Against Chauvinism, Against Nationalism!

Posted on May 24, 2008 by @ndy

Zabalaza Anarchist Communist Front – ZACF
May 23 2008

As the media, the politicians and the “experts” rack their brains in search of the cause of the “criminality” and “xenophobia” that has killed 42 people in 10 days and driven [at least] 15,000 from their homes, organisations of the working class have come closer to the truth than any of these wise men and women.

The Zabalaza Anarchist Communist Front supports and replies to the Abahlali baseMjondolo Statement on the Xenophobic Attacks in Johannesburg.

Abahlali baseMjondolo [the South African shackdwellers’ movement] tell how “the anger of the poor can go in many directions”. They tell how fury is stirred up by “the rats and the fires and the lack of toilets”, by unemployment, homelessness and mandrax. They tell how people are “damaged” in a world where few are rich and many are poor.

The demon that has been unleashed in Gauteng, that is spreading to Mpumalanga and other provinces, is the demon of poverty. It is the child of the demon of capitalism, of the demon of exploitation.

But another demon has also been unleashed. This is the demon of NATIONALISM.

Abahlali point out that all the poor, all the workers, face “the same kind of oppression”. They call on all the poor and the workers to join in struggle against this oppression. The Zabalaza Anarchist Communist Front joins this call.

But against this unity of the working class appears another unity, a false unity, the unity of nationalism. This is a false unity between the rich and the poor, between the oppressor and the oppressed. It is a false unity that divides those who should be united. It proclaims that because the master and the slave were born in the same country, they have something in common, from which the slaves of other countries must be excluded.

The ZACF does not deny or reject bonds of language, culture and tradition. But in the greatest of struggles, the struggle against poverty, exploitation and oppression, we proclaim that class unity, the unity of all the oppressed and exploited, must come first.

When Winnie Madikizela-Mandela declares that those who attack foreigners are not real “South Africans”, she calls up the demon of nationalism. She says that to be South African is good, and not to be South African is bad. She presents herself as a leader who can decide who are the real South Africans. And like so many politicians, she would surely say we should be “proudly South African” – as if where you are born is the most important thing to be proud of.

These are the divisions that keep us in slavery, that stop us uniting against our true enemies. Our true enemies – the real criminals – are the capitalists and the state, the robbers who exploit us and the politicians who lie to us. Always these partners stand together against us, and seek to stop us standing together against them. They so fill our heads with lies that some of us even think the insane rise in food prices is somehow the work of foreigners – when clearly it is the work of the small band of capitalists of all countries who control the world’s food.

Poverty and oppression can never be resolved through capitalism or the state.

The ZACF agrees with the greatest part of Abahlali’s analysis and supports the bulk of their demands. But we have one difference. We cannot join in their call for “a police force that serves the people”. No police force can be anything other than a force of repression, a force for the state to keep itself on top and the masses at the bottom, a force for the defence of the rich against the poor. Again and again the police have shown this against the movements of the poor, arresting, torturing and murdering us. Not to mention their attacks on immigrants. When the politicians condemn poor South Africans for attacking foreigners, it is because they wish to preserve this power of violence for themselves and their forces alone.

We can and do fight to stop the worst police repression. And any of us, in fear of our lives, will seek the help of the police when there is no alternative. We cannot blame anyone for seeking refuge with the police, or for calling them in to prevent imminent attacks.

But we hope for something better. If there is no alternative, let us try to create one. Let us build our movements to the point where immigrants – or women facing rape, or gay and lesbian people facing chauvinistic violence – do not need to seek the dubious help of the police. Let us build strong, organised working class communities that can defend themselves and their comrades against repression and chauvinism.

And let us build our movements to the point where they can fight oppression in every form, everywhere. The dockworkers of Durban recently prevented a shipment of weapons from passing through South Africa to the Mugabe regime – but the weapons reached the butcher of Harare by another route. With a stronger movement, an international movement of the working class, we could halt all future shipments. We could cease quarreling over the supposed ideals of tyrants and topple tyranny. We could cease fighting over who should get a house, and demand and obtain houses for all. We could cease blaming our brothers and sisters for “taking jobs”, and demand and get jobs for all. We could cease seeking scapegoats for soaring food prices, and force a halt in the rise in prices as a step towards food for all. We could win ID books for all – or better still, a world in which none will need ID books. We could tear down the Lindela concentration camp. And building a global movement that reaches across every border, we could proclaim to the whole world:

NO BORDERS! NO NATIONS! NO DEPORTATIONS!

Posted in Anarchism, Anti-fascism, State / Politics | Leave a comment

GO PIES!

Posted on May 23, 2008 by @ndy

Tonight Geelong were

STUNNED
RIPPED APART
PULVERISED
HAMMERED
CLINICALLY DESTROYED!

Collingwood stun Geelong
The Australian

COLLINGWOOD stunned AFL reigning premiers Geelong tonight, smashing them by 86 points with a brutal and brilliant team performance at the MCG. The Magpies’ fierce tackling set the agenda from the opening bounce and they dominated all but a few minutes of the match, winning 20.14 (134) to 7.6 (48)…

Magpies rip apart Cats
Raman Goraya
ABC

Geelong’s undefeated start to the season came to an astonishing end courtesy of an 86-point drubbing by Collingwood at the MCG on Friday evening. The Magpies were ferocious at ground level and even more relentless in attack as they powered to a faultless 20.14 (134) to 7.6 (48) victory to move into fifth position on the AFL ladder…

Magpies pulverise sorry Cats
Andrew Wu
Sportal

Geelong’s winning run is over after Collingwood rediscovered its competitive edge to deliver its best performance of the season and stun the reigning premier by 86 points at the MCG on Friday night. Save for a five-minute burst at the start of the second half, the Magpies comprehensively outplayed Geelong setting up the 20.14 (134) to 7.6 (48) demolition with a powerhouse first half when they outscored the Cats 11 goals to three…

Posted in Cats, Collingwood | Leave a comment

Citizens say the darnedest things

Posted on May 23, 2008 by @ndy

Following on from the revelation that the Royal Canadian Kilted Yaksmen were big fans of the Canadian Punk Rock Band The Suicide Pilots comes an editorial from the Upright Ottawa Citizens’ Association.

