Mediaboss Marketing

Clare Doyle, of the Committee for a Workers International (CWI the socialist international organisation to which the Socialist Party is affiliated) spoke to socialists and worker activists in Ukraine and Kazakhstan on 25 March about the devastating impact of war, not only on lives and infrastructure, but also its political effects on the workers movement.

Half of Ukraines capital city, Kyiv, is now wrecked by shelling and bombing from Russian forces. I spoke to V a trade union and political activist from that city. He has succeeded in taking his wife and son from the crowded school basement they shared with no less than 300 people. Now they have one room in a hut of a Pioneer youth camp in the North-West of Ukraine.

A number of organisations have been banned, broken up, he tells me. But they are mostly pro-Russian groups. Trade unionists and political people have not been able to form separate units.

We have never been able to officially form a party. You had to have ten thousand signatures to do that! We had about 1,200 at one stage in our union.

As a war-time necessity, all our TV news channels have been amalgamated into one. We do get news and videos through social media of one sort or another, including cartoon films for the children.

We discussed the prospects for the war. V commented that Ukraines president Zelensky had clearly dropped the aim of joining Nato, the Western military alliance. There would be a compromise, but it was obviously not clear what and when. Already 800,000 refugees have left Luhansk which, along with Donbas, is one of the hotly disputed regions between the regimes of Russia and Ukraine.

The Russian army is reported to have lost at least 15,000 fighters on the battlefield. Conscription is for two years in Russia. Of course, there will be great distress when the young men fail to return home.

Support for Putin in Russia remains high with all the state-controlled media propaganda about fascists and Nazis ruling Ukraine. The Russian-led USSR lost 20 million people in World War Two following the Nazi invasion, and therefore invoking the spectre of Nazism undoubtedly affects public consciousness.

There are Azovtsi and Banderovtsi (far-right groups) in the Ukrainian army, but the majority of Ukrainians see Russians as family. You have the military horror and the deep shock and disappointment.

V and I spoke about the defection from Russia last week of Anatoly Chubais chief architect of the rapid transition to market capitalist relations in the early 1990s. We also spoke about the area in southern Ukraine where the revolutionary leader Leon Trotsky spent his childhood and student days now coming under bombardment.

Odesa, in the sights of Putins forces, is an historic and beautiful city. It is the scene more than a century ago of a major battle and mutiny in the Russo-Japanese War of 1905 a defeat that led to revolt and revolution in Tsarist Russia.

Andrei in Astana, the largest city in Kazakhstan, speaks of a major fuel shortage developing because of a broken pipeline.

But the authoritarian Tokayev government is not likely to put up the price of fuel, given what happened last time he tried in January this year when a mass uprising followed a doubling of LNG supplies at the pumps!

Nor is the shaky dictatorship likely to accede to any demand from Putin to supply young men from Kazakhstan for his war in Ukrainian as pay-back for Russias military assistance in January to quell the uprising.

Andrei speaks of Communists in the Russian Duma (parliament) and in the Moscow City Duma urging Russian forces be sent to retake Kazakhstan! and bring it back within the borders of the old USSR (now defunct for over 30 years). This is by no means aimed at re-establishing a workers state of any kind!, says Andrei.

The party of veteran communist, Gennady Zyuganov has been a loyal collaborator throughout the process of establishing dictatorial, oligarchic capitalism in what was long ago a totally voluntary federation of soviet socialist republics.

The president of Kazakhstan, Kassym-Jomart Tokayev, is torn over relations with Russia, explains Andrei. He lived in Russia a long time and was part of the clique of gangsters at the top. His broader family and his wealth are in Russia. They are all robbers at the top of society, but thieves fall out!

Tokayev seems very uncertain about the future fearful of any new upsurge that could push him aside. His government seems wary of the growth of independent trade unionism and the possible establishment of a workers party especially if it has socialism as its aim.

The bosses are incompetent, the state-controlled trade unions cover up for them and the government looks to us for advice! There are plenty of spontaneous walk-outs taking place and some substantial strikes, says Andrei.

The cessation of the ghastly war in Ukraine, when it comes, will open up a period of turmoil, of reappraisal and of workers struggling to build strong, independent unions and socialist parties in Ukraine, in Kazakhstan, and in Russia itself.

