From the monthly archives: November 2011
For a bank “crisis”, the capitalists can raise 5, 10, 20 trillion dollars. For war they can always raise the same. Yet when there is famine, like in Somalia, Djibouti, Kenya, and Ethiopia, only $1.2bn is committed, even when “official” estimates say $2.5bn is needed. They always underestimate human need, so its likely much higher. And we can only expect that, like in Haiti, so much of the aid will not make it to the people who need it, but will be used for repression and other anti-human goals. Take a minute to ponder this: 20 trillion is 20,000 billion.
Famine, like the so-called “housing crisis”, isn’t about a lack of food. Rather, more perversely, it simply means that there are huge numbers of people who can’t afford to get a piece of the vast social product that the workers of the world create, because a tiny class of idle-rich parasites – the 1%, the capitalist class – can’t make a profit from those people. If they can’t make a profit from a group of people, it doesn’t consider those people part of the food “market”. So they starve, in a world of vast abundance.
From Al Jazeera:
“Tens of thousands of Somalis have died and the UN warns that 750,000 others are at risk of dying before the end of the year”.
“Famine is declared when acute malnutrition rates amongst children exceed 30 per cent and more than two people in 10,000 die per day”.
“Children have borne the brunt of the disaster across the affected region, with an estimated 2.34 million suffering from malnutrition”.
“Out of that, more than 566,000 children are severely malnourished and at risk of death”.
Further Reading on capitalism’s absurd and perverse logic:
“Financial Times: ‘Demolitions would boost housing market’“, by Liam O’Ceallaigh
Photo Source: Faultlines / Al Jazeera
“After God had finished the rattlesnake, the toad, and the vampire, he had some awful substance left with which he made a scab.
A scab is a two-legged animal with a corkscrew soul, a water brain, a combination backbone of jelly and glue.
Where others have hearts, he carries a tumor of rotten principles.
When a scab comes down the street, men turn their backs and angels weep in heaven, and the devil shuts the gates of hell to keep him out.
No man or woman has a right to scab so long as there is a pool of water to drown his carcass in, or a rope long enough to hang his body with.
Judas was a gentleman compared with a scab. For betraying his master, he had character enough to hang himself. A scab has not.
Esau sold his birthright for a mess of pottage.
Judas sold his Savior for thirty pieces of silver.
Benedict Arnold sold his country for a promise of a commision in the british army.
The scab sells his birthright, country, his wife, his children and his fellowmen for an unfulfilled promise from his employer.
Esau was a traitor to himself; Judas was a traitor to his God; Benedict Arnold was a traitor to his country.
A scab is a traitor to his God, his country, his family and his class.”
by Jack London, b. 1876, d. 1916
via M. Thanks!
“The earth is for all the people. That is the demand.
The machinery of production and distribution for all the people. That is the demand.
The collective ownership and control of industry and its democratic management in the interest of all the people. That is the demand.
The elimination of rent, interest, profit and the production of wealth to satisfy the wants of all the people. That is the demand.
Cooperative industry in which all shall work together in harmony as the basis of a new social order, a higher civilization, a real republic. That is the demand.
The end of class struggles and class rule, of master and slave, or ignorance and vice, of poverty and shame, of cruelty and crime — the birth of freedom, the dawn of Brotherhood, the beginning of MAN. That is the demand.”
Eugene V. Debs, 1903, Speaking before the Western Federation of Miners
WSJ headline yesterday: “U.S. Tightens Drone Rules”. Seriously, you can’t make this shit up. “Tightening drone rules”, doesn’t mean killing less people. Rather, it means: “the CIA agreed to suspend operations when Pakistani officials visit the U.S.”. Can’t have bad publicity, now, can we!
