What made these men come to such a conclusion? That a left-wing, life-long socialist and anti-war activist had become a puppet for a Russian neo-liberal nationalist oligarch? The proposition is absurd, and demonstrably untrue. Nevertheless, the framing of Clare Daly in the EU elections by the media and political establishment is a masterclass in using innuendo as disinformation in order to influence an election.

The primary basis for the claim came from media reports that Daly and Wallace were two of 13 members of the EU Parliament to vote against a resolution to condemn the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

Except they didn’t.

Daly did condemn the invasion, and was as strong as anyone in their condemnation. Daly said in her explanation:

“I unequivocally supported the sections of the resolution which condemn Russia’s war of aggression and call on the Russian Federation to immediately terminate all military activities in Ukraine, unconditionally withdraw its forces, and fully respect Ukraine’s territorial integrity, sovereignty and independence. I express my undivided solidarity with the ordinary people of Ukraine and call for urgent diplomatic efforts to secure a ceasefire, for negotiations to end the conflict and the withdrawal of Russian military forces.

The decision by Russia to abandon diplomacy and invade Ukraine is contrary to international law. The sole responsibility for this is borne by President Vladimir Putin.”

Had the media wanted to, they could have used an alternative heading such as:

“Daly demands Russian withdrawal from Ukraine and respect territorial integrity”

This would have been accurate, far more accurate than the headlines used, but it didn’t fit the narrative.

With European Parliament resolutions, you have to vote on the entire proposal, and not single components like the simplistic statement presented. Journalists know that.

The resolution contained the condemnation of the invasion, which Daly and Wallace wholeheartedly agreed with, but went much further. It called, as Daly and Wallace explained, to:

• Accelerate provision of military equipment and weapons to Ukraine;
• Strengthen NATO’s forward presence in the region;
• Further increase defence spending;
• Activate European common and joint defence efforts “in order to strengthen the European pillar within NATO”; and, opportunistically,  
• Open the European energy market to fracked liquefied natural gas (LNG) from the United States.

Daly and Wallace’s political group, the Left, sought to remove these elements from the resolution, but the majority in the European Parliament fought to keep them. So the question shouldn’t have been, why did Daly and Wallace vote against these provisions, it should have been, why did all the other representatives of Ireland, a supposedly neutral country, vote in favour of these provisions that would increase the militarisation of Europe, lead to thousands of unneccessary deaths and damage the environment during a climate crisis? Needless to say, that question has never been asked.

The strategy was repeated ad nauseum over the following two years.

A resolution is moved in the EU Parliament which contains many worthwhile provisions, while opportunistically including provisions which would lead to more weapons; more war; more deaths; and more funding for the military at the expense of peace; whilst also defunding climate action, and then frame those who oppose militarisation as Putin stooges or Russian spies. The enthusiasm with which some commentators engaged in this behaviour is a worry, but the lack of journalists to call this out is a deeper worry.

When POLITICO published an article on the eve of the elections citing “Russia’s best friends in the EU Parliament” which included Daly and Wallace, this was regurgitated by Irish Times journalist Naomi O’Leary, among others.

The article read:

“With the EU election under way, POLITICO has looked at the data to find out which MEPs have been the Kremlin’s top allies in the European Parliament.”

Daly and Wallace were both included in the list. So, now, in this binary topsy-turvy post-truth world, if you condemn Russia, and call for peace and a negotiated settlement, you are one of the “Kremlin’s top allies”?

Notably, when the Pope made the same arguments, he was not branded a Putin sympathiser or a top “ally of the Kremlin”. But then, there was no need to brand him, he wasn’t running for election.

The article in POLITICO and the timing of the publication were a transparent attempt to influence EU elections by a news outlet with questionable credentials.

POLITICO is owned by a multi-billion German company named Axel Springer SE which, The Nation reported, received $7m funding from the CIA apparently “to influence the publisher to align its editorial content with American geopolitical interests.”

Axel Springer requires its European employees to sign a pledge in support of the trans-Atlantic alliance and Israel. Its chief executive, Mathias Döpfner, said support for Israel is “a German duty.”

He also said this support, and a free-market economy – “are like a constitution, they apply to every employee of our company.” Employees who disagreed “should not work for Axel Springer, very clearly.”

Axel Springer itself is majority owned by KKR & Co. Inc., an American private equity firm which has been named as the worst offender for investing in dirty energy according to a climate risk scorecard. It also, coincidently, has investments in the Port Arthur Liquified Natural Gas (LNG) project in Texas where a report claimed this investment “exemplify environmental racism and are actively harming low-income, Black, brown, and Indigenous people.”

I don’t remember any articles in the Irish Times warning of foreign interference from a CIA supported, Zionist, climate destroying corporation?

It makes sense that a media outlet with connections to the CIA, Israel, climate destruction and racism would want to damage the election campaign of a left-wing socialist firebrand like Clare Daly. She and Wallace scored the highest of all Irish MEPs for their climate voting. She has arguably been the most vocal MEP throughout Europe for peace and against militarisation. She’s used her enormous social media platform to condemn Israel for their ongoing genocide. What’s disappointing is how Irish commentators allowed themselves be vehicles for these attacks.

This week Justine McCarthy penned a piece in the Irish Times criticising Clare Daly for not engaging with the media after she was not elected. When the returning officer announced Daly’s elimination, the media scrambled seeking a comment:

“Ye’d no interest in talking to me for five years, so I’ve no interest in talking to ye.”

McCarthy sensationalised it:

“What shattered the air was her dog whistle to haters of the so-called ‘mainstream media’. The salivating in the trenches of the dark web was almost audible… ‘At a time when more journalists than ever are being killed around the world for doing their job…”

Seriously? Daly politely refusing to comment is a threat to the lives of journalists? Watch the clip and make up your own mind…

Clare Daly is maligned and misrepresented for more than two years, faces allegations of being a Putin puppet, is abused on the streets regularly, received death threats, and then politely declines an interview and she is the “reckless” one?

Justine might want to look closer to home at the implications of the irresponsible journalism emanating from the Irish Times if she wants to understand recklessness.

Earlier this year the Slovak Prime Minister Robert Fico was shot multiple times in an apparent assassination attempt. The gunman, Juraj Cintula, in his explanation for his attack said what he mainly wants is for “military assistance to be given to Ukraine,” and “regards the current government as a Judas toward the European Union,” so he “decided to act.”

The misrepresentation of Daly and Wallace in the Irish media as Putin supporters incited many people. It was lapped up by political opponents who used it as innuendo against Daly and Wallace, most famously by Barry Andrews when he said Clare Daly should worry more about Crumlin than the Kremlin. This, in turn, is used by the very same media outlets to justify and amplify insinuations that Daly is a Putin stooge.

This was further illustrated earlier this year when Fianna Fail issued a statement saying “two of our own Irish MEPs, Clare Daly and Mick Wallace, have consistently taken decisions that are straight from the Kremlin’s playbook.”

The statement then insinuates that because Daly and a Latvian MEP, Tatjana Ždanoka, who is under investigation for spying for Russia, have been in the same room together, that they must have a relationship. No evidence was provided, other than, “They voted the same way as her on several European Parliament votes related to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine nearly two years ago.”

The far right parties of the EU (ECR) voted overwhelmingly with Fianna Fail on the very same votes, but that doesn’t mean Barry Andrews is a fascist. In fact, of the 13 who voted against the resolution in March 2022, 9 were leftists, and almost all the far-right and fascist MEPs voted with Fianna Fail, Fine Gael and the Greens.

Sadly, rather than scrutinise these allegations properly, our media simply regurgitated nonsense from the press office of Fine Gael and Fianna Fail. It was taken to the extreme when, during the Ireland South RTE Prime Time debate, Miriam O’Callaghan had the audacity to ask Mick Wallace, “do you regret that you were perceived to support Russia”. A perception fertilised by the media, and then perfectly illustrated when Fine Gael’s John Mullins received free reign on the same debate to say “A vote for Mick Wallace is a vote for Russia”. The mediator didn’t feel it necessary to correct the record.

The failure of Daly to hold her seat was not down entirely to the smear campaign, but it was a factor. We should all be concerned about the state of our democracy, and our media. The Irish media has responsibilities beyond click-baiting the public in the interests of the global war machine and advertising revenue.

There’s a latin phrase, cui bono. Who benefits. The greatest beneficiaries of Daly and Wallace losing their seats are the military industrial complex, the genocidal regime in Israel, Ursula Von Der Leyen and the Irish political parties chomping at the bit to end Irish neutrality and align ourselves with NATO.

