Mathew G.H Toll writes:

"Australian Neo-Liberals Let Their Agenda Slip"

Matthew G.H. Toll

Senator Nick Minchin, leading member of the Australian federal government has been taped during a private meeting advocating further industrial relations reform if the liberal party is re-elected into another term.

"The fact is the great majority of Australians do not support what we are doing on industrial relations, they violently disagree," said Senator Minchin to HR Nicholls Society, a far-right wing group intent of the dissolution of the current IR system in favour a ‘flexible system’. Amounting to an IR system where workers rights effectively mean ‘take it or leave it’, lowering minimum wages and conditions.

Eric Hobsbawm and Jacques Attali on Karl Marx

New Statesman

In the past week Eric Hobsbawm, the pre-eminent historian and avowed communist, debated the role of Karl Marx in the 21st century with the one-time international banker Jacques Attali. They came to some unlikely conclusions.

Hobsbawm: Here we are, paying our respects to Karl Marx. Jacques Attali's biography of him, which has sold like hot cakes in France, is being translated in Britain. I've only done the biography of Marx in The Dictionary of National Biography, in a more modest way. When you consider, it's really rather strange that we should be here to talk to an enormous audience about it. One can't say that he died a failure in 1883, because his writings had begun to have some impact in Russia and a political movement in Germany was already in being under the leadership of his disciples. And yet, how could he have been satisfied with his life's work? He'd written a few brilliant pamphlets and the torso of an uncompleted major work: Das Kapital. His major political effort since the failure of the 1848 revolution, the so-called First International of 1864-73, had foundered. He had established no place of significance in the politics of the intellectual life of Britain, where he had lived for over half his lifetime. And yet what an extraordinary posthumous political success.

NOT BORED! writes:

"The Sick Planet"

Guy Debord

Today "pollution" is in fashion, exactly in the same manner that revolution is: it takes hold of the entire life of society, and it is illusorily represented in the spectacle. It is boring chatter in a plethora of erroneous and mystifying writings and discourses, and in reality [dans les faits] it gets everyone in the throat. It reveals itself everywhere as ideology and it gains on the ground as real process. These two [mutually] antagonistic movements -- the supreme stage of commodity production and the project of its total negation, equally rich in internal contradictions -- grow together. They are the two sides through which a single historical moment (long-awaited and often foreseen in inadequate partial figures) manifests itself: the impossibility of the continuation of the functioning of capitalism.

The epoch that has all the techincal means to absolutely alter the conditions of life of the entire Earth is also the epoch that, by the same separated technical and scientific development, disposes of all of the means of control and indubitable, mathematical prediction to exactly measure in advance where -- and when -- the automatic increase in the alienated productive forces of class-society will lead: that is to say, so as to measure the rapid degradation of the conditions for survival in the most general and trivial senses of the term.

While imbecilic reactionaries still hold forth on and against an aesthetic critique of all this, and believe themselves lucid and modern when they affect to marry their century by proclaiming that the super-highway and Sarcelles have their own beauty, which one must prefer to the discomfort of the "picturesque" old neighborhoods, or by gravely remarking that the entirety of the population eats better, despite those nostalgic for good food, the problem of the degradation of the totality of the natural and human environment already completely ceases to pose itself on the plane of so-called ancient quality, aesthetic or otherwise, and radically becomes the problem of the material possibility for existence of a world that pursues such a movement. This impossibility is in fact already perfectly demonstrated by all of separated scientific knowledge, which now only discusses the expiration [date] and the palliatives that, if one applies them diligently, can slightly delay it. Such a science can only accompany to destruction a world that has produced it and has it, but is forced to do so with open eyes. It thus shows, to a caricatural degree, the uselessness of knowledge without use.

Anarchafeminist Manifesto

8 March, International Women's Day, is a specially relevant day to remember the Anarchafeminist Manifesto.

The origin of the Anarchafeminist Manifesto is in Norway. The Anarchafeminist Manifesto is the summary of the feminist political program unanimously agreed upon by the third congress of the Anarchist Federation of Norway, 1–7 of June 1982. The manifesto was first published in Norwegian in Folkebladet (IJA) no 1 1983 pp. 4–5. Soon after the "Manifesto" was published in CRIFA-Bulletin no 44 mars–avril 1983 in French (p. 12) and English (p. 13). Later on the French version was used as the basis for a translation to English that was published on the Internet. The "Manifesto" is also translated to other languages.

