Corbyn’s Labour, British imperialism and the working class

Below is the text of a talk delivered by Dani in Dunedin on Friday, July 21.

by Dani Sanmugathasan

Good evening! My name is Dani Sanmugathasan, and I am a member of the British Marxist and Leninist organisation called the Revolutionary Communist Group. The following talk will be on the topic of ‘Corbynmania’ – the opportunist phenomenon that’s swept through the labour movements in core economies over the last two years – and a good place to start is at the events in London earlier this month.

INTRODUCTION

“Oh, Je-re-my Cor-byn!” rang out the chants of many on the streets of London on the 1^st of July at the People’s Assembly’s ‘Tories Out’ march. The People’s Assembly, Momentum, Radical Housing Network, the Socialist Workers Party, the Stop the War Coalition, the Socialist Party, and the large trade unions (PCS, RMT, CWU, Unison, Len McCluskey’s Unite the Union…) were all rallying round the Labour Party leader, the holy Son of Attlee, the man who would save Britain from the iron grip of Tory austerity.

But beside these organisations, a distinct second current of marchers – composed of such organisations as Class War, the Focus E15 Mothers, Lesbians & Gays Support the Migrants, Architects for Social Housing, Movement For Justice, the Revolutionary Communist Group, and trade unions like the IWGB – led a different chant: “Labour, Tory, same old story!” These groups made

Radio interview with Philip Ferguson on not voting in the 2017 general election

FreeFM Hamilton’s community radio station interview with Philip Ferguson

Interview starts at 18.39 min

19.20  Discussing the lesser evil position on Labour vs National. Someone who was generally critical of Labour had said they would vote Labour as it was for light rail in Christchurch. On that basis beneficiaries should vote National as they raised benefits where Labour didn’t; pensioners should vote NZFirst because they are the most pensioner-friendly party!

21.50 National is a lot less xenophobic than Labour. Intern scandal – a fraudulent vote for change ‘non-partisan’ campaign really a front for Labour.

25.00 There’s lots of pressure on people to vote as if not voting makes one responsible for something bad happening. Were people who voted Labour in 1984 responsible for that government? Why give your vote for something you don’t agree with or don’t trust?

27.00 Not voting is actually making a statement. A lot of people not voting says something quite powerful. “They are all basically the same, how do we choose”.

1. 00 Murray Horton in the early 1990s said National are the front stabbers and Labour are the back stabbers. That is the key difference between them

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A six-part series by Laurence Peterson documenting an example of downward mobility in Post-Meltdown America

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Trying to make any sense of it all 

Is there any wider significance to this sorry little tale? Well, it just so happens that Daymon was recently purchased by Bain Capital, the private equity  firm of Mitt Romney fame. Private equity firms often purchase failing and lacklustre companies, load them up with debt, pay big dividends to investors in the private equity firm, charge high fees to the acquired firm for the favour, and then dump the zombified carcass of firms drastically bled of labour and sunk capital back onto the market, sometimes generating a big, second profit on top of the fees, with the ultimate profitability or even viability of the affected firm remaining a big question mark behind the inflated dividends and lean production numbers. Being privately-held (and not required to produce public financial figures), I can’t say for sure whether or not Daymon fits this pattern exactly, but, from my vantage point, limited in the extreme though it was, the purchase of Daymon by Bain was not a surprise: the kind of unproductive, underappreciated and even unwanted work we did at CDS seemed to me to have zombie company written all over it.

Jobstown Not Guilty: working class activists beat Labour-State assault on right to protest in Ireland

The jury verdict in the Jobstown case is another blow to Labour, the cops and state

by Ian Ó Dálaigh (general secretary of  Éirígí, writing in a personal capacity)

On the 15th November 2014, a spontaneous protest took place in Jobstown, Tallaght, an overwhelmingly working class area in south-west Dublin.  Labour Party leader Joan Burton, who at the time was also tánaiste (26-county deputy prime minister), was delayed in a car for just over two hours by a sit-down protest.  The protest was directed against the vicious austerity measures of the Fine Gael/Labour coalition.  These measures included cuts to social welfare benefits, disability benefits, and pensions and attempts to impose a water tax.  As both minister of social protection and tanaiste, Burton played a key role in these attacks.

Nineteen of the protestors (eighteen adults and one teenager), including our own Scott Masterson, were arrested and charged with false imprisonment in the wake of this. The teenager has already been convicted.

To term a two-hour delay in a car – while surrounded by police – as

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Toward the latter part of last year, conditions for most CDS advisors took a turn for the worse. Marc had left, and was replaced by Ashley, who had worked alongside us as a senior advisor for a long time. This move was very popular with just about all of us, especially inasmuch as CDS practice tended towards bringing in someone from outside via the corporate office when there was a management change. I really liked Ashley: she was always respectful and eager to help every one of us, and seemed more likely to take our side in the state of permanent war with Costco management than Marc had been. For a few months things went better than they ever had done in my time with CDS.

French elections: Macron’s hollow ‘majority’

by René Gimpel

And so it came to pass – the prodigal obtained his majority. Emmanuel Macron, youngest French president and elected to public office for the first time, last year conjured up ex nihilo a political party, La République en Marche (LRM) and has seen it obtain a solid majority in the general election. Half his new national assembly members had never been in politics before, half are women, all owe their appointment to Macron personally and all have signed a pledge to carry out the president’s programme, which Macron claims is synonymous with a ‘programme for France’. In the 17th century, the absolutist king, Louis XIV, proclaimed: “The state is myself” – something of this claim adheres to Emmanuel Macron.

LRM has 308 of the 577 seats and its close ally, Mouvement Démocrate, a further 42. The two parties are in lockstep. Meanwhile, the conservatives, Les Républicains, drop from 199 seats to 113 – they may split into pro- and anti-Macron factions, as the president tries to woo more to come into his big tent. Most dramatic of all, the Socialists, who held 284 seats, are reduced to a rump of

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More fun and games…

      Once in whatever spot chosen the advisor is pretty much chained within an invisible circle measuring exactly 12 feet in radius for the rest of the shift, and is not allowed to leave the cart itself at all without someone else taking command of the cart unless the advisor maintains constant eye contact with the cart for the duration of the walk. Alternately, one may leave without regard to the former rather annoying restriction (which, in turn, made it extremely difficult to observe the injunction to keep the floor around the demo clean at all times), but only if all prepared samples and raw foodstuffs are cleared off the top of the card and stowed on racks below, and after the cart is turned round to obscure the opening on to the side with the racks. Technically advisors are allowed to close the exhibit off in this manner to visit the loo or to go back to fetch supplies, but Marc’s sometimes savage reaction to such sorties ensured that many advisors were too afraid to undertake them even when in need, and several advisors would chose to wait for their allotted breaks to take care of such things, rather than dealing with them as the situation arose. I actually became quite popular because I began asking other advisors if they needed anything when I had to make an extra journey back for supplies, and I always tried to tread lightly when I got back there to avoid contact with Marc.