This week marks the 35th anniversary of the death of the great Chilean folk singer, educator and fighter for socialism Victor Jara – tortured and killed by the supporters of General Pinochet during the Western-backed coup against the socialist government of Salvador Allende.
Un saludo rojo, compañero. Seguimos con la lucha!
Speech by Hugo Chávez in Caracas last Thursday announcing the expulsion of the US ambassador to Venezuela, in response to ongoing US support for right-wing secessionists in Bolivia who are have in recent days killed dozens of peasant activists and attempted to subvert the democratic mandate of President Evo Morales.
UPDATE:
The Latin American leaders’ summit meeting in Santiago has ratified a declaration supporting Evo Morales and calling for Bolivia’s territorial integrity to be respected.
Meanwhile, outside the summit hundreds of Chileans demonstrated to show their support for Morales and Chávez.
On his way into the meeting Chávez told reporters that “the United States is the great interventionist” in Latin America. “35 years ago imperialism came in all its fury, utilising the pro-Western oligarchy and the media to sabotage Chile and the government of Allende, and in the end they overthrew and killed him.”
Chávez warned that “if they overthrow and kill Evo Morales, Venezuela will not remain with arms folded and not only Bolivia but all of Latin America could erupt, as Che Guevara said: one Vietnam, two Vietnams, three Vietnams.”
Article in Spanish and video footage here.
Such is the banal and asinine nature of most New Zealand bourgeois politicians that it is really no surprise the attitude towards them on the part of the average punter in the street is one of sheer exasperation and ennui. How then to explain the current popular and media hysteria over the Winston Peters-Owen Glenn saga?
Today’s Dominion Post features former National Party spin doctor Richard Long comparing the Labour Party to the corrupt rulers of the Byzantine Empire in his bid to justify tremendous hype over the events playing out in the parliamentary privileges committee over the last fortnight.
As his allusions to the works of Graham Greene make clear, Long is certainly aware of the strong element of bathos in play here. One could perhaps fault him on one or two points of historical accuracy (such as the idea that the political institutions of the Roman Republic or the Byzantine Empire had anything in common with Athenian radical democracy), but the point is essentially valid – the Labour Party is to the Byzantine Emperors what sad old Louis Napoleon Bonaparte was to his uncle and namesake, the victor of Austerlitz. (meanwhile the National Party itself is so utterly insipid that it is impossible to think of any obvious historical allusions!)
But how to explain the magnetic power of the man himself, Winston Peters, who even in the hour of his political nemesis still manages to captivate the nation in a way that no other bourgeois politician can?
Continuing with our classical precedents, I think that it is perhaps because Winston embodies that same mercurial mix of attraction and repulsion – or as Aristotle would describe it, pity and fear – that characterised the Athenian demagogues such as Alcibiades, who had a very similar love/hate relationship with the electorate to that enjoyed Winston.
Unhappily for Winston though if the fate of Alcibiades is anything to go by his future prospects look very bleak indeed. All very sad really when you consider that once the tragic spectacle of the populist demogogue undone by “those sneaky baubles” (to borrow David W. Young’s great phrase) passes from our TV screens, bourgeois politics in New Zealand will no longer be even a halfway decent spectator sport!
Call me cynical, but doesn’t it seem like every time a member of the police or armed forces gets killed the NZ media jumps into a frenzy of clichéd and over-the-top reporting? Not content to run a lead story on it, TV 1 tonight had to feature at least 3 live crosses during the news bulletin to various locations around the area in South Auckland where some undercover cop was shot while conducting surveillance on a suspected P-lab.
Then later on Campbell Live the whole sentimental saga was dragged out again. Watching the sorry spectacle I was reminded of the comments made by Middle Eastern Foreign Correspondent Robert Fisk during the talk he gave at last weekend’s Christchurch Writers Festival, when he said that journalism was increasingly being reduced to a stock of clichés – a kind of paint-by-numbers exercise if you will.
Thus police officers like the one in the report linked to above are always “unsung heroes”, killed “in the line of duty”. Our thoughts of course must always “with the families” while those present at the time are left “still in shock”.
Then the inevitable pundits come out to lament the “social breakdown” and propose “tougher sentences” for the “violent thugs roaming our streets”.
Attempts are seldom made to analyse seriously the underlying issues, since the “story”, such as it is, has already been written and either broadcast or published hundreds of times before.
On the other hand, perhaps Baudrillard was right when he said that the simulacrum is the only genuine manifestation of reality and we should just forget about trying to seriously understand the world or (god forbid!) actually change it.
Andrew Little and his Labour-loving cohorts in the leadership of the EPMU have been in the news this week for attempting to sack EPMU call centre worker Shawn Tan because of his decision to stand as a candidate for the ACT Party in the upcoming election.
While Little doesn’t have a problem with union organisers taking time off work to campaign on behalf of the pro-capitalist Labour Party (and giving tens of thousands of dollars of their members’ dues to help with Labour’s election campaign), standing for any other capitalist party is apparently an absolute no-no.
Little argues that it is really an issue of Tan failing to follow due process, as all EPMU officials must gain approval from the union’s national executive if they wish to stand in local or national elections. However, the indisputable fact remains that in the entire history of the Engineers’ Union permission has never been granted any paid official to stand for any party other than Labour. Indeed, the rule was first introduced in the 1950s for the express purpose of preventing a regional secretary of the union standing as a candidate for the Communist Party in a local mayoral election!
Moreover, while Shawn Tan is clearly a very politically confused individual, the same could be said for the EPMU hierarchy who recently opposed a remit by one of their Auckland delegates calling for the removal of all GST on essential food items, on the grounds that it might embarrass Labour! On other key class questions such as the right to strike it also has to be said that Little & co also stand squarely on the side of the bosses against the interests of workers.