The ‘What Do You Expect’ dept.
The Ottawa Citizen
May 23, 2008

Many Canadians likely would want to dismiss Jeffrey Monaghan as nothing more than a misguided young man, but in fact he has provided a service by restoring a measure of unity to our fractured political body.

That is, politicians of all stripes are united in their belief that Mr. Monaghan is a misguided young man.

Ok, perhaps that’s not exactly how politicians are putting it, but they are agreed that Mr. Monaghan is wrong to complain that the RCMP is persecuting him and his friends. If anything, the consensus seems to be — rightly — that the police would have been derelict had they not done some checking into the group’s activities.

Mr. Monaghan belongs to a punk rock band that calls itself the Suicide Pilots, and its logo is an image of airplane heading towards the Parliament Buildings. In the post 9/11 world, this is a bit like making jokes about hijackers at the airport. If you joke about hijackers at the check-in, people are going to notice and start asking questions. It’s disingenuous to then react with righteous indignation and claim that you are shocked — shocked! — to be mistaken even momentarily for a terrorist.

An intriguing question: just how many jokes about hijacking a plane does the Al Qaeda Training Manual actually contain? And are hijackers instructed not to make jokes to airport authorities about their intentions to commit a terrorist attack upon boarding? Or is there, in fact, a strict limit on the number of jokes concerning their immediate goals members of the terrorist cells are able to relate? Inquiring minds demand answers.

The Citizen continues:

The Suicide Pilots learned from documents obtained through the Privacy Act that their band had caught the attention of the RCMP. Actually, police already knew Mr. Monaghan. He was arrested last year while working on a temporary assignment with Environment Canada, on suspicion of leaking government materials relating to environmental policy. Mr. Monaghan was associated with an anarchist group in Ottawa at the time and while no charges have been laid, he has made clear that he is a fierce political opponent of the government.

“Actually” — that is, in reality — it appears that the investigation into the band was launched almost immediately upon Monaghan’s arrest. Further, the investigation concerned not just the supposed leak — the treatment of which raises other issues — but Monaghan himself, his band, and his political activities as a whole, including — but presumably not limited to — his involvement in Exile, an anarchist infoshop. “According to documents obtained by Monaghan through the Privacy Act, two days [after his arrest] the RCMP decided to investigate the band, which “compares Harper to Hitler.” The handful of pages released by Monaghan of the 184 pages he obtained indicate that police examined the band’s lyrics and Monaghan’s involvement in an anarchist bookstore” (Mounties probe band: Investigate lyrics, logo, Elizabeth Thompson, The Gazette, May 22, 2008).

Now, Mr. Monaghan is absolutely correct to insist that police should not be harassing people for their political views, no matter how eccentric they might be. But celebrating suicide terrorism — as the name and logo of the band seem to do, at least at first glance — can hardly be dismissed as just another variety of political dissent. Mr. Monaghan and his fellow musicians are no terrorists, but it’s hard to blame the RCMP for wanting to confirm that.

Uh-huh. Well, actually, the band’s logo can be dismissed, quite easily. (Try it at home.) But the point is that it wasn’t. By an institution — the RCMP’s Integrated National Security Enforcement Team — dedicated to combatting non-state terrorism. On what basis? Do the Yaksmen seriously believe that a terrorist organisation would form a band and call it The Suicide Pilots? If so, then the RCMP’s account of the terrorist threat requires some very serious revision:

Threats to our national security are continually changing, presenting an “intelligence challenge” to governments and law enforcement around the world. Potential terrorists may not have yet engaged in criminal activity and are therefore difficult to recognize and impede. Terrorist organizations, whether foreign or domestically-based are increasingly sophisticated, with members linked through technology and loosely linked groups or cells, allowing them to operate in an environment where borders are virtual and detection is difficult. This global operations base for terrorist groups emphasizes the importance of an integrated policing approach where intelligence is shared among countries around the world.

On the other hand, “increasingly sophisticated” potential terrorists may also form punk bands, call themselves The Suicide Pilots, and employ a silly cartoon as their logo; a real ““intelligence challenge”, this sneaky tactic.

The editorial concludes that “The anarchists with whom Mr. Monaghan has been associated may not like our system of government, but they’re lucky to be living under it”; to be precise, to be spied upon by it on the basis of their cartoons.

The last word goes to The Suicide Pilots:

SP and the Terror Coppers!
May 22, 2008

It appears some idle bureaucrats in Ottawa’s spy departments have been evaluating the terror-ness of The Suicide Pilots.

A note on our logo: Please, please, notice the plane has a face. Unless you’re a crude and improbate crap-sack, you will recognise that “planes” do not have faces. Therefore, if this “plane” has a face, is it really a “plane”? Now, silly reactionaries, ask yourself that question. If you’re being snide, let us help you: The answer is no! (our apologies for all individuals that did not need that condescending explanation). That is not a plane. It is an image of a plane with a puzzled face. That means it’s a symbol, or metaphor, or whatever the fuck you want to call it. Please feel the freedom to interpret it any particular way you’d like. We’ve displayed the image publicly and have therefore accepted the risks of independent interpretation. So please, eat that shit up.

Authoritarian states have a long history of suppressing dissent. Some of history’s most powerful images of dissent have been expressed through various means of art (for the record, we don’t consider our art, or expression, or music – for that matter – particularly important). The fact that the gargantuan “War on Terror” apparatus of the State has identified and catalogued our work is an example of the ridiculousness of this phony war. Of course, there have been many individuals directly impacted by this war’s racism. We do not want to understate those abuses. Along with the renditions, racism, and other forms of oppression perpetuated by the “War on Terror” campaign, the spying on social activists, artists and others, displays the real character of the State. It shows a closed group of power-hungry megalomaniacs entirely concerned with protecting their power and suppressing movements that challenge their authority and legitimacy.

