Will ministers eventually say, as they did after the killing of Jean Charles de Menezes and after the raid on that house in Forest Gate when another innocent man was shot, that it’s better to err on the side of safety? Better a few innocents are shot than a terrorist act in which hundreds die?

Whatever the truth, the “security alert” last month in which a terrorist attack was said to be “imminent” allowed the state to project itself as the defender of the public. It is no such thing. The state is controlled by pro-capitalist politicians who pursue policies they consider to be in the general interest of British capitalism, even to the extent of putting the lives of the general public at risk.

The present government, led by Blair, has decided that it is in the best interest of the British capitalist class to tag along behind the US government’s global pretensions, especially its so-called “War on Terror", which is really a struggle with certain Middle East states and disaffected Arab elites and their supporters for control of that oil-rich region.

The US government is committed to furthering the interests of US capitalism, which don’t necessarily coincide with those of British capitalism, and there are pro-capitalist politicians in Britain, some apparently within the cabinet, who think that Blair might have gone too far in his pro-US stance. But it is not up to us as socialists to judge which politicians best represent the interest of the British capitalist class.

It is this pro-US capitalism policy option that has put the “British public” in danger by making them legitimate targets in the eyes of the Islamist opponents of US domination of the Middle East. It is just plain ridiculous for government ministers to try to deny this. What makes it worse is that neither the attack on Iraq nor (even less) giving Israel more time to bomb Lebanon enjoyed majority popular support.

But no government can leave such a vital decision as to whether or not to go to war to a popular vote. This is because the role of governments is to be “the executive committee of the ruling class” and, as the interests of the capitalist ruling class are at variance with those of the rest of us, such a decision cannot be left to us as there is no guarantee that our decision will coincide with what the ruling class judge to be in their interest. In fact, in the case of war, people spontaneously tend to be against it.

It is true that, as most people do support capitalism, if a government launches an effective enough propaganda barrage it can generally persuade people to support a war. But this takes time and decisions about war cannot wait. Blair is on record as saying that as a leader it is his duty to give a lead on going to war, even against majority popular opinion. In Britain, until recently and still formally, going to war was a government decision that didn’t require even parliamentary approval.

Democracy and war are in fact incompatible. States have to have a minimal degree of popular support to function, but this need not extend much further than allowing the populace to decide every few years which group of pro-capitalist politicians are to staff the state and, exercising “leadership", use it to further national capitalist interests.

Truth may be the first casualty of war, but civil liberties come a close second.

Whether real or manufactured, “terror plots” and “security alerts” provide a pretext for a state to further erode civil liberties inherited from a more liberal past, as the string of laws introduced by the Blair government to increase the powers of the state bears witness.

It can’t be denied that there is a conflict going on involving attacks on innocent civilians on both sides. In Iraq, Afghanistan and Lebanon the US and /or its allies bomb villages and villagers. In America on 11 September five years ago and in Britain last 7 July, the other side killed innocent workers at or on their way to work. Socialists condemn both sides. And we don’t swallow the propaganda that the state is there to protect us.

Ever fearful that foreign governments might, among other things, introduce labour and environmental legislation detrimental to US investments, Washington has opposed the principle of democracy on almost every continent, even helping to overthrow democratically elected governments whenever it felt its interests threatened (e.g. Iran in 1953, Guatemala 1954, Congo 1960, Ecuador 1961, Bolivia 1964. Greece 1967, Fiji 1987).

Nor have its methods been peaceable. Indeed its agents in the CIA have carried out assassination of prominent individuals with as much indifference as its embassies have supported right-wing death squads and bloody coup attempts throughout Central and South America. Across the world, the US has backed dictators of every hue, turning a blind eye to their horrendous affronts to the democratic process.

We are now to believe that the US, presently occupying “sovereign Iraq” (for President Bush has declared Iraq is now “sovereign”), a country with sizeable oil reserves, and which has lost 100,000 of its people since the US-UK invasion, will see that free and democratic elections take place on 30 January. Bush has since informed the people of Iraq - the same Iraq in which the CIA helped Saddam Hussein pull off the military coup that originally brought him to power: “We will help you build a peaceful and representative government that protects the rights of all citizens. And then our military forces will leave.”

John Negroponte, the US Ambassador in Iraq, has been adamant that the US will not allow a delay in the 30 January vote. Speaking to reporters he stated that the elections would go ahead and that the security situation would be improved by then, and went so far as to say that conditions in 15 of Iraq’s 18 provinces were already safe enough for elections to be held.

He said: “I think once they realize that the elections will go forward as planned, then they [Sunni opponents of the election] are going to have to deal with that reality” (Washington Post, 1 December). However the Sunni resistance looks set to spiral, his comments coming just after it was reported that US deaths in Iraq in November matched the post-invasion record set in April - 135 troops dead.

In Washington and London, the claim is that the ongoing attacks by insurgents are an all-out attempt to disrupt the coming elections, when in truth the overriding fact is that many Iraqis still see the US as an army of occupation whose presence they have a right to oppose. An opinion poll carried out in September by the US-led Coalition Provisional Authority confirmed that opposition to the US presence was widespread. It revealed that just 2 percent of Iraqi Arabs - that is, minus the Kurdish population - agreed wholeheartedly with the occupation. If anything, this shows that in spite of the age-old hostilities between Sunnis and Shiites, one thing that could unite them is their hostility to an occupying army of 138,000 - a figure set to increase before the election.

Securing the peace in Iraq in time for the elections has so far meant installing a pliable puppet regime, and implementing Order 39, which the Economist (25 September 2003) described as “a capitalist’s dream” and which opened up the Iraqi economy to complete foreign takeover. It has meant the deliberate bombing of homes, hospitals and religious buildings by squadrons of bombers and helicopter gun-ships, turning cities into rubble (Fallujah was napalmed), cutting off water, electricity and medical supplies and spreading hunger and disease.

A comprehensive new study by the British-based charity organisation Medact, which looks at the impact of war on health, reveals that acute malnutrition among Iraqi children between the ages of 6 months and 5 years has increased from 4 percent prior to the invasion to 7.7 percent since the invasion and that about 400,000 Iraqi children are suffering from ‘wasting’ and ‘emaciation’ conditions of chronic diarrhoea and protein deficiency.

Despite such facts as these, Washington would have it that people in Iraq are being irrational in not supporting US-organised elections.

As we go to press, Sunni, Shiite and Kurdish politicians are at odds over whether elections can take place on 30 January as planned. Iraq’s 60 percent Shia majority, who clearly suffered worst under Saddam’s reign, are keen for the elections to go ahead on time, knowing they are likely to consolidate the increased power they have enjoyed since overthrow of the essentially Sunni president Saddam. However, as rebels have continued their assaults on other towns since the fall of Fallujah, a campaign led by Sunni politicians has gathered momentum, with Shia leaders claiming that a postponement of the election date would only play into the hands of the insurgents.

The head of the Shiite Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, has insisted that the elections go ahead. He has been backed by 42 mainly Shia and Turkmen parties who have issued a statement to say moves to delay the elections were illegal.

Conversely, Adnan Pachachi, a former Sunni minister, is heading a group of 17 political parties asking that the 30 January vote be delayed by six months because of the violence, fearing the insurgency in Sunni towns will discourage people from voting, thus disenfranchising them. Significantly, the two major Kurdish parties have also signed up to the delay

Alawi, the interim leader appointed by Washington to run Iraq, has said that in centres of resistance like Fallujah elections could be “delayed” until stability existed there, without the vote being invalidated, or in other words Washington-style democracy would will be available in the first instance only to those who did not resist the occupation by US forces.

Alawi, it seems, has no real control over the situation, and though it is said he has the power to cancel the election if he wished, there still exists the US hand-picked seven-member commission set up to run the elections, which can bar any candidate or party from standing and which will be deciding who is and who is not eligible to stand as a candidate.

