World Socialist Party (US) » Culture

“If we listened to it…

FN Brill — Fri, 20 Aug 2010 05:10:32 +0000

maybe history would stop repeating itself.” -Lily Tomlin

No related posts.

Making Bread

fnb2 — Sun, 15 Aug 2010 19:54:57 +0000

Wheat is the new gold. As poor countries brace for shortages, it’s boom time for Kansas farmers. “It feels like Christmas in August,” admitted Darrell Hanavan, of the Colorado Wheat Administrative Committee, noting that the harvest just completed in his state seems to have been the most bountiful for 25 years.

The dollar value for the crop is almost sure to set a record. The US Department of Agriculture expects US exports to surge by 36 per cent this year. The futures prices of wheat on the Chicago commodities exchanges are spiking at heights that even a few weeks ago would have seemed mad – above $7 (£4.50) a bushel in recent days. Speculators rushing to buy wheat in the wake of Russia’s export ban may have created a bubble that is not immune from bursting. Russia announced that weeks of fierce heat and uncontrolled fires would cost the country a quarter of its crop and that its wheat exports, which will be frozen from tomorrow, may not resume until next year. Output in Ukraine and Kazakhstan has slumped too. Canadian wheat farmers have been struggling with crops drowned by rains that won’t stop, and in eastern Australia, the wheat crop could be devastated by a plague of locusts expected to start hatching next week.

Egypt, the world’s biggest wheat importer, and Indonesia and Thailand, which also both rely on imports of grain, complained this week that they face a sudden price squeeze on such staples as bread, pork and sugar and with that, the risk of social unrest of the kind witnessed in 2008, when food price hikes provoked riots in a number of countries. Abdolreza Abbassian, a senior economist with the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation in Rome, said Morocco, Libya, Tunisia and Iran all face higher budget deficits because of the amounts they spend on bread subsidies. “Some are politically unstable countries – they simply cannot afford” the social effects that bread queues could have on the urban poor.

Daryl Larson, who farms 1,500 acres in Kansas sold nearly half of his wheat crop but will keep the rest in the silo in the expectation that the prices will at least climb further. Most analysts would concur with Mr Larson’s strategy of holding on to some grain for added profit. The SPGB only asks: why do some in this world face destitution and hunger, while others hoard food to obtain higher profits?

No related posts.

Can’t Pay – Can’t Have

fnb2 — Fri, 16 Jul 2010 03:58:50 +0000

The ongoing food crisis in the Sahel, West Africa is actually a purchasing power crisis: there is food in the markets, but the poorest households cannot afford it said Bakari Seidou, food security advisor to Save the Children UK.

“The market is their main source of food, but they need money. Their main source of cash is their labour: they earn an average of 20 cents a day per person; even if there is food available on the markets, they can not afford it.”

Insufficient agricultural production: the poorest families have insufficient earning power; more than 50 percent of household income comes from paid labour, but significant numbers are unable to secure work locally and are forced to migrate or sell their land to buy food and pay debts.

More than half the income of the poorest goes to food: even in agricultural areas, food purchases eat up more than half of family income; any food price increase means a family may eat less, consume food of poor nutritional value, or cut education and health expenses.

Substantial wealth gap: in agricultural areas, the richest earn from nine to 15 times more than the poorest; even though they only represent 15 percent of households, the richest own more than half the cultivated land and cattle.

And in Kenya according to Alun McDonald, the regional media and communications officer of Oxfam GB,hundreds of thousands of people in Nairobi already live in serious poverty and are just surviving. “They simply can’t afford to pay any more for food,”

Meanwhile, Kenyan politicians gave themslves a monthly pay rise of nearly 25%, making them some of the best-paid legislators in the world bring it to £8,920 a month (In Kenya the minimum wage was last month raised to £50 a month for employees in cities and £25 for farm workers)

No related posts.

I read some Marx…

FN Brill — Fri, 02 Jul 2010 06:18:59 +0000

Utah Phillips once said that IWWs used hymns as the basis of their famous labor songs because the tunes were pretty and every one knew them. All the IWW would have to do was change the lyrics so they made sense.