Paranoid governments are prone to attacking artists and dissidents. Perhaps the paranoia evident in this enormous police apparatus is an expression of the system’s weakness; the tighter their grip, the more people will slip through their fingers. As more folk find themselves on the fringes – disenfranchised, manipulated, persecuted & cast aside by a system emphasizing property and profit – resistance to this abusive structure will grow. Things desperately need to change; the more those at the top of the hierarchy struggle to hold on to the reins of power, the more apparent it becomes, even to those who never thought themselves radical, that change is imminent. We would like to believe that this bloated, top-heavy, cop-shop-State – being built by people, can be broken down just the same. Sarah Polley shall lead the charge that sees Harper swingin’ in the breeze, so much crow meat… Apologies to Ms. Polley if they take that last sentiment as seriously as our poor little plane.

For centuries the buildings atop of Garrison Hill (aka Parliament Hill) have coordinated the violence of this colonial enterprise. No empires last. When in Rome, do as the Vandals.

FOR A LIFE WITHOUT DRUDGERY
FOR A HOLIDAY WITH NO BEGINNING OR END
FOR A SOCIETY WITHOUT PARANOID COPS AND TERRORCRATS
FOR A MEDIA WITHOUT SENSATIONALISM AND TRIVIALITY
SMASH THE STATE!

Posted in !nataS, Music, War on Terror | Leave a comment

Troy Southgate as state asset?

Posted on May 23, 2008 by @ndy

Troy Southgate is the political bizarro responsible for establishing a fascist groupuscule known as the New Right in the UK, and for propagating the bizarro doctrine of ‘national anarchism’. In Australia (and um, New Zealand), his Antipodean equivalent is Welf Herfurth, who’s established a groupuscule of the same name propagating the same philosophy (and to which a few local teenagers and twenty-somethings have been attracted). Anyway, it’s all rather old information now, but Southgate appears to have dabbled in ‘security’.

In 2005, the ‘Anglo-Saxon League’ emerged in the UK.

WELCOME……

An Introduction to the Anglo Saxon League.
We are a NON PROFIT [Mutual] aid organisation for members & their families.
We believe in building a NON materialist, Traditional Family based alternative to today[‘]s modern world.
Our way may not be everyone[‘]s, but it’s ours.
We will not push or [implement] our way of life on anyone & we in turn expect the same.
Please view our website & decide for yourself.

The usual shite.

What’s rather odd about the League (or rather was — the League is apparently now defunct) is its contact address: Suite 530, 27 Colmore Row, Birmingham, B3 2EW, England. Further, the same address is used by ‘BMB Security Services’. The supposed connection between Southgate and BMB is that the League was another one of his various front groups — like many others on the political fringes, Southgate has a habit of establishing one group after another: the English Nationalist Movement, the National Revolutionary Faction, the English People’s Party, the Anglo-Saxon League, the New Right, et cetera. The BMB site (no longer available) linked to MI5. This, supposedly, constitutes evidence of Southgate’s sneaky service for the state… a rather tenuous link, in my opinion.

Curiously, a company of the same name (“BMB Security Pty Ltd”) also operates in Australia — but this is probably just a coincidence.

Posted in !nataS, Anti-fascism | 6 Comments

Boris gets Spiked

Posted on May 23, 2008 by @ndy
    More fun and games courtesy of the bizarros @ Spiked.

Boris gets spiked
James Turley
Weekly Worker
(#722, Thursday. May 22 2008)

Ex-communists continue their rightward evolution, reports James Turley

One of the less well circulated bits of journalism on the recent London mayoral elections was Dr Michael Fitzpatrick’s piece, ‘I’m backing Boris for London mayor’ [March 31, 2008]. Not so remarkable, you might think – he was certainly not the only one, since Boris Johnson did indeed pick up the job.

But the esteemed doctor’s justification for this support was not so commonplace. In 2002, Ken Livingstone had publicly stated that his then unborn child would not be having the combined measles, mumps and rubella immunisation, during a related health scare, and would instead be going to “one of the sleazy private clinics” that had cashed in by giving the old separate jabs. Boris Johnson, by contrast, went so far as to lambaste the Daily Mail for consistently intensifying the panic. For Dr Fitzpatrick, this represents the qualitative difference between the two candidates.

Just a curious individual hobby horse? No – the article, if readers have yet to guess, appeared on Spiked Online, the journalistic manifestation of the tight, clandestine political group once known as the Revolutionary Communist Party. [1]

Spiked’s coverage of the new mayor has been generally positive. It views him as some kind of libertarian, and enthusiastically urges him to be more openly so (though Spiked editor Brendan O’Neill has criticised his new ban on drinking on public transport). It is similar to Socialist Appeal’s approach to Chávez – you might call it ‘critical fawning’ (the problem for Socialist Appeal is that Chávez is not the future of socialism, and the problem for Spiked is that Johnson is not really a libertarian).

The new mayor, in an exciting twist, has repaid the favour, employing regular Spiked contributor Munira Mirza as his cultural advisor. Mirza’s main contribution to the ideological melange of this curious project has been to add to its highly unfavourable attitude to multiculturalism. “Multicultural policies,” she writes on the Guardian’s ‘Comment is free’ blog, “have encouraged ethnic-minority groups to believe they are in need of special recognition … paradoxically, by insisting on engaging with muslims as a separate group, the authorities make many of them feel even more excluded.” [2]

Munira might simply be a ‘fluke’, employed on the basis of her papers for the rightwing think tank, Policy Exchange; but rumours abound that she will not be the last appointee from the Spiked project.

The artists formerly known as the RCP

All this seems a far cry from a group that once called itself revolutionary and communist. To explain this, it is worth looking at the history of the RCP (and its successors), one of the weirder tales of post-war Trotskyism.