More here:
War in Ukraine: Workers' voices behind the lines - Socialist Party

For quite a period now International Trans Visibility Day has felt, for the trans community at large, increasingly hollow. First conceived by Michigan transgender activist Rachel Crandall in 2009, at that time it aimed to counterbalance the mourning of Transgender Day of Remembrance by celebrating the lives and accomplishments of trans people. It was also a response to the sidelining of transgender people in the broader LGBT community. Subsequently, Joe Biden gave the stamp of US government approval to it, the culmination of making liberal trans rights a centerpiece of his presidential election campaign. (Although he has done little to nothing for trans Americans subsequently, having put them in the crosshairs of GOP reactionary opportunists.)

The situation in 2022 is substantively different to what it was in 2009. Trans liberation (and the securing of access to vital healthcare, legal recognition and community protection from transphobic violence) has stalled throughout most of the world not because trans people are relegated to the extreme margins, but because we have become a fetishistic object for cis fears about societal collapse. The British media now engages politicians to speculate about trans womens genitalia with the likes of Wes Streeting former Head of Education at Stonewall and current Shadow Secretary of State for Health and Social Care proudly proclaiming that women cannot have a penis. (This foreshadows what trans people can expect even were a Labour government in the offing.)

The Gender Critical movement in the UK, borrowing transphobic ideas from currents of radical feminism as well as conservative Catholic reactionaries, coalesced around Theresa Mays planned reform to the Gender Recognition Act to grant improved access to Gender Recognition Certificates, humanizing and demedicalising the process. (Although likely retaining significant and brutal checks, and completely excluding nonbinary people.) These minor changes with no consequences for cis people, were cynically conflated with long existing rights enshrined in the Equality Act that protects trans people from discrimination and gives them access to gender specific spaces congruent with their gender identities.

This has given rise to a phoney debate about single-sex spaces, amounting to a fascist wedge against the oppressed, bolstered by false claims to represent cis womens and LGB anxieties with no evidentiary polling basis. Politicians and journalists now glibly speculate about trans womens genitals and misrepresent language intended to include trans men as a concession to trans womens delusionsor, in the pretentious language of noted transphobic academic Kathleen Stock, immersive fictions. In this context the relative invisibility of trans men is deeply interwoven in the weaponised hyper-visibility of trans women and transfeminine people.

Meanwhile, transphobic hate crimes have quadrupled during a pandemic that already renders queer people especially vulnerable, often bereft of vital familial support needed to traverse this social catastrophe. Denied services, publicly attacked and maligned, discriminated against in work, all LGBQIA+ people near disaster as the cost-of-living crisis again impacts us doubly: first, as generally more financially precarious, and second, as scapegoats for inevitable mass discontent.

The kind of visibility trans people have received, then, is harmful. But a deeper invisibility, the one to which Crandall was responding, remains in place. Our humanity remains tragically invisible. We are the subject of a debate, material for clickbait throughout the press from the BBC and Guardian to the Times and Telegraph. Every major party (the Labour Party, the Conservative Party, the Green Party, the Liberal Democrats, the Scottish Nationalist Party) has been embroiled in transphobia, with the Tories easily being worst and the SNP performing better, but nobody coming out well. In all of this, our lives and struggles and complexities are rendered null.

Before Streeting sat opposite arch-reactionary and transphobe Julia Hartley-Brewer to deny trans humanity, he congratulated a conservative MP for coming out as trans and discussing gender dysphoria. The disconnect here is exemplary. Real human beings are not seen at all in this culture war, we are mill for the grist. The selfsame person can express compassion for us one moment, and contribute to our demonization an entire fifteen minutes later! The cognitive dissonance sees that trans issues are separated from real trans people, as interlocuters on all sides (but rarely trans people themselves) are given immense platforms to discuss us as an abstracted problem.

Instead of visibility, trans people want support. The living solidarity needed to secure healthcare and to be allowed about society without constant harassment or worse. We need a Trans Day of Action. Not merely our own, because we cannot win this fight alone. Trans people routinely donate to one anothers Go Fund Me pages to raise enough to seek private treatment for dysphoria; we regularly create online spaces, on an internet utterly hostile to us, to nurture our shared trans consciousness and allow one another to flourish; we often attend protest after protest to demand liberation from the systems of domination that renders our existences living hell.

We need cis people to commit to taking some of this burden in the coming years. We need more unions to care enough to show up to our protests (during a recent trans pride, many unions opted to attend another generalised left protest that had no demands, no unified message and no reason to exist whatsoever). We need the prejudice of transphobia to be addressed in all liberatory organisations and called out in workplaces, education, political parties and everywhere else.

After these conditions are met, we will be enabled to be visible in all of our diverse humanity, not only as trans men, trans women, and nonbinary people, but as human beings. But until the particularities of our social condition are thereby addressed, our general place in a universal humanity, and therefore humanity as such, is impossible. This diminishes not only us, but everyone. It also creates an example of reactionary triumph that inevitably jeopardizes the wider unity of the exploited and the oppressed, and therefore the entire socialist project.