There’s another latin phrase, cui malo. Who loses. The greatest losers are the thousands of innocent people dying and being injured every single day in Ukraine, Gaza and through other preventable wars. It’s sad that so many actively participated, knowingly or unknowingly, in a witch hunt against one of the worlds most prominent peace campaigner. Nevertheless, LA LUCHA CONTINUA!

The post The dangerous framing of a Putin Puppet appeared first on LeftBloc.

Creidtear go forleathan i measc an phobail idirnáisiúnta go bhfuil Éire agus muintir na hÉireann ar na daoine is cineálta ar domhan agus go gcuireann siad fáilte roimh dhaoine go croíúil. Creidtear é seo de bharr streachailtí na hÉireann san am atá caite i gcoinne an choilíneachais Bhriotanaigh a nascann an tír le go leor tíortha eile a d’fhulaing faoi lámha na gcoilíneach chomh maith. Cé nach bhfuil ann ach mo thuairim féin, tá ardú tagtha ar idé-eolaíochtaí na heite deise in Éirinn, chomh maith le go leor tíortha eile, go háirithe i ndiaidh na paindéime. Is ábhar imní é seo, go háirithe mar go bhfuil na smaointe seo ag dul i méid i measc muintir óga.

Is minic a nascadh go leor daoine an Tuaisceart leis an seicteachas, agus tá sé sin fíor, ach tá níos mó ionsaithe ciníochais ann gach bliain sa tuaisceart ná an seicteachas. In 2021–22, tuairiscíodh 1,334 ionsaí ciníoch i dTuaisceart Éireann.  Sa bhliain chéanna, bhí 1,067 ionsaí seicteach ann.  Leis an phaindéim, bhí pléascadh de theoiricí comhcheilge ann, agus i gceartlár na dteoiricí comhcheilge sin, bhí go leor comhcheilge ciníochais. Sa dóigh seo, chuir an phaindéim dola ollmhór ar thuairimí polaitiúla daoine. Mar gheall ar an cheart a bheith ceannasach i bhformhór na bpobal ar líne, d’éirigh ciníochas níos déine faoi phróifílí ceilte.

Le déanaí, ní raibh a fhios ag aon duine cé chomh dona agus a bhí éifeacht na paindéime. Sa Phoblacht, bhí go leor agóide frith-inimirce le bliain anuas. Chuaigh roinnt grúpaí timpeall ar phobail na n-imirceach ag iarraidh imeaglú a dhéanamh orthu. Bhí go leor bratacha agus siombailí nua-Naitsíoch le feiceáil ar agóidí chomh maith. I mí na Bealtaine 2023, i mbliana, cuireadh bratacha an SS agus an Swastika taobh amuigh de mhosc in iarthar Bhéal Feirste.

In 2004, mar shampla, bhí reifreann a chuir an cheist ‘ar chóir saoránacht a bhronnadh ar gach leanbh a bheirtear in Éirinn fiú nuair nach as Éirinn na tuismitheoirí?’ Vótáil an tír in éadan an reifrinn. Ní raibh aon ghá leis an reifreann seo, ní raibh ann ach vótáil ar son ciníochais. Níl sé cothrom, ceart ná cóir.

Ar fud an domhain, tá méadú tagtha ar chreidimh na heite deise. San Iodáil, is iad páirtí na heite deise ‘Fratelli d’Italia’ an Rialtas agus bhí an Príomh-Aire ag moladh roinnt faisisteach Iodálach ó rialtas Mussolini. Tá fiú tíortha a bhfuil an chuma orthu go bhfuil comhionannas agus cearta níos fearr acu ná tíortha eile ag tiontú chuig an eite dheis. Bhain an eite dheis sa tSualainn an toghchán anuraidh le tacaíocht ó 3 pháirtí dheasacha; tá siad in aghaidh inimirce agus frith-ilchultúrthacht sa tSualainn.

Mar sin, cén fáth a bhfuil na tíortha seo, Éire san áireamh, ag tiontú ar dheis? Níl tú in ann teacht chun cinn na heite deise ailtéarnaí a mhíniú gan tagairt a dhéanamh don ardú atá tagtha ar neamhshlándáil eacnamaíoch agus éagothroime sa tír seo mar ní i bhfolús amháin a thagann smaointe agus fórsaí sóisialta chun cinn. Aon uair a tharlaíonn sé seo, úsáideann an rialtas ceap milleáin, agus cuirtear an locht i gcónaí ar mhionlaigh. Cuireadh an locht ar an ghéarchéim thithíochta sa Phoblacht maidir le hinimirce go hÉirinn, úsáideann siad an haischlib ‘Ireland is Full’ mar mhana. Cé go bhfuil an locht curtha ar na hinimircigh, seachas ar an rialtas, is é an rialtas atá ag cruthú na géarchéime tithíochta.

Fad is a leanann an streachailt in aghaidh an chiníochais sa tsochaí, caithfidh muid a admháil go bhfuil an ‘cath ar linne’ buaite ag an eite dheis. Tá go leor tionchair den eite dheis ar líne agus cruthaíonn siad ábhar cumhachtach le héifeacht mhór a imirt ar dhaoine óga. Mar shampla is iad Andrew Tate agus Jordan Peterson na daoine is mó míchlú. Is gnách leo díriú ar mhionlaigh eitneacha, ar imircigh, ar an bpobal LADTA+ chomh maith le scéalta frith-fheimineach. Tugann siad smaointe frithbhanda agus patrarcacha fosta d’fhir óga, agus bhí seó ag Peterson le déanaí san SSE Arena i mBéal Feirste.

Tá an ciníochas agus an eite dheis ag fás. Tá siad ag fás ní mar gheall ar inimirce ná saoirse na mban ach mar gheall ar éagothroime agus géarchéim eacnamaíoch.

Ní mór dúinn sochaí níos cothroime a thógáil do chách, mar má theipeann orainn réitigh réasúnacha a sholáthar ar ár bhfadhbanna, bainfidh an eite dheas  an ócáid le ‘réitigh’ neamhréasúnacha agus frithghníomhacha.

The post Ciníochas in Éirinn appeared first on LeftBloc.

Debates about the levels of “antisemitism on the left”, and the relationship between antisemitism and anti-Zionism, crop up on a regular basis. About as regularly as Israel bombing Gaza, or “mowing the lawn” as the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) describe the slaughter.

Following Jeremy Corbyn’s election to the Labour leadership in 2015, a narrative emerged about both him and his Labour Party being fundamentally antisemitic. This accelerated after Corbyn’s surprisingly good electoral performance in 2017.

It was absurd: Corbyn is one of the most anti-racist politicians in these islands over the last forty years. Further, complaints of antisemitism were directed against around 0.3 percent of Labour Party members. Some of the charges were dismissed immediately, some of the accused left, others were sent remainders regarding conduct. In July 2019, the party’s General secretary wrote in a published reply to the Deputy Leader that “antisemitism-related cases that have been taken through the stages of our disciplinary procedures since September 2015 relate to roughly 0.06% of the Party’s average membership during this time.”

Hardly a hotbed of antisemitism, but the absurdity of the narrative was successfully employed by the Israel Lobby and a compliant media that wanted Corbyn to fail. Some are trying to develop an equally absurd narrative: that of a leftist, secular “early years” Zionism, often Marxist in character and committed to Jews and Arabs working together in Palestine in pursuit of common goals, including that of proletarian revolution. An inclusive Zionism, corrupted later by war and right-wing influences.

This approach seeks to rehabilitate the essence of Zionism, arguing that the failure to take an appropriately nuanced view of the doctrine leads to a questioning of Israel’s legitimacy as a state, i.e. that it’s a settler colony formed by the ethnic cleansing of the Arabs. However, it is a settler colony, formed by ethnic cleansing of Arabs; and Zionism is a racist creed in concept, theory and practice.

Dear diary

In 1895, Alexander Herzl, the founder of modern, secular Zionism, wrote in his diary:

We must expropriate gently the private property on the state assigned to us. We shall try to spirit the penniless population across the border by procuring employment for it in the transit countries, while denying it employment in our country. The property owners will come over to our side. Both the process of expropriation and the removal of the poor must be carried out discretely and circumspectly. Let the owners of the immoveable property believe that they are cheating us, selling us things for more than they are worth. But we are not going to sell them anything back.

This was written a year before the publication of his Der Judenstaat pamphlet in 1896, that advocated the creation of a state of the Jews in Palestine. He may have advocated doing it “gently,” though denying the indigenous people employment opportunities doesn’t sound that gentle. But statement makes it very clear that Zionism was all about creating a predominately Jewish state via forcing out the Arab population, an inherently racist endeavour in the tradition of European colonialism. The Arabs are referred to here as “the penniless population.”

