Tuesday, 28 May 2019

Political news from the United Kingdom:

by Warwick Alderman. 2019.

Corbyn and McDonnell severing last thread between the Working Classes and Labour...............................................Politics LIVE! With Warwick Alderman. Monday 270519.

Corbyn 'listening very carefully' to Labour calls for second referendum | Politics | The Guardian
https://www.theguardian.com/…/corbyn-pressed-by-senior-labo…

"Labour MPs in leave-leaning seats also sounded a note of caution. Gloria De Piero, the MP for Ashfield, said backing a fresh referendum would be “an effective ending of Labour’s historic coalition of working-class, middle-class, city and non-city voters”."

•••

Dear Comrades,

The Socialist line in the Labour Party is hanging by a thread, as the Blairite Centrists and Trotskyites increase their pressure on the leadership.

"However, moves to back a second referendum under any circumstances faced immediate resistance from some wings of the party – including Unite’s general secretary, Len McCluskey, and close Corbyn allies in the shadow cabinet such as the party chair, Ian Lavery, and the shadow Cabinet Office minister, Jon Trickett."

A few stalwarts, such as Len McCluskey are holding out for the socialist position, doubtless, sensing, with their firm Class Instincts, that this issue is the Rubicon for The Labour Party.

That, once it comprehensively betrays its working class voters, that this treacherous act will destroy forever the alliance between the working class and this mass political party.

This alliance was already febrile, and ailing: Labile and insecure, as the bourgeoisie increased their stranglehold on the PLP and Membership.

Virtually every British trades union is in the hands of the Trotskyists, and, as such, they stand opposed to both the working class, and true socialism.

The proletariat are very clear about these developments, and, they are switching their support to the Nationalist parties of Britain: The National Socialist parties, which, alone amongst Britain's political parties, are prepared to defend them, and their interests unequivocally.

To defend the working classes AS THEY ARE! And not as the Revisionist Socialists would have them be.

The same phenomenon is occurring across Europe, the USA and the Western World, as the working classes everywhere draw a historic line against Trotskyist Revisionism: The source of their political and cultural oppression since the 1980's.

It is: "The Alderman Doctrine," in action; and, it seems that, across the Western World, hardly any political pundits understand what is happening, and are fit to construct an accurate political analysis of events. Such pundits, as they exist, are all of the Far-Socialist Right. Nationalists like Dr Steven Turley.

The British Labour Party was already suffering badly. Now, Jeremy Corbyn, John McDonnell and Diane Abbot, drawing the wrong political conclusions from the EU Elections, seek to open Labour's veins fully, so that the last of its lifeblood can run out into the sand.

If they choose this disastrous course: If they align themselves fully with our class enemies, the Bourgeiosie: The Capitalists, it will spell the final destruction and death of The Labour Party: It will be the last nail in it's coffin.

••••

Len McCluskey accuses Tom Watson of anti-Corbyn plot | Politics | The Guardian
https://www.theguardian.com/…/len-mccluskey-accuses-labour-…

Comrades,

Len McCluskey's instincts are sound, as always. This man, who is universally hated by Labour's middle-class supporters; the metropolitan elite that hold sway over this once great party, alone has a clear picture of the Socialist struggle for working class emancipation.

In a Britain with zero social mobility, working class voices are increasingly rare. As a public person, he exists thanks to trades unionism. And, how Labour has betrayed THAT! How it has turned against its historic supporters, is evidenced by the fact that, Jeremy Corbyn, since becoming Leader of The Labour Party, has not pledged himself to the restoration of Clause 4 of The Labour Party's Constitution.

This historic clause, which was the heart and soul of the Labour Party, which was sacrificed for Tony Blair, in order to maximise his electoral chances in 1994, has still not been recovered; bought back to it's rightful place.

Why not?

•••••••••

Corbynism is now in crisis: the only way forward is to oppose Brexit | Paul Mason:

https://www.theguardian.com/…/corbynism-crisis-oppose-brexi…

". I will enthusiastically circle the wagons around Corbyn. He has grown since 2015 into a politician who thrives on adversity and class struggle and will do so now. But the officials who designed this fiasco, and ignored all evidence that it would lead to disaster, must be removed from positions of influence.

They include Seumas Milne, director of strategy, and Karie Murphy, Corbyn’s chief of staff. With an electoral fiasco like this, the buck has to stop somewhere, and it must stop with them – together with Ian Lavery MP, the party chair, who twice broke the whip to oppose the second referendum."

••

Comrades,

That this bourgeois lickspittle should mention the Marxian concept of: "Class Struggle," is really the sickest joke of all..

In his woeful article, he advocates the dumping, the removal of Seumas Milne, and Ian Lavery: Two members of the: "Gang of Four," who hold the socialist line in The Labour Party.

Thus are the plans of the Bourgeoisie revealed: To pull the last effective tooth from the Labour Party, and complete its metamorphosis into an irrelevant Social Democratic/Liberal party.

Not actually needed; because, the best Social Democratic/Liberal Party out there are the Liberal Democrats.

The Guardian Newspaper is a disgusting neo-liberalist Shilling, that does more damage to the working classes than The Daily Mail. Any true Socialist who has ever donated money to them has a hole in the head. You might as well donate your money to George Soros.

••••••

This isn't about Brexit. Backing remain now would wreck Labour | Gloria De Piero
https://www.theguardian.com/…/brexit-backing-remain-labour-…

••••••

May laments 'very disappointing' EU elections as voters take Brexit revenge
https://www.theguardian.com/…/eu-elections-tories-and-labou…

••••

European election latest results 2019: across the UK
https://www.theguardian.com/…/european-election-latest-resu…

••••

Swedish Government wants to ban ancient Viking symbols, claiming they "constitute incitement to hatred" - Voice of Europe:

https://voiceofeurope.com/…/swedish-government-wants-to-b…/…

"
Northern Europe
Swedish Government wants to ban ancient Viking symbols, claiming they “constitute incitement to hatred”
By Emma R. 23 May 2019

The Swedish Government is trying to make certain runes from the runic alphabet, as well as some old Norse Scandinavian symbols illegal.

Their official reason for banning the runes is that Nazis used some of them during the second world war, for example the Odal rune that means O and the Tyr/Tiwaz rune that means T.

Reportedly, the Social Democratic Minister of Justice Morgan Johansson is behind the initiative.

According to the proposal, Old Norse symbols and jewelry may also be banned as incitement to hatred. This includes Mjolnir, hammer of the Norse God Thor, the Valknut/Odin’s knot and the Vegvisir.

However, runes are over 1200 years old and have absolutely nothing to do with Nazis."

Comrades,

In an amazing development, the Swedish Government is considering banning elements of its own 1200 year-old ancient culture, in order to appease multiculturalists.