Anarchafeminst greetings from Anna Quist, co-writer of the "Anarchafeminst Manifesto." Translated from French (Bulletin C.R.I.F.A. No 44 mars–avril 1983 p. 12).

All over the world most women have no rights whatsoever to decide upon important matters which concern their lives. Women suffer from oppressions of two kinds: 1) the general social oppression of the people, and 2) secondly sexism — oppression and discrimination because of their sex.

There are five main forms of oppression:

— Ideological oppression, brainwash by certain cultural traditions, religion, advertising and propaganda. Manipulation with concepts and play upon women's feelings and susceptibilities. Widespread patriarchal and authoritarian attitudes and capitalistic mentality in all areas.

— State oppression, hierarchical forms of organization with command lines downwards from the top in most interpersonal relations, also in the so-called private life.

— Economic exploitation and repression, as a consumer and a worker in the home and in low-salary women's jobs.

— Violence, under the auspices of the society as well as in the private sphere — indirectly when there is coercion because of lack of alternatives and direct physical violence.

— Lack of organization, tyranny of the structurelessness which pulverizes responsibility and creates weakness and inactivity.

These factors work together and contribute simultaneously to sustain each other in a vicious circle. There is no panacea to break the circle, but it isn't unbreakable.

Anarcha-feminism is a matter of consciousness. The consciousness which puts guardians off work. The principles of a liberating society thus stand perfectly clear to us.

Anarcha-feminism means women's independence and freedom on an equal footing with men. A social organization and a social life where no-one is superior or inferior to anyone and everybody is coordinate, women as well as men. This goes for all levels of social life, also the private sphere.

Anarcha-feminism implies that women themselves decide and take care of their own matters, individually in personal matters, and together with other women in matters which concern several women. In matters which concern both sexes essentially and concretely women and men shall decide on an equal footing.

Women must have self-decision over their own bodies, and all matters concerning contraception and childbirth are to be decided upon by women themselves.

It must be fought both individually and collectively against male domination, attitudes of ownership and control over women, against repressive laws and for women's economic and social autonomy and independence.

Crisis centers, day care centers, study and discussion groups, women's culture activities etc. must be established, and be run under womens's own direction.

The traditional patriarchal nuclear family should be replaced by free associations between men and women based on equal right to decide for both parts and with respect for the individual person's autonomy and integrity.

Sex-stereotyping in education, media and at the place of work must be abolished. Radical sharing of the work by the sexes in ordinary jobs, domestic life and education is a suitable mean.

The structure of working life must be radically changed, with more part-time work and flat organized cooperation at home as well as in society. The difference between men's work and women's work must be abolished. Nursing and taking care of the children must concern men just as much as women.

Female power and female prime ministers will neither lead the majority of women to their ends nor abolish oppression. Marxist and bourgeoisie feminists are misleading the fight for women's liberation. For most women it is not going to be any feminism without anarchism. In other words, anarcha-feminism does not stand for female power or female prime ministers, it stands for organization without power and without prime ministers.

The double oppression of women demands a double fight and double organizing: on the one hand in feminist federations, on the other hand in the organizations of anarchists. The anarcha-feminists form a junction in this double organizing.

A serious anarchism must also be feminist otherwise it is a question of patriarchal half-anarchism and not real anarchism. It is the task of the anarcha-feminists to secure the feminist feature in anarchism. There will be no anarchism without feminism.

An essential point in anarcha-feminism is that the changes must begin today, not tomorrow or after the revolution. The revolution shall be permanent. We must start today by seeing through the oppression in the daily life and do something to break the pattern here and now.

We must act autonomously, without delegating to any leaders the right to decide what we wish and what we shall do: we must make decisions all by ourselves in personal matters, together with other women in pure female matters, and together with the male fellows in common matters.

