ARS NOTORIA

SACP 2009 End of the Year Statement 29 December 2009 The SACP takes this opportunity to wish all South Africans especially the working class and the poor a restful and enjoyable festive season and a happy new year. The toiling masses of our people deserve this rest as they are not only the backbone and engine of the South African economy but also the backbone of the struggle to deepen our democracy. Without the decisive leadership of the working class our democracy will forever remained threatened. As we go into the New Year, the working class, like it did during the struggle against apartheid, must ensure that it remains at the head of the struggle to consolidate our democracy. To this end the workers and the poor of our country have a duty to remain vigilant and fight against all the threats to our hard earned democracy. Just like there would have not been victory against apartheid without the working class being at the head of our struggle, there will be no deepening and conso...

Amigos Inside Report: How ALBA Fought for Humanity in Copenhagen December 28, 2009 Evo Morales: “I have heard many debates in the UN where presidents condemn climate change but they never say what causes it. We say clearly that it is caused by capitalism.” By Ron Ridenour “Nobel War Prize winner walked in and out of a secret door, and that is the way capitalism and the United States Empire will end up leaving the planet, through a secret back door.” So spoke Venezuela President Hugo Chavez from the plenary podium on the last afternoon, December 18, of the 12-day long Copenhagen climate conference (COP15). “While the conference was a failure, it, at least, led to more consciousness of what the problem is for all of us. Now starts a new stage of the struggle for the salvation of humanity, and this is through socialism. Our problem is not just about climate, but about poverty, misery, unnecessary child deaths, discrimination and racism-all related to capitalism,” Chavez said at the...

Prachanda (front) and Baburam Bhattarai Nepal Maoists ask India to clarify army chief’s remark Sudeshna Sarkar, Thaindian News, Bangkok, 28 December 2009 Kathmandu, Dec 28 (IANS) Terming a recent remark by the Indian Army chief as “naked intervention in Nepal’s internal affairs”, this country’s former Maoist guerrillas, who are seeking to get back to power, have asked the Indian government to clarify its position. During a visit to India earlier this month by Nepal’s army chief Chhatraman Singh Gurung, Indian Army chief Deepak Kapoor was reported as saying that the Maoists’ guerrilla force should not be merged with the Nepal Army as it would lead to the politicisation of the national army.

The relevance of Gramsci’s life, times and theory to today Peter   Latham, Communist University in South London, 24 th December 2009 I first read Gramsci in English over 40 years ago. Moreover, my PhD thesis on Theories of the Labour Movement —which is a Marxist critique of non-Marxist theories of industrial relations—used Gramsci’s concept of the “organic” working class intellectual to explain 20 th century rank and file movements in the building industry. [1]   This paper is based on the Gramsci section in my forthcoming book on The State and Local Government . [2] Roger Simon—the co-author with Noreen Branson of The British State published in 1958 at the height of the cold war when they used the pseudonyms James Harvey and Katherine Hood [3] —s ubsequently revised his approach to take into account what he saw as Gramsci’s modification of classical Marxism, including Leninism. The latter, according to Simon, saw power as concentrated in the state and under t...

What It Takes to Build a Movement Mark Rudd, Counterpunch, 25-27 December 2009 Since the summer of 2003, I've crisscrossed the country speaking at colleges and theaters and bookstores, first with  The Weather Underground documentary and, starting in March of this year, with my book,  Underground:  My Life with SDS and the Weathermen  (William Morrow, 2009). In discussions with young people, they often tell me, “Nothing anyone does can ever make a difference.” The words still sound strange: it's a phrase I never once heard forty years ago, a sentiment obviously false on its surface.  Growing up in the Fifties and Sixties, I – and the rest of the country – knew about the civil rights movement in the South, and what was most evident was that individuals, joining with others, actually were making a difference. The labor movement of the Thirties to the Sixties had improved the lives of millions; the anti-war movement had brought down a sitting president ...

                              Else Steinhardt. Should people be defined by their victimhood?   By Phil Hall Fraulein Else is the name of the novella Arthur Schnitzler wrote in 1924. It was a forerunner of Joyce's stream of consciousness writing and it incorporated some of the pschosexual ideas of Freud. It's about a young girl of 19 who lives in Vienna and is cornered into stripping for a roue by her mother. The father is having financial problems and the man will help the girl's father if she obliges by undressing in front of the rich man. There are some parallels with Else Steinhardt , my great aunt. Else was roughly the same age as the character in the novella at the time it was published, and she probably moved in the same circles as Schnitzler, as a young opera singer. Moreover,though Else's face lacked classical proportions, she was beautiful, attractive, flirtatious and overtly sexua...