Under the rules, the Iraqi electorate will vote for a 275-member Transitional National Assembly. Political parties will submit a list of candidates and every third name has to be a woman’s. Those Parties with alleged connections to militias are disqualified from taking part, along with former leading members of the Baath Party.

The US hopes to have 150,000 troops in place in time for the election, evidence if ever it was needed that the crisis in Iraq is escalating. It was not so long ago that Bush was boasting how US troops had been greeted as liberators and projected that the country could be policed with 50,000 troops by the end of 2003. Now military analysts are cautioning that the Iraq army and police force will not be in a position to police the country for another ten years. So much, then for Bush’s claim that once a legitimate Iraqi government is up and running the troops will be on their way home.

And as for the post-election situation, make no mistake, any government elected in Iraq will be permitted to function only so long as it kowtows to the dictates of Washington. Whatever, government is elected to ‘rule’ Iraq on 30 January it will only be allowed to do so with the endorsement of the White House.

Here in Britain, Bush’s sidekick, Tony Blair, is likewise looking forward to a post-election regime in Iraq that has no real say on foreign investment. Moreover, Blair is desperate for elections to take place in Iraq for the simple reason that he needs something resembling a foreign policy success to present to voters in the run up to the election. Indeed any good news at all at the moment would be welcomed by New Labour.

The essential goal of the Bush regime in the Middle East remains the same as that of preceding administrations going back to WWII, and that is to reinforce control of the region’s oil reserves and the profits that arise from them. Furthermore, Washington is well aware that control of Middle East oil gives the US enormous leverage over its economic rivals, Europe, Japan and China, all of whom are more dependent on Middle Eastern oil than the US. China in particular is expected to have the same oil demands as the US within 25 years.

That Iraq has huge oils supplies is the sole reason the US cannot allow a government - freely elected by its people and one advocating a US departure - to exist.

JOHN BISSETT

Nationalism is utterly opposed to socialism. Socialists therefore oppose nationalism in all its forms.

It might be supposed that people who profess an interest in the doings of human beings—such as, say, journalists—might well consider a solid and determined strike by nurses over pay to be a worthwhile subject for their notice. This should be especially so when such a strike is going on within but a few hundred miles of their offices, as happened when in October the nurses of Ireland voted by an overwhelming majority (90 percent for) to go on indefinite strike over their shoddy pay. Devoted consumers of the British media, however, would have found nary a whisper on the subject. Clearly, a story of dedicated health care professionals—usually referred to as “angels” by our sharp-eyed reporters—feeling so ill-used and battered by the system that they decided to take action for themselves, is not of interest to human beings on the other side of a small stretch of water. Instead we were treated to facile dissertations upon the constitutional significance of Prince Charles skipping dinner with the Chinese president.

The story is ever the same. Events that occur outside of Britain’s boundaries are of no concern to our intrepid observers of humanity, unless they somehow have a “British interest". We are not meant to be interested in the affairs of humans generally, but instead to be concerned with “the British” first and foremost. Indeed, when BBC journalist Kate Adie reported on the Dunblane massacre, using exactly the same style and technique as she would have reported a massacre in some far-flung war-torn region, she was execrated for her insensitivity. The deaths of British children are clearly more important than children dead in war.

Tool of rising capitalist class
Historically, nationalism and national feeling have been the tool of the capitalist class for both winning and retaining power. England, for example, can be seen as having developed through the growth of the economic power and influence of London. As London grew, and began to dictate the economic priorities of the surrounding regions, so to it began to need to control them politically, and socially, in order to protect its own interests. Up until the reign of Henry VIII the feudal barons had lived in almost total autonomy, specifically the far-flung magnates like the Percies of Northumbria. Most regions, villages even, maintained a distinctive identity, set of values and traditions. As their influence grew, it became incumbent upon the London capitalists to try and tailor these values and traditions to win over more support for themselves, or at least to ensure an absence of conflict.

In order to achieve this they adapted the traditions they found among the subjected communities, or even made them up when none suitable existed. A classic example was the myth of the Norman Yoke—that Saxon England had been a bastion of Freedom and Democracy, but that William the Conqueror had imported the tyrannical monarchy and feudalism with him. The historical record shows that the Saxons had extensive feudal structures of their own. Of course, that was irrelevant to the myth-makers. They had a tradition to invent, specifically, one which would unite people behind them against their feudal opponents.

The aristocracy itself maintained a preference of looking towards the complex familial power structures across Europe, rather than to a feeling of community with people of their own domain. Title, land and religion were the factors that mattered to them, not nation. They were more concerned with status among their peers. It didn’t matter what language the people who lived on their lands spoke. Further, avowal of the doctrine of the nation was seen as placing an ideological category above the monarch; where before the monarch was the state, now the monarch was to be subordinated to the state.

Making (up) a nation
As the power of the proponents of these ideas grew, so pronouncing an adherence to their ideas became a swift and secure way to win preferment. Hence the power of their ideas grew too, to become the dominant, ruling ideas. There was a further practical impetus for cultural standardisation: the extension of state and bureaucratic power further into life, in order to more efficiently control the economy and delineate property. Coupled with the increased capacity and need for rapid communication, this meant that standardised linguistic practices were needed. Language became a factor in establishing state power, and thus it became a factor in determining a “nation". It’s no coincidence that the rise of the nation-state coincides with the invention of the dictionary and the encyclopaedia. It’s no coincidence that nationalism is accompanied by a mania for classifying, delineating and defining people into categories. These practical considerations were made explicit by the Polish nationalist Pilsudski, who observed that “It is the state that makes the nation, not the nation the state.”

Nations have taken a great deal of building. There is almost no nation-state that has not had its boundaries drawn in blood, its foundations dug out of human flesh. England was nationalised by Cromwell with the deaths of the Cornish and the Irish. France was nationalised by bloody wars between the monarchy and local lords and interests (not to mention the interminable wars with the Germanic states to set the exact boundary between the two “nations"). America was built on the bodies of the native population. It is a process that continues today in the form nation-building, which has taken in Yugoslavia and Central Africa.

The effort, though, has to be ongoing. States have required the use of an education system, to standardise learning, spread a national history and a sense of shared culture. An example of this can be seen in the Thatcher government’s enforcement of the intellectually bankrupt notion of a Literary Canon in the National Curriculum: a gallery of literary luminaries, led by Shakespeare, that bored, uninterested children are told are great and something for them to be proud of. On the continent, it was the task of “turning peasants into Frenchmen” that the Republic set itself. Nations are made, not born.

In order to enforce the new system of property over the whole range of its influence, the capitalist class needed the state, and its legitimising idea of nationalism and the nation. Culture resides in sets of ideas, values and practises that set out a sense of precedent, self and future possibility. By imposing the idea of the nation upon a culture, complete with its inherent notions of territorial ownership and property, the ruling class impose their notions of property on the very self-image of the people within that culture.

All possibilities and plans are circumscribed by, or at least must be made in relation to, this logic. So long as people think in terms of the “common good” of the “national economy", in terms of the overall performance of one unit in the world-wide division of peoples, they are, whether consciously or not, serving the interests of the capitalist class. All evaluations, priorities and hierarchies of value within a “national culture” are made from the point of view, from the self-interest, and, indeed, the apprehended self-hood, of the members of the capitalist class. When the economy is “doing well” it is doing so for the capitalists, when the economy is ailing, it is ailing for the capitalists. Their interest and feeling is the condition for action and evaluation of a national culture.

The idea of “the nation", then, functions as a supreme good, beyond the physical and mechanical functionings of the state, to which any cause may appeal. Thus, both Blair and Hague are claiming that their position on the Euro is the true “patriotic cause". Put another way, it is a fantasy, a dream, which can be used to cover up for problems and contradictions in the practice of the state’s daily life. Its function is to legitimise both the state and class rule, and sustain a large quantity of support, through workers who identify with the ideals of nationhood and believe themselves to be the same as, and have the same interests as, their masters.