Solidarity is a means and an end for socialism, every part of our humanity that comes under sustained assault draws in ever more of our humanity to resist, and to transform defensive struggles into a fight for our full emancipation in the abolition of the social forces of class society that deny us freedom. In this struggle, to give ground at all, to fail to defend the smallest group, is to encourage inhumanity to its final victory, what Marx insightfully called the common ruin of the contending classes. Solidarity is the only alternative.

Source: Anti*Capitalist Resistance.

Original post:
Invisibilities, Visibilities, and Liberation - International Viewpoint

NEWYou can now listen to Fox News articles!

Fox News host Sean Hannity analyzes what's at the core of America's economic problems as Biden continues to blame others for his policy failures.

SEAN HANNITY: Seven months away from the midterm elections the Biden White House is in one crisis after another. Today a key inflation gauge just set another 40 year high. This impacts every single American, every American household. A whopping 6.4% increase and according to Bloomberg the average American family now can expect to spend $5,200 more this year or $433 more each month on the exact same items they bought one year ago.

Already one out of every five workers in this country is now running out of money before payday. That number is expected to get much worse and in Bidens economy, its especially worse and burdensome, for the poor and the middle class in this country. At the core of these economic woes, record high after record high gas prices. Tonight, the American people know who to blame. They said, yeah, its Joe Biden. His policies are the number one cause for the increase in fuel costs which means its more to heat and cool our homes and more we pay in every store we go to. This poll conducted by Quinnipiac. Heres a news flash for Democrats ahead of the midterms. American people, guess what? Theyve figured it out. New Green Deal, socialism is not going to work ever.

On the campaign trail, it was your candidate Joe Biden vowing to end fossil fuels. This was the predicable result. During his very first week in office, he banned the drilling in ANWR [Arctic National Wild Refuge]. We have such vast resources. We could have cheap energy for every American. He banned new exploration and auctions on federal land. He killed the Keystone XL pipeline.

The Alberta premier [Jason Kenney] said if they finished it, it would be done by now. We would have 900,000 barrels of oil a day flowing into this country from Canada. Last month the Biden administration paused all new leases on oil and gas because of climate change. What a surprise, U.S. oil and gas prices are predictably higher than ever.

In fact, costs have been rising every single month since Joe Biden took office. Vladimir Putin did not cause that. Joe Biden, New Green Deal radical socialism caused it. According to him, Vladimir Putin and COVID-19 are to blame for his woes. If its COVID, why didnt it happen under Trump?

Visit link:
Sean Hannity: America has figured out Biden is causing the oil and gas crisis - Fox News

Lela Messaoudi, General secretary of Gauche Rvolutionnaire (CWI, France)

Anger at rising prices, record profits for French multinationals and shareholders, the destruction of public services, reduced rights of the unemployed, and ongoing strikes over wages for several months As in the rest of the world, instability is the rule in France.

President Emmanuel Macrons last five years in office are synonymous with heightened social tensions: the Gilets Jaunes (Yellow Vests) movement, movements for more social justice, mobilisations against the pension reform in 2019, and more besides

The Covid crisis has, for a time, anaesthetised the struggles. Using the pandemic and unable to protect the population, Macron preferred to impose a very repressive state of health emergency during the first lockdown.

The aforementioned struggles did not lead to a decisive victory against Macron and the capitalists, even though the government was forced to back down temporarily on the pensions attack. And on the political front, no party or political force has mobilised a coordinated opposition of workers and the general population against these policies.

Only France Insoumise (FI), with its 17 deputies (MPs) in the National Assembly, and its leader, Jean-Luc Mlenchon, has represented a consistent opposition to Macron.

Macron officially announced his candidacy for the presidency at the end of February, just six weeks before the first round of the election, which will be on 10 April. The war in Ukraine serves as a justification for not campaigning and for saying his re-election is a foregone conclusion.

On 18 March, Macron announced his fighting programme for the interests of the bosses! He wants later retirement at 65, compulsory work for those receiving minimum social benefits, dismantling the national education system by attacking the status of teachers and then others, a refocusing on leading sectors of energy supply (nuclear), and so forth. The same programme as the traditional right!

The capitalists thus have in Macron the political representative of their class and intend to keep him for another five years. The bourgeois (capitalist) parties, initially of the classical right, like Sarkozys Les Rpublicains or the bourgeoisified Socialist Party (SP) of Franois Hollande and Anne Hidalgo, have collapsed for the moment. Indeed, little or nothing in their programme distinguishes them from Macron and his policies.

