David North (ICFI) ~versus~ David Green (Grand River)

Posted on May 18, 2012 by @ndy

wsws.org is the online publication of the ICFI, the ‘International Committee of the Fourth International’. You may remember the ICFI from such rallies as took place in Melbourne in the early 1990s (when they were still known as the ‘Socialist Labour League’); the selling of their newspaper, Workers News, sometimes being accompanied by angry denunciations of anarchism.

Well, I do anyway.

In any case, the ICFI is one of umpteen FIs out there battling to maintain Brotsky’s Crotsky’s Drotsky’s Frotsky’s Trotsky’s legacy. For its part, the ICFI modestly describes itself as “the leadership of the world socialist movement… consist[ing] of Socialist Equality Party national sections throughout the world”. ‘The world’, in this instance, meaning Australia, Canada, Germany, the United Kingdom, the United States and Sri Lanka, and ‘the leadership’ an American bloke named David North.

(The history of the FI (est.1938) is complicated, and there are many different international associations claiming descent. Wikipedia, for example, lists 20, of which four–CWI, ICFI, ICL and IST–have a noticeable presence Down Under. Their size ranges from the tiny (eg. IBT) to the very, very small.)

In its current incarnation the ICFI, aka the leadership of the world socialist movement, developed in the wake of a split in the I during the mid-1980s. Bob Gould:

…after several years of intense activity, including publishing a bi-weekly newpaper for some time, [the Australian SLL] imploded in 1985, about the same time that the British Workers Revolutionary Party collapsed. Bob Pitt’s thorough political biography of WRP leader Gerry Healy [The Rise And Fall of Gerry Healy] explains most of the reasons for the collapse of the SLL/WRP current. The remnants of the SLL were subsequently incorporated into the Socialist Equality Party, and the newspaper Workers News was closed and incorporated in the World Wide Socialist Website.

So much for Australia. As Bob Pitt puts it: “In February 1986 supporters of David North, led by Dave Hyland, were kicked out with all the WRP’s usual contempt for democratic procedure. Adopting the name of the International Communist Party, the Northites [in the UK] quickly relapsed into sectarian ultra-leftism, adopting the Bordigist position that the trade unions are no longer workers’ organisations having been entirely incorporated into the capitalist state.” Ten Years After, according to the SEP nee SLL:

In June 1996, the SLL held its 17th National Congress to begin the process of transforming itself into the Socialist Equality Party. A similar initiative was being undertaken in all the sections of the ICFI. This was not simply a change of name. It was based on the recognition of the new responsibilities posed to the party by the far-reaching changes in the fundamental historical context in which the party conducted its work. New forms of work were necessitated by the political realignment underway in the international working class.

As part of this transformation, the wsws site was launched wayback in 1998 (that is, three years after The Mid Atlantic Infoshop site). Strangely, despite being launched wayback when, the inaugural SEP conference was only held in January, 2010: many years after its supposed birth. Leaving aside the question of the ICFI’s access to time travel, the blast-off into cyberspace was not greeted with much enthusiasm by their comrades in the International Communist League, who of the historic occasion remarked (Bulletin Liquidated: Northite Pirates Run for Cyberspace, Workers Vanguard, No.687, March 27, 1996):

Contrary to the hostile buzzing of a small clot of petty-bourgeois losers and nerds who obviously have nothing better to do than clog up the Internet with sneers that the SL is “anti-technology,” we actually do believe that computers, and yes, even Web sites, are useful tools — for certain purposes. But that’s all they are. To pretend dumping some documents into cyberspace is any substitute for the hard fight — in the real world, among real people — to build a revolutionary workers party, only confirms the total depths of cynicism and humbug for which the Northites are infamous.

Humbug!

As well as providing incisive analysis of World-Historical Events (and film reviews), wsws also includes innumerable exhortations to join the ICFI, such calls almost invariably concluding ‘most any such analysis. Which makes perfect sense if the reader is committed to following the leadership* of the world** socialist movement.

Be that as it may, recently, while searching for critical materials on Drink-Soaked Ex-Trotskyite Popinjay for War Christopher Hitchens, I stumbledupon a rather unflattering portrayal of him on the ICFI site: Journalist, scoundrel Christopher Hitchens dies at 62 (David Walsh, December 17, 2011). The mournful response to his death on the part of The New York Times, Walsh argues, is on account of his exemplifying “a social type they admire”:

Taken from the widest angle, Hitchens’ trajectory resembled that followed by many of his contemporaries in the “protest generation.” His was an especially spectacular and filthy evolution, but the difference between a Hitchens and a great many left celebrities, including those who still maintain a pretense now and then of opposition to the existing order, is slight. What has characterized these middle class elements, above all, has been an immense unseriousness about the great life-and-death questions of our day.

And certainly, if a complete absence of humour regarding both Life and Death is your thing, then so too is the ICFI; revolution, like the ah, internets, is serious business. With regards Hitchens (Scoundrel time redux: Christopher Hitchens as a social type, David Walsh, February 13, 1999):

He takes positions… that draw attention to himself, allow him to stand out in a crowd, but don’t threaten his social position or standing. To get on in the world it helps sometimes to raise a few eyebrows. In some circles, a British accent, a little sauciness (but nothing too profound) will do the trick.

Maybe. But Hitchens wasn’t the only one to be tricky. The thing is, wayback in April 2007, the leader of the ICFI, David North, was exposed as being David Green, the CEO of a Michigan-based printing company (Grand River Printing and Imaging).

Well, kinda sorta.

When I blogged about it a year later (May 2008) one commenter described ex-SEP member Scott Solomon’s outing as “a pathetic effort to slander David North and the SEP”. Which again, may be so. But this didn’t actually answer the question: is David North, the leader of the world socialist movement aka the ICFI, also David Green, CEO of Grand River?

Dunno.

