En Passant

The real extremists sit in Canberra and in the board rooms across the country. It is not Karen who invaded Iraq, or Afghanistan. It is not Karen who is bombing Syria. It is not Karen killing black men and women in custody. It is not Karen driving Aboriginal people off their land to open it up for big mining companies. It is not Karen killing women in relationships or doing very little about it. It is not Karen increasing inequality and poverty in Australia. It is not Karen attacking Medicare. It is not Karen attacking penalty rates and wages. It is not Karen who is stopping equal love. It is not Karen locking up and abusing thousands of innocent people on Manus Island and Nauru.

Caracas is seeing an uprising of the middle classes and the rich. The working class neighbourhoods remain loyal to the government, but also deeply cynical about the extraordinary corruption of the heirs of Chavez. Mike Gonzalez analyses this contradictory situation in revolutionary socialism in the 21 st century

This verdict is a blow to the Islamophobes who hoped to rehabilitate themselves after the Norway massacre shone a spotlight on their sickening propaganda. But it is not enough by itself. The capitalist crisis is already creating social conditions that can help the far right grow in Europe. We can see this most chillingly in Greece with the rapid electoral rise of Golden Dawn’s neo-Nazi thugs. All of this underlines that building resistance to austerity has to be combined with exposing and confronting those who share Breivik’s hateful beliefs.

There is little in the political concerns of right-wing terrorist Anders Breivik that would be out of place in Coalition Party meetings or the mainstream media and especially on the shock jock radio shows.

Breivik saw 3 threats to Western society – Islam, multiculturalism and cultural Marxism.

This is stock standard right wing discourse. Indeed some of his comments could just as easily have been made by Australian Labor Party Parliamentarians and certainly some members.

Labor is consolidating around a reactionary agenda and destroying itself politically as a consequence.

This is a government without political purpose, without vision, without morals, without principles other than ruling for the rich, but with a strategy to out-Tory the Tories.

With this sort of Labor trajectory the Conservatives could be in power soon.

Our task is to resist reaction of whichever hue and to argue for a fightback in our unions and in the social movements.

Without a left-wing political or industrial focus some of the exploited, the forgotten and the marginalised have turned to nationalism and its twin, racism, as crutches for the loss of working class community and working class strength in action.

Julia Gillard’s ascension to the Prime Ministership has exposed the fault lines of Australian feminism between the liberals and the liberationists.  Already some feminists are complaining that the attacks on Gillard are because she is a woman, not because she is a reactionary. Some committed women unionists have swung totally behind Gillard despite the fact her policies […]

Remember the Democratic Labor Party? Evidently they saved Australia from a communist Government. Don’t believe me? Let me quote from that font of all knowledge, Angela Shanahan, a ‘journalist’ with The Australian. ‘As a reader wrote: “What comes out of this book is not to praise the ‘stay-in-and-fighters’ (sic) (as Carr does) but those who sacrificed […]

Why not pick out two sentences from hundreds of articles by a leftie and think that you have undercut all those crazy ideas about democracy and satisfying human need?

Montgomery Burns didn’t get called into Tony Abbott’s shadow cabinet,  but just about every other undead Liberal did. Bronwyn Bishop, preserved in a petrol bath, has been resurrected to look after old people. She did such a great job last time, didn’t she? Kevin Andrews, the man who overdosed on Workchoices rhetoric and spewed out its putrid essence, […]