On “After Russia’s UN veto, US talks of ‘coalition of the willing’ against Syria”

This one, without any doubt, is the best analysis, bar none! No wonder other sites recognise this, by quoting WSWS, such as on ICH (Information Clearing House), a liberal Internet site. Parallels with recent US wars of aggression in Libya and Iraq are obvious to most intelligent people; what is not so apparent, is the sheer inventiveness and persistence of the capitalist class and their enablers, including the mainstream media. All this is driven by their class interests, not their concern for democracy, human rights, or justice. That is why it seemed so counterintuitive for the two countries that vetoed the current Security Council Resolution, to have abstained on the Libyan vote, risking billions of dollars of their investments in that country, and strengthening the position of the Zionist State in the Middle East.

It seems that they have learned their geo-political lesson, that a lot of socialists knew at the time: that the imperialists never retreat, they must be destroyed root and branch.

Mirek
Australia
7 February 2012

On “January employment report masks depth of US jobs crisis”

What should also be noted, perhaps, is that between December 2011 and January 2012 the official “not seasonally adjusted” unemployment rate in the United States actually increased from 8.3 to 8.8 percent and the official “not seasonally adjusted” number of unemployed US workers actually increased by 549,000 (from 12,692,000 to 13,541,000), according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ own data, despite the recent corporate mass media/Obama administration spin on the January 2012 figures.

Bob
4 February 2012

On “Britain’s Guardian and Observer sound a warning to the political elite”

Like the Guardian/Observer’s paeans to Marxism, the New York Times alternates between cynically invoking Marx on the one hand, as in David Brooks’ “Workers of the World, Unite!” in which Brooks holds up Rick Santorum as a champion of the working class; and on the other hand treating Marxism more directly as the threat it is to the bourgeois establishment these papers represent, as in Gary Gutting’s “Liberty, Equality, and Hostility” on Feb. 1, 2012.

Gutting writes, “What we need to keep in mind is that for us the basic issues of the French Revolution have been resolved (the final step was probably the Voting Rights Act of 1965). We firmly endorse the principle of democratic inclusion but also soundly reject the radical call for an equal distribution of power. We live in a post-revolutionary society, where liberals are not radicals and conservatives are not reactionaries. Our political debates—important as they often are—are about optimizing the distribution of power within a non-radical (that is, not completely egalitarian) democracy.”

Add to these the Financial Times, which, after a year of revolutionary upheavals, feels compelled to explicitly defend capitalism on a daily basis, and what we can conclude is what Marx and Engels themselves concluded 164 years ago:

“I. Communism is already acknowledged by all European powers to be itself a power.

II. It is high time that Communists should openly, in the face of the whole world, publish their views, their aims, their tendencies, and meet this nursery tale of the Spectre of Communism with a manifesto of the party itself.”

In other words, build the party that, as Chris Marsden writes, “is anathema to the Guardian/Observer crowd, one whose relationship to Marx’s historic struggle for world socialism is not confined to cynical rhetorical flourishes, but is its raison d’être.” This is the Socialist Equality Party.

Mitch M
Michigan, USA
2 February 2012