Solomon’s allegations caused something of a stir at the time, and another FI — the International Bolshevik Tendency (IBT) — was certainly happy to elaborate, first with Notes on the SEP/GRPI Puzzle (May 15, 2007) and then with Northites Inc.: Toeing the Bottom Line: Being Determines Consciousness (Bolshevik, No.30, 2008). Another FI — (Jan Norden’s) Internationalist Group — also makes reference to the seeming contradiction in Socialists in Bourgeois Electionland (The Internationalist, November 2008) and Where Were You, David North? (The Internationalist, July 2009).

Upon receiving a local business award (“Best Places to Work in Southeast Michigan”, an honour bestowed by Crain’s Detroit Business and IRI Consultants to Management) in 2003, David Green (David North?) remarked of his company that it “places heavy emphasis on what an employee has to deal with day to day, including personal and social responsibilities, and accommodates accordingly. The company firmly believes it and employees must work together to survive.”

As of this date, the name ‘David Green’ has been expunged from the Grand River website; Grand River remains a union-free workplace.

See also : On the Socialist Equality Party, The Partisan, April 6, 2010 | The Downward Spiral of the International Committee of the Fourth International, Alex Steiner, Permanent Revolution, November 2009. NB. This PR is to be confused with Permanent Revolution, the group that split from Workers’ Power aka the Fifth International, in 2006. Sadly, its five Australian members failed to keep the flame of the Fifth International-And-A-Half alive Down Under, their spark expiring a few short years later.

Posted in Media, Trot Guide | Tagged , , , , , , | 19 Comments

#BobHawke trolls the ACTU : ‘Solidarity Forever’

Posted on May 17, 2012 by @ndy

*hic*

‘Solidarity Forever’ was written by Ralph Chaplin (1887–1961), a member of the ‘Industrial Workers of the World’ (IWW). In Australia, the IWW (‘Wobblies’) frequently battled the ALP for the hearts and minds of the working class. They lost, and the ALP won.

Burgmann:

Less than a quarter century before the appearance of the IWW, the Labor Party in New South Wales had vowed to ‘make and unmake social conditions’; the memory of this promise was still fresh in the mind of many workers, who had lived to see the undertaking woefully unfulfilled. Hughes acknowledged in federal parliament early in 1917 that the strength of the IWW represented ‘the revolt of the people against the chicanery of legislatures’, which had not relieved their suffering: ‘The best remedy for syndicalism is effective political action’. The IWW had decided that the reverse was the case: that the best remedy for ineffective political action was revolutionary industrial unionism. It expressed and reinforced the strong feelings of resentment felt by many militant workers towards their elected representatives. Accordingly, it was widely resented by Labor apologists for its ‘determination to make workers believe their representatives in Parliament are all unmitigated scoundrels’; concern was also expressed that the IWW was encouraging workers to avoid registration under the Commonwealth Electoral Act…

In Australia, with a comparatively democratic franchise and reasonably fair access to electoral registration, the IWW was more expressly and truly anti-political [than it was in the United States]. The Australian IWW’s determined rebuttal of political action was informed by the experience, peculiar to Australasia, of the duplicity of Labor, the betrayal of working-class interests by Labor governments. While many individual Wobblies may occasionally have voted in elections, the IWW itself was insistent that political action had nothing to offer: ‘The I.W.W. does not say that the workers must not vote at Parliamentary elections; but that such voting is of no use to the proletariat in the great class struggle.’ Direct Action explained: ‘Our members are not pledged to do one thing or the other on election day. They simply please themselves. They can vote if they wish, or they can “strike at the ballot box with an axe”. It matters not to the organisation.’

…The ballot, the IWW argued, was ‘the greatest fraud ever perpetrated upon a long-suffering and over-patient working class’. Hundreds of thousands of workers were living in a fool’s paradise because of ‘insidious teaching on the part of those whom the workers themselves have raised to positions of privilege and of others aspiring to such positions’. The best-known indigenous Wobbly creation was the song of the Labor MP, ‘Bump Me Into Parliament’, written by Bill Casey in Melbourne, to the tune of ‘Yankee Doodle’:

Come listen, all kind friends of mine,
I want to move a motion,
To make an El Dorado here,
I’ve got a bonza notion.

Chorus:
Bump me into Parliament,
Bounce me any way,
Bang me into Parliament,
On next election day.

Some very wealthy friends I know
Declare I am most clever,
While some can talk for an hour or so
Why, I can talk for ever.

I know the Arbitration Act
As a sailor knows his ‘riggins’,
So if you want a small advance,
I’ll talk to Justice Higgens.

Oh yes I am a Labor man,
And believe in revolution;
The quickest way to bring it on
Is talking constitution.

I’ve read my Bible ten times through,
And Jesus justifies me,
The man who does not vote for me,
By Christ he crucifies me.

So bump them into Parliament,
Bounce them any way,
Bung them into Parliament,
Don’t let the Court decay.

~ Verity Burgmann, Revolutionary Industrial Unionism: The Industrial Workers of the World in Australia, Cambridge University Press, 1995, Chapter 10: ‘Bump Me Into Parliament’: the Critique of Laborism, pp.143–145.

Posted in History, Music, State / Politics, That's Capitalism! | Tagged , , , , , , | Leave a comment

‘Second talent agency for bloggers’ launches. Also: Drink Doss Blockos. It’s Ace.

Posted on May 16, 2012 by @ndy

ZOG Communications PR manager Dr Cam Sexenheimer has left the agency to launch a talent agency for bloggers in what he claims is an Australian second.

Sexenheimer has launched The Revolutionaries Group with an initial roster of five Molotov blogs including Andy Fleming, whose blog slackbastard was categorised as being militant and extremist several years ago in filtering organised by the US company Websense. Also on the roster are A New World in Our Hearts, Deconstructing Self, A Bleak Future and BabyMac.

