Class independence and the election in Greece. Critical support to SYRIZA

Socialists, communists and class conscious working class people should critically support the current election campaign of SYRIZA in Greece.  We should, while not taking responsibility for the programme of a SYRIZA government, nevertheless support measures by such a government that are directed against the austerity directed from Brussels, Berlin and Paris, assuming such measures are enacted.

As is well known, a massive economic and political crisis led to two Greek national elections in 2012. The immediate issue was finally settled with an unstable coalition led by the main right-wing capitalist party, New Democracy (ND), supported by the main bourgeois-populist pseudo-socialist party, PASOK, and the right-wing splinter party from SYRIZA (or rather its immediate precursor) known as Democratic Left. That government enforced the Eurozone’s bail-out conditions, involving massive attacks on Greek workers’ wages and salaries, and what remains of welfare and public health provision, to the point that Greek society came close to ripping apart. There was a very dangerous and worrying growth of Golden Dawn, an outright fascist party that openly took its inspiration from Hitler’s National Socialists, together with a torrent of violence and racist terrorism against African and other migrants living in Greece.

Continue reading →

Communist Explorations journal published today

commexplor1

Launched today, at a protest at the American Embassy this afternoon commemorating the 13th grim anniversary of the creation of the US imperialist concentration camp at Guantanamo: the hard copy edition of Communist Explorations. 24 pages of genuine communist politics and programme. Also distributed, a hard-copy version of the statement ‘Muslim-baiting Charlie Hebdo slaughtered by vengeful Islamists‘, issued on the day of the attack.

Continue reading →

Good Sense on Charlie Hebdo – from another ex-Jewish ‘renegade’

Will Self, a contemporary thought professor, tells Channel 4 News that satire should only target “people in power”. Writer and cartoonist Martin Rowson says “total freedom of expression is ludicrous”.

Will Self in particular, a prominent writer and broadcaster of Jewish origin who is another one of those highly advanced individuals of Jewish origin who have renounced the secular Jewish identity in the cause of universalism and humanism, talks some basic good sense here. He puts many of the hysterics among the Islamophobes and capitulators to Zionism on today’s left, to shame.

http://bcove.me/eqoeo8tq

Muslim-baiting Charlie Hebdo Slaughtered by Vengeful Islamists

It should go without saying that the killing, apparently by militant Islamists, of the editors, journalists and cartoonists of Charlie Hebdo in Paris, should be condemned by the working class movement. The people responsible are guilty of some pretty heinous crimes and obviously need to be caught and prosecuted. As humanists, communists are opposed to such wanton killing of unarmed people, with the suffering that it will undoubtedly cause to those close to them. That much and no more should the working class movement stand formally with the mainstream politicians who are loudly condemning these killings.

We must condemn this action, not because it ‘outrages’ the sensibilities of the French government or its imperialist allies regarding ‘free speech’ or the alleged sanctity of human life – they have no respect for these things themselves. But we condemn it not least because it will inevitably result in an increase in anti-Muslim bigotry and hatred, and will lead to the victimisation of Muslims in France and elsewhere. Those who took this action, who appear to have had military know-how and training, no doubt will welcome such a reaction as it tends to further drive angry and alienated young Arab and African people of Muslim background towards them.

Continue reading →

George Galloway MP interviews Gilad Atzmon

This is a significant political event, that will no doubt lead to further demonisation of George Galloway by the ruling class, the Zionists, and the various capitulators to Zionism, philo-semites and Islamophobes on the left. It is a fascinating interview, between two important and prominent left-wing but non-Marxist figures, notably Britain’s most radical left-reformist MP and the famous artist/musician whose insights into the Jewish/Israeli question need to be critically but positively engaged with as part of developing a Marxist programme that takes account of the concretes of world politics today.

George Galloway and Gayatri Pertiwi interview ex-Israeli political writer/thinker and jazz musician, Gilad Atzmon, Sputnik (Russia Today) #59, Jan 3 2015. Followed by Miss H, soul singer and DJ.

Andrew Windsor’s Dodgy Zionist Sex Scandal

Material now coming into the public domain appears to implicate the Duke of York, Andrew Windsor, the second son of the reigning monarch of the UK, Elizabeth Windsor, and fifth in line to the throne, in a scandal involving the trafficking for paid sex of underage girls by a Jewish billionaire banker, Jeffrey Epstein, in the US, UK and elsewhere. Epstein has admitted soliciting under age girls for prostitution. Now testimony has been submitted in court in the United States accusing Windsor, as well as the hot-shot Jewish-Zionist lawyer Alan Dershowitz, of engaging in sexual activity with underage girls procured by Epstein, allegedly working with Ghislaine Maxwell, the daughter of the late corrupt press baron Robert Maxwell, who was also a rabid Israel supporter.

