Tendance Coatesy

Workers at New Fabris (sub-contractors for the automobile  industry) have threatened to blow up their factory.  Faced with redundancy they have demanded a special sum of 30,000 Euros as a pay off, on top of statutory payments.  Today they have announced they will carry this out if their demands are not met.  The ultimatium date is  the 31st of July.  (Here)

A large demonstration is planned today at  at Châtellerault  (Vienne). (Here)

Workers’ declaration (from NPA site):

Nous exigeons toujours une prime de licenciement de 30 000 euros en plus des indemnités légales.

(We demand a special redundancy payment of 30,000 Euros on top of legal indemnities.)

Nous appelons l’ensemble des salariés des entreprises qui, comme nous, sont sous la menace d’une fermeture de leur entreprise ou de licenciements, du bassin châtelleraudais et de toute la France, à nous contacter de façon à coordonner nos luttes et à former un collectif contre les patrons voyous et licencieurs..

(We call on all workers in companies,. like out own, who are threatened with their enterprise closing or redundancies, in the châtelleraudais region, and across France, to contact us in order to coordinate our struggles and to form a collective against ‘thug-and-lay-off bosses’.)

Nous appelons l’ensemble des salariés en lutte pour l’emploi à une manifestationà Chatellerault jeudi 30 juillet à 14h.

(We call on all workers out struggling for employment to join the demonstration at Chatellerault Thursday the 30th of July at 14.oo. )

Nous invitons également tous les responsables politiques et syndicaux à venir se joindre à nous.

(We invite all the political and trade union leaders to join us.)

Vous pouvez nous contacter en écrivant à : newfabrisenlutte@yahoo.fr

(Contact details.)

Communiqué de la CGT New Fabris, Châtellerault, le 24 juillet à 11h.

Note: there’s a good article about New Fabris in the latest Solidarity.

Added Friday: Report on demo (about 1,000, composing important union delegations and personalities): here

UPDATE SATURDAY: End of movement. The workers have accepted 11,000 Euros extra payment and stopped their actions (here).

European Savants Inspired by Islamic Science.

From one of Origio’s numerous front sites (Jimas).

Cartoons, Science and a Shared Euro-Islamic History

By Professor Salim Al-Hassani

Read here. “ They show that many everyday things that have become integral to Western civilisation were invented or brought to us by Muslims. Examples of these are coffee and the culture of coffee drinking, soap and surgical tools, vaccinations, paper, carpets, ‘Arabic’ numerals, algebra, cameras, soap, automatic water raising machines, clocks, many musical instruments, architectural features such as the pointed ‘Gothic’ arch. Even Robinson Crusoe and the English rose have been found to have Muslim origins, this list is endless. But the problem is that this knowledge isn’t yet widely available for the public.”

Coffee is no more Islamic than Tea is Confucian. The Professor, poor soul, is confusing the camera obscura with a camera that could take photographs – the latter is a European invention. Soap (in the modern sense, soap-like substances were known circa 2000 BC in Mesopotamia)  is an prehistoric Germanic  discovery (as the etymology of the word indicates, even in Romance languages). 120 types of surgical tools have been discovered in the ancient Indus Vally Civilisation. Smallpox vaccination was practiced in China and India 200BC. Paper in the modern sense (not Papyrus) is from ancient China.  ’Arabic’ numerals are from India. Algebra originates in the Babylonian civilisation (here). Water clocks, clepsydrae, were invented in antiquity; the first mechanical clocks were created in Europe in the 13th century, and it was not until the 15th that they appeared in the ‘Islamic’ world.

I could go on through the list but I’m bored. Though the Muslim ‘origins’ of the English rose and Robinson Crusoe looks promising material.  But, be fair: the Ottomans were the first to manufacture carpets.

Let’s bear in mind that these well-funded nutters (bigots?) have free run of University Campus Suffolk & Suffolk New College (here).

Salim T S Al-Hassani is an Emeritus Professor Mechanical Engineering and an Honorary Professorial Fellow at the School of Languages, Linguistics and Cultures, Faculty of Humanities, University of Manchester.

I wouldn’t trust him to repair my bath taps.

What a Selection of Learned Works They Have!

Origio in Ipswich is an Islamic evangelist movement. It has an Internet Café in Eagle Street and a ‘Community Centre’ in Upper Orwell Street. Rather well-funded by the looks of it. Certainly posher than our Council community centres – to say the least. A bit of a creepy cult-like atmosphere around them. Hard-looking types offer you elaborate cakes like they is spreading peace and light. Right goody-two-shoes. Wormed their way into the favour of the local state religious-support structures – aka CRC, Inter-faith groups etc. That it’s a ‘charity’ indicates how far the public purse subsidises all religions.

