Joseph Kay's blog

Some students today unfurled a giant banner. In simple white type on black, one side simply read 'communism'. On the reverse, 'omnia sunt communia'. Not being versed in latin, an accompanying leaflet translated and gave some context.

Junge Linke's short piece nicely skewers how attempts to mobilise resentment of claimants and the unemployed undermine even those in work who aren't claiming benefits. What I'd like to focus on is two perspectives on what an explicitly anti-work politics might look like.

Robocommunism

The 'housing shortage' has become something of a received wisdom amongst the political mainstream. From the right, we get the endless moans from property developers about 'bureaucratic planning red tape'. From the left, the nostalgic call for a new wave of council housing.

I previously blogged on this topic at the end of last year.

1. Workfare represents a massive reimposition of work both on the unemployed and in undermining pay/conditions/security of waged workers.

I've been meaning to write something on this for a long time, but I've hesitated as class struggle critiques of identity politics are often clumsy and serve to gloss over very real oppressions and violence.

So everybody’s taking perverse pleasure in celebrating the return to recession as proof that 'austerity isn’t working'.1 Setting aside the armchair-Keynesianism behin

• 1. This assumes a rapid return to growth is the objective, rather than tearing up the post-war social contract, smashing the remnants of organised labour, privatising everything in sight and getting even more ridiculously minted.

In terms of what’s been happening in Brighton, a ‘pro-life’ group (who I won’t name since they’re aiming at publicity) have been regularly harassing women at the British Pregnancy Advisory Service clinic, importing tactics from the US where such actions are a lot more common. This made the front page of the local paper today after they intimidated a rape survivor (see lead pic).

Workfare has been kicking up a twitter-storm again lately.

What follows isn't really a review, but some thoughts on some of the concepts put forward and ideas raised in the book. Nor am I going to summarise the arc of the book's main arguments.

The COP-17 climate change talks in Durban earlier this month agreed to a binding greenhouse gas emissions agreement to be prepared by 2015 and entering into force in 2020.1

• 1. 'COP' = 'Conference Of the Parties' to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC).

Since the book makes the explicit claim that patriarchal histories have written out women, I put this down to a dissonance between received patriarchal 'common sense' and the book, and gave the book the benefit of the doubt. Anyhow, I just got into a conversation about the scale of the witch hunts, and looked up Federici. Here's what she has to say:

The cops have been urging people to report anarchists to the anti-terrorist police.

This is the graph we printed in Catalyst. The green line represents thousands of strike days and is read from the left y-axis, black represents inequality as measured by the Gini coefficient, and is read off the right y-axis (100 = one person owns everything and 0 = perfect equality.

What makes a revolutionary union revolutionary? or in other words, what is the content of the 'political' in a political-economic organisation?

Academic historian Marcel van der Linden says this, which i think can be used to think about an answer:

Anarcho-syndicalist criticisms of trade unionism are often scathing and incisive, but are weaker or non-existent when it comes to the bureaucratisation and class collaboration of ostensibly revolutionary unions – most famously the CNT’s participation in the Spanish government dur

Liberalism is the default ideology of capitalism. Within mainstream ideologies, its only real rival is realism, aka realpolitik, aka power politics. While liberalism seeks to subjugate might to right, realism says that might makes right. So in arguing that [url=http://www.solfed.org.uk/?q=the-paradox-of-reformism-a-call-for-economic-blockades]“It’s all about the balance of class forces.