En Passant

Today the capitalist system is in crisis internationally. It is inflicting experiences on people that undermine neoliberal ideas in the eyes of millions. The struggle against this austerity and the system is also, with various ups and downs, developing internationally. If we want ideas to change, and we do, our job as socialists is to raise the level of that struggle. We also need to make sure that at the heart of the struggle is a political movement systematically arguing for a real change in the system.

The Greens’ push for reforms imagines that in a time of global economic crisis, a crisis of low profit rates arising out of the way production is organised under capitalism, capital will willingly divert some of the surplus value we workers create back to us or the poor. That is fairy land stuff.

Of course, whether we leave behind a world to our descendants as beautiful as the one we were born into, will depend on our own independent, organized self-activity to wrench control away from a ruling elite that is quite happy to continue making money from a system that must be overturned.

As Israeli missiles and artillery shells pounded the densely packed Gaza Strip, Australians from all walks of life will protest the massacre, which to date claimed over 100 lives, at noon on Saturday 24 November outside the Israeli Embassy in Turrana St Yarralumla.

Palestinians living under the brutality of occupation – and now an all-out war in Gaza -have not asked for global ideological approval. Instead, they have asked that we do whatever is in our power to help end their misery and stop the bombings, years-long siege and occupation.

To heed their call for solidarity means defending Palestinians’ right to resist Israel’s terror.

A Tamil asylum seeker, known as Anjan, was scheduled to be deported back to Sri Lanka on Wednesday. But an eleventh-hour appeal successfully overturned yesterday’s Federal Magistrates Court decision which denied Anjan an injunction on his removal. Importantly, the court appeal was backed up with direct action by refugee rights activists outside the Maribyrnong detention centre.

There has been almost no discussion of the context for these protests – decades of U.S. imperialist intervention in the Muslim region. In reality, the film has become a symbol of the contempt with which the U.S. government holds the people of the Middle East and North Africa.

Solidarity is not a light switch. It must be on the whole time. Our support for the oppressed today prepares us for the struggles of tomorrow against capitalism and its agents of oppression. The best way to do that right now and to help drive back racism and oppression is to support and defend the Muslim demonstrators and any other struggles that do break out against capitalism.

The prison workers’ snap strike in response to the Newman Budget should be a clear signal to all workers about how to fight back. Strike. Join the rally on Wednesday and fight, fight, fight. Strike together, stay out indefinitely and close Queensland down until Campbell Newman surrenders.

For 40 years I have been raging against the capitalist machine in all its manifestations – war, genocide, poverty, human rights abuses, working class exploitation, economic crises and the racism, sexism and homophobia which act as a glue for the system and the Labor party and trade union leadership which are its staunchest defenders and the rock on which it survives.

If recent calls in Australia for the further criminalisation of dissent mean that I’ll have to write my blog from a prison cell then so be it. I won’t be the first and I certainly won’t be the last revolutionary imprisoned for their views.