Although The Revolutionaries will help manage the bloggers’ media profiles and organise advertorial, Sexenheimer says it is not operating as an advertising sales house.

According to today’s announcement: “The agency will manage brand partnerships from start to finish to deliver remarkable results for both brands and the bloggers it represents. The team will coordinate briefing, approvals, payment and also revolution, which is a key priority. There is no cost to brands to work with The Revolutionaries Group, but it may save their CEOs from being executed after The Revolution.”

Before launching The Revolutionaries, Sexeneheimer spent two years at ZOG. Before that he was an accountant with The Gnomes of Zurich. Prior to that he spent ten years in a maximum security prison in Cebu, in Cebu Province, Philippines.

He said in his launch announcement: “The Revolutionaries offer a powerful channel for brands to get their message talked about by their target audience, in what is an increasingly cluttered media and unstable political landscape. Molotov is the main decider in Australian politics, so communicating to them is a top priority for many brands in the current marketing climate. It made sense to launch The Revolutionaries Group with five bloggers who are having thousands of conversations every day with Australian Molotovs.

“We’re also keen to help Australian brands pioneer new ways to work with bloggers, based on the success in the Middle East and North Africa of blog ambassadorships and bloggers being featured as above the line talent.”

Note : This post has been brought to you by Doss Blockos: “the beer of the people, by the people, for the people”.

Posted in !nataS, Media | Tagged , , , | 3 Comments

#LeaveCraigThomsonAlone! #knockshop

Posted on May 14, 2012 by @ndy

How fucking dare anyone out there make fun of Thomson after all he’s been through! He lost his credit card, he went through a divorce… he had two kids, his union turned out to be a user, a cheater, and now he’s going through a legal battle. All you people care about is… readers and making money off of him!

He’s a human!

What you don’t realise is that Thomson’s making you all this democracy and all you do is write a bunch of crap about him. He hasn’t performed on stage in years. His song is called ‘I Was Set Up’ for a reason because all you people want is more, more, more, more, more!

Leave him alone!

You’re lucky he even represented you bastards!

Leave Thomson alone!

Please!

Paul Howes talked about professionalism and said if Thomson was a professional he would’ve pulled it off no matter what. Speaking of professionalism, when is it professional to publicly bash someone who’s going through a hard time?!

Leave Thomson alone! Please!

Leave Craig Thomson alone… right… now! I mean it! Anyone who has a problem with him you deal with me, because he’s not well right now.

Leave him alone…

Posted in State / Politics | Tagged , | Leave a comment

antifa notes (may 14, 2012)

Posted on May 14, 2012 by @ndy

A New Day in Greece and a Limp Attack in Bulgaria?

Already having a history of working closely with the members of Golden Dawn in repressing political and social dissent in Greece, it appears that Greek police have also been actively supporting the neo-Nazis at the ballot box.

More than half of all police officers in Greece voted for pro-Nazi party ‘Chrysi Avgi’ (Golden Dawn) in the elections of May 6. This is the disconcerting result of an analysis carried out by the authoritative newspaper To Vima (The Tribune) in several constituencies in Athens, where 5,000 police officers in service in the Greek capital also cast their ballot.

See also : Greeks see reasons for hope and fear amid the political ruins, Julian Borger, guardian.co.uk, May 11, 2012 | From the Greek Streets.

Across the border in Bulgaria, the ultra-nationalist Ataka (Attack) party, after reaching a high in 2009 and obtaining “9.4 percent in parliamentary elections and a whopping 12 percent of the vote in elections to the European Parliament” appears to be in decline:

Today, it turns out, the party is pretty much a joke. Ataka is in the midst of crumbling, in part because of sensational charges that [party leader] Siderov had an affair with an Ataka parliamentary deputy, the former high school girlfriend of his son. In response to the scandal, the son and his mother have formed a splinter party, the National Democratic Party, and have tried to attract Ataka parliamentary members, with mixed results. The latest polls give Ataka a mere 2 percent or even less, far too little to enter into parliament in next year’s elections.

Boneheads

24-year-old Swiss bonehead, Sebastien Nussbaumer, has been arrested in Hamburg, Germany. Accused of shooting someone in Zurich last week, our hero has a string of previous violent criminal convictions and a series of ugly Nazi tattoos: a great way to make friends in prison which, luckily for Nussbaumer, would appear to be the direction his political career is taking him.

Also incurring The Wrath of ZOG recently are boneheads in the United States.

In Minneapolis, two White supremacists — Samuel Johnson (31) and Joseph Thomas (42) — were arrested in late April accused of amassing weapons (Johnson) with a view to launching a blitzkrieg against left-wing political opponents. Oh, and dealing meth (Thomas). Sieg heil!

Johnson is the former unit leader for the southeast Minnesota branch of the ‘National Socialist Movement’, the biggest and brightest group of Hollywood Nazis the USA currently has to offer. In October, 2009 he organised a neo-Nazi rally in Austin and had the following words of wisdom to offer: “I think Hitler was a great man… I think he did what Germany needed to have done at that time. As far as the Holocaust, if you actually look up the stuff on the Holocaust, Adolf Hitler did not even know that there was anything going on with the Jews, as far as any type of murder or whatever you want to think happened” (Tim Ruzek, Austin man keeps pushing white agenda, Austin Post-Bulletin, October 23, 2009).

(In Australia, the NSM has only been able to recruit the lonely figure of Carl D Thompson to its ranks. The former editor of the One Nation newspaper, Thompson was kicked out of their office after an especially stoopid edition of the paper. He now (as “Derrick MacThomas”) vituperates against The Jew from the comfort of his home in an Internet radio series titled ‘Australia Calling’, formerly hosted on the NSM site but now mostly promoted on Stormfront and other neo-Nazi, fascist and White nationalist websites. A few years ago, Carl made Dr Jim of Australia First very angry and upset, prompting Herr Doktor to write one of his more memorable character assassinations, superbly titled: Howl, You Bitch! Time For ‘Howlingdog88’ To Tell Us If He Is ‘Leonard’ The Pornographer, Mental Patient And Pervert! Neo-Nutzi Brisbane Boss Won’t Last Long After New Revelations!)