The reality of dispossession

At the time of the 1947 UN resolution that recommended partition, Arabs remained in possession of approximately 85% of the land while Jews owned less than 7%. Herzl’s plans did not come together. The population of Palestine at the end of 1946 was estimated to be almost 1,846,000, with 1,203,000 Arabs (65%) and 608,000 Jews (33%).

Despite these facts, the UN proposed that the Arab state be constituted from only 45.5% of the whole of Palestine, while the Jews would be awarded 55.5%. A total disgrace that the Palestinians and Arab states rightly rejected: this precipitated the ethnic cleansing of Arabs by the Jewish forces and the war that led to the formation of the state of Israel.

The Soviet Union supported the resolution as did a number of communist parties globally. Realpolitik drove the Soviet decision, they thought that Israel would be a good, anti-British ally. This did not work out well and the Soviets gradually moved to support the Arab camp. People on the left who cite Soviet support for the travesty of that UN resolution in order to defend the Zionist idea should remember two things: not everything that the Soviet Union did was right; and that it went against Lenin’s strong opposition to Zionism.

A land without a people, a people that mattered

As Nur Masalha writes in his Expulsion of the Palestinians: The Concept of “Transfer” in Zionist Political Thought, 1882-1948:

It should not be imagined that the concept of transfer was held only by maximalists or extremists within the Zionist movement. On the contrary, it was embraced by almost all shades of opinion, from the Revisionist right to the Labour left. Virtually every member of the Zionist pantheon of founding fathers and important leaders supported it and advocated it in one form or another, from Chaim Weizmann and Vladimir Jabotinsky to David Ben-Gurion and Menahim Ussishkin. Supporters of transfer included such “moderates” as the “Arab appeaser” Moshe Shertok and the socialist Arthur Ruppin…More importantly, transfer proposals were put forward by the Jewish Agency itself, the government of the Yishuv.

When Zionists like Israel Zangwill and Chaim Weizmann – later to become the first president of Israel – talked about “a land without a people, and a people without a land,” they were not being literal.  They knew there were people there, but they were not people to be regarded as equally human. Nor was the suffering of these untermenschen seen to be as important as that of the Jewish people.

As Masalha puts it:

They did not mean that there were no people in Palestine, but that there were no people worth considering within the framework of the notions of European supremacy that then held sway. In this connection, a comment by Weizmann to Arthur Ruppin, the head of the colonisation department of the Jewish Agency, is particularly revealing. When asked by Ruppin about the Palestinian Arabs, Weizmann replied: “The British told us that there are some hundred thousands negroes (Kushim) and for those there is no value.”

Zangwill himself elucidated on the concept with true colonialist clarity in 1920:

If Lord Shaftesbury was literally inexact in describing Palestine as a country without a people, he was essentially correct, for there is no Arab people living in intimate fusion with the country, utilising its resources and stamping it with a characteristic impress: there is at best an Arab encampment.

Two classic imperialist and racist tropes are at play here: denial of a full shared humanity to the indigenous people, and the lie that those people did nothing with the land.

Asher Avi Ginsberg, a Russian Jew who visited Palestine in 1891, was very critical of the ethnocentricity of Zionism and the exploitation of the local people by the Zionists. He observed that the “pioneers” believed that:

…the only language that the Arabs understand is that of force.

(They) behave towards the Arabs with hostility and cruelty, trespass unjustly upon their boundaries, beat them shamefully without reason and even brag about it, and nobody stands to check this contemptible and dangerous tendency.

Nobody stands to check them today either. Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.

Labour Zionism

Some people adduce the spirit of Ber Borochov and the Poale Zion movement with which he is associated, in an attempt to restore Zionism’s leftist credentials. Borochov, who died in 1971, may have advocated a harmonious and revolutionary relationship between Arabs and Jews in Palestine, but he was hardly in the mainstream of Zionism and his views on the Arab population betray, at the very least, an imperialist mindset. He felt that the people he called “natives of Palestine” lacked any culture of their own and did not have any outstanding national characteristics.

They easily and quickly adopt any imported cultural character higher than their own; they cannot unite in organized resistance against external influences, they are not capable of national competition…(therefore) the natives of Palestine will assimilate economically and culturally with whoever brings order into the country and undertakes the development of the forces of production of Palestine.

If trying to convince that Zionism is not inherently racist, then Borochov is not the man to invoke.

The Poale Zion movement was ridden with factionalism until it faded away and became assimilated with other organisations. Many of the factions shared Borochov’s vision of cooperation (and his patronising attitude to the “natives”), though many did not, and the Borochov tendency remained a minority view in Zionism. The British Poale Zion affiliated to the Labour Party in 1920. It renamed itself the Jewish Labour Movement in 2004, and is a strident apologist of Israel.

The Histadrut (General Organisation of Workers) formed in Israel in 1920 was a racist, Zionist organisation that would not accept Arabs. Its main role under the British Mandate period (1920-1948) was to bring the Jewish work force under its control in order to ensure no solidarity or integration occurred between Palestinian and Jewish workers – a policy it called “Labour Zionism.” Led by David Ben Gurion, the future Israeli Prime Minister and Labour Party leader, it actively promoted racial discrimination and boycotts. As an organisation it refused to countenance having Palestinians and Jews together in the same union: Ben Gurion called it “the evil of mixed labour.”

The Histadrut actively broke up unions like the Union of Railway, Postal and Telegraph Workers which had a mixed Jewish and Arab Palestinian membership. As it established its own companies, eventually becoming the second largest employer in the country, it refused to employ non-Jews. Similarly, it lobbied the British authorities for separate pay rates for Jews and Arabs and did what it could to undermine Palestinian trade unions, lobbying against them on the grounds that they were separatist, exclusionary and against the spirit of workers’ solidarity. Without any sense of irony.

The fruits of Zionism

The racist and colonialist creed of Zionism found expression in the ethnic cleansing of Palestine in 1948 that inflicted the Nakba on the Palestinian people. Its realisation continues today with the increasingly brutal colonisation of the West Bank and an 18-year blockade of Gaza, punctuated by various episodes of “mowing the lawn” i.e. slaughters of innocents through bombing and land invasion. At the time of writing, over 11,000 people have been killed in Gaza in Israel’s response to the Hamas attacks of 7 October, including over 4,000 children.

It has to be remembered that the excesses of the 1948 ethnic cleansing, the Suez war in 1956 that resulted in the massacre of 400 Palestinians in and around Khan Yunis, and the 1967 land grabs, all took place under regimes led by the Israeli Labour movement. These excesses cannot be explained by the subsequent triumph of the Ze’ev Jabotinsky “revisionist” school of Zionism, an extreme right-wing political ideology that find expression today in the governing Likud party.

It should be acknowledged that there are brave people and organisations within Israel that fight the dominant culture and speak up for the Palestinians. There were similarly brave people inside the white population of racist South Africa who fought against the regime, including many Jews inside and outside the Communist Party. However, their existence did not make it any less of an apartheid state.

More than this, there is solid evidence that the current government is broadly reflective of public opinion in Israel, and that the racist attitudes afforded by the supremacist creed of Zionism have in fact hardened in recent years. According to one poll taken last year, 62 percent of Jewish Israeli voters identified as right-wing. Among young people aged 18-24, that number rose to 70 percent. This is why Netanyahu is Prime Minister, with some seriously racist people in his cabinet.

If self-determination means apartheid

Condemnation of Zionism in theory and practice does not mean that you are an antisemite. It means that you are a regular, anti-racist human. Similarly, denying Israel’s right to exist as a racist, expansionist state that brutalises the Palestinians and regularly attacks its neighbours is not antisemitic. Denying white South Africa’s right to exist as an apartheid state was never condemned as “anti-white” or “anti-Dutch,” except by right-wing racist supporters of Pretoria.

Why is it antisemitic to suggest that Israel should cease to be a sectarian state that discriminates against people and kicks them out of their homes because they are not Jewish? That Palestinians and Jewish people should enjoy equal rights in the state that succeeds the currently unsustainable and murderous status quo? That Zionism was always doomed to fail in its basic purpose of providing a safe haven for Jewish people, because you cannot achieve that by stealing someone else’s country and continuing to brutalise and colonise the descendants of the people that you displaced?

There are many forces that militate against a peaceful solution in Palestine. These forces will be strengthened if people are scared to speak the truth for fear of having the ‘antisemite’ slur cast at them, and their views being damned as those of terrorists.