No common interest
Workers, of course, do not share a common interest with their masters. It does not follow that if the “national wealth” increases, or if trade increases, or even if profit increases, that higher wages will be gained by workers. In fact capitalists can only make a profit by appropriating the wealth produced by the workers to themselves; but in the topsy-turvy world of ideology, it seems that workers will only have good pay and wealth when the capitalists are doing well. So it appears that workers and capitalists share a common interest. In fact, the interest of workers is conditioned by the interest of the capitalist, in exactly the same manner as hostages held by a kidnapper: unless the kidnapper-capitalists’s demands are met, they will not allow the hostage-workers to have what they need to live.

There is a well-documented effect of hostage situations, called “The Stockholm Syndrome” in which hostages under duress began to identify with their kidnappers, and believe in their cause. Nationalism works in much the same way. It is the Stockholm Syndrome on a grand scale. The working class who are dependent (under the current system) on the capitalists, to whom they are bonded by state-boundaries across which they are not permitted to escape, begin to believe that they share an identity with them. Hence the ridiculous comments we’ve all heard from people flipping burgers in McDonalds, insisting blindly that they don’t like socialism because they’re capitalists. Hence further, the ridiculous spectacle of people wittering on about the Union Flag being on British Airways’ planes, as if BA were anything more than a vehicle for enriching share-holders.

Workers have no country

The only way to define such national identity is to define it in terms of what (who) it is not, i.e. negatively. Thus nationalism sets itself as being against other countries, striving to define a uniqueness of national cultureso as to once and for all set its country apart from others, to know itself by what is un-like it. At one extreme this can include myths about race and blood, trying to attach the national abstraction to some trait of genetics or similar such nonsense. Since people have a strong desire to retain their own perceived identity, and to have a good opinion of themselves, often the creeds based on such identities function in a highly irrational, and ultimately, defensive way. Thus it is usually a sign of desperation and of an incapacity to formulate a coherent argument when our masters resort to playing the nationalist card.

It is clear, then, that socialists must oppose nationalism in all its forms: not just refusing to espouse their creed, but defying the rituals, the anthem signing, flag saluting and other expressions of craven loyalty to the nation-state, that help enforce the idea of nation in our minds. There is no national interest for workers, and any attempt to reform capitalism must be based on a national interest and thus be opposed to socialism. Self-determination for “nations” just equates with freedom and self-determination for a ruling class. It must be opposed in favour of self determination for people, concretely and actually in their own lives. It must be opposed with socialism.

PIK SMEET

After being cancelled for years the Rising Commemoration has been restored by the Ahern government, anxious to maintain its republican credentials against the growing threat of Sinn Fein in the impending General Election. The excuse for originally cancelling the Commemoration was that the army was so overstretched on foreign UN peace-keeping duties that it couldn’t stage a march of a couple of hours’ duration in Dublin.

The real reason, of course, was that the genuine inheritors of the political lunacy of 1916, the Provisional IRA, were actively engaged in the killing business, intermixed with bank robberies and crimes of violence not only in Northern Ireland but in the Republic of Ireland as well. Celebrating the killings of those who had laid the foundations of the Irish state was regarded as honourable but the new killings of their latter-day progenitors were not. The fear was that the Provisional IRA might well be the political and military beneficiaries of a dramatic outburst of the patriotic emotion engendered by the establishment’s recognition of a Rising that had even less justification than the resuscitation of the IRA in 1970.

It was Dublin that bore the bloody birth pangs of the IRA when about 1,000 men of the Irish Volunteers coalesced with Connolly’s 300-member Irish Citizen Army on Easter Monday 1916 to become the Irish Republican Army (IRA) and challenge the might of the British army as well as units of the British navy in a fight for Irish political independence.

The Commander-in-Chief of the rebel army was a Dublin schoolteacher and poet called Patrick Pearse. At a practical level he appears to have been an inoffensive pedagogue but his writings reveal another side to the man, a side that might well have preoccupied a psychiatrist, for his alter ego was a soldier of destiny with an inclination for blood sacrifice.

In 1916 blood sacrifice was high on the agenda of world capitalism. Competition between opposing national segments of capitalism had spilled over into massive violence as hapless legions of working men contested on the blood-soaked battlefields of Europe in the interests of their masters. Pearse obviously felt the exhilaration of an absent participant; in 1915, when incompetent generals and field marshals were sending millions of men to assured death in northern France he wrote:

“The last 15 months have been the most glorious in the history of Europe. Heroism has come back to the earth+ It is good for the world that such things should be done. The old heart of the earth needed to be warmed with the red wine of the battlefields. Such august honour was never offered to God as this.”

In The Story of a Success, he complains:

“The exhilaration of fighting has gone out of Ireland+ when people say that Ireland will be happy when her mills throb and her harbours swarm with shipping they are talking as foolishly as if one were to say of a lost saint, ‘That man will be happy again when he has a comfortable income’. I know that Ireland will not be happy again until she recollects + that laughing gesture of a young man that is going into battle or climbing to a gibbet.”

Thus, the idiocies of the Commander-in-Chief of the armed wing of Sinn Fein who, in kindness, we can only see as deeply mentally disturbed. But, along with Pearse, in creating what W B Yeats saw as the birth of “a terrible beauty” was James Connolly, one-time member of the Social Democratic Federation, who broke with that organisation a short time before the founding comrades of the Socialist Party of Great Britain and was one of those who combined in establishing a Scottish section of the Socialist Labour Party.

Connolly claimed to be a Marxist and described Marx as the greatest of modern thinkers. In 1912 during the great Dublin lockout when the Irish Constabulary attacked the strikers, Connolly and James Larkin, the strike leader, had established a workers’ defence organisation with the grandiose title of the Irish Citizen Army (ICA) that, in 1916, was to combine with a small section of the Irish volunteers as the IRA, whose political mouthpiece was Sinn Fein.

The Irish dramatist, Sean O’Casey, who was secretary to the ICA, said Connolly forsook the cause of the international proletariat for the insular romanticism of Irish Nationalism. In fact, Connolly’s espousal of Irish nationalism could be more properly defined as a betrayal of the worker’s trade-union cause as what he brought the impoverished members of the ICA out to fight for on Easter Monday was the right of a fledgling Irish bourgeoisie to establish legislative independence that would afford it trade protection, in the words of Sinn Fein, “+from English and other foreign capitalists”.

Ironically, then, the people whose economic interests were to be fought for was the nascent Irish capitalist class; the very people who had locked out the Irish workers in 1912 and called out Crown forces to attack those workers; the very people who had led Larkin and Connolly to conclude the need for a defensive Irish Citizen Army.

Sinn Fein, in its policy statement of 1907 had made clear the identity of the class it represented though it euphemistically referred to the Irish capitalist class as “home manufacturers and producers”:

“If an Irish manufacturer cannot produce an article as cheaply as an English or other foreign capitalist, only because his foreign competitor has larger resources at his disposal, then it is the first duty of the Irish nation to accord protection to that manufacturer.”

As an epilogue to the Rising we might recall the words of Patrick Pearse in The Coming Revolution:

“We might make mistakes in the beginning and shoot the wrong people but bloodshed is a cleansing and sanctifying thing.”

In the Rising of 90 years ago which the political agents of Irish capitalism are commemoratong this Easter, some 50 rebels were killed while more than four times that number of civilians died. It was the latter, innocent and, as it happened, uniformly poor, who were the real blood sacrifice and their deaths presaged even worse to come.

RICHARD MONTAGUE

In the late 1980s the Andean Group of governments further liberalized investment regulations to ease the repatriation of profits from foreign investments and to allow a greater foreign involvement in the national economy. This led to the Andean Pact free trade agreement in 1992. The most recent figures show that free-trade capitalism has done little to benefit workers in Colombia. World Bank figures show that the national poverty rate declined from 65 percent in 1988 to 64 percent in 1999. According to the FAO, the number of undernourished people in the population decreased from 6.1 million in 1990-92 to 5.7 million in 2000-02. If this is the World Bank’s current motto of ‘A World Free of Poverty’ in action, then Colombians will be waiting several decades before they even have enough food to eat in a country with the some of the richest natural resources on the planet.