Surely this is the most radical surrender yet to Trotskyist Revisionist Socialism, and: "Diversity"?

The British equivalent to this act would be to ban: "Beowulf," and the Anglo-Saxon (Old English) tongue. That is not: "Good Kooning."

Every day the Swedish authorities make it clear that the success of their multicultural project will only be achieved through ruthless suppression of the native Swedes, and their culture.

••••

The 18 abandoned Tube stations no longer part of the Underground:

https://www.mylondon.news/…/18-abandoned-tube-stations-no-1…

•••••

Warwick Alderman. 2019.

Sunday, 26 May 2019

Socialist Quotes for Sunday Reflection pt 63

Lenin on how to deal with prostitution:

"organise immediately mass terror, shoot and deport the hundreds of prostitutes who are making drunkards of the soldiers, former officers and the like."

- Letter to Fyodorov 1918

....................

“The bourgeois, in the metaphysical sense of the word, is a man who only believes in the world of the visible and tangible, who only aspires to occupy in that world a secure and stable situation […]. The only thing he takes seriously is the economic force […]. The bourgeois lives in what is finite, he is afraid of any prolongations towards the infinite. The only infinite he recognises is the economic development."

- Nicolas Berdiaev

..................

25 May marks Lebanese Resistance and Liberation Day when in 2000, the Israeli army withdrew from southern Lebanon after almost two decades of occupation. Southern Lebanese resistance had finally been able to push the Zionists out of Lebanon.

The victory of the resistance was a humiliating defeat for the Zionists.

“In man - in the history of mankind, this has happened many times, and occupation leaders hang on to the land that they're occupying. People fight to liberate their land. But in the end, the people's will is what achieves victory”

- Hassan Nasrallah

.....................

“If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle.”

- Sun Tzu, The Art of War

...........................

May 23th 1889 - May 23th 1967 -- Ernst Niekisch

The bourgeois must die if the (German and Russian) people are to live. He is the enemy on the inner front of the class struggle, just as the nobility around 1790 was the enemy on the inner front of the national struggle. At the time the nobility was highly regarded, now it is more the bourgeois. However, he is a "man from the past", as you once had the nobility; he no longer has the right to stay with us. The exclusively social class struggle is a slave revolt that only concerns the poor and the weak; the politically determined class struggle is a struggle for freedom that decides the fate of the people. The driving forces behind the social class struggle are feelings of envy, the dream of prosperity and the desire for earthly bliss. Behind the politically motivated class struggle is the pointing finger of world history. In Soviet Russia, the proletarian is not made happy, but is drilled ready for a world historical mission; it is a military barracks: class adherence is mandatory. As a class comrade, one only has the privilege of starving and dying. This is how they mature into political leadership. Capitalism bewildered man as soon as it took away the job satisfaction. The wage slave must go through bolshevik purgatory, in order to be able to regard his hard life as a meaningful assignment. ”

(Source: Widerstand, Ernst Niekisch)

............................

Wherever possible, we must seek to renovate existing property in order to avoid the breaking up of communities. Unfortunately, in many of Britain's towns and cities, many properties are beyond repair and renovation and are only fit for demolition. Whether or not we decide to build new houses on these sites must be seen in the overall context of a possible policy of de-urbanisation. It may well be that with the introduction of new production techniques, and a totally reorganised economy, we may find it possible to reverse the trend of the last 150 years and encourage people to move from our crowded cities back to the under-populated rural areas.

- Nick Wakeling

Wednesday, 22 May 2019

Wilberg on Wednesday - The Illness Is The Cure pts 45&46/46

This is the final installment of the Wilberg on Wednesday serialisation of the book, The Illness is the Cure. Thank you for reading. All feedback is appreciated:

Disclaimer

This radical critique of biological medicine is in no way intended to invalidate the good intent and caring efforts of countless physicians, nurses and other health professionals operating within institutions dominated by the biomedical belief system.

Its only aim is to help release them – and their patients – from the iron grip of that system. Nor does this book seek to deny the role either of emergency care or surgery, or natural forms of symptomatic relief known and used for centuries (in particular remedies such as aspirin whose source lies in natural plant extracts).

Finally, this book is certainly not a critique of patients who continue to have trust in biomedical tests and treatments – and/or suffer little side effects from them. For though such treatments, for example pharmaceutical treatments and radiotherapy, may carry very serious dangers, they can also serve as a form of psychological as well as biological medicine.

The Invention of Capitalism: How a Self-Sufficient Peasantry was Whipped Into Industrial Wage Slaves

By Yasha Levine / exiledonline.com / Jan 30, 2013

“…everyone but an idiot knows that the lower classes must be kept poor, or they will never be industrious.”

—Arthur Young; 1771

Our popular economic wisdom says that capitalism equals freedom and free societies, right? Well, if you ever suspected that the logic is full of shit, then I’d recommend checking a book called The Invention of Capitalism, written by an economic historian named Michael Perelmen, who’s been exiled to Chico State, a redneck college in rural California, for his lack of freemarket friendliness. And Perelman has been putting his time in exile to damn good use, digging deep into the works and correspondence of Adam Smith and his contemporaries to write a history of the creation of capitalism that goes beyond superficial The Wealth of Nations fairy tale and straight to the source, allowing you to read the early capitalists, economists, philosophers, clergymen and statesmen in their own words. And it ain’t pretty.

One thing that the historical record makes obviously clear is that Adam Smith and his laissez-faire buddies were a bunch of closet-case statists, who needed brutal government policies to whip the English peasantry into a good capitalistic workforce willing to accept wage slavery.

Francis Hutcheson, from whom Adam Smith learned all about the virtue of natural liberty, wrote: ”it is the one great design of civil laws to strengthen by political sanctions the several laws of nature. … The populace needs to be taught, and engaged by laws, into the best methods of managing their own affairs and exercising mechanic art.”

Yep, despite what you might have learned, the transition to a capitalistic society did not happen naturally or smoothly. See, English peasants didn’t want to give up their rural communal lifestyle, leave their land and go work for below-subsistence wages in shitty, dangerous factories being set up by a new, rich class of landowning capitalists. And for good reason, too. Using Adam Smith’s own estimates of factory wages being paid at the time in Scotland, a factory-peasant would have to toil for more than three days to buy a pair of commercially produced shoes. Or they could make their own traditional brogues using their own leather in a matter of hours, and spend the rest of the time getting wasted on ale. It’s really not much of a choice, is it?

But in order for capitalism to work, capitalists needed a pool of cheap, surplus labor. So what to do? Call in the National Guard!

Faced with a peasantry that didn’t feel like playing the role of slave, philosophers, economists, politicians, moralists and leading business figures began advocating for government action. Over time, they enacted a series of laws and measures designed to push peasants out of the old and into the new by destroying their traditional means of self-support.