Clearly its openness has its limits. Like material about forbidding non-Muslim men from marrying Muslim women. Usual stuff about ‘hygeine’.

More important it is heavily pushing the works of a certain Dr. Mohar Ali (deceased 2007). According to Wikipedia he was “arrested after the liberation of Bangladesh and exiled” (here). The cause? He was charged with being a collaborator with the Pak army and complicit in the infamous 1971 Dhaka University massacre.

Oh dear.

We have a cult round the corner that looks up to someone implied in the Pakistani genocide in Bangladesh.

Not so rosy.

The French Parti Socialiste (PS) is undergoing a deep, even existential, crisis.

The background is the continued feud between PS General Secretary Martine Aubry and  failed Presidential (and failed General Secretary) candidate Ségolène Royal. The most obvious immediate cause the fall out from the results in the European Elections. The PS got 16,5% , with 14 MEPs,  closely followed by Europe Ecologie at 16,3% . The latter also got 14 MEPs.

Europe Ecologie is an alliance of, notably,  pro-EU and social market Green Daniel Cohn-Bendit (co-President of the EU Parliament’s Greens) anti-EU anti-capitalist,  José Bové, and  Verts National Secretary  Cécile Duflot, whose background is in the  Jeunesse ouvrière chrétienne (Young Christian workers). Its principle was that, “Ecological and social imperatives must drive political choices.” The Euro-election programme  gives priority to combating climate change, protecting biodiversity, extending ecological measures across industry, and European-wide raised social standards (wages, social security). It calls for a new European Dream.

Here are some recent comments from leading Socialist figures (though where BHL fits in I’m not sure).

Below:

“ Depuis le 14 juillet, date de sa lettre à Manuel Valls le sommant de taire ses critiques ou quitter le parti, les attaques ont fusé : Mme Aubry, taxée d ‘”amateurisme” (Julien Dray), a été qualifiée de “gardien” d’une “maison morte” (Bernard-Henri Lévy).”

“Since the 14th of July, when Martine Aubry (PS General Secretary) wrote to Manuel Valls telling him to stop criticising or  leave the Party, a flurry of further attacks has been launched: charging Aubry with ‘amateurism’ (Julien Dray), describing her as the ‘caretaker of a dead house’ (Bernard-Henri Lévy).

Furthermore,

“Le PS, cet “arbre sec” (Jack Lang), qui est “tombé dans le formol” (Arnaud Montebourg), doit “changer ou mourir” (Arnaud Montebourg).”

“The PS is ‘dead wood’ (Jack Lang) , “has fallen into Formaldehyde (‘ (Arnaud Montebourg), it “must change or die” (Arnaud Montebourg).

 

Maybe they should come to Britain and get some advice. From some real experts on how to reduce a left party to pathetic wreck dying on its feet.

For now they’re off to the beach hoping everyone will forget about this.

‘Ere you gonna pay that fine or not?

Open Left witters on about ‘choice in public services’ (here)

I shall not cite Marxist writers on the changing nature of the state.* That is about, the privatisation of its functions and the increased domination of the interests of capital. No. I cite one in favour, Phillip Bobbitt (here). Bobbit argues, amongst general considerations on the ‘war against terror’, that that the Western state has been transformed. It has become a ‘market state’. That’s one that “promises to maximize the opportunity of its people, tending to privatise many state activities and making representative government more responsive to the market”. That includes said sacred freedom of choice in public services.

A perfect illustration today. The BBC reports plans to extend the right to issue on-the-spot fines to private security firms. That includes Bouncers. Increased opportunities for would-be hard men to get into fights with customers. And for the bosses  – a nice little earner.

Anyone with a modicum of common sense- obviously this does not include The Cabinet or its Advisers – can see this is a  recipe for disaster. Unlike many Marxists I find that Magistrates – now protesting vigorously at this imbecility – are often people of great good sense. Will they be listened to?

No doubt about it. There will be plenty of ‘listening’.

*For those interested in such matters one of the most interesting modern Marxist writers on this is Bob Jessop. Jessop works with a concept of the state that is a “condensation of class forces” and not a fixed instrument of bourgeois rule.

The Bright Side of Things.

Review: Ernest Mandel. A Rebel’s Dream Deferred. Jan Willem Stutje. Verso 2009.