In the late 1980s, when Colombia began to attract British capital, Margaret Thatcher sanctioned military assistance to Colombia’s notorious armed forces. This assistance continues to this day. Despite the efforts of journalists and activists, the British government refuse to disclose the full amount and nature of all the military assistance given to Colombia’s armed forces. It is known that British military officers have trained their members in the UK as well as in Colombia. The UK government has also aided the Colombian government to set up the National Intelligence Centre a co-ordinating body for the Colombian security forces. The UK government has also sanctioned arms sales to Colombia; indeed Colombian delegations have attended the Defence Systems and Equipment International Exhibition (DSEi) in London and Farnborough International Airshow at the invitation of the Ministry of Defence. The Foreign and Commonwealth Office issued arms export licences to the value of ú£3.5 million in 2004. The British government can refuse to allow export of arms, for example, on the basis of risk of use for internal repression, risk of contributing to internal tensions or conflict in the recipient country or the preservation of regional stability. Perhaps the case of Colombia is an administrative oversight.

US security assistance amounted to $98 million in military financing, $1.7 million for military training and education and $474 million for counter-narcotic operations in the 2004 financial year. Corporations are also thought to make donations to the Colombian military.

The US Department of State’s Reports on Human Rights Practices for 2004 state that members of the security forces continued to commit serious abuses, including unlawful and extrajudicial killings and forced disappearances. Also police, prison guards, and military forces mistreated detainees in harsh, overcrowded and underfunded prisons. State security forces were responsible for 124 extrajudicial killings during the first six months of 2004 and at least 17 of the 65 cases of forced disappearance. Victims are often portrayed as guerrillas killed in combat.

One of the controversial aspects of US-funded counter-narcotic operations involves the eradication of coca and opium poppy plantations by aerial herbicide spraying. The US Department of State’s Bureau for International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs reports that 2004 was the fourth consecutive record-breaking year of aerial eradication: 136,500 hectares of coca and 3,061 hectares of opium poppy were defoliated. The use of broad-spectrum, non-selective herbicides means that not only is coca and poppy production affected but also food crops, pasture and forests, to say nothing of the possible effects of large amounts of herbicide on livestock and humans. The illicit crop eradication programmes have simply meant that new areas are brought into cultivation. The result is that the increasing destruction of immensely diverse natural forest as farmers are displaced by removal of their means of living and by poorly targeted spraying. Some compensation is available as part of the eradication programme but is inadequate when set against the losses, and not enough to act as a disincentive to further planting of illicit crops.

Commentators have suggested that US-funded counter-narcotic operations are little more than an attack on the financial supply lines of the guerrillas. Quoted in the New York Times last year, a spokesperson from the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy said ‘Key indicators of domestic cocaine availability show stable or slightly increased availability in drug markets throughout the country’. It seems that the eradication programme has had little effect on the supply of cocaine within the USA.

The Caûo Limùn oilfield in the Arauca region, which accounts for 30 percent of Colombia’s oil production, has seen some of the greatest violence in recent years. A pipeline which pumps oil to the Caribbean for export has been a major target for guerrilla forces seeking payment for not sabotaging the pipeline. The 18th Brigade of the Colombian military which is funded and trained by the US government and an oil company has been accused of abuses against civilians and of co-operation with paramilitaries. Health workers, trade unionists, teachers, journalists and activists as well as members of displaced peasant communities who lived near the pipeline have been victimised by the both the military and paramilitaries.

The US State Department and Amnesty International both state that despite the near impunity with which military personnel carry out atrocities, they continue to fight a ‘dirty war’ by collusion with paramilitary groups. The extent to which this occurs is unclear, reports vary from the merely sharing intelligence to paramilitaries and the military being trained, transported, armed and fighting together.

Paramilitaries were responsible for numerous violations of international humanitarian law and human rights according to the US Department of State’s Reports on Human Rights Practices for 2004. There are approximately 12,000 paramilitary fighters in Colombia, mostly members of the United Self-Defence Forces of Colombia (AUC), a coalition of paramilitary groups. Though officially the AUC is demobilising and announced a ceasefire in 2002 more than 1,800 killings and disappearances have occurred since then. Paramilitaries were responsible for at least 304 of such killings during the first six months of 2004, including journalists, activists, trade unionists, indigenous leaders, local politicians and others who threatened to interfere with their drug trafficking activities or those suspected of collaboration with guerrillas. There are also reports that paramilitaries continued to commit ‘social cleansing’ killings of prostitutes, drug users, vagrants, and the mentally ill in city neighbourhoods they controlled.

One of the most well publicised aspects of paramilitary killing in Colombia in recent years involved the Coca-Cola company. SINALTRAINAL, a Colombian food and drink workers’ union, claim that members and their families have been abducted, tortured and murdered by paramilitaries hired by the management of Coca-Cola bottling plants. With no means of redress in Colombia, the union with the help of the United Steel Workers of America and the International Labor Rights Fund attempted to bring a case against Coca-Cola in Florida under the Alien Tort Statute and Torture Victim Protection Act. The court found the Colombian government complicit with the paramilitaries but absolved Coca-Cola of responsibility as the bottling companies were separately owned, despite Coca-Cola then being the major shareholder in the company. The union’s case against the bottlers is unresolved. Since the beginning of the case SINALTRAINAL have called for an international boycott of Coca-Cola products.

The paramilitary groups and guerrillas have their roots in La Violencia, the war of 1948–1957 between supporters of the oligarchic landowners and supporters of a liberal state and land reform. At the end of La Violencia several independent republics existed within Colombia. The armed forces of the state, supported by the US military, took these areas by force. From one of these republics known as Marquetalia, the creator and future leader of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) emerged with a small band of guerrilla fighters to continue to fight against the official parties who had now formed a power-sharing coalition. It was later that they aligned themselves with the Colombian Communist Party (PCC). FARC and the PCC severed links in the late 1980s. However, despite the differences between Marxism and the PCC’s Leninism, and the obvious discrepancies between FARC’s openly stated political programme and that of Marx, FARC and the smaller pro-Cuban National Liberation Army (ELN) are often referred to as ‘Marxists’ in the popular press. In fact, FARC declare themselves to be Bolivarian and call for ‘Colombia for Colombians, with equality of opportunities and equitable distribution of wealth and where among us all we can build peace with social equality and sovereignty’, rather than for Marx’s call for workers of all lands to unite for the overthrow of all existing social conditions.

FARC and ELN members were responsible for a large percentage of civilian deaths attributable to the armed conflict according to the US Department of State’s Reports on Human Rights Practices for 2004. FARC are thought to be responsible for hundreds of intentional killings and have injured hundreds of civilians with bombings and land-mines. FARC also kidnap, torture, and murder off-duty members of the public security forces. Both FARC and ELN kidnap hundreds of civilians to help finance their activities. The Colombian Presidential Programme for Human Rights reports that from January to November 2004, the FARC killed at least 99 persons in massacres. Guerrillas targeted local elected officials, candidates for public office, religious leaders, suspected paramilitary collaborators, and members of the security forces.

The war in Colombia reminds us that we are living with a globalised capitalism. The war is of a global nature and not just a domestic war. Tragically most workers still look to a beneficial national government for amelioration of their conditions. However, as long as the social conditions of capitalism exist, and minority ownership of the means of production and distribution, competition to be that minority will all too often turn to war. Be it the benevolent liberal democratic state with a mixed economy, or the free-market economy or a government of nationalized industry free of foreign influence, this has ever been the case. World socialism will destroy the social conditions that create poverty and war.

PIERS HOBSON

We in the Socialist Party have always insisted on the advantages, for the advancement of the cause of socialism, of the fullest possible freedom of expression of political and social ideas, including when these take the form of religion (since all religions hold views on how society should be organised and are in this sense political). No view should be prevented from being expressed. And no view (not even religion) should be exempt from being criticised.