The week before ZOG was suppressing the freedom of speech of Whitey in Minneapolis, the E-E-EDL attempted (April 22) to have a March for E-E-England in Brighton. While their march didn’t quite reach the dizzying heights achieved by the BUF back in the day, the butthurt was considerable. As a result of fail, a notable development in recent times is the increasing propensity of EDL members and supporters and those of related groups to target the left. On April 28, two elderly SWP newspaper sellers were attacked in Lewisham by a small gang of alleged EDL members. Otherwise, on May 5, EDL leader Stephen Yaxley-Lennon officially joined the new powerhouse of British politics, the British Freedom Party, “The biggest cultural nationalist party in the UK”. And while it may be the biggest party, at the local council elections it received the littlest vote.

The BNP crashed out too.

Finally, at the end of March, fascist boofhead Johnathan Bowden deaded. Bowden was at one time the ‘Cultural Officer’ for the BNP; later, he established the tiny fascist groupuscule ‘New Right’, a talking-shop for fascist pseudo-intellectuals. Now just another Dead White Male, Bowden was — as amusingly recounted by anti-fascists-online — A Renaissance Man. Bowden’s Antipodean equivalent is Welf Herfurth. Sadly, a few years ago, Welf junked the New Right to join the boneheads in the Sydney chapter of the US-based Volksfront. In terms of public activity, the group peaked in 2007 when it organised a rally at the APEC summit.

Floriduh, Nazis, and the Goddess Kali

Police have arrested ten, Florida-based members of the fascist groupuscule ‘American Front’. You may remember AF from such murders as the shooting to death of AF leader David Lynch in March 2011. Reuters writes: “Ten alleged members of a white supremacist group training near Orlando and Disney World for a ”race war” have been rounded up in a series of arrests in central Florida, authorities said on Tuesday. The arrests were based on evidence from a confidential informant who infiltrated the neo-Nazi organization known as the American Front 17 months ago, according to an arrest affidavit.” According to the affidavit, the RAcial HOly WArriors were supposedly planning on doing all kindsa crazy in Melbourne, including infiltrating the local SHARP milieu, luring members to an undisclosed location, ambushing them and then (presumably) attempting to re-enact the murders in July 1998 of SHARP skinheads Lin “Spit” Newborn and Dan Shersty (for which crime federal authorities laid further charges in February 2012). The boneheads were also allegedly planning on attacking the anarchist May Day rally in Melbourne.

Oddly, the AF site (disabled at some point after Lynch’s death) links to what is described as the AF blog, ‘Open Revolt!’. Rather than extolling the many virtues of being a bonehead, the OR! blog is now dedicated, inter alia, to the worship of the Hindi Goddess Kali, contains glowing refs to Kim Jong Il and numerous other fascist/ultra-nationalist crackpots, and promotes a rather kinky form of White nationalism. Further, as I noted in December 2011, the openly revolting bizarro(s) belonging to the semi-fictitious ‘Rural People’s Party’ actually jumped Jim Jones’ ship to join up with this mob. Check the superbly batshit blog belonging to the North American Juche-Songun Ideas Study Group, “the place to learn about the philosophy of our time”, for more infos on Juche Thought as well as on the sad demise of the RPP:

Over the past several years, the Juche movement in North America has been hampered in its’ development because of the study group’s former chairman John Paul Cupp’s deviationism from Kim Il Sungist Thought and his flirtations with anti-communist philosophies such as white nationalism which led him to bring many dangerous and suspect people into the group; two of these individuals were Joshua Caleb Sutter and James Porrazzo [Parazzo?]. This very same James Porrazzo has been slandering us and our current chairman Jason Adam Tonis heavily over the Internet recently, telling people that he is a “globalist agent” and “pig”…

Curiously, the affidavit which brung the ten boneheads in Florida to justice also makes reference to James Parazzo [Porrazzo?]. Parazzo/Porrazzo apparently uploaded a video on to YouTube poking fun at the group’s leader and his mates in AF, leading him to “conspire” with the local chapter of ‘Combat 18’ to seek revenge against Parazzo for his butthurt. (Recent interview with Master P, described as the leader of New Resistance, the successor organisation to AF, here : http://xportal.pl/?p=4433.) The fuehrer of the Florida franchise of the American Front, Mark Faella — one of the ten arrested last week — is a former member of the Confederate Hammerskins, with a long history of nazi stoopid.

Another Good Fascist

Speaking of murder, in Arizona, neo-Nazi JT Ready — described by a rather, er, stoopid Vice journalist as “a complex and complicated guy” — shot and killed four people, including a 15-month-old girl, before shooting himself last week. As well as being complex and complicated, Ready was virtuous. Thus, “Despite the media’s full-spectrum character assassination of Ready, all evidence from his speeches and interviews point to a modus operandi that was not divisive, racist, or overly militant. On the contrary, this was an incredibly articulate, level-headed, and thoughtful political upstart – certainly an individual whose aspirations of gaining elected office in Arizona’s Pinal County were not at all unattainable” (loon on infowars).

It’s a conspiracy!

In reality, Ready was a neo-Nazi, a former member of the ‘National Socialist Movement’ and a racist who liked to play dress-up and run around both desert and town armed; in October 2011, Ready and some of his NSM/Border Guard mates rocked up to the first general assembly of #OccupyPhoenix. They made friends with the police and the liberals but were told to go away by others. Now Ready is permanently gone, and so too four of his friends and family. Presumably, our hero will be joining Jeff Hall in Valhalla.

