ALB
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Citizen Downing is an utter nutter. He used to be a member of the Labour Party but got expelled for supporting Isis. He campaigned about being expelled, wanting to stay in and vote for a party that exactly fits the description of “pathetic reformist groveller to the capitalist establishment.”
I will rush off a letter to the Weekly Worker as Alan Johnstone would already have done.
That’s from someone taken in by MMT — Modern Monetary Theory — which also stands for Magic Money Tree. It’s a load of nonsense, a variety of currency crankism.
I will add a comment pointing this out.
Report from Bristol:
“The march was great, people were extremely welcoming and receptive to the flyers, I got to give out many and I even went out of the march to give to people who were on the sidelines just watching. I told them to check out our website and if they agree, to get in contact. Hopefully that will create a little buzz and get more people interested in the only solution to this mess.
Only con I can think of is there was a strong SWP presence there basically doing the same thing as me, however they seemed to only give out leaflets to the marchgoers and were really nice too, so that was good.
From the amount of leaflets I was able to give out and the people that seemed genuinely interested in having a chat I definitely think this is something the party should get more involved with, especially in reaction to events such as benefit/tax cuts, big strikes, wars and so on.”
Yes, that’s a valid point that we have in fact made on a number of occasions. The trouble is we have used the term “Marxism” so many times ourselves in the past, even if in the sense of a type of analysis, that we can’t be too insistent about taking to task those who use it.
Report about Oxford:
“It was a bit smaller this week. Probably got rid of about half of those fliers. Was rather cold though. Oxford itself was jammed with Xmas shoppers. Who were on the whole supportive from the side lines. The police did arrest one lone anti protester.”
Also shows that Marxism and Nationalism don’t mix. You are either one or the other. People like Jagan were nationalists disguised as Marxists rather than Marxists who went off the rails over nationalism.
More on this from the other side:
https://www.csis.org/analysis/guyana-oil-politics-and-great-expectations
The irony of the situation is that the present president of Guyana is a member of the Peoples Progressive Party whose founder, Dr Jagan, was said to have been a Marxist.
“Jagan has been labelled as communist or Marxist by many different sources.(…) In a discussion with V.S. Naipaul, Jagan elaborated on his appreciation of Marxist literature. (…) In 1984, Jagan stated that “I am not only fighting for the people of Guyana. I am fighting for the people of the world. I am contributing to that struggle. That struggle is winning. That is why the United States is so hysterical at the moment, because of that very fact, that what I stand for is winning”. Jagan also went on to claim in 1990 that it was socialism in Eastern Europe which was failing, rather than communism, and stated that “Communism, as a system, has not been tried in any country as yet, and remains a highly moralistic and humanistic ideal and destination.” If Jagan was a Marxist, he would have been the first democratically elected Marxist in the Western Hemisphere, ahead of Chilean leader Salvador Allende.”
A demonstration of over 200 in Hounslow in west London was leafleted this lunchtime. Mainly Muslims but that would be normal for the area.
Among the “Free Palestine” placards was one that said “Boycott Starmer’s Labour Party” and “Don’t Vote for Cadbury” (the local Labour MP). She’s a Quaker (yes, of that family) but didn’t vote for a ceasefire. I thought they were supposed to be pacifists. Also chants of “local councillors, shame!” Only one resigned. I think she was one of the speakers:
Apart from us only the SWP were there. Not sure if they would agree with not voting Labour.
In her column in the Times on Tuesday (28 November) their economics editor mentions a study by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology which identifies a link between austerity and the rise of “extreme parties”:
“An MIT study covering more than 200 European elections between 1980-2015 found that deep fiscal consolidation ‘leads to a significant increase in extreme parties’ vote share, lower voter turnout and a rise in political fragmentation’. The paper estimated that a 1 per cent reduction in regional public spending translated into a three percentage-point increase in the vote share of extremist parties. The researchers noted that centre-left governments paid the highest political price for their austerity drives.”
I don’t know about such a precise link, and why just a cut in regional as opposed to national spending? But some link between austerity and the rise of extreme parties makes some sense.
The mainstream political parties, whether “centre-left” or “centre-right”, promise that, if elected, they will make things better. Voters believe them but these parties always fail to deliver but often end being forced by economic circumstances to protect profits by imposing austerity
When (inevitably due to the nature of capitalism) governments repeatedly fail to make things better, some voters blame not capitalism but the politicians who have failed to make it work for them and see conventional career politicians as a self-serving elite.