In 1973, a large number of members of the International Socialists were expelled by Tony Cliff. Their opposition had not had much cohesion at all, but they were nevertheless a faction of sorts, and got the boot at roughly the same time as a number of other such IS factions, when Cliff was “rediscovering” Lenin (that is, pseudo-Leninist bureaucratic centralism). [The IS changed its name to the Socialist Workers Party in January 1977.]

The group soon split again, with one section joining the Labour Party (the secretive Discussion Group around Roy Tearse) and another rapidly signing up to a virulent third-worldist strain of Stalinism (the Revolutionary Communist Group). The rump was organised around bright young Kent sociologist Frank Furedi, and after a few years as the Revolutionary Communist Tendency, decided that they were a party after all, and launched their paper The Next Step.

Their main ideological shibboleth in the early days followed on from Lenin’s (correct) characterisation of reformism as organically tied to and reliant on imperialism. Furedi and his allies believed that this implied two things – firstly, that the widespread support of reformism in the British working class rendered it as such a non-revolutionary entity; secondly, that any campaign that promoted reforms was objectively a threat to the revolution. The RCP became infamous for an ultra-sectarian attitude to all such ‘reformist’ campaigns, even going so far as to sneer at the 1984-85 miners’ strike and demand a strike ballot well beyond the time when such a ballot may even have been possible.

Furedi believed that the Labour Party was imminently going to undergo a total crisis, and – since other left groups were contaminated with ‘reformism’ – the RCP was likely to replace it. For the 1987 election it organised the Red Front with the Revolutionary Democratic Group and Red Action (a street-fighting squad then primarily engaged in militant anti-fascism and Irish republicanism). The results were desultory in the extreme; in places they were outperformed by the Monster Raving Loony Party.

This, along with the collapse of the Soviet bloc, was the final straw for Furedi – the working class was, if not dead, at least defeated for the next historical period. Consequently, what mattered were those apparently ‘non-political’ aspects of all our lives, whose analysis would yield a revolutionary strategy and whose resolution would produce a revolutionary agent. Somewhat fortuitously, then, the model of a Marxist was to be … the sociology professor.

Furedi declared a “turn to the suburbs”, which in practice meant total immersion in the academic system. Its former journal Living Marxism became LM and then folded after ITN successfully sued it for £375,000 over the LM allegation that ITN’s coverage of Serb atrocities was partially falsified. Its main successors are Spiked and the Institute of Ideas think tank. The RCP was formally liquidated in 1997.

The particular academic milieu that proved most amenable to RCP entry was the positivist-scientist ‘third culture’, with its veneration of technological progress and general technocratic coloration. Whereas in the past the RCP was known for setting up myriad front groups, today the ex-RCP manages to find its way into leading positions in a whole network of think tanks, umbrella groups and lobbies, listed by long-time bête noire George Monbiot in an article for the Guardian: Sense About Science, Global Futures, the Science Media Centre, Progress Educational Trust, British Pregnancy Advisory Service, and the Pro-Choice Forum. [3]

For a time, it was highly influential in the broadcast media, and effectively produced its own TV programme on the environmentalist movement, Against nature, in 1997. This caused a minor ‘reds under the bed’ scandal at the time. [4]

They need not have worried. The operative political project of the ex-RCP group is a thoroughgoing bourgeois libertarianism. While not as explicitly rightwing as (particularly green) critics make out, its objective result has been very close cooperation with what are effectively fronts and lobbies for corporate interests. Sense About Science, for example, is very enthusiastic about corporate GM research; the RCP project has also promoted Forest, the ‘smokers’ rights’ lobby funded by the tobacco industry.

One area where it has maintained a dubious continuity with the left is in its rather monomaniacal approach to anti-imperialism. As mentioned, LM foundered on a lawsuit over ITN’s coverage of the Bosnian war – the RCP was one of those declared Serb-defencist groups which were never to be found acknowledging the grotesque atrocities perpetrated by Milosevic, Karadzic and company.

‘Rightwing nutcases’?

It is easy to dismiss the RCP evolution as a cautionary tale – yet more proof that an ultra-leftist is, as Trotsky put it, an opportunist afraid of his own shadow. The gap between the heady left hysteria of The Next Step and the smartly-suited dinner parties of the LM days seems enormous, but the key break took only months. The formal and final abandonment of the working class as the agent of political change – indeed, of ‘agency’, full stop – was bound to lead to a wrenching shift in political orientation. The only variable was precisely which blind alley Furedi’s sect would take.

But there are lessons – positive lessons – to be learned from both phases of the RCP story. It is true that, in the 1980s and today, the left is rendered effectively inert by its series of concessions to reformism. The kowtowing of the Socialist Workers Party to Labour loyalists in the Stop the War Coalition, for instance, ruled out any electoral intervention, and indeed anything other than dwindling protest marches. The transformation of Socialist Party activists into trade union bureaucrats has led to serious sell-outs, too.

Likewise, one does not have to be a full-blooded climate change denialist like Furedi to recognise the dark underbelly of large sections of the green movement. As left groups scramble to liquidate themselves into the green movement, the Spiked project’s reminders of the reactionary nature of most variants of official greenism is timely. It is true that simply breaking up big enterprises – replacing Tesco with local greengrocers, mechanised farms with ‘old MacDonald’ operations and so on – would produce such a drastic drop in global production that literally billions would starve (as opposed to the millions at present).

And, to return to Munira Mirza, there is a legitimate line of attack to be brought against multiculturalism. On this, the RCP gets as close to the truth as a group deliberately limited to liberal positions can get. Another of its ‘cadre’, Kenan Malik, has made very forceful criticisms of the move from political struggles (which unite) to ‘cultural’ struggles (which divide).

All of this will be of little concern to Johnson, who is simply looking for some brainy ammunition against multiculturalism. Indeed, this alliance is not just one more iteration of the Spiked project – it represents another break for the RCP.

Despite the rather feeble attempts of Dr Fitzpatrick to paint him as a defender of science, and of Emily Hill to call him a libertarian, the London mayor is a figure on the hard authoritarian right of the Tory Party. Though they once defended fox-hunting on libertarian grounds, the RCP has never infiltrated anyone quite like Boris.

