LENIN'S TOMB

Thursday, July 16, 2009

Statement against the new wave of repression in Iran posted by lenin

The Revolutionary Flowerpot Society has a translated statement (original here) from Iranian leftists and former political prisoners against the state's latest crackdown:

The act of millions of demonstrators who took to the streets recently in most cities in Iran was a huge show of power by a people challenging the injustice, deceit and the constant oppression of this regime. A challenge that was answered by the exercise of violence by the anti-democratic system of the Islamic Republic and its security forces. Up to now, we have had definite reports of tens of deaths and hundreds of injured. Available reports tell of thousands of detained or disappeared among the activists and dissidents against the regime. Meanwhile, the university dormitories have been among the first targets of the forces of oppression, leading to tens of deaths and innumerable arrests of students. The widespread wave of nightly raids of and arrests in the homes of the youth, journalists and students, and the disappearance of others remind us of the fear and the terror during the 1980s. The masses of the detained, in addition to being sent to known prisons such as Evin or Gohardasht or ... are being sent to military bases, Basij offices and unknown locations...

Labels: ahmadinejad, iran, mousavi, repression, state

Also appearing posted by lenin

I will be giving a talk on my book, The Liberal Defence of Murder, tonight. It is hosted by the Stop the War Coalition, and will take place at the Carr's Lane church centre, Birmingham, from 7.30pm. I will be doing an extra long talk, because I know for a fact that there's nothing else going on in Brum. (Kidding.)

Labels: events, the complete and utter works of richard seymour, the liberal defense of murder

Wednesday, July 15, 2009

That Honduras coup posted by lenin

In the past, if a Central American military deposed a left-wing government, Bush would have declared that he was happy to see democracy prevail. These days, the State Department bristles that it is shocked - shocked - by the affront to a sovereign country's constitution. One way to determine whether the US ruling class actually approves of the coup, though, is to consult its media. Here's one index of the corporate media's view of the coup:

Did a CID-Gallup poll last week indicate that a plurality of Hondurans support the military coup against democratically elected President Zelaya? Yes, according to the Washington Post [July 9], the Wall Street Journal [July 10], the Christian Science Monitor [July 11], and Reuters [July 9], which all reported that the poll showed 41% in favor of the coup, with only 28% opposed.

But in fact the poll showed that 46% -- a plurality -- were *opposed* to the coup, according to the New York Times [July 10], the Associated Press [July 11] and the president of CID-Gallup, in an interview with Voice of America on July 9.

As of this writing -- Sunday evening, 5:30 pm Eastern time -- none of the outlets which reported the poll incorrectly had corrected their earlier, inaccurate, reports.

Another way to study this is to determine whether the US government actually approved of the coup, despite its disavowals. Eva Golinger has some thoughts:

• The Department of State had prior knowledge of the coup.

• The Department of State and the US Congress funded and advised the actors and organizations in Honduras that participated in the coup.

• The Pentagon trained, schooled, commanded, funded and armed the Honduran armed forces that perpetrated the coup and that continue to repress the people of Honduras by force.

• The US military presence in Honduras, that occupies the Soto Cano (Palmerola) military base, authorized the coup d’etat through its tacit complicity and refusal to withdraw its support of the Honduran military involved in the coup.

• The US Ambassador in Tegucigalpa, Hugo Llorens, coordinated the removal from power of President Manuel Zelaya, together with Assistant Secretary of State Thomas Shannon y John Negroponte, who presently works as an advisor to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

• From the first day the coup occurred, Washington has referred to “both parties” involved and the necessity for “dialogue” to restore constitutional order, legitimizing the coup leaders by regarding them as equal players instead of criminal violators of human rights and democratic principles.

• The Department of State has refused to legally classify the events in Honduras as a “coup d’etat”, nor has it suspended or frozen its economic aid or commerce to Honduras, and has taken no measures to effectively pressure the de facto regime.

• Washington manipulated the Organization of American States (OAS) in order to buy time, therefore allowing the coup regime to consolidate and weaken the possibility of President Zelaya’s immediate return to power, as part of a strategy still in place that simply seeks to legitimate the de facto regime and wear down the Honduran people that still resist the coup.

• Secretary of State Clinton and her spokesmen stopped speaking of President Zelaya’s return to power after they designated Costa Rican president Oscar Arias as the “mediator” between the coup regime and the constitutional government; and now the State Department refers to the dictator that illegally took power during the coup, Roberto Micheletti, as the “interim caretaker president”.

• The strategy of “negotiating” with the coup regime was imposed by the Obama administration as a way of discrediting President Zelaya – blaming him for provoking the coup – and legitimizing the coup leaders.

• Members of the US Congress – democrats and republicans – organized a visit of representatives from the coup regime in Honduras to Washington, receiving them with honors in different arenas in the US capital.

• Despite the fact that originally it was Republican Senator John McCain who coordinated the visit of the coup regime representatives to Washington through a lobby firm connected to his office, The Cormac Group, now, the illegal regime is being representated by top notch lobbyist and Clinton attorney Lanny Davis, who is using his pull and influence in Washington to achieve overall acceptance – cross party lines – of the coup regime in Honduras.