“The brutal acts associated with the process of stripping the majority of the people of the means of producing for themselves might seem far removed from the laissez-faire reputation of classical political economy,” writes Perelman. “In reality, the dispossession of the majority of small-scale producers and the construction of laissez-faire are closely connected, so much so that Marx, or at least his translators, labeled this expropriation of the masses as ‘‘primitive accumulation.’’

Perelman outlines the many different policies through which peasants were forced off the land—from the enactment of so-called Game Laws that prohibited peasants from hunting, to the destruction of the peasant productivity by fencing the commons into smaller lots—but by far the most interesting parts of the book are where you get to read Adam Smith’s proto-capitalist colleagues complaining and whining about how peasants are too independent and comfortable to be properly exploited, and trying to figure out how to force them to accept a life of wage slavery.

This pamphlet from the time captures the general attitude towards successful, self-sufficient peasant farmers:

The possession of a cow or two, with a hog, and a few geese, naturally exalts the peasant. . . . In sauntering after his cattle, he acquires a habit of indolence. Quarter, half, and occasionally whole days, are imperceptibly lost. Day labour becomes disgusting; the aversion in- creases by indulgence. And at length the sale of a half-fed calf, or hog, furnishes the means of adding intemperance to idleness.

While another pamphleteer wrote:

Nor can I conceive a greater curse upon a body of people, than to be thrown upon a spot of land, where the productions for subsistence and food were, in great measure, spontaneous, and the climate required or admitted little care for raiment or covering.

John Bellers, a Quaker “philanthropist” and economic thinker saw independent peasants as a hindrance to his plan of forcing poor people into prison-factories, where they would live, work and produce a profit of 45% for aristocratic owners:

“Our Forests and great Commons (make the Poor that are upon them too much like the Indians) being a hindrance to Industry, and are Nurseries of Idleness and Insolence.”

Daniel Defoe, the novelist and trader, noted that in the Scottish Highlands “people were extremely well furnished with provisions. … venison exceedingly plentiful, and at all seasons, young or old, which they kill with their guns whenever they find it.’’

To Thomas Pennant, a botanist, this self-sufficiency was ruining a perfectly good peasant population:

“The manners of the native Highlanders may be expressed in these words: indolent to a high degree, unless roused to war, or any animating amusement.”

If having a full belly and productive land was the problem, then the solution to whipping these lazy bums into shape was obvious: kick ‘em off the land and let em starve.

Arthur Young, a popular writer and economic thinker respected by John Stuart Mill, wrote in 1771: “everyone but an idiot knows that the lower classes must be kept poor, or they will never be industrious.” Sir William Temple, a politician and Jonathan Swift’s boss, agreed, and suggested that food be taxed as much as possible to prevent the working class from a life of “sloth and debauchery.”

Temple also advocated putting four-year-old kids to work in the factories, writing ‘‘for by these means, we hope that the rising generation will be so habituated to constant employment that it would at length prove agreeable and entertaining to them.’’ Some thought that four was already too old. According to Perelmen, “John Locke, often seen as a philosopher of liberty, called for the commencement of work at the ripe age of three.” Child labor also excited Defoe, who was joyed at the prospect that “children after four or five years of age…could every one earn their own bread.’’ But that’s getting off topic…

Happy Faces of Productivity…

Even David Hume, that great humanist, hailed poverty and hunger as positive experiences for the lower classes, and even blamed the “poverty” of France on its good weather and fertile soil:

“‘Tis always observed, in years of scarcity, if it be not extreme, that the poor labour more, and really live better.”

Reverend Joseph Townsend believed that restricting food was the way to go:

“[Direct] legal constraint [to labor] . . . is attended with too much trouble, violence, and noise, . . . whereas hunger is not only a peaceable, silent, unremitted pressure, but as the most natural motive to industry, it calls forth the most powerful exertions. . . . Hunger will tame the fiercest animals, it will teach decency and civility, obedience and subjugation to the most brutish, the most obstinate, and the most perverse.”

Patrick Colquhoun, a merchant who set up England’s first private “preventative police“ force to prevent dock workers from supplementing their meager wages with stolen goods, provided what may be the most lucid explanation of how hunger and poverty correlate to productivity and wealth creation:

Poverty is that state and condition in society where the individual has no surplus labour in store, or, in other words, no property or means of subsistence but what is derived from the constant exercise of industry in the various occupations of life. Poverty is therefore a most necessary and indispensable ingredient in society, without which nations and communities could not exist in a state of civilization. It is the lot of man. It is the source of wealth, since without poverty, there could be no labour; there could be no riches, no refinement, no comfort, and no benefit to those who may be possessed of wealth.

Colquhoun’s summary is so on the money, it has to be repeated. Because what was true for English peasants is still just as true for us:

“Poverty is therefore a most necessary and indispensable ingredient in society…It is the source of wealth, since without poverty, there could be no labour; there could be no riches, no refinement, no comfort, and no benefit to those who may be possessed of wealth.”

***

Yasha Levine is a founding editor of The eXiled. You can reach him at levine [at] exiledonline.com.

Want to know more recovered history? Read Yasha Levine’s investigation into the life of Harry Koch, the man who spawned Charles and David Koch, the two most powerful oligarchs of our time:The Birth of the Koch Clan: It All Started In a Little Texas Town Called Quanah

Want us to stick around? Donate to The eXiled.

Read The Invention of Capitalism in PDF form.

Wednesday, 15 May 2019

Wilberg on Wednesday - The Illness Is The Cure pt 44/46

Appendix 7. Extracts from ‘Medical Nemesis –
The Expropriation of Health’ by Ivan Illich

The medical establishment has become a major threat to health. The disabling impact of professional control over medicine has reached the proportions of an epidemic. Iatrogenesis, the name for this new epidemic, comes from iatros, the Greek word for ‘physician’, and genesis, meaning ‘origin’.

A professional and physician-based health-care system that has grown beyond critical bounds is sickening for three reasons: it must produce clinical damage that outweighs its potential benefits; it cannot but enhance even as it obscures the political conditions that render society unhealthy; and it tends to expropriate the power of the individual to heal himself and shape his or her environment.

More and more people subconsciously know that they are sick and tired of their jobs and of their leisure passivities, but they want to hear the lie that physical illness relieves them of social and political responsibilities. They want their doctor to act as lawyer and priest. As a lawyer, the doctor exempts the patient from his normal duties and enables him to cash in on the insurance fund he was forced to build. As a priest, he becomes the patient’s accomplice in creating the myth that he is an innocent victim of biological mechanisms rather than a lazy, greedy or envious deserter of a social struggle for control over the tools of production. Social life becomes a giving and receiving of therapy: medical, psychiatric, pedagogic or geriatric.