BoNuS tRoOf!

Posted in Anti-fascism | Tagged | 2 Comments

anarchist notes (may 10, 2012) with BONUS! juche thought and american frontage

Posted on May 10, 2012 by @ndy

Aotearoa/New Zealand

Once Upon A Time, The Activists Formerly Known As The Urewera 20(?) were, according to police, intent on blowing shit up: even conspiring to Kill The President (of the United States).

Or some shit.

Sadly, in March, the Crown case fell to pieces. Rather than convict 20 or 18 or 17 or 16 or even 4 individuals with engaging in a terrorist conspiracy, They had to be content with guilty verdicts on various firearms charges. This week, the Crown declared that the remaining four defendants (‘The Urewera Four’) will not be re-tried on a charge of belonging to an ‘organised criminal group’; on the other hand, neither will The Fantastic Four be getting an apology for the 2007 raids.

No surprises there really.

That said, John Minto of Global Peace & Justice Auckland is only one of many who reckon:

Urewera Four convictions ‘should be quashed’

GPJA supports the decision of one of the Urewera Four lawyers to apply to have the Arms Act convictions against his client, Te Rangikaiwhiria Kemara, quashed following the Crown decision to abandon plans for a retrial of the four remaining Urewera defendants on a charge of “belonging to a criminal gang”.

The defendants are to face sentencing on 24 May after convictions on some breaches of the Arms Act.

However the convictions under the Arms Act were only possible using illegally obtained police evidence. This evidence was inadmissible on the Arms Act charges and was only allowed by the Supreme Court because of the more serious “criminal gang” charge laid by police.

With this charge now gone the convictions based on illegally obtained evidence should be quashed.

It appeared early on that the police laid the “criminal gang” charge principally to allow them to admit evidence even if they knew that evidence wasn’t strong enough to get a conviction on the only serious charge. It wasn’t.

The police were “gaming the system” to get even these minor convictions.

The other 13 defendants had all Arms Act charges against them dropped and the same should now apply to the last four defendants.

Otherwise, check out the xclnt film Operation 8 for The Real Story…


[Initial footage shows police breaking and entering 128 in Wellington]

…and for totally choice infos and analysis on ‘Revolutionary Anti Colonialism & Anti Capitalism in the Pacific’ check out Whenua Fenua Enua Vanua. For more on teh anarchys, this grp is AWSM while this one goes Beyond Resistance: both got links to other useful stuffs.

Canada

Students in Quebec have been on strike for over twelve weeks now, “sparked by the announcement of a new, 75 per cent increase in university tuition fees”. Yesterday (May 9) students rejected a piss-weak offer by the government to piss-off back to skool in exchange for… well, nothing much, really. Unsurprisingly, this unappealing carrot is being supplemented by a rather large stick, “[a]s the historic student strike stretches on… the police repression is intensifying.” Linchpin has some English-language coverage as well as links to other sources; French speakers can read lotsa stuff elsewhere, including on Cause Commune. For what it’s worth, a key factor in the success of the Quebec organising model has been its commitment to direct democracy. A local history of direct confrontations with authorities also seems to have made a significant contribution to the development of a lively anti-authoritarian culture; the following video documenting the May Day rally in Montreal is illustrative:

Chile

The struggles of students in Chile against the neoliberal restructuring of the higher education system has been one of many sources of inspiration for that of students in Canuckistan. War on Society on Chile provides some useful infos on social struggles in that part of the world; LASNET and Chile Solidarity provide further insights and links to other organisational resources. Finally, La Rabia Reading Group (Rebeldia contra los duenos del poder y la riqueza) is a Melbourne-based group which examines a variety of texts examining these and a variety of other matters related to This World We Must Leave.

Greece

The elevation of the neo-Nazi group Golden Dawn to the Greek parliament has triggered a good deal of anguish and speculation on the part of commentators, especially as their success means access to public funding to further their aim of cleansing Greece of undesireables. Last election GD got 20,000 votes; this time around 438,000. On the other hand, LAOS (the other extreme-right party) saw their vote decline to beneath the 3% threshold, thus meaning it lost all 17 of its comfy seats. “We should also take note that New Democracy campaigned under the slogan “re-occupy our neighborhoods from the immigrant ghettos”—and Pasok supported the building of detention centres for immigrants.” Further, the election saw a large increase in the vote for SYRIZA, the ‘coalition of the radical left’ (Yiorgos Vassalos, Greek election: The austerity parties have collapsed. This is the moment of truth for the left, Red Pepper, May 10, 2012). The coalition supposedly includes anarchists; a statement on Occupied London is probably more reflective of the general mood: “The crucial task ahead is… for us to understand that the times (not so far) ahead will involve a fight to shift society as a whole in an emancipatory direction. A struggle to keep our cities, our streets, our spaces clean from misanthropic nazi scum. But also, and most importantly, a struggle and a race to occupy the space left behind by a crumbling, retreating system of order; we’d better get going.”

Italy

“Investigators say the shooting of the CEO of a nuclear engineering company bears similarities to attacks by the radical leftist Red Brigades terrorist group against executives of the same company in the 1970s. Roberto Adinolfi was shot in the leg on Monday morning near his Genoa home by an unknown assailant. He was recovering in the hospital Tuesday.” Oddly enough, the headline given the AP article in The Washington Post identifies the Red Brigades as “anarchist”, a fact which even someone with a passing knowledge of Italian politics would understand is incorrect, BR being unashamedly Marxist in orientation. See : ‘Italy investigators link attack on nuke executive with anarchist Red Brigades attacks of 1970s’, May 8, 2012. Further, attacks such as these emerge from a far more diverse radical milieu, just as they did in The Years of Lead. In this previous era, the most murderous attacks were conducted by Italian neo-fascists acting at the behest of state authorities. Thus a bombing at the Piazza Fontana on December 12, 1969, which killed 16 people and injured 84 (or possibly 90), was conducted by members of the Ordine Nuovo (New Order), acting under the instructions of the Italian secret service. It was one of a number of fascist ‘outrages’ committed during this period in Italian history, the most bloody of which was the Bologna train station bombing on August 2, 1980, in which 85 people were killed and over 200 injured.

