ARS NOTORIA

We can c h a n ge the Labour Party... Paul Myners with Gordon Brown, his neo-con chum ...ea sy as A , B , C I am your typical left-wing (mainstream) voter, who was up until recently in a quandary, but the more I read woolly, apologetic, cowardly articles like Jonathan Freedland's and numerous others in the Guardian , the more I realize that it is every left-of-centre persons duty NOT to vote Labour in this election. No, its not yet again about holding one's nose and voting tactically. We do this every time, and yet the same authoritarian, right-wing, neo-liberal administration stays in power, be they Tory or Labour. The media don't like to acknowledge it, but we have two main parties who have the same political agenda. This will be the first and hopefully only time I will vote Liberal-democrat , because it is the only mainstream party to identify itself (ever so slightly) with the left of centre and it seems not be scared to either. Since the Labour party abandoned its...

God, don't you miss the Tony Benns? Tony Benn, picture by... Is morality in politics dead? The discussion over immigration in the first leader’s debate made me want to be sick. It seemed to me that all three leaders had as good as accepted tabloid accusations and negativity over the subject, and it boiled down to simply an argument over who had the best way of reducing immigration. It was disgusting, it was racist, and it as good as lacked any form of morality. It begged the question, what about the immigrants? What about the people outside our borders (but still human, you should understand) who are just trying to – like all of us – make a life for themselves? I’m not saying open the floodgates, I’m not suggesting a full on embrace of idealistic solutions, but perhaps a tentative question of whether Gordon Brown, leading the Labour Party (probably to defeat) has abandoned idealism altogether. It is interesting to consider that, despite common claims of Labour’s shift to the right...

CU, NDR Part 7b Defiance Campaign The document linked below, the third in this part of the National Democratic Revolution (NDR) series, was written by the famous “Drum” reporter, Henry Nxumalo [pictured above]. In 1950, the Communist Party of South Africa (CPSA) was banned, dissolved itself, and gradually began to reconstitute itself as a clandestine party, the SACP. The Communist Party made no further public statements until 1959, when the first issue of the African Communist magazine was published. But two other things happened: the remaining, legal components of the movement rallied round to protest against the banning and to support the formerly-CPSA comrades, such as Dadoo, Marks, Bopape and Kotane, as reported by Henry Nxumalo a few months later in the Drum magazine. The movement was solid. The ANC did not wash off the communists. The NDR was already on firm foundations. The Defiance Against Unjust Laws campaign was led by Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela among others. Mandela w...

"At some future period, not very distant as measured by centuries, the civilized races of man will almost certainly exterminate, and replace, the savage races throughout the world. At the same time the anthropomorphous apes, as Professor Schaaffhausen has remarked, will no doubt be exterminated. The break between man and his nearest allies will then be wider, for it will intervene between man in a more civilized state, as we may hope, even than the Caucasian, and some ape as low as a baboon, instead of as now between the Negro or Australian and the gorilla." Charles Darwin He says that he is “inherently gloomy about the prospect of Africa” because “all our social policies are based on the fact that their intelligence is the same as ours – whereas all the testing says not really”, and I know that this “hot potato” is going to be difficult to address. His hope is that everyone is equal, but he counters that “people who have to deal with black employees find this not true”. He s...

Manufactured enemies Crimes against humanity that we are witness to in our day can roughly be divided into three categories. Crimes which are not qualified as such, not punished and not judicially processed. Crimes which, in contrary, are qualified as such, punished and processed in some form or another, but judicially is not quite the term that seems to fit the description. And, finally, crimes against humanity which are completely disregarded by everyone except those they are perpetrated against, given that they are not committed within the interest sphere of any one power. The justification for the first type of crime usually lies in the second type. They are often of a much larger scale than the second and the rational for them, more precisely, excuse given, is self defense. Take the example of 9/11. Approximately 3000 people were killed in a day in the most horrifying way imaginable while they were quietly getting on with business in their offices. This crime was qualified by th...

Domza at NUMSA 2009 , photo by Patrick Bond What is Marxism relevant to? Who is it relevant to? For what purpose is it relevant? Dear readers of ARS NOTORIA, How wonderful that there are young students of Marx out there in the readership! What is Marxism relevant to? Who is it relevant to? For what purpose is it relevant? Is there even such a thing as Marxism? Marx didn't think so, and nor did Cyril Smith , who is quite usefully erudite on this question (see the Cyril Smith archive on Marxists Internet Archive ). The question "Marxism is as relevant today as it ever was" implies an a priori intentionality and a deliberate subjectivity. If it is a question you are asking then that is encouraging. Marxism would not be relevant if history had ended, The Subject had died, and post-modernism continued to waive the rules of philosophy. The first kind of reading list I can offer is the (currently) eight "Generic Courses" of the Communist University, which are link...