Unlike in the 1930s these parties are not blaming political democracy; they blame the conventional reformist politicians who currently operate within it. They are ‘extreme’ in the sense that, being xenophobic and ultra-nationalist, they are at one end of the nationalist spectrum on which the conventional parties situate themselves.
Conclusion: the growth of support for the “far-right” parties is a consequence of the (inevitable) failure of the mainstream reformist parties to make capitalism work for the majority. Reformism is not just a dead-end. It has dangerous consequences.
Well, if you are thinking in terms of capitalism being the only game in town, the most realistic way to end the oppression of Palestinians by the Israeli state is the so-called “two-state” solution.
In other words, from the river to the pre-1967 border between Israel and Jordan (the West Bank has only been ruled and its population politically oppressed by Israel since 1967, ie 56 not 75 years; before that it was part of Jordan and ruled by the King of Jordan). That seems to be what the Powers want.
If you believe in playing the only games in town, why don’t you support it too as that’s what it seems to be, instead of propagandising for what you consider to be the ideal arrangement?
There is also this that Lloyd draws attention to in his article;
“Starmer’s pronouncements, like those of Rachel Reeves, address this Britain. The pair talk of a volatile, insecure, dangerous world. They describe national rot and decline with furious dismay.”
And make the Trump-like promise that a future Labour government will Make Britain Great Again.
Meanwhile Labour are still making empty promises to make workers better off. Here’s a “Labour spokesman” quoted in today’s Times:
“We will invest in British industry to boost growth, cut bills and make working people better off.”
Oh yes? Only a mug would believe that. Where are they going to get the money from to invest? As if, anyway, any government can control the way capitalism works and make it “grow” just like that through an act of political will.
And stopping bills from rising (if they do that, which is open to question) is not the same as making workers better off; it would only be stopping them getting worse off.
Starmer is a man without any principles but Reeves sounds as if she really believes that a government can make capitalism grow. Just like Liz Truss . . .
There are various events this Saturday in different cities and towns up and down the country.
Members in Bristol, Cardiff, Lancaster, Oxford, Yorkshire and Glasgow have leaflets to cover those in these places. Some will be distributed in London too. Southampton and Portsmouth have already been leafleted.
Are you sure? Both will require a change of consciousness. We envisage people coming to want socialism and do our bit to try to hasten this.
You have to convince the Jewish population of Israel to dissolve the state of Israel into a single Palestine state. You fancy your chances of being able to achieve that?
Unless, that is, you envisage imposing this by force of arms. In that case don’t forget that the Jewish Nationalists have the Bomb. That’s a recipe for more slaughter on an industrial scale.
To tell the truth, what you propose seems the least likely and most unrealistic outcome under capitalism. And of course, if you achieve it, with or without war, a Palestine ruling class would be “free”, but the vast majority of the people living between the river and the sea wouldn’t be, any more than in any of the existing Arab states. In fact, if Hamas has anything to do with it, they‘d be living under an Islamic dictatorship in addition to being economically exploited.
An Italian translation here:
https://socialismo-mondiale.blogspot.com/2023/11/guerra-israele-gaza-cosa-diciamo.html?m=1
Meanwhile an updated version has been prepared and will be considered at the meeting of the EC on Saturday.
An article in today’s Times by Will Lloyd of the New Statesman talks about “Dark Labour” and writes of it being the new Nasty Party.
Recalling that at the time of the 2011 riots Starmer was Prosecutor General (a key post on the repressive side of the capitalist state) and authorised the harsh prosecution of rioters:
“Comically cruel punishments were the consequence. A student was jailed for three months for stealing some water bottles; two men were send down for four years after inciting riots on Facebook, although no disorder occurred.”
Clearly the man is what the present Home
Secretary might call a “shit”.Lloyd goes on:
“Dark Labour is defined by its willingness to be harsh. . . On everything from migration and criminal justice to the war in Gaza, Dark Labour is the opposite of gentle and kind . . . The shadow cabinet is mirroring its leader, which is why members sound like prosecutors, not politicians.”
We have been warned. If a Labour government takes over next year we are in for a stretch of hard labour.
