En Passant

My local petrol stations (and presumably in the name of ‘competition’ this occurred across most of Canberra) increased their unleaded price on Thursday from 91 cents to 124 cents per litre. Even leaving in GST and excise, this is an increase of about 36 per cent. There appears to be no reason for this increase [...]

Hello to my visitor from Arlington Virginia. I hope you learned something useful.

The real Marxist tradition and the Russian revolution– a day of discussion and debate 10am – 5pm, Saturday 7 February The powerful historical lessons of the revolution – from its making by the Russian working class, through to the defeat of the revolution and the rise of Stalinism that smeared the name of socialism for [...]

I have one word to say to the namby pambies from the Australian Council of Trade Unions: France. On Thursday millions of French workers went on strike against President Sarkozy’s pro-capitalist and anti-worker economic crisis policies. The strikes affected transport, education and health services. The Confédération Générale des Travailleurs, one of the main trade union [...]

“Stars of David and graffiti in Hebrew and English proclaiming ‘Arabs need 2 die’, ‘no Arabs in the state of Israel’, and ‘One down and 999,999 to go’ had been scrawled on the walls. A drawing of a gravestone bore the inscription ‘Arabs 1948 to 2009′.” These are the Zionist truths Israeli soldiers scrawled on [...]

The economic crisis has destroyed the neoliberal experiment.  Yet the bourgeoisie cannot come up with an adequate new theory to justify the continued exploitation of workers and to serve as some sort of ideological pretence for increasing that exploitation as a response to stagnant,  low profit rates. In fact the reality may be that neoliberalism [...]

I have been having an email discussion for the last week or so with a defender of Israel.  In his most recent email he tells me the one state solution is pie in the sky stuff and that ethnic cleansing can’t be an apt description for Israeli actions because the number of Palestinians has grown [...]

So Barack Obama is going to double the number of US troops in Afghanistan.  He will make the 1 million innocents killed in Iraq look like a footnote to history as he unchains and unleashes the world’s most ferocious killing machine on Afghans and Pakistanis. So much for change you can believe in.  Obama is, [...]

Tess Lee Ack  from Socialist Alternative (www.sa.org.au) argues that it is falling profit rates, not under-spending, that is the problem for capitalism. So Keynesian spending won’t work.  Instead workers need to throw the whole rotten capitalist system overboard. We need a new democratic society where production occurs to satisfy human need, not one based on [...]

I love this comment from Peter Reuhl, a columnist with the Australian Financial Review. “I can speak with a certain amount of authority here, partially because as a columnist I’m a self-appointed expert (meaning I’m usually wrong)…” (‘Hey, what’s a few differences between friends …’ AFR January 23-26 2009, page 84). I can relate to [...]