Dear Jon Voight: A letter about Gaza

Does Jon Voight have his facts on Israel and Palestine right?
SOURCE: Aljazeera

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Hollywood conservative, Jon Voight, has accused fellow actors of inciting anti-Semitism, following their condemnation of Israeli attacks on Gaza [AP]

Jon Voight long ago lost his marbles, if he ever had them. But what no one asks is, why did this actor turn a rabid conservative after appearing in progressive films like Coming Home? Are his reactionary positions mere career opportunism?

Gil Hochberg
Gil Hochberg is a professor of Comparative Literature at UCLA. She is the author of “In Spite of Partition: Jews, Arabs, and the Limits of Separatist Imagination” (Princeton University Press, 2007) and is presently finishing a project studying the Visual Politics of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Mark LeVine
Mark LeVine is a professor of Middle Eastern History at University of California, Irvine, and a Distinguished Visiting Professor at Lund University. His new book is One Land, Two States: Israel and Palestine as Parallel States, co-edited with Ambassador Mathias Mossberg.

[A]s the carnage in Gaza reached a crescendo in the beginning of August, Jon Voight, one of Hollywood’s most vocal conservatives, penned a harsh attack on fellow actors Javier Bardem and Penelope Cruz in response to a letter they signed condemning the latest Israeli bombing of Gaza in which he accused them of “inciting anti-Semitism all over the world”.

Many activists dismiss Voight’s letter as the rantings of an unthinking actor who long ago lost touch with political reality – a poor relation of conservative icon Charlton Heston. But Voight’s vitriol, and the narratives behind them, have for decades been quite effective in silencing criticism of Israel in Hollywood or among entertainers more broadly.Indeed, they provide the intellectual cover for even more extreme attacks by celebrities like Joan Rivers, who in an “epic rant” worthy of an Israeli Knesset member, declared that Palestinians in Gaza “deserved to be dead”. This level of hatred mirrors the increasingly genocidal discourse against Palestinians within Israeli political and culture.Yet it also gives cover for a growing blacklist by “top industry executives” against actors like Cruz and Bardem who dare criticise Israel publicly and without the level of deference that has long defined Hollywood’s treatment of the Jewish state.Like most Hollywood scripts, the narratives on which the views of Voight, Rivers and other Hollywood Israel supporters are based are far removed from the historical and contemporary realities they purport to describe. Yet their power remains secure precisely because they are the same narratives used by the seemingly reasonable mainstream media and political actors – from the New York Times to President Obama – whenever the conflict is discussed.

Historical myths

There are three fundamental “myths”, to borrow a phrase from one of Israel’s founding revisionist historians, Simha Flapan, surrounding Israel’s birth and subsequent history that cohere the traditional narrative Voight is re-voicing. The first surround’s the state’s creation itself: “when in 1948 the Jewish people were offered by the UN a portion of the land originally set aside for them in 1921… The Arabs rejected the offer, and the Jews accepted, only to be attacked by five surrounding Arab countries committed to driving them into the sea… The Arabs tried it again in 1967, and again in 1973.”

Voight’s account is familiar but it is a distortion of the actual history, one that echoes the official Israeli narrative to the letter. In reality, after three decades of increasing intercommunal conflict marked by periodic bursts of violence and growing Jewish immigration, the UN voted to partition Palestine in 1947.

Already by December 1947 a civil had erupted, in which both Zionist and Arab forces engaged in regular attacks and even terrorism, with coordinated Zionist attacks on Palestinian villages aimed at Judaising strategic parts of the country picking up speed by the beginning of spring 1948.

By May 15, the date of Israel’s establishment, tens of thousands of Palestinians had already been forced into exile. As Oxford University professors Avi Shlaim and Eugene Rogan demonstrated in their book The War for Palestine, Rewriting the History of 1948, Arab leaders either sent mostly untrained and badly armed forces whose primary goals were to prevent rather than support the creation of a Palestinian state. Jordan had even secretly agreed to a division of most of the territory (except Jerusalem) with the Zionist leadership.

The second myth surrounds the Six Day War. Voigt’s description of 1967 as the “Arab trying again” is familiar yet similarly inaccurate. There were certainly many threats emanating from Arab capitals in the late spring of 1967, but ultimately it was Israel that launched a “sneak attack”, one in which US and Israeli intelligence agencies correctly assumed would wipe out the combined forces of the surrounding states in roughly five days.

