Left Politics

By Nick Everett

Over the weekend of November 7-9, 2008, socialists from Malaysia, Indonesia, Thailand, Philippines, Singapore, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Hong Kong, Australia, Britain, Sweden and Taiwan gathered near Kuala Lumpur for Socialism 2008, a conference hosted by the Parti Socialis Malaysia (Malaysian Socialist Party, PSM). This was the second international conference organised by the PSM, the first being held in 2005. Socialism 2006 was held in Bangkok and Socialism 2007 was held in Manila.

By Allen Myers

In its earliest stages, capitalism necessarily began from what was provided by the feudal economy that preceded it. This was primarily an extremely low level of productivity, based mostly on very simple tools and producers (peasants and artisans) with few skills.

By Marcus Pabian

Despite Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez leading a popular socialist revolution in his country that has inspired millions beyond its borders, a range of people describing themselves as revolutionary socialists don’t accept that such a revolution is taking place and have declared Chavez incapable of leading such a revolution; that he is an obstacle to carrying through such a revolution.

By Allen Myers

If you listen to capitalist economists, media commentators or major party politicians, two things you will always find treated with reverence are private property and free markets. These, we are told, are essential not only to economic progress but even to “democracy” and “freedom”. US presidents have used these holy concepts as justification for threatening, or launching, wars. But in reality, capitalism’s relations with private property and free markets are not so simple.

By Allen Myers

Contrary to what some ideologues would like us to believe, the economic arrangements we know as capitalism are not of long standing. Capitalism arose fairly recently in history (in the late mediaeval period), in a particular place (western Europe, mainly in Flanders and England). From there, it spread through most of the rest of the world, by both economic and military-political means, in what is a fairly short time in historical terms.

By Kathy Newnam

Over 80% of people in Australia support a woman’s right to choose abortion — a significant gain of the women’s liberation movement. Having lost the debate on a woman’s right to choose, the anti-abortion movement has adopted a new tactic — posing as being “pro-woman”. At the forefront of this maneuver in Australia is Women’s Forum Australia. The WFA was formed following a meeting in December 2004 at the Sheraton on the Park hotel in Sydney that was called to discuss the next steps in the campaign to ban abortion.

By Nick Everett

On September 6, Western Australians will be voting in a state election to determine which of the two big-business parties can best manage WA’s resources export boom for the big end of town. WA Premier Alan Carpenter called an early state election on August 7, just one day after WA Liberal Party leader Troy Buswell resigned. Buswell was replaced by former state Liberal leader Colin Barnett, after a controversy surrounding Buswell’s sexist treatment of a parliamentary colleague.

By John Percy

Issy Wyner, one of the pioneers of revolutionary socialism in Australia, died in Sydney in August, aged 92. Issy was an early member of the Workers Party, the first Trotskyist group in Australia, formed in May 1933. Those early Trotskyists were mostly former members of the Communist Party of Australia (CPA), maintaining their original support for the communist ideal as exemplified in the Bolshevik Revolution, and rebelling against the political degeneration of the Communist Party taken over by Joseph Stalin, and the subsequent political and organisational degeneration of communist parties around the world.

By Allen Myers

Exploitation, as I wrote in the previous issue of Direct Action, is an unequal economic relationship, in which one party to a transaction gains something at the expense of the other. That is a very broad definition; it would include being short-changed by a shopkeeper and other fairly trivial inequalities. The exploitation that is essential to capitalism is not so minor or occasional, but is built into the system. It is there all the time, and people’s roles as exploited or exploiters are essentially fixed. (By contrast, you don’t get short-changed every time you go to the shop, and customers might exploit the shopkeeper by paying with a counterfeit note.)

By James Crafti

“Socialists argue that, while the student union bureaucracy can’t simply be ignored, it’s far more important to involve the vast bulk of ordinary students in campaigns or demonstrations rather than concentrating on the factional manoeuvres that often take place within relatively small cliques within the student unions.” This good advice offered by Gerard Morel and Jeff Sparrow in Socialist Alternative #49 (March 2001) now appears to be being totally ignored by Socialist Alternative (and, to be fair, most of the student left) today.