Robert Maxwell was one of the key architects of the Mossad kidnapping of Mordechai Vanunu, who exposed the size of Israel’s nuclear arsenal – in excess of 200 nukes – in the Murdoch press in 1986. One of the few creditable actions of Murdoch’s Times was to run this story, but the fact that Vanunu had previously unsuccessfully offered it to Maxwell’s Mirror Group put Mossad onto him, the result being his abduction via a fake holiday to Rome. Maxwell was up to his neck in this crime. It should be recalled that, after Maxwell finally drowned himself in the sea, fearing imminent exposure of his embezzlement of hundreds of millions of pounds of his workers’ pension funds, he was buried in Jerusalem, on the Mount of Olives.

Continue reading →

Materialist Analysis, Zionism and the Jewish Question: Reply to a Comrade

The comment below was recently received in response to the Draft Theses on the Jews and Modern Imperialism that was published on this site in September. The issues raised are on a qualitatively higher political level than most previous responses received to these theses, and therefore require as full a political reply as possible. So I am turning the response to them into a separate item, in order to address the issues posed properly. Comrade Eric’s comment reads in full as follows:

The problem with this materialist analysis is that there isn’t a material connection between the American-Jewish bourgeoisie and the state of Israel. Or rather there is a connection but it is of no particular significance compared with the connections between the American bourgeoisie and other states in general. Israel is not the state of the Jewish bourgeoisie. It does not defend Jewish property throughout the world.

That many of today’s top capitalists in America are Jewish is surely of some significance in determining American orientation towards Israel and foreign policy in the Middle East in general. But if, for example, we look at Sheldon Adelson, the most notorious Zionist fundraiser and lobbyist, we find that he was not a Zionist until 1988. (See http://theweek.com/article/index/229275/sheldon-adelson-7-surprising-facts-about-2012s-biggest-donor). Such individuals play the role of philanthropists, party funders and lobbyists but their attachment to Israel is ideological rather than material and is thus plastic. Indeed until 1967 Jewish elites in America had very little interest in Israel at all. It was the ten day war that transformed Israel into a strategic asset and allowed Jews to express support for Israel without fear of being accused of dual loyalty. Norman Finkelstein locates 1967 as the year when the Holocaust Industry kicked off. Continue reading →

CIA’s Torture Damage Limitation exposes anti-Islamic State ‘Left’ militarists

The torture report on the CIA is an exercise in damage limitation. Realising how much the supposed ‘excesses’ of the Bush administration and the stratagems for US/Israeli world domination of the neocon Project for the New American Century have damaged the self-proclaimed moral authority of US imperialism, the Democratic Party are using this report, of the CIA’s Inspector-General, to try to distance themselves from some of the crimes of their predecessors.

It is cynical hogwash on the part of the Obama administration. This report was commissioned apparently in 2004, under Bush. Its findings were suppressed earlier but ultimately, in the aftermath of US imperialism’s obvious failures and defeats in Iraq and the wider Middle East, it became untenable for an American bourgeois establishment that is not (as yet) prepared to openly break with the formal pretence of democracy, to suppress these facts indefinitely. Not if it wanted to continue the hubris and chutzpah that makes US Presidents believe they have the authority to lecture the world on ‘human rights’.

Continue reading →

Phoney Obama Exposed by Ferguson Black Struggle

The balloon of illusion in Barack Obama is bursting. It was inevitable that the election of America’s first Black President would lead to a temporary dampening down of struggle by Blacks and working class people more generally against capitalism and its effects. That was the reason Obama was handed the Democratic nomination in the first place.  After the extreme repression, warmongering, rampant venality, and finally near-economic collapse of the Bush years, US capitalism desperately needed a more attractive face to head off the likelihood of a social explosion.

Obama more than fitted the bill: as not only a liberal, but a Black liberal to boot, he was the ideal man to do this job for the bourgeoisie. His progress through a two-party political system that is both thoroughly stitched up and fundamentally still intact – no real challenge has been made to the twin parties of US capital for many decades – was a reflection of the fact that he was the rulers’ man for the job. And he temporarily succeeded in co-opting many previously very angry Black and other working class people to accept that his administration was the only thing realistically on offer. A historically very weak US left that had begun to sense that things were beginning to swing to the left in the late Bush years, with rising anti-war activism and accelerating Black and working class anger over atrocities like the attacks on the victims of Hurricane Katrina, was abruptly becalmed by Obama.

Continue reading →

Michael Brown solidarity camp in London, England

Dear Kitty. Some blog

This video is called Justice for Michael Brown; protest at the US Embassy, London 27/08/14.

By Joana Ramiro in Britain:

Michael Brown solidarity camp to be set up

Wednesday 26th November 2014

PROTESTERS vowed to camp outside the US embassy in London this evening in solidarity with the family of Michael Brown, shot dead by a police officer in the US.

They will assemble in Grosvenor Square from 5.30pm to call for justice after a grand jury in Ferguson, Missouri, deemed Darren Wilson innocent of illegally killing Mr Brown.

“It is really important for us to show solidarity globally when there is injustice and racism,” Black Activists Rising Against the Cuts (Barac) co-chair Zita Holbourne told the Star.

“People are relating to it because there are similar cases going on here.”

Barac will host a vigil in the square along with the National Union of…

View original post 279 more words