Clearly it is incumbent on all serious leftists to defend the right of workers to stand for any political party they wish – no matter how reactionary – as legal restrictions and bans are even more likely to be used to muzzle socialists and anti-capitalists than confused working class Tories. For the same reason leftists should advocate the abolition of all government legislation that restricts political free speech – such as the Electoral Act as it applies to public servants and the Electoral Finance Act.
Genuine human freedom (not the illusory kind offered up by right-wing libertarians or the middle class control freakery of Labour) must be the watchword of left-wing and socialist activists if we are to have any hope of winning the struggle for ideological hegemony.
So Cadbury has announced that 145 jobs are to go at its Dunedin plant – adding to the local redundancies already announced this year at Fisher & Paykel, Sealords, PPCS and Tamahine Knitwear. As usual the employers are claiming that it’s all about remaining competitive in the global marketplace and maximising efficiency, and in a sense they are right – capitalism forces firms to produce goods more and more cheaply and that can only be achieved one of two ways – either through increased mechanisation, or through a reduction in the price of labour power.
What’s interesting about the job losses at Cadbury’s is that unlike (say) Fisher & Paykel and other firms that have looked to move production to lower wage companies they have instead announced an increase in investment in plant equipment and machinery in NZ and Australia – a classic example of what Marxists like to call a shift in the organic composition of capital.
So does this promise of more local capital investment make the redundancies any more acceptable, as the union official interviewed in the article linked to above seems to imply? Definitely not!
The fact that fewer workers are now going to be working to produce more goods, with each individual employee generating a greater amount of surplus value for the capitalist directors and shareholders, means that the remaining workers are going to be more – not less – exploited. Added to this of course the fact that a whole lot of workers no longer have any jobs at all, even though from a rational point of view there exists the same amount of work as there did before, and clearly this is hardly the rosy Panglossian scenario that some liberal bloggers would have us believe.
The irony is that long term even from a capitalist point of view the whole exercise is self-defeating, since the rising rate of constant as opposed to variable capital will lead to a tendency for the rate of profit to fall.
Meanwhile as I pointed out during my 2007 Dunedin Mayoral campaign, the real scandal is that in recent years the city council has been doling out millions of dollars in rates relief to businesses like Cadbury’s which at the end of the day has proved to be only so much corporate welfare, contributing nothing to the lives of ordinary citizens!
I think the following piece of smug middle class nonsense, reposted from a Greens’ supporters’ blog, nicely sums up everything that is wrong with the Green Party!
*An invitation to *
*‘SHOPPING WITH SUE’*
Take a tour of a supermarket with me, Sue Kedgley Green MP, where I will answer questions on issues such as:
- how to become a more conscious, ethical consumer
- how to read and understand nutrition labelling
- how to avoid purchasing foods that may contain GE ingredients
- how to identify cruelty free products
- how to purchase locally grown New Zealand products
- additives to avoid
*Thursday 21st August 2008*
*2.00pm to 3.00pm*
*Pak’n’Save Kilbirnie*
*78 Rongotai Road*
*Kilbirnie*
*Wellington***
I wasn´t going to post anything on the current Russian-Georgian imbroglio since most of the essential points have already been made very well by writers such as Seumas Milne in the Guardian and bloggers such as Splintered Sunrise, but the continual lauding by the mainstream media of Georgian president Mikheil Saakashvili as a paragon of virtue and champion of democracy really has finally provoked me beyond all reasonable limits!
As I noted at the start of this year on this blog, Saakashvili’s re-election for a second term as president was marked by allegations of vote-rigging and mass demonstrations on the streets of the Georgian capital Tblisi.
Not content with this, Saakashvili has now gone and sent his troops marauding through South Ossetia killing hundreds of civilians and forcing thousands more to flee their homes. Yet he still has the temerity to wax indignant when the predictable blowback arrives in the form of Russian tanks and Ossetian irregulars crossing the border into Georgia.
Honestly, what would this man have to do to lose his charmed status in the eyes of bourgeois media pundits?
But then, as John Pilger has reminded us in this recent article, at the end of the day the West thinks nothing of a little ethnic cleansing, just as long as it is their own agents that do the killing!
Finally got around to seeing Turkish-German director Fatih Akin’s new film The Edge of Heaven (German title: Auf der Anderen Seite) last week, and would honestly have to say it is the best film I have seen since Pan’s Labyrinth and The Lives of Others hit screens here in NZ just over a year ago.
In many ways dealing with similar themes to those taken up by Alejandro González Iñárritu’s 2006 film Babel (eg the tragedy of national, linguistic and cultural borders) it is however (I think) superior in every conceivable way.
For a start, although The Edge of Heaven is not exactly a political film, it nevertheless does not shy away from addressing some very serious concrete political issues – from the hypocrisy of the European Union’s position on asylum seekers to Turkey’s persecution of Kurdish and communist dissidents, the film is not afraid to raise questions which demand a political (as opposed to a purely emotional) response.
It’s almost enough to make me want to slit my wrists – the sheer vacuousness and egocentricity of the candidates standing in the elections for the University of Canterbury Students’ Association 2009 exec being held this week. In fact, the options on offer are so unpalatable that were I not a bit too long in the tooth I would have been sorely tempted to run myself!
When “putting the U back into UCSA” is the closest thing approaching a political slogan on any of the campaign posters and hoardings littering campus you know that the level of student consciousness really is at an all-time low.
If you don’t believe me just have a read of some of the candidates’ blurbs on the UCSA website – I won’t quote any of them here as it is altogether far too depressing. It suffices to say though that I was almost tempted to vote for the ACT on Campus candidate on the grounds that at least he manages to expound a coherent political philosophy!
