Socialism, someone said to me recently, may be a fine idea, but unfortunately human nature would prevent it from operating as intended; by nature, people are too individualistic or competitive or greedy to live in a system of planned cooperation and solidarity. Is this the case?

Perceptive

“I think the message from the Australian people is they do want to see a change to the way politics is conducted.” – Julia Gillard.

Leadership

“We should be ashamed of the way we led the country.” – Iraqi Vice-President Adel Abdul Mahdi.

At the Byron Bay Writers Festival in August, a popular ideologue of the environment movement, Ian Lowe, told a packed-out marquee, to a round of applause “and someone is shovelling coal into the steamer to get us there faster ...”: “The only responsible thing for citizens to do is organise a mutiny”.

Zionism, the belief that all Jews throughout the world constitute a nation that requires its own homeland, is a relatively recent ideology.

Radical

“It’s the sort of radical proposal that often comes up in these sort of reports that goes too far.” – John Brogden, chief executive of the finance industry’s lobby group, on the Cooper review’s proposal that the finance industry should take less of our superannuation.

“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”.

It’s easy enough to see that there are many things in this world that need changing. Figuring out how to change them is a bit more complicated.

US military authorities announced the laying of charges against Bradley Manning, a 22-year-old military intelligence analyst, on July 6. Manning was accused of leaking classified US military information through the whistle-blower web site Wikileaks.

Canadian G20 protests

A new high of hysteria and aggression by the Canadian state marked the G20 meeting held in Toronto June 26-27. Reportedly US$1.2 billion was spent by the Integrated Security Unit (ISU) (a trumped up name for police) to protect the ruling class together with the bourgeois media.

But expect more

“America has never experienced an event like this before.” – US President Barack Obama on the Gulf of Mexico oil disaster.

More equal than you

“The US is a big and important market for BP, and BP is also a big and important company for the US.” – BP chairperson Carl-Henric Svanberg.

“Socialism sounds like a great idea, but it’s not really feasible. At least in the developed countries, workers are too brainwashed by the system, and the ruling class is just too powerful to be overthrown.” That is not a precise quotation from any specific person, but socialists frequently encounter arguments to this effect.

Qualified

“He says the most appalling things and can’t understand why people get upset. He has no empathy. He’s got narcissistic personality disorder.” – Former Liberal Party leader Brendan Nelson on Malcolm Turnbull, his successor as Liberal Party leader.

Australia has been much luckier than most countries in the current international recession. While unemployment has certainly increased, it has not risen as much as in most of the world and, at 5.4%, it is still lower than it was throughout the 1990s.

Food, Inc.
Directed by Robert Kenner
Written by Robert Kenner and Elise Pearlstein
Runtime: 94 minutes
DVD available for order online

“Why can’t the left get together? Why are there so many different socialist groups?” Sometimes these questions are just an attempt to belittle the socialist left by right-wingers (who nevertheless think it perfectly normal that there should be many pro-capitalist parties). But it is also a serious question from unaffiliated leftists.

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.

Finance made easy

“It’s like buying fire insurance on your neighbor’s house – you create an incentive to burn down the house.” – A German finance expert, quoted in the February 25 New York Times, explaining the financial derivative known as credit-default swaps.

In a March 19 article on the website of the Socialist Alternative (SAlt) group, the largest Australian organisation claiming to be Marxist, titled “Why men don’t benefit from women’s oppression”, SAlt member Kate Jeffreys repeats a gross distortion of the Marxist analysis of the oppression of women under capitalism.

And it cost only $1.9 billion

“Quite obviously chlorinated … on the nose, with an interesting texture … a little bit oilier in the mouth and a little bit of pucker, almost like you find with tannin in wine.” – Wine taster Peter Bourne, commenting on a blind tasting of water from the NSW government’s new desalination plant.

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 c

An Sydney Morning Herald report a few months ago unintentionally pointed out one of the absurdities of modern capitalism. This is that a good part of the so-called wealth of capitalist societies doesn’t really exist.

International Women’s Day began at a time of political and social upheaval more than 100 years ago, on February 28, 1908, when socialist women in the US organised demonstrations and meetings all over the country demanding women workers’ political and economic rights and called it “Women’s Day”. In 1909, 2000 people attended a Women’s Day rally in Manhattan.

When the visit of US President Barack Obama was announced last month, an official White House statement said he “is looking forward to commemorating the 70th anniversary of Australia-US relations”.

“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.

Why are so many films so bad? This year’s Oscar nominations are a parade of propaganda, stereotypes and downright dishonesty. The dominant theme is as old as Hollywood: America’s divine right to invade other societies, steal their history and occupy our memory. When will directors and writers behave like artists and not pimps for a world view devoted to control and destruction?