John Passant

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Miniposts

The Greens: Opportunities for the Left?
The swing of 3.7 % to the Greens gives them almost 12% nationally. It offers the left an opportunity to argue our case with those who will become disillusioned with the Greens and their incapacity to fundamentally change anything. They support the profit system which is the root cause of our problems – climate change, war, poverty. They are unwilling to mobilise mass support in the streets for climate change, refugees, jobs. I hope I am wrong. However I made the same point about Obama before he was elected. I was right. (0)

Some questions for Abbott and Gillard
And when the boats keep coming (a good thing), and interest rates go up, and unemployment skyrockets, and GDP falls, and climate change wreaks more and more havoc on our planet, and the Taliban win in Afghanistan, what then? A retreat further into reaction and the politics of fear and attacking the victims even more? (2)

There is no red ink
‘In an old joke from the defunct German Democratic Republic, an engineer gets a job in Siberia. Aware of how all mail will be read by censors, he establishes a code with his friends: “If a letter is written in blue ink, it is true; in red ink, false.” ‘His first letter, written in blue ink, began: “Everything is wonderful: stores full, food abundant, apartments large and heated, movie theatres show films from the West – the only thing unavailable is red ink.” ‘ Zizek: The colour of truth. (0)

Tax the mining companies to keep interest rates down

One of the best ways to keep interest rates down would be to properly tax resource rents. Thanks for the forthcoming interest rate rises Julia and Tony and Markus, Tom, Twiggy and Clive.
(0)

What will socialism be like?
 There is a beauty in not having to rush to work but rather enjoy the morning at human pace, not capitalism’s pace. Holidays are what socialism will be like, I imagine. Minus all the democracy. (0)

Greece: what is happening?
Under threat of civil conscription Greek truck workers voted narrowly to return to work. Rhys Williams gives his thoughts.  

I don’t think this outcome actually constitutes a defeat. The level of struggle in Greece is increasing every day and the drivers’ vote to return to work was only taken due to the fact that the drivers feared that a continued strike would result in the Government’s civil conscription of drivers and use of the Armed Forces. Reports from the drivers seem to suggest that they are still incredibly militant and ready to strike again if needed. The drivers stopped their strike not out of defeat but because of tactical considerations. Other strikes are coming up in the next few weeks and I hear another general strike is planned. Workers in Macedonia , Slovakia, and elsewhere across the Balkans are also beginning to strike in solidarity with Greece and due to their own austerity measures . Interesting things are also developing in Spain, France, Britain and Germany. The fight back across Europe is entering a new phase. It is not, however, slowing down.
(0)

Unscripted?
So Julia Gillard is going to tear up the script and be herself. I can’t help but think this is a scripted campaign to be unscripted, probably the result of focus group analysis. (0)

Blood on Gates' hands
A headline from today’s Australian: ‘Wikileaks may have blood on its hands already, says Gates.’ What, unlike Gates and Obama? (1)

Election 2010: There is no choice - build a socialist alternative
I will be talking about the elections at the University of Canberra on Wednesday 18 August at 1 pm in 22 B 25 (ie room 25 on level B of Building 22 above the retro cafe). Election 2010: There is no choice – build a socialist alternative. (4)

Gillard's gender pay gap
Evidently Julia Gillard has the interests of working people and retirees at heart.  So I ask her to explain her role as Employment and Workplace Relations Minister and Deputy Prime Minister for almost 3 years in addressing the gender pay gap? Under Labor it actually increased to 18.2%. So apart from platitudes, what will Prime Minister Gillard offer to redress the imbalance and cut the gender pay gap to zero by 2013 if she is re-elected? Or could it be that such a policy would be too costly for her key supporters – business? So she will talk about equal pay for equal work but do nothing.  Add equal pay to the mining tax, climate change. WorkChoices Lite, the Australian Building and Construction Commission and many other examples of Gillard and Labor not being prepared to upset their real masters – the rich and powerful. (0)

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Build a socialist alternative

Posted by John, July 17th, 2010 - under Canberra Socialist Alternative.