NOT BORED! writes: "You'd think the translator of a text that shows that people can't understand texts that have passages left out of them would NOT leave any passages out of his/her translation. But Ken Knabb may not be as good a translator as we'd like to think, because he failed to translate a full third of the situationists' crucial essay "How Not To Understand Situationist Books"!

"How Situationist Books Are Not Understood" [1]

Unattributed (Guy Debord?)
Translated by Not Bored!

If the action led by the SI had not involved several consequences that were publically scandalous and threatening, it is beyond doubt that no French publication would have reviewed our recent books. Which was naively confessed by Francois Chatelet in Le Nouvel Observateur for 3 January 1969: "Confronted with similar works, the first sentiment is to purely and simply exclude them, let them have the absolute point of view where they place themselves in the absolute, exactly, in the non-relative, in the non-related." But as a result of letting us have the non-related, the organizers of the conspiracy of silence have, after several years, seen this strange "absolute" fall upon their heads and show itself as not being distinct from current history, from which they are absolutely separated; without being able to prevent this "old mole" from making its way towards the day.[2]

"Rachel Corrie, A Message Crushed Again"

Katharine Viner, Los Angeles Times

Three years after American activist Rachel Corrie died under an
Israeli bulldozer in Gaza, her words are being censored for political
reasons.

The flights for cast and crew had been booked; the production
schedule delivered; there were tickets advertised on the Internet.
The Royal Court Theatre production of "My Name Is Rachel Corrie," the
play I co-edited with Alan Rickman, was transferring later this month
to the New York Theatre Workshop, home of the musical "Rent,"
following two sold-out runs in London and several awards.

We always felt passionately that it was a piece of work that needed
to be seen in the United States. Created from the journals and
e-mails of American activist Rachel Corrie, telling of her journey
from her adolescence in Olympia, Wash., to her death under an Israeli
bulldozer in Gaza at the age of 23, we considered it a unique
American story that would have a particular relevance for audiences
in Rachel's home country. After all, she had made her journey to the
Middle East in order "to meet the people who are on the receiving end
of our [American] tax dollars," and she was killed by a U.S.-made
bulldozer while protesting the demolition of Palestinian homes.

But last week the New York Theatre Workshop canceled the production —
or, in its words, "postponed it indefinitely." The political climate,
we were told, had changed dramatically since the play was booked. As
James Nicola, the theater's 's artistic director, said Monday,
"Listening in our communities in New York, what we heard was that
after Ariel Sharon's illness and the election of Hamas in the recent
Palestinian elections, we had a very edgy situation." Three years
after being silenced for good, Rachel was to be censored for
political reasons.

The Cuban Five

Noam Chomsky, ZNet

After a recent screening of "Mission Against Terror", a new film documentary about the Cuban Five, Noam Chomsky answered questions from the audience. For more information on the on-going case of the Cuban Five, visit www.freethefive.org.

Woman: Since we are in the business of torture, and the country has swung very far to the right, what are the realistic chances of getting a fair trial for the five?

Noam Chomsky: Well, first of all it is not really true that the country has swung far to the right. Though the press systematically refuses to report it, there are extensive public opinion studies taken in the United States. We know a great deal about public opinion, and I can give you some detail if you like. But what the studies shows, consistently, is that both political parties and the media are far to the right of the public on issue after issue, on a host of issues.

To give one example, the Federal Budget came out yesterday and today. Well there hasn't been time yet for a study of public attitude towards this budget, but it's about the same as the budget that came out a year ago, February 2005. Right after that the most prestigious institute that studies public opinion in the world, based in the University of Maryland, carried out a study of what people thought the budget ought to be, okay. And it was very striking. It was the exact inverse of the budget. Where federal spending was going up, the public wanted to go down: military spending, supplemental for Iraq and Afghanistan; where spending was going down, the public wanted to go up: social spending, health, education, veteran's benefits, renewable energy, support of the United Nations peacekeeping missions, on and on.

Furthermore, they were an overwhelming majority; and the scale of cutback and rises…. increases the public wanted, were enormous. Well, in a democratic society, one of the things you want to know is what your neighbor thinks. I mean if each person says "look, I am some kind of a lunatic, everything I read is something else," you are not going to get a functioning democracy. So we, therefore, want to know what happened to this information. I am willing to bet that almost none of you saw it. The reason is it was not published in a single newspaper in the United States, at least a single newspaper that's accessed by the stadard database. Well, okay, so people don't know about it. I suspect the same is true of this budget. And you'll probably have the same study and the same suppression.

