Blogs

This short essay covers the realities of the nation state that Israel makes explicit as well as personal experience with the occupation.

The truth is, to the authorities, Grenfell Tower tenants didn’t really matter ...It has been left to the survivors themselves and the wider community to organise relief ... they organised in their hundreds and held mass meetings, electing delegates, organising demonstrations. The community has shown itself to be well organised, efficient, extremely compassionate and truly democratic. Everything the capitalist state isn’t.

A review of Wesley Lowery's book covering the emergence of the Black Lives Matter movement and other activist projects in response to police shootings in the US.

Latest episode of the Living The Dream podcast from The Word From Struggle Street - an anticapitalist blog from Brisbane.

Latest blogpost from The Word From Struggle Street - an anticapitalist blog from Brisbane. An attempt to make sense of the debate in Australia around Corbyn.

There was no revolution in Venezuela. Being against neo-liberalism is not the same as opposing capitalism but only one form of it. However, it does feed into the social democratic narrative of Corbynism. Today, in the middle of an election campaign, the assertion that “Venezuela is socialist” is happily repeated by right wing papers and politicians to gloat over the social disaster which Venezuela has become.

It is a fact that lately certain anarchists have placed themselves in the Corbyn camp. As Freedom News admits, "lots of anarchists have decided they’re going to vote to try and get rid of the Tories".

Whatever the result of the general election, we need to be building a movement capable of creating a better world.

Corbyn, rather than being the saviour of the working class in Britain, demonstrates the futility of even the best of intentions when operating within logic and limits of capitalist democracy.

I originally posted this at Freedom News shortly after the Manchester bombing, but blow me if it's not strangely prescient on today's events as well...

Latest episode of the Living The Dream podcast from The Word From Struggle Street - an anticapitalist blog from Brisbane.

The principle of enantiadromia says that culminating processes revert into their opposite like a yin-yang. This is a force that's certainly at work in Venezuela today as the Bolivarian Revolution, which promised deepening democracy becomes a dictatorship.

A sketch written and distributed amongst some anarchists from April of 2016 prior to Trump's electoral victory.

For years the world capitalist system has been in economic crisis. No matter what policies various governments have tried (from increased spending, to privatisation and letting the banks speculate on anything and everything) this crisis has not gone away. It got worse in 2007-8 when the speculative bubble fuelled by the banks burst. We have been paying the consequences ever since. Despite talk of a recent recovery, real incomes of the majority have continued to fall.

These are dangerous and unpredictable times. Ten years after the global financial meltdown the world economy still isn’t fixed. After decades of promoting globalisation, which has produced only fortunes for the few and misery for the many, our rulers are beginning to lose their grip. A growing number are turning to so-called nationalist “populism”. ... this is the sign of a system which lacks real solutions.

The National Front was initially created by several fascist groups in 1972. Its first significant national victory was in 1986 thanks to to the "Socialist" President Mitterrand who wanted to divide the Right and temporarily changed the electoral system which enabled the NF to get 35 MPs this year. From 1988 its influence has grown at every presidential election (except in 2007 because of a split) reaching 21,7 % of the votes in 2017 10;6 million of the votes among 46 million of potential voters).

This National Front is a political UFO... A very dangerous one: even if specialists and militants don't agree about what should be the right label: fascist? postfascist? national-populist? It's a very dangerous enemy for the working class...

This text was presented in London in July 2015 during an "Ideas for freedom" meeting organized by the AWL, a Trotskyist group with whom I have strong differences on many subjects but.... which invites me regularly to debate about France. Since 2015, unfortunately, the influence of the National Front has grown, especially among the working class. I will write a new article at the end of June after the Parliamentary elections...

Presentation

This collection of articles deals mainly with problems which have been intensely dividing the “revolutionary ” Left in France recently: some are relatively new (the growing social and political importance of a foreign-born population, the growth of Islam, the clash between identity politics and French Republicanism), some are indeed quite old: the attitude of the workers movement towards national identity, religion, French nationalist form of universalism, the bourgeois state, electoral politics, anti-Semitism and the “Jewish question,” Zionism, the nature and role of Trotskyism, political violence, etc.

Our work creates the bulk of the world’s wealth which ends up in the hands of the capitalist class. They use the wealth we create to supply armies and to wage wars to defend their existence. We need to build an international movement which can create a society in which people’s needs not capitalist profits dominate, and in doing so end atrocities like the one in Manchester. No war but the class war.