Whether this pans out as another ideological shift for Spiked, a flash in the pan, or a chaotic second-time-farce replay of Ken Livingstone’s alliance with Socialist Action, it is certainly not business as usual in the sociology department at Kent.

For unconditional military defence of the Chinese deformed workers state!
China is not capitalist!
For proletarian political revolution!

Posted in Trot Guide | Leave a comment

Resistance : Another one bites the dust

Posted on May 22, 2008 by @ndy

Following the purge of several dozen (that is, all) members of the Leninist Party Faction (LPF) from the Democratic Socialist Perspective (DSP), and the expulsion of James Crafti from the Melbourne branch of Resistance, comes news of the expulsion of another LPF member from the DSP’s Youth Brigade the same “independent” socialist yoof organisation, run by, for and on behalf of the yoof.

May 20, 2008

Resistance National Council Statement on the Expulsion of James Crafti and Shua Garfield

On May 18 the Resistance National Council (NC) voted to expel Melbourne Branch member James Crafti and Sydney Branch member Shua Garfield from Resistance.

This decision was not taken lightly and there have been very few, if any, cases where such disciplinary action has occurred in Resistance.

Both James Crafti and Shua Garfield have the right to submit a written appeal to the next Resistance National Conference and a report on the decision of the NC to invoke Rule 13 will be given at the Conference, as required in Rule 14, Section 6…

The statement then proceeds to outline the offences allegedly committed by the pair, the crux of which is the public expression of dissatisfaction with the DSP:

The NC reaffirmed our position of political solidarity with the DSP as outlined in the Resistance Constitution [unavailable online]. It ruled that Resistance members do not have a right to publicly and openly criticize the DSP. It was deemed that such attacks harm Resistance given that:

• Resistance supports building a revolutionary party as stated in the introduction to the Resistance Constitution.
• Resistance and the DSP have broad agreement over the main political issues.
• Resistance receives significant material support from the DSP including the use of GLW [Green Left Weekly] to publish a regular Resistance Page and the use their offices for Resistance activities.

Resistance does not deny its members their right to have criticisms of other organizations and our political perspectives. However there is a process, as outlined in the constitution, to convince other members of Resistance to alter our political positions and actions, including changing our long held position of working with and helping to build the DSP.

The Resistance National Conference will be held from Friday June 27–Sunday June 29 in Sydney, employing the slogan ‘Turn Anger into Action!’. As for the GLW, it describes itself not as the publication of either the DSP, Resistance or the Socialist Alliance, but “a proudly independent voice” which “aims to provide a much-needed forum for discussion and debate about changing the world”; GLW “is your paper. As a grassroots publication, it thrives on your input”. In reality, both Resistance, SA and GLW are strictly subordinate to the DSP.

As for Shua, aside from being a member of the LPF, their alleged crime was to send an email from the Sydney Resistance address, allegedly attacking Resistance/the DSP. The NC claims that this action constituted “a threat to the security of property of Resistance (particularly its membership lists)”, and therefore warranted their immediate expulsion. Thus:

In response to the posting to various email lists of public attacks on Resistance and the DSP by Sydney Branch member Shua Garfield, the NC voted to charge Shua Garfield with violating Article 2 of the Constitution and the Introduction to the Constitution. Shua Garfield’s actions also included accessing and using the [Sydney Resistance] email account to send a statement on the recent split in the DSP. The NC deemed that there was a threat to the security of property of Resistance (particularly its membership lists), as shown by the accessing of Resistance email accounts and lists, and therefore invoked Rule 13, Section 6 of the constitution to take immediate disciplinary action and expel Shua Garfield.

In re-asserting authority over the DSP, the leadership is certainly being thorough. The two main problems it will encounter in future will be accounting to curious members for the continued failure of SA to be anything other than a front group, and the inevitable demoralisation that such events as the expulsion of a significant minority of members from its ranks will have on those who remain loyal. As for those expelled, some may be tempted to (re-)constitute the LPF as a separate party; others, to join one of the other Leninist parties currently in existence: Socialist Alternative and Solidarity being the main contenders, Direct Action (a tiny group formed in 2006 by former members of the DSP) and the Socialist Party being others. On the other hand, some may even consider joining the Greens.

Posted in !nataS, Trot Guide | 12 Comments

Jock Palfreeman in court

Posted on May 22, 2008 by @ndy

Paul “Jock” Palfreeman, the Australian accused of the murder of Andrey Monov and the attempted murder of Antoan Zahariev on the night of December 28, 2007, faced court for the first time today in Sofia, Bulgaria, having previously been denied bail. Palfreeman is pleading not guilty to both charges. If found guilty, Palfreeman could be sentenced to between 10 and 20 years in jail or life imprisonment with or without the possibility of commuted sentence. Palfreeman could also be ordered to pay compensation to Monov’s family if found guilty.

Family faces $200k compo fine for murder, Charles Miranda, The Daily Telegraph, May 22, 2008
First hearing in Australian stabber’s case, Petar Kostadinov, Sofia Echo, May 21, 2008
Case Opened, The Frontier Times, May 21, 2008
Case of Bulgarian Boy Murder by Australian Stabber Enters Court, novinite.com, May 21, 2008

On a somewhat odd note, another report in the Bulgarian media (Online blog and website keep Joе Paul Freeman in countenance, FOCUS Information Agency, May 21, 2008) states that “Meanwhile there is online blog in the support of Joе Paul Freeman which is focused on the unfairly Bulgarian justice due to the fact that Andrei’s father is prominent psychotherapist. There is also online website in memory of Andei.” The former is presumably either a reference to this blog or to one of two Facebook sites maintained by Jock’s friends in Australia: JOCK PALFREEMAN IS NOT GUILTY and Comrade Jock Palfreeman: a group for those who support and love the man!.

