Anticapitalist Frontiers

Speech given at Socialist Resistance Forum London, March 28 2017

Phil Hearse (2017) “The way the Leave campaign have tried to ramp up a fear of immigration has been disgraceful—but the truth is that if you see an immigrant in a hospital, they’re far more likely to be working there than being treated. The time has come to brand the “Brexit” campaign for what it is—a bid for a right-wing Tory takeover of the reins of power in the UK and to dismantle the hard-worn social gains of the last few decades. The people leading the case for a vote to leave are on the right of the Conservative Party and will take an “out” vote as their signal to make their power grab complete.” Nicola Sturgeon, 16/6/2016 Our enemy’s enemy is not necessarily our friend, and of course the Scottish National Party, despite its vaguely leftish social democratic programme, is not a friend of socialism. But Nicola Sturgeon was completely correct on what was happening during the EU referendum last year. Being anti-EU has been the banner of the Conservative right wing for 30 ...

Phil Hearse (first published at  Left Unity ) The shocking victory of Donald Trump in the US presidential elections is a major turning point that is part of, and will give new momentum to,  a surge to the right in world politics. The international situation is dealt with below, but for starters we should note that there is near certainty that the far right will win the Austrian presidential re-run and that Marine Le Pen has a major chance to win the presidential election new year in France. Most of all though we have to insist that  the Trump victory follows on from, and in part of the same trend as, Brexit in Britain . It seems that that the Lexiteers have gone remarkably quiet. No wonder. How can anyone seriously pretend that the new Teresa May government does not represent a shift to the right in bourgeois politics, or that the victory of Brexit was not achieved on the back of a xenophobic anti-immigrant campaign?

By Pritam Singh, Professor of Economics, Oxford Brooks University. Pritam Singh Professor of Economics Faculty of Business Oxford Brookes University, Oxford UK psingh@brookes.ac.uk (Draft paper for the conference on ‘Before ’68: the Left, Activism and Social Movements in the Long 1960s’ at the University of East Anglia, Norwich, 13-14th February 2016) India’s Maoist/Naxalite movement Introduction On 25 May 1967, in one village called Prasadujot in the Naxalbari bloc in the West Bengal state of India, a group of peasants led by two left-wing activists Kanu Sanyal (1929- 2010) and Jangal Santhal (?-1981) who were supported by a communist ideologue Charu Mazumdar (1918-1972)i tried to forcibly seize the land from some landlords who controlled the land to which the peasants had the legal entitlement.

By  LUCAS KOERNER - VENEZUELANALYSIS.COM ,  December 9th 2015 The United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV) suffered a crushing defeat in Sunday’s National Assembly elections, winning just 55 of 167 seats. Formerly in opposition, the Venezuelan right took a two-thirds majority with 112 seats, gaining control of the South American country’s legislature for the first time in 17 years. The outcome affords the Venezuelan right an unprecedented opportunity to roll back the gains of the Bolivarian Revolution by legal means, without having to resort to coups or other forms of extra-institutional violence. But will they succeed? Counter-Revolution without Counter-Hegemony? Under Venezuela’s democratic system, the single-house National Assembly holds enormous power: a two-thirds super-majority can pass or revoke organic constitutional laws, replace Supreme Court magistrates, appoint the heads of crucial public institutions such as the Public Prosecutor’s office an...

By Phil Hearse T Rich and powerful hide their money offshore The Panama Papers’ revelations about the rich and powerful hiding untold billions in ‘offshore’ tax havens may be shocking, but it’s hardly a surprise to anyone who knows the first thing about the way that big business works. We are living through a blitzstorm of allegations and controversy about corruption. In the few years alone we’ve had:

This article was written by two veteran French revolutionary socialists in  response to the November 2015 attacks in Paris. Its logic and position stands equally for the recent attacks in Belgium. " At such a time, we of course continue the class struggle, to support the struggle of all the oppressed; but beyond that, we defend humanity against barbarism.  "

Phil Hearse explains how the world’s richest company rips off workers and governments worldwide Apple headquarters in Cupertino, California 2/9/2016. First published by  Left Unity The ruling by EU competition commissioner Margarethe Vestager that Apple should pay the Irish government €13.2 bn, because the derisory 2% tax charged on Apple profits was ‘unfair’ to other companies, reveals just a tiny corner of the tax, labour and political practices of the world’s most profitable company. Apple practice is the gold standard of multinational super-exploitation that modern neoliberal corporations aspire to. How Apple functions is closely mirrored by the practices of transnational corporations like Google, McDonalds, Amazon, Starbucks, Fiat Chrysler and many others. Critics of Vestager – like Apple boss Tim Cook, Ryanair supremo Michael O’Leary and former EU competition commissioner Neelie Kroes (who now works for tax evader Uber) – say she is wrong because the Irish ...

