PFLP leader Ahmad Sa’adat’s May Day statement

Comrade Ahmad Sa’adat, the imprisoned General Secretary of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, delivered a special message from prison via the Campaign to Free Ahmad Sa’adatto the forces and movements of the Left in the world on the occasion of International Workers’ Day, marking a renewed landmark of revolutionary struggle against imperialism, Zionism and fascism and the forces of class and social exploitation. Sa’adat said in the statement that the open-ended hunger strike being waged currently by the Palestinian prisoners’ movement is the most prominent national site of confrontation with the Zionist occupation and its racist settler-colonial laws. He urges the expansion of the campaign for boycott and the isolation of the occupation at an international level.

Comrades and friends

Revolutionary greetings,
Greetings of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine,
Greetings to the strugglers for justice, freedom, equality and progress everywhere.

Greetings to you from inside the prisons and cells of Zionism, and salutes to all those who celebrate today, who march and participate in this day, in the lighting of the flame of this immortal, human, day, the first of May, the day of workers, the people, and the struggling classes. This is the day in which we together renew our primary commitment to defend the rights and interests of the impoverished and struggling classes with a fundamental interest in progress and change, the classes that were and still are the front line of the revolution, standing against the savage forces of capitalism, occupation, colonialism and racism.

Greetings from the camps of our people in the homeland and in the Diaspora, these Palestinian camps that were and still are strongholds of resistance, popular resistance and revolution, the birth of the front of popular classes, struggling workers, poor revolutionaries and revolutionary intellectuals. Our

In Review: Anwar Shaik’s ‘Capitalism’

Anwar Shaikh, Capitalism: Competition, Conflict, Crises, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2016, £35.99; reviewed by Michael Roberts

Anwar Shaikh is one of the world’s leading economists who draws on Karl Marx and the classical economists (“political economy”, if you like). He has taught at New York’s New School for Social Research for more than 30 years, and authored three books and six dozen articles.1 This is his most ambitious work. As Shaikh says, it is an attempt to derive economic theory from the real world and then apply it to real problems. He applies the categories and theory of classical economics to all the major economic issues, including those that are supposed to be the province of mainstream economics, like supply and
demand, relative prices in goods and
services, interest rates, financial asset prices and technological change.

A classical approach

Shaikh says that his approach “is very different from both orthodox economics and the dominant heterodox tradition”.2 It is the classical approach as opposed to the neoclassical one. In other words, he rejects the approach that starts from “perfect firms, perfect individuals, perfect knowledge, perfectly selfish behaviour, rational expectations, etc” and then

Working class candidate upsets the establishment in French presidential election debate

Philippe Poutou

by Marisela Trevin
April 10, 2017

It was as if an unspoken, mutually protective code of silence had been established among the candidates leading the polls in this year’s French presidential debates. Despite their scandal-ridden campaigns, against the backdrop of the collapse of the traditional French party system, neither Fillon, of the right-wing party The Republicans, nor Le Pen, of the far-right National Front, had been asked to answer to the multiple accusations against them regarding the misappropriation of public funds.

Piercing the bubble

Unlike the first debate, in which only five of the eleven presidential candidates had participated, the second debate on April 4 featured all of the candidates, including the New Anti-Capitalist Party’s Philippe Poutou, who made it a point to pierce the French political establishment’s bubble before millions of viewers, while expressing the need for a radical change in French politics and society.

Protest against the French social democratic government’s attacks on workers and youth rights (Photo by Aurelien Meunier/Getty Images)

Fillon smiled rigidly, then affected outrage and threatened to sue as Poutou exposed his hypocrisy. “Fillon says he’s worried about the debt, but he thinks less about the matter when he’s dipping into the public treasury,” he quipped. “These guys tell us that we need austerity and then they misappropriate public funds.”