People who are angered, sickened and impaired by their industrial labour and leisure can escape only into a life under medical supervision and are thereby seduced or disqualified from political struggle for a healthier world.

Medicine has the authority to label one man’s complaint a legitimate illness, to declare a second man sick though he does not himself complain, and to refuse a third social recognition of his pain, his disability and even his death. It is medicine which stamps some pain as ‘merely subjective’, some impairment as malingering, and some deaths – though not others – as suicide. The judge determines what is legal and who is guilty. The priest declares what is holy and who has broken a taboo. The physician decides what is a symptom and who is sick.

For rich and poor…life is reduced to a ‘span’, to a statistical phenomenon which, for better or worse, must be institutionally planned and shaped. This life-span is brought into existence with the pre-natal check-up…and it will end with a mark on a chart…

To be in good health means not only to be successful in coping with reality but also to enjoy the success; it means to be able to feel alive in pleasure and in pain; it means to cherish but also to risk survival. Health and suffering, as experienced sensations are phenomena that distinguish men from beasts. Only storybook lions are said to suffer and only pets to merit compassion when they are in ill-health.

Medicalisation constitutes a prolific bureaucratic programme based on the denial of each man’s need to deal with pain, sickness and death. The modern medical enterprise represents an endeavour to do for people what their genetic and cultural heritage formerly equipped them to do for themselves. Medical civilization is planned and organized to kill pain, to eliminate sickness, and to abolish the need for an art of suffering and of dying.

Culture makes pain tolerable by interpreting its necessity; only pain perceived as curable is intolerable.

A myriad virtues express the different aspects of fortitude that traditionally enabled people to recognize painful sensations as a challenge and to shape their own experience accordingly. Patience, forbearance, courage, resignation, self-control, perseverance, and meekness each express a different colouring of the responses with which pain sensations were accepted, transformed into the experience of suffering and endured. Duty, love, fascination, routines, prayer, and compassion were some of the means that enabled pain to be borne with dignity.

The pupils of Hippocrates distinguished many kinds of disharmony, each of which caused its own type of pain…Pain might disappear in the process of healing, but this was certainly not the primary object of the…treatment. The Greeks did not even think about enjoying happiness without taking pain in their stride. Pain was the soul’s experience of evolution…

The body had not yet been divorced from the soul, nor had sickness been divorced from pain. All words that indicated bodily pain were equally applicable to the suffering of the soul.

[The] raised threshold of physiologically mediated experience, which is characteristic of a medicalised society, makes it extremely difficult today to recognize in the capacity for suffering a possible symptom of health. The reminder that suffering is a responsible activity is almost unbearable to consumers, for whom pleasure and dependence on industrial outputs coincide.

During the 17^th and 18^th centuries, doctors who applied measurements to sick people were liable to be considered quacks by their colleagues. During the French Revolution, English doctors still looked askance at clinical thermometry, Together with the routine taking of the pulse, it became accepted clinical practice only around 1845, nearly thirty years after the stethoscope was first used by Laenne.

An advanced industrial society is sick-making because it disables people from coping with their environment and, when they break down, it substitutes a ‘clinical’ prosthesis for the broken relationships.

People would rebel against such an environment if medicine did not explain their biological disorientation as a defect in their health, rather than as a defect in the way of life which is imposed on them or which they impose on themselves.

The medical diagnosis of substantive disease entities that supposedly take shape in the individual’s body is a surreptitious and amoral way of blaming the victim. The physician, himself a member of the dominating class, judges that the individual does not fit into an environment that has been engineered and is administered by other professionals, instead of accusing his colleagues of creating environments into which the human organism cannot fit.

Before sickness came to be perceived primarily as an organic or behavioural abnormality, he who got sick could still find in the eyes of the doctor a reflection of his own anguish and some recognition of the uniqueness of his suffering. Now, what he meets is the gaze of a biological accountant engaged in input/output calculations. His sickness is taken from him and turned into the raw material for an institutional enterprise. His condition is interpreted according to a set of abstract rules in a language he cannot understand. He is taught only about alien entities that the doctor combats, but only just as much as the doctor considers necessary to gain the patient’s cooperation. Language is taken over by the doctors: the sick person is deprived of meaningful words for his anguish, which is thus further increased by linguistic mystification.

…while the industrial worker refers to his ache as a drab ‘it’ that hurts, his predecessors had many colourful and expressive names for the demons that bit or stung them.

Through the medicalisation of death, health care has become a monolithic world religion…

Like time-consuming acceleration, stupefying education, self-destructive military defence, disorienting information, or unsettling housing projects, pathogenic medicine is the result of industrial overproduction that paralyses autonomous action.

The patient is reduced to an object – his body – being repaired; he is no longer a subject being helped to heal. If he is allowed to participate in the repair process, he acts as the lowest apprentice in a hierarchy of repairmen. Often he is not even trusted to take a pill without the supervision of a nurse.

When people become aware of their dependence on the medical industry, they tend to be trapped in the belief that they are already hopelessly hooked. They fear a life of disease without a doctor much as they would feel immobilized without a car or bus.

Increasing and irreparable damage accompanies present industrial expansion in all sectors. In medicine this damage appears as iatrogenesis. Iatrogenesis is clinical when pain, sickness and death result from medical care; it is social when health policies reinforce an industrial organization that generates ill-health; it is cultural and symbolic when medically sponsored behaviour and delusions restrict the vital autonomy of people by undermining their competence in growing up, caring for each other, and aging, or when medical intervention cripples personal responses to pain, disability, impairment, anguish and death.

Man’s consciously lived fragility, individuality, and relatedness make the experience of pain, of sickness, and of death an integral part of his life. The ability to cope with this trio autonomously is fundamental to his health. As he becomes dependent on the management of his intimacy, he renounces his autonomy and his health must decline. The true miracle of modern medicine is diabolical. It consists in making not only individuals but whole populations survive on inhumanly low levels of personal health. Medical nemesis is the negative feedback of a social organization that sets out to improve and equalize the opportunity for each man to cope in autonomy and ended by destroying it.

Sunday, 12 May 2019

Socialist Quotes for Sunday Reflection pt 61

- About Slavery & Civilisation: Varg Vikernes

........................

..................

....................

Alain de Benoist on the connection between capitalism and the dissolution of all limits:

Today we live in the time of limitlessness, that is to say the generalized negation of limits. We could say we live in time of “trans”: transnationality, transfrontiers, transactions, transsexuals, transparency, transgression, transhumanism. Limit is measure; limitlessness is disproportion – and it's also non-differentiation, hybridization, the eradication of particularities and norms that the dominant ideology has attempted to deconstruct for a long time.