The weaponisation of antisemitism, reinforced by the dubious exculpation of Zionism as a fundamentally racist creed, cannot be allowed to win: the Palestinian people deserve better, much better.

Stewart McGill is a former member of the Communist Party of Britain, writing in a personal capacity.

Alan Polak is a secular Jew from an Orthodox Jewish family, and author of The Cultural Representation of the Holocaust.

The post Zionism: A Racist Project in the European Colonial Tradition appeared first on LeftBloc.

“I know very well that the Stability and Growth Pact is stupid, like all decisions which are rigid.” – Romano Prodi, President of the European Commission (2001)

It is now three-and-a-half years since the EU’s fiscal rules were suspended and state aid rules relaxed in response to the economic fallout of the coronavirus pandemic, which saw governments incur record debts and deficits as a result of increased public spending commitments and collapsing tax revenues.

The reimposition of the fiscal rules has been delayed until Spring 2024 due to the impact of the Ukraine war and global inflation shocks, which have worsened the already dire prospects of the eurozone economy. With several member states now carrying debts above 60 percent of GDP and facing higher interest payments, policymakers recognise that debt reduction strategies based on the existing rules (i.e. large scale austerity) would likely trigger a recession across the bloc.

Figure 1. EU government debt-to-GDP ratios (Source: Eurostat)

It is in the context of these post-COVID economic realities that the question of whether, how and in what form the fiscal rules should be reintroduced has become a key battleground in European politics. A new economic governance framework proposed by the European Commission has been on the table since November 2022. However, this has yet to be endorsed by all 27 members of the European Council, with Germany and France still at odds over key aspects of the proposed reforms.

Whereas the former is keen for the EU to retain a strict and uniform approach to deficit and debt reduction, the latter favours more leeway to enable public investment. This debate not only reflects the particular cases of Germany and France, which is coming under pressure to reduce its €3.3 trillion debt. It threatens to deepen existing faultlines between the core and periphery of the EU.

Constitutionalising austerity

Austerity has been a part of the constitutional system in Europe since the signing of the Maastricht Treaty, which laid the foundations for the EU as it exists today.

Maastricht not only redefined the role of the nation-state as member state, making them accountable to one another in key policy areas. It also reflected the ideological consensus of ‘sound money’ advocated by Thatcher’s economists and those of the German Bundesbank.

Key to implementing this consensus was the creation of a single currency (the euro) and establishment of the European Central Bank (ECB) to assume control of monetary policy from eurozone members, a three percent budget deficit cap and a public debt target of 60 percent, subsequently enshrined in the 1997 Stability and Growth Pact (SGP) as a binding condition of European Monetary Union (EMU) membership.

The SGP later underwent a series of revisions to ensure stricter adherence to the demands of fiscal conservatism. Notably, the Treaty on Stability, Coordination and Governance (Fiscal Compact, 2012) introduced in the wake of the 2011 eurozone debt crisis obliged all member states to enshrine balanced budget requirements in national law, creating a permanent politics of austerity. The Irish ruling class willingly submitted to this agenda, citing reasons of economic necessity and access to future bailout funds.

Layered on top of this Treaty were the “Six Pack” and “Two Pack” reforms, together with the rollout of the European Semester, which empowered the European Commission to scrutinise national budgets, propose changes to economic policy and impose penalties on those with ‘excessive’ debts or deficits.

Figure 2. Evolution of the fiscal rules (Source: ISPI)

With these changes, unelected EU bureaucrats could effectively determine whether a particular government was spending too much on wages, social welfare, pensions or vital public services. They marked the consummation of the neoliberal mode of European integration that had gradually come to dominate since the 1980s.

A lost decade

The eurozone crisis was largely rooted in a structural divide between its constituent economies, with Germany able to run a persistent trade surplus with less industrially advanced southern members on the basis of suppressed wages. The flip side of this was the creation of large trade deficits in the southern periphery that had to be financed by external borrowing from banks in the European core.

Financialisation of the periphery also stimulated increased private borrowing that fuelled property bubbles, most notably in Spain and Ireland. In the Irish case, the large public debt arose from the government’s decision to socialise the losses of commercial property lending by banks, with German, French and British banks heavily exposed.

European leaders reluctantly agreed to bailout packages in order to prevent defaults by the worst affected countries and avert a collapse of the financial system, protecting the economic interests of banks and bondholders in the core. Bailouts in the form of conditional loan packages also allowed Germany to avoid the unthinkable prospect of a fiscal union involving risk-sharing and redistributive economic transfers from the core to periphery.

The EU’s response to the crisis exposed the hollowness of ‘social Europe’. Namely, the imposition of vicious austerity programmes and neoliberal structural reforms had a catastrophic impact on the living standards, development prospects and state capacities of crisis countries, widening existing disparities between the core and periphery. As a case in point, the extent of the suffering inflicted on the Greek people was such that national mortality rates increased by 17.7 percent in the six years after austerity measures were first introduced.

This orthodoxy of austerity was applied to a greater or lesser extent across the continent, underpinned by the interplay between ideology and the drive to shore up capitalist class relations of exploitation through the wholesale transfer of wealth to private capital, both at a national level and within the EU as a whole. It is undeniable that this led to huge increases in economic inequality and social dislocation, helping to fuel the rise of far-right parties and movements.

While benefitting particular blocs of capitalists, austerity was an act of self-immolation that fatally damaged the longer-term prospects for economic growth in Europe. As Yanis Varoufakis explains, austerity not only destroyed consumer demand and with it the conditions for private investment. The area of fiscal expenditure hit hardest was public investment, a key driver of economic activity:

The overall impact of this is most starkly illustrated by the fact that the US economy has grown to twice the size of the eurozone’s over the past fifteen years, having been roughly the same size when the crisis hit in 2008. This has left the average EU country poorer than all but two US states and the once mighty European manufacturing sector falling behind its American and Chinese rivals.

The consensus disrupted

Austerity did not proceed uninterrupted: rather, it was resisted by popular movements and undermined by the contradictory actions of governments and EU institutions during the period. Key in this regard was the famous “whatever it takes” speech by the then ECB President Mario Draghi, which ushered in a massive quantitative easing programme involving the purchase of large quantities of government and corporate debt. This effectively transformed the role of the ECB into a lender of last resort for governments and the financial system: a magic money tree whose job of saving the euro took it outside of its own narrow mandate and the conservative ideology (monetarism) governing the eurozone.

Equally significant was the uneven and inconsistent enforcement of the fiscal rules, which have enjoyed an average compliance rate of just over 50 percent since the SGP entered into force in the 1990s. Successive decisions by the European Commission and European Council over the years appeared to increasingly succumb to political imperatives by granting excessive leniency to the more powerful member states. This reality was spelled out by the European Commission President Jean Claude Juncker in 2016, when he explained in the bluntest of terms that France had been allowed to repeatedly break the rules “because it is France”.  

Already on shaky ground, the narrative of austerity as an economic necessity was radically upended by the pandemic. The unprecedented decision to suspend the fiscal rules was matched only by the ECB’s move to buy up a further €1.6 trillion in sovereign debt, taking it firmly into the uncharted territory of financing the deficits of member states.

Figure 3. Central bank bond purchases and holdings of government debt (Source: CEPR)

Together with the creation of an underwhelming Recovery Fund, this intervention by the ECB provided governments varying levels of discretion for increased public spending. Some of this money went to struggling households through pandemic income payments and furlough schemes. Some was used to fund the response of creaking healthcare systems. But largest chunk was provided to businesses in the form of no-strings-attached loans and subsidies. This was on top of the €140bn funnelled directly by the ECB into the corporate sector, inflating asset prices and enriching the extremely wealthy.

The new global economic order

As well as revealing the destructive impact of austerity on public services and welfare states, the pandemic exposed the reliance of capitalist economies on the state. This reliance became even more apparent at the height of the energy crisis, when the further relaxation of state aid rules permitted France and Germany in particular to subsidise energy prices to protect their industries from higher costs.

Europe finds itself in the grip of a perfect storm, at a time of accelerating shifts in global political economy. Public services and infrastructure are crumbling due to years of underinvestment, while the cost-of-living crisis has caused real wages and household living standards to plummet after fifteen years of stagnation. Across the eurozone, key industries are rapidly losing competitiveness thanks to a combination of weak domestic demand, supply-chain shocks, energy costs, de-globalisation and the rise of China, which has been investing in its own technological and productive capacity for decades. Even in the context of a global economic slowdown, the eurozone is facing a particularly bleak prognosis of long-term stagnation.

For their part, the European institutions have responded in a way that has exacerbated conditions of economic and political instability. The EU has hitched its fortunes to the imperial strategy of the declining US empire, committing itself to exponential militarisation and support for endless proxy wars at great financial cost.

