En Passant

No matter how badly Abbott and co treat asylum seekers, many workers will still have insecure, poorly paid unfulfilling jobs.  Joining in the demonisation of refugees won’t change that and only reinforces and assists the very people who create the rotten system that gives us rotten jobs and enables them to worsen our conditions. While the one sided class war the bosses have waged successfully against us cannot go on for ever, mass class struggle isn’t going to break out in the immediate future. Instead we may well see Captain Crook and his listing ship Team Australia win the next election on the back of demonising asylum seekers, MUSLIM!!!!! terrorists and lifestyle choice Aborigines while a pathetic Opposition cheers them on and a cowed labour movement continues its surrender.

Easy access to guns – one-third of Americans own a gun, and the U.S. as a whole has half the world’s guns in civilian hands – may provide the means for committing certain types of crimes, but the roots of Adam Lanza’s actions go deeper. They lie in a profoundly alienated society in which violence in general is sanctioned by the most exalted American institutions–as long as it is carried out for “legitimate” purposes, like U.S. wars abroad or police at home defending law and order.

The love of a dog is real enough. It brings joy to both owner and dog in a joyless world; love in a loveless society. It doesn’t challenge that heartless world; it at best provides an avenue for ameliorating it outside the seeming boundaries of its brutality – the workplace and the production of profit.

As a class we can empower ourselves and in doing so would no longer have to endure structures of feudalism and celebrations of war, bigotry and the mysticism of religion. As Trotsky put it ‘Life is beautiful. Let the future generations cleanse it of all evil, oppression, and violence, and enjoy it to the full.’

The Church hopes that Mary MacKillop will be the Tiger Woods of religion in Australia, without the sins but with a drawing power that will have people coming back through the turnstiles, oops, doors.

When the oppressed arise, we must be on their side, even if they do believe in Mary MacKillop. It is their power as workers that is the driving force of change and one we socialists want to relate to.

A combative working class can move Australia from the racist backwater Australian capitalism has made it to one where relations between people are on a more equal footing.

Evidently the people of Sydney don’t go to the toilet. That’s the only conclusion I can draw from the lack of public conveniences in the city. Even the train stations didn’t have loos (or at least none I could easily find). At first I thought the lack of public toilets was a plot to force us to use those […]

To reclaim rock and roll we must reclaim rebellion. Only revolution can liberate modern music from its current tepidness and timidity.

I long for the day when we are all superstars, drunk on our collective power and rich beyond our means.