War Were Declared

I’ll leave the job of explaining the escalation of the new Cold War to the post at Lenin’s Tomb.  All I’m going to say is that the American missiles in European bases, pointing at Russia as the only way to protect us from Iran, or something, have been meeting with resistance.  It’s been a focus for antiwar demonstrations across Eastern Europe over the past few years.  The militarisation of Europe was also a key theme in the Irish opposition to the Lisbon Treaty, along with the anti-neoliberalism that it had in common with the non à la Constitution three years earlier.  And, speaking of the French, I’ve not been following it that closely but surely the Sarkozy presidency and its rapprochement to NATO has been stirring up a good bit of anger there too.

That’s why the celebrations of NATO’s 60th birthday next year will be the subjet of a demonstration in Strasbourg.  Campaigners from around Europe will be organising coaches down.  I don’t have dates or details yet, but keep it in mind when you’re planning next year’s holidays.

The left does have solutions to the credit crunch

I got a letter published in today’s Guardian.

Aditya Chakrabortty (Capitalism lies in shambles, and the left has gone awol, August 7) concludes from the silence of “progressive” thinktanks that the left has no response to the credit crunch. Perhaps he should revise his definition of the left beyond the circle of policy advisers struggling to hold up the left leg of New Labour’s triangulation.

He could include those workers on picket lines against the pay freeze, in Argos, at Shell, and across the public sector. He could mention the thousands who attended the Marxism festival to discuss capitalism and its resistance, or who agitate at the climate camp against the environmental destruction driven by capitalist activity. And there are more radical policies than those of the Liberal Democrats coming from parties like the Left Alternative and Solidarity in Scotland. It might also be worth reading the People Before Profit charter, and joining the ranks of its signatories.

Perhaps it is true that “the ultimate breakdown of financial capitalism” leaves New Labour thinktanks at a loss, but Marxist analysis remains as useful as ever in the face of the credit crunch. We can see that the rise of financial capitalism was rooted in the needs of productive capitalism; the only way to square the circle of low wages and high consumer demand. It’s a corollary of the neoliberal attack on the working class and its solution is just as simple: we need a strong working-class movement to fight and to reverse real wage cuts and to fight the exploitive system that implemented them.

Perhaps the left that Chakrabortty knows is incapable of relating to this, but that is not the only left.