However, this geopolitical convergence has not brought about the economic convergence envisaged by European leaders. The switch from cheap Russian gas for expensive American LNG has only benefitted US fossil fuel interests, while the green subsidy package introduced by Biden administration threatens to further erode European industry and drag the EU into a protectionist race it doesn’t want and can’t win.

The ECB meanwhile has responded to a largely profit driven and supply-side induced inflation crisis with interest rate hikes that have massively increased the debt repayments of states, businesses and mortgage holders; and the sell-off of government and corporate bonds, leaving debtors at the mercy of the financial markets.

Resisting austerity 2.0

It is clear that any reimposition of the fiscal rules based on Germany’s hawkish deficit and debt reduction criteria would usher in a new era of austerity that hits the poorest countries and populations hardest, leading to greater economic divergence and political conflict. Moreover, as the New Economics Foundation has shown, even the reforms proposed by the European Commission would deny many countries the necessary flexibility to invest in their citizens and in addressing the climate crisis. The difference between the two positions therefore is the scale of social, economic and ecological damage they would inflict. Needless to say, any third way based on exemptions for defence spending would not represent an advance in any progressive sense.

The stakes today are even higher than in 2008, with depressed economic conditions and accelerating ecological breakdown coinciding with – and helping to fuel – the continued rise of the far right.

Faced with this challenge, and equipped with the lessons of the post-2008 period, the bottom line of the trade union movement and socialist left has to be one of steadfast resistance to austerity – in upcoming elections, on the streets and where the left is in government. This may involve a revival of the short-lived Plan B strategy of strategic disobedience, which aimed for reform of the EU while preparing for a break with it. In this vein, any reform agenda worth its salt must go beyond tweaks to the fiscal rules to incorporate a more fundamental overhaul of the EU’s economic and political governance framework, the role of the ECB and the case for debt cancellation.

Ultimately, the battle ahead will test the dubious proposition that the EU can be reformed into a more progressive (much less socialist) entity, one that delivers a semblance of social, economic and environmental justice for all of its constituent member states. Should it fail this test, increasing unrest and dislocation are likely to follow.

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One of the many profound insights of Marx was that capitalism is driven by the imperative to accumulate more capital. It’s all about the drive for profits: if you want to understand how the capitalist economy works, you need to view it through the prism of that central imperative.

Now this may seem obvious to many of you, but it is less so to those that manage our economy. The Bank of England’s response to an inflation provoked largely by corporate price gouging is to increase interest rates, thereby exerting more pressure on poorer people that have had to go into debt to keep their heads above water and enjoy any quality of life.

Personal debt in Britain rose by one-third in 2022, with over two-thirds of adults (68%) saying that have felt stressed due to the cost-of-living’s impact on their finances this year, and almost half (46%) in debt as a result of the crisis.

In April this year Citizens Advice warned that of a debt time-bomb resulting from the cost-of-living crisis: they were having to help increasing numbers of people with a negative budget i.e. those whose income is not enough to cover essential expenses. According to its latest statistics, 51% of those helped by Citizens Advice are in a negative budget, compared with 36% in 2019. The average debt client now has £0 left over each month, compared with more than £15 in 2019.

“The maths speaks for itself – a household debt crisis is coming and we have a choice about whether to prepare,” says Matthew Upton, the director of policy at Citizens Advice.

Interest rate increases are blunt, misdirected, and more about disciplining labour through fear and impoverishment than fixing inflation.

Food’s robber barons

The French government are showing signs of understanding the issue, and even the European Central Bank (ECB) is beginning to realise the true nature of the problem.

French food prices rose 14.1% in the year to May, close to the eurozone average, and have overtaken energy as the region’s biggest driver of inflation. The French Finance Minister announced recently that 75 food producers had pledged to lower prices following weeks of mounting pressure from the government.

The European Central Bank in April, observed that although commodity prices were “falling steeply”, the prices paid by consumers for food “remained very sticky, suggesting that expanding profit margins were preventing inflation from falling.”

The problems in the food industry run deep. We can’t blame it all on the supermarkets ripping people off, though there is still plenty of that.

The big food companies have been cashing in from the cost-of-living crisis that followed COVID, just like the energy companies. The latter tend to be well known: Shell, BP, British Gas and other predators. The names of the businesses pulling the strings of the food industry – Cargill, Louis Dreyfus etc – are less well-known, and much less scrutinised.

“It’s surprising in a way, because I think that they’re doing exactly the same thing as the fossil fuel corporations,” argues Nick Dearden, director of NGO Global Justice Now,

“You’ve got a bunch of corporations that are growing more and more and more powerful all the time, gaining more control over different aspects of the food system and massively profiteering.”

According to a recent report by Oxfam titled Profiting from Pain, food billionaires have seen their collective wealth grow by an estimated 45% over the past two years, with a total of £328 billion added to their profits. In the same period, 62 new billionaires were created as companies inflated their profits by capitalising on the COVID pandemic and the cost-of-living crisis.

In another recent report on the issue, Mapping Corporate Power in Big Food, the ETC Group identified “just four to six” dominant firms that control every aspect of the food industry, from agriculture machinery to animal pharmaceuticals.

Cargill is owned by the 11th richest family in the world and one of the world’s largest private companies. In 2017, the company was reported among the four oligarchs controlling over 70% of the global market for agricultural commodities. Since 2020, the Cargill family’s collective wealth has grown by 65%, with four members joining the Forbes list of the richest 500 people in the world.

Cargill’s competitor Louis Dreyfus PARIS reported a 44% jump in net profit in 2022.

Nick Dearden sums it up nicely: the food industry is “in a tiny number of hands and effectively controlled on the basis of how much profit those companies can make rather than preventing people from being hungry.”

We need to understand how this market works so we can argue against people that blame inflation on ‘natural causes’ beyond human agency, and the idiots who blame it on workers trying to secure pay increases that prevent them from sinking further into debt-ridden poverty. We also need to understand that, if we want real change and to take control of the commanding heights of the economy, the power of these global giants must be broken and the entirety of the food production and distribution network needs to be transformed. This is also fundamental to saving the environment.

Diesel’s fast and furious profits

No analysis of inflation would be complete without a note on fuel profiteering. RAC analysis has shown that retailers, including supermarkets, have quickened the pace of cutting the price of diesel since the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) expressed concern about weakening competition in the market. In the last two weeks of May, when the CMA issued its road fuel market study update saying average supermarket margins in 2022 had increased compared to 2019, the average price of a litre of diesel at supermarkets fell by 7.44p, from 151.02p to 143.58p. They did this to look better and appear more reasonable in the face of further CMA investigation, and hopefully exposure of their naked profiteering.

The RAC points out that the prices could still fall a lot more, with the average retailer margin on diesel reaching 22p a litre – more than three times the long-term average of 7p.

This hiking up of the price of diesel has a knock-on effect and exacerbates price pressures in the rest of the economy. Combined with the increased price of food provoked by the rapine of monopoly capitalism, this causes wholesale misery.

In the UK alone, more than 30 million people will be unable to afford what the public considers to be a decent standard of living by the time the current parliament ends in 2024, according to a study by the New Economics Foundation. This will be due to rising prices, below-inflation increases in earnings and projected increases in unemployment. Approximately 43% of households will lack the resources to put food on the table, buy new clothes or treat themselves and their families – a 12 percentage point rise compared with 2019.

Conclusion

The idea that companies’ pursuit of profit maximisation will work to the greater benefit of all by means of an invisible hand is one of the stupidest and most dishonest in history. Marx had it right about the way capitalism really works:

“It establishes an accumulation of misery, corresponding with accumulation of capital. Accumulation of wealth at one pole is, therefore, at the same time accumulation of misery, agony of toil slavery, ignorance, brutality, mental degradation, at the opposite pole…”

The post Follow the profit: How price gouging is still fuelling inflation appeared first on LeftBloc.

More than 6 in 10 young adults are now living at home in Ireland, the highest rate since we started counting in 2003. For the 25-34 year-old group, over 60% of whom have a third level qualification (the 2^nd highest in Europe), over 4 in 10 still live at home. It’s the 7^th highest rate in the EU and over the last decade has increased more than in any other EU member. Over 6 in 10 of this group work full time. Other than Portugal, the average age of flying the nest has increased more in Ireland the last 15 years than any other EU member, now at over 28 years old. These numbers precede the current ‘unprecedented’ inflation. Rents continue to spiral. This will most likely get worse.

