Due to my recent retirement from political activism I have not had much enthusiasm for posting here of late.
I have now started a new blog here which will be less politically-focussed and contain my musings on a much wider variety of subjects.
I hope to see some of this blog’s readers (all 10 of you!) over there…
Around 100 people turned out in Cathedral Square at lunchtime today (despite having only 48 hours notice) to show their anger at the brutal actions of the Israeli government which in the last week have cost the lives of over 700 Palestinians in Gaza.
A bigger march and rally is planned for Saturday 17th January, assembling outside the Canterbury Museum at 12 noon.
Below is my rough translation of an article on the recent Venezuelan regional elections by the well-known trade unionist and socialist leader Stalin Pérez Borges (who despite his name is actually a Trotskyist!). The original source can be found here.
After the regional elections: The workers propose a thorough clean out and more revolution
Stalin Pérez Borges, National Coordinator of the UNT labour federation, PSUV militant and national director of Marea Socialista (the class struggle tendency within PSUV).
25 November
I want to give a few first personal impressions, about that which many comrades are very worried, above all concerning the significance of the loss of the Mayoralty of Caracas and various important or key governorships in the country.
Right now we need to be calm and sit down to evaluate in depth with the comrades. There are various points which we must analyse in order to try to come to the conclusions closest to reality. It is necessary to open a far-reaching debate within the party in order to reflect and carry out self-criticism as president Chávez stressed on Sunday night.
Photo: Scoop
Due to the failure of my home internet connection and my ISP’s general incompetence there has been some delay in posting this 
In the NZ general election over the weekend the Labour Party suffered a huge defeat (down from 41% of the vote in 2005 to 33% this time) and is now relegated to the opposition benches. In part this was due to the National Party staking out more moderate centre ground and even outflanking Labour to the left on some issues (eg promising state assistance for all laid off workers and directing the government superannuation fund to invest in local rather than overseas assets). A bigger factor though was probably the decline in voter turnout (from 80.92% of enrolled voters last election to 78.69% this time) – with the trend especially marked in the so-called “Labour heartland” of South Auckland and also in the Maori seats – and Labour’s failure to arrest the widening gap between rich and poor during its nine years in power.
As expected, the extraparliamentary left parties (the Alliance, Workers Party and RAM) all got tiny votes – although RAM were talking up their chances big time going into the election yet only got around 400 votes, despite avoiding all references to scary terms like “socialism” or “the working class”!
The Alliance slightly increased their vote from 2005, gaining just over 1 700 votes.
The 824 votes for WP was a modest total but does at least represent a solid core of people who were prepared to defy the enormous pressure not to cast a “wasted vote” and opt for a hard left anticapitalist alternative. Also given that WP only achieved offical registration at the beginning of October and so had only 5 weeks to campaign for the party vote (and also got very little media exposure) I am confident that next time round we will be able to build on this (especially if we stand more candidates).
It was certainly notable that in areas like Christchurch East where we have been doing a lot of campaigning our party vote was a lot stronger (12 votes from one booth in the working class suburb Aranui alone, 40 across the electorate).
More important than the amount of votes gathered however was the big boost in the party’s profile among workers and a modest influx of new activists into the organisation. Hopefully we can continue to build on this success in the coming weeks and months.
Full preliminary election results available here.
How ironic that the man who has just orchestrated the biggest government intervention into the finance and banking sector in US history is now warning other countries that a reversion to state regulation of the economy could endanger the long-term viability of capitalism!
Of course a turn away from monetarism to good old-fashioned Keynesianism poses no danger to the capitalist system at all, although in the short term it may make a few inidividual capitalists nervous.
The only way that capitalism could be seriously endangered would be if the working class itself seized political power and expropriated all the capitalists and greedy financial speculators, but alas that does not seem to be on the cards just at the moment…
After preaching neo-liberal monetarist orthodoxy for over two decades, the current panic on world financial markets has seen both the Labour and National tripping over each other in their haste to propose new Keynesian-style government pump-priming measures during the lead up to next month’s general election.
In order to solve the problem of the disappearance of so much fictitious capital in the form of overextended credit and worthless junk bonds they propose to … create yet more fictitious capital! Except this time the government – not the banks or finance companies – will be the one to perform the divine task of creating fresh capital ex nihilo.
Having been tied up with end-of-semester seminar presentations for the past three weeks I have been unable to post much yet about the rapidly approaching 2008 NZ general election. Over the next few weeks however I hope to be able to blog much more frequently as the campaign really heats up and the inevitable debate and controversy on the left between the proponents of lesser-evilism, “don’t scare the horses” gradualism and principled revolutionary politics ensues.
Adding to the mix this election is the fact that the Workers Party has just managed to achieve official party registration, meaning that this November for the first time in NZ history there will be an anti-capitalist option available to tick on every ballot paper in the country!
Meanwhile Socialist Worker will also be running on the party list with their “broad left” vehicle the Residents’ Action Movement (RAM), and the surviving remnants of the once-mighty Alliance Party will be keeping the banner of left social democracy flying for another election as well.
To kick things off I’ve set up a poll for readers of this blog (including overseas readers – we are internationalists here after all!) to express their views on the best approach for the left in the upcoming elections – located at the top of the sidebar at right on the main page, or alternatively click here.
Let the voting begin!
In their hundreds they came out today wanting to be in at his fall, and yet at the same time they cheered and clapped him, laughed with him even. The crowd built up over an hour waiting expectantly for the gladiator to strike out into the arena and then slow clapped as we finally made his entrance…
Who else other than Winston Peters, the Alcibiades of New Zealand politics, could inspire such atypical fervour in the normally apathetic student body at the University of Canterbury – even though he is currently rating at less than 2% in the polls?
This is after all a student body whose political consciousness is at such catatonic levels that only in a recent students’ association by-election the turnout barely made it into three figures.
Yet this afternoon, compelled perhaps by a peculair sense of schadenfreude at least 400 students congregated on the C Block lawn to hear Winston Peters do verbal battle with the hecklers and engage in his trademark tub-thumping oratory against the dark forces (in the form of the National and ACT parties as well as the Serious Fraud Office) now arraigned against him.
Venezuela Updates Bolivia Updates
