Song That Never Ends

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By Gary Egelston

Two headed monster - GovernmentLast time government shutdown occurred was in 1995, during the Clinton administration; healthcare, environmental reforms, and education were a few issues dividing elected opinion. And, while the two-headed monster chewed its own neck, mainstream media ensured that took center stage, drawing attention away from its tail. Democrats claimed their ideas helped the public, and republicans appeared as cantankerous assholes that cared little for the well-being of citizens… sound familiar?

Clinton was and is the poster-child for austerity, along with an extreme big brother state. After all, he heavily supported the original Patriot Act and NDAA (introduced on the floor by then Sen. Biden as The Omnibus Counterterrorism Act of 1995). ‘Reforms’ were pure donkey shit wrapped in a nicely framed message, with opposition from the right dividing public opinion, as one side appeared as a party acting for good and the other not. As it turned out, what the democrats and Clinton promoted was the advancement of corporatism, yet constructed debate blinded most to that truth. What he lobbied helped only the elite, and that is not coincidental. Clinton heavily championed corporate interests, as his reforms were nothing more than the progression of neoliberalism. Howard Zinn wrote many great pieces explaining it further if you want to research.

Today isn’t any different, as republicans appear obstructionist, and democrats the opposite. The main disagreement is Obamacare, another state capitalist idea that mandates corporate profit through government force, at the expense of people’s health. One side fights fiercely against it, creating a perspective that it must not be that awful if those assholes hate it so much. The other touts they care and frames a message of good vs. bad. Incidentally, it forces sides and the original wrong becomes justified, accepted, and not questioned by the general population.

Obamacare will stay, as this administration, along with Jonathan Gruber, ensured corporate interests were protected and pushed forward. While this issue takes center stage and distracts, a compromise will occur, resulting in further austerity guts to the economy. It’s a distraction designed to advance a neoliberal agenda. Watch, social services will take the biggest hit, with the rich getting richer. One hand washes the other; that’s how it works.

Sixth night of rioting in Antakya, Turkey

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A look through Turkish newspaper Hurriyet today will find nothing of the ongoing rioting in Antakya and to a lesser extent Istanbul despite now going into the sixth day.

Courtesy of jn1:

Solidarity with those trying to oust Recep Tayyip Erdogan and the fascist AKP regime.

Good luck, you’re going to need it but don’t give up!

Republican Socialism

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By Barry Mellows

In Ireland the Free State and British Government have a special interest that is to protect Partition; to do so and to protect their interests they have placed us all in human gutter’s that they build, manipulate and maintain to sustain their imperialist and capitalist interests. They infect our environs with poverty, deprivation and the consequential social illnesses to keep us there.

They create the context whereby poor choices and hopelessness prevail and yet condemn and castigate us in their media for falling victim to their intent, their justice systems pursue us relentlessly, their courts harangue and pillory us, their prisons teach us vengeance, the addictions and abuse they foster among us chain us to despair – they set us apart among ourselves and separate us in to sections – the have a special administrative section governed by their special police, the drug dealers, gangsters, informers and agents those who live among us on their wages, in their esteem employed to massacre our dreams while murdering our children and all of this while simultaneously they criminalize all of us equally, frowning upon us, dehumanizing us as equally disgusting, forcing us to believe we are less, we are less than them. As humans we are less, and have less entitlement to Human rights than other Humans.

Republican Socialists are the guardians of our rights where we dwell, the aspiration is to eradicate the gutters imposed upon us, empowerment, to smash them, but while held here in these cruelly imposed gutters, Republican Socialists protect our rights and inspire our responsibilities.
We do not wish to vacate the gutters they have placed us in all that will achieve is a placement for their next victim, we wish to destroy them, not one can leave without the other, if one rises and leaves, all it can ever be is a betrayal of the rest left behind, one must be enlightened to rise, and on rising must take the others hand and on enlightening them take the other onward to victory.

We will not engage their media portrayal of who we are expected to be, or allow their police and courts condemn our children to adulthood dehumanized, we will reject their cosmetic culture and ethics to kill our principles, we will seize their media and present to them ourselves and the aspirations they hoped to kill with apathy and we will not condemn their victims to more disdain but instead we will stand alongside them and protect them, we will show them fraternity and love and we will elect that administrative section the one that contains their Drug dealers and abusers and we will chase it from our midsts as we rise as one people and smash their imperialist hell and we will build a Socialist Republic, We will.

