En Passant

Me in The Conversation today, with my second piece on the likes of Google and other highly mobile digital companies not paying much tax in Australia. Digital disruption is eroding Australia’s tax base

Judy Horacek in the latest edition of Overland. And, yes, I did have to post it, didn’t I?

Without class struggle no alternative working class political ideas can prosper, can break through, can shine, let alone lead. So enjoy your reading about Ricky’s retirement and Ralph’s rort, about Abbott’s allegations and Gillard’s gadflying. One day politics, real class politics, will burst forth and we will be able to say, like Marx, well grubbed old mole.

Marxists can’t predict the future, but it seems likely that at some stage class struggle in Australia will return, perhaps even explode, despite the deadening influence of the Labor Party and the Australian Council of Trade Unions.

The more people who are prepared practically and theoretically for that day the closer we will be to a truly democratic society where production is organised to satisfy human need. Then begins our liberation.

Join us in running to where the ball will be.

Asylum seekers have committed no crime but are being locked up offshore for many years to come for seeking refuge in Australia.

The real crime is not Julie Bishop’s accusations against the Prime Minister or the AWU scandal. The real crime is locking people up whose only crime is to flee war and rape and torture and genocide for a better life here.

Put Gillard and Abbott, Bowen and Morrison, on trial for their crimes against asylum seekers and refugees. If Omid dies, his blood is on the hands of all of them.

Free jailed workers and all political prisoners in Iran! End executions! Demonstrate 12 Pm Thursday Parliament House NSW The Islamic Republic of Iran is speeding up the rate of execution, with tens of prisoners executed over the past few weeks alone. There are 3000 people of death row. Given economic crisis and widespread poverty, the […]

It might well be a case of a stopped clock being right twice a day, but on the very day I had an article in The Conversation called Giant profits, tiny tax bills: time to close loopholes on corporate tax avoidance dealing with multinationals like Google et al and the inadequacies and problems with 20th century […]

Revolutions usually begin with a temporary and apparent unity among all those who oppose the old regime. However, with the beginning of the fall of that regime, opposition forces quickly become divided according to the interests which they express, their conceptions of revolution and the limits of their goals, between the completion of the revolution and its halting, between the political demands and social demands of the revolution.

For capitalism, both global and Egyptian, is in a state of collapse and the Egyptian working class is in a constant state of near uprising. These historical conditions do not recur often, so either we progress toward the second Egyptian Revolution or our fate will be the victory of the counterrevolution.

Omid, the Iranian asylum seeker on Nauru who has now been on hunger strike for 47 days, is rapidly deteriorating. It is likely he will die within the next few days. There are also five other Iranians on their 27th day of a hunger strike and 30 others who joined them last Friday.

Du Plessis turned the fait accompli of an Australian victory into the possibility of a South African win in the long term. Despite all the hype and hyperbole about Australia’s performance from the cheer squads of the media and the experts in the grandstands, the possibility that South Africa could win or at least draw the series and retain the number one world ranking shows that perseverance and persistence, coupled with skill and a steady, unflappable approach, can triumph.