Labor and the Liberals have the same policies on war, refugees, attacking living standards, cutting public services like schools and hospitals, screwing Universities and doing nothing about climate change. They both run the system for the bosses and their profits. It’s time for a real alternative – a socialist alternative of democracy where production is organised to satisfy human need. The first step in that process is fighting against the attacks of whichever party is managing capitalism for the bosses. Come along to hear John Passant from Socialist Alternative argue the case against capitalism and for socialism and why you should be a socialist on Thursday 22 July at 6 pm in room G 40 Haydon-Allen Building ANU.

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Comments

Comment from Eli Cash
Time July 22, 2010 at 4:15 pm

Are you really saying that socialism is on the table? I think this misreads the present impasse quite dramatically.

And what would it mean for production to be ‘organised to satisfy human need’. Isn’t it always organised to satisfy human need — why would there ever be production if it was not humans organising to satsify some need or desire that they have? Isnt it the historically specificity of what counts as valid ‘human need’ or desire that is the problem? That slogan seems rather simple.

Comment from John
Time July 22, 2010 at 10:03 pm

Eli No. Socialism is not on the table. I am saying that to get to that position we need to build a socialist organisation committed to the democratic rule of the working class and to the working class and oppressed in the battles of today.

Let me illustrate my point about production by using food as an example. There is enough food produced today to feed everyone more than 2500 calories a day. Yet 2 billion people are starving or malnourished. Why? Because it is not profitable to feed them. Profit is an obstacle to the most basic of human needs – food – for one third of humanity. A rational planned democratic society where production is organised to satisfy human need – not in some abstract fashion as is the case under capitalism – but by actually feeding everyone – is the only sensible alternative.

Comment from Eli Cash
Time July 23, 2010 at 2:16 pm

But you say: “It’s time for a real alternative – a socialist alternative of democracy where production is organised to satisfy human need.” Is it time for that alternative or not?

The problem with he ‘human need’ things is that, taking your example of ‘food’, people don’t eat food – a universal but particular sorts of foods. I think the problam with the social democratic approach that you seem to be putting, is that it takes phenomena in a very poitive fashion: there just is food, for example. Instead there is a very definite social formation that produces particular sorts of needs and desires: people don’t eat food they eat McDonalds or Sushi or Tofu Burgers. A clearer example might be: people do not want to be alive, they want some particular sort of life – a life that they have reason to value – and we know that people give up life in order to achieve the possibility of the sort of life they would value. So talking about production for human need is just nonsensical, ‘human need’ isn’t a phrase that means anything for concrete human life. It also suggests that there is some transhistorical ground of human need, a centre that human society is trying to find. I find that implausible, and obviously contradictory with historical materialism.

Comment from John
Time July 23, 2010 at 7:10 pm

But Eli, the productive forces of capitalism objectively mean socialism can be on the agenda. We have the productive basis for a life of plenty now. But the consciousness of the working class makes that an impossibility at this moment in Australia.

Not sure about my ahistoricism. Here’s part of Engels’ eulogy at Marx’s funeral:

Just as Darwin discovered the law of development or organic nature, so Marx discovered the law of development of human history: the simple fact, hitherto concealed by an overgrowth of ideology, that mankind must first of all eat, drink, have shelter and clothing, before it can pursue politics, science, art, religion, etc.; that therefore the production of the immediate material means, and consequently the degree of economic development attained by a given people or during a given epoch, form the foundation upon which the state institutions, the legal conceptions, art, and even the ideas on religion, of the people concerned have been evolved, and in the light of which they must, therefore, be explained, instead of vice versa, as had hitherto been the case.

Comment from eli.cash
Time July 24, 2010 at 1:42 am

“We have the productive basis for a life of plenty now. But the consciousness of the working class makes that an impossibility at this moment in Australia.” But the productive basis is inseparable from capitalism (only analytically is there an ‘economy’ – it doesn’t actually exist), and you previously said that this didn’t produce for your ‘human needs’. So it now can, but we just aren’t conscious of this?

Comment from John
Time July 24, 2010 at 10:55 am

Eli I think we are discussing matters at cross purposes. Capitalism provides the material basis for socialism – eg enough to feed, house, educate everyone. It doesn’t because production is for profit, not satisfying need.