Wilhelm Liebknecht

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Today is the 113th anniversary of the death of Wilhelm Liebknecht, founder of the SPD. Here is what the “Great Soviet Encyclopedia of 1979” said about him:

Born Mar. 29, 1826, in Giessen; died Aug. 7, 1900, in Berlin. A prominent figure in the German democratic and labor movement, a disciple and comrade of K. Marx and F. Engels. One of the founders and leaders of the German Social Democratic Party. The son of an official.

Liebknecht was educated in the universities of Berlin, Giessen, and Marburg. He was active in the Revolution of 1848–49 in Germany. After the revolution was defeated he emigrated first to Switzerland and then to Great Britain. During his emigration he became acquainted with Marx and Engels. Under their influence he adopted the ideas of scientific communism. In 1850 he joined the Union of Communists. The proclamation of an amnesty permitted Liebknecht to return to Prussia in 1862. He worked as a correspondent for various democratically oriented German and foreign newspapers. He was involved with the General German Workers’ Association and helped form the opposition to Lassallean leadership within the association. Liebknecht was one of the most ardent propagandists of the revolutionary ideas of the First International. He helped attract German workers to its ranks. In April 1865, Liebknecht was expelled from Berlin and traveled to Leipzig in Saxony, where together with A. Bebel he was active in workers’ societies. In January 1868 he was appointed editor of Demokratisches Wochenblatt, which in December 1868 became the newspaper of the Union of German Workers’ Societies. He worked in close contact with Bebel.

“Bebel,” wrote V. I. Lenin, “found in Liebknecht just what he wanted—living contact with the great work done by Marx in 1848, contact with the party formed at that time, which, though small, was genuinely proletarian, a living representative of Marxist views and Marxist traditions” (Poln. sobr. soch., 5th ed., vol. 23, p. 365). Counterbalancing the leaders of the Lassalleans, Liebknecht and Bebel criticized the policies of O. Bismarck, who had carried out the unification of Germany by counterrevolutionary means under the aegis of the Prussian Junkers. Striving to unify the country on a democratic basis, Liebknecht tolerated certain mistakes (assuming that the creation of an independent workers’ party was premature, he allied with the South German petit bourgeois democrats, who were calling for a policy of federalism). Liebknecht’s democratic illusions were sharply criticized by Marx and Engels, with whom Liebknecht was in constant communication. In 1868 at the Nuremberg Congress of Workers’ Societies, Liebknecht and Bebel broke organizationally with the bourgeois democratic currents and in 1869 founded in Eisenach the Social Democratic Workers’ Party, which was governed by the revolutionary principles of the First International. Liebknecht was the editor of the central party newspaper, Volksstaat, published in Leipzig.

Liebknecht was a deputy to the North German Reichstag from 1867 to 1870 and to the German Reichstag beginning in 1874 (with interruptions). Following the instructions of Marx and Engels, Liebknecht skillfully used the parliamentary platform to denounce the reactionary foreign and domestic policies of the Prussian Junkers and to attack militarism. During the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–71, Liebknecht and Bebel, taking an internationalist position, opposed the annexationist plans of the Junkers and bourgeoisie. He passionately propagandized the idea of solidarity with the Paris Commune of 1871. For their opposition to Germany’s annexation of Alsace and East Lorraine, Liebknecht and Bebel were brought to trial in 1872 by Bismarck’s government, accused of “state treason,” and sentenced to two years’ imprisonment. “We congratulate all of you for your speech in court,” Engels wrote to Liebknecht on Apr. 23, 1872, referring to the bold appeal of the accused to the German and international workers’ movement (Marx and Engels, Soch., 2nd ed., vol. 33, p. 378).

Liebknecht was instrumental in helping the Eisenachians and Lassalleans come together in 1875. However, in doing this he made considerable concessions to the Lassalleans on questions of principle involving both theory and the party program. The program adopted at the Gotha Social Democratic Unity Congress, which had been principally devised by Liebknecht, was sharply criticized by Marx and Engels. Under the impact of criticism from Marx and Engels, Liebknecht adopted revolutionary positions at decisive moments of the class struggle. During the period when the discriminatory law against socialists was in force (1878–90), Liebknecht was one of the militant leaders of the illegal party. In 1890 he became editor in chief of Vorwärts, the central organ of the Social Democratic Party. He played an active part in disseminating Marxist teachings in Germany.

