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An interesting publication recently highlighted how innovation in capitalist economies doesn't work as it says on the tin. Does this mean that resurgent social democracy is well placed to save capitalism from its own orthodoxies?

Sometimes, politics can be so strange and irrational that it takes your breath away. After a huge economic crisis, recession and now an ongoing depression, facilitated by decades of increasing deregulation and “neoliberal” policies, European governments are falling over themselves in their attempts to cut back, defund, privatise and otherwise dismantle the remains of the postwar welfare state.

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A critique of identity politics from a queer, anarchist communist perspective, arguing that identity politics runs the risk of forming cross-class affinities between queers, women, and people of colour, and assimilating radical struggles into establishment politics. Originally published in Pink and Black Attack #4, 2010, and reproduced in Queer Ultraviolence - A Bash Back! Anthology available from Ardent Press.

Introduction

It is, after all, the politicians who had us criminalized or killed. It is the capitalists who make us work to survive, or sometimes keep us out of work. Why do we petition those who marginalize us for an end to our marginalization? Pink and Black Attack

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A situationist critique of Harvard’s 1969 Left politics.

“Whereas this project was undertaken by individuals at different points in their growth to consciousness, i.e to revolutionary coherence (unity, totality) as persons, and

Whereas there was more or less lack of engagement in the practical task of carrying out the project – due partly to unavoidable difficulties of spatio-temporal coordination, and

Behind this appearance of wealth is hidden the most human misery: the additional emptiness of so many lives that side-by-side never meet. Energies that no longer know what to search for because they have everything at their disposal.

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A central part of our organising practice at Recomposition is direct action. In this piece our comrade Marianne addresses criticisms of Occupy Wall Street and the importance placed in that movement on a direct action strategy.

The following is not a commentary on, much less a defense of, David Graeber – with whom I disagree. It is a critique of key facets of the ideology of Andrew Kliman.

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A reflection of how far the IWW has come in the last 13 years, and what might be still needed.

I have been a member of the IWW since 1999, virtually my entire adult life. During my time as a member the union has grown in both numbers and in vibrancy. When I joined the IWW, only a handful of members had any significant organizing experience.

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Adam Ford discusses the recent elections in Europe.

The financial markets went into a petulant sulk today, in response to the election results in France – where incumbent Nicolas Sarkozy was defeated by his ‘centre-left’ challenger – and in Greece, where two thirds of the electorate voted for avowedly anti-austerity candidates.

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Blog post for people to post links to stories about police brutality and violence.

For a while I have thought it would be good for someone to have a blog on libcom dedicated to keeping track of police violence.

However, in the absence of anyone volunteering to do that I thought I could put up this blog post and then anyone can post links with short summaries in the comments below as a kind of repository of news of police brutality and abuse of their power.

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Aufheben's late 1990s pamphlet, appendix and epilogue on workfare and unemployed struggles.

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How does a revolt come about and what does it leave behind? What impact does it have on those who participate in it and those who simply watch it? Is the Greek revolt of December 2008 confined to the shores of the Mediterranean, or are there lessons we can bring to bear on social action around the globe? Revolt and Crisis in Greece: Between a Present Yet to Pass and a Future Still to Come is a collective attempt to grapple with these questions. A collaboration between anarchist publishing collectives Occupied London and AK Press, this timely new volume traces Greece's long moment of transition from the revolt of 2008 to the economic crisis that followed.

In the essays collected here, over two dozen writers offer historical analysis of the factors that gave birth to December and the potentialities it has opened up in face of the capitalist crisis.

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Paul Mason on SYRIZA, a previously lesser known leftist political party in Greece which has surged ahead in the polls as voters have become disillusioned with the major pro-austerity parties.

[i]This is less of a blog more of a series of notes to try and enhance understanding of who SYRIZA and its leader Alexis Tsipras actually are, and how they might behave if, as polls suggest, they become the winning party in a second Greek general election.

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Disabled workers in Michigan form a trade union to fightback against poor wages and sweatshop conditions. The bosses respond with a variety of union busting tactics.

Workers at Peckham Vocational Industries in Michigan, a not for profit company that provides job training and employment for disabled workers are in the process of forming a trade union.

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Occupy Iowa City held a rally and march as part of Occupy May 1st and the national Day of Action / General Strike. This was given as a speech there by Wild Rose Collective member R. Spourgìtis.