We have always practised what we preach. We opposed the banning of the Daily Worker in 1941. We have criticised the policy of “no platform for fascists” as censorship by direct action. We have debated against fascists and Islamists, exposing their views before their followers to the withering criticism of the socialist case.

The main case against censorship is that it considers that people are too ignorant to decide for themselves and so must be protected from hearing certain views. All censors, actual or would-be, consider themselves a cut above the rest. They are not corrupted by reading Lady Chatterly’s Lover but their servants would be. They are not affected by reading anti-Christian or anti-Muslim writings (as the case may be) but their followers would be. They are not affected by a BNP rant but other, less enlightened people would be.

Since ideas are thrown up by social conditions censorship never works to suppress them anyway. The Catholic Church was not able to prevent the rise in Europe of the secular, practical materialism generated by capitalism and has been forced to accommodate itself to this. The same fate awaits Islam, which seems to want to rival Catholicism for the title of the world’s most intolerant religion. At the moment its clerics are desperately trying to hold back the spread of capitalist secularism – and still have the power to mobilise fanatical mobs to rage against a few harmless cartoons – but, as capitalism progresses more and more in the areas where they now dominate they too will lose influence, painfully slow as this is turning out to be.

In any event, Socialists are opposed to the attempts made by Muslim clerics to prevent and punish criticism of their religion. We are under no obligation to respect the religious dogma of these obscurantists that places the so-called prophet Mohammed beyond criticism, not that he has anything relevant or sensible to say for 21st century conditions.

The last refuge of those who favour censorship is the proposition that people should be legally banned from insulting each other. It is true that if you want to persuade someone to change their views insulting them is not the best way to begin. But you can’t legislate for good manners or good persuasive techniques. To allow one side in an argument to cry “you’ve offended me” and appeal to the law to silence the other side would mean an end to free speech.

Our answer to all censors is to reaffirm that workers are quite capable of judging for themselves, quite capable of sorting out the wheat from the chaff and working out which ideas accord with their interests – and which do not. The best condition for the emergence of socialist understanding remains free and frank discussion.

How soon will the carrier groups in the Gulf, AC-130s in bases in Iraq and the nearby B-52s “liberate” another 100,000 or so Iranians? Well, the Iran Bourse will formally open on March 20 and allow countries to break the US monopoly on oil purchases in petrodollars. Central banks across Europe and Asia will trade in part of their 3 trillion US dollars for euros. So the Iran Bourse is a direct threat to extorting labor and resources from the developing world for worthless paper and Washington’s ability to print unlimited amounts of money to fund a powerful standing army and provide lavish tax cuts to the wealthy.

But, of course this little scenario differs only in the details from the last 300 or so war mongering scenarios that have taken place since World War I. The simple fact of the matter is that capitalism is a war-prone society, in that built into it is the perpetual conflict between rival states over sources of energy (oil), markets, raw materials, trade routes, areas of influence and the strategic points to defend them. You simply can’t have capitalism without wars, the threat of war and preparations for war. To end war we must end capitalism. To end capitalism, we must replace it with socialism. –PF

-Pablito Calvo de la Barba Larga

The figure 6 million is highly evocative – the same number as the usual estimate of Jews that were murdered in The Holocaust – possibly the most heinous act of mass murder in history as these millions were gunned down in pits or gassed in specially built camps for the extermination of a whole people. A crime of such infamy that its like has never been known and to this day in many parts of the world – as renowned liar David Irving is finding to his cost in Austria – it is considered a crime to deny that it happened.

What historians can and do dispute, though, is the extent to which The Holocaust was planned out in advance – whether Hitler always intended for the mass murder of Jews or whether slaughter grew out of local pragmatic responses to dealing with local populations in conquered territories. The so-called Intentionalist versus Functionalist accounts of The Holocaust.

The debate is complex – and probably irresolvable now. What is, perhaps, clear, is that the Functionalist case is somehow more horrifying. It would be comforting to human minds to know that a handful of monsters dreamed up and guided the mass-murder from their bunker – but it is more dreadful to conceive of low-level local officials going about their business : Item 5 – Merits of Gas over Bullets for extermination. Literally getting rid of some inconvenient people.

Perhaps, though, in future years, people will look back on the functionalist holocaust of our times – sit agog as they hear of committees sitting down to make policies knowing they will lead to millions of preventable human deaths because they can’t, won’t, daren’t raise the lives of these people above holy private property, the sovereignty of nation states or even God.

The autogenicide of the human race is why 6 million must die each year and why 850 million must live undernourished.

We will be as equally deserving of opprobrium as those who stood by and let the Holocaust happen if we do not act as soon as we may to end this preventable waste. If we lend our voices or our votes to political parties that put trade, business, capital and property before the rational good of distribution according to needs, we are contributing as culpably as the lowliest corporal genocide.

We urgently need to build a worldwide movement to bring a speedy halt to the carnage. The easy thing – the functionalist thing – is to go on supporting parties that offer small, possiblist solutions within the current system. But the right thing to do, the necessary thing, is to demand the impossible and turn the whole system over. Let’s make 2006 the monument to the beginning of the end of a murderous system.

The death of the two young lads who were accidentally electrocuted when they ran into an electricity sub-station in Clichy- sous-bois north of Paris following an all too routine police identity check in the area was not in itself the trigger to these events. The trigger was the reaction of the Interior Minister, Sarkozy, (France’s answer to Blunkett, marital problems included) who called the unruly young people in the suburbs “riff-raff", thus confirming a tendency towards the blanket stigmatization of the population who live there.

The equation suburbs = immigrants = delinquents, is, of course, the kind of brainless reasoning favoured by members of the National Front, and by some police officers, particularly those who “know” the immigrant population largely through their experience of the dirty Algerian war of independence. But the “immigrant” population in the suburbs have been there for three generations and as such they walk around with French identity papers. Unfortunately for them, they have Arab names and/or black faces and thus face discrimination in employment.

Their problems are a concentration of those faced by French workers as a whole and have nothing to do with their level of “integration” into the French nation. After all, those Arabs who fought for the French during the Algerian war of independence (the so called “harkis") have themselves vegetated in ghettoes, the victims of post- colonial benign neglect. Even these Arabs haven’t been allowed to integrate.

Can of worms

The background to this can of worms is not the state of the housing in the sink estates ("cités") in the suburbs of the major towns in France. Some of the housing, admittedly not all, is of fairly good quality having been built in the mid-1970s. British sink estates are a lot worse. Nor is the problem that of the absence of public services, education, health care, public transport and all the rest. These public services are present in these areas to an extent which could only be dreamt of in an equivalent American or British ghetto. Let’s not get things mixed up. No, the main problem of these sink estates is precisely the social and ethnic homogeneity of these areas or the concentration of people with profound social problems there. Family breakdown, sole parenting, low self-esteem, educational difficulties, problems of employment co-exist with an often violent social environment where young people grow up surrounded by delinquent gangs.

To make matters worse, the French police force is mainly installed in the quiet small towns, the spatial deployment of the flics having stayed largely unchanged since the Vichy epoch. The police trade unions haveresisted all attempts at redeployment. As a rule then ,the cops only come to thump people they don’t know in areas they get lost in. Calm “middle-class” areas have a plethora of police stations. Earlier experiments with community policing ("police de proximité") undertaken by the “socialist government” of Jospin succeeded in calming the suburbs but were abandoned by the super-cop Sarko on the ground that this allowed the proliferation of a parallel drug economy (true). In these terms, the more testosterone-propelled policing of the current administration is believed to be more effective (not true). As a resultpolicing in the suburbs has taken on the “wham bang and thank you mam” style with lots of media attention.

Funds going to the associations in the suburbs have been cut and job-creation schemes suspended. This is guaranteed to worsen community relations with little payoff in terms of the fight against thugs whose activities do, after all, provide some cash-flow in these areas where youth unemployment often hits 45 percent - the highest rate in Europe. No wonder then that the government has decided to park the riot police (CRS) on a semi-permanent basis in these estates. Although country bumpkins with a well-deserved reputation for brutality, they do at least know how to react when they get lost in an area they don’t know.