From the point of view of the election itself, Macron is hoping for a second round with Marine Le Pen, which would see him elected hands down. There is little chance that Le Pens RN (National Rally, previously the National Front) can win. Its profile has not been able to develop over the last five years.

The nationalist right and the far-right have dominated the beginning of the election with a virulent anti-immigration campaign. But rising prices and the cost of living came back to the centre of the debate. The social issues remain central.

The right and the far-right are in crisis and are regrouping around Eric Zemmour, the racist, sexist, ultra-free-market politician. Le Pen is on the other wing, along with the Republicans.

The challenge is for workers and young people, who are most aware of the issues, to be able to express their own views as clearly as possible. We must have a vote against Macron and the capitalists, the right and the far-right, but also a vote that breaks with all the policies carried out on behalf of the capitalists by the PS and the Greens in government and in the local regions and departments.

On the political left, Jean-Luc Mlenchon of France Insoumise-Union Populaire is standing again. In the first round of the 2017 presidential election he won 19.6% of the vote, only narrowly failing to contest the second round against Macron.

Mlenchon is the only candidate capable of playing a central role in reaching those among the working classes who want to fight Macron, but also the growing number of voter abstainers.

On the basis of his Common Future programme, Mlenchon has succeeded in bringing together activists from social movements, organisations and parties in a grouping called The Popular Union (Gauche Rvolutionnaire Revolutionary Left is part of the Parliament of the Peoples Union and has been building France Insoumise since 2017).

Registering between 13% and 15% in the polls, Mlenchon is in third spot, just behind Le Pen, and Macron, who is leading. Mlenchon is now ahead of Zemmour, who is losing points, and Valrie Pcresse of the right-wing Republicans. He leaves the Green and PS candidates far behind.

The PCF (French Communist Party), unfortunately, has chosen to go it alone this time, essentially to continue to exist, and its candidate is polling around 4% to 5%.

This is not insignificant, and shows the potential of a single FI-PCF candidate. The PS, on the other hand, is hitting an all-time low of 2%-3%, at the same level as the NPA (New Anticapitalist Party) of Philippe Poutou and Olivier Besancenot, who are also running, as well as Lutte Ouvrire (Workers Struggle).

Mlenchons programme calls for: freezing prices, expanding public services, creating real jobs and raising wages. These are the crucial pillars of the programme.

The only force capable of carrying out these measures is the working class through the establishment of a workers government. But Common Future only goes halfway. It fails to deal with how to change society and end capitalism, and why we have to fight for a socialist society.

For these reasons, Gauche Rvolutionnaires campaign to support the candidacy of Mlenchon, in France Insoumise, and also with our own material, seeks to go further on certain demands by fighting for: the state monopoly of public health services, renationalisation under workers control; decent jobs for all; an increase in the minimum wage; pensions and wages; retirement at 60; increased resources for public services; the renationalisation of Energie de France and Engie; and of the railways.

We also have disagreements, such as on international issues, and the illusions that Mlenchon has in international capitalist institutions, and on a supposedly historic role for France abroad.

In the streets, in the door-to-door campaigns, and in the workplaces, campaigning for Mlenchon largely facilitates political discussion around the ways of combating the capitalists. These also provide the basis for discussion about the role that a genuine mass workers party for socialism could have in the next period.

As Mlenchons latest poster says, another world is possible! We say yes, a socialist world is necessary!

The Committee for a Workers International (CWI) is the international socialist organisation which the Socialist Party is affiliated to. The CWI is organised in many countries. We work to unite the working class and oppressed peoples against capitalism, and to fight for a socialist world.

socialistworld.net

See original here:
French presidential election: Five more years of Macron? - Socialist Party

In March 2009, one of the e-mail forwards of the moment was the piece quoted below. It appeared variously titled Excellent Lesson in Economics, Great Experiment, Experiment in Socialism, Texas Professor, A Simple Analogy, A Great Lesson on Socialism, Economics 101, Something for Nothing?, A Perfect Analogy, Simple Economics and Capitalism vs Socialism:

An economics professor at Texas Tech said he had never failed a single student before but had, once, failed an entire class. The class had insisted that socialism worked and that no one would be poor and no one would be rich, a great equalizer. The professor then said ok, we will have an experiment in this class on socialism. All grades would be averaged and everyone would receive the same grade so no one would fail and no one would receive an A.