Posted in State / Politics | Leave a comment

Israel, Jews, the state, anarchism…

Posted on May 22, 2008 by @ndy

Some of my best friends [are] anti-Semitic
Barry Cohen
The Australian
May 21, 2008

MY favourite definition of an anti-Semite is “a person who hates Jews more than is absolutely necessary”. Susan Chandler, the former Victorian Liberal Party campaign manager who described a colleague as a “greedy f..king Jew”, appears to qualify…

After World War II, and the attempt by the Nazis to destroy European Jewry, there was sympathy and support for the establishment of a Jewish homeland in the mandated territories of Palestine. When the UN voted in November 1947 to create an Arab and a Jewish state, the neighbouring Arab countries attacked the Jewish state.

[See: United Nations General Assembly Resolution 181, November 29, 1947; The 1948 Arab-Israeli War, also known by Israelis as the War of Liberation, and by Palestinians as al Nakba (Arabic: النكبة, “the Catastrophe”) was the first in a series of wars fought between the newly declared State of Israel and its Arab neighbors in the long-running Arab-Israeli conflict. The War, commencing immediately on the termination of the Mandate on 15 May 1948, was fought mostly on the territory of the British Mandate of Palestine, and for a short time also on the Sinai Peninsula, marking an exodus of hundreds of thousands of Arabs from their residency. The 1948 war was concluded with the 1949 Armistice Agreements.]

That Israel survived was first met with disbelief, then awe and finally anger. Those, particularly on the Left, who had wept openly for the murdered millions, started to resent Jews no longer being victims…

As a young boy growing up in the aftermath of World War II, I hoped that anti-Semitism would gradually fade away. Regrettably, that has not been the case. It is alive and well and, it would appear, still common among what was once called polite society.

On Monday, Media Watch ran a story (Saying Goodbye is Hard to Do) on the spiking of an article by Ed O’Loughlin, his final contribution for Fairfax, published by The Age but not The Sydney Morning Herald.

Wars between worlds
Ed O’Loughlin
The Age
May 10, 2008

THE car was still burning when we came upon the scene. A bullet-proof plate from a flak jacket lay near the wreckage, its plastic layers peeled open like the pages of a book. My “fixer” recognised the silver Pajero at once, and he hurried over to a colleague to find out what had happened. When he came back he looked almost puzzled. “It’s Fadel,” he said. “He’s dead!” And he started to weep for his friend.

In fact four were already dead, men and boys, and two more were to die of their wounds a few days later. But 23-year-old Reuters cameraman Fadel Shana was the one who made headlines.

Hundreds of innocent people die in Gaza every year – far more than we bother writing about in the West. But footage from Shana’s camera revealed that he had actually filmed an Israeli tank firing the shell that killed him, as he stood in his clearly marked press flak jacket, by his clearly marked press vehicle.

A second tank shell, fired several minutes after the first, sprayed would-be rescuers with a second cloud of three-centimetre “flechette” steel darts, killing 19-year-old Khalil Dogmoush and injuring several others, including freelance photographer Ashraf Abu Amra.

We didn’t know all of this at the time, as we stood by the wreckage of Shana’s vehicle. All we knew was that a press vehicle had been targeted minutes earlier, that we were standing beside that vehicle, fully exposed to a hillside where Israeli tanks were operating, and that an Israeli drone was whining overhead.

And we knew from long experience that, whatever had happened, the Israeli Defence Force would deny responsibility. This it duly did, claiming that its troops had fired only at armed militants who had attacked them at close range.

I have covered quite a few stories like this over the past 51/2 years, in Gaza and elsewhere. Since the present uprising began in 2000, close to 5000 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli action, according to figures from the Israeli rights group B’tselem. Slightly more than 1000 Israelis were killed by Palestinians. In the first three months of this year, 11 Palestinians died for every Israeli civilian.

Eman al-Hams was a 13-year-old schoolgirl who was machine-gunned to death at point blank range by an Israeli officer, who admitted the act on army radio. The officer was subsequently acquitted, promoted and decorated.

Asma al-Mughair, 16, and her brother Ahmed, 13, were both shot in the head on the roof of their home in Rafah, which was in the sights of an Israeli sniper’s nest, only 100 metres away. Seven members of the Ghaliya family were blown to bits while picnicking on a Gaza beach which Israeli artillery was shelling.

But if you Google any of the above names you will quickly learn – from armchair bloggers and Israeli Government spokespeople – that all of these stories are false, elaborate hoaxes concocted by anti-Semitic journalists to smear the state of Israel. Little wonder, then, that Israeli talkback was generally of the opinion that Fadel Shana got what he deserved…

Why was the story not published in the SMH? Ed O’Loughlin told Media Watch that “I was told informally that there were concerns about how the pro-Israel lobby would react to it”; the editor, Alan Oakley, is playing mum.

In addition to concerns over Ed O’Loughlin’s reportage — Michael Danby has denounced his “systematic bias against Israel, which is indeed both intellectually lazy and politically intemperate”, while Tzvi Fleischer maintains that Ed “is obviously a talented journalist who brilliantly distorts facts and substitutes opinions for news” — concern has also recently been expressed by the “pro-Israel lobby” over an address by Antony Lowenstein to a group of students at UNSW (“Uni students face heat over Loewenstein debate”, AJN, May 16, 2008). According to Anthony:

Zionists in Australia believe that continuing to sell the same discredited myths to a young generation will ensure a life-long love for Israel. But a growing number of vocal Jews are publicly questioning Israel’s brutality and rejectionism. The Palestinians deserve an equal hearing in the mainstream press (and the recent tour of Palestinian-American Ali Abunimah proved that this is starting to happen, away from the censorious Jewish community.)

The ongoing success of my work – aimed, incidentally, at a non-Jewish readership, as well as Jews, an audience that the Zionist lobby has no clue how to reach, preferring to pressure editors to block opposing views – indicates that the space here and overseas for critical thoughts is expanding. The tone of this laughable article, that somehow the students and the Zionist lobby must prove their allegiance to the “official” line on Israel/Palestine, is really a sign of weakness.