The fact that we continue to have the “have young Irish people ever had it so good?” debate is fascinating in and of itself. Why is it that seemingly en masse, young people are worrying about the Irish economy and what it is offering for the future, and at the same time column inches and radio minutes are regularly devoted to denying this as a reality based on some chart or other, inevitably followed by some observation relating to the availability of phones or consumption of exotic fruit. Young people are just negative!

Why the disconnect? 

It may be a reflection of the change in the labour market over the past 15 years. Before the financial crisis around 60% of all Irish workers were under 40. Now it’s around 45%. There are still 250,000 fewer workers under 40 than there were in 2007. It may be that young people simply do not have the representation in workplaces around the country they did 15 years ago. Think tanks? Economics departments? Newsrooms? 

In Maslow’s hierarchy of needs housing is one of the first things we need for a full life. Not just for safety but for physiological needs – the biological requirements for human survival. If this basic need is unattainable for growing numbers of workers, it’s fair to say that the Irish economy is failing young people. It’s clear that living standards have fallen for those who rely on wages to live.

One of the reasons some of the headline figures on living standards seem to contradict the testimony of a generation (two generations?) is because we measure most indicators at the household level in surveys. As I’ve mentioned, the composition of households for young adults and young workers has changed significantly over the past decade or so as their wages in many instances are not high enough for the cost of living independently. Their wages are however counted with their parents’ income and so we might hear things like “household incomes have never been so high” etc. 

We measure all sorts of living conditions at this level. Recently for instance, the fact that we have a very low at-risk-of-poverty rate in an EU context for under 30s and relative to the population was doing the rounds across traditional and social media. But the explanation of this seeming mismatch of perceptions is simple: over 4 in 5 of them are stuck living at home, relying on the good graces of their parents. The household level figure obscures the reality of increasing numbers of young adults.

Falling wages and living standards

The fact is, the wages of young Irish workers have declined relative to older workers since 2006 more than any other high-income EU country (across most occupational groups too) and even with a third level education, many are not securing employment which provides the expected returns to that education. Over a third of working graduates under 35 are in jobs that don’t require their qualifications and thus pay less.

There has been no wage-price spiral. Inflation is bad. It will have economic consequences if incomes don’t keep pace, similar to the downward demand spiral we experienced in the austerity years (or all the economic textbooks need a fundamental rewrite and we can advise the ECB not to worry and that its new inflation target should be 8%). We may already be seeing signs of this with two quarters of contraction in modified domestic demand and a levelling off of employment growth and even slight contractions in a number of sectors in the latest data.

Irish workers and the Irish economy need a wage increase in line with inflation.

Ciarán Nugent is a PhD candidate with the Department of Sociology in Maynooth and part-time Lecturer in Political Economy in the department of Applied Social sciences in Maynooth. An economist by trade, he also sits on the Living Wage Technical Group and the Board of Directors for GEMS NI.

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Last week I was in the kitchen listening to the Talking Bollox podcast. I am ridiculously enthusiastic about it and what it could do for young working class activism and politics. As a working class artist, I’ve spent my life having conversations about class warfare. It always comes back to this. Politicians don’t care about working class people, because they think we don’t vote. 

The way I see it, as working class people, we don’t vote because we don’t have time for a system that tries to either wipe us out, lock us up or make us dress and talk like them. We participate in a different parallel political system that happens within the power structures in our communities. We can and we do get involved in the farce of Dáil Éireann when we feel like our contribution will be meaningful, but the rest of the time, when its just the rich playing chess with their assets and our lives, we leave them off and get on with surviving hour to hour.

Politicians are really like reality tv actors, who speak the lines written by their producers; the civil service- representing the rich, and their success is just measured by how authentic they can make their script sound. 

My play HISTORY opens with the 1916 Proclamation being read aloud with the backing of an improvised Patti Smith-esque drum beat with the actors emphasising the lines “Cherishing all the children of the nation equally”. 

The play is a Public Art commission to mark the ‘regeneration’ of St Michael’s Estate in Dublin. It was first performed in 2013. 

This is the same line that Terence Power decided, ten years later, to open his conversation with Micheál Martin on Talking Bollox with. He asked him, “does this government cherish all the children equally?” Micheál starts to repeat his script,  at one point Terence interrupts and says “No, I went hungry. I was a child who went hungry” And as I was cleaning down my units I teared up. The contrast of something so true and authentic being said to a politician, something so from the real world, compared with the fictional political answers coming from the guest hit me hard in the heart. 

Later in the interview, around the time I was taking the dinner up, Micheál Martin is asked by Calvin, why do we have the housing crisis we have now? 

Micheál’s answer is population increase, and he says thats the most fundamental reason. 

This is what politicians call ‘an answer’. What will you say when Terence and Calvin ask you about the housing crisis? This answer would usually have been carefully crafted by his team. Like a group of people writing the lines for a character in a play. But in this case, they really don’t care about the audience, they don’t vote. The answer is like a sly way to say “look over there!”. I read ‘population increase’ as dog whistle for ‘asylum seekers and refugees’. Like when you say someone is unique but you mean they are an odd ball. A Politician will spend most of their working life rehearsing questions and answers. They are really good at bamboozling us so we can’t see the wood for the trees. They do this to people on doorsteps and academics with degrees. This is the answer to why they keep getting back into power when they keep making the same mistakes.

In my play HISTORY, the character based on housing activist John Bissett says “To really watch how something like this operates you have to watch it for twenty years, and write it all down. People don’t have twenty years to be doing that”

St Michael’s Estate, which used to be massive area of 368 huge flats, is now an empty green park, with three small housing developments around it; Thornton Heights 75 apartments, Emmet Crescent 50 houses, and Bulfin Court an old folks with 22 homes. 

In 1998, there was 368 homes there, then a Fianna Fail government started to knock them all down. They said knocking down the flats would solve the drug problem. They said everyone would have a front and back garden and then they wouldn’t take drugs anymore. They called it Regeneration. Words like trauma, recovery, therapy were nowhere to be seen. 

The last families moved out in 2011.. Since then they have built a total of 147 homes. 

Three hundred and sixty eight minus one hundred and forty seven equals two hundred and twenty one. 

Two hundred and twenty one homes gone for me and people like me, who the market doesn’t take care of. 

They knocked down all the flats and they didn’t build as many as they knocked down. Thats basically the answer to Calvin’s question. 

I was raging when I told my family what the Tanaiste’s answer had been. He’s a sleeveen, basically. I told them. I heard the lads ask all the right questions but there was nothing they could do with his answers. A good man with the right intentions training to be a snake in the grass. 

It’s one thing for us to be able to claim the space to tell our own stories, to build that up from a kitchen table when the odds are stacked against you, but this exchange made me think that we also all need to be able to work together to learn that it’s okay to answer these people back when they have the cheek to bullshit us. 

The most honest answer to the question – “Why do we have the housing crisis we have now?” is “Our housing policies failed”. Micheál Martin and Fianna Fail and their twins in Fine Gael believe the Market will take care of everyone, though it never has.

FIanna Fail used to believe the government should take care of everyone, and they did. It’s a tired point to make at this stage that they built massive public housing projects all over the country in the 1930s, the 1950s and the 1970s. Sean Lemass told us “People will live in the sky” 

But then, They didn’t know what to do with the new state so the let the church look after everything else. They sent us to the care of abusive priests and nuns to be punished when we needed support. They sexually abused us so we took drugs to deal with the pain. They responded to an epidemic of trauma in the form of heroin use by bulldozing peoples homes in the promise of front and back gardens. They called it Regeneration. 

They looked at ‘social housing’ like somewhere the state would protect you if you failed at life, a place for people down on their luck, who couldn’t make it in the ‘Market’. They started to say things like why should anyone have a free house. 

 They started to believe in the Market the way they used to believe in God. They started to believe emphatically that the market would take care of everything.

Micheál Martin and Fianna Fail believe the Market will take care of everyone, though it never has. Just like Christians believe that there will be a second coming, though there never has. Fianna fail and Fine gael believe and defend Neoliberalism just as passionately, they don’t say it in as many words. They do it by talking about home ownership over public housing, by making buying your first house a sacrament and not even allowing the option that you may just want to rent, or live in public housing. If you don’t own a home your sinful. 

On the podcast, Martin goes on to say that for that for the last ten years, (who was in power then?) they weren’t building enough houses – but that they are ‘throwing the kitchen sink at it’ now. If I had any upper body strength I was liable to pull out my own kitchen sink in the hopes of throwing it at him. 