After the first test the grades were averaged and everyone got a B. The students who studied hard were upset and the students who studied little were happy. But, as the second test rolled around, the students who studied little had studied even less and the ones who studied hard decided they wanted a free ride too; so they studied little

The second Test average was a D! No one was happy. When the 3rd test rolled around the average was an F. The scores never increased as bickering, blame, name calling all resulted in hard feelings and no one would study for anyone else. All failed to their great surprise and the professor told them that socialism would ultimately fail because the harder to succeed the greater the reward but when a government takes all the reward away; no one will try or succeed.

CLASSROOM SOCIALISM

Is this man truly a genius?

An economics professor at a local college made a statement that he had never failed a single student before but had recently failed an entire class. That class had insisted that Obamas socialism worked and that no one would be poor and no one would be rich, a great equalizer.

The professor then said, OK, we will have an experiment in this class on Obamas plan. All grades will be averaged and everyone will receive the same grade so no one will fail and no one will receive an A . (substituting grades for dollars something closer to home and more readily understood by all).

After the first test, the grades were averaged and everyone got a B. The students who studied hard were upset and the students who studied little were happy.

As the second test rolled around, the students who studied little had studied even less and the ones who studied hard decided they wanted a free ride too so they studied little. The second test average was a D! No one was happy.

When the 3rd test rolled around, the new average was an F.

As the tests proceeded, the scores never increased as bickering, blame and name-calling all resulted in hard feelings and no one would study for the benefit of anyone else.

To their great surprise, ALL FAILED and the professor told them that socialism would also ultimately fail because when the reward is great, the effort to succeed is great, but when government takes all the reward away, no one will try or want to succeed.

Human nature will always cause socialisms style of government to fail because the world has producers and non-producers (makers and takers).

It could not be any simpler than that.

There is indeed a real school named Texas Tech in Lubbock, Texas, but that school is merely one of many settings used for this fictional illustrative tale meant to explain the tellers belief that socialism does not work. (Another example of an illustrative tale used to explain what might otherwise be a difficult concept to grasp is the How Taxes Work item that was widely circulated in 2002.)

Weve encountered other pieces that expressed the same concept as this one in a similar setting, such as the following:

A young woman was about to finish her first year of college. Like so many others her age, she considered herself to be a very liberal Democrat, and was very much in favor of the redistribution of wealth. She was deeply ashamed that her father was a rather staunch Republican, a feeling she openly expressed. Based on the lectures that she had participated in, and the occasional chat with a professor, she felt that her father had for years harbored an evil, selfish desire to keep what he thought should be his.

One day she was challenging her father on his opposition to higher taxes on the rich and the addition of more government welfare programs. The self-professed objectivity proclaimed by her professors had to be the truth and she indicated so to her father. He responded by asking how she was doing in school.

Taken aback, she answered rather haughtily that she had a 4.0 GPA, and let him know that it was tough to maintain, insisting that she was taking a very difficult course load and was constantly studying, which left her no time to go out and party like other people she knew. She didnt even have time for a boyfriend, and didnt really have many college friends because she spent all her time studying.

Her father listened and then asked, How is your friend Audrey doing? She replied, Audrey is barely getting by. All she takes are easy classes, she never studies, and she barely has a 2.0 GPA. She is so popular on campus; college for her is a blast. Shes always invited to all the parties, and lots of times she doesnt even show up for classes because shes too hung over.

Her wise father asked his daughter, Why dont you go to the Deans office and ask him to deduct a 1.0 off your GPA and give it to your friend who only has a 2.0. That way you will both have a 3.0 GPA and certainly that would be a fair and equal distribution of GPA.

The daughter, visibly shocked by her fathers suggestion, angrily fired back, That wouldnt be fair! I have worked really hard for my grades! Ive invested a lot of time, and a lot of hard work! Audrey has done next to nothing toward her degree. She played while I worked my tail off!

The father slowly smiled, winked and said gently, Welcome to the Republican party.

Regardless of its literal truthfulness, the example proffered here has some significant flaws as an object lesson in the supposed perils of socialism:

1) The concept it criticizes distribution shared equally by everyone, regardless of their efforts is far more an expression of communism than of socialism (the latter being a system that advocates social ownership of production and distribution, but does not eliminate either free-market capitalism or rewards for individual effort and innovation).

2) It attempts to compare a system for the equitable distribution of resources across an entire population with a system intended to measure individual achievement. This is as nonsensical as positing that under a socialized health care system, the heart rates, blood pressures, weights, and other vital statistics of patients would all be averaged together rather than being individually charted and treated.

View original post here:
Did a Professor Use Grade Averaging to Teach About Socialism?