After Cyprus, Who Next?

Deal rejected by the masses

EXTRACT: There were warnings that the impact could reach beyond Cyprus, particularly to Russia. The country’s prime minister, Dmitry Medvedev, bitterly complained that the troika are “continuing to steal what has already been stolen.” Russian officials and the press have repeatedly compared the Cypriot ‘stability levy’ to the expropriations carried at the time of the 1917 revolution - only this time it is the capitalist Euro-bureaucracy doing the expropriating.

But the potential ramifications go beyond Russia - compared to Cyprus, other countries have even larger banking sectors relative to GDP. For example, in Luxembourg, the euro zone’s biggest champion of banking secrecy, it is more than 20 times GDP - the Luxembourg government has admitted it is “concerned about recent statements and declarations” on the “alleged risks” of out-sized financial sectors. And Malta’s finance minister has expressed similar concerns about what would happen if a second Mediterranean island encounters such problems.

What about the City of London, a major contributor to the tax-base of the UK and no stranger to ‘casino banking’ - a pioneer of financial speculation, in fact. If ‘stability levies’ can be imposed on Cypriot banks in times of crisis, then why not in the UK?

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Pope Francis: Silence Equals Complicty

Cardinals: most appointed by the last two popes

EXTRACT: In his inaugural mass, Francis told a slightly revealing anecdote. Whilst in conclave, with the votes being counted and things seeming, in his own words, a “bit dangerous”, the cardinal sitting next to him - an old friend from Brazil - embraced him and said: “Don’t forget the poor”. The new holy father added that the reminder had made him think of none other than St Francis, a man “who wanted a poor church”. According to a star-struck Guardian, adopting the name of Francis was a “clear signal” by Bergoglio of his desire to “reset the priorities” of the embattled Catholic church (March 16).

All this professed concern for the poor is pure hypocrisy. The official Christian attitude towards the oppressed and exploited, whether it be the Church of England or the Catholic establishment, is essentially encapsulated by the saying attributed to Jesus: “The poor will always be with us”. Of course, for communists this is an utter obscenity - both to believe that class society is eternal and also to ascribe such a wretchedly reactionary position to the apocalyptic revolutionary communist Galilean, Jesus - a Jewish Spartacus who wanted to abolish class society, not ameliorate it or appease the oppressors.

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SWP Factions: Two Errors of the Opposition

Easily defeated

EXTRACT: In fact, the opposition as a whole should have done the exact opposite - stepping up the attack, doubling the number of posts, holding more meetings and so on. You can only fight fire with fire. But from the start, IDOP leaders were seeking a ‘reasonable compromise’ with the CC in order to put the whole unpleasant business behind them. Shake hands like ladies and gentleman. Hence IDOP’s disgraceful decision not to support the Facebook Four - the comrades expelled just before the January 4-6 annual conference for discussing whether to form a faction. For IDOP that would have rocked the boat too much.

Instead, they should have threatened the CC. Not threats of physical violence, of course - we leave that to the apparatus and Alex Callinicos’s “lynch mobs”. Rather, the threat of solidarity - of walking out in a collective and disciplined manner if the bureaucracy went for the throats of Seymour, Miéville, etc. Possibly, though now we will never know, even the SWP leadership might have blinked at the thought of losing 532 members or more overnight.

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Snapshot of Political Failure

Nigel Farage: very good second, fruitcake

EXTRACT: Many voices are being raised saying the Tories urgently need to move to the right in order to reclaim the ground allegedly stolen from them by Ukip - start banging on about tighter immigration laws, repatriating powers from the Brussels bureaucrats, and so on. Cameron’s recent call for a simple in-out referendum on European Union membership, though hailed by many at the time as a brilliant political manoeuvre, does not seem to have warded off the dangerous Ukip beast - at least not yet.

Expressing this anxiety, Michael Fabricant - the Tory vice-chairman who last year called for an electoral pact with Ukip - issued a series of tweets about how the Tories’ voice is “muffled and “not crisp”: it does not “clearly project” Conservative Party “core policies or principles”. For Fabricant, Ukip “clearly connected with Conservative policies” at Eastleigh. Or, as Nigel Farage put it more straightforwardly, the “real problem” the Conservatives have got is not with Ukip, but rather that their own supporters “look at a Conservative Party that used to talk about wealth creation, low tax and enterprise and it now talks about gay marriage and wind farms” and other such highly undesirable issues. Instead, back to reactionary basics.

Unhappily for the Tories though, this sort of prognosis is at best crudely simplistic and at worst plain delusional. If only life was so simple. Take a quick look at the Tories’ Eastleigh candidate, Maria Hutchings. She came across as more Ukip than Ukip’s own Diane James. Yet it counted for nothing in the end.

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No Alternative to Stagnation

It will take at least another decade to get it back

EXTRACT: Now it is a different story, of course. Osborne wants to have his cake and eat it. Far from being a sign of economic failure, an indication that there might be a flaw in the plan, Osborne is making out that losing the triple-A status - previously the unimaginable - only proves that the government must stick to its guns. Not in denial, but rather a man who just enjoys a drink now and again, Osborne said Moody’s decision was a “stark reminder” of the debt problems facing the country and that, “far from weakening” his resolve, it actually “redoubles” his determination to follow the same plan. There is no alternative to austerity and stagnation. Quite the opposite. What is required is more cuts and sooner cuts. Time for plan A+. As Simon Jenkins put it in The Guardian, Osborne - just like his European counterparts he so disparages - is akin to an Aztec priest at an altar: “If the blood sacrifice fails to deliver rain, there must be more blood” (February 27).

