Archive for the ‘Anti-Fascism’ Category
Morning Star Hails “much-needed intervention” as Communist Party of Britain Stands Against Labour in Local Elections.
Candidates Against Labour, “for a sovereign, united and internationalist working class.“
The Morning Star, independent of the Communist Party of Britain, and owned by the co-op, leads with this Editorial Britain’s communists and the May elections: a much-needed intervention.
For many years British Communists have stood ‘witness candidates’ in elections. This year the Communist Party of Britain is running in local elections.
They are engaged in a battle across the country. Who are our enemies, who are our friends? They ask.
TOMORROW sees the launch of the Communist manifesto — the Communist Party (CP) of Britain’s manifesto for the Scottish, Welsh and English local elections, that is.
Revolutionary Left.
The party is standing its biggest slate of candidates since the 1980s after six years in which it didn’t stand — calling, as did much of the revolutionary left, for maximum support for Labour during the Jeremy Corbyn years.
Much of the labour movement remains sceptical of voting left of Labour. Despite the party’s lurch right under Keir Starmer, there is a widespread belief that a non-Labour vote only helps the Tories in England and Wales, and the SNP in Scotland.
Here is the Communist Party of Britain standing up to the right:
Labour Movement Welcome.
Labour’s poor projections nationally — with polls placing it about 10 points behind the Conservatives — can encourage this caution. Yet there are good reasons the renewal of communist election campaigning should be welcomed across the movement.
The British government’s handling of coronavirus has been catastrophic. We have one of the highest death tolls anywhere in the world and the deepest recession in Europe. Tens of thousands of lives could have been saved, hundreds of thousands would not have lost their jobs, had Britain adopted the zero-Covid strategies implemented by countries as diverse as China and New Zealand.
Follow the successful models of Cuba and Venezuela!
As countries which have successfully kept deaths and disruption to a minimum have proved, Covid-19 did not need to provoke a prolonged crisis. The worst-affected countries have been the heartlands of neoliberal capitalism — western Europe and the United States in particular. In Latin America, the contrast between the performance of socialist-led countries such as Cuba (40 deaths per million) and Venezuela (62) and neoliberal ones like Ecuador (995), Colombia (1,308) and Brazil (1,673) has been especially dramatic (figures from statista.com).
Covid has put the status quo to the test and found it wanting. There are plenty of people who recognise that. The point is regularly made from trade-union platforms and at online meetings.
But the pandemic struck Britain just as Labour was transitioning from a socialist leadership to a restorationist (??? Note to Subs, translate) one that has rowed back on the Corbyn movement’s searing critique of economic inequality and social injustice while stressing its support for (fawning on) “business as usual.”
With a handful of honourable exceptions, this has deprived institutional politics of voices drawing out the lessons of the pandemic to challenge the capitalist system itself.
Public Debate.
Yet we sorely need a public debate on an alternative economic and political strategy: one that understands the role of the market in creating the jobs crisis, the housing crisis, the climate crisis — and outlines real solutions to these, which must involve a big expansion of public ownership and economic planning.
Labour is not raising these issues. In a campaign in which it seems determined to compete with Priti Patel’s increasingly authoritarian Tories for the “law and order” vote, and in which it has even been caught distributing race-baiting anti-Gypsy and Traveller leaflets, the importance of an intervention from the left is paramount.
Learn from China’s Example of Racial and Political Tolerance!
Standing Against Labour Will Help Left Unity.
Far from undermining left unity, the left within Labour will be strengthened by the promotion of socialist solutions to the crisis and by leftward pressure on Labour candidates across Britain.
But besides that, we know that Labour’s long assumption that working-class voters have nowhere to go has been exploded by events — for years now in Scotland, more recently elsewhere. Refusing to challenge Labour from the left has not upheld its vote: it has simply meant disillusionment and anger at a party that no longer seems to represent ordinary people has been expressed by not voting at all or by voting for parties to its right.
The left has lost a lot of ground across Britain over the past year. We cannot sit out the first significant Britain-wide platform for political debate since the pandemic struck. The Communist Party’s election campaign will be a significant contribution to the revival of a militant and combative socialist movement.
What serious spotters want to know is if there are any contests between Communist candidates and the Socialist and Trade Union Coalition (TUSC), and the Monster Raving Loony Party.
Socialist Workers Party (US) “anti-scientific thought police try to erase the existence of women” by recognising Transgender rights.
SWP (US) World’s Oldest Trotskyist Party Goes Confusionist.
The US left is now having its own ‘Spiked’ Moment.
Don’t say ‘mother’! Speech code is blow to fight for women’s rights
Liberal social engineers are striking blows to women’s rights as they push laws and regulations that eliminate the word “mother.” This is the latest front in their drive to deny women’s oppression under capitalist rule and to hide the long struggle for women’s equality that has made gains and strengthened the working class.
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Manchester University in the U.K. announced March 6 new guidelines that replace the words “mother” and “father” with the “gender-neutral” terms “parent” or “guardian.” And Brighton and Sussex University Hospitals Trust has new guidelines that replace the term “breastfeeding” with “chestfeeding.”
All of this is bad for the working class.
A friend of mine who went for prenatal care was referred to by a medical professional as a “pregnant person,” because a transgender “man” can have a baby. At a public forum in Louisville, Kentucky, on a woman’s right to abortion one of the invited speakers lectured participants that we should say “a person’s right to abortion” for the same reason.
Some good news: female human beings give birth to 385,000 babies in the world each day. That’s how the human race continues to exist. If a few of the mothers don’t identify as women, that’s their prerogative and they shouldn’t face discrimination, but it doesn’t change reality.
