Carel Weight

Balthus (Balthasar Klossowski de Rola)

Secularism is Hostile to State Religion, not Religion

Clive Bone: local hero?

EXTRACT: Communists, on the other hand, call for the strict separation of church and state - meaning, to begin with, the disestablishment of the Church of England. Which is why we welcomed the initial Bideford ruling, whether it gets reversed or not. In its own small way, that points to the sort of society communists fight for - where the state/government does not privilege one faith or denomination over another and there is a fundamental equality between followers of all faiths and none.
Yet for Marxists this is only half the story. Not being liberals, we do not just want freedom of religion. We want the right to struggle against religious ideas and so - ultimately - freedom from religion. We agree with the sentence recently added to Socialist Worker’s ‘What the Socialist Workers Party stands for’ column - “We defend the right of believers to practise their religion without state interference” - even though it omits the main issue in Britain: the need for secularism; equality between all citizens in the eyes of the state. But what about the SWP itself? What does the ‘party’ think when it comes to the struggle against religious backwardness, an issue which revolutionaries cannot be neutral or ‘diplomatic’ about? Exactly the point made by Marx, of course, in his Critique of the Gotha programme.

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Danger of Default Catastrophe Remains

EXTRACT: Even if the virtually impossible happens, and the Greek government over the next few days conjures up a cuts plan that entirely satisfies the EU leaders, the national parliaments in Germany, Finland and the Netherlands still have to vote on the second bailout package. Since these countries have been the most vocal critics of the bailouts - why should we subsidise these ‘lazy’ and ‘unproductive’ countries? - it is by no means an automatic certainty that they will vote in favour of the second bailout package. They will need a lot of convincing that the deal will actually make Greece’s debt sustainable again.
Then there are the long-running and torturous negotiations with Greece’s private creditors over debt restructuring, which must also be concluded before it is too late - March 20 is not that far away. Yes, Rehn may have told reporters that the “draft agreement” with the creditors is “practically finalised”, but in the new economic order nothing is guaranteed. And if the bailout deal is delayed to after the general election, then that could frighten the horses - causing the creditors to give up on Greece and backtrack on its 70% haircut. The threat of a disorderly default remains.

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Greek Razor Edge

Euro: in danger

EXTRACT: Anger obviously mounting, Nikos Sofianos - who sits on the central committee of Communist Party of Greece (KKE) - told a local radio station on the morning of the demonstrations that the Papademos government is “murderous”, and pledged that the KKE will “do everything in our power to stop this agreement with foreign lenders” being carried out. The troika - “We won’t let them pass”, he told his audience in demagogic fashion.
The real tragedy, of course, is that the KKE’s ‘solutions’ to the crisis in Greece - and Europe as a whole - would be just as disastrous for the working class as the troika’s austerity plans, if not more so. Withdrawal from EU “capitalist club” into splendid ‘socialist’ isolation: the ‘Albanianisation’ of Greece. A programme for true misery and impoverishment from the JV Stalin and Mao handbook.

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Fool's Paradise at Davos

George Osborne: King Fool

EXTRACT: Concisely summing up the new fiscal deal in Europe, [Angela] Merkel pronounced that the “debt brakes will be binding and valid forever”; from now on, “never will you be able to change them through a parliamentary majority”. Whoever you vote for, the EU bureaucracy wins. Merkel could not have made the fundamentally anti-democratic nature of the current EU set-up more clear: an elitist project run in the interests of capital at our expense. Not that genuine communists have any illusions in the ‘independent’ bourgeois nation-state: inside or outside the euro zone/SCG, or the EU, capital needs to attack the working class in order to salvage its system. A system that is suffering from chronic dysfunction.

All the evidence is that the banks and other financial institutions are hoarding cash - sitting on the money as the fiscal environment looks more and more dangerous. Perfectly rational, of course, for the viewpoint of the individual capitalist - totally advisable, in fact. But it is totally irrational for the system as a whole. The second great credit crunch remains a very real possibility.

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