Whatever its motivations, 1967 became a war of conquest and expansion. Israel could have maintained a military occupation indefinitely, if security was its main concern. Instead, it began a process of settlement, which in Jerusalem and the West Bank has intensified without pause to the present day. Gaza, which Voight and other Israel supporters argues was “give[n] the Palestinians… as a peace gesture”. Gaza was never a gift Israel could “give” to Palestinians. It was not only occupied under international law but legally inseparable from the West Bank. What Israel has done was withdraw and then impose a siege while intensifying once again its settlements in and control over the West Bank, both of which violate international law.

The third myth surrounds the Oslo peace process. The traditional narrative, repeated here, is that “Israel has always labored for a peaceful relation with its Arab neighbors.” In reality, Israel violated every agreement with and about Palestinians, beginning with its pledge in the Camp David Accords to enable “full autonomy to the inhabitants” as soon as possible (as we know, instead of robust autonomy Palestinians received half a million settlers and lost control over the vast majority of their land). Israel’s record of abiding by the Oslo-era agreements is no better, and in fact doomed them from the start.

INTERACTIVE: Gaza Under Attack

The fourth myth surrounds Hamas. Voight claims that “the Palestinians elected Hamas, a terrorist organization, and they immediately began firing thousands of rockets into Israel.” Even the arch-conservative New York Post recognised that Hamas was elected not because of its terrorism but out of disgust with an utterly coopted, corrupt and brutal Palestinian Authority. More to Voight’s point, Hamas did not begin firing missiles into Israel until after it attempted to remove the newly elected leadership by force in a US and PA-supported coup. No significant rocket fire occurred until two years after Hamas was elected, during which time Israel continued its siege on Gaza and ever-tightening stranglehold on the West Bank.

Finally, Voight claims that his fellow actors “have forgotten how this war started”. But contrary to his assertion, as reported in great detail in the Israeli media, the Israeli government began a series of attacks on Hamas and other Palestinian activists, arresting, shooting and even killing many in response to its unity deal with the Palestinian Authority. This was the context for the kidnap and murder of three settler youth which was not a cause of but rather a link in a much larger chain of events that led to the present disaster.

Have Israel’s actions risen to the level of genocide, as the letter Mr Bardem and others signed alleges? Given the history of genocide against the Jews – the term was invented to describe the Holocaust – it is tragic that such a characterisation can even be considered. But it must be faced, because Israel’s actions, which have long been characterised as “politicide” or “spaciocide” by Israeli and Palestinian scholars, as well as the political and public rhetoric against Palestinians, have become so intense that the genocide accusation can no longer be dismissed out of hand.

It is undeniable that Israelis have suffered in the latest Gaza war, but it’s equally certain that the suffering Israel has inflicted upon Palestinians is exponentially greater, and the responsibility for that suffering lies not just with Israel, but with the United States which has, in the words of Jon Stewart, acted as its “drug dealer”while pretending to be a caring friend. If Israel’s most vocal partisans like Jon Voight really care so much about Israel, they should take the time to understand this historical and political reality. Otherwise, their passion and concern for Israel will only lead it closer to the very reckoning they desperately hope it will avoid.



Robin Williams and George Carlin—comedic genius with different twists

(Wikicommons)

Robin Williams (Wikicommons)

PATRICE GREANVILLE

[T]he world is justly lamenting the premature departure of Robin Williams, a suicide at 63, one of the most unique and beloved comedians to appear in the postwar period, a true master of improvisation, but also a man who, like many comics, was utterly torn and tormented on the inside. It’s next to impossible to know for certain the real motives that push someone over the edge, but in Williams’ case the fractures and weaknesses in his temperament had been visible from the start.

A shy youth born to affluence, like many celebrities, especially in the bloated and hyper-pampered American culture, Williams had self-indulgent tendencies that inevitably devolved into cocaine and alcohol addictions. As was the case with John Belushi, and the more recent example of Philip Seymour Hoffman, this almost guaranteed a history of constant self-abuse culminating in periodic crises and ultimately death. As Williams entered his senior years the struggles with addiction were compounded by a lifelong tendency to depression (he was diagnosed as bipolar) and heart disease requiring the replacement of an aortic valve in 2009. It is known that serious cardiac issues can precipitate serious depressive episodes.

