i) Errant nonsense. Everybody knows it’s the International Cricket CouncilInternational Communist Current wot done it.
ii) Mad props to the kids from the slums of London (from the land down under).
“…it is unprecedented to see a government teeter before a movement in whom the iconic voices are sixteen and seventeen year old women, and whose anthems are mainly dubstep.”
“The cops would find it far more difficult to recklessly block and beat protesters like they did yesterday if they were facing the assembled membership of the UK’s radical trade unions. Would they kettle firefighters and prison officers the same way they do students and school-kids?”
~ Off your knees, comrades, Donnacha DeLong, The revolution will be streamed, December 10, 2010.
Lunch with Arbib at Azuma’s in Sydney. It’s interesting to listen to these machine guys: they live in a world of non-stop political manoeuvres and gossip, no structured thoughts about making society better. Their only points of reference in public life are polling and focus groups. And so it is with Arbib. Some snippets from him.
…The focus groups… show that it’s popular to bash the blacks: ‘You need to find new issues, like attacking land rights, get stuck into all the politically correct Aboriginal stuff–the punters love it’. Maybe he should have had lunch with Pauline Hanson, though not at Azuma’s.
…Arbib reckons that [Laurie] Oakes was consistently against us during the campaign: ‘He was the worst every night, so you must have a problem with Packer. You need to go and see the big media people every now and then and kiss their arses. Carr does it all the time, it works wonders’. Yes, if you don’t mind having shit on your lips.
~ Mark Latham, The Latham Diaries, Melbourne University Press, 2005 (Monday, 1 November, pp.369–370)
FEDERAL minister and right-wing Labor powerbroker Mark Arbib has been revealed as a confidential contact of the United States embassy in Canberra, providing inside information and commentary for Washington on the workings of the Australian government and the Labor Party.
Secret US embassy cables obtained by WikiLeaks and made available exclusively to The Age reveal that Senator Arbib, one of the architects of Kevin Rudd’s removal as prime minister, has been in regular contact with US embassy officers.
His candid comments have been incorporated into reports to Washington with repeated requests that his identity as a ”protected” source be guarded…
Operation: Payback seems to be having some effect. The website belonging to Stockholm law firm Borgstrom and Bostrom is refusing to answer any questions, and while there are (allegedly) some things money can’t buy / for everything else, there’s MasterCard… when you can find it.
*shrugs*
Other sites apparently targeted have included Swiss bank PostFinance (what froze a defence account for Assange), the Swedish Prosecutor Authority website, and one or two others…
First, let’s be clear, this is a difficult issue to deal with and there are opinions on all sides. Second, EveryDNS.net, the world’s largest free managed DNS provider, is not taking a position on the content hosted on the wikileaks.org or wikileaks.ch website, it is following established policies so as not to put any one EveryDNS.net user’s interests ahead of any others. Lastly, regardless of what people say about the actions of EveryDNS.net, we know this much is true – we believe in our New Hampshire state motto, Live Free or Die.
Defend Assange and WikiLeaks on Human Rights Day in Melbourne
WHEN : 4:30pm, Friday, December 10
WHERE: State Library Lawns
Julian Assange has been arrested in London. Join the protest to defend Assange and WikiLeaks on Human Rights Day in Melbourne, this Friday, December 10 @ 4.30pm @ the State Library.
Spread the word…
The demonstration will go till about 6 or so – so people should come after work.
December 6 is the second anniversary of the police murder of Athens teenager Alexandros (aka Andreas/Alexis) Grigoropoulos. His death triggered widespread rioting in Athens and elsewhere in Greece; these uprisings in turn helped to lay the groundwork for further revolts against state repression and the (ongoing) imposition of EU and IMF-backed austerity measures. (In October 2010, Epaminondas Korkoneas, the fascist-sympathising policeman responsible for executing Grigoropoulos, was sentenced to life in prison.) The (so-called) Global Financial Crisis has had European authorities shitting bricks over the prospect of Greek stylee resistance spreading across Europe, a possibility which has been partly realised in some territories (Iceland) and simmers away in others (England, Ireland, France). Their worst fears are now apparently centred upon economic dysfunction leading to (a deepening of) political unrest and social revolt in Portugal, Spain and Italy.
Anarchist Developments in Cultural Studies (ADCS) is an international, peer-reviewed, open-access journal devoted to the study of new and emerging perspectives in anarchist thought and practice from or through a cultural studies perspective. The interdisciplinary focus of the journal presumes an analysis of a broad range of cultural phenomena, the development of diverse methodological traditions, as well as the investigation of both macro-structural issues and the micrological practices of “everyday life”. ADCS is an attempt to bring anarchist thought into contact with innumerable points of connection.
