En Passant

As many seek a better way of running our lives, Marxist writer Alex Callinicos spoke to Socialist Worker about what life after capitalism could look like.

If these attacks on public servants and public services, low and middle income superannuants, students, backpackers, middle aged dependent spouses and mums are what Labor is prepared to do to the Australian working class when we have the best performing economy in the world, imagine what it will do if the situation in Europe worsens and drags down the global economy and Australia with it.

If we really want to save our world from climate change, we need to see fighting for real reforms and the reining in of corporate power not as an endpoint, but as a stepping stone toward a completely different society. That new society must be one that, in contrast to a capitalist system based on endless growth, competition in pursuit of profit, exploitation, oppression and imperial warfare, will be based on real democracy and cooperation between all people and the planet we depend on. For that, we will need a revolution.

So Terrance has taken to posting responses on my blog and whinging that I don’t publish them.  Is this the same Terrance who parades on my blog under multiple names like Wendy, Terrance Propp, Interested Bystander etc and who has created a climate of fear for me at my workplace and home?  Wow.  Just to make it […]

Feeding the one percent more and more will supposedly make them fitter rather than fatter and benefit all of us. But something new has arisen. People are fighting back. The Arab spring, the European demonstrations and strikes and the Occupy movement are all symptoms of a system in crisis, a system that while it can provide benefits to the one percent now has to do so at the expense of the rest of us. Our only option is to fight back.

If rank and file nurses in Victoria reclaim the campaign from the trade union bureaucrats they can win. If not the likely result is a half way house of wage increases paid for out of screwing more out of nurses – e.g. some tawdry deal on nurse/patient ratios.

Yesterday wasn’t a bad day for democracy. Every day is bad day for democracy until we have a truly democratic system in which workers, those who produce the wealth, run society democratically in their own interests. That is socialism.

This is my article in Thursday’s The Conversation on the Minerals Resource Rent Tax and superannuation. http://theconversation.edu.au/weve-gained-a-mining-tax-but-lost-a-rare-opportunity-4442

The nurses’ actions, the Portuguese general strike and the Egyptian revolution won’t rate too much of a mention in the news in Australia. It’ll all be Slipper, Slipper, Slipper. This Parliamentary cretinism is a side show to the class struggle. Victory to the Egyptian revolution. Victory to Portuguese workers. Victory to Victorian nurses.

It is no accident that the Stonewall riot happened in 1969 and millions around the world stood up for sexual liberation in the ensuing years. The world was in turmoil as millions confronted war, racism, sexism and exploitation. There was enthusiasm for revolutionary change among millions. That is the political atmosphere we have to recreate. So the fight for sexual liberation cannot be separate from the struggle to rebuild a revolutionary movement to overthrow capitalism.