Now some folks make more sense of Katy Perry’s “I kissed a girl”…

No related posts.

It’s the Devil’s fault!

SPGB — Tue, 13 Apr 2010 08:14:26 +0000

“Noted Italian exorcist Father Gabriele Amorth, commented this week that “the recent defamatory reporting on Pope Benedict XVI, especially by the New York Times, was prompted by the devil.” Speaking to News Mediaset in Italy, the 85-year-old exorcist noted that “the devil is behind the recent attacks on Pope Benedict XVI regarding some pedophilia cases. There is no doubt about it. Because he is a marvelous Pope and worthy successor to John Paul II, it is clear that the devil wants to grab hold of him.” Father Amorth added that in instances of sexual abuse committed by some members of the clergy, the devil “uses” priests in order to cast blame upon the entire Church: “The devil wants the death of the Church because she is the mother of all the saints. He combats the Church through the men of the Church, but he can do nothing to the Church.” The exorcist went on to note that Satan tempts holy men, “and so we should not be surprised if priests too fall into temptation. They also live in the world and can fall like men of the world.” (Catholic News Agency, 31 March)

No related posts.

Desmond Dekker – Israelites

FN Brill — Mon, 22 Mar 2010 08:57:05 +0000

“Get up in the morning, slaving for bread, sir,/So that every mouth can be fed./Poor me, the Israelite. Aah.”

No related posts.

Strike – the movie

FN Brill — Tue, 16 Mar 2010 07:13:26 +0000

Demo trailer for the movie musical “Strike!” now in pre-production. O’Reilly (Carson Nattrass) convinces his army mate McDougall (Jon Ted Wynne) that they have more in common with their former WW1 enemies than their rulers. … “Strike!” is based on the actual events of the 1919 Winnipeg General Strike which our comrades in the Socialist Party of Canada were influential participants.

No related posts.

Street Sweeper Social Club

FN Brill — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 06:54:27 +0000

“Off the breaking backs of others/Where you got all your bucks/Till we make the revolution I just hope your life sucks”

Street Sweeper Social Club is an American rap rock supergroup, formed in Los Angeles, California in 2006. The band primarily consists of guitarist Tom Morello of Rage Against the Machine and vocalist/emcee Boots Riley of The Coup

No related posts.

The prophet debunked

FN Brill — Wed, 03 Mar 2010 04:56:26 +0000

Trotsky. A Biography. By Robert Service. Macmillan. 624pp. £25.

Were Trotsky alive today, he would have the editors of this book shot. It is riddled with irritating errors. Round brackets close square; names change spelling; weird sentences like the idea that Russian radicals “took the bits of Marxism they disliked and discarded the rest” slip through; and apparently Oslo and St. Petersburg lie on the same longitude, 59 degrees North. Macmillan should be ashamed to have allowed this slapdash product into print.

This would not matter except that the representatives of Trotsky on Earth have launched a flurry of chaff to attack this biography of their idol. Forensic hair splitting has been their method, and finding faults, such as that Natalya Sederova (Trotsky’s partner) died in 1962 rather than 1960 as the book claims. This is, of course, a distraction tactic. Hardly any of their reviews deal with the meat of the book.

Peter Taaffe, leader of the “Socialist Party” of England and Wales (SPEW – formerly Militant) performs the usual Trotskyist miracle of simultaneously denying and justifying the repressive tactics and terror of the Bolsheviks. David North of the World Socialist (sic) website cavils over trivialities, and even manages to accuse Service of anti-Semitism. North also has the lack of originality to describe Service’s text as part of the ‘School of historical falsification’ echoing his hero’s riposte to Stalin.

They don’t address Trotsky’s ordering the decimation of a battalion for cowardice. Or Lenin signing an order for 100-1000 leading citizens of a city to be hanged. The book notes Trotsky’s willingness to use authoritarian methods, and suggests that prior to 1917 he never spelled out what he meant by dictatorship, but that during the crisis leading to the Bolshevik coup d’Etat, he would speak in praise of the guillotine that made opponents of the revolution “shorter by a head”.