Marine Le Pen was rendered speechless when Poutou addressed her own scandals, which had been widely covered by the media, like those of Fillon, but for which she had not been held accountable in the debates until then. “Then we have Le Pen. (…) She takes money from the public treasury as well. Not here, but in Europe. She’s anti-European, so she doesn’t mind taking money from Europe. And what’s worse, the National Front, which claims to be against the system, doesn’t mind seeking protection from the system’s laws. So she’s refused to appear before the court when she was summoned by the police.” When Le Pen replied “So in this case, you’re in favor of the police,” Poutou retorted “When we get summoned by the police, we don’t have workers’ immunity.” The audience burst into applause.

Contrast

The contrast could not be starker. On one hand, the political establishment’s rigid, highly-groomed candidates, stuck to their tired playbooks. On the other, a factory worker dressed in a

For a campaign of positive abstention in the 2017 elections

by Phil Duncan

In 2014, most of us at Redline favoured not voting in the New Zealand general election.  There was simply no party that represented the interests of workers, much less that attempted to politicise and organise workers to represent themselves.

Labour and National are the twin parties of capital in this country and a vote for either is a vote for capitalism.

The other parliamentary parties represent variants that still ‘play the game’.

Mana might have been worth considering in 2014 but the lash-up with pirate capitalist Kim Dotcom and giving the presidency of InternetMana to Laila Harre. who had not long before taken a job which meant she oversaw the laying off of a swathe of workers in Auckland. put that party beyond the pale.

This year Mana is in an alliance with the Maori Party, a political vehicle of Maori capitalist interests.

Another issue to take into account is that

Factory committees, soviets and workers power

A meeting of the Petrograd Soviet in 1917

This year marks the 100th anniversaries of the Russian revolutions of 1917.  The piece below is taken from the April 3-17 issue of the US Marxist workers’fortnightly, The Spark.

In April 1917, a little more than a month after the victory of the revolution in Petrograd and the abdication of Nicholas II, the workers organized themselves more and more independently from the Provisional Government, and they did so certainly against its wishes. Workers elected committees on the level of the workshops, the factories, the working class neighborhoods, and the cities. These were sites of debate where everyone could express themselves and learn, but these committees also made decisions that affirmed the power and consciousness of the working class.

A worker reports how the soviet was built and gained its influence in Saratov, a city 500 miles southwest of Moscow: “It’s been five days since the soviet of workers and soldiers deputies was organized here. But it seems like several years have passed here. Everything has changed. The masses are organized with a remarkable spirit of

On the 150th anniversary of Capital vol 1

Check out some of the articles on Redline about Marx’s Capital and its ongoing relevance:

How capitalism works – and why it doesn’t

How capitalist ideology works

4,000 words on Capital

Karl Korsch on “tremendous and enduring” impact of Marx’s Capital (1932)

Capital, the working class and Marx’s critique of political economy

Marx’s critique of classical political economy

From the vaults: two articles on wages, profits, crisis

Pilling’s Marx’s Capital: philosophy, dialectics and political economy

Capital and the state

Value, price and the ‘transformation problem’ in Marx’s Capital

The ‘transformation problem’ and Marx’s crisis theory

London conference on 150th anniversary of Marx’s ‘Capital’

International conference sponsored by Department of European and International Studies, King’s College London, and thenextrecession.wordpress.com blog.

19th September 2017 – 20th September 2017

Karl Marx published the first volume of his life work, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, in September 1867. Together with Volumes II and III, published after Marx’s death by Friedrich Engels, this book remains the most profound and challenging study of the logic of the capitalist system that still dominates our lives.

The British Museum: The Reading Room. Illustration for The Queen’s London (Cassell, 1896).

150 years after the first appearance of Capital Volume I, that system is grappling with the effects of one of the greatest crises in its history and the resulting political instability. Many have turned to Marx’s Capital seeking to understand the present conjuncture. But Marx never finished this work, and the recent publication of his manuscripts has revealed both the immensity and the complexity of his project.

Within