Posted 3:12 PM by Ken

That same Ramblas

This weekend I'm going to Barcelona to take part in Stitch and Split, a cultural event whose agenda is as follows (it says here)

Stitch and Split explores the joint, the interstices, between these two registers which might be considered opposed, science and fiction, and their reciprocal contamination. Science fiction as a zone of tension that amalgamates imaginary and real, utopia and dystopia, flesh and machine; the use of intrusion, incongruity and discrepancy as a system of resistance and a tool for questioning the present. Science fiction is not an oracle that can predict the future more or less exactly, but a critical, inventive, cross-genre/gender and cross-disciplinary discourse on the body, identity and contemporary territories.

I think I know what they mean.

I've been in Barcelona before, but only for a day. Cap Nau, Parc Gaudi, Sagrado Familia, the Ramblas. An open-top bus tour around the old quarter. Readers of Orwell et al will understand why I felt a slight shiver seeing a big old building with the chiselled inscription Telefonica.

I've added a few links in my sidebar to various leftist sites. (Mostly Trotskyist in origin - links to offshoots of the previous three internationals will follow shortly.) No blanket endorsement implied. A little digging around any of these sites will turn up interesting and useful stuff. Caveat lector.

Also, I've added an Atom site feed to the sidebar. Lots of people have asked me to do this. Most of them have explained to me why it's important. If I've missed out something, please let me know.

Posted 10:13 PM by Ken

Israel/Palestine

Ethnic Cleansing or The One-State Solution? If you have contempt for your brother, it isn’t acceptable to cut your mother in two.



Socialism on One Planet

Some of my comrades and friends call this guy a Stalinist. He sure doesn't sound like one:

I must admit that Marx was right when he sketched out the idea that only when a truly rational, just and equitable social regime exists on this earth, will humankind have left prehistory behind. If the whole development of human society has inevitably been chaotic, disorderly, unpredictable, extremely cruel and unjust, the struggle to create a different and truly rational world, worthy of our species’ intelligence is, at this moment in its history, which bears no resemblance to any of humanity’s previous stages, something that was not possible or even imaginable in other circumstances: an attempt by human beings to plan their own destiny for the first time.

Dreaming of impossible things is called utopia; struggling for goals that cannot only be reached but which are essential if the species is to survive, is called realism. It would be wrong to assume that such an aim would be motivated by ideology alone. We are talking about something that goes beyond the noble and completely justifiable wishes for justice, beyond the deep desire that all human beings can live a free and decent life: we are talking about the survival of the species.

[...]

A summary of all that I have said shows my profound conviction that our species, and with it each one of our peoples, are at a turning point in their history: the course of events must change or else our species shall not survive. There is no other planet we can move to. There is no atmosphere, no air and no water on Mars, neither is there any transportation for us to emigrate there en masse.

Either we save this what we have, or many millions of years will have to go by before another intelligent species arises that can start all over again the adventure we have gone through. Pope John Paul II has already explained that the theory of evolution is not irreconcilable with the creation doctrine.

Speech given by Dr. Fidel Castro Ruz, president of the Republic of Cuba, at the Karl Marx Theater on January 3, 2004.

Posted 1:41 PM by Ken

Boldly Going

I have an article on space in this weekend's Sunday Herald.

Posted 6:41 PM by Ken

Paella-eating surrender monkeys, not

Juan Cole, Jim Lobe and Julian Sanchez skewer the punditry that claims al-Qaeda won the Spanish elections. Elsewhere, Alan Woods rather long-windedly describes the fast turn-around in 'the mood of the masses' last weekend.

A tactical line for the antiwar movement might be 'Turn the imperialist war into a war against terrorism'. We could challenge the governments along the lines of: I mean come on guys, when it comes to fighting terrorism you've got just about everyone on your side. You've got the Spanish Socialists, you've got the Russkis and the Red Chinese, you've got Fidel Castro, you've got for heaven's sake the Vietcong rooting for you. All you haven't got is the oil majors and the spooks, who have other priorities, like invading oily places and keeping some muj and contras on the payroll. And what goes into the pipeline at one place comes out of it somewhere else. The script for turning that into practical policies, T-shirts, soundbites and placards - open the books, close the camps, shut the pipeline, stop the blowback - more or less writes itself.