[Update (May 12, 2012) : The Informal Anarchist Federation — to be precise, “the Olga Nucleus of the Informal Anarchist Federation-International Revolutionary Front, said two of its members had shot Roberto Adinolfi, the CEO of Ansaldo Nucleare, in Genoa on Monday”. The Informal Anarchist Federation (FAI) tag first appeared back in December 2003. Numerous other actions have been claimed by the FAI since then, both in Italy and elsewhere. Italian authorities in 2003 wrote:

The members of this Federation claim to be “against any Marxist cancer” and advocate a type of armed struggle based on direct actions by individuals or groups. They are inspired by “three key points”:

1. Revolutionary solidarity, which entails armed struggle against facilities and persons responsible for the detention of comrades;
2. Revolutionary campaigns, which can be freely promoted and shared “through one or more actions claimed by single action groups, which make a reference to the Federation in their acronym”;
3. “Communication among groups or single members” that should take place “through the actions and the information channels of the movement with no need to know one another”.]

See also : Italy Calling: Italian Tales Of Oppression & Resistance | More Work! Less Pay! Rebellion and Repression in Italy, 1972–1977.

United States

The five d00ds what got arrest last week for planning to ‘splode a bridge are obviously in heap ’em big trouble. Rob los Ricos reckons “it is imperative not to let these brave, foolish comrades become isolated. more than anything else we must remember: ATTACKS ON THE FASCIST/CORPORATE INFRASTRUCTURE ARE LEGITIMATE AND NECESSARY!”

So yeah.

The Famous Five were apparently recruited by the FBI via their participation in Occupy Cleveland. In Occupied New York, the antics of some radikal fu*king yoof on May Day has come to the attn of a fu*cking gossip columnist on Gothamist. Christopher Robbins writes (Anarchists Think Photographers And Reporters Are The “Fu*king Enemy”, May 8, 2012):

The issue of some protesters targeting photographers covering the Occupy Wall Street movement came to the fore after videographer Tim Pool shot footage of protesters letting the air out of an NYPD squad car’s tires the night of the eviction. Since then, protesters engaged in black bloc tactics—illegal actions that some in the Occupy movement embrace as part of a “diversity” of tactics—have attempted to damage or confiscate cameras documenting them.

The article is pretty daft, as is the commentary which accompanies it. On a more serious note, NYPD have apparently begun to incorporate sexual assault into their arsenal. See : David Graeber, New Police Strategy in New York – Sexual Assault Against Peaceful Protestors, nakedcapitalism.com, May 3, 2012. His account naturally brings to mind Andrea Dworkin‘s account of being sexually assaulted by prison authorities back in 1965 after being arrested for participating in a march against the Vietnam War.

Dworkin’s response to this incident was her first act of purposeful bravery: she wrote scores of letters to newspapers detailing what had happened, and the story was reported in the New York Times, among other papers, which led to a government investigation of the prison [Women’s House of Detention in Greenwich Village]. It was eventually torn down, and in its place today is the idyllic flower garden at the foot of the Jefferson Market clock tower on Sixth Avenue in Manhattan.

Otherwise, Chris Hedges’ February black bloc stoopid is the gift that keeps on giving, and has prompted Mark Taylor-Canfield (Occupy Without Isms: Hedges vs. the Black Bloc, Round Two, Counterpunch, May 7, 2012) to add some of his own to the pile, prompted by black bloc shenanigans in Seattle and Oakland. A much more useful disco on Occupy and attendant issues is provided by Ken Knabb in The Situationists and the Occupation Movements (1968/2011); Kevin Carson describes attempts to repress the movement here, concluding that “The state’s functionaries are beginning to realize how high the stakes really are. In response, its shock troops are dropping the Officer Friendly masks. So get ready: The state, before it’s over, will be as nasty as it has to be.”

BONUS!

On a final note, police have arrested ten, Florida-based members of the fascist groupuscule ‘American Front’. You may remember AF from such murders as the shooting to death of AF leader David Lynch in March 2011. Reuters writes: “Ten alleged members of a white supremacist group training near Orlando and Disney World for a ”race war” have been rounded up in a series of arrests in central Florida, authorities said on Tuesday. The arrests were based on evidence from a confidential informant who infiltrated the neo-Nazi organization known as the American Front 17 months ago, according to an arrest affidavit.” According to the affidavit, the RAcial HOly WArriors were supposedly planning on doing all kindsa crazy in Melbourne, including infiltrating the local SHARP milieu, luring members to an undisclosed location, ambushing them and then (presumably) attempting to re-enact the murders in July 1998 of SHARP skinheads Lin “Spit” Newborn and Dan Shersty (for which crime federal authorities laid further charges in February 2012). The boneheads were also allegedly planning on attacking the anarchist May Day rally in Melbourne.

