The unified Sydney peace movement is a step forward. But these organisers failed in one of their key tasks - to organise the April 9 Palm Sunday march. We try to uncover the reasons for this failure and the ideas speakers presented to the 200 or attendees

And the peace movement said unto the masses, "Why hast thou forsaken me"

 
 
 
 
 

The book Marx’s ecology - materialism and nature by John Bellamy Foster does much to reclaim a lost tradition of ecological thinking in Marxism. Mark Fischer spoke to the author about the relationship of red and green politics, ideas and traditions.


(MF) The question of how Marxists relate to environmental issues - as Marxists rather than as born-again greens - is clearly a controversial one.

(JBF) The answer to your question is complicated. There definitely is a danger in the sense that at least some of the views of the Greens - as a party-movement - are hardly progressive. There are some definite reactionary views mixed in there. So Marxists have to address them critically, like anything else.

 
 
 
 
 

Neocolonialism and Fraud

by Larry Lohmann - The Corner House

For much of the left, John Howard's failure to implement the Kyoto protocols is one of his greatest crimes. And while Howard's failure to act on this displays his utter comtempt for the environment, it means that progressives have been cornered into hailing Kyoto as essential in humanity's struggle to cope and manage climate change.

However Kyoto is in fact a big-business con job. Labor Tribune is carrying this article from the Cornerhouse as it strips away the myths inherent in the the Kyoto protocol, exposing it as a market-based swindle that enormously benefits existing polluters, while locking the developing world out of the benefits of industrial development.

 
 
 
 
 

In the first of two articles, Hillel Ticktin, editor of Critique, looks at the rise and fall of different modes of production and the problems of transition and non-transition

Aspects of the decline of modern capitalism are all too evident today - most notably the law of value, which is fundamental to the system. We see the constant tendency to replace the law of value with administration, resulting in increasing bureaucracy, both private and public, managerialism and a tendency to authoritarianism. At the same time there is also the self-defeating attempt to force the market back to its former dominance.

 
 
 
 
 

Hillel Ticktin concludes his discussion on the theory of decline by examining its forms as capitalism makes way for a higher society

How does the decline of capitalism and the transition to socialism differ from the previous declines and transitions discussed earlier - see part 1.

 
 
 
 
 

The 2005 Cronulla riots expose official multicultarism as a broken edifice

While the origins of capital are steeped in blood and empire and racism, it has globalised and changed. It seeks top-down integration of various national and ethnic groups. It wants control of the labour force on a world scale. It seeks to incorporate around the nation-state the various waves of migration that an increasingly globalised capital has dispersed. It seeks, invents, co-opts or adapts to ideology that can achieve that. In Australia, that ideology is official multiculturalism.

Marcus Strom looks at the background to the riots, the response of the establishment, and critiques the response of the Marxist left, that continues to tail official (i.e. bourgeois) multicultarist ideology.

 
 
 
 
 

Marcus Strom reviews:
Beyond Right and Left: new politics and the culture wars
by David McKnight (Allen & Unwin, $24.95)

The path from erstwhile Marxist to academic apologist for the system of capital is a well-worn one. Most who have travelled this path have drifted into obscurity. Not so David McKnight. He remains an advocate for social change, albeit with a twist.

 
 
 
 
 
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