“To really watch how something like this operates you have to watch it for twenty years, and write it all down. People don’t have twenty years to be doing that”

Its now 20 years since the Moving Ahead Plan for St Michael’s Estate was scrapped by a Fianna Fail government led by Bertie Ahern. There’s even a rumour that when he visited the fourteen storey tower blocks that he got trapped in a lift with a notable local activist, who may have used the opportunity to apply some pressure on behalf of the residents. 

This plan was scrapped overnight because it would have cost the State too much money. That was their stated reason in a letter. Instead, they decided to go into a Public Private Partnership with Bernard McNamara, who went bust in 2008, because he promised to tap the value of the land and get the social housing for the state for free, off balance sheet. 

They didn’t want to invest in social housing twenty years ago, when the numbers of asylum seekers were in the hundreds. Population increase, me hole martin. The Tanaiste picked up population increase, or maybe he was whispered that in the car on the way to GoLoud studios because he thought that was the shoe that would fit this audience, who don’t even vote.

Of course, thousands of people suddenly seeking refuge has made the housing crisis look worse, but the social housing system is not broken because people, any kind of people from anywhere, need it.  

It is broken because they meet people who worship the market in the same way on the doors. Neighbours in Inchicore who thought a budget in the millions was ‘a lot really’ for regeneration in St Michael’s Estate.

We’re talking about here so we can talk about everywhere. 

St Michaels is a metaphor, that holds the problem and the solution. 

When the people of the Estate got the news that the moving ahead plan had been scrapped, they refused to take it lying down. They knew then, that public housing was important for them and for generations to come. A chant rang out in the hall at the meeting that night that went ‘The plan agreed is the plan delivered’ and it was repeated, and is repeated, to this day. 

And then the people did watch for twenty years and write it all down.

 And now along with the community of Inchicore, they have another plan, the seventh proposed plan since demolition, for the future of that 14 acres site. Hundreds of new homes. And every single one is Public Housing in a new model called cost rental. They have met weekly, for more than twenty years. The powers that be tried talk bollox and grab the land, but the people learned not to take their answers, and ask better questions. 

A Fianna Fail minister has given the OK for this new development, and you can see him gleaming in the photos. Why can’t he do this everywhere? 

At the end of the interview, Calvin reads out the numbers of people facing eviction, and he includes how many of those are children. The Tanaiste doesn’t catch the irony of all those children being treated equally, he doesn’t acknowledge it, and he moves on.   

Link to the Talking Bollox podcast referenced is below 

“Two lads from the inner city of Dublin sitting around doing what they do best, talking bollox.”

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The happy idea of using a proletarian holiday celebration as a means to attain the eight-hour day was first born in Australia. The workers there decided in 1856 to organize a day of complete stoppage together with meetings and entertainment as a demonstration in favor of the eight-hour day. The day of this celebration was to be April 21. At first, the Australian workers intended this only for the year 1856. But this first celebration had such a strong effect on the proletarian masses of Australia, enlivening them and leading to new agitation, that it was decided to repeat the celebration every year.

In fact, what could give the workers greater courage and faith in their own strength than a mass work stoppage which they had decided themselves? What could give more courage to the eternal slaves of the factories and the workshops than the mustering of their own troops? Thus, the idea of a proletarian celebration was quickly accepted and, from Australia, began to spread to other countries until finally it had conquered the whole proletarian world.

The first to follow the example of the Australian workers were the Americans. In 1886 they decided that May 1 should be the day of universal work stoppage. On this day 200,000 of them left their work and demanded the eight-hour day. Later, police and legal harassment prevented the workers for many years from repeating this [size] demonstration. However in 1888 they renewed their decision and decided that the next celebration would be May 1, 1890.

In the meanwhile, the workers’ movement in Europe had grown strong and animated. The most powerful expression of this movement occurred at the International Workers’ Congress in 1889. At this Congress, attended by four hundred delegates, it was decided that the eight-hour day must be the first demand. Whereupon the delegate of the French unions, the worker Lavigne from Bordeaux, moved that this demand be expressed in all countries through a universal work stoppage. The delegate of the American workers called attention to the decision of his comrades to strike on May 1, 1890, and the Congress decided on this date for the universal proletarian celebration.

In this case, as thirty years before in Australia, the workers really thought only of a one-time demonstration. The Congress decided that the workers of all lands would demonstrate together for the eight-hour day on May 1, 1890. No one spoke of a repetition of the holiday for the next years. Naturally no one could predict the lightning-like way in which this idea would succeed and how quickly it would be adopted by the working classes. However, it was enough to celebrate the May Day simply one time in order that everyone understand and feel that May Day must be a yearly and continuing institution […].

The first of May demanded the introduction of the eight-hour day. But even after this goal was reached, May Day was not given up. As long as the struggle of the workers against the bourgeoisie and the ruling class continues, as long as all demands are not met, May Day will be the yearly expression of these demands. And, when better days dawn, when the working class of the world has won its deliverance then too humanity will probably celebrate May Day in honor of the bitter struggles and the many sufferings of the past.

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Poland, Hungary and Slovakia announced a unilateral ban on Ukrainian grain imports in the middle of April. At the time of writing, Brussels has just agreed to impose emergency curbs on grain imports from Ukraine to five EU member states. The EU bowed to pressure to reverse its support for Ukraine’s agriculture exports and climbed down from its original position of reminding the east European countries that they had no right to impose such a ban.

The situation was provoked by complaints from local farmers who said they were being undercut by cheap Ukrainian grain flooding their markets. The EU’s restrictions are an attempt to get the affected countries to lift their unilateral bans and avoid confrontation.

Apart from questioning the depth of Poland’s loudly advertised solidarity with Ukraine, this raises many issues about the EU’s agricultural policies that should not be ignored, particularly by those on the left who talk as if the EU is the re-incarnation of the International Working Men’s Association (The First International).

Ukraine’s agriculture and EU integration

On the outbreak of war, much of Ukraine’s grain harvest was redirected into Europe and all tariffs and quotas into the EU were lifted to ensure the grain would not be trapped and go to waste. Unprecedented inflows of Ukrainian wheat, worth €1.17 billion, have crossed into neighbouring EU countries, forcing down local prices, and leaving the produce of many farmers languishing in warehouses. The produce was meant to transit through those countries to international markets. However, much of it has stayed in-country, taking up space in silos and entering the local market.

The surplus has been created by infrastructure bottlenecks – basically lack of cost-effective transport capacity – as well as farmers delaying selling last year’s produce, with local growers holding on to their crop in anticipation of higher prices following the war. A broader global downturn has instead pushed prices down, leaving farmers in Poland, Romania, Slovakia, Hungary and Bulgaria facing lower revenue and struggling to empty their stockpiles before the new harvest starts in the summer.

Decreased demand from North African countries, who have had to cut back food imports as their economies weaken in the context of a general downturn and rising interest rates, has also contributed to the crisis.

Some of the most vocal proponents of Ukraine joining the EU are in the eastern parts of the bloc – Poland, for instance. These countries did not think through the implications and the current crisis may have woken them up to reality. What do they expect to happen to the agricultural market when Ukraine is an EU member?

EU states cannot block cheaper products coming from a fellow single market member. Ukraine would become a massive recipient of funding under the Common Agricultural Policy, diverting cash from other ‘deserving farmers’ and probably building an even larger grain mountain. Ukraine is an agricultural giant: before the war, it produced more than a quarter of the world’s sunflower oil, and was in the top ten producers of wheat, corn and barley. In 2022, the Polish minimum wage was €654.8 per month, in Ukraine it was €216.7 per month. You can see why the Polish farmers might be concerned, as should anyone at the lower-end of the wage distribution in Poland.

The concentration of wealth and power in the global North

Just over a year ago we were supposed to be facing a catastrophic global food shortage, politicians and lobbyists were exploiting fears by pressing the EU to relax its proposals to slash pesticide use. Now people are still going hungry but there is a grain glut in Europe, how did we get here?

It’s a long story based around unequal distribution of wealth and dysfunctional markets rigged to benefit the producers in the global North who exercise power and influence over their states and institutions. For decades, farmers in many countries across the global South have been similarly undercut by the dumping of cheap foods onto their markets from rich countries that subsidise food production and export.

Many of those countries have become reliant on food imports, this has left them particularly vulnerable to global market disruptions. These countries are now grappling with rising food import bills and ballooning debt repayments provoking new waves of hunger even as there is a glut of grain in Europe.

These kinds of outcomes are products of a failing industrial food system that prioritises the over-production of few staple food commodities for globalised just-in-time supply chains; and that encourages monopolisation by just a handful of agribusinesses – like the grain giants who saw record profits this past year.

