En Passant

The revolution will be won by Syrians themselves or it won’t be won at all.

When Tony Abbott, Christopher Pyne and Warren Entsch (I think it is Entsch) realised that Thomson was voting against the gag order and thus with them, they jumped from their seats and made for the exit.

Entsch went to a door that wouldn’t open. Pyne hid in an adviser’s box. Abbott was too late – the doors had been locked. Strategic geniuses.

It just shows what a farce Parliament is. With all the real challenges facing society isn’t it time we had a truly democratic institution instead of this sand pit for intellectual pygmies?

The ramifications of the collapse in class struggle are clear for all to see – growing inequality, more wealth being shovelled to the wealthy, long working hours, high levels of disguised unemployment and politically a cowered trade union movement meek in its mildness and terrifying in its timidity, with a Labor Party whose raison d’etre appears almost indistinguishable from the Tories.

Instead of attacking Chinese and other ‘foreign’ workers we should welcome them and fight for them. In doing that can we begin rebuilding our capacity as a movement to defend all jobs and help keep at bay the nationalist flag of racism.

There is a thread that runs through the Henry Tax Review and the thinking of O’Dwyer and perhaps Bartos. It is that the state should take less out of the earnings of capital, earnings created by the labour of workers.

It may be this ‘tax capital less’ mantra is a response to a systemic problem, the tendency under capitalism of the rate of profit to fall. Cutting tax rates won’t address that threat to capitalism. Paradoxically it might increase it in the long term.

Bashar al-Assad, the butcher of Syria, has killed another 100 people, overwhelmingly women and children. Western leaders are ‘outraged.’ Barack Obama, the butcher in Washington, authorised another drone bombing. It killed a family of 8 in Afghanistan. Western leaders are silent. Zionism continues its genocide against the Palestinian people and the West enthusiastically supports the [...]

The right to withdraw our labour is basic to defending wages and conditions, otherwise we will be powerless.

I will be taking a short break for a few days. Just a reminder too that all comments close after an article has been on the site for 7 days. You are not able to post comments on pieces older than 7 days.

To conjure up racist images of Chinese workers marching into Australia, as Doug Cameron has done, is the desperate cry of a political and industrially bankrupt politician and unionist on a path to nowhere.

Doug Cameron’s world of class collaboration is collapsing around him as the bosses’ demons he and his ilk unleashed consume him. So instead of class struggle to defend jobs he raises race as the defining issue. Shame, Doug Cameron, shame.

The Greens have not become a left wing alternative in Australian politics. A genuine left wing alternative has to be built by building fighting movements in the workplaces, on campuses and on the streets.

Such an alternative has to reject all the “common sense” ideas of capitalist politics to which all the major parties, the Greens included, are committed and must argue instead for socialist solutions to the problems of the working class and the oppressed.

Such a perspective is a world away from the likes of Peter Whish-Wilson.

The ASIO security checks are designed to create hysteria writes Benjamin Solah in Socialist Alternative. The government wants us to believe that those coming to our shores to seek protection are a threat. We should be clear that refugees are the ones under threat – not just from the countries that they flee, but from our government.

The only solution is to demand a complete scrapping of these checks and to demand that refugees inside detention are released into the community.