Since when was open debate frowned upon? The two-state solution is dead. New ideas are required. A serious and informed Jewish establishment would welcome it. Instead, we’re treated to the sorry sight of leaders and newspapers trying to seal the cracks.

I never realised I was so dangerous.

See also : A celebration that ignores the plight of Palestine, The Age, Michael Shaik and Antony Loewenstein, May 8, 2008 | Independent Australian Jewish Voices | Australians For Palestine | Anarchists Against the Wall | Messianic Troublemakers: The Past and Present Jewish Anarchism, Jesse Cohn, Zeek, April 2005 | Funk soul brother Uri Gordon’s blog Anarchy Alive! and his essay Israeli anarchism: Statist dilemmas and the dynamics of joint struggle, Anarchist Studies, 15.1, 2007 (PDF):

I would have liked to end this article on an optimistic note, but as it goes to print the situation in Israel/Palestine is worse than it has ever been. The Israeli government continues to make life hell for the residents of Gaza and the West Bank, and has adopted a policy of knee-jerk rejection towards any and every initiative for renewed negotiations. Among the Israeli public, wide support for the recent war in Lebanon and the lack of outcry at the ministerial appointment of Avigdor Lieberman – a barefaced racist advocating ethnic cleansing and centralisation of power – represent a mood of dazed passivity, fed by economic hardship and the constant revival of dark collective traumas. In such an environment, the efforts of anarchists and the wider left easily seem like a drop in the sea. Even when hundreds mobilise to protest the continued pounding of Gaza or the accelerated building of the segregation barrier, their voices largely fall on deaf ears as the seemingly-unstoppable engines of death churn on. As the nightmare unfolds, all that anarchists and their allies can do is hold on to their visions and continue the thankless work of building the infrastructures of joint struggle, never losing their hope for a breakthrough that will finally bring some solace to this orphaned land.

Sublime:

Ridiculous:

Posted in Anarchism, State / Politics | 17 Comments

Hail the Kilted Yaksmen

Posted on May 22, 2008 by @ndy

From the Department of Your-Taxes-At-Play:

Punk band The Suicide Pilots catches eye of anti-terror cops
The Canadian Press

OTTAWA — All it takes to get noticed by Canada’s top anti-terrorism team is a shocking band name and a provocative logo.

At least, that’s the contention of The Suicide Pilots, a self-described “no-name punk band” based in Ottawa that promotes itself with a cartoon image of an anthropomorphic plane swooping toward the Parliament Buildings.

Access to Information documents released by the band’s lawyer Tuesday show that the RCMP’s Integrated National Security Enforcement Team took a look at the group last year.

It started just after the band popped to brief national notoriety courtesy of its outspoken and politically active drummer, Jeffrey Monaghan.

“If you want an example of bloated police powers, this is it,” lawyer Yavar Hameed said in a news release.

Monaghan was alleged last spring to have leaked the environmental plan of the Conservative government, and was marched in handcuffs by the RCMP out of his contract job at Environment Canada.

He was never charged with anything, but his musical tastes – including a song titled “Harper Youth” – quickly attracted state scrutiny.

“Subject is a self-described anarchist and drummer in a punk band that compares (Prime Minister Stephen) Harper to Hitler,” says an RCMP occurrence report dated two days after Monaghan’s May 9, 2007 arrest.

The band’s myspace page depicts a “9/11 type drawing showing an airplane crashing into the Parliament; there is also anti-Harper songs from the band,” says an assistance request from the national security team to the Tech Crime unit.

The documents show that the force’s integrated cyber analysis team, the commercial crime unit and national security team were all involved.

The Canadian Security Intelligence Service was apprised. “Advise CSIS of our findings,” states a timeline for May 29.

The last entry is dated Sept. 8 and is marked “NFAR, CH” – RCMP jargon for No Further Action Required, Cancelled Here.

The band, in a statement, said the investigation is indicative of “Harper’s ‘War on Terror’ gone mad.”

The RCMP declined to comment.

Posted in !nataS, Music, War on Terror | 5 Comments

Michael Warby: Fascism and the Left

Posted on May 21, 2008 by @ndy

Michael Warby’s essay on ‘Fascism and the Left’ (Quadrant, May 2008, Volume LII, Number 5) addresses a long-standing pre-occupation of political ‘conservatives’: how to respond to the accusation ‘Fascist!’. This has found one of its most recent expressions in the form of a book by Jonah Goldberg, Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left from Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning (Doubleday, 2008).

At first glance, Liberal Fascism sounds like an extended remix of a Tory undergraduate response to the biting remarks of a Leninist cadre: “I know you are, but what am I?”. In a scathing review for The Nation (Conservative Cannibalism, February 21, 2008), Eric Alterman writes that “It’s a rare book, indeed, that can be fairly judged by its cover, but I really do think that a smiley face with a Hitler mustache tells you all you will ever need to know about Liberal Fascism“.

Naturally, the book became a No.1 bestseller.

To his er, credit, Warby’s review tries very hard to take Goldberg’s thesis seriously. “But, a small voice asks, is it true? Is fascism really a “left-wing” movement? Are modern US liberals “nice” fascists, as Goldberg alleges? No, no and no.”

And ah, no.

Actually, the proposition that ‘Fascism’ is a ‘leftist’ ideology is hardly novel. Thus while Alterman notes that “I see from my own ten seconds of Googling that cult leader Lyndon LaRouche beat Goldberg to this argument by five years with an essay titled “How Liberalism Created Fascism,” published by his presidential committee”, 70 years ago the council communist Otto Rühle argued that ‘The Struggle Against Fascism Begins with the Struggle Against Bolshevism’:

Russia must be placed first among the new totalitarian states. It was the first to adopt the new state principle. It went furthest in its application. It was the first to establish a constitutional dictatorship, together with the political and administrative terror system which goes with it. Adopting all the features of the total state, it thus became the model for those other countries which were forced to do away with the democratic state system and to change to dictatorial rule. Russia was the example for fascism.