This limitlessness finds its most typical illustration in the very nature of the capitalist system. The fundamental characteristic of this system is actually its orientation towards endless accumulation in both senses of the term: processes that never end and have no other end but the appreciation of capital, a system where all surplus is used to reproduce and increase itself. Everything that can impede the circulation of men and things necessary for the planetary expansion of the market, starting with borders, must be eradicated or treated as nonexistent. The logic of the expansion of capital hardly differs in essence from the processes subjugating the world that Heidegger called Gestell or Machination (Machenschaft). Perceived as an object devoid of intrinsic meaning, the world is interpreted as fundamentally exploitable, it is commanded to become productive and the source of profit, that is to say “valuable” in the economic sense of the term. It's limitlessness in theory as well as practice that makes capitalism a system based on disproportion, the negation of any limit, solely concerned with always producing more value in order to further increase and appreciate capital.

You'll notice in passing that the society of individuals is quite naturally a market society, as the limitlessness of desire and the inflation of rights corresponds to the limitlessness that is the very principle of the reproduction of capital. “Economic” man aims to maximize his self interest like Form-Capital aims to maximize profit: both seek to increase themselves solely in the category of possessing.

Between the notion of border and the ideology of liberal capitalism, the contradiction is thus total.

......................

Identity politics are anti-Marxian and a harmful diversion from the class struggle

Refuse to allow our movement to be hijacked by hostile class forces!

The following motion was passed overwhelmingly at the party’s eighth congress in September.

While being totally opposed to discrimination on grounds of race, sex or sexual proclivity, this congress declares that obsession with identity politics, including sexual politics, is anti-Marxian.

Congress therefore resolves that the propagation of identity politics, including LGBT ideology, being reactionary and anti-working class and a harmful distraction and diversion from the class struggle of the proletariat for its social emancipation, is incompatible with membership of the party, rendering those involved in its promotion liable to expulsion.

We (https://www.cpgb-ml.org/) will be publishing materials to explain this motion’s content in more detail over the coming period. Check the page on identity politics for updates.

.............................

Homosexuality is commensurate with the rise of capitalism. Countries that are actually socialist rank at the bottom of every measurement of political freedom, civil liberties, personal freedom, and LGBT rights.

In the name of individual freedom, social bonds are dissolved in the acid of market driven logic (expanded consumer choice, disposability and interchangeability of objects, merciless competition) applied to human relationships. Volker Woltersdorff, writing at the Institute for Queer Theory in Berlin, thus concludes: “Social de-solidarization is the historical precondition of the state recognition of some non-heterosexual ways of living.”

Furthermore, this requires enormous state support, for small government is incompatible with “official homosexuality.” We see in the West how ever-expanding technocratic government agencies have come to replace the old-fashioned intermediary institutions like Church and family, which used to oversee, and constrain, the discourse of norms. To secure the means of the discursive production of Euro-American gay identities massive institutional intervention is necessary.

http://theagonist.org/essays/2019/04/15/essays-mccormack-queering-the-world-for-capital.html?fbclid=IwAR29DvPZ4NCeeuLWl2TL7jqvVMIpkqSMSvEa7T-MY1hYHxS1pWn75y3m2UI

........................

"Production based on never-ending accumulation, no matter the consequences, is the prime motor of the capitalist system. For life on earth to remain sustainable the choice facing humanity is simpler than ever. Either we put an end to the current capitalist system which has already dragged us beyond the point of no return, or we face social and ecological collapse within the next few generations. The ruling class, with its private jets and helicopters, security guards, bunkers and luxury apartments, are already planning how to escape the effects of climate change, rising sea levels, and all kinds of disasters.

On the other hand, the global working class and the poor will have no such privilege. We are already paying for capitalism’s economic crisis. This is now merging with the environmental crisis. And again we are the first victims. The recent Cyclone Idai which hit southern Africa has left behind at least 750 dead, hundreds more missing and 100,000 now living in camps with the looming threat of cholera and malaria outbreaks. Disasters like this are only going to become more frequent and more intense. Along with the threat of imperialist war, the upcoming environmental crisis may not be as sudden but it will be no less serious."

http://www.leftcom.org/en/articles/2019-05-03/climate-change-capitalism-is-the-problem?fbclid=IwAR1dLAHEFteygiYLiwndEfXo9lMb_khUrTUnn_cBi96t2pIWUKvnq1nI3V8

............................

.........................

**Important piece from the CPGB-ML on the insanity of bourgeois/revisionist/trotskyite id politics**

The following speech was delivered by a central committee member to the party’s eighth congress in September.

This is a very interesting debate, comrades. I find it both encouraging and discouraging at the same time.

Why are we having this debate?

I would like to say that I agree with motion 8. It’s quite clear that this is an issue which is causing genuine confusion – and not only in our party. Our party is the reflection of society, and so if it is confusing us, you can be sure there is a far greater confusion outside our ranks – and that, if you like, is why we’re having this debate.

While I am sympathetic with the arguments put forward by those opposed to motion 8, we clearly do need to have a debate. Clearly some people have taken on identity politics (idpol) as a very central part of their political discourse: people in our schools, people in society, in every mainstream paper that you turn to.

A mere reference to gender identity and idpol, without expressing an opinion, is enough to make many people incandescent with rage.

We have to ask ourselves why that is, because when I grew up some years ago, this wasn’t an issue. It didn’t affect peoples’ minds. People didn’t talk about it, they didn’t debate it. In the seventies and eighties this wasn’t an issue. It didn’t affect their minds, people didn’t debate it, didn’t talk about it.

Marx and Engels and Lenin and Stalin didn’t devote much attention to the politics of gender fluidity because it did not exist as an issue. This concept – contrary to the opinion of those opposed to this motion – is not “as old as humanity”.

Does material reality exist?

I do think that it is very important that all our discussions are rooted in material reality. And we have to ask ourselves: do we think that a material reality exists? Because there is the question, a fundamental question of philosophy, which underlies everything.

It’s why dialectics is so very powerful. I don’t want to go on about it. It wasn’t me who invented dialectics, but I am a firm adherent of it; of the revolutionary teachings of Karl Marx.

Dialectical materialism didn’t come naturally to me because my father happened to be a Marxist, or my mother happened to be a Marxist. You have to win that ideological bedrock through study; through really struggling with ideas and understanding.

I grew up in bourgeois society – just like everyone else. So when I was taught chemistry, when I learned and went to school, I quite liked some subjects and I didn’t like others. I realised after a while it was mainly my relationship with certain teachers that determined my enjoyment of certain subjects. But I had a flair for science.

I found out, actually, that I enjoyed studying history and politics more, but I argued with my schoolteachers; they would send me out of the class for disagreeing in a way they felt was antisocial. They couldn’t control the class. So I gave up those subjects and I concentrated on the sciences, thinking that science at least is objective; no-one will argue over the question: is two plus two equal to four?