I am not really a political animal, more a political inanimate. But reading some of the contributions to this blog, I know many of you are, your passion is apparent and whether I agree or not with what is being said at times, I like the idea it is being said. So, I thought I would offer up this image (if only to banish Bob Dylan and his backlit hair) - I went to the rally on false pretenses,kind of. I had enrolled on a part time evening photography course, for beginners. After a few weeks we were asked to put some of what we had learned into practice, I thought I would test myself (and my skills) to the full by attending the demonstration with only my 35mm SLR for protection (there was talk of organised trouble). I was at the Embankment in London as the crowd gathered. All of a sudden I was in a scrum in amongst the seasoned photojournalist all desperate to get the perfect protester shot. I was petrified. The police were on one side, the protesters on the other and we were in the m...

It's very hot here and we could us more rain. There are many people praying in various languages, some are having long serious discussions but Gabrielle's chooks are doing well. Sorry to sound like I am speaking in code but for some reason that no-one can quite work out, the Australian Government has decided to introduce some kind of mandatory internet filter and not tell anyone else what it is they are filtering out. This has caused a kind of quandry among agrarian socialists. Just as well I'm not one. The big names of Australian literature continue their strange game of whispering to each other whilst desperately trying to control their public image as they did in the old days. Maximum fun at Christmas time, messing with their legacies. I continue to enjoy Ars Notoria greatly, the wit and erudition, the way debates are conducted and so forth, all greatly instructional and Australia's most windely read poet on the internet says thankyou! More beer!

Over the last year or so I have been collecting autograph stories from friends, family and work colleagues (Phil has submitted a story as has Camraman).It has been a very pleasureable experience listening to/reading the 50 tales I have received. Of course, I am having no luck with publishers or agents and I receive rejection letters on a regular basis. But, the project was fun to do, so I cling on to that thought as I tear open the envelopes. Here is a story about Bob Dylan, it is one of my favourites, I hope you like it. Dylan I owned everything by Dylan and last saw him in 1967 at Manchester Free Trade Hall. Now I had the chance to see him again and if I was lucky, meet him. I was a policeman in my early twenties, I think it was 1976, when Dylan played three or four nights at Earls Court. Dylan was on form around this time having released Desire and Street Legal. I was based at Notting Hill Police Station but for big concerts or demos worked with other policemen from all ove...

Pythagoras understood and promulgated the reality and power of truths that seemed independent of physical reality. A small demonstration of this mathematical power was the aqueduct Polycrates had Eupalinos build through a mountain to supply water to the town. Plato , a neo-Pythagorean of sorts, took these ideas and speculated on the existence of intelligible four dimensional forms. Asynchronically speaking, Baudrillard, showed how language and human culture can remove us from the contemplation of nature and how human created simulacra soon replace what pristine and real. He explains how humans hollow out reality, reform it and assign their own functions to it. But Freud has offered us the unconscious and started psychiatry, (very unfashionable in these days of brain science). The unconscious manifests itself in the iconography of dreams and through our concealed or transformed drives and intentions - through Thanatos and Eros In a way the unconscious is the ...

It is not as easy at it looks. Photo Copyright:The Quiet Busker.

Maoists to declare autonomous states Baburam Bhattarai KATHMANDU , NOV 26 - The UCPN (Maoist) on Thursday decided to declare 13 ethnic and region-based autonomous provinces from Dec. 11-18. Maoist Vice Chairman Baburam Bhattarai, who heads the party’s United National People’s Movement, announced the decision on Thursday evening after a meeting of the party’s central office bearers and regional and ethnic fronts.

Truly the Taleban could have arranged as many bombings and terrorists acts as they liked in the UK. There are many Pashtun young men and women in cities in the UK who still have large extended families back in Afghanistan and who could be forced into doing something they should not. But guess what. So far there have been no attacks by Afghans on British soil. Why? It is a mystery. News comes from Afghanistan and the recent UN report that the Taleban and the drug trade are intertwined and that now the Taleban, who are mainly Pashtun, are officially in command of an international drug cartel.  News comes from Afghanistan that Taleban drug lords go to Dubai to live high on the hog and gamble and sleep with women and luxuriate in all the that the freedom to consume has to offer, while their footsoldiers, peasant fighters, are deluded and told that they are fighting a patriotic religious war.  And though they are told they are fighting a religious war what really matters to t...

Anandi Sharan has supplied a list of people to petition. If you have read her previous blog then the essence of it goes like this: "B oycott America's ineffectual measures at Copenhagen: The way to do this is to rush through, for purely procedural reasons, a meaningless 1 page document at the main Conference of the Parties – the CoP15, and then move on to the Meeting of the Parties to the  Kyoto Protocol  – the CoP/MoP5.   "We must write to our leaders and tell them to finish the CoP15 in one day flat, and avoid American filibustering, thereby freeing up the next ten days of negotiations for the CoP/MoP5 - the forum that can deliver real results." I trust Anandi's judgement utterly. She is one of the most perceptive people I know, if not the most perceptive person - a true Cassandra. Anandi was working against climate change and relating it to poverty alleviation in the 90s when everyone else was still talking about El Nino and the hole in the ozone layer. She...