It’s also worth keeping in mind Bakunin’s words of warning, written in 1866 (and expanded upon in subsequent writings on the intellectual class), regarding the potential impact of the Marxian conception of revolution. Noam Chomsky, in an interview with Robert Borofsky (Intellectuals and the Responsibilities of Public Life, Noam Chomsky interviewed by Robert Borofsky, Public Anthropology, May 27, 2001):

RB: Ivan Illich has talked about “disabling professions” – or really disabling professionals – who systematically disempower others through their claims to expertise. To what degree do you perceive elite experts, and more broadly academics, being a “new class” of apparatchiks who function to reinforce rather than challenge the status quo in America?

NC: That intellectuals, including academics, would become a “new class” of technocrats, claiming the name of science while cooperating with the powerful, was predicted by Bakunin in the early days of the formation of the modern intelligentsia in the 19th century. His expectations were generally confirmed, including his prediction that some would seek to gain state power on the backs of popular revolution, then constructing a “Red bureaucracy” that would be one of the worst tyrannies in history, while others would recognize that power lies elsewhere and would serve as its apologists, becoming mystifiers, “disablers,” and managers while demanding the right to function in “technocratic isolation,” in World Bank lingo.

I would, however, question the implication that there is some novelty in this beyond modalities, which naturally change as institutions change and develop. Isaiah Berlin described the intellectuals of Bakunin’s “Red bureaucracy” as a “secular priesthood,” not unlike the religious priesthood that performed similar functions in earlier times – functions described acidly by Pascal in his bitter rendition of the practices of the Jesuit intellectuals he despised, including their demonstration of “the utility of interpretation,” a device of manufacturing consent based on reinterpretation of sacred texts to serve wealth, power, and privilege. Berlin’s observation is accurate enough, and applies at home as well, and even more harshly for the reasons already mentioned: the apparatchiks and commissars could at least plead fear in extenuation.

In any case, Warby’s principal aim, aside from responding to Goldberg’s argument and to more closely examine the relationship between ‘right’ and ‘left’, is to safeguard the virtue of what he calls ‘Anglo-American conservatism’, and to ensure that the “liberal-conservative alliance” remains a sticky relationship. This makes a great deal of sense considering the role of Quadrant as a forum for the articulation of this ideology in the Australian context (although the alliance risks being permanently ruptured within the parliamentary wing by the eradication of its minority ‘liberal’ faction).

Part of the glue of the liberal-conservative alliance is an overlapping belief that there are real limits to what one can expect politics to do and that it is dangerous to go beyond those limits—on the grounds that the state is potentially dangerous; that political mechanisms are of limited effectiveness; that salvation is entirely a religious matter, not a political one. To accuse people whose politics is grounded in a sense of the limitations of politics as being “fascist” is to show either that you do not understand fascism, or that you do not understand liberal-conservatives, or that you do not care whether there is any truth to your rhetoric.

On this basis, one can view the Thatcher (1979–1990) and Reagan (1981–1989) governments as ‘conservative’, not ‘fascist’, even if they embraced ‘change’ in the name of ‘freedom’: “Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan were proponents of change, but proponents who wished to decrease, rather than increase, reliance on political mechanisms in support of a strong commitment to freedom. Merely advocating change does not place you on the Left.”

This is correct, insofar as the changes being proposed and carried out do not concern institutions considered as being fundamental to contemporary capitalist society (‘Western Civilization’). The references to ‘political mechanisms’ and ‘freedom’ can of course be read, in practice, as constituting the dismantling of the welfare state and the “political mechanisms” via which the general population are theoretically able to hold corporate power, and capital generally, to some form of public account. In short, the death of ‘social democracy’.

In Warby’s view, Goldberg has in fact written two books, one silly, one sensible: “The sensible and useful book shows how much fascism (including Nazism) had Left roots and how much more overlap modern progressivism (such as contemporary US liberalism) has with fascism than fascism has with Anglo-American conservatism… The silly and distracting book is the one trying to show US liberalism as largely of the same broad political movement as the various fascisms and therefore a form of fascism and the heir of fascism.”

What’s Left, What’s Right

THE MATTER TURNS on what fascism is and what makes something “of the Left”. Goldberg’s answer is based on fascism as a manifestation of the broad (and Left) movement of politics as a secular religion seeking unity by remaking society. As part of this, Goldberg has ultimately a simple categorisation of politics. Fascism is collectivist (true), the Left is collectivist (true), therefore fascism is of the Left… Goldberg wraps this in a larger argument about politics-as-secular-salvation involving deification of the state being inherently leftist, and a characteristic of fascism, hence fascism is leftist…

How do we define the Left? Being Left involves a commitment to change—that is, a rejection of the past: the more complete the rejection, the more Left you are. It involves a commitment that this change be delivered politically: the more encompassing the use of political mechanisms (and the political mechanisms one is willing to use) the more Left you are. It also involves a commitment to equality: the more complete the commitment to equality, the more Left you are. So a revolutionary socialist engages in a near total rejection of the past, is willing to use any political mechanism, if judged to be effective, to politicise all aspects of society, and is committed to as complete equality as is practicable…

So, can we envisage a collectivism that is not Left? Easily. One that is not based on rejection of the past and does not have equality as its prime public value. That would be fascism, then. So is fascism clearly “right-wing”?

If “Right” is the political opposite of “Left” then to be Right is to have no particular commitment to change—that is, not reject the past: the less you reject the past, the more Right you are. It involves some level of scepticism, or even hostility to political mechanisms: the more sceptical, the more Right you are. It involves rejecting the primacy of equality: the more you reject the primacy of equality, the more Right you are.

So an extreme right-winger wants as little change as possible, is highly sceptical about political mechanisms and is committed to something other than the primacy of equality. The last being the problem with talking about “the Right” since a range of values can be held to be not trumped by equality—such as liberty, authority, order, religion—and in almost any arrangement (such as including serious commitment to equality)…

To be continued…

Posted in Anti-fascism, State / Politics | 6 Comments