Oddly, the AF site (disabled at some point after Lynch’s death) links to what is described as the AF blog, ‘Open Revolt!’. Rather than extolling the many virtues of being a bonehead, the OR! blog is now dedicated, inter alia, to the worship of the Hindi Goddess Kali, contains glowing refs to Kim Jong Il and numerous other fascist/ultra-nationalist crackpots, and promotes a rather kinky form of White nationalism. Further, as I noted in December 2011, the openly revolting bizarro(s) belonging to the semi-fictitious ‘Rural People’s Party’ actually jumped Jim Jones’ ship to join up with this mob. Check the superbly batshit blog belonging to the North American Juche-Songun Ideas Study Group, “the place to learn about the philosophy of our time”, for more infos on Juche Thought as well as on the sad demise of the RPP:

Over the past several years, the Juche movement in North America has been hampered in its’ development because of the study group’s former chairman John Paul Cupp’s deviationism from Kim Il Sungist Thought and his flirtations with anti-communist philosophies such as white nationalism which led him to bring many dangerous and suspect people into the group; two of these individuals were Joshua Caleb Sutter and James Porrazzo [Parazzo?]. This very same James Porrazzo has been slandering us and our current chairman Jason Adam Tonis heavily over the Internet recently, telling people that he is a “globalist agent” and “pig”…

Curiously, the affidavit which brung the ten boneheads in Florida to justice also makes reference to James Parazzo [Porrazzo?]. Parazzo/Porrazzo apparently uploaded a video on to YouTube poking fun at Faella and his mates in AF, causing Faella to “conspire” with the local chapter of ‘Combat 18’ to seek revenge against Parazzo for his butthurt.

Speaking of murder, in Arizona, neo-Nazi JT Ready — described by a rather, er, stoopid Vice journalist as “a complex and complicated guy” — shot and killed four people, including a 15-month-old girl, before shooting himself last week. Ready was a former member of the ‘National Socialist Movement’; in October 2011, Ready and some of his NSM/Border Guard mates rocked up armed to the first general assembly of #OccupyPhoenix. They made friends with the police and the liberals but were told to go away by others. Now Ready is permanently gone, and so too four of his friends and family.

I’m sure there’s a lesson in there somewhere…

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Pell & Co. ~versus~ Deveny & Twitter… and memes

Posted on May 9, 2012 by @ndy

Oh dear.

Local comedian Catherine Deveny got a letter from the government Twitter the other day. She opened it, read it, it said they were suckers she may wanna remove a tweet she done re Sydney Archbishop George Pell — else she too might be sued for defamation. (See : Pell in threat to sue Twitter, Nathan Partenza, The Age, May 9, 2012 | Cardinal backs away from threat to sue Twitter, Nathan Partenza, The Age, May 8, 2012.)

Deveny’s offending tweet made reference to a meme generated by Pell’s appearance on the ABC’s Q&A (April 9, 2012) when he, in turn, made reference, inter alia, to ‘preparing some young English boys… for First Communion’:

MICHAEL MATTY: Is it okay to tell a child that God doesn’t exist?

TONY JONES: Richard Dawkins?

RICHARD DAWKINS: I think it is okay to tell a child the truth but I would prefer to encourage a child to make up her own mind and to think about the evidence and to believe things when there is evidence. What I think is not okay, what I think is deeply immoral, is to tell a child that when she dies if she’s not good she’s going to go to hell. That seems to me to be mental child abuse and an utter disgrace.

TONY JONES: Okay.

GEORGE PELL: I remember when I was in England we were preparing some young English boys, they were from very…

(AUDIENCE LAUGH)

GEORGE PELL: Preparing them for…

(AUDIENCE BOO)

TONY JONES: Come on.

GEORGE PELL: Thank you. Preparing them for the first communion…

Pell’s remark prompted some tittering among the LIVE! studio audience; indicative, perhaps, of the general mood when Catholic priests make reference to ‘preparing boys’: a product of the ongoing series of scandals involving the rape and abuse of Catholic children by Catholic clergy (rape and abuse which, incidentally, prompted recently-retired State Labor MP Bronwyn Pike to produce a somewhat bizarre treatment of her own).

Deveny has written some thoughts on the matter (as well as re-published the legal exchange) here.

Pell’s threat naturally brings to mind that of fellow morals crusader Melinda Tankard Reist, who in January threatened to sue blogger Jennifer Wilson for allegedly defamatory remarks she made on her blog (regarding Reist’s religious convictions and their supposed political implications).

Speaking of convictions, last week eleven men — mostly former pupils at St Alipius Primary Skool for Boys in Ballarat — made an application in the County Court for compensation for their rape and abuse as Catholic schoolchildren by Christian Brother Robert Best. The Catholic Church spent millions on defending the paedophile, but it remains to be seen if the Church is willing to pick up the tab should the application be successful. It’s also an open question if the Church will undertake to fulfill additional (moral) obligations incurred during the lengthy process of bringing Best to court for his crimes. Thus:

During the church’s lengthy delaying tactics (and after church lawyers had been fighting victims in the committal hearings), one of the 14 victims took his own life. This victim (Damien, aged 48 in 2009) had encountered Best as a schoolboy in Ballarat in the 1970s. According to Damien’s family, he had been damaged not only by Best’s crimes but also by the church’s long record of harbouring and protecting Best.

Damien was survived by a teenage daughter in her early teens. It remains to be seen whether the Catholic Church will recognise its responsibilities to this child (and, if so, to what extent).

Church ideology and rhetoric (cf. Pike) suggest that the answer to this question is ‘yes’; Church practice — that is, The Church in that other dimension known as The Real World — suggest that the answer is ‘no’. And of course, the more dead former victims, the less money the Church (and its insurers) potentially have to part with.

As for St Alipius, Best was one of a nest of Catholic child rapists who took up residence there, including Father Gerard Ridsdale (see : Ballarat’s good men of the cloth, Peter Ellingsen, The Age, June 14, 2002). When Ridsdale was first summonsed to court to face charges in May 1993, Pell — who in Ballarat in the early 1970s shared a house with the rapist — appeared by his side as a “family friend” and “support person”. “By Ridsdale’s third court case, in 2006, his convictions involved a total of 40 children (comprising 39 boys and one girl), aged between six and 16, who were sexually assaulted between 1961 and 1987. These are not Ridsdale’s only victims — they are merely those who eventually spoke to the police.”

