute finance(high finance), a name that stuck through the ages.
So much for economic history. But haute finance began to take on a new meaning in a much closer era – the vibrant and often over-optimistic markets seen in the 1990s (perhaps stretching back to the 50s) and 2000s. While Polanyi's haute finance mechanisms was ended via the Great Depression and second World War, this new period of haute finance came crashing down through the financial crisis of 2007. Although this has resulted in growing attention in accredited MBA programs in sustainability, the vast majority of the “haute finance” mindset remains unchanged, leaving the world to wonder: If haute finance keeps failing, is it really such a valuable institution?

World Peace
Polanyi felt haute finance was a primary force for peace, since it focused primarily on financial gain across the board. Because war imbalanced financial gain and disrupted the status quo of the day, he believed the haute finance would always work against war and promote equality. Unfortunately, the lengthy wars of the 20th and 21st centuries, even after Polanyi's work was published, counter this particular argument. War with certain countries has become less likely through trade and greater financial reliance, but if this is haute finance it has proved a fickle creature, focusing only on markets with the most immediate benefit (Brazil, China, India…) and leaving other markets to fend for themselves or suffer (Iran, Iraq, Cuba…).
The start of the 21st century, with its move toward online trading and international corporations, punctured a hole in the haute finance theory. Looking back, we see that Polanyi's hopeful "Balance of Power" existed only on the sides that had financial power. Far from being ultimately flexible, haute finance conditions proved ultimately rigid. The dot-com bust and real estate market collapse in the 2000s proved that: a full-on pursuit of wealth creates problems, not peace.

All for One…
This "permanent" and "most elastic" agency of haute finance also begins to falter when looking at the investment markets leading up to the Great Recession. Analysts noted the rise of several major firms during this time period, including Lehman Brothers, Ernst & Young, Merrill Lynch, and others. They were haute finance in motion, nearly as tangible as an intangible force can get. But the drive to wealth, and concentrated wealth at that, served the purpose of no nation, no company, and in the end no individual. Lehman Brother's crashed to the dirt with its blindness and over-reliance on real estate. Other firms barely survived through mergers and bailouts. Corporations proved how greedy they were, and how that greed kept little peace and encouraged no stability.
The post-crisis market was left reeling from decades of an haute finance mentality, raising key criticism: Does the haute finance mechanism ever work, or should it always be looked at with suspicion? Free market capitalism is a discussion for the Ayn Rand battlefields, but here the overarching spirit and attitude are the key factor. Should the United States attempt to change its financial zeitgeist? Will this help avoid or diminish inevitable market cycles? As business becomes more global and a new haute finance oligarchy forms, perhaps a look to the past will serve as a useful reminder of what happens with too much wealth obsession.

Capitalism Kills - Kill Capitalism

“[Greek] Pensions have been cut by around a quarter since the crisis first hit in 2008. And the government has pledged to cut pensions further this summer. This is what causes the levels of desperation that have led to this latest suicide. People are forced to rely on their families if they can. There has been a huge increase in those turning to the churches for food. Even the United Nations now describes the situation in Greece as a humanitarian crisis.”
Panos Garganas on the recent suicide of a Greek pensioner

“Don’t let capitalism kill us!”
—protest outside the Greek embassy in London, 6pm, Thursday 5 April, at Greek Embassy, 1A Holland Park, W11 3TP

Roundtable on the Eurozone crisis

BREAKING UP? A ROUTE OUT OF THE EUROZONE CRISIS

Friday 9 December, 2011
Doors open at 6 pm; the panel will begin at 6.30 pm
Brunei Gallery Theatre, SOAS , WC1H 0XG

Join us for a timely and urgently needed discussion over the future of
the eurozone, the possibility of exit, and what it will all mean for
the people of Europe . Bringing together leading economists, political
scientists and financial journalists, the discussion will play a
critical role in setting the terms of the debate for the tumultuous
period that lies ahead.

The panel includes:
- Costas Lapavitsas, professor, department of economics, SOAS, and
lead author of a series of groundbreaking reports on the eurozone
crisis from the Research on Money and Finance network.
- George Irvin professor, department of development studies, SOAS, and
author of 'Super Rich: the Growth of Inequality in Britain and the
United States '.
- Paul Mason, BBC economics editor and author of 'Meltdown: The End of
the Age of Greed'.
- Stathis Kouvelakis, reader in political theory, King's College London.
The panel will be chaired by Seamus Milne, associate editor at The
Guardian.

Please register your participation (see link below or visit the RMF
website) and arrive as early as possible.

Read the latest RMF report on the eurozone crisis: www.researchonmoneyandfinance.org
Register: https://docs.google.com/a/soas.ac.uk/spreadsheet/viewform?hl=en_US&formkey;=dDRpWjBGaXNhTmxyb3lLUUFQdnRvcmc6MA

Terry Eagleton on The Communist Manifesto

From a review of Eric Hobsbawm's How to Change the World

Few works have sung the praises of the middle classes with such embarrassing zest as The Communist Manifesto. In Marx’s view, they have been by far the most revolutionary force in human history, and without harnessing for its own ends the material and spiritual wealth they have accumulated, socialism will prove bankrupt. This, needless to say, was one of his shrewder prognostications. Socialism in the 20th century turned out to be most necessary where it was least possible: in socially devastated, politically benighted, economically backward regions of the globe where no Marxist thinker before Stalin had ever dreamed that it could take root. Or at least, take root without massive assistance from more well-heeled nations. In such dismal conditions, the socialist project is almost bound to turn into a monstrous parody of itself. All the same, the idea that Marxism leads inevitably to such monstrosities, as Hobsbawm observes, ‘has about as much justification as the thesis that all Christianity must logically and necessarily always lead to papal absolutism, or all Darwinism to the glorification of free capitalist competition’. (He does not consider the possibility of Darwinism leading to a kind of papal absolutism, which some might see as a reasonable description of Richard Dawkins.)

