Latin America rebels against war on drugs

Seemingly an insatiable demand in the west

EXTRACT: Communists, however, unambiguously call for the full legalisation of all drugs - not just marijuana. For us that is the only real ‘game-changer.’ Not because we naively believe that legalisation is some sort of magic wand that will instantly usher in a Nirvana of perfectly adjusted, non-alienated individuals. We fully recognise the danger of drugs, both legal and illegal. Why do some people drink so much alcohol that it endangers their health? It has something to do with the society we live in - an alienated and grossly unequal one.

No, our call for legalisation is principally motivated by the desire not to make a bad situation worse. Huge swathes of the population are criminalised by the current prohibitive drugs laws and for communists that is unacceptable, morally and rationally. All serious evidence and research, plus plain empirical observation, informs us that the legalisation of drugs would be far less harmful than the present regime. Portugal, where drugs have been decriminalised, has not seen an increase in use - rather, the opposite.
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Climate change: Entering the Danger Zone

Pollution and production for the sake of production

EXTRACT: Capitalism, in reality, is a system uniquely designed not to cope with the ecological crisis that is so obviously gripping the planet. Given its very nature, predicated on production for production’s sake - not on the basis of satisfying rational human need - it is constantly throwing more fuel on the fire. Contrary to a relatively widespread view, capitalism is not the result of countless individual actions taken by ‘bad’ or ‘greedy’ people. Instead it is a form of uncontrolled human relation based on the self-expansion of exchange-value, and this inner dynamic imposes itself on its personifications - ie, the capitalists, who ultimately are slaves to capital just as we in the working class are.

Yes, obviously, other past social-economic systems damaged various aspects of the environment - deforestation under the Romans and so on. But capitalism does it on a vaster and more terrifying scale. It is a destructive and wasteful mode of production, which seeks only to make profit - anywhere, anyhow and by any means necessary. Left to itself, capitalism will ‘industrialise’ to the point of self-destruction, making the air unbreathable and the rivers dead with toxic sludge. Conversely, it will effectively leave underdeveloped whole areas of the globe, where it calculates no profit can reasonably be made.
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Fear and Harassment as the Norm

Stuart Hall: part of the establishment 

EXTRACT: But the Hall revelations should really cause some on the left to rethink their absurd idea - eagerly endorsed by some radical feminists and mendacious, pro-imperialist, mainstream journalists - that the Socialist Workers Party has an ingrained ‘rape culture’ that makes it a more ‘unsafe space’ than the likes of the BBC, perhaps deserving to be no-platformed like the ‘Nazi’ British National Party.

Frankly, this is a crazy notion. Yes, the comrade Delta case was appallingly botched by the SWP’s leadership. For that the organisation needs to be severely criticised and that is what we in the Weekly Worker, among others, have done. But the idea of ostracising the SWP or even driving it out of workers’ movement is a fundamental mistake that can only empower the trade union bureaucracy and all those with an anti-left agenda. The prime reason for the Delta debacle, if truth be told, was the SWP’s ingrained bureaucratic centralism - not its institutionalised ‘misogyny’ or nonsense like that (women formed a majority on the disputes committee that cleared comrade Delta, for instance). Its authoritarian culture privileged certain comrades, making them unaccountable and essentially beyond criticism.
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On the fiver

EXTRACT: Then, of course, there were Churchill’s odious social views - notably his support for a particularly foul brand of eugenics. The “improvement of the British breed is my aim in life”, he wrote to his cousin, Ivor Guest, on January 19 1899. As a young politician entering parliament in 1901, Churchill saw the mentally disabled as a threat to the vigour and virility of British society. The stock must not be diluted. Thus as home secretary he was in favour of the confinement, segregation and sterilisation of the “feeble-minded” and others - including “idiots”, “imbeciles” and “moral defectives”. He proposed in 1910 that 100,000 “degenerate” Britons should be “forcibly sterilised and others put in labour camps to halt the decline of the British race”.

As for “tramps and wastrels”, he said a year later, there “ought to be proper labour colonies where they could be sent for considerable periods and made to realise their duty to the state”. Very liberal. Unsurprisingly, Churchill eagerly endorsed Dr HC Sharp’s charming booklet, The sterilisation of degenerates. Sharp was a member of the US Indiana Reformatory and issued an apocalyptic warning that “the degenerate class” was reproducing more quickly than the general population and thus threatening the “purity of the race”. In 1907 Indiana passed a eugenics law making sterilisation mandatory for those individuals in state custody deemed to be “mentally unfit” - other states followed suit and in the end more than 65,000 individuals were forcibly sterilised (nor were they allowed to marry). Naturally, Churchill was impressed, writing to home office officials asking them to investigate the possibility of introducing the “Indiana law” to Britain. He remained frustrated on this point. The 1913 Mental Deficiency Act rejected compulsory sterilisation in favour of confinement in special institutions. Bloody do-gooders.
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Austerity Myth Debunked