Doesn't it?

Posted 7:24 PM by Ken

3/11 again

Well, it looks like Al-Qaeda did it. This doesn't detract from the main point of the post and link below. Blaming ETA, or some splinter of it, was unfortunately not implausible. It was also very much in the interests of the outgoing Aznar government. But the rapid arrests of Al-Qaeda suspects, and other mounting evidence, after the government's insistence, in the teeth of their own and other intelligence agencies that the atrocity was the work of ETA and not Al-Qaeda has resulted in a massive victory for the PSOE, a party which like 90% of the country's population opposed the war on Iraq.

Posted 7:50 PM by Ken

3/11

As you no doubt know by now there has been an attack (train bombing) on
Madrid with 190 known fatalities so far. At the moment the Spanish government is saying 'ETA' and everyone else is asking 'Al-Qaeda?' It makes a practical difference, yes, but ETA has become so nihilistic and pointless it might as well be part of Al-Qaeda already.

Update 12 March

Some sombre comments from Alan Woods, a British Marxist:

If ETA is in fact responsible, it shows weakness not strength. ETA is isolated and desperate. Last year 300 ETA suspects were arrested. The organization is finding it difficult to get new recruits. The ones arrested in the van incident were novices. There are serious differences within ETA and Batasuna. Many people are questioning the methods of individual terror that have been carried on for decades without bringing the desired results.

The questioning is justified. Members of Batasuna should ask themselves who gains from this? The answer is clear: only the extreme right wing, the police and the state. Spain is on the eve of a general election in which Batasuna for the first time will be barred. Maybe the authors of the bombing imagined they were striking a blow against the PP. In fact, the opposite is the case.

The secretary general of the separatist Catalan ERC, Josep Lluis Carod-Rovira, calls for dialogue with ETA to finish with "this barbarism". This is just stupid. The only dialogue the actions of ETA will bring about is the dialogue of bullets, fists and truncheons. After the atrocity, the Spanish minister of the interior, Angel Acebes, warned that those responsible would "pay dearly for it". We have no reason to disbelieve him.

France has already backed the campaign against ETA, and this has caused the organization a lot of trouble. France immediately declared a further tightening of border controls after the Madrid atrocity. The French interior minister Nicolas Sarkozy has sent a telegram to his Spanish counterpart offering police help. The noose will be tightened.

And what will the consequences be for the Basque Country? By their actions the terrorists have united the people of Spain against them. Hearts will be hardened. The most reactionary wing of the Spanish bourgeoisie will be strengthened. There can be no talk of negotiations. The Basque prisoners will continue to languish in prison.

The right wing Popular Party immediately suspended the election campaign. The PP is now certain to win a sweeping victory at the polls. The PP has adopted a tough line with ETA and the Basque nationalists. They will now be encouraged to increase repression even more. Only this week the UN produced a report denouncing cases of torture and beatings of Basque suspects in Spanish prisons. The Spanish state will now be able to continue these methods and clamp down on democratic rights with complete impunity. This will create a climate in which violence, madness and murder can flourish. In what way this could help the cause of the Basque people nobody can say.

[...]

Marxism is opposed to individual terrorism. But the reason for our opposition has nothing to do with the hypocrisy of the bourgeois politicians who are not averse to violence and bloodshed when it suits them. We oppose individual terrorism because it is counterproductive and always produces results that are diametrically opposed to those intended.

Russian Marxism was born in struggle against individual terrorism. But compared to the modern breed of terrorist the old Russian terrorists were like saints. They only killed known torturers, police chiefs and tsars. Quite often they would hand themselves over to the police after a terrorist act. The modern form of terrorism that kills ordinary people indiscriminately is an abomination that contains not a single atom of progressive content.

Posted 9:34 PM by Ken

Back by popular demand

Several correspondents have pointed out that the Fortean Times article on Trots in Space is now online. Its subject, Juan Posadas, was nothing like Nahuel Moreno (see below). Apart from being a Latin American Trotskyist who wrote about space travel, that is. Moreno was ... controversial. Posadas was mad.

Note: the sidebar article, Posadism for Beginners is riddled with errors which it would be tedious to nitpick.