Lenin quite rightly told us that “if geometrical axioms affected human interests, attempts would certainly be made to refute them”.

What did he mean? There are simple formulas that tell one the volume of a sphere, or how to work out the area of a triangle: half the base times the height. Does anyone fundamentally disagree with that? If a circle thinks it’s a square, is it a square? What a stupid thing to say; no-one’s saying that!

Why can’t a circle self-identify as a square? Is there not some kind of shape fluidity between circles and squares? Are they not fundamentally the same? They all fundamentally consist of area. Why do we differentiate between them at all? Why has humanity worried to define objects as green or blue?

Is there a material reality? There are those who will argue there is no material reality; we are not among them. That is not a Marxist concept.

Sex, gender and gender fluidity

Is sex important? Attempts are being made to confuse us as to what ‘sex’ is. Are ‘sex’ and ‘gender’ synonyms? Well they are synonyms, but a certain group of academics in the seventies in the United States decided that they weren’t synonyms. They were going to use ‘gender’ in their own way; they were going to use ‘gender’ to mean the social construct of behaviour surrounding what was expected of the biological differentiation among human beings (men and women).

But biological differentiation between male and female is a real thing. It doesn’t just exist in humanity, it exists in many species throughout the natural world. Sexual reproduction is a strategy hit upon by nature; a phenomenon encountered in the natural world.

And let’s not forget how this debate impinged upon us. We’ve been following this ideological trend, and encountering identity politics among supporters and candidates for membership of our party, and amongst people we’ve been working with for at least four or five years. Because idpol has become a fashion in that period.

And it is a fashion; it is a trend. And it suddenly – from being very marginal to certain academic institutions in the 1970s – became mainstream globally worldwide; it was actively promoted. Not promoted by communists, not by socialists, but picked up on and accepted by many of them, because they are led by, and they blindly followed, bourgeoise society down this dead-end.
Bourgeois and proletarian politics

But we are a party of a different kind. What is the purpose of internal party discourse? What is the purpose of debate? What is the purpose of democratic centralism? It’s so that we can amongst ourselves work out the truth; what is in the interests of the working class as a whole.

We claim to be the party of the working class. It is a big claim, and really, we’re in embryonic form – let’s be frank about it. We’re not going to be the people and the organisation that finally make the revolution. We’re the beginning of that; we’re in the process of building it.

We have to earn the right to be trusted by the working class; to bring the best elements of the working class into our ranks and organisation. We must develop broad roots among the masses, to be in a position where they even trust and accept anything we’re saying.

And so, we are really only trying to find the truth. The truth is our biggest ally in that process.
Why deny the material reality of gender?

Why did it become a fashion to say there’s no such thing a male and female? I think the use of our internal bulletin has evolved to the point where we actually used it successfully to conduct that inner-party debate. The debate came up because of some posts on the party’s main Twitter account; the controller of the account was denounced on Twitter as “fascist” and “racist”.

Is it true? Are we going to get up here at congress and denounce comrades in debate? Will we tell them that “If you say X,Y and Z – then that’s it! I’m off! Screw the lot of you!”?

Is that a comradely way to have a debate? Does that forward our arguments? Does it help us reach a sound understanding? It does not! We’ve got to reckon with science, we’ve got to reckon with social phenomena. We have to come to a correct position which serves our class, and if we fail to do so, our organisation will fail to exist.

Not that the working class won’t achieve their salvation without us; it’s our firm belief that they will be able to. But will they be put back in the process if we do not evolve the leadership that is capable and worthy of the name of actually interpreting the world and Britain, and leading them forward?

Yes, they will be set back enormously. We know how difficult it is to get a foothold and a correct orientation; to develop and hold a class position that’s capable of leading working people. It’s been a problem – and it’s been a problem not just because it’s hard in itself; it’s been a problem because there’s been an active class whose interest it is to prevent us.

The British capitalist class is not passive; they’re not idle, and they’re perfectly happy to troubleshoot problems. They don’t have all the answers ready-made, but they have all the levers of power and they have capital.

So they can take an intellectual worker, they can set him a problem and when he comes up with a solution they find workable, they can employ him, and when they put their divisive ideas into practice in a little case study somewhere, and that seems to be working quite well, they can roll them out.

Class analysis seems alien to many workers in Britain because it’s gone ‘out of fashion’. It’s gone out of fashion because it’s been deliberately denounced and ridiculed from every pulpit, every university, every fount of learning. From the kindergarten right through to getting your PhD and becoming a lecturer, you’re rewarded if you do certain things.

In industry and in science, you’re rewarded if you provide any kind of technology or medicine that’s going to make money.

Keeping workers economically, intellectually and ideologically subordinate

When I went to medical school, I had a very erudite, intellectual, quite self-satisfied, pompous, English upper-middle-class, Oxbridge graduated professor. He had a degree of respect and notoriety as he had become a multimillionaire through the intellectual property right he exercised over his research. He had discovered and developed the proton-pump inhibitor (PPI) that went on to become the drug Omeprazole.

It’s just one of those things. In the lab he had played a key part in inventing this drug, which reduces stomach acidity. During an undergraduate lecture at the Royal Free hospital many years ago, he told us that before his results had been widely published, someone phoned him from Wall Street.

He said: “I was amazed that someone from Wall Street even knew about my research!” And this Wall Street capitalist asked him one question. He said: “This medicine, would you have to take it for a certain period of time, or would you have to keep on taking it to get its effect?”

The professor: “Ah, well, you’d have to keep on taking it.”

The Wall-street caller: “Oh, well thank you very much, that’s fascinating.”

His discovery went on to become one of the pharmaceutical industry’s huge money-making drugs, rolled out worldwide – because you have to keep on paying. It doesn’t solve the problem. To keep gastric symptoms at bay, you have to take it lifelong. So the drug was viewed by the industry as an almost limitless source of revenue.

In the field of science, why is it that huge amounts of money is put into the latest research to develop endovascular stents for an aneurism, which is going to cost £50,000 to treat a single patient, when in fact you could get rid of much of the problem by stopping the community from smoking? You could usefully spend those billions of dollars to develop a programme of preventative healthcare, rather than develop treatments for the wealthy inhabitants of a very small number of overwhelmingly industrial countries in certain healthcare systems, making a huge amount of money.

How much do we spend on malaria research, or tuberculosis research? Or even realising how aspirin can be used to treat certain conditions? Use and application of cheap drugs, that you can’t patent, are not pursued or promoted.

There is a vested interest of the capitalist class to accumulate capital, through the exploitation of their wage slaves.

Bourgeois ideology in culture – the hypocrisy of the mantra of ‘objectivity’

But then there is also an ideological outlook. Science and the arts are not alien to bourgeois influence. Lenin wrote a very beautiful article in 1905, in which he called for the intellectual class to be partisan.