Service depicts, with accounts from witnesses, Trotsky as an aloof and self-centred man, who lacked political judgement to help him keep friends close. He alienated many by his manner. He was never, contrary to the received wisdom and dogma of the sects, an organised Marxist. He was a non-aligned member of the Russian Social Democratic Party, who spent the years up to the Great War trying to unify the factions but never joining any. Even when he joined the Bolsheviks, it was as a loose cannon, and that would be part of his undoing.

Service attributes Trotsky’s failure to become the leader of the revolution after Lenin to a lack of will on his part – and claims that any obstacles were surmountable. He suggests that Trotsky was not planning, nor might have been able, to use his position of head of the Red Army to seize power: but that the fear of this motivated his opponents.

What sticks in the craw of the Trots, and threatens the entire ideological edifice of their movement, is Service’s contention that Trotsky did not in policy terms differ from Stalin, and that he had indeed consciously presided over the introduction of a series of show trials of opponents like the ones used by Stalin against Trotsky’s allies. Further, he examines Trotsky’s late claim that the “backwardness” of Russian development was to blame for the “degeneration” of the revolution. In that case, enquires Service, was not the whole enterprise, including all its shed blood, a forlorn waste of time?

Despite the claims of the acolytes, this is not an entire hatchet job, Service freely acknowledges that Trotsky was a great writer and orator, and a brave man in his own personal right. It is, though, a biography, as much a literary form as an historical one, and judgement plays an important part. Service gives his opinion, and is openly critical of Bolshevism and the reader can make up their own mind.

No related posts.

Capitalism and Michael Moore

SPGB — Sat, 20 Feb 2010 20:28:32 +0000

Like Michael Moore’s other films, ‘Capitalism: A Love Story’, is brilliant in its way, hard-hitting and funny. He strips away the lies and hypocrisy of “public relations” propaganda to expose the ruthless predators who dominate our society and profit from the misery of working people.

And at the same time he makes us laugh. So far so good. It’s fairly clear what Michael Moore is against. But what he is for? He doesn’t seem to know himself, as he admits in a recent newspaper interview:

“What I’m asking for is a new economic order. I don’t know how to construct that. I’m not an economist. All I ask is that it have two organising principles. Number one, that the economy is run democratically. In other words, the people have a say in how its run, not just the [wealthiest] 1 percent. And number two, that it has an ethical and moral core to it. That nothing is done without considering the ethical nature, no business decision is made without
first asking the question, is this for the common good?” (Guardian, 30 January).

We too want democracy to extend to all spheres of social life. For us that’s what socialism is – the common ownership and democratic control of the means of life by the whole community. But genuine democracy will not be achieved by relying on economists or other supposed experts to design it.

By its very nature, democracy must be created by a conscious majority. Michael Moore seems to be saying that in his “new economic order” the wealthiest 1 percent will still exist, even though they will no longer have all the say. He also assumes that there are still going to be “business decisions”. But business decisions are about making money, not serving the common good. Any firm run by managers who care too much about ethics and morality will soon go bust – unless the managers get sacked first!

On one key point, he is right. If the situation he exposes so well is to change, it really does require a “new economic order”. An end to production for profit. The alternative is a society in which the means for producing what we need are owned in common and run democratically. A society in which productive activity is no longer “business” but simply cooperation to satisfy human needs.

This is much more than he offers on his website. He says nothing there about any kind of “new order”. It’s all about campaigning for various reforms. These may well be of benefit to working people in the short term, but as they still leave capitalism in place there would always be pressure to reverse any gains made. Worst of all, and despite Michael Moore’s evident disillusionment with Obama, heurges readers to work for change through the Democratic Party – a recipe for endless failure and frustration.

One last point. Michael Moore talks only about changing things in the United States. This national focus makes it impossible even to conceive of a fundamentally new society. That’s because nowadays capitalism is a highly integrated world system and can only be replaced at the global level.

It is clear to us that society urgently needs a worldwide system upgrade…from capitalism to socialism!

No related posts.