From the latest Chartist (not though in on-line edition – they only put a limited selection on the Web).

In 1976 Ernest Mandel observed that Europe’s far left had been able to “accumulate sufficient forces” in this “revolutionary period” to have the “realistic possible of winning over the majority of the working class.” (New Left Review. No 100.) As a young member of the same Fourth International as Mandel I read many of Mandel’s similar exhortations. Even to us ‘ultra-leftists’ in the International Marxist Group, only a few believed that this was true in Britain. Most were wary of what Stutje calls his “exuberant optimism”. Yet someone with a command of serious Marxist theory, a democrat and a revolutionary socialist, opposed to the official Communist parties of the day, a tireless activist, deeply impressed us. That our International had someone with such fierce intelligence, not a bullying leader of a sect, was a source of pride. A Rebel’s Dream Deferred tries to do justice to this Mandel. Somebody with the ambition to influence and take part in not just Europe’s but the World Revolution is no easy subject. If Stutje’s biography does not unearth a forgotten figure, Mandel’s writings remain in circulation; it confronts us with aspirations that have seemed, for a long period, from another epoch.

A “Flemish internationalist of Jewish origin” Mandel was born (1923) in Hamburg and grew up in Antwerp. His father was a leftist refugee from Hitler, who became a diamond dealer and then insurance agent; he was linked to the small Trotskyist movement opposed to Stalin. Mandel was brought up in an atmosphere of high European culture, and classical Marxism. Soon after the founding of the Fourth International in 1938 he joined the Belgium Trotskyists. Under German occupation Mandel remained politically active. Arrested once, and released (or ransomed, Stutje recounts), he was finally tried again for giving German soldiers anti-militarist leaflets. Deported to a labour camp in Germany, he was freed in 1944 full of expectation of the coming revolution. He had a lasting impression, “The alliance against fascism had consolidated both the democratic and Stalinist regimes, but under working class pressure.” Mandel threw himself into a lifetime of ratcheting up that pressure.

From the 1940s hope that Europe’s workers would rise in socialist revolution, to the joys of ’68, the left’s rise, and impasse, in the decades that followed, Mandel plunged into far-left politics. Stutje recounts the saga of the Belgium left (through the microscope of Trotskyism), and Mandel involvement in the Fourth International. Or rather, the United Secretariat of the Fourth International. He is fair to Michel Raptis (‘Pablo’), for years his closest collaborator and rival, praising his “political intuition”, and his faults, “imperiousness”. They separated mid-60s, on Pablo’s unconditional support for anti-colonialist movements. Mandel too, as the sixties wore on, had been wrapped up in ‘third-worldist’ causes – Struje cites close contact with Che Guevara. But his principal faith lay in the working class in industrialised counties. At the same time the party man was writing serious, if (critics comment), too all-embracing works, such as Marxist Economic Theory (1962), and the unfortunately titled Late Capitalism (1972) – how ‘late’? These consolidated his academic position at the Dutch language Free University of Brussels. That aside, few consider Mandel as the founder of a ‘school’ of Marxist political economy. As Stutje remarks, his study on the ‘long waves’ theory of crises (1978), lacks the institutional details of how capitalist accumulation developed post-war. But his influence was wider. Amongst prolific writings, which read as if stitched together from Europe’s press, Mandel produced real gems, his Introductions to the Penguin edition of Capital, and on Marx’s wider intellectual development. Perhaps his greatest political contribution – a break with the Leninist past as great as Eurocommunism’s – was to envisage socialist democracy. Strange to say, in retrospect, this was a major turning point for those reared in the harshest interpretations of the Dictatorship of the Proletariat. It would be impossible to imagine a left capable of confronting the collapse of Official Communism without this return to democratic roots.

In the 1970s Mandel was banned from entering several countries, including Germany, France, and the US. Not only Mandel envisaged – in this case, feared – revolutionary upheavals. Even when this prospect subsided in the early 1980s the Fourth International peaked at 10,000 active members. But it did not weather the Thatcher-Reagan years well, nor adapt easily to the Fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. They foresaw everything but the neo-liberalism that ran riot across the globe. Yet till his death in 1995, Mandel remained bound to the “moral imperative” to continue to fight. Mandel was too much part of the real left – perhaps obscured in Britain through his brief canonisation by the most politically sterile faction of the New Left – to retreat to the Watchtower. A Rebel’s Dream Deferred pays tribute to the sheer ethical drive of the man. That the Fourth International’s Ligue Communiste Révolutionnaire, now the Nouveau Parti Anti-capitaliste is now a real player in French politics demonstrates that he was not entirely mistaken.