On October 15th, 2007 an estimated 300 police raided houses all over Aotearoa New Zealand and arrested people based on warrants issued under the Terrorism Suppression Act. Lives were turned upside down as the police searched for evidence of ‘terrorism.’ This book is a collection of oral history interviews of people affected by those raids and the aftermath: defendants, friends, family, supporters and other people subject to the state’s coercive powers on that day.
The case is the first ever attempted use of the Terrorism Suppression Act, a piece of legislation enacted in response to the 9/11 events in New York and Washington DC. The terrorism charges were not brought, but the people arrested continue to face a long journey to freedom as the state seeks to punish political activists and to reinforce the status quo.
Not exactly a roaring success for the Australian Protectionist Party in Newcastle on the weekend: just four anxious souls rocked up on Saturday to their protest against the Islamification of Newcastle, two of them party members. Spokesperson Nicholas Hunter-Folkes is pretty cool though; meathead held a sign reading “LISTEN TO THE MAJORITY NOT THE MINORITY” — all the while being outnumbered by a token number of counter-protesters.
D’oh!
Said one of two concerned local residents to attend the rally:
“We’re here to protest because we don’t I don’t like it I don’t [indecipherable] country being taken over by Muslims stupid politicians let them get away with everything it’s not right.”
A rally opposing a mosque in Elermore Vale was overshadowed by anti-racism protesters at Civic Park today.
But organiser Nick Folkes denied the Australian Protectionist Party was opposed to the mosque on race grounds.
Just four members of the party turned up to protest the proposed mosque.
The protectionist party handed out flyers with an image of a Muslim man holding a sign that said ‘‘Islam will dominate the world’’.
The flyer stated traffic and parking, 5am wake-ups, a drop in house values, migration into the area and extremist elements would be the effect of a mosque in the suburb.
A small group of anti-racism protesters stood behind the party armed with signs stating ‘‘It’s a cowardly racist who hides behind cars.’’
For unknown reasons, Perth plasterer Paul Innes has pissed off from convicted terrorist Don Black’s Stormfront website, for which august forum he was previously the token Aussie moderator (his place taken by a Damn Yankee). Presumably, Paul is too busy planting trees in his Pioneer Little Europe to persist in berating other bigots for misspellings… or something.
Otherwise, Canadian Holocaust denialist Paul Fromm is on tour, and will be speaking in Melbourne on December 11.
Bulgaria
Australian anti-fascist Jock Palfreeman’s appeal against his unjust sentence is continuing. Please consider supporting Jock. For moar details see the Free Jock site.
Radical right-wing skinheads have attacked in the Bulgarian capital Sofia two young Romas and, besides, one of them seriously injured. As the urban authorities informed on Friday, the attack occurred on the Thursday evening in a bus in the city center. The serious casualty has been delivered with a cranial break and a cerebral injury to the hospital, however, is not in mortal danger. The other victim has suffered no heavy injuries. Members Roma-[minority] have to suffer in Bulgaria from discriminations and are the purpose of violent raids over and over again.
Greece
Recent municipal elections in Athens witnessed widespread abstention–roughly two-thirds of the electorate didn’t bother to vote during a second round–and also an apparent swing to the left. In addition, for the first time a member of the neo-Nazi groupuscule Golden Dawn was elected. The ever-reliable and always-outrageous blog From the Greek Streets has loads moar on social struggles in the birthplace of democracy. Otherwise:
1/12/2010- A wave of violent attacks against immigrants by suspected right-wing extremists has put Muslims and the police on alert in rundown parts of Athens with burgeoning migrant populations. Immigrants have been beaten and stabbed near central squares, and several makeshift mosques have been burned and vandalized. In the most grievous attack, at the end of October, the assailants locked the door of a basement prayer site and hurled firebombs through the windows, seriously wounding four worshipers. “The attacks are constant — I’ve never seen anything like this,” said Naim Elghandour, who moved to Athens from Egypt in the 1970s and now heads the Muslim Association of Greece. “I used to be treated like an equal. Now I’m getting death threats.”
Poland
Swedish nutzi Anders Hoegstroem has plead guilty to stealing a sign from Auschwitz (Neo-Nazi pleads guilty to theft of Auschwitz sign, Digital Journal, November 26, 2010) and will spend some months of quiet contemplation in a Swedish prison for his efforts. Also in Poland, members of reich ‘n’ roll band Tormentia were subjected to some harsh criticism by music lovers while on their way to a gig in October.