Ridsdale is scheduled for release as early as next year… though I somehow doubt Pell will be waiting outside the prison to escort him to his new abode.

Posted in !nataS, Media, Sex & Sexuality, State / Politics | Tagged , , , | 2 Comments

The Situationist International: Forty Years On (John Lepper)

Posted on May 8, 2012 by @ndy

The Situationist International: Forty Years On
John Lepper
Socialism and Democracy
Vol.26, No.1 (March 2012)

Mackenzie Wark, The Beach Beneath the Street: The Everyday Life and Glorious Times of the Situationist International (London/New York: Verso, 2011).

Richard Gilman-Opalsky, Spectacular Capitalism: Guy Debord and the Practice of Radical Philosophy (London/New York: Minor Compositions/Autonomedia, 2011).

In the 40 years since the dissolution of the Situationist International (SI), its perspective and legacy have been discussed in perhaps two dozen books and many dozens of scholarly and general interest articles. Virtually all those sources fall into one of two categories: those that emphasize the SI’s early artistic period and its connection to the avant-garde, and those which focus on its later “political” period. The situationist concepts elaborated by its early supporters were the derive (drifting), détournement (diversion), psychogeography, unitary urbanism, and the construction of situations. While those concepts continued to play a role for the later SI, it was much more concerned with critiquing reification, the commodity and the spectacle as well as advocating total self-management in the transformation of everyday life.

The artistic period loosely coincides with the fifties during which avant-garde precursors such as the Letterist International coalesced to form the SI in 1957 and continued up through 1961. During that time, the SI was more bohemian and mainly involved with interventions in the art world. By 1962, the largely German, Dutch and Scandinavian artists had been excluded by the Francophone theorists around Guy Debord and Raoul Vaneigem. It is rarely mentioned that this change in perspective came after Debord’s brief involvement with Castoriadis’s Socialisme ou Barbarie group and his exposure to the council communist idea of self-management (autogestion). Vaneigem then published a two part article called “Basic Banalities” in the SI journal in 1962 and 1963, which would become the basis for his book. As a pamphlet entitled The Totality for Kids, this was the first major situationist text translated into English (in 1966).

In 1965, the SI began circulating clandestine French-Arabic texts into Algeria and published “Decline and Fall of the Spectacular-Commodity Economy,” celebrating the Watts uprising in Los Angeles. The following year, student partisans of the SI gained control of the student union at the University of Strasbourg and asked for its help to critique the university. The situationist Mustapha Khayati, with some help from Debord, wrote On the Poverty of Student Life, which, together with a comic strip, The Return of the Durruti Column, was published with student funds. This devastating critique of modern society put the SI on the political map, so to speak, and is still the best short introduction to its ideas.

At the end of 1967, the two major works of situationist theory – Debord’s Society of the Spectacle and Vaneigem’s The Revolution of Everyday Life – were both published, and within six months these works, together with On the Poverty of Student Life, had had a major impact on the entire extra-parliamentary opposition that then exploded on the scene with the events of May 1968 in France. During that month, the situationists and their enragés allies played a significant part in challenging the old left bureaucrats who were trying to prevent the extension of the wildcat general strike. After the decline of May ’68, the situationists collaborated to analyze the events in a book which appeared under René Viénet’s name, followed by “The Beginning of an Era”, another essay on that subject written by Debord but published anonymously in the SI journal, Internationale situationniste. In spite of having expanded its membership after ’68, the SI then went through the long crisis of its orientation debate which culminated in the dissolution of the organization. Why this little summary of the SI’s political period, which constituted two thirds of its existence? Because with the exception of brief mentions of Watts and Viénet in his final chapter, Mackenzie Wark’s new book, although well-researched, is virtually devoid of analysis of the SI in the 1960s.

Continue reading →

Posted in Art, Broken Windows, History, Media, State / Politics, That's Capitalism! | Tagged , | 3 Comments

Trouble @ usyd education mill // #saveusydjobs

Posted on May 7, 2012 by @ndy

lulz. SAlt is getting blame for police arresting students @ usyd during course of protest today (video).

Well, so some boofhead on Sydney radio reckons anyways.

Below is moar dramatic footage of police foiling terrorist plot/’police being thugs’. Take note of police tickling especially recalcitrant elements.

Next time I reckon the students oughta close and lock teh door eh.

The protest was apparently called in response to VC Michael Spence’s issuing of a “final round of letters… sent to 23 academic staff… offering them voluntary redundancy, while another 20 staff have been offered teaching focused roles as an alternative to losing their jobs”.

The NTEU has more blah on the cuts and the campaign against it here.

As usual, it’s double or nothing.

From the Department of Mario Savio is The Gift That Keeps on Giving:

See also : How did Quebec Students Mobilize Hundreds of Thousands for Strike? , TheRealNews, May 3, 2012 | A look at the massive student movement shaking up Quebec, Richard Fidler, rabble, April 25, 2012 | Stop the Hike.

Bonus Greek Stuff!

Posted in State / Politics, Student movement, That's Capitalism! | Tagged | Leave a comment

New, Golden Dawn for Greece

Posted on May 7, 2012 by @ndy

Congratulations to Χρυσή Αυγή / Chrysi Avyi/Chrysi Avgi / Golden Dawn on entering the Greek Parliament… again. Certainly, it’s interesting times ahead for Greece. As teacherdude says, “the real fun and games start when the world’s stock markets open on Monday”.

*Stockmarket. Not. Happy.

• Greek shares crash nearly 8%
• Euro tumbles on election results
• Mediterranean bond yields, credit default swaps rise
• EFSF head says Greek euro exit would be “catastrophe”

See also : Meet Greece’s Golden Dawn, Fire and Flames, May 8, 2012.

Posted in Anti-fascism, History, State / Politics, That's Capitalism! | Tagged , , , | 5 Comments