Every so often, the bourgeois political system runs into crisis. The machinery of the state jams; the veils of consent are torn asunder; and the tools of power appear disturbingly naked. Brazil is living through one of those moments — it is dreamland for social scientists; a nightmare for everyone else. Dilma Rousseff was elected president in 2010, with a 56-44 percent majority against the right-wing, neoliberal Brazilian Social Democratic Party (PSDB) opposition candidate. She was reelected four years later with a diminished yet convincing majority of 52-48 percent, or a difference of 3.5 million votes.

In 2009 the French LCR,  follwing two highky successful presidential election campaigns with candidate Olivier Besacenot, took the initiative to form the New Anti-Capitalsit Party (NPA). Although the organisation is still significant compared with British far left groups, its early promise and membership surge has not been maintained.  Here longtime French revolutionary socialist leader Pierre Rousset takes a long hard look at the balance sheet of the NPA. The following piece was written for  Kojkkino , the theoretical magazine of the Greek organization DEA. Though quite long, it does not claim to cover all sides of the question. Indeed, it’s the kind of article that is never really finished and that has to be constantly reworked and supplemented. Its main objective is to stimulate collective thinking about the lessons of the successes and failures of the NPA from its birth to the present day.

  Robin Blackburn ( ESSF  via NLR) Stuart Hall CND rally Trafalgar Square 1963 The renowned cultural theorist Stuart Hall, who died on 10 February 2014, was the first editor of the  New Left Review  (NLR). Stepping down in 1962, he continued to play an outstanding role in the broader New Left for the rest of his life. Stuart made decisive contributions to cultural theory and interpretation, yet a political impulse – involving both a political challenge to dominant cultural patterns and a cultural challenge to hegemonic politics – pervades his work. 

By Sarah Parker and Phil Hearse ( first published by Left Unity ) On March 21 hundreds of thousands of Kurdish people in  Diyarbakır, unofficial capital of Turkish Kurdistan, flocked to celebrations of Newroz, the Kurdish New Year. The celebrations this year had a more than usual political angle – not just a celebration of Kurdish identity but a demonstration of opposition to the brutal dictatorial actions of  Turkish president  Recep Erdoğan and his ruling AKP (Justice and Development Party). The politics of the Newroz are well understood by the regime. In  Istanbul tens of thousands of people from across the city tried to reach the Bakırköy district to join the massive Newroz celebration which had been banned by the city governor. In a scene repeated in many cities, people who did reach the celebrations were attacked by the police. Dozens of people were arrested and many injured. Erdoğan and the AKP are carrying through an all-out attack on civil li...

New Left Review . You can download a pdf or order a copy of NLR 97 or subscribe to the magazine by clicking this link Syriza won power in January 2015 as an anti-austerity party—the most advanced political opposition so far to the hardening deflationary policies of the Brussels–Berlin–Frankfurt axis. Six months later, the Tsipras government forced through the harshest austerity package Greece had yet seen. This trajectory was a predictable outcome of the contradiction embodied in Syriza’s programme: reject austerity, but keep the euro. Why was Tsipras so incapable of envisaging a course inside the   EU  but outside the Eurozone, the position of Sweden, Denmark, Poland and half a dozen other European countries? First, one shouldn’t underestimate the popularity of the euro in the southern-periphery countries—Greece, Spain, Portugal—for whom joining the  EU  meant accessing political and economic modernity. For Greece, in particular, it meant being part of the West...

Another day, another sharp attack on Jeremy Corbyn in the Guardian, this time from  Peter Mandelson . Mandelson heaps half-truths upon untruths and tops them up with venomous red baiting: “ But Corbyn is now in a position to impose his views on the party, and he is doing so by very unconventional means. To secure his support base and grip within the party, Corbyn has created Momentum , a trade union-funded organisation run in conjunction with hard-left networks outside the party. This differentiates it from the moderates’ Progress organisation, which has no outside allegiances…..You would expect Corbyn to recruit loyalists to his office in parliament, but this is largely staffed from two further far left entities: Socialist Action, a Trotskyite group most closely associated with Ken Livingstone, and Labour Representation Committee, which was founded by John McDonnell, the shadow chancellor. ” (1) Mandelson accuses Corbyn of wanting total dominance of the party and a tot...

Ernest Tate (1) and Phil Hearse (2) Delivered at the  Left Before 1968  conference, organised at UEA by the Socialist History Society and the  University of East Anglia  Department of History, February 13/ 14, 2016 Part 1 – Building the VSC In line with the theme of this conference this presentation will not say much about the large anti-war mobilisations in 1968 or what happened later. Rather, it will discuss what lay behind the remarkable rise of the Vietnam Solidarity Campaign (VSC)   and the factors that influenced its development.  Launched on 20 December1965, the VSC initiated a series of ad-hoc committees to organise mass protests on the streets of London against the escalation of the war in Vietnam and the Labour Government’s complicity in it.  These protests came to characterise the period. They are now seen as an important expression of the youth radicalisation of those years, and raised the central question for the whole Brit...