“Arab work”

In strictly capitalist terms nothing can nor perhaps will be done to change this sorry state of affairs. The current population of the suburbs largely consists of the sons and daughters of black Africans and Arabs brought over in the 1960s and 1970s to do the shit jobs in the factories that the French didn’t want to do. (A reality which was brought home to me when I saw an entire train full of exhausted workers returning from a night shift at the Peugeot works in Poissy. They were all Arabs.) Whilst this earlier generation now subsists on microscopic pensions and social benefits, the new kids on the block are showing a distinct tendency towards underemployment and delinquency. When mass unemployment hit these areas in the 1980s what complacent sociology calls the “visible immigrants” found themselves trapped and underemployed in the suburbs as the earlier ("invisible"?) immigrants of Spanish, Italian, Polish or Portuguese origin had succeeded in getting the hell out. Integration after all is not so much a question of religion as it is a question of timing.

Then came the trendy do-gooders who in the mid-1980s launched the windy humanistic movement “Touche pas à mon pôte” ("don’t touch my mate") with the help of heavy public subsidies from the Mitterrand government, “the Sphinx” having abandoned all pretence to defend working class interests sometime early in the 1980s. Ostensibly a worthy movement aimed at overcoming the problems faced by those French citizens who were unfortunate enough to have Arab or black parents, this current of thought succeeding in convincing gullible people that the real problem faced by people in the sink estates was the entrenched racism of the French and not simply shit jobs, unemployment and a brutal and ignorant police force: problems faced by workers everywhere.

Vomitorium

The other side of the political rainbow has seen the development of a far-right extremist party, the National Front, from out of the moribund Poujadist organisation of the 1950s. Led by Jean Marie Le Pen, an ex-paratrooper involved in dirty business during the Algerian war of independence, this outfit provides a convenient bogey-man for lefties who have got lost in the banality of left/right capitalist politics. The party, generously staffed by disaffected former colonists from Algeria (the so-called “pieds noirs"), has heavily underlined the failure of integration of the French citizens of Araborigin many of whom, incredibly, still don’t know how to conjugate the subjunctive of the imperfect in French and this after so many grammar lessons. The party even has a radio station called, curiously, “Radio Courtoisie” (Right wing French thugs have always had impeccable manners) to beam out its Christian message of hatred and prejudice. Fortunately, only boredhousewives and retired colonels listen to this drivel. Ordinary French workers have proved over and over again that they are not on the whole racist bigots, thoughthey can be a bit xenophobic. Nonetheless the party continues to garner votes inconstituencies where it doesn’t even have a local branch or even any kind of grass-roots existence. For the party exists in fact, as a convenient way for workers to express their disaffection with the French political establishment which is all too clearly in cahoots with capitalist interests. It’s a kind of gigantic publicly-subsidized vomitorium into which people spew their bile with Le Pen’s ugly mug providing a convenient emetic. In doing this, however, French workers have clearly been playing with fire Now they’re getting burnt.

Urban pariahs

Thus doubly confirmed in their status as urban pariahs, many of the young people in the suburbs have continued to study quietly and find work despite an ill-adapted educational system, material difficulties, postcode discrimination, the useless condescension of the politicians and crap jobs. The educational priority areas ("zone éducation prioritaire"), modelled on the earlier British fiasco, have been starved of resources and have thus done little to erode the inequalities of an overtly elitist educational system. They receive a piddling 8 percent more than the mainstream schools, hardly enough to compensate for the learning difficulties encountered by people from poor backgrounds, not to mention those from non-French speaking backgrounds in a country where national arrogance places on premium on speaking proper.

Despite the difficulties there are some fine, dedicated teachers in these areas whose efforts have been hampered by a sordid social environment and poor logistic support. In the final analysis then, 62 percent of French working-class people find their offspring back in the working-class background which they came from (the highest proportion in Europe) in a country which presents itself as secular and meritocratic. And that’s before we put the peculiar problems faced by the denizens of the ghetto into the balance.

So the real problem is the inability of people in these areas to escape from a highly stigmatizing spatial set-up. The association suburb = immigrants = delinquency is criminal stupidity. The Arab and black populations who live in areas in close proximity to mainstream French life do not riot. Nor did the Arabs who live in the centre of Marseilles. (In the same way quiet Alsatian villages with no Arabs vote National Front.) Where the sink estates did not riot is more important than where they did but no television cameras go to these areas. In fact, the vast majority of the third generation immigrants in the suburbs took no part in the disorders and many were as terrified by what went on as the French population in general.

The problem should not be thought of simply in terms of spatially delimited sink estates. The wider trends of the whole of French society should be taken into account. To a significant extent, the troubles should be seen as a reflection of the growing geographical segregation of the French population partly due to the booming housing market and the continuous rise in rents in the private sector. And the doings of the affluent in France should also be mentioned. The rich are beginning to privatize the French republic for their own ends. Rich ghettoes, like Sarko’s own constituency of Neuilly to the west of Paris has only 2 percent of council housing when the legal obligation is for 20 percent. The same is true of neighbouring Levallois and the pattern is repeated all over France. Clearly the rich are having some difficulty integrating into the Republic, perhaps they don’t want to.

After all, they send their kids to private,often catholic schools, where they learn how different they are from everyone else.Thereafter they take advantage of higher education facilities to propel their horrendous offspring into the better jobs. A short sojourn in the States completes the picture.

More importantly, recent events have allowed the government to sneak through controversial tax breaks for the super-rich whilst introducing more tax free enterprises into the sink estates - but then again, perhaps, this was what was really at stake in the first place.

MM (Paris)

We have received the following report on the recent riots in France as seen by a migrant worker there.

At the end of October there was a heavy riot in the suburbs of Paris as a result of a police identity card control. Three African immigrants, one from the west coast and the other two from North Africa were controlled by police around Seine Saint Denis in one of suburbs of Paris. There was a disagreement between the immigrants and the police on duty. So, the three immigrants raced for safety but, unfortunately, two ran into a high tension compound and were electrocuted. Another one ran in a different direction and alerted his friends to what happened. Before they could trace the two boys and call the fire service to rescue them, it was too late.

These suburbs have been neglected, segregated for people of the same ethnic and religious background, for the past thirty years. Some of those living there who acquired good skills in one trade or the other were denied a job opportunity because of their colour, location of their residence or Islamic names. An English adage says that an idle man is the devil’s workshop. Since these immigrants were denied social and economic integration into French society, they devised what means of livelihood they could in order to keep the body and soul together. For many years French society has regarded them as outcasts and vagabonds who have no value just because of their colour and fate.

When this incident happened the Interior Minister of France, Nicolas Sarkozy, a hardliner and the son of an Hungarian immigrant, supported the action of the police and said that they were on a drive to control criminals and drugs in those suburbs instead of showing compassion and regret over the
death of the two African immigrants. After his television broadcast, these immigrants, comprising black Africans and the North Africans, plus their sympathetic friends from Asia, Latinos, West Indies and other Europeans, joined hands in the riots.

On the second day of the riots, the Interior Minister bragged that he would beef up the police to one thousand to control the situation. And that night about eight hundred cars were burnt excluding houses. The riots started from Seine Saint Denis around Paris and spread all over France. These cities are
Bordeaux, Nantes, Toulouse, Tours, Belfort, Essonne, Roubaix, Strasbourg, Lyon, Vaucluse, Besancon, Aulnay, Marseille, Amiens, and many more cities in France.

The cost of the damage in the three weeks of riots in France amounted to 200 million, just because of racism, xenophobia, and segregation that was imposed on immigrants by capitalism. And this is the country that propagated a disguised colonisation to third world countries under the pretence of a policy of association and assimilation. And today their fake paradigm programme is exposed to the world for us to know the danger in capitalism.