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Otto Griebel

Vatican Elections: Keeping up with Modern World

Too bad there'll be another one

EXTRACT: When John Paul II died in 2005 to near universal mourning, the brainless Bono rhapsodised about him being the “first funky pope”. Well, he was not and neither was Ratzinger - the former head of the congregation of the doctrine of the faith: ie, boss of the inquisition.

Rather, Ratzinger represented a continuation of John Paul II and his noxious legacy - the Joseph and Karol double act. John Paul II doggedly pursued a reactionary, counterrevolutionary, pro-American and pro-imperialist agenda. Prior to his reign, particularly with Vatican II (1962-65), sections of the church hierarchy had decided that peaceful coexistence with the ‘socialist world’ was the only option - after all, the Soviet Union was clearly here to stay. No need to rock the boat. But, hailing from ‘socialist Poland’, John Paul II knew better than most that bureaucratic socialism was doomed. Hence he played his part in the downfall of ‘official communism’ - channelling CIA money into Solidarność, going on the ideological offensive, and so on. In that way, he was god’s cold-war warrior, and played his hand well.

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SWP and the Internet: Let a Thousand Blogs Bloom!

EXTRACT: Plain fact of the matter, at least for Marxists, is that no means of communication - or technology - in and of itself can be backward or reactionary. An utterly irrational notion that leads to madness. Remember the Unabomber? How any technology is used, or abused - whether it liberates or oppresses - is determined by the level of class struggle in a given, historically concrete, society. Gas ovens can be used to cook nice food or burn the bodies of those you have murdered. The internet can be used to Tweet inane slanders about your drinking partner last night or to expose the dirty secrets of the ruling class or the government.

One thing communists cannot deny though is that the SWP leadership is absolutely right to be deeply nervous about the ‘threat’ the internet poses to its police regime. Spot on, comrades. Without resorting to cyber-utopianism or libertarianism, as some do, here is a medium/technology which undermines the CC’s hold on power - a universal acid dissolving its grip over the membership, no longer cowed. It is the bureaucrat’s worst nightmare come true. As blogger ‘Soviet Goon Boy’ puts it, “ideally” the CC would like to retain a “monopoly of information in the party”; however, this is just not “humanly possible” any more - “Charlie Kimber may not recognise the internet, but the internet recognises him”. You can purge and expel, SWP CC, but you can’t hide.

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Cameron: From Hero to Renegade

EXTRACT: Such objections to gay marriage are based on nothing more than good, old-fashioned homophobia - whether sanctified by god or not. Whilst David Cameron may be a new man who likes gays and the environment, the Tory Party he just happens to lead is still the “nasty party” that Theresa May described and warned about in 2002 - still “unrepentant, just plain unattractive”. And the gay marriage vote gruesomely showed that not much has changed over the last 10 years. No wonder Tory modernisers and reformers were horrified by the speeches given by anti-gay marriage MPs - one unnamed minister telling The Guardian that “with the help of four or five speeches we have been taken back more than 50 years to the horrors of the 1950s” (February 6).

Curiously, good Christian MPs, yes like Roger Gale, made the repeated assertion that marriage is the “union between one man and one woman” - simple as that. Look it up in the Bible. But, according to that book, Solomon had 700 wives and 300 concubines - the only wife mentioned by name is Naamah, who apparently was the mother of Solomon’s successor, Rehoboam (1 Kings 11:1-3). And, for the record, king David also had many wives, though the exact number is contested. Other such examples abound in the Bible. This led Edward Gibbon in The history of the decline and fall of the Roman empire to waggishly note that Mohammed, by comparison to Solomon, was extremely modest - he only had 14 wives. Nor does the New testament, for that matter, explicitly say anywhere that marriage has to be a union between “one man and one woman”, or for life.

Not only are Christian Tory opponents of gay marriage obnoxious bigots: theologically speaking, they are up a gum tree too.

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EXTRACT: Frankly, the left in Britain has a dismal record when it comes to Europe. Yes, the International Socialist tradition which spawned the Socialist Workers Party briefly flirted with the idea of a united Europe. ‘Official communism’, on the other hand, can do little better when it comes to ‘theory’ than cite Lenin’s 1916 polemic against Karl Kautsky’s ‘united states of Europe’ slogan. Not unreasonably, viewing the horrors of imperialist carnage, Lenin argued that to advance such a slogan at that time was either ridiculous or utopian. But it is worth reminding ourselves that the Communist International had no problems adopting Trotsky’s slogan of a ‘united socialist states of Europe’ in 1921 - only abandoned by the Soviet bureaucracy as it increasingly embraced national socialism.

The bulk of the British left notionally reject the ‘Stalinist’ doctrine of socialism in one country, but actually advocate it on an operative level. Therefore most left groups, Trotskyist or otherwise, look around the world and think the solution is to be found in a left or workers’ government coming to power in one country or another - whether through elections or a spontaneous upsurge by the masses - and implementing a left Keynesian programme. One idiotic expression of this left nationalist outlook is the slogan, ‘Take the power!’ - directed towards Syriza in Greece. Luckily, Syriza did not win the election.

For orthodox Marxists, as opposed to ‘official communists’ and many supposed followers of Leon Trotsky, the problem remains the same - capital exists on a global level and has to be superseded at its most advanced point. Meaning that we need a revolutionary strategy that takes into account history, political consciousness and also the reality of material/economic wealth. Without such a perspective, we are doomed to failure.

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