Andrew Coates.

Also read Phil Hearse (Fourth International) on this book here.

Open Left Theorist.

So” equality of capability” and, elsewhere, “equality of potential” are James Purnell’s objectives (here). Whatever this means: like equality of being capable to realise a potential chance to have a chance to get a capability.

John Cruddas pontificates on fellowship and moral unity with material equality (here). Blimey he’s read a bit of Tawney. Though not, one suspects, any serious modern discussion of what equality means. Like by Brian Barry.

Our old friend, David Blunkett, notes on today’s letter pages that, Cruddas’s approach is misguided. What is needed are new directions. He cites, “The fascinating speech of Oswald Mosley, then a member of the cabinet, in 1930 – before his decline into fascism – showed that what was required were bold economic measures, not the cutback, retrenchment and cut in wages that were the reality of the early 1930s.” In fact David, the need for these bold measures were precisely what led the leader of the New Party  to his fascist trajectory. But then we always knew you had a shine for Mosley.

As for the rest of this stuff about equality. I note a deafening silence on a major cause of rising social exclusion, poverty and inequality in the UK. Welfare Reform. Even Red Pepper, which participates in Cruddas’s Compass, has kept mum about it. Mind you as it was founded by Trustafarian money I suppose they already have a welfare system of their own. Only the unions and a few campaigning groups have done anything at all. Which has not been enough – yet.

Until the left grasps the mettle and campaigns against Welfare Reform all these fine words on equality butter no croissants. Mass unemployment is coming back and those on the Dole are being subjected to a life of pain. Those on incapacity benefits are suffering. Lone parents, drug users, alcoholics, are being dragooned into coercive schemes. Against this we need decent welfare, freedom of choice, proper jobs and higher benefits. Or as they used to say, work or maintenance.

Or maybe the Open Left  – so open I bet they’ll ask lot to contribute (er, not), wants to force us to have equality that Blair, Brown, Purnell and Blunkett have created. Hat tip to rwendland on the very rich, Quangos,  and large companies who fund Demos here.

Their project. For most of us: Equality of misery.

Update: as this post seems to have got attention from Open Left they couldn’t do better than see this  site to grasp what is meant. Ipswich Unemployed Action.

Last night because  there was crap on the telly I watched my old video of ¡Ay, Carmela!

What a brilliant film.

Apart from the fact that it has like my favourite actress in the world, Carmen Maura there. If anyone wants to understand the Spanish fight  against fascism, this is a must see. When she stands up for the brave Poles who fought for the International Brigades. Well…

¡Ay Carmela! ¡Ay Carmela!

prometemos combatir,

¡Ay Carmela! ¡Ay Carmela!

Blair’s Role Model.

Small article in Le Monde yesterday (here).

The fact is that Glenys Kinnock (here) is sponsering him for the Presidency of Europe. Not exactly. But nearly. Or maybe for something more suited to his standing: like President of the Solar System.

There was a massive campaign against this the last time. I was a member of a Facebook group. Etc.

Blair is, and I would like to underline this more than I can in Print, absolutely hated. Let’s start with the French Parti Socialiste. You have some serious enemies there.

That smirking face, that Invasion of Iraq, that smashing of the Labour Party, your million quid job with some American Bank - this really got me goat – uniting world religions. Some Faith Foundation. And your Cherie  nicking all the light-bulbs and plugs  in Downing Street when you were evicted.

The question the world’s progressive people is asking; why don’t you just sod off and die.

Members of Facebook can join the Campaign against nomination of Tony Blair for European President

Never forget: Germany produced this poem of unspeakable beauty!

I am deeply influenced by German culture. I spent several years of my life reading Kant and Hegel. In depth. I have gone to evening classes in the speech and my German is to an extent that I can understandthe beautiful language. I went with a German bird to Heine’s grave round the corner to my gaff in Paris and know what he means to the Germans. I have his poems in me front-room.  My politics are strongly influenced by Germany. I think I do not need to cite the name. Or names.

All eyes on the European left are on howDie Linke is going to do in the forthcoming elections.

But I have a problem. We English are not Teutonic. I do not really speak German. On Facebook as a French-speaker I can communicate with Italian comrades with a flash of an eye-brow. I cannot do this in German.

Last night  I read Chesterton’s essay on this.

Our eyes have been turned towards the Latin world for over a thousand years. We are in fact more Latin than Germanic.

But as I say, all attention on Europe’s left is now on Germany.

We wish you well comrades.