En Passant

If we want to end the racism and sexism that pervade society, not just the variety that is amplified in the rarefied unnatural atmosphere of the defence forces, we are going to have to have a revolution to turn society on its head and establish democracy and freedom. Revolution is not going to happen overnight. We need to build a party of the working class to challenge the dictatorship of the ruling class and its killing machine. Let’s get cracking. Join Socialist Alternative today to fight the bosses and their armies with ideas and strikes.

This is a paper I wrote and published a few months ago on the recent resource rent tax experience in Australia. I argue that the left should be involved in the debates and battles over tax and tax policy as part of the wider struggle for a new society in which production is organised democratically to satisfy human need.

The Arab world has put revolution firmly on the agenda for the twenty-first century. And so women’s liberation is posed as a real possibility. This is a marvellous time to be a revolutionary.

This particular paper, unpublished and looking for a home, is called ‘Reason in revolt now thunders to end the age of neoliberal tax cant.’ It looks at the political economy of tax reform in Australia and argues that without an upsurge in resistance to neoliberal policies the ongoing shift of wealth to capital from labour in Australia will continue irrespective of tax policies.

That is what I am working for – a truly democratic society in which we workers, the people who produce the wealth of society, decide what will be produced to satisfy human need, not to make a profit. Then neoliberal nobodies like Gillard and Rudd and Abbott would be consigned to the museum of recent history and our really democratic and fulfilling lives could begin.

The farcical Punch and Judy show in Canberra is a consequence of the lack of fight from the trade union movement over the last 30 years. Victorian nurses are showing a different way, a better way, to win better pay and conditions and by doing that challenging the bosses’ industrial laws. Nurses in Victoria can win their demands, if they keep the industrial action going. They could even defeat the Fair Work Act penal powers and strike restrictions. The sideshow in Canberra won’t produce real change. Strikes can.

I sent this compilation of songs for the band unformed to my great guitarist son to see if he wants to put them to music. I have 2 cunning plans. Put these or some of them at the back of my book on the best political pieces from my blog, and hire a recording studio [...]

OK, let’s descend into the Seinfeld debates between Rudd and Gillard. What are your thoughts on this comedy of errors between two neoliberal nobodies, one of whom will be continuing to implement their version of neoliberalism soon enough. May, when the Budget is handed down, comes to mind as a a litmus test for the [...]

I have heard tell that some Labor Party caucus members plan to write on their ballot papers on Monday – Don’t vote, it only encourages them.

We shouldn’t look to parliament, but to Egypt, if we want a model of how to change the world.

Capitalism inflicts horror after horror on people all around the world: poverty and starvation in every country, the murderous wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the economic crisis sweeping Europe that has led to savage austerity measures, mass unemployment and misery. In the course of the Global Financial Crisis trillions of dollars have been handed out to the bankers while at the same time tens of millions of workers have lost their livelihoods.