Brands of comedy

Except for a handful of figures like the legendary Lenny Bruce and later George Carlin, Chris Rock and Jeanine Garofalo, American comedy in the postwar period has been mostly an escapist, nonpolitical affair. Some of the most popular contemporary comics, including Williams, Steve Martin, John Candy, Bill Murray, Jerry Seinfeld, and even an older generation that presided upon the ushering of television—Milton Berle, Sid Cesar, Jonathan Winters, Phil Silvers, Jerry Lewis—carefully eschewed explicitly political topics, considering this too risky to their careers. Many, of course, had no desire to make political and social commentary the centerpiece of their art, since they simply lacked the ideological clarity or personal compulsion to do so. I am talking here about leftist commentary that zeroes in on the system’s crimes and flaws, not merely liberaloid/Democratic party-style GOP-denigrating potshots in the style popularized by Jon Stewart, Bill Maher, Stephen Colbert and many others of their ilk.

It is in this manner that these two giants of comedy —Williams and Carlin—differentiate their material and define their art. Williams, a master of personal, quirky, often manic and near-impossible to classify material, leaves behind a legacy that covers an unlimited range of topics, frequently cultural and sexual, notably his series of sendups of different nationalities. Who can resist Williams’ hilarious version of the invention of golf (see video), as explained in near incomprehensible burr by a native Scot?

Still, after almost 40 years of uninterrupted work, the core of Williams’ comedy can be seen as just zanily observational with only a passing touch of the social and political (as a Hollywood liberal his most politicized barbs were reserved for George Bush in 2008). In fact, the main thing we deplore about Williams, given his obvious intelligence, is the absence of any real political conscience capable at least of realizing that America’s filthy imperial wars are not something to whitewash through art. Perhaps it is for that reason that his much celebrated film Good Morning Vietnam always felt like a stain on his career, an outing reinforced by his quietly flag-waving, Bob-Hopish-entertain-the-troops tours. For a man that ahead of his time in terms of comedic boundaries, such participation remains hard to explain. (Again, contrary to majority opinion on this, and his risqué standup persona, I found most of his movie roles, except for Garp, embarrassing or downright cloying and conformist. Patch Adams is almost unwatchable.)

Despite this, Robin Williams’ place is assured in the pantheon of entertainers in postwar America.

Below: George Carlin on Business Ethics

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Carlin in Jesus is Coming (Credit: Bonnie from Kendall Park, NJ, USA)

Of working-class Irish background, Carlin was cast in a different mould. While a lot of his work concerned regular observational comedy, what he baptized as “humanity’s bullshit,” he was also a serious (some would say infamous) student of the English language and a man deeply offended by hypocrisy. Few targets of concentrated mendacity seemed as tempting to his satirical wit as the business system itself, the main engine of American society, its values, and the real controller of the government despite pious protestations of democratic power.  Consistent with his vision and temperamental urge to throw bricks at the established order and the human species itself, Carlin’s most enduring and irresistibly funny sketches feature often bitter, misanthropic commentary on advertising, politicians, and other creatures and institutions central to the ability of the capitalist system to operate.

In his later years, fully aware now of the dimensions of the destruction wrought by a well-organized but criminally led humanity, Carlin turned his eyes in bitter despair to the environment, endless war, corruption and other pestilences inherent in the global disorder we have allowed to prevail.

Can anyone blame him for this statement excerpted from his Life is Worth Losing show?

 



The Role of US Corporate Entertainment in the Social Control Element of Imperialism

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Belafonte & Jay-Z (Credit: Black Agenda Report)

Danny Haiphong, Black Agenda Report

[D]on’t expect truth or wisdom from entertainers. They work for monopoly media corporations, not for their adoring publics. With a few exceptions, Black entertainers conform to the dictates of Power and view their own “fans” as lower forms of life. “Jay-Z rejected an invitation to speak to [Harry] Belafonte, calling him a ‘boy’ who needed to understand that the rapper’s very presence was ‘charity’ to the Black community.”

“While Jay-Z collects millions in profits from shared ownership of the Brooklyn Nets and ‘Rocawear,’ actor Danny Glover has yet to find ‘charity’ forToussaint, a film that has been in the works since at least 2008.”

Corporate entertainment, as an appendage of the mass media, has for decades been a staple of the US imperial project.  Corporate mass media is completely in the hands of five mega corporations, each with friendly relations with the Zionist entity (Israel) and Washington.  Under these conditions, the careers of US entertainers are dictated both by the corporate profit motive and the interests of the states that regulate it.  In this period in particular, where capitalism is in perpetual crisis, entertainers are highly valued for their social control function. Capitalists could very well accumulate far more profits from entertainers than they already do. Instead, the capitalist class pays for the lavish lifestyles of corporate entertainers to ensure they willingly present bourgeois ideology as a pleasurable product to the masses.