CU, NDR Part 7a Three Doctors’ Pact “This Joint Meeting declares its sincerest conviction that for the future progress, goodwill, good race relations, and for the building of a united, greater and free South Africa, full franchise rights must be extended to all sections of the South African people…” This second document in the seventh part of the CU NDR series is a transcript of the “Three Doctors’ Pact” of March, 1947. It was a historic pact for democracy and national liberation, as the above quotation from it shows. There had been nothing like it before. The three doctors were Dr A B Xuma, Dr Yusuf Dadoo, and Dr Monty Naicker, leaders of the ANC, the Transvaal Indian Congress, and the Natal Indian Congress respectively [Picture: Dr Xuma signing; Dr Dadoo is seen on the right side of the picture, Dr Monty Naicker on the other side]. This Pact was a precursor of the Women’s Charter of 1954 and of the Freedom Charter of 1955, including the latter’s volunteer campaign prior to the...

Baghdad burning What on Earth is the real reason why the US and Britain are prolonging their stay in Afghanistan? They won't make it more governable by staying longer. Moreover, the Afghan government that they are supposed to be shoring up is discredited and biting the hand that feeds it. It is behaving obstructively towards NATO. It is infiltrated completely by the drug cartels. Nevetheless, Obama's plans for a troop withdrawal are on hold . Why? Is this strategy really a response to the situation in Afghanistan? Isn't sending more troops to Afghanistan, as many Afghanis believe, not really about Afghanistan at all, but about the US is gearing up for war with Iran? Iran's nuclear weapons' programme challenges US hegemony in the Middle East. But the question here is: Would it really matter if the government in Iran were secular and democratic and had nuclear weapons? Would that make the US hold back? It would not. Iran is boxed between two massive US ...

CU, NDR Part 7, main Congress, Pact and Defiance The National Democratic Revolution is more than a theory. It has a history. In South Africa, the unity of the vanguard party, the mass democratic liberation movement, and workers’ industrial unions was created by the actions of countless individuals in the course of many historic events. In terms of South African history we have already noted among others the formation of the ANC in 1912, the ICU in 1919, and the SACP in 1921. We have considered the Black Republic Thesis, Moses Kotane’s Cradock Letter, and the sectarian problems of the CPSA in the 1930s. The Party had already begun to solve some of these problems by the time South Africa became part of the war of 1939-1945. Although we will mostly refer from now on to South African events in the second half of this 12-part series on the NDR, yet it is as well to keep in mind that the National Democratic revolutionary wave was a world-wide historic change. NDRs swept old-style colonialism...

What has the EU ever done for us? David Cameron argues against greater European integration David Cameron: They've bled us white, the bastards. And what have they ever given us in return? Nick Clegg: Well, the single market, you know. That's a pretty good idea. There are no tariffs on UK products sold in Europe. David Cameron: Oh yeah, yeah they gave us that. Yeah. That's true. Gordon Brown: And they've got rid of borders in Europe. We can work and live wherever we like in any European country. No problem. Nick Clegg: Oh yes... movement within Europe, David, you remember what travel used to be like: "Take out your passport." "Why are you here?" and all that. Much better now. David Cameron: All right, I'll grant you the single market and free travel are two things that Europe has done... Nick Clegg: And what about the great European food. We'd still be eating boiled cabbage. Italian food, French, Spanish. Lovely grub. Where wou...

Umsebenzi Online, Volume 9, No. 7, 21 April 2010 Red Alert Strengthening the ideological capacity of the working class: An urgent political task Blade Nzimande, General Secretary "Capitalist influence must be rooted out in the fields of ideology and culture, and a new type of intellectual must be trained, devoted to the welfare of the people and to socialism - The Road to South African Freedom The intensity of the class struggle both inside our movement and in broader South African society requires that the working class takes bold and decisive actions to take ideological work and the battle of ideas to higher levels, now and going into the future. The battle of ideas is a battle we dare not lose, as this is critical in driving a radical national democratic revolution as our direct route to socialism. This task must be carried out and work intensified both inside and outside the organized formations of the working class. Apart from the above, there are a number of othe...

People's Democratic Dictatorship Ten years after the 1939 publication of Mao’s near-perfect example of the way to lay out the Political Economy of a country, given yesterday and linked again below, the same Mao stood in Tiananmen Square, Beijing, on 1 October 1949, to declare the founding of the People’s Republic of China [photograph above]. Also in 1949 Mao wrote of the People’s Democratic Dictatorship in a document linked below. There he rehearsed some of the history, for example: “Imperialist aggression shattered the fond dreams of the Chinese about learning from the West. It was very odd - why were the teachers always committing aggression against their pupil? The Chinese learned a good deal from the West, but they could not make it work and were never able to realize their ideals. Their repeated struggles, including such a country-wide movement as the Revolution of 1911, all ended in failure. Day by day, conditions in the country got worse, and life was made impossible.” In 20...