Russia
Charles Clover has written a lengthy article for the Financial Times on ‘The skinhead terrorists’ (December 3, 2010). Paying particular attention to the murderous antics of one gang of boneheads called the ‘National Socialist Organisation’ (NSO) (aka ‘National Socialist Society’), Clover notes that it was likely funded by some VIPs, and functioned with the state’s blessings, which fact is also meant to be surprising rather than mundane (The Other Russia is one source that provides copious documentation of the Russian state’s otherwise unremarkable gangsterism; the recent Wikileaks of US State Department dox gives the official seal of approval). Clover quotes one former fascist leader who gets straight to the point:
…the problem that the authorities have with groups such as his is not their violence, but the prospect of the political competition they present. There is an implicit contract between bonehead gangs and the authorities under which the state turns a blind eye to violence by bonehead groups, in exchange for their not getting involved in politics.
As antifascist activists marked the fifth anniversary of the murder of the 20-year-old antifascist activist and punk musician Timur Kacharava on Saturday, they claimed that they are under increasing pressure from the police, while the threat of attacks from nationalist radicals has not decreased…
Other Russian antifa to have been murdered in the interim include Alexander Ryukhin (April 16, 2006), Ivan Yelin (January 15, 2007), Ilya Borodaenko (July 2, 2007), Ovanes Ajriumian (October 20, 2007), Fedor Filatov (October 10, 2008), Anastasiya Baburova and Stanislav Markelov (January 19, 2009) and Ivan Khutorskoy (November 16, 2009).
There’s a Union and Community Summer School next weekend (December 10-11, 2010) @ Melbourne Trades Hall. It’s a “public forum to build practical unity within the labour movement, for workers’ rights, social justice, economic democracy and environmental sustainability.”
Trade Union Membership as Proportion of Employees, 1912–2001:
Social Democracy: No Future?
Introduction to Articles on the Retreat of Social Democracy
Relating to the retreat
The question of how we grasp social democracy and its current retreat is now more than ever a practical one. The institutions of social democracy continue to be the focus of many contemporary struggles. In the UK context, this is exemplified in recurrent conflicts over privatization, employment rights and cuts in welfare spending. Hence we face the question of how we relate to these struggles: what do we want and how should we fight?
The question always arises because our immediate experience as proletarians of the institutions of social democracy is characteristically twofold. Consider the example of the welfare state. In the first place, the organs of the welfare state – benefits, health care, free education – present themselves simply as a means of survival. But our experience of such organs is also one of domination, control, objectification. These institutions do not belong to ‘us’; their processing of us often seems to be for alien and bureaucratic aims and purposes – for ourselves only as bourgeois citizens, or in the interests of ‘the public’, ‘the law’ or other such abstractions.
Leftists, emphasizing the first aspect of this immediate experience, campaign for the maintenance and extension of the conditions of the post-war settlement: full employment, the restoration of ‘trade union rights’, reversal of cuts in the health, education and benefits systems, plus a meaningful minimum wage. Yet ‘defence of the welfare state’ and the other leftist demands represent either adherence to reformist social democracy as progress or a misconceived and disingenuous strategy of ‘transitional demands’.
An anarchist or ‘ultra-left’ analysis often emphasizes instead the second aspect of our immediate experience of social democracy: social democratic institutions as control mechanisms. Some anarchist types claim that, without the welfare state, genuine forms of mutual aid will necessarily develop, and thus that we need not resist attacks on the welfare state. However, while it is undeniable that the welfare state has served to atrophy working class community traditions of mutual aid, given the present absence of growth of militant networks and organs of support, this kind of analysis is simply ahistorical posturing. The restructuring of the welfare state is taking place at the initiative of capital and the bourgeois state – albeit in response to previous rounds of working class struggle. This is a time of chronic weakness in the working class and revolutionary movement. Simply to accept the present programme of ‘welfare reform’ is a capitulation to the autonomy of global finance capital and its ideology of neo-liberalism – a force which is currently growing in self-assurance and audacity. This kind of account seems to see the working class as passive and in need of a good kick up the backside to get it to do anything – the more life-threatening the kicking the better. The present New Labour Government’s abandonment of social democracy will not in itself bring us closer to communism: only the self-activity of the proletariat can do that…
Two Greek anarchists are making molotov cocktails. One says to the other: "So who will we throw these at then?" The other replies: "What are you, some kind of fucking intellectual?"