• Otto Reich and a Venezuelan named Robert Carmona-Borjas, known for his role as attorney for the dictator Pedro Carmona during the April 2002 coup d’etat in Venezuela, aided in preparing the groundwork for the coup against President Zelaya in Honduras.

• The team designated from Washigton to design and help prepare the coup in Honduras also included a group of US ambassadors recently named in Central America, experts in destabilizing efforts against the Cuban revolution, and Adolfo Franco, ex administrator for USAID’s Cuba “transition to democracy” program.

Labels: chavez, coup, honduras, latin america, US imperialism, zeyala

Tuesday, July 14, 2009

Proposal for the refoundation of the Committee of Public Safety posted by lenin

How fitting, on Bastille day, to find oneself moved to astonishment and laughter at a particularly puerile BBC docu-drama on Robespierre and the French revolutionary terror. I was actually planning on writing a brief historical post on the topic of the French Revolution, but it will take a while for this drivel to wash out of my system so that I can keep a level head. Simon Schama - The Utterly Preposterous Simon Schama, to give him his full title - is evidently the éminence grise of the programme, the authoritative defender of Anglo-Saxon liberty. He relentlessly vulgarises every single important argument, hammers away with his trivial psychologisms and thoughtless moralising. I find him absolutely detestable. A few other passable writers are allowed to talk, but Schama usually gets a right of reply if they do not agree with him (which they usually do anyway). The only other vaguely authoritative voices are those of the revisionist historian David Andress, and Slavoj Zizek.

Zizek is the only person on the show who makes, or is allowed to make, any effort to explicitly defend the revolution on political grounds. But he is not an historian, just someone who has read and written an introduction to some of Robespierre's writings, and he is obviously there to be lampooned as just the sort of trendy intellectual whose dangerous abstractions could lead to the gulag. Between the talking heads, there is plenty of opportunity for caricature as various old-hand jobbing actors play out the roles of Robespierre, Saint Just, Carnot, Collot, etc. (They actually get 'Spider' from Coronation Street to play Collot, I think). And beyond that, there are scenes from twentieth century revolutions from Russia 1917 to Iran 1979, all of them apparently chilling events, overlaid with this abysmal musical refrain that I think is taken from Hans Zimmer's sountrack to The Thin Red Line. All of which banality is intended to corroborate the bare thesis that the revolution was the result of an excess of idealism that could not but lead to tyranny. The alternative explanations of the Terror - a complex, multi-faceted, and multi-agent response to external and internal threats - are glancingly dealt with. How many more times do we have to be subjected to this mediocre soap plot?

Schama himself is of course one of the primary authors of that narrative, having delivered himself of the verdict some two decades ago that the Revolution was nothing other than tyranny and collective terror: "violence was the Revolution itself". Like Pierre Chaunu, Stephane Courteois and François Furet, he insistently holds the French revolutionaries responsible for the gulag, supposedly anticipated in the 'genocide' in the Vendée (actually, as Arno Mayer has argued, the majority of those killed in the Vendée were effectively soldiers engaged in a military reaction against the Revolution). Like Furet, Popper and Talmon, it is to the excess of Rousseauian idealism and its application that he attributes the Terror, particularly to his idea of a 'General Will'. But the 'General Will', however problematic the idea may be, is hardly the blueprint for 'totalitarianism' that paranoid liberals would have you believe. In essence, it is nothing more than the idea that people should be bound by the collectively agreed laws that they have participated in making, even if they didn't agree with them, and that this is essential to prevent them from being subject to someone else's 'individual will'. Just because it doesn't affirm liberal atomism doesn't make it the basis for the evils of Stalinism, Nazism, the Khmer Rouge, etc. As Enzo Traverso has pointed out, such an ideocratic approach to the revolution both restores counterrevolutionary doctrine to mainstream wisdom in the guise of 'antitotalitarianism', and allows the Right to avoid historical analysis of the circumstances of the revolution.

All of this raises a question. The French Revolution was supposedly a heroic bourgeois revolution: the most complete, the most conscious, the most thoroughgoing attempt to destroy feudalism and create a modern, bourgeois society - or 'an independent centre of capital accumulation', as one might more drily and accurately put it. Yet, the bourgeoisie of today seems to loathe it. They want nothing to do with it. Their reasons for doing so are not really plausible. Oh yes, the Terror, the Terror... I don't see these people denouncing the American Revolution, (in fact, Schama praises it as the most fitting alternative) for all that many of the revolutionaries were authentic genocidaires and slave masters. Or is it only terror if white reactionaries are its subjects? And might we not also say a word or two about the terror of the Directory, practised on behalf of property, beyond the cliched 'irony' that the revolution was eaten by its own children? Or the terror of the counterrevolutionaries who, as Mayer points out, were not slackers in the business of indiscriminate murder and rape? No. I can't help feeling that what they despise, ostentatiously, is democracy. It is above all the very idea of such direct democracy, of the iruption of the masses and the sans-culottes (the real villains of the docu-drama) into the political sphere, that is scandalous.

