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on 9th June 2012 at 13:34, Marie Lynam said:

Hello Richard
How interesting and important what you are saying here.
At the meeting of the Organisation of the American States (OAS) a few weeks ago, (the occasion when Obama’s confused Slovakia and Slovenia, and his guards slept with prostitutes), on that occasion, Wilma Roussef of Brazil told Obama precisely what you say here. She did not detail sufficiently, but she made the point that international finance and the ‘Free zones’ bring complete destruction to certain countries.
Of course Obama was not interested enough, or too polite perhaps to tell her that all this was the plan, and there is not much he could do, even if he wanted to, about it.

We are in a new colonial period, much much worse than the previous one. For countries like Jamaica, there is no way out except the Cuban road, but that is not easy. Particularly now that the Soviet Union is no longer present, to create a world balance of power within which smaller countries can defend themselves.

But this is not good for the exploiters either. In the same way as they pay under the form of wage only a portion of the value produced by the labour-power of the worker, in the same way, the act of keeping one billion humans hungry - means that capitalism cannot expand.

It cannot expand because dispossessed people cannot buy. No markets, hence no sales, hence no profits, hence close production down (at least for some time). But there comes a time when the dispossessed manage to stand up and fight, anyway. As in Iraq and Afghanistan, that should have become markets, and are only devastated places. Same as Libya. Devastated places, where the only thriving thing is armed resistance, rebellion and revolution. So many places are like that now, Honduras and Haiti included, that it is capitalism that suffers. Its wars are more devastating than ever, but they do not allow it to reproduce its system.

The other consequence that flows from the dispossession of the world - whilst 1% get rich - is that no emerging country can keep long on the Revolutionary State path; that is to say, a State basically capitalist (like Bolivia) but that does not permit the free reproduction of capital. Such a State could continue for quite a long time when the Soviet Union was around. Mozambique, Angola, Ethiopia, Burkina Fasso, Zimbabwe, are examples of Revolutionary States that survived a long time ‘in between’ capitalism and the Workers State, because of the existence of the Soviet Union.

What the fall of the Soviet Union has done is to make it impossible for ‘developing’ countries to remain steady on a kind of anti-capitalist development that still did not mean the construction of the Workers State. A development, as Posadas explained in The Revolutionary State, that caused a country like Peru to carry out an agrarian reform under Alvarado, 1974 or so. An agrarian reform that truly attacked imperialism, local capitalism and the banks. But Peru did not progress much after that, and then retreated.

With the fall of the Soviet Union, countries that would have advanced in the Revolutionary State manner like Peru in the 1970’s, can no longer do that. They either have to keep going against capitalism, like Venezuela, and come close to the Workers State (without yet being one), or they go the way of Jamaica.

It is the same polarisation that happens in any country, where the capitalist economy is no longer sustainable. A sector of the right goes to fascism, and a sector of the Left pushes towards the left, forcing the Communists (as in France) and a part of the Socialists, more to the Left.

A polarisation that, on a world scale, and in every country, leads to the inevitable confrontation between the forces for the public good (around the working class and its organisations) and the (autistic) forces that embody the individual interest, individual egoism and the fear of socialism.

It is not humanity that is going to go Jamaica’s way, but capitalism that is going to lose. The private interest is clearly at war with the public good. The organisation of the left in the Labour Party is inevitable, because the British working class is going to be on the side of the public good, forcing Labour to revolutionize. This will not happen through parliament, but directly, in the struggle.

Sorry long winded, had to rush, could not concentrate.

Warm greetings, Marie Lynam

on 10th June 2012 at 12:52, David Mitchell said:

This is colonisation and slavery by economic means and the IMF have fine tuned this to horrendous levels. They are wonderful at protecting the interests of what are mainly US Corporate interests. The whole world is being subjugated to this Corporate slavery and Neo-Liberal capitalism has become a monster that we need to resist on a global scale. The clock is being turned back and it is global revolution of the ordinary majority that will finally end this slavery.

This will happen as conditions for the vast majority become more and more intolerable. We can already see global resistance growing and as working people we need to keep building the LRC and act in solidarity with our brothers and sisters in struggle. We need to equip Labour with the Socialist policies that can be the start of forever reversing the balance of power in favour of the working class majority.

on 10th June 2012 at 19:31, Marie Lynam said:

Hello Richard,David, and all

It is important what David says, that what is in the main US corporate interests - are “wonderful at protecting [their] interests”. Indeed. And the world masses are very challenged by this. We, the working masses and their families, the British working class and its allies - we have to learn to be equally wonderful at protecting our interests.

The challenge is great because the economy of the world needs planning, not just of one country. And it is not just a matter of taking power first in some countries and then linking up between countries (perhaps), but of overcoming the obstacles that put, at the moment, every single individual in competition with the other. We survive through the market. Wages and profits rule the relations not just between classes, but between individuals.

Individuals who need so much, so very very much to be in solidarity, in every country and across frontiers, and yet, whose relations are mediated through the market, through exchange, through the price, payment and money.

For instance, we should refuse keeping jobs in one company in Britain, if this means sackings in Germany, for instance. But ‘we’ don’t. There is not the consciousness in the leaderships of the Trade Unions; and amongst those whose life - and family’s survival - depend on the wage, it is not possible to pose “lads, refuse the offer to keep your jobs until the German workers are assured to keep their’s as well”. There is a fracture here in the relations between the workers, and the Trade Union bureaucracies use this fracture to keep the fight for jobs on a national, nationalist level. No wonder that ‘British jobs for British workers’ appeared around this matter. There is no answer here in capitalism. The British, French, German workers will only unite when the power of capitalism is challenged, on the way to the Revolutionary State.

I don’t know more than that. But this may help us to deal with the question: What is the role of Labour? What should be the role of Labour? Is it not its role to united the workers internationally? The investigation I raise here comes from the ability of the Marxist masters - and I am not even doing them justice. 

But since we must start somewhere, let’s start this way, and see if someone has a better view of what the role of Labour should be.

When Labour starts talking of Revolutionary States, or Workers States, it will no longer call itself Labour.

Those who want the re-founding of Labour should discuss this.

But let us return to the question of building the solidarity necessary to “protect the interests” of our class.

We need help here. The question is simple, but it is complex too, and deep. It needs studying what are the obstacles in the way of our class protecting its interests.

Marx explains how “the relations connecting the labour of one individual with that of the rest, appears not as direct social relations between individuals at work, but as what they really are: material relations between people and social relations between things” (Capital)

I know the LRC does a lot to come close to the struggle, against the cuts, to oppose the attacks of the working class and masses, etc.

But the most important, it seems to me, is for the LRC to study, invite all those who wish to study, invite a debate on the nature of the human relations that keep us all separate, and indeed all in competition (if not worse). Once we know this, we can discuss how to overcome these separations, at present determined by the wage (that is to say by the markets), to build international working class relations based on solidarity (that is to say based on human consciousness). A thing that cannot be achieved unless one challenges the capitalist system - and its imperialist madness.

More and more clarity regarding these matters will allow the LRC to break from the forces (within Labour and the Trade Unions) that have the power to stop the Labour Party being changed.

Comradely, Marie Lynam