When the contradictions of US empire reach crisis levels, corporate entertainers are ultimately left with the choice of siding with the oppressed or remaining loyal to the oppressor’s social system. History shows that the loyalty of American entertainers to imperialism is not guaranteed. In the mid 20th century, numerous Hollywood entertainers were subjected to FBI surveillance, harassment, and even exile for identifying with global socialist movements abroad and organizing with the Black freedom and communist movements at home. Targets included popular names such as Paul Robeson, Richard Wright, and Charlie Chaplin.

“Entertainers are highly valued for their social control function.”

But that was a different time. The monopolies of the entertainment industry have greatly expanded their basis of economic and social control for the capitalist ruling class. In this period, corporate entertainers maintain loyalty to US imperialism not only because of the exorbitant salaries they receive from their bosses, but also because of the political influence they are endowed from capital. It is no secret that media monopolies carefully recruit willing soul-sellers in exchange for access to a publicly celebrated bourgeois lifestyle. Still, imperialism’s assessment of this period of crisis is that a stronger form of insurance is needed to maintain popular consent to its atrocities. The imperialist exploiters and warlords have found this insurance in the select-few entertainers it promotes to political class membership.

Jay-Z has been in the rap industry for over two decades but only recently ascended into Black political class membership. His inter-bourgeois mobility has come complete with connections to the Obama Administration and profitable business ventures. Last year, the gap between Jay-Z’s rise to power and the conditions of the Black community evoked a strong response by Black freedom fighter and entertainer, Harry Belafonte. Belafonte urged Jay-Z to be more socially responsible to Black America, which alongside indigenous Native America, remains the most oppressed people in continental USA. Jay-Z rejected an invitation to speak to Belafonte, calling him a “boy” who needed to understand that the rapper’s very presence was “charity” to the Black community.

The “charity” Jay-Z refers to is merely the visibility of a Black political class whose careers are built on the spoils of the white capitalist power structure. While Jay-Z collects millions in profits from shared ownership of the Brooklyn Nets and “Rocawear,” actor Danny Glover has yet to find “charity” for  Toussaint, a film that has been in the works since at least 2008.

Glover’s film planned to tell the story of the Haitian Revolution. In 1804, the victory of this Black revolution freed Haiti from colonial enslavement and forced France to sell what is now half of the United States. But because the film’s script possesses no white protagonist, the film has caught little interest from Hollywood execs. Hugo Chavez and the Chavista government agreed to donate 18 million to the film in 2008. The Black political class and its Hollywood reps have yet to donate a dime.

“The corporate entertainment industry produces and reproduces white supremacy, sexism, and bourgeois ideology.”

So when Rihanna and Dwight Howard both deleted tweets expressing solidarity with the Palestinian people, it should be understood that such cowardice indicates the dual purpose of US imperialism’s entertainment industry. Hollywood, corporate sports, and monopolized record labels are businesses of media profiteers. These institutions are inherently political. The corporate entertainment industry produces and reproduces white supremacy, sexism, and bourgeois ideology. It also produces a political class whose continued prosperity and political connection is dependent upon the plunder of the world’s peoples and resources.

It is important for the capitalist ruling class to sustain a political class of corporate entertainers whose intended audience is first and foremost Black America. The fact that most of the corporate celebs apologizing for their position on Israel’s genocide are Black representatives in the industry is no coincidence. This development is tied to Jay-Z’s insult of Harry Belafonte and Hollywood’s hostility to Danny Glover’s project on the Haitian revolution. Each scenario is part and parcel of imperialism’s assault on Black radical politics and the social control function of corporate entertainment toward this end.

Malcolm X’s grandson was on his way to the “International Conference on Hollywoodism” in Iran before being interrupted and arrested by the FBI. Shortly after, he was tragically killed in Mexico. The conference he was supposed to attend is a gathering of scholars, activists, and concerned citizens who come together to discuss Hollywood’s role in promoting the interests of US and Western imperialism. As the conference suggests, an anti-imperialist liberation movement in the US must combat the vicious lies of corporate media and do so in this period without the aid of the vast majority of corporate celebs. The revolution will not be televised, nor made into a celebrity affair.

Danny Haiphong is an activist and case manager in the Greater Boston area. You can contact Danny at: wakeupriseup1990@gmail.com. [13

 

Source URL: http://blackagendareport.com/content/role-us-corporate-entertainment-social-control-element-imperialism

 


 



Where does Steve Harvey get off calling Tavis Smiley and Cornel West “Uncle Toms”?

ARCHIVES: Obama’s presidency has had a profoundly divisive effect among many Americans, including the Black