Labels: 'antitotalitarianism', 'totalitarianism', france, french revolution, history, revisionism, simon schama, zizek

Exploding the system posted by lenin

Ahem:

Workers at collapsed French car parts maker New Fabris threatened on Sunday to blow up their factory if they did not receive payouts by July 31 from auto groups Renault and Peugeot to compensate for their lost jobs.
New Fabris was declared in liquidation in April, so the workers stand to get no redundancy money, although they are entitled to draw state unemployment benefit.

They want Renault SA (RENA.PA) and PSA Peugeot Citroen (PEUP.PA) to pay 30,000 euros ($41,800) for each of the 336 staff at the factory, or some 10 million euros in total, in return for its remaining stocks of equipment and machinery.

"The bottles of gas have already been placed at various parts of the factory and are connected with each other," CGT trades union official Guy Eyermann told France Info radio.

"If Renault and PSA refuse to give us that money it could blow up before the end of the month," he added.

Labels: france, militancy, recession, strike, working class

Sunday, July 12, 2009

Segregation can, apparently, be fun. posted by lenin

Labels: gaza, imperial ideology, Israel, palestine, racism, segregation, west bank, zionism

Friday, July 10, 2009

Unionising call centres posted by lenin

I spent about six years working in call centres, and I just say a bit about what it is like, for those of you who have avoided it. All of the call centres I worked in employed people on a casual, part-time and temporary basis. All of them had their share of bullying, vindictive and harrassing supervisors. Supervisors were empowered to sack one at a moment's notice, and didn't require a particularly good excuse. Actually, they could just stop booking you for shifts if they didn't like you for some reason. Pay was always low, about as close to minimum wage as they could get away with. Lunch or dinner breaks were usually unpaid. Toilet breaks are timed, and more than five minutes away from one's computer might be penalised. And it's miserable. Most call centres are situated in relatively inexpensive office space out in the sticks - bleak looking industrial wastelands with few amenities nearby.

The literature from 'work and psychology' journals characterises call centre work as 'emotional labour', which is accurate. After eight hours on the phone, pretending to listen to and sympathise with members of the public, while at the same time conforming closely to a pre-scripted routine, you will feel drained. Despite the way management tend to treat staff as expendable, it is actually a highly skilled and demanding kind of labour. In my experience, this would come out when experienced staff members were consulted for their suggestions as to how a particular project might work: there was a wealth of accumulated wisdom and experience that management simply wouldn't have access to otherwise. But partly because workers are so lightly hired and fired, the work is also heavily micro-managed by supervisors, who listen in to about 12% of calls on average. Among the various points a worker is likely to be assessed for is fidelity to a script that is quite often stupidly worded and unworkable, written as it usually is by people who spend no time on the 'phones. Since your job is to get people to stay on the phone and either do a survey, or divulge some information, or buy something, the natural temptation is to chuck the script - people hate it when they think you're just reading a script at them. But persistent failure to read the lines out is a disciplinary issue. Lots of people who can't stand this idiocy just walk out mid-shift, and never show their faces again.

It isn't easy to unionise call centres. To get recognition, you need a vote of all employees. But there's a high turnover of staff, and a large number of people who remain formally on the books long after they have ceased to work shifts. On top of that, staff are disproportionately young, and are perhaps not as assertive as they need to be. And most people have other things they're moving on to - they don't see it as a permanent job, and thus may be reluctant to get involved in lengthy battles with management, especially if it's so easy to fire them. That said, however, I am encouraged by this series of articles which suggests that things are changing. It would be an enormously important development if this happened, because the those most exploited in the private sector have tended to be those least able to respond to their situation. It would potentially drive up incomes the lowest paid jobs and improve the bargaining power of an undervalued layer of workers.

Labels: call centre, exploitation, low pay, trade unions, working class

Thursday, July 09, 2009

Consequences posted by lenin

You know how we've been told that the constant vilification of the hijab and women who wear it has something to do with liberating women? Yeah:

It was while Marwa el-Sherbini was in the dock recalling how the accused had insulted her for wearing the hijab after she asked him to let her son sit on a swing last summer, that the very same man strode across the Dresden courtroom and plunged a knife into her 18 times.
Her three-year-old son Mustafa was forced to watch as his mother slumped to the courtroom floor.
Even her husband Elvi Ali Okaz could do nothing as the 28-year-old Russian stock controller who was being sued for insult and abuse took the life of his pregnant wife. As Okaz ran to save her, he too was brought down, shot by a police officer who mistook him for the attacker. He is now in intensive care in a Dresden hospital.
...
Unemployed Alex W. from Perm in Russia was found guilty last November of insulting and abusing Sherbini, screaming "terrorist" and "Islamist whore" at her, during the Dresden park encounter. He was fined ¤780 but had appealed the verdict, which is why he and Sherbini appeared face to face in court again.
Even though he had made his anti-Muslim sentiments clear, there was no heightened security and questions remain as to why he was allowed to bring a knife into the courtroom.

Labels: 'secularism', hijab, islam, islamophobia, misogyny, racism, religion, women