Results are in...

And counted. A grand total of 51 people voted. We would have liked to have got more votes than TUSC, but taking on such a mighty electoral machine in such a short space of time... we think we did well. So, anyway, puzzle no longer, the definitively tip-top best meme of the SWP crisis is, well, you can see it: That's quite a successful revolutionary organisation you've got there... Aaaaaaaand it's gone. It was quite a close run thing. The results are as follows:

Aaaaand it's gone - 31%
Creeping feminism - 25%
Don't X Y - it's petty bourgeois - 20%
We must observe socialist discipline - 12%
China Mieville is SCANDALOUS - 8%
Do you support this - 4%

Both the Whiff of autonomism and I've been on the internet... got no votes.

The interventionist leadership finally grinds into action...

And it's a calamity. Julie Sherry's article in the Guardian is appalling. It dodges every substantial criticism made of the SWP during this crisis. The only defence offered (that the matter was investigated and voted on) is actually what people find MOST offensive about the leadership's handling of the Delta case - that the leadership thought itself capable of investigating then ruling on an allegation of sexual assault. Even if it was a good article it has come out THREE months after the crisis broke; so much for interventionist leadership. 

Here is a link to an IS Blog piece responding to the Guardian article.

This is a crisis...

A large crisis. In fact, if you've got a moment, it's a twelve storey crisis with a magnificent entrance hall, carpeting throughout, 24-hour portage, and an enormous sign on the roof, saying 'This Is a Large Crisis'. A large crisis requires a large plan. Get me two pencils and a pair of underpants.

Once more on bourgeois culture...

The role of any socialist approaching modern culture is as a critic. There is no such thing as socialist culture and trying to create such a thing is at best misguided.

Just because something is said in the bourgeois press does not make it untrue let alone something that can simply be written off. Modern mainstream culture is bourgeois. The prevailing ideas in any epoch are the ideas of the ruling class; this includes ideas about law, justice and so on. Most people we want to reach are, to this extent, 'bourgeois'. If mainstream press attacks a part of the socialist you deal with it head on, you don’t dismiss the attack and you don’t hide, because you can’t.

In case you didn't know (but do care)...

Both Keith and I are in full agreement with this and this.

Live in the real world... there is no money... etc

There is 'no money' because the bankers and stock market jockeys are deliberately withdrawing it. European stock markets are tumbling on the news that the Greeks will be given some kind of say over their future, through a referendum on the current debt package.

Our capitalists are in no doubt as to how popular they are, how welcome their policies are. They are generally realistic when their precious, precious wealth is on the line.

Functioning democracy is seen as an obstacle to capital accumulation. Beware, Greece has had dictatorships before, in living memory. If the Greek working class lets up for a moment the ruling class wouldn't hesitate to impose another dictatorship if it felt it needed to.

News: many and various

Sometimes I feel like a right sour old git, but sometimes I have the courage of my convictions, like when I see It's Time to Democratise Money Creation . I just think: "Is it...? Is it really?"

Meanwhile in Chile military service is obligatory, public education is not.

Chile has given nearly 57,000 18-year-olds one month to report for potential military duty, saying the government needs to fill gaps in its armed forces because a nationwide student protest movement has reduced the number of volunteers it usually gets.

Chilean government is preparing for war on someone, probably the Chileans.

New spaceport opens, new tax-funded (but privately owned) $209m spaceport offering $200,000 2 and 1/2 hour flights, 2 and 1/2 hour flights with 5 minutes zero gravity, new spaceport opens for test flight. We at TtSD are all in favour of this, on one condition, they set the controls for the heart of the sun. Blastoff! Feel the world getting lighter!

Follow coverage of the Dale Farm evictions, LIVE! Watch marauding police and bailiffs batter ordinary people, LIVE! Watch people's homes and lives being destroyed, LIVE! Then go back to your business as if nothing's happened.

Sow austerity, reap recession

Back in the day world financial institutions would use debt as a lever. A country, second or third world country, would get into economic difficulty. The instruments of global finance would then basically send the economy into deliberate shock, and use the precipitous economic and social decline to raid said country.

This method is fine, if you happen to be a financier and not a citizen. The only trouble is there is a global economic crisis. The Markets, aka the ruling class, are trying to perform this trick over the entire planet. If every country is suppressing wages, driving up unemployment, privatising public assets and aiming to become an export economy (as if you can turn a whole economic set-up around just like that) the only problem is... who are they going to export to?

The ruling class is clinging to a global policy that reduces effective demand during recession and, lo and behold, we are on the brink of recession, again. There have been bigger debt 'crises' than this one. After World War Two there was a greater public debt across Europe as well as Britain. This crisis, the actual crisis, is being deliberately precipitated.

We don't just need Greek-style resistance, soon that won't be enough. It's getting to that stage now in Greece, popular resistance will need to go beyond strikes, into occupations, beyond demonstrations into armed mutinies. It's popular democracy or a new dictatorship.

Interesting times ahead, perhaps...? Oh dear...