Comment & Analysis

By Doug Lorimer

“The ultimate reason for all real crises”, Karl Marx argued in Capital, his seminal work on the laws of motion of the capitalist system, “always remains the poverty and restricted consumption of the masses as opposed to the drive of capitalist production to develop the productive forces as though only the absolute consuming power of society constituted their outer limit”.

By Linda Waldron

Julia Gillard’s successful challenge to Kevin Rudd for leadership of the federal ALP on June 24 delivered Australia its first female prime minister. Sydney Morning Herald journalist Josephine Tovey wrote the next day that, “While her role as the first female Prime Minister will make her a hero to many women, it is her actions that will keep her being one ... Will she, as Prime Minister improve the lot of other women, and make their paths to equality easier?” Given her past track record, the answer should be obvious — a resounding “No”.

By James Crafti

Racism is at the forefront of the 2010 Australian election. Both Labor and Coalition politicians use some of their most passionate language to convey the false idea that the few thousand Afghan and other Asian asylum seekers who have arrived by boat are responsible for a host of problems caused by their own decisions to prioritise corporate profits before social needs, such as their encouragement of suburban sprawl and lack of funding of public transport and public health services.

By Jorge Jorquera

I’ll begin with two preliminary remarks. First, football here refers to the sport played with your feet, not those codes where the primary limbs used are the hands. Some of these hand-codes are known in a handful of the 195 nations of the world as football. Australia is one of these, where the term soccer is used instead for football. I once thought it might have something to do with socks, but apparently the word has a long history dating back to its use as a colloquialism formed by extending the second syllable of “association” (socca), in reference to the original football association of Britain.

By Marce Cameron

In April and May, Cubans went to the polls in local government elections across the island. These were elections with a difference. Imagine if neighbours got together in open meetings in your street to nominate, by show of hands, between two and eight candidates for each electoral district. That’s what happened in each of Cuba’s 169 municipalities.

By Allen Myers

Last month, I was fortunate to hear Phillip Adams’ ABC Radio interview with Dr James Hansen, the US scientist who has done so much to awaken the world to the fact that our climate is already changing and that it will change catastrophically if we don’t very quickly stop dumping carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.

By Tim Stewart

“Penny Wong jeered, Hugo Chavez cheered” was the headline of an article in the Australian newspaper during the final days of the UN Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen last December. Wong, the Australian Minister for Climate Change, was there to “seal a deal” which favoured business-as-usual for the world’s biggest carbon dioxide polluters. Despite years of pledges to act on climate change, the bottom line for the Rudd Labor government is still a mere 5% reduction of carbon emissions by 2020.

By Shua Garfield

In the wake of the failure of last December’s UN Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen to reach even a token legally binding agreement for greenhouse gas (GHG) emission reduction, and with the Rudd Labor government’s patently inadequate emissions trading scam blocked by the Senate, reformist environmentalists have been casting around for an alternative way to try to address the climate crisis within the confines of what is acceptable to the capitalist ruling class. In doing so, they have continued to try to channel action to reduce GHG through indirect, market-based mechanisms, controlled by pro-capitalist governments. The Greens’ proposal for a tax on emissions of CO2 is one such example.

By Doug Lorimer

The first issue of the Socialist Alliance’s Green Left Weekly for this year, dated January 20, carried an article headlined “New period of left unity and struggle launched”. The article quoted SA member Dave Kerin as saying that the seventh national conference of the SA, held January 2-5, with some 220 participants, signified that “the Socialist Alliance becoming a true alliance of a very broad cross-section of views that are of the historic left”.

By Allen Myers

“Socialist Alliance structures remain too loose and weak to win, educate and train new socialist activists and the Socialist Alliance caucuses and working groups have only partially begun to organise united interventions into the movements.” This statement was made in a resolution adopted by the 22nd congress of Democratic Socialist Perspective (DSP), held in January 2006. Since the end of 2003, the DSP, formerly the Democratic Socialist Party, has described itself as a “Marxist tendency in the Socialist Alliance”. The SA is no stronger today than four years ago; indeed, in many respects it is weaker, but the DSP leadership has decided that from the next DSP congress, to be held on January 2, the DSP will “merge” into the SA, thus handing to the SA the tasks of winning, educating and training new socialist activists. What has changed? Only the DSP leadership’s perception of how best to keep reality at bay.