Euro-crisis – is this the anti-1989?

Greek masses on the move

1989 was the year that so-called ‘Communism’ in Eastern Europe reached the point of collapse. A collapse that subsequently, as everyone knows, spread to the USSR itself, as this whole bloc of anti-working class tyrannical dictatorships over the working class was swept into the historical dustbin. Unfortunately, it also seemed to have swept the socialist and communist project away with it.

1989 was also the year that Francis Fukuyama, a Japanese-American Professor of political science and ideologue of American imperialism, proclaimed that the ‘The End Of History‘ had arrived, in an audacious attempt to re-appropriate Hegel for the bourgeoisie and turn elements of Marx’s historical vision against Marxism. Fukuyama probably more than anyone else tried to give intellectual coherence to the totalitarian neo-liberal trend that in the past three decades or so has become known as ‘neo-conservatism’. His famous essay declared that all possibility of a systemic political alternative to capitalism and ‘liberal ‘bourgeois democracy had disappeared, and was effectively impossible in the future.

This was an exercise in what many have aptly called ‘bourgeois triumphalism’. It was not the abstract counterposition of political systems that was rendered impossible in Fukuyama’s pseudo-Hegelian scheme, but rather that capitalist class rule was deemed to have decisively won out. This was in fact an example of the bourgeoisie’s false-conciousness, its belief that communism is simply the conspiracy of a handful of malevolent and criminal fanatics, and that therefore the collapse and discredit of the Stalinist regimes, which claimed to speak in Communism’s name, necessarily meant the permanent eclipse and discredit of the very notion of replacing capitalism with socialism.

 

Labour’s Electoral Rise – A Tepid Reformism Reconsolidates

Ed Miliband

The victory of the Labour Party in the local elections has consolidated Ed Miliband’s leadership of Labour and set the political direction of Labour for the next period. For the first time since the death of John Smith in 1994, Labour has a leadership whose politics can be broadly characterised as social democratic, albeit very tepidly and timidly so.

The first hesitant blow against the Blair/Brown legacy of aggressive privatisation at home and imperialist wars abroad was struck by trade union members in the autumn of 2010, when they overruled the purged, cowed and largely middle class ‘aspirational’ Labour Party membership and installed the Green-tinged soft-left former Climate Change Secretary, Ed Miliband, as Labour leader, defeating his brother David whose entire political profile was as a clone of Tony Blair. David Miliband, as foreign secretary in the later New Labour years, is personally culpable in such crimes as ‘extraordinary rendition’ – i.e. illegal kidnapping (with torture) of Muslims suspected of Al Qaeda activities or even just sympathy, for transport to the United States or its then client regimes like Libya or Syria, in contradiction to even formal legal norms.

Ed Miliband, though not in parliament at the time, claims to have been opposed to the Iraq war as waged by Blair, Brown, his elder brother and the entire Labour leadership. It is typical of Ed Miliband’s vacuity that there seems to be no credible evidence that he ever said or did anything in opposition to that criminal invasion. Not a single speech or article can his supporters produce to substantiate this claim of opposition. His claims on this are not really credible at all – probably the most that can be said for Ed Miliband is that he wishes that he had had the courage of his claimed convictions and spoken out against the war waged by his own party leadership. But he didn’t.

 

London TUSC Election Broadcast

 

Weekly Worker editor on Galloway election victory

The following worthwhile and thought-provoking article is from this week’s Weekly Worker, paper of the CPGB. While I would not endorse everything in it, particularly its somewhat jaundiced view of George Galloway’s previous election victory for Respect in Bethnal Green and Bow, it does make a number of very useful points and could be the basis for some worthwhile discussion on the left.

Galloway shows what can be done

How can the left make the most of the Bradford West result? Peter Manson joins the debate

George Galloway: viable

George Galloway’s tremendous win for Respect in Bradford West has given the left a real boost. Standing on an anti-cuts, anti-war, anti-establishment platform, he swept to victory with a huge 55.9% share of the vote.

It is fair to say that this result took everyone by surprise – apart from the Respect campaigners on the ground, who began to realise within the last week or so that they had an excellent chance of winning. I have to admit that I was among those who thought Galloway would do well to save his deposit – especially after his failure to get elected to the Scottish parliament last year, where the Coalition Against Cuts list he headed in Glasgow picked up only 3.3%

 

Blatant Bias on BBC against Galloway’s By-Election Triumph

George Galloway’s victory in the Bradford West By-Election is one of those rare things on the left: a pleasant surprise. Not because the potential was not always there to give the establishment parties a bloody nose, given the vicious attacks on the working class and the poor by this government and the flagrant capitulation to the austerity agenda by the Labour Party under Ed Miliband. But because it appeared that Galloway and his party had lost the desire and appetite to confront Labour, preferring a strategy of maintaining Respect as a ginger group on the Labour left while quite a few of his former supporters joined the Labour Party and basically gave up any attempt to build an alternative.

 

London TUSC Election Launch

 

Lansley’s NHS Demolition Bill – political strikes are both necessary and possible to defeat it!

The Tories are in deep trouble over Lansley’s health ‘reforms’. Their Lib Dem coalition partners are deeply split over it, in the Lords Shirley Williams appears to be among those fighting hardest to defeat it. The Labour Party meanwhile, though it has capitulated on the public sector pay freeze and on the wider issue of cuts, is making defeating it in parliament a cause celebre. And rightly so, as the proposals are a deadly threat to the NHS, aimed at fragmenting it and allowing private health companies to virtually tear off profitable chunks of it for themselves. It also aims at integrating the NHS into economic sectors governed by EU competition laws that ostensibly oppose ‘monopoly’, thus imposing marketisation and a slide to outright privatisation through extra-territorial legal fiat.

No doubt the Bullingdon Club boys are quietly chortling to themselves at this spiffing wheeze. The Eurosceptic-dominated Tories setting a trap for the Euro-friendly Labourites using EU law to stymie attempts by a future reformist government to reverse this attack on the NHS. In this they calculate, probably correctly, that the cretinous subservience of Labour to capitalism and bourgeois legality will mean they will maintain whatever ‘gains’ the Tories are able to acheive in demolishing or partially demolishing the NHS.