On May 1st, 1886, workers across the US went on strike for the 8 hour day. In Haymarket Square in Chicago, a massacre took place. In the years that followed, May 1st became known as International Workers Day in commemoration of these events, and most nations of the world now celebrate their Labor Day on or around May Day.

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Ellen Meiskins Wood analyses the extent to which capitalism can be separated into political (state) and economic (market) spheres.

The intention of Marxism is to provide a theoretical foundation for interpreting the world in order to change it. This is not an empty slogan. It has—or ought to have—a very precise meaning.

In this sense, the very differentiation of the ‘economic’ and the ‘political’ in capitalism—the symbiotic division of labour between class and state—is precisely what makes the unity of ‘economic’ and ‘political’ struggles essential. Ellen Meiskins Wood

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Robert Brenner's critique of the market-focused theories of development which overlook class structures and relations, opening the door for third-worldist ideology.

The appearance of systematic barriers to economic advance in the course of capitalist expansion—the ‘development of underdevelopment’—has posed difficult problems for Marxist theory.

The notion of the 'development of underdevelopment' opens the way to third-worldist ideology. From the conclusion that development occurred only in the absence of links with accumulating capitalism in the metropolis, it is a short step to the strategy of semi-autarkic socialist development. Robert Brenner

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The introduction from Kathi Weeks' book 'The problem with work: feminism, Marxism, antiwork politics and postwork imaginaries'.

Though women do not complain of the power of husbands, each complains of her own husband, or of the husbands of her friends. It is the same in all other cases of servitude, at least in the commencement of the emancipatory movement. The serfs did not at first complain of the power of their lords, but only of their tyranny.

If class is figured as a process of becoming classed, it may be that work including struggles over what counts as work could be conceived as a useful lens through which to approach class; in this way, the struggle against work could be a terrain of class politics. Kathi Weeks

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Vidal Sassoon, the celebrity hairdresser and one-time militant in the anti-fascist 43 Group, has died aged 84.

Sassoon, dubbed the "anti-fascist warrior hairdresser" by the Telegraph joined the East End-based 43 Group as a 17-year-old trainee hairdresser.

The 43 Group fought pitched battles, often armed with knives and razor blades, with the BUF and eventually smashed them off London's streets. Sassoon's weapon of choice? Fittingly, a pair of scissors.

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Alana Lentin analyses the de-politicisation of racism via policies of state multiculturalism which gloss over racist premises, structures and institutions.

In the West, the first years of the new millennium are being marked by a growing public preoccupation with the supposed incompatibility of diverse groups of people, at both a global and a local level.

Even the admission of institutional racism by the Metropolitan Police in the United Kingdom following the 1997 Macpherson inquiry has primarily engendered policies of ‘inclusion’ and ‘diversification’ within institutions that fail to transform the culture of racism by which they are structured. Alana Lentin

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Kenan Malik analyses how the development of state multiculturalist policies in response to the struggles of asian youth in the 1970s and 1980s diverted struggles from a politicised class terrain into battles for recognition of cultural identities.

It was February 1989. I was in Bradford, a few weeks after the demonstration on which a copy of Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses had been burnt. I had gone there to interview Sher Azam, president of the Bradford Council of Mosques, and the man who had torched the book. Waiting in the drab building that housed the Bradford Council of Mosques, I heard a familiar voice.

Multiculturalism transformed the character of antiracism. By the mid-1980s the focus of antiracist protest in Bradford had shifted from political issues, such as policing and immigration, to religious and cultural issues. Kenan Malik

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Kenan Malik distinguishes between the positive lived experience of a multicultural society, and multicultural state policies which foster division

‘Has multiculturalism been good or bad for Britain?’ It’s a question to which the answers have become increasingly polarised in recent years. For some, multiculturalism expresses the essence of a modern, liberal society. For others, it has helped create an anxious, fragmented nation.

Multicultural policies have come to be seen as a means of empowering minority communities and giving them a voice. In reality such policies have empowered not individuals but ‘community leaders’ who owe their position and influence largely to their relationship with the state. Kenan Malik

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Teachers in thirteen primary schools in Birmingham are being balloted for strike action against plans to force them to become academy schools.

NUT and NASUWT, the two largest teaching unions, are issuing the strike ballot to members in an attempt to halt the expansion of the academies program through conversions. Academies are publicly funded, but run independent of local authorities and amount to the creeping privatisation of state schools.

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