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Campaigning broadly among working people, Socialist Workers Party candidates find a welcome response to our program, which starts from the capacities of working people to join together to change our conditions and to advance our self-confidence and class consciousness— the opposite of identity politics. A good reason to join the SWP campaigns!
Brendan could not have said it more clearly.
Now it obvious that the Tendance, which comes from the ‘Paboite tradition loathes the US SWP from the depth of our being, but even so, we are shocked.
This was the founder of their Party, James P. Cannon.
They asked, “What have you against him?”
I said, “He wears a corduroy suit up and down Greenwich Village, with a trick mustache and long hair. There is something wrong with this guy.”
I wasn’t making a joke, either. I said, people of this type are not going to be suitable for approaching the ordinary American worker. They are going to mark our organization as something freakish, abnormal, exotic; something that has nothing to do with the normal life of the American worker. I was dead right in general, and in this mentioned case in particular. Our corduroy-suit lad, after making all kinds of trouble in the organization, eventually became an Oehlerite.
The Dog Days of the Left Opposition. 1994.
Update: Background to the Present Evolution of the SWP:
Balance Sheet on the Socialist Workers Party (U.S.A.)
Adopted by the Fourth Internationalist Tendency National Conference, September 2, 1990.
Our platform briefly described the programmatic revisionism of the Barnes leadership on five crucial questions: the application of the theory of permanent revolution; political revolution in the deformed and degenerated workers’ states; the recognition of the interdependence of the three sectors of the world revolution; the application of the transitional method and the united front to the class struggle in this country; and, “defense of workers’ democracy as a necessary basis for the functioning of the working class movement in general, and of the Leninist party in particular.”
The death agony of the Socialist Workers Party. Louis Project. 2017.
In the recent past, there have been such shocking developments with this sect-cult of probably around a hundred members with an average age of 55 or so that I have decided to file this report. I don’t think there is much point in trying to connect its paroxysms with the tasks facing the left today except maybe to indicate that “Leninism” can produce some remarkable pathologies.
How an organisation becomes a cult
Barry Sheppard’s The Socialist Workers Party 1960-88 (Volume 2: Interregnum, Decline and Collapse, 1973-88) reviewed by Patrick Scott.
To briefly summarise Volume 1, dealing with the 1960s and early 1970s. Amongst many things Sheppard takes us through the Cuban revolution, the black civil rights movement, the anti-Vietnam War movement, and the growth of the women’s and lesbian and gay movements. The US SWP certainly did not get everything right in this period. But it was definitely a revolutionary organisation that actively intervened in a broadly positive way into the class struggle and the major political and social movements that arose though struggle. At the time the party was also the largest revolutionary organisation on the US left with well over a thousand members. How therefore can we square this with the burnt out shell of a sect that the US SWP and its satellite organisations (sometimes referred to as the Pathfinder Tendency) have become today?
The Rise of Right Wing Identity Politics.
“‘Identity politics allows the privileged to pretend to be oppressed’” Brendan O’Neill. (Spiked)
Identity politics have become the plaything of the right and an array of confusionnistes. Farewell Woke. Goodbye gender politics. Adieu, Intersexuality. The magnetism of the national neo-liberalism of the British Government, and ;the claims of National Sovereignty have worked their effects. The politics of the identity and, nation, and flag, right wing identity politics are everywhere. There’s even a ‘left’ version, claiming to speak for the ‘real’ working class, not the shifting cosmopolitans of the left,, and a variety of nationalist (SNP) and regionalist forms (Northern Independence Party, NIP).
Post Brexit you would have thought that Sovereigntist politics, left’ or right would have lost traction. But from the pages of Spiked to the launcher of GB News, it’s the right wing, the nationalist populists, who are leaders of the pack.
“Andrew Neil launches 24-hour news channel to rival BBC and Sky.”
Nowhere have the voices of the new identitairians been louder than in the London Mayoral Elections.
From the London mayor: The full list of candidates standing at the 2021 election
Piers Corbyn and the Let London Live movement demand an immediate end to all lockdowns and restrictions imposed on the people in the name of fighting a virus.
If elected as Mayor of London Piers Corbyn calls on the people to “refuse to abide by coronavirus restrictions on freedom, life and liberty. I will instruct the police to stop enforcement of coronavirus rules and regulations in London. We will stand up as a beacon of hope to the people of the world.”
..the breakthrough for the pandemic industry had to wait for the next opportunity which came in 2020 with the SARS-COV-2 “pandemic” which they had been preparing by means of simulations and catastrophe planning exercises, like an army prepares for war. …..It is not a conspiracy theory to say that there is no pandemic.
Confusionist, Conspiracist, one-time International Marxist Group activist, and, for term, a Labour Councillor in the 1990s: He has actually got on the ballot.
Piers Corbyn, Let London Live
Peter Gammons United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP). There is no need to comment further
Social Democratic Party (SDP), canal historique, now a hard-line pro-Brexit groupuscule:
David Kurten Heritage Party: “a socially conservative political party in the UK, standing for free speech, traditional family values, national sovereignty & financial responsibility.”
This chap, already familiar to our readers:
And, naturally, old matey Fox:
To round it off there’s this, (Spiked) Julie Burchill.
Harry and Meghan can’t hold a candle to Prince Philip
He showed the self-obsessed duo what a life of public service really looks like.
Just as I could never vote Tory until it became clear that this was the only way to get Brexit done, so I could never stand up for the queen’s theme song until Harry and Meghan rocked up with their passion project – ‘The Grabdication’ as I coined it – to make it all about them.