On 11 November, BBC radio reported that the European Union Justice Commissioner, Franco
Frattini, told France to integrate its ethnic minorities in other to avoid further such occurrences. On 13
November, the same EU gave 50 million to France to rebuild their country. They had forgotten to pass
the message across to other EU member states that prevention is better than cure.

To my greatest surprise, on the streets of Paris and other cities that I visited in France many French people confessed in front of the television cameras that they had never seen riots like this in their life. And these were just riots with petrol bombs and stones thrown by few boys! And I asked myself, what if they had seen the genocides from Biafra to Rwanda that imperialism caused, because of its egocentric intent, at the expense of poor Africans in particular and the third world countries at large.What is happening in France today should be a lesson to nations like Belgium, Holland, Germany, Switzerland, Austria, Denmark, Norway and Sweden.

As a socialist propagandist, I hate vandalism, I believe in peaceful social and political dialogue. But, when people take the law into their hands, that means that they have been oppressed beyond bounds and they are prone to explode. And their explosion can result to rioting, rebellion, terrorism and
sometimes total anarchy.

At this juncture, EU should use its tongue to count its teeth and know that the Fortress Europe has brought severe damage to France and that many more riots are on the way to other EU member
states that have refused to open up their immigration policy that encourages marginalised ‘illegal’ immigrants. Immigration policy in the West is based on corrupt western politicians conniving with the third world politicians; as a result, immigrants continue to cross borders and seas no matter what the risk ahead.

Sarkozy is a man who believes that he can become the President of France in 2007 by fighting immigration. Capitalism has blindfolded the world that our level of forgetting things is quite enormous. If not, how can some political riff-raff like Nicolas Sarkozy of France and the Belgium Interior Minister Patrick Dawael be propagating what their forefathers could not achieve ears ago? These two sycophants are looking for cheap popularity in their political party because they live in the land of
the blind that have eyes but cannot see. They will bring woes to the entire population of these two nations.

Lastly, I am advocating that the only solution that will enable people of different race to live in peace is socialism. And capitalism should be eradicated without further delay to enable us to enjoy the beautiful things of the world without fear.

Dele C. Iloanya, Paris

Of course, no one ever calls it America Gets Out of Economic Collapse Day, even though 2,390 deaths, 1,178 injuries, 21 sunken ships, and 323 planes destroyed seemed to have done the trick.

What this day really stands for is the day that got America in WWII, catapulting itself to world power that it is today. Aside from ridding the world of Fascism, corporations where formed, fortunes where made, and the restructuring of the worldwide balance of power was completed, paving way for the Cold War, the “most peaceful time in world history”.

While many Americans will take some time to reflect on the significance of this day, I would hope that we realize that this day also represents a day in which capitalism was to take one if its greatest leaps forward. The decision to attack Japan or its allies was not just one out of revenge, but out of politics and economics.

While capitalism continues to be the social system in which we live, politics and economics (and even a little revenge) will be the only basis for which decisions are made for us.

TC

Among the hunters are also animal rights groups protesting the hunt and fanning out through the forests to document the hunt and search for wounded bears. All legal challenges having been exhausted, the groups resorted to protesting the weigh station the dead bears are brought to.

The conflict between wild animals and human development into their habitats is a major environmental issue, and one that capitalism is not prepared to deal with. Capitalism, and its constant need to expand and develop, will slowly but surely continue expanding into the habitats of wild animals across the globe.

This conflict is better suited to be solved by socialism. Without a profit system to interfere, the workers can make decision about animal control and human development that allows for both to fit within the ecosystem. While the protestors are trying to stop the hunt itself, this conflict started long before, with the expansion of human development. It will continue after this hunt, because the current social system, capitalism, will not allow for the ecosystem, including the human population, to create a balance.

TC

While one might be inclined to say “politics as usual”, I think the phrase of “capitalism as usual” better fits this situation. Only in a social system where money is the main motivation will bribes and favors be exchanged for doing what is right. Only in capitalism can elected officials be turned against those who voted for him.

Scandals such as there are pervasive in cities across the globe. Its nothing new, and they will continue. While there may be certain individuals who participate in them, scandals such as these are a product of the social system that we live, capitalism.

In a socialist society, a society with no money and free access to all, none of these scandals would, or could exist.

California Kid

This milestone is a good time to take a quick look at capital punishment. It, like prisons, is a product of capital society, and would have no place a socialist one. Capital punishment is a form of revenge that is being placed on the guilty, people who, if living in a socialist society, probably would never of even had a chance to commit the crime.

Capital punishment is a clear example of the hypocrisy of the capitalist system, where a working class man can commit a murder, and be executed for it, and at the same time a president or CEO can make decisions that results in the unnecessary deaths everyday, and be lauded as heroes or responsible men.

Capital punishment is a tool that governments use to show the people that they are taking action against crime and murder, and that they are willing to take the burden of the execution that make society safe again.
Capital punishment is used not to the benefit of the working class, but to its detriment. It divides the working class into smaller groups so that we will remain scared, but at the same time feel safe and secure under “our government”.

Capital punishment today is a product of capitalism, and we can do away with execution only when we abandon our capitalist mode of thinking, and embrace a new society based on socialist organization.
California Kid

-An eye for an eye, and tooth for tooth, leaves us tooth-less and blind.

A pandemic may well be on the way. The government Chief Medical Officer, Sir Liam Donaldson, has announced his estimate of 50,000 ‘excess’ deaths (over and above the average annual death rate of 12,000 each flu season), stating: “We can’t make this pandemic go away, because it is a natural phenomenon, it will come.” However, other scientists dismiss the figure of 50,000 as a complete guess. “It could be worse, it could be better. I think initially it could be worse than that”, says Dr Martin Wiselka, consultant in infectious diseases at Leicester Royal Infirmary.

(BBC News Online, Oct 16).

The problem is that everybody is guessing, and governments are not willing to spend money on hunches. Currently H5N1 has an exceptionally high mortality rate of 50%, but is very hard to transmit, especially from one human to another, which is why only 60 people worldwide have so far died. The current guess is that the most likely threat is from H5N1 recombining with ordinary flu during the annual winter flu season. This is known to have happened during the Spanish flu outbreaks of 1957 and 1968, when the hybrid strain was much less deadly but spread very rapidly and thus killed more people. On the basis of this guess, a best-case scenario, the government plans to rely on its standard seasonal vaccination programme for at-risk groups including children, old people and asthmatics, with the additional purchase of the Tamiflu antiviral drug just in case. However, new research is showing that the 1918 pandemic, the deadliest ever recorded, which killed between 20 and 40 million people, was a pure bird flu, not a hybrid, and that H5N1 is evolving in ominously similar ways. The 1918 virus infected almost everyone on the planet within a year of its appearance, and without the aid of modern transport and cheap mobility. (New Scientist, October 8). Donaldson dismisses comparison with the 1918 pandemic because antiviral drugs and other advanced medical practices were not available then, yet many scientists are worried that the pandemic could spread so rapidly that it will outrun any attempt to contain it, and the government in any case has rejected plans to curtail population movement as largely pointless.

Capitalism is no more to blame for bird flu than for the recent earthquake in Kashmir, however it can be criticized for its way of dealing with natural disasters and threats. In capitalism, whatever the urgency, nothing can happen until agreement has been reached over money. As one example, the EU is currently unable to spend any money on purchasing vaccines and antiviral drugs because, according to officials, Britain is blocking agreement on the overall EU budget for 2007 to 2013 (Guardian, Oct 15). In another less publicized example, scientists have expressed horror that the team which has recreated the 1918 virus, ‘one of the deadliest viruses of all time’ have been testing it in live mice at only the second highest level of containment, and without wearing protective suits. The obvious question, when it is known that Soviet scientists in the 70’s accidentally released a mild member of the 1918 family of viruses into the environment, is: why not the highest level of containment? The answer can only be cost. If there is a chance to keep cost down, even if it involves a risk, capitalism will exert pressure to take that chance. It would be an incredible irony if H5N1 turned out to be a case of mild sniffles but we all died anyway from an artificially recreated laboratory virus because somebody tried to save a few quid from their research budget.