Only four corporations—ADM, Bunge, Cargill and Dreyfus—control more than 75 percent of the global grain trade, this is a dangerous global oligopoly that will need to be destroyed, not ‘reformed’, if real change is to be achieved.

World agriculture that is run in the interests of those agribusinesses and the global North in general systematically fails to get food where it is needed, prevent rising hunger, or deliver stable livelihoods for farmers.

EU policies hurting the global South

The EU’s agricultural policies are a major part of the problem and expose the fundamental nature of a bloc dedicated to facilitating exploitation by the rich. Those who come out with the ‘reform from within’ fantasies fail to understand that this is the raison d’etre of the EU.

Africa has large amounts of fertile land, but it struggles to make its agricultural sector profitable, leaving most African nations net importers of food. The continent imports roughly 80% of its food, spending more than $70 billion each year on staples, including maize, wheat, rice, soya and milk, according to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO).

The European Union (EU) is the biggest exporter of food to Africa, selling food products valuing nearly $20 billion to the continent each year according to European Commission statistics. Subsidies enable farmers in the political bloc to sell agricultural products at prices that don’t cover production costs. Most of these foods – wheat, milk powders, cereals, vegetable oils, poultry and vegetables – could be easily grown on African soil but unfair trade agreements give EU farmers an enormous advantage over their African colleagues, according to the FAO.

Free trade deals between the EU and some African, Caribbean and Pacific states known as the Economic Partnership Agreements (EPA) gives the EU cheap access to up to 83 percent of African markets. In exchange, the EU offers to eliminate certain tariffs and duties. Industry experts have repeatedly criticised the deals, saying they primarily benefit the EU because African companies are too weak to compete with European firms in a free trade environment. When Kenya, for example, refused to sign a deal in 2014 out of fear that subsidised agricultural products from the EU would ruin its food sector, the EU threatened to impose import tariffs on one of the country’s biggest foreign exchange earners, the cut flower sector. Kenya gave in and signed the agreement.

“African countries cannot compete,” according to the UN economic analyst for East Africa, Andrew Mold. “As a result, free trade and EU imports endanger existing industries, and future industries do not even materialise because they are exposed to competition from the EU,” which affords little incentive to enter the market.

High EU import tariffs on processed foods force African farmers to export agricultural products raw, instead of adding value to them to increase profits. Raw foods that cannot be grown in Europe, such as coffee, are exempt from tariffs, while roasted beans have a 7.5 percent surcharge.

As a result, Africa, a key coffee grower, earned $2.4 billion from the sale of green coffee beans in 2014, while Germany earned $3.8 billion from coffee re-exports after roasting the beans according to Calestous Juma, Professor of International Development at Harvard University: “The concern is not that Germany benefits from processing coffee. It is that Africa is punished by EU tariff barriers for doing so.”

If Ukraine were to join the EU, it wouldn’t just damage farmers their east European neighbours. An agricultural superpower armed with EU subsidies would inflict even more neo-colonial damage on Africa. This is more akin to the quasi-imperialism of the Second International than Marx’s original First International that some on the left mistake as the EU’s inspirational ancestor.

The post The EU: Proud heir to European colonialism appeared first on LeftBloc.

Yesterday was Earth Day, an impotent annual carnival of greenwashing from western environmentalism. This year’s theme was “Invest in Our Planet”, exhorting businesses and states to finally invest capital into the changes the environment, a personless political object, requires in order to avoid terrible crisis.

The Irish government’s self-congratulatory Earth Day announcement was some €99.6m of “international climate finance” invested in 2021, a figure that pales into complete insignificance beside the €26bn budget surplus since 2021 revealed by the Department of Finance only a few days earlier.

The erstwhile eco-capitalists whose gambits on electric vehicles and hyperloops were convincing to large sections of the professional managerial class a decade ago have meanwhile turned their eyes to investing other peoples’ money in other planets. The trajectory of the capitalist ‘transition’ is well epitomised by the “rapid unscheduled disassembly” of Elon Musk’s publicly-funded rocket littered over the Gulf of Mexico this week. 

There is already a firmly embedded class politics of climate, and its main purpose is to depoliticise climate action. This politics is more felt by workers and carers in their everyday lives than it is theorised as a ‘capital P’ politics. The existing politics of climate is eco-austerity, a new iteration of the austerity following the financial crash. It serves the same class function: a cover provided by the ruling class to the rich to allow them to continue as they are while ordinary people shoulder the cost. For example, Phillip Boucher Hayes reported this Earth Day that “Irish taxpayers will have to fund up to €8 billion in penalties for missing 2030 emissions targets, not the corporations or sectors doing the polluting.”. The done-deal scientism of climate policy at the State level makes it difficult to see this politics overtly. Green parties acting as the gormless, smiling face of eco-austerity dress the issue of climate up in a language of post-politics. The environment is not ‘political’ because it involves us all–a contradiction in terms. They are aided and abetted by both corporate greenwashing and activist groups that all speak to climate as an issue “beyond politics”.

Workers and carers who speak of the lived effects of eco-austerity are dismissed as being either anti-science or line themselves up to have the narrative of “personal responsibility” inflected back onto them. This is itself a more aggressive reinforcement of the prevailing idea that peoples’ everyday lives are the problem and not the economic framework in which they are lived.

Currently the ruling class’s monopoly on climate politics via depoliticised technocratic ‘policy’ is unthreatened. Its bogeymen, the climate denying deplorables of the far-right and the dinosaurs of the centre-right, are able to use climate as a fulcrum to make a reactionary pitch to workers hit by eco-austerity. Green parties remain confident in the electoral power of their middle-class transition in which the patrician layer conduct a more ethical, responsible life of earnest sacrifice through publicly-subsidised investment in the solar panels on their four bed detached properties. 

In the face of this Actually-Existing Climate Politics, the Left could be generating a workers-led climate politics. Instead, it finds itself embroiled in the confused mélange of Green Politics, theorised generously as a heady blend of feminism, marxism and environmentalism. People engaged in it believe that they are on the right side of history, but this is an impossible synthesis. It is simply not credible to have a politics that attracts eco-fascists, neoliberal technocrats (the dominant tendency) and socialists behind the same agenda. Such politics can never be accountable to people, it is a blank canvass for ‘whatever-it-is-you’re-having-yourself’ politically. This liberal framing almost by design precludes people from seeing climate’s radical potential. In this way, it is entirely predictable that the outworking of this politics has been to produce more space for the right than any actual climate action. 

So what is there in climate for workers and carers, other than further sacrifice at the altar of eco-austerity? Is it a matter of grafting on an ecological element to existing socialist ideas and organisations, or does the wheel need to be reinvented yet again? Should we adopt a defensive posture by latching onto the capitalist transition by making it slightly more ‘just’ or is there a more radical pathway available? 

My view is that the climate politics of the ruling class and their policy gardeners is opening up a new vista for politicising the people it targets—workers and carers. An alternative climate politics is one which eschews the technocrats’ need to deterministically model and foreclose the future in favour of using the contradiction of the ruling class’s climate politics to build consciousness, agency and eventually class power among workers and carers. Already there are some things that could be done.

Trade Unions are in an excellent position to invest resources in alternative economic planning for whole sectors of the economy, for example in food production and security, in which workers in key sectors such as processing, logistics and retail are mobilised in a coordinated way. 

Political parties, campaigners and educators can provide counter-narratives to the language of personal responsibility, for example on car use in a suburbanised country like Ireland.  Alternatives such as a single state car insurance company and public-transport oriented public housing development are measures which are relevant to political campaigns and electoral cycles now which would not only be popular but would take the challenge of reducing car use out of the markets’ hands and into public control. This stands in stark opposition to the Green approach of pricing people out of their only means of transport to work, study and provide for their families. 

In 1907, James Connolly wrote a poem about calls for “moderation” from the bourgeoisie that sound familiar today. The repeated thematic demand of the poem in contrast to these moralistic pleas is “For our demands most moderate are, We only want the earth.” There are revolutionary truths that dare not speak their name under the present hegemony, and which are being brought into view by the failure of the ruling class’s climate politics. Chief among these is that the ‘transition’ underway is already stalled, and that the alternative is one led by workers. 

Workers with agency in their workplaces, communities and homes are the only class capable of decarbonisation, but without a prospectus that gives them agency and control over production and distribution we remain in the tractor-beam of the prevailing narratives on the climate emergency. A confident Left would advance the idea that the mirage is not our revolutionary alternative to eco-austerity, but the hopelessly limited vista of the Earth Day fantasists who think the capitalists can invest their way out of planetary disaster on our behalf. 

The post Earth Day is over. Time for worker-led climate action.  appeared first on LeftBloc.