Canterbury Socialist Society: Christchurch public talk on “The Working Day”, Thursday, March 29

“As capitalist, he is only capital personified. His soul is the soul of capital. But capital has one single life impulse, the tendency to create value and surplus-value, to make its constant factor, the means of production, absorb the greatest possible amount of surplus-labour. Capital is dead labour, that, vampire-like, only lives by sucking living labour, and lives the more, the more labour it sucks. The time during which the labourer works, is the time during which the capitalist consumes the labour-power he has purchased of him. If the labourer consumes his disposable time for himself, he robs the capitalist.”
-Marx, Capital Vol. 1, Ch. 10, Section 1, ‘ The Limits of the Working Day’.

For Canterbury Socialist Society’s March event we are returning to some of Marx’s foundational texts regarding political economy and its critique.

A comrade and Wellington-based supporter of the CSS will be presenting on Marx’s exposition of ‘The Working Day’. The lecture will examine the 

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One stinking hot afternoon down at the Fords factory – some reflections on the class struggle in the ‘70s and now

by Don Franks

It was a stinking hot afternoon down at Fords Lower Hutt assembly plant when one of us deliberately smashed a new truck windscreen. The truck trim line was a small non-automated section where four or five painted cab shells got fitted out each day, their windows fixed in place by skilled use of a big rubber hammer.

A worker would tap around the edges of the glass, on this occasion whacking it hard in the middle so it shattered. This meant work in the area had to stop until a cleaner’s union guy was located, had made his dignified way across to us and methodically swept up all the pieces. That process took a good twenty minutes, during which we were able to enjoy a break.

Of course we didn’t pull that stunt too often or it would have looked suspicious. There were other, less dramatic ways to get a break.

This time as we sat watching

Lifting children out of capitalism

by Don Franks

Almost always, news of a new baby coming brings great joy.

Then the anticipation, the preparation, the anxiety and finally the miracle of a wonderful new arrival.

In recent months I’ve been privileged to share this wonder with three young family friends. Watching the wee tot sleep, touching the tiny hands, sharing a first real little smile. It’s no wonder that the Christian religion has got so much mileage from its symbol of Madonna and child, because almost always, human birth is a joyous event.

Not in every case. There are accidental, unwanted pregnancies, imposed pregnancies and arrivals into a family already too desperately poor to support the existing brood.

New Zealand’s most famous anticipated baby will not be born into

In review: Fire, fury and the madhouse of Donald Trump

Michael Wolff, Fire and fury: inside the Trump White House, Little, Brown 2018, pp336, retailing for $NZ34 at  The Warehouse and just over $2o from the Book Depository (free delivery); reviewed by Paul Demarty

The appearance of Michael Wolff’s extraordinary account of Donald Trump’s presidency has already become the pre-eminent succès de scandale of 21st century letters thus far.

The White House response has been trenchant and hysterical, with the president denouncing it as a complete fiction, and the latest in what the book reminds us is a long line of press secretaries reinforcing the condemnation. Legal action is threatened against Wolff, publisher Henry Holt and – not uninterestingly – Trump’s former chief strategist, Steve Bannon. It is surely more than mere gratitude that led Wolff to thank in his acknowledgements, pointedly, the libel lawyer he hired to give Fire and fury a once-over. The truth is that Trump has blundered directly into what is now called the ‘Streisand effect’, whereby attempts to suppress some item cause it to spread more rapidly among outraged enemies.¹ Even British readers, whose much trumpeted national veneration of liberty reaches no further than the door of the libel courtroom, will benefit from the samizdat PDFs circulating online once Trump’s legal team cast an eye over the Atlantic in pursuit of a cheap victory.

Peculiar

What we find, in whatever format, is a very peculiar book, albeit compulsively readable, droll and frankly horrifying. The sourcing of various anecdotes in here is a particular problem, to which we shall return; certainly, there is a great deal of eyebrow-raising material, which will be confirmed or refuted in the coming months and years. If even a third of it is true, however, Americans are living through some of the most preposterous events in modern political history. Certainly, those looking for evidence that Trump is not what he often appears to be in the presentation of his hated enemies in the media – a narcissistic, vindictive man-child, a demonic cross between King Joffrey of Game of Thrones and

The bosses’ time and our time: an endless fight over working hours?

by Luigi Morris

4:30 a.m. The first alarm rings, then the second, and so on. Little by little the sound invades your sleep; it starts to disturb you. Not so much because of the noise, but because of what it means. A tired body, sleepy head and relaxed legs are forced to suddenly get up. First you sit up and understand little or nothing. You just realize you already have to leave and you won’t come back until the evening. One more day that slips away from you while you’re working.

Eight, 10, 12, 14 or 16 are the number of working hours that many of us have to endure in a day—multiplied by 5, 6 or 7 days, with shifts and/or rotating days off—”American Inventions” that lengthen the week, that only give you one or two days off. Overtime, forced by pressure, threats or wages that aren’t enough for anything. Awards, for production, sales or perfect punctuality, are just other means of extortion. And so it is with these different combinations that we arrive at the life of daily work in which we wage a class struggle that is silent, but no less brutal: we hate going to work. We struggle to get more minutes or seconds for rest or distraction, doing everything a little more slowly, going to the bathroom or defying the time limits of our breaks while the hours DO NOT pass. The hands on the clock are heavy; they don’t move. We can’t wait until

All I want for Christmas. . .

 

Education for anti-capitalists: https://rdln.wordpress.com/2016/02/27/education-for-anti-capitalists/

 

 

John Pilger: “We need to keep the documentary alive”

Pic: EPA/FACUNDO ARRIZABALAGA

The following is the text of a talk delivered by veteran journalist and film-maker John Pilger at the British Library in London last Saturday (Dec 9).  His talk was part of a festival called “The Power of the Documentary” organised by the Library.  The festival was held to mark its acquisition of the archive of his written work.

by John Pilger

I first understood the power of the documentary during the editing of my first film, The Quiet Mutiny. In the commentary, I make reference to a chicken, which my crew and I encountered while on patrol with American soldiers in Vietnam.

“It must be a Vietcong chicken – a communist chicken,” said the sergeant. He wrote in his report: “enemy sighted”.

The chicken moment seemed to underline the farce of the war – so I included it in the film. That may have been unwise. The regulator of commercial television in Britain – then the Independent Television Authority or ITA – had demanded to see my script. What was my source for the political affiliation of the chicken? I was asked. Was it really a communist chicken, or could it have been a pro-American chicken?

Of course, this nonsense had a serious purpose; when The Quiet Mutiny was broadcast by ITV in 1970, the US ambassador to Britain, Walter Annenberg, a personal friend of President Richard Nixon, complained to the ITA. He complained not about the chicken but about the whole film. “I intend to inform the White House,” the ambassador wrote. Gosh.

The Quiet Mutiny had revealed that the US army in Vietnam was tearing