More than leaked secret memos are needed to rescue Labour’s missionIT SEEMS that the winds of discontent have finally started to blow around the Cabinet table. It is dawning, partially and belatedly, on Keir Starmer that he has made a mess of governing. It is also dawning on his colleagues that they might be plunged into a struggle over the keys to Number Ten well before the next general election. First, there has been the possible U-turn over the cut to the winter fuel benefit, announced last year. It took away assistance from 10 million older people, many of whom relied upon the benefit at a time of soaring energy costs. There are hints of more capitulations to come, perhaps even on the cruel two-child benefit cap. Starmer is claiming that these course adjustments are now affordable because the economy is improving. Given that this week’s figures have shown both inflation and government borrowing rising by more than anticipated, this is, like so much the Prime Minister intones, unlikely to be true.
https://morningstaronline.co.uk/article/more-leaked-secret-memos-are-needed-rescue-labours-missionBehind the Enemy Everywhere: Return of Palestinian External Ops?In 1971, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) published an issue of its journal Al-Hadaf, dedicating its second edition to the topic ‘The PFLP and External Operations.’ The piece explored the Front’s rationale and its responses to the varied reactions surrounding the operations it had launched since July 1968. Operations that included hijackings and bombing Israeli companies and embassies across Europe. The Front’s response focused on its fundamental principles, chiefly, the nature and definition of the enemy. According to the PFLP, the enemy camp is a triad: The Israeli Entity (Zionist movement), global imperialism, and Arab reactionaries. This, the Front argued, was a precise diagnosis of the conflict. Consequently, it maintained that targeting the enemy should not be restricted by geography, since the enemy itself had made the entire world a battlefield. The second pillar of the PFLP’s reasoning concerned media and mobilization: external operations, far from tarnishing the Palestinian cause, were in fact a form of revolutionary media that forced the world to listen to the Palestinians. “These operations,” the pamphlet stated, “are revolutionary propaganda that pulls out the wax from European ears.” During that period, the media dimension was central to the fedayeen who carried out such missions. In the collective will and testament of the martyrs of the 1972 Munich operation, the fighters wrote: “We hope our revolutionary action will help the world grasp the grotesque reality of the Zionist occupation in our land. Our revolutionary method aims to expose Zionist-imperialist ties.” The martyrs, and the Front, were right. These operations functioned as screams against a near-total Zionist grip over global media. For Palestinians and Arabs living under suffocating silence, these missions were screams embodied in flesh and blood. As martyr Nizar Banat once put it: “In the 1970s, Palestinians struck hard, and the world sympathized. It sympathized when we struck back.” Today’s reality is not far from the logic the PFLP once laid out. In fact, the enemy camp, with its Zionist, imperialist, and reactionary Arab lackeys, has never been more bloodthirsty. The media logic also remains sound: armed resistance is still the most potent form of revolutionary media. What has changed, however, is that new communications tools have enabled armed struggle within occupied Palestine to become the primary focus. For those who believe that today’s narrative shift in our favor is due to a global moral awakening in the face of genocide: imagine for a moment if the resistance in Gaza were to surrender, if the Israeli army marched in and handed the Strip over to the Palestinian Authority. How would the narrative look then, especially if written by collaborators with the occupation?
https://abolitionmedia.noblogs.org/19298/The Conquest of Bread by Peter KropotkinChapter 7: ClothingWhen the houses have become the common heritage of the citizens, and when each man has his daily supply of food, another forward step will have to be taken. The question of clothing will of course demand consideration next, and again the only possible solution will be to take possession, in the name of the people, of all the shops and warehouses where clothing is sold or stored, and to throw open the doors to all, so that each can take what he needs. The communalization of clothing – the right of each to take what he needs from the communal stores, or to have it made for him at the tailors and outfitters – is a necessary corollary of the communalization of houses and food. Obviously we shall not need for that to despoil all citizens of their coats, to put all the garments in a heap and draw lots for them, as our critics, with equal wit and ingenuity, suggest. Let him who has a coat keep it still – nay, if he have ten coats it is highly improbable that any one will want to deprive him of them, for most folk would prefer a new coat to one that has already graced the shoulders of some fat bourgeois; and there will be enough new garments, and to spare, without having recourse to second-hand wardrobes. If we were to take an inventory of all the clothes and stuff for clothing accumulated in the shops and stores of the large towns, we should find probably that in Paris, Lyons, Bordeaux, and Marseilles, there was enough to enable the commune to offer garments to all the citizens, of both sexes; and if all were not suited at once, the communal outfitters would soon make good these shortcomings. We know how rapidly our great tailoring and dressmaking establishments work nowadays, provided as they are with machinery specially adapted for production on a large scale. “But every one will want a sable-lined coat or a velvet gown!” exclaim our adversaries. Frankly, we do not believe it. Every woman does not dote on velvet nor does every man dream of sable linings. Even now, if we were to ask each woman to choose her gown, we should find some to prefer a simple, practical garment to all the fantastic trimmings the fashionable world affects. Tastes change with the times, and the fashion in vogue at the time of the Revolution will certainly make for simplicity. Societies, like individuals, have their hours of cowardice, but also their heroic moments; and though the society of to-day cuts a very poor figure sunk in the pursuit of narrow personal interests and second-rate ideas, it wears a different air when great crises come. It has its moments of greatness and enthusiasm. Men of generous nature will gain the power which to-day is in the hand of jobbers. Self-devotion will spring up, and noble deeds beget their like; even the egotists will be ashamed of hanging back, and will be drawn in spite of themselves to admire, if not to imitate, the generous and brave.
https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/kropotkin-peter/1892/bread.htm#chapter07