On the 30th of August 1932, amidst the worst crisis of the capitalist system the world had thus far faced and in the shadow of the rising Nazi power, Clara Zetkin - German Marxist and member of the Communist Party of Germany (KPD) – opened what would become the last session of the Reichstag (Germany’s parliament). As the oldest member of the assembly she was its chairwoman and had the right to an opening speech. She used her speech to call for all working and oppressed people to not let political differences divided them and to unite to smash the fascist threat and move towards a socialist revolution to overthrow the bourgeoisie. She called for the overthrow of the bourgeois government, for its complicity in the Nazi’s rise, its violation of the German constitution, and its absolute impotence in the face of the horrors of the Great Depression. Despite being nearly blind, unable to walk (she had to be carried to the podium), and in the face of Nazi threats that they would assassinate her if she spoke, Comrade Zetkin gave an impassioned speech outlining the strategy of the “United Front of all workers in order to turn back fascism”.
The workers movement did not to succeed in turning back the Nazi threat. By January what would be called the “Machtergreifung” (seizure of power) took place: President Hindenburg appointed Adolf Hitler as Chancellor of Germany on 30 January 1933. The Reichstag was dissolved. The Communist Party was banned. Its members either went underground, into exile, or were tortured and murdered. The organisations of the working class were annihilated. Nearly a hundred of the non-Nazi members of the Reichstag were hunted down and killed.
Clara fled to Moscow, were she died in June. In a period of a little over a decade Germany went from a country on the brink of communist revolution to a Nazi dictatorship which would bring war and genocide to all of Europe.
Below is the text of her speech, as recorded in the Reichstag’s minutes and published in the International Publishers collection of Zetkin’s selected writings and speeches. Perhaps after reading them you, like I, will see their profound relevance for today’s struggles against capitalism.
- - - -
Fascism Must Be Defeated
The Opening Address of
The Honorary President
Of the Reichstag
Meet Byron Wilder. This former Nazi skinhead went through 26 agonising laser surgeries to his face, head, and neck to remove his Nazi tattoos. “It’s a small price to pay for being human again”, he says. People change – that’s why elites can’t win their war against us. One day the 1% will join other tyrant classes in the dustbin of history. We don’t have to let their racist, sexist, homophobic, nationalistic myths divide us. We can overthrow the 1%.
“[T]here is more possible pleasure in the idea of a converted Nazi than from all the cynics and nihilists. That is why the most dogged enemy of socialism is not only, as is understandable, great capital, but equally the load of indifference and hopelessness; otherwise great capital would stand alone.” – Ernst Bloch, The Principle of Hope
“To those who does not know the world is on fire, I have nothing to say.” – Bertolt Brecht
Further Reading:
“Questions from a Worker Who Reads” by Bertolt Brecht, 1935.
“The struggle for socialism is the struggle for proletarian (working class) democracy. Proletarian democracy is not the crown of socialism. Socialism is the result of proletarian democracy. To the degree that the proletariat mobilizes itself and the great masses of the people, the socialist revolution is advanced. The proletariat mobilizes itself as a self-acting force through its own committees, unions, parties, and other organizations.” – C. L. R. James
(via Paul Le Blanc’s excellent piece: “What Do Socialists Say About Democracy?”
Further Reading:
The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution by C.L.R. James
”The people’s revolution instead of the proletarian revolution? [The argument is that] 95 percent of the people are interested in the revolution, consequently it is not a class revolution but a people’s revolution… In reality, the worker-Communist should say: of course, 95 percent of the population, if not 98 percent, is exploited by finance capital. But this exploitation is organized hierarchically: there are exploiters, there are subexploiters, sub-subexploiters, etc. Only thanks to this hierarchy do the superexploiters keep in subjection the majority of the nation. In order that the nation should indeed be able to reconstruct itself around a new class core, it must be reconstructed ideologically and this can be achieved only if the proletariat does not dissolve itself into the “people,” into the “nation,” but on the contrary develops a program of its proletarian revolution and compels the petty bourgeoisie to choose between two regimes. The slogan of the people’s revolution lulls the petty bourgeoisie as well as the broad masses of the workers, reconciles them to the bourgeois-hierarchical structure of the “people” and retards their liberation.” – Leon Trotsky, “Thälmann and the “People’s Revolution”“, April 1931
(via Alexander)
Further Reading:
Class politics needed to build the Occupy movement by the Socialist Workers Party of Ireland
Socialist Politics:
Recommended Readings