It could also be argued that capitalism’s peculiar and illogical ways of working can conspire to make a deadly pandemic more rather than less likely. The secrecy of the Chinese state-capitalist regime has already held back study on H5N1 as, like the SARS epidemic before it, China has refused to allow researchers access to samples or to reveal actual mortality statistics. Then there is the incentive for poultry farmers to allow isolated cases of flu to go unreported rather than see their entire stocks destroyed, as has happened in South East Asia, where billions of birds have been culled. The manufacture of an effective antiviral drug, once the infectious strain has been identified, would be enormously accelerated if the drug company making it were to provide the details to other drug companies, but in view of the money to be made by not doing so, we may not be able to rely on such public spirited cooperation. And if the worst happens, and governments give out the useless advice to stay indoors and not travel, how are workers supposed to make a living? Will bosses look kindly on any worker who takes a day off sick every time she sneezes or her kids have a temperature? Will banks look kindly on businesses that curtail activity because of staff absences? Will capitalism look favourably on anyone who falters in their perpetual and relentless pursuit of money because of an altruistic concern for social health and welfare, or will it instead reward those who have no such concerns?
Capitalist governments are gambling that H5N1 won’t mutate to humans, or that if it does mutate to humans, it won’t be deadly, or that if it is deadly, it won’t spread fast, or that if it spreads fast, it will be treatable with an antiviral, or that if no antiviral can be developed in time, that it won’t kill anyone rich or important. Workers, as so often in wartime, appear in this calculation in the section at the end, under the heading ‘expendable assets’. We’re just not worth spending too much money on, provided some of us survive to keep working.
Diseases among social animals are common, and since the agricultural revolution brought humans into close and sustained contact with other social or herd animals, we have acquired many of their diseases,(over sixty from dogs for instance). Many of these now harmless childhood diseases started life as epidemics that brought empires to their knees and destroyed civilizations. A new virus strain unleashed on a virgin population is a more terrible event than any volcano, any earthquake or any tsunami, and yet capitalism is content to gamble that it won’t happen, just as it did over the tsunami, or that it won’t be that serious, just as it’s doing over global warming. Capitalism is always gambling with our lives in this way, without giving us any say at all. If the gamble comes off, the rich win. If it doesn’t, we die.

Nature can sometimes do worse things than capitalism. But to fight them and protect ourselves, we need something better than capitalism.

“This land is your land,
This land is my land, … “

It should be, but in fact it isn’t. Many millions of working people own no land at all. Those who are a bit better off own the small plot on which their house stands — a fraction of an acre.

So who does own the land? Over 95 percent of the privately held land in the United States is owned by just 3 percent of the population. (1) These are the people who own the land, the industry, the technology — all the means of life on which we depend. This land is THEIR land.

A land survey conducted in 1999 (2) found that the 53,000 largest landlords — those owning 2,000 acres (3 square miles) or more — own a total of 350 million acres, worth $366 billion. (3) On average each of these people owns about 7,000 acres (11 square miles), worth some $7 million.

Even this is quite modest by comparison with the largest landowners. King Ranch (Texas), owned by the Kleberg family, is worth about a billion. At 825,000 acres or 1,300 square miles, it is larger than the state of Rhode Island. Besides 60,000 head of cattle, the ranch includes farmland and game preserves. (4)

There are whole towns that belong to a single individual. The “developer” Ben Carpenter owns the town of Las Colinas near Dallas, with 12,000 acres, about 20,000 residents, and about a square mile of office space. Country and western singer Loretta Lynn owns Hurricane Mills, Tennessee. (5)

It is also possible to buy an island — if you have the money, of course. In 1919 William Wrigley, Jr. (of chewing gum fame) bought the 74 square miles of Santa Catalina Island, 22 miles offshore from Los Angeles. (6) There are quite a few privately owned islands scattered around the world. Even Josip Broz Tito, ruler of the so-called “Socialist” Republic of Yugoslavia, had
one — Vanga in the Adriatic, home to his three palatial villas.

Apparently Woody Guthrie did know whose land this really is. One verse of the original song went:

“Was a big high wall there that tried to stop me A sign was painted, said ‘Private property.’ But on the other side it didn’t say nothing. That side was made for you and me.” (7)

This was one of two verses that were later suppressed, turning a protest
against private property into yet another piece of patriotic drivel.

John Lennon’s “Imagine” is more difficult to distort:

“Imagine all the people
Sharing all the world
No need for greed or hunger
A brotherhood of Man.”

Stefan

While none of these 7 will ever have to work again, they have the option of choosing to do so if they wish. They could spend their money on numerous expensive items, take a trip around the world, or live like a movie star for a while, and still have money left over.

Or they could continue to go to work everyday, doing something they enjoy doing, knowing that they will not have to worry about paying the bills, sending junior to college, or having the resources to retire.

In a way, acheiving socialism is like the entire world winning the lottery jackpot. We will all have what we need, but could continue to work at something we enjoy doing, whether it is being a doctor, a janitor, or driving a bus. In socialism, like winning the jackpot, we will have the resources to live stress free lives where our needs will be decided by our selves, and where we can count on living the end of our lives as comfortably as the beginning.
The California Kid

Ps- The numbers drawn Tuesday night were: 2-4-5-40-48; Mega Ball 7.

While I don’t think that recalls will be inevitable in a socialist society, recalls in capitalist society are a result of a profit system that tries to cut corners any way it can. It is through these cost cutting decisions that millions of dollars can be made, while putting workers at risk to their very lives.

In a socialist society where people come first and profits don’t exist, safety standards will be higher then they could possibly ever be in capitalist society.
TC

The truth is that the differences between the parties really are quite superficial on a politico-economic basis. Political outlooks differ slightly on foreign policy, if only on the “how” and not the “what”. Economic stands differ mainly in the management style each party tries, eternally unsuccessfully, to apply to capitalism. Some people believe the Republicans are the tough foreign policy party, ready to protect Americans and ensure our number one spot in the global order, but Democrats have presided over both World Wars and numerous other smaller foreign acts of aggression. Others cite the New Deal and Great Society as evidence that the Democrats are for the working class - willing to use tax dollars to alleviate societal problems - when all they really have done are apply ineffective palliatives to avoid large-scale social unrest.

Make no mistake – the ultimate goals of both parties, the ones never talked about in polite company – are essentially the same though the methods may appear to differ. Both wish to hold on to power and wealth at all costs, so both parties desire to keep the systems of “law and order” and “free market” capitalism in place, ensuring they stay both powerful and rich. Just try to find one so-called Democrat or Republican who thinks otherwise!

Some will try to give credit to either political party for social political or economic changes that occurred during their tenures as evidence they are committed to making things better, however it really becomes hard to explain just who really benefits with out letting the cat out of the bag! Unfortunately, many of those who disagree with both political parties think that forming their own party, with an eye to reforming the system from within, end up wasting their energies by trying to force it to act against its own interests and rules set up to ensure the status quo. Worse yet, most are content to try to convince the powers that be to change their ways, enacting reforms or policies that would actually curtail their ability to remain in the class of the elite. They write their congressman, circulate petitions, demonstrate in Washington, and Rock the VoteTM, foolishly hoping that those behind marble walls will see it in their hearts to voluntarily champion the oppressed and downtrodden. This strategy has never really worked and never really will!

There is a solution to the hegemony of law, capital and property - defended and administered by whichever face of the coin is currently showing, and that is to be rid of them and their system completely and forever. Social problems can only be solved by eliminating their causes, and the global race for superiority will be meaningless in the face of a world united in freedom and owing allegiance to no leaders or borders. Now more than ever, as global politics and capital are pushing us to the brink of economic, environmental, and genocidal disaster, it is time for World Socialism. Depending on one indistinguishable political party or the other is not the answer!