He was repeatedly imprisoned for revolutionary activities. Liebknecht was one of the organizers of the Second International and a participant in its congresses. He actively opposed militarism.

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How we can gain support

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By Jim Hargreaves

If we are to build a kautskyian mass party, we would obviously need members and the support of the proletariat. So, how do we obtain this? Agitation: agitate inside your union for a rank and file workers union, rather than the bureaucratic, class collaborationist organisation that the majority of unions are today; agitate in your workplace for strikes; agitate on the streets by handing out leaflets and papers; agitate online by making your own site or on Facebook.

By doing this, it will:
A) increase class consciousness
B) lead to others joining you in your agitation
C) increase the numbers of the party, therefore giving it more power, thus giving it more influence in unions, which will give it more influence among the working class as a whole.

With each strike the proletariat will grow in confidence, leading to more strikes and demonstrations, which will boost its confidence even more! We need to agitate for independent working class organisations, not just ones set up by one of the many ‘communist’ parties; we need to agitate for committees to be formed- people’s councils; we need to agitate for the workers running their own factories, and their own lives without the bourgeois state moralistically regulating what we can and can’t do. We need to agitate for freedom and for the democratic dictatorship of the proletariat.

What needs to be formed is something similar to the soviets which were formed in Russia- democratic, independent working class organisation which are suitable of superseding the bourgeois state apparatus.

Our demands are simple: we want those who work to receive the full fruits of their labour; we want to do away with bosses, policemen, soldiers and bureaucrats; we want to run our own lives. We can only do this by overthrowing the bourgeois state and replacing it with the democratic dictatorship of the proletariat.

A call to account

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The drum of war thunders and thunders.
It calls: thrust iron into the living.
From every country
slave after slave
are thrown onto bayonet steel.
For the sake of what?
The earth shivers
hungry
and stripped.
Mankind is vapourised in a blood bath
only so
someone
somewhere
can get hold of Albania.
Human gangs bound in malice,
blow after blow strikes the world
only for
someone’s vessels
to pass without charge
through the Bosporus.
Soon
the world
won’t have a rib intact.
And its soul will be pulled out.
And trampled down
only for someone,
to lay
their hands on
Mesopotamia.
Why does
a boot
crush the Earth — fissured and rough?
What is above the battles’ sky –
Freedom?
God?
Money!
When will you stand to your full height,
you,
giving them your life?
When will you hurl a question to their faces:
Why are we fighting?

Vladimir Mayakovsky (1917)

UK tories cutting social security

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We pay into the tax system when we are working and when times are tough we have a small part of that tax held for when we need it, social security.

From the Socialist Party (UK)

Tories make the poor pay say Socialists as benefits cap is introduced

Paula Mitchell, Socialist Party London regional secretary said: “This is yet another demonstration of the Tories obsessional hatred of working class and poor people. Instead of getting people into work by creating jobs they are forcing some of the poorest people in society into destitution. Up to 40,000 households will now face the prospect of not being able to pay the rent or buy food.

The government claims that this is in the name of “changing a culture” and putting an end to “days of blank cheques”. It’s a shame that they have never applied these principle to the bankers who caused the economic crisis in the first place who have had plenty of blank cheques written for them in the form of huge bail outs.

Unfortunately the Labour Party is too busy attacking trade unionists to put up any real opposition. They accept the same logic as the Tories of kowtowing to big business.

This is why Bob Crow made the call for a new party at the weekend. In the elections next year, hundreds of trade unionists, socialists and ordinary working people, fed up with Labour’s inability to stand up for us, will be standing candidates in the elections under the banner of the Trade Unionist and Socialist Coalition (TUSC).

In order to end worklessness and poverty a government would have to unroll a programme of public works in order to create real jobs. The money is there – if big companies aren’t prepared to invest, they should be nationalised under democratic control.

We call for the trade union movement to work alongside unemployed activists and anti-cuts campaigners to build a mass movement against austerity. A 24 hour general strike should be the next step in the campaign against the ConDemolition of our rights and living standards.”