He said: “Don’t be neutral. Don’t say ‘art for art’s sake’. Don’t pretend that your output – funded and commissioned by the possessors of money, the capitalist ruling class – is intellectually neutral output. Call a spade a spade. Become and state fearlessly that you are fierce advocates of the working people, and that their only way to a better society is to develop a liberating culture, a culture of proletarian revolutionary ideology.

You have to be openly partisan! That was his call – in art, in culture and in science.

Sex and sexual identity

So the question is sexuality: how does this tie up with the question of sexuality? And we come back to that innocuous post on Twitter, which I thought was obviously hilarious because I thought it was non-controversial.

We wrote: “There is a group of self-proclaimed ‘socialists’ who are not actually any longer fighting against our oppression, they’re fighting against reality!” and posted a link to an article.

Why did we say that? They’re a circle of people who broke away from a very small group which you may know, called the RCG. This circle wrote a blog called ‘Red Fightback’, and the bottom line is, their position is that there’s no such thing as gender.

Rather, gender, they claim, is some kind of medical conspiracy where, at birth, the doctors go away and huddle together and they ‘assign a gender role’ to you. So, pregnant mothers: when you have your 20-week ultrasound scan, you’re not having a scan to see whether your baby is a boy or a girl (say ‘Red Fightback’). No; that’s all medical conspiracy! And when the baby is born, they inspect the baby to say it’s a boy or a girl – well that’s all medical conspiracy, too! These things (boys and girls, men and women) aren’t real – don’t you see??

Now, that seemed to us to be so absurd and preposterous that we posted it. And the post seemed popular! It had, like, 100,000 views, with hundreds of comments saying: “You’re a Terf!”

I didn’t know what a Terf was at that point but, but I have since found out. It is an acronym for ‘Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminist’ – which I’m not, because I’m not a feminist! But essentially, their line is that anyone who would purport to say there really is such a thing as gender (men and women), is some kind of fascist.

Who is pushing this ideology that there is no such thing as gender? That there is no such thing as sex? That it’s not real?

There is even a movement termed ‘ableism’ or ‘trans-ableism’. There exist people who say: “I look as if I’ve got two arms and two legs, but actually in reality, I feel like I was born disabled.”

There are people who are petitioning for the right to have an arm or a leg cut off; to have an operation which will make their physical form conform to how they feel; “my inner essence”.

It’s the ultimate idealism isn’t it? Idealism in the philosophical sense that that “the material world doesn’t exist”; “it’s whatever I think that is most important”. So actually, by that rationale, ideas are prime and matter will have to conform with my ideas, and the ultimate result is this kind of solipsism where you are alone in the world – the lone conscious force and the ultimate determiner of your own reality without reference to other people or the material reality of the word’s environment around you.

Morally, it means whatever you want subjectively is right and correct. So it can be used to justify doing anything, committing any crime against anyone.

As a philosophy it is totally isolating, and totally gets rid of the idea, as the previous speaker was saying, of having things in common, uniting on a class basis around the real things that oppress us; real material and economic phenomena.

Capital is the labour of past generations, accumulating in the hands of a tiny number of people who use their vast wealth to oppress and enslave us. We are wage slaves. We are slaves!

You go and tell working people outside this congress that they’re wage slaves! They won’t agree with you – they’ll think you’re mad. “I’m not a slave. Slavery, that’s all gone. That was the black people in the United States.” They literally have no concept of real history and culture. That is the deliberate product of capitalist education.

We in the CPGB-ML are here to create a scientific analysis. But let’s move away from the fact that this is pure idealism.

Why would the capitalist class suddenly take this idea from a group of academics and propagate it worldwide to the point where it’s on the lips of every prime minister; it’s on the lips of every banker; it’s on the lips of every capitalist?

You know, sometimes, the billionaires let slip things that the mainstream politicians feel unable to say. Now there was quite a nice article, probably about the time when the 2008 banking and world-economic crisis hit, when Obama had said to Wall Street: “I’m the thing that stands between you and the pitchforks.” But the billionaires were not to worry, Obama told them: “We’re going to bail you out. We’re going to protect you.”

Some of those billionaires have said that they don’t understand why the working-class movement hasn’t got more traction than it has. They literally don’t understand why they’re getting away with it. There are, incredibly, just eight (8) multibillionaires who have as much wealth in their hands as fully one half of humanity’s population (3,500,000,000 people). Billions of people don’t have enough food, clothing, housing, shelter – the other, apparently ‘uncontroversial’, motions that we’ve discussed today very convincingly paint that picture.

So there’s a real question on how they can take art and culture and ideology and politics and divide working people, make them feel disunited. If you make people concentrate on their differences, if everyone is totally isolated and different, if everyone is suspicious of their neighbour … well, racism certainly has a part to play.

It’s very useful not to trust muslims or not to trust Pakistanis or not to trust Afro-Americans, or “I don’t really like that Nigerian who lives next door to me, they’re a bit different aren’t they?” Well, if people rub along with each other, they get over that don’t they?

In my opinion, despite the active promotion of anti-immigrant hostility, this country is far less racist then it was whilst I was growing up. Yet the capitalists are constantly, constantly searching for new ways of dividing people.

Bourgeois feminism

Not enough working women are involved in our movement. Why is it that all of our YouTube videos have 80 to 90 percent hits from men? Young women don’t think politics has got anything to say to them. They’ve been pushed into this blind dead-end of bourgeois feminism.

As a previous speaker very informatively related, what began as a liberating movement for women became a simple demand for a meaningless piece of legislation – complaints about pay for professional and wealthy women. Working-class women were left to go back to the kitchen and raise their families.

Actually, say the bourgeois feminists, equality with men is mainly about women being sexually promiscuous. To the absurd point where Hugh Hefner-type Playboy promiscuity, not conforming to this marriage thing, just ‘go for it, girl’, make yourself naked and get into a pornographic magazine – this is touted as ‘liberation’! Women were already liberated in the sixties and seventies, runs the narrative: well done women, all your problems are over, be in pornographic magazines – all your problems are over!

Working women, while not fully buying into all of this, however, have successfully been encouraged not to identify with mainstream working-class movements. It’s very hard. We’re lucky to have a few strong women comrades; but look at the composition of the room: where are our able, active, working-class young women? Why aren’t they here?

We’ve been divided from them through a narrative that says: “Sex is the most important thing. Men are oppressing me. Why would I unite with a man to try and solve my problem? My problem is men! I don’t want anything to do with you.”
Unity of all workers and oppressed

We must get away from this idea of wearing a ‘badge of oppression’. We are a small group because we’ve been actively marginalised. The huge, multimillion-strong communist movement across Europe and the middle east, across much of Asia and Africa, has been broken by Khrushchevite revisionism from within. It’s been broken by imperialism, which used every division in the communist movement as an opportunity to drive home the wedge and destroy our ideology.

