"There is a crack in everything, that's how the light gets in"
(Leonard Cohen)
"Ignore all proffered rules and create your own, suitable for what you want to say"
(Michael Moorcock)
"Look for your own. Do not do what someone else could do as well as you. Do not say, do not write what someone else could say, could write as well as you. Care for nothing in yourself but what you feel exists nowhere else. And, out of yourself create, impatiently or patiently, the most irreplaceable of beings."
(Andre Gide)

"I want my place, my own place, my true place in the world, my proper sphere, my thing which Nature intended me to perform when she fashioned me thus awry, and which I have vainly sought all my life-time."
(Nathaniel Hawthorne)
“A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us.”
(Franz Kafka)
"All mankind is of one author, and is one volume; when one man dies, one chapter is not torn out of the book, but translated into a better language; and every chapter must be so translated"
(John Donne)
“Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.”
(Robert J. Hanlon)
"Life is beautiful, but the world is hell"
(Harold Pinter)

Saturday, July 13, 2013

Miliband’s Media-pleasing Funding Proposals

Ed Miliband: a welcome from Tony Blair
EXTRACT: The clash over Falkirk shows that the Labour Party remains a site of struggle. Therefore it would be foolish in the extreme to urge the trade unions to simply up and leave. Of course, that is exactly the position of Peter Taaffe and his Socialist Party in England and Wales. In response to Falkirk, SPEW declares that now is the “time to discuss the bold step of disaffiliation”, Falkirk demonstrating once again “the political transformation of Labour from a party based on workers, that had socialist aspirations, albeit with a pro-capitalist leadership, into a pro-big business party with similarities to the Democrats in the US”.3 Apparently, Labour is “unreformable” and ever since its leadership “accepted the free market” and dropped clause four (which “envisaged nationalisation and socialism”), it ceased to be a site for class mobilisation and struggle.

 What is SPEW’s alternative for Unite and the unions in general? An “emergency executive council” should be called to discuss the crisis and pass a resolution for a “recall rules conference” which would remove the references to Labour Party affiliation, thereby “facilitating disaffiliation”. We further read that this conference should also “discuss political representation for the working class” - there should be meetings and conferences of trade unionists, from affiliated and non-affiliated unions, with the aim of “forming a new workers’ party” armed with a programme of fighting the cuts. In other words, unions should walk out of Labour and join the no-hope Trade Unionist and Socialist Coalition. Comrades, this is a pathetic, delusional fantasy - it will never happen.
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Posted by at 12:08 pm

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