Down, down, down

EXTRACT: Last week, quite wonderfully, also saw the debunking of a central myth promulgated by fiscal conservatives and hawks everywhere - not just the hapless Osborne. First published in American Economic Review - a supposedly peer-reviewed and prestigious academic journal dating back to 1911 - the seminal 2010 paper, ‘Growth in a time of debt’ by Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff, looked at 20 advanced economies since 1945. Both former IMF employees, they argued that, when “gross external debt” reaches 90% or more of GDP, then a country’s average growth rate collapses to -0.1%. Conversely, when debt was below 90% of GDP, you had growth rates between 3% and 4%. Inevitably, this conclusion has been cited by everyone from the IMF, World Bank, European Central Bank and the Euro group to Angela Merkel and, of course, George Osborne to justify programmes of ‘fiscal consolidation’ and vicious austerity, creating human misery on an enormous scale.

There was only one problem with Reinhart’s and Rogoff’s paper - it was total bunk. Researchers from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst found a simple coding error that omitted several countries from a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet of historical data - a few rows left out of an equation to average the values in a column. Almost a schoolboy error. As a result of this statistical mistake in the original calculations, it is now abundantly clear that the 90% ‘debt cliff’ does not exist. Simply put, Reinhart and Rogoff confused cause and effect: countries have high debt levels because they have slow growth rather than having slow growth because they are heavily indebted. You surely do not have to be a genius to realise that.

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Thatcher Funeral: A Woman who was Hated

Should expect better from the left

EXTRACT: The Socialist Workers Party’s response to Thatcher’s death has been atrocious. As part of Socialist Worker’s “Rejoice! Thatcher’s dead special pull-out”, we are treated to a picture of Thatcher with a noose around her neck and the headline: “Gotcha! Now get the rest” (April 13).

Sorry, comrades, this is utterly crass - and says a lot about the frighteningly bad politics of the SWP. Yes, we all know - yawn - that the Socialist Worker editorial team were aping The Sun’s vile headline about the sinking of the Belgrano in 1982. Jolly good, no doubt, that Ian Burrell of The Independent has described the headline as a “breakthrough” or “triumph” for Judith Orr, current editor of Socialist Worker, writing that the paper’s “name was everywhere” (April 12). Orr herself is obviously proud as punch that the “Gotcha!” headline/image went “across the world as being the most defiant front page celebrating the end of Thatcher”. Enjoy your 15 minutes of fame, comrade.

Socialist Worker is deluding itself and treating its readers as idiots, not for the first time. Neither the SWP nor anybody else on the left ‘got’ the 87-year-old Thatcher - nature did. What are we supposed to do - wait for all Tory politicians, or perhaps the entire bourgeoisie, to die of natural causes? A brilliant revolutionary strategy. What the headline actually did was reveal the SWP’s impotency, advertising the fact that it has no answers and - like the left in general - is programmatically directionless. Get real, comrades.

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BBC Class Survey: Old Wine in New Bottles

Surplus product: who produces it, how they extract it

EXTRACT: Yes, no doubt, the Great British class survey contains elements of truth - pointing towards various divisions and societal developments that do exist in some shape or form. It would be a very odd sociological survey that completely ignored reality. But for us the real question when examining any society past or present is a relatively straightforward one - who exactly extracts the surplus labour from whom and how?

Looking at contemporary Britain, the crucial and deciding determinate for Marxists is the antagonistic relationship - and social dynamic - between two main classes, the working class and the bourgeoisie (capitalist ruling class). We do not think of this strictly in terms of numbers or sociological categories, but rather in what actually characterises and drives a particular society - in this case, the exploitative capital-labour relation. An antagonism that cuts across all other societal divisions and every field of human production and consumption, from the economy to culture, politics, sexuality, sport, etc.

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Obama Raises the Stakes

Kim Jung-un: rising to provocation

EXTRACT: There seems little doubt that the current crisis is predominantly the result of United States provocation. Just because Pyongyang says something it does not automatically mean that it is crazy. The facts surely speak for themselves. Since the beginning of March, the US has been engaged in joint military exercises with South Korea scheduled to last two months. This has involved nuclear-capable B-52 bombers buzzing around the Korean peninsular - not to mention long-range B-2 stealth bombers and F-22 stealth fighters, out to prove (if proof was needed) that US imperialism is capable of conducting “long-range, precision strikes quickly and at will”, dropping dummy munitions on a South Korean-claimed island very close to North Korean territory. If that were not enough, the USS John McCain, an Aegis-class destroyer capable of intercepting missiles, has been positioned off the Korean peninsula and a second destroyer - the USS Decatur - has been sent to the region. It is an open secret that these exercises simulate an invasion and occupation of North Korea.

Talk about being in your face. Just because you’re paranoid, which Pyongyang certainly is, about almost everything, it doesn’t mean that they’re not out to get you - or to at least seriously rattle your cage. Nor should it be forgotten that the whole of Korea was flattened by US imperialism during the 1950-53 war, which left millions, the majority of them civilians, dead. That would make anyone twitchy.

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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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