The grip that communist politics naturally had over working people was based upon its truth and utility as a guide to the liberation struggle of the masses.

We want to rebuild that. We’re not going to rebuild it through division and discord; through a struggle against reality. I think the resolution is very good for this reason.

We in the CPGB-ML are and have always been actively opposed to discrimination on the grounds of race, sex, or sexual proclivity. We want broad unity of the working class, as working people who face the same economic oppression and have the same interest in changing it.
Relative and absolute oppression. Data and truth. The oppression of ‘transwomen’

During our inner-party debate running up to this congress, conducted largely in local groups and the party bulletin, some comrades produced articles saying that particular and unusually harsh oppression had come to a group of people, ‘LGBTQ+’ people. They attempted to demonstrate this particular oppression of transgender people by producing a variety of references and percentages.

First of all, I would urge then to look very carefully at their figures and their sources. What is the actual percentage of the working class that are transgender?

It’s very difficult to find out. (A member of audience: “Ten percent of the population!”)

No. It’s very far from that figure. It is statistically so small as to be insignificant. It’s absolutely tiny. But, if you take everyone who is ‘gay’ and tell them “actually really, you’re transgender”; if you take everyone who is ‘confused during puberty’ – well, everyone’s confused during puberty! – “but actually, probably you’re transgender”. If transgender becomes your fashionable label that you impose on everyone who feels alienated in society, then you start to arrive at these incredible figures.

Because actually, the percentage of people who are alienated in society is massive; absolutely bloody massive. Because alienation is a product of capitalist exploitation, of its individualism and its dissatisfying, isolationist, selfish culture.

Equally, if you take any group in a society, figures can be quoted to show an association but not causality. Let me give an example. I’m not comparing the two groups, but if I said that “fascists are overwhelmingly working class” or “fascists are overwhelmingly less likely to get a job”, therefore we need to be championing the rights of fascists – it’s totally the wrong way of constructing an argument; it’s meaningless.

When we discuss the question of ‘trans rights’, we are told that this is exiting and new and meaningful and trumps all other issues! But never forget that to the extent that this is a real group of people and not a manufactured ideological product purveyed by the bourgeoisie to sow confusion and disunity in the ranks of the working class – then we’re talking about an insignificant percentage of the working class.

When we state clearly that we are against unjust discrimination, that relates to everyone, to all groups of workers. It’s covered! That statement and belief covers everyone. We’re inclusive.
Racism, black and bourgeois nationalism vs proletarian internationalism

It’s the same in our attitude towards racism. I’ve been in Brixton and I’ve had someone walk up to me and say: “Yeah, man. You think it about race, or about class?” And when I told my fellow Lambeth resident and worker that fundamentally oppression is based on class, he simply opined: “Nah!” and walked away, because the black community also … Why aren’t the black community here? They should be! Overwhelmingly, black workers find themselves confined to the lowest sections of the working class, because of racism, because of the legacy of colonialism.

Black workers should be identifying with the broad highway of working-class politics. But no, because we’ve been kept artificially divided. Blacks are told whites are racist, whites are encouraged to be racist, and, despite the fact that we’ve broken that down in many day-to-day dealings, in our political organisations, in our social organisations, we ghettoise.

We ghettoise. Should a Turkish comrade living in Britain identify as a British worker or as a Turk? Is he a Turk first and foremost? That’s been a huge problem for the revolutionary movement in this country.

I can tell you there are hundreds, thousands of militant communists in London who will agree with me on pretty much everything – but they will not join our organisation, “because I’m a Turk. Actually, the struggle I identify with, that I feel most strongly about, is going on in Turkey. And although I live here, and my kids are here, and they go to school here and I’m working here, and I face the problems that are here and in fact basically, I’m a British worker and my kids don’t speak Turkish … Well, I’m Turkish, and I don’t want them to get involved with you because I want them to look to Turkey.”

The children of such a ‘revolutionary’ are almost impossible to draw into revolutionary politics on this basis. They don’t really engage with Turkey in that way because they’re British; they were born here. You adopt the culture of your friends and the culture that surrounds you when you grow up. For kids that grow up in Britain, they are culturally British. And to deny their Britishness, and their right to change British culture, to join the British working-class movement and change what is wrong in their lives, means they become alienated from all that is living in both cultures.

Are we going to carry on in that way, where we are all separate and all divided? Do we have to follow the fashion of the bourgeoisie?

The bourgeoise that have pushed this identity movement aggressively have done so to confuse and isolate working-class youth.

So I will conclude by saying: We are not transphobic! There’s nothing to be afraid of in this statement. We do not advocate discrimination against any group of the working class. We advocate unity, we advocate common struggle, we advocate understanding, we advocate a broad and tolerant society. But, we do not advocate and we cannot allow the bourgeoisie to impose this divisive ideology upon us!

Thank you, comrades.

Tuesday, 28 May 2019

Political news from the United Kingdom:

Sunday, 26 May 2019

Socialist Quotes for Sunday Reflection pt 63

Wednesday, 22 May 2019

Wilberg on Wednesday - The Illness Is The Cure pts 45&46/46

Further Reading and Web Resources

Other Books and Articles by Peter Wilberg

Monday, 20 May 2019

Socialist Quotes for Sunday Reflection pt 62

The Invention of Capitalism: How a Self-Sufficient Peasantry was Whipped Into Industrial Wage Slaves

Wednesday, 15 May 2019

Wilberg on Wednesday - The Illness Is The Cure pt 44/46

Appendix 7. Extracts from ‘Medical Nemesis –
The Expropriation of Health’ by Ivan Illich

Sunday, 12 May 2019

Socialist Quotes for Sunday Reflection pt 61

UNRWA are terrorists

Labels

Blog Archive

Tuesday, 28 May 2019

Political news from the United Kingdom:

Sunday, 26 May 2019

Socialist Quotes for Sunday Reflection pt 63

Wednesday, 22 May 2019

Wilberg on Wednesday - The Illness Is The Cure pts 45&46/46

Further Reading and Web Resources

Other Books and Articles by Peter Wilberg

Monday, 20 May 2019

Socialist Quotes for Sunday Reflection pt 62

The Invention of Capitalism: How a Self-Sufficient Peasantry was Whipped Into Industrial Wage Slaves

Wednesday, 15 May 2019

Wilberg on Wednesday - The Illness Is The Cure pt 44/46

Appendix 7. Extracts from ‘Medical Nemesis –The Expropriation of Health’ by Ivan Illich

Sunday, 12 May 2019

Socialist Quotes for Sunday Reflection pt 61

UNRWA are terrorists

Appendix 7. Extracts from ‘Medical Nemesis –
The Expropriation of Health’ by Ivan Illich