En Passant

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, [...]

What sort of sick society forces a middle-aged man from power for loving a younger woman? Australia evidently. John Della Bosca’s resignation as Health Minister in the New South Wales Government over an affair with Kate Neill is typical of the state of politics under capitalism in Australia these days.  Spin replaces substance. So what [...]

Science must become the tool of those who can develop a democratic and planned society freed from the strictures of profit – working people.