Hobsbawm, however, points out that Marx was actually too generous to the bourgeoisie, a fault of which he is not commonly accused. At the time of The Communist Manifesto, their economic achievements were a good deal more modest than he imagined. In a curious garbling of tenses, the Manifesto described not the world capitalism had created in 1848, but the world as it was destined to be transformed by capitalism. What Marx had to say was not exactly true, but it would become true by, say, the year 2000, and it was capitalism that would make it so. Even his comments on the abolition of the family have proved prophetic: about half of the children in advanced Western countries today are born to or brought up by single mothers, and half of all households in large cities consist of single persons.

Hobsbawm’s essay on the Manifesto speaks of its ‘dark, laconic eloquence’, and notes that as political rhetoric it has ‘an almost biblical force’. ‘The new reader,’ he writes, ‘can hardly fail to be swept away by the passionate conviction, the concentrated brevity, the intellectual and stylistic force of this astonishing pamphlet.’ The Manifesto initiated a whole genre of such declarations, most of them from avant-garde artists such as the Futurists and the Surrealists, whose outrageous wordplay and scandalous hyperbole turn these broadsides into avant-garde artworks in themselves. The manifesto genre represents a mixture of theory and rhetoric, fact and fiction, the programmatic and the performative, which has never been taken seriously enough as an object of study.

Marx, too, was an artist of sorts. It is often forgotten how staggeringly well read he was, and what painstaking labour he invested in the literary style of his works. He was eager, he remarked, to get shot of the ‘economic crap’ of Capital and get down to his big book on Balzac. Marxism is about leisure, not labour. It is a project that should be eagerly supported by all those who dislike having to work. It holds that the most precious activities are those done simply for the hell of it, and that art is in this sense the paradigm of authentic human activity. It also holds that the material resources that would make such a society possible already exist in principle, but are generated in a way that compels the great majority to work as hard as our Neolithic ancestors did. We have thus made astounding progress, and no progress at all.

In the 1840s, Hobsbawm argues, it was by no means improbable to conclude that society was on the verge of revolution. What was improbable was the idea that within a handful of decades the politics of capitalist Europe would be transformed by the rise of organised working-class parties and movements. Yet this is what came to pass. It was at this point that commentary on Marx, at least in Britain, began to shift from the cautiously admiring to the near hysterical. In 1885, no less devout a non-revolutionary than Balfour commended Marx’s writings for their intellectual force, and for their economic reasoning in particular. A whole raft of liberal or conservative commentators took his economic ideas with intense seriousness. Once those ideas took the form of a political force, however, a number of ferociously anti-Marxist works began to appear. Their apotheosis was Hugh Trevor-Roper’s stunning revelation that Marx had made no original contribution to the history of ideas. Most of these critics, I take it, would have rejected the Marxist view that human thought is sometimes bent out of shape by the pressure of political interests, a phenomenon commonly known as ideology. Only recently has Marxism been back on the agenda, placed there, ironically enough, by an ailing capitalism. ‘Capitalism in Convulsion’, a Financial Times headline read in 2008. When capitalists begin to speak of capitalism, you know the system is in dire trouble. They have still not dared to do so in the United States.

Terry Eagleton has a new book out entitled simply Why Marx was right and is speaking at Marxism 2011

The Big Society is coming to town

On Saturday 26 March in London, the 'Big Society' will be taking over the streets of London in the first national demonstration organised by the trade union movement against the cuts and for alternative solutions to getting out of the deficit crisis - there is even talk of the Big Society staying on the streets and going on strike to bring down the Government. Anyway, to mark the glorious 'coming out' of the Big Society Philosophy Football have done what they do best - produced a T-shirt...

It's Capital - not multiculturalism - that fails us now...

‘I don’t want to just try to win good headlines by saying I’m going to hammer these guys’, David Cameron mused about the bankers recently - after all these are rich and powerful and he knows many of them from his days at Eton. Instead Cameron has decided - in the most time-honoured ruling class traditions of divide and rule - to aim to win support from racists by declaring that instead of hammering bankers he is going to hammer one of the poorest and most powerless groups of people in Britain, and a group he knows next to nothing about: yep, you guessed it, the Muslim community.

We get deeper insight into Cameron's 'active, muscular liberalism' - as opposed to the supposed 'passive tolerance' of old - with his plans to try and abolish May Day - international workers' day - something not even Thatcher seriously attempted to do. It is clearer than ever what is the only thing Cameron really cares passionately about - the profits of the rich. As Madeleine Bunting notes, 'the "vision of society" that Cameron urges as necessary is in fact already in evidence – in a million versions of consumer capitalism 24/7, and it promotes acquisitiveness'. It is precisely this system - not 'multiculturalism' - which is currently failing in Britain and internationally. It is critical that socialists unite and throw themselves into helping build the working class fightback against this rotten government and the system it serves.

Edited to add: Sign this petition and see this appeal