So it just isn't true, I mean there is case after case like this, it's just not true that the population has swung to the right. The government has, the parties have, the media have, the public hasn't. And does that mean they can get a fair trial? Well, yeah, I tend to agree with Leonard Weinglass on that, it's possible. Not in Miami, of course. But can you get fair coverage of it? Well, that's really up to people like us. If there are delegations at the Boston Globe day after day saying why don't you publish some of this stuff, then chances are it'll get published. It's the same elsewhere. If there is public engagement and involvement, things change, otherwise, they don't. They'll keep drifting to the right, and the public will be somewhere else, with a huge gap between public opinion and public policy. It's startling, in fact, when you look at it.

Al D. writes:

"The Green Scare:
Memory Against Foregetting"

Al D, for Rebel Cascadia

"The struggle of humanity against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting." —Milan Kundera

Two weeks ago I found my name on a government list regarding the current "Green Scare," also known as the FBI's "Operation Backfire" against the grassroots ecology and animal movements.

The mysterious "No Contact" list contains the names of many radical, wonderful people—the people that perhaps would be the most outspoken in their support of those charged in this case—and for some unknown reason these people are supposedly banned from communicating with the defendants. I have tried to find out exactly what the list means, yet I've found no solid answers, but instead a general sense of paranoia, confusion and unease. I've come to view this ridiculous list as symbolic of the whole Green Scare campaign. Check it out here.

The U.S. government excels at dropping down on people's lives like a ton of bricks, and of course that's what it has done with this witch hunt. In the last couple months, it has incarcerated or otherwise hammered many amazing radicals, thereby traumatizing them, their friends, families, and movements. Federal prosecutors have also set a new standard for potential sabotage penalties: life in jail plus, oh, say, about 300 years.

"Rumsfeld Zeros In on the Internet"

Mike Whitney, Informatin Clearing House

Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld was warmly greeted at the recent meeting of the Council on Foreign Relations. The CFR is the hand-picked assemblage of western elites from big-energy, corporate media, high-finance and the weapons industry. These are the 4,000 or so members of the American ruling class who determine the shape of policy and ensure that the management of the global economic system remains in the hands of U.S. bluebloods.

As the Pentagon’s chief-coordinator, Rumsfeld enjoys a prominent place among American mandarins. He is the caretaker of their most prized possession; the high-tech, taxpayer-funded, laser-guided war machine. The US Military is the crown-jewel of the American empire; a fully-operational security apparatus for the protection of pilfered resources and the ongoing subjugation of the developing world.

Rumsfeld’s speech alerted his audience to the threats facing America in the new century.

He opined: “We meet today in the 6th year in what promises to be a long struggle against an enemy that in many ways is unlike any our country has ever faced. And, in this war, some of the most critical battles may not be in the mountains in Afghanistan or in the streets of Iraq, but in newsrooms—in places like New York, London, Cairo, and elsewhere.”

“New York”?

"Capital Ideas:

Jacques Attali, Banker and Champion of Marx"

Stuart Jeffries, London Guardian

Jacques Attali has changed. When he was the special economic adviser to François Mitterrand in the 1980s, his name was a byword for pomp. In the Elysée Palace, Mitterrand had the most coveted office, but Attali had the best desk, one that had been designed for Napoleon. Mitterrand may have been the French president, critics said, but Attali — for all the brilliant banker's socialist credentials — had the airs of an emperor. He is even Napoleonically short.

That reputation followed Attali to London, where, in 1991, he became the first president of the European Bank of Reconstruction and Development and sparked controversy by lavishly marbling the halls of its headquarters. Critics suggested that the £750,000 makeover would have been better spent on the bank's founding purpose — namely to ease former Soviet Bloc countries' transition to capitalism by supplying small businesses with loans. Under Attali, though, the EBRD got a reputation for being the bank that liked to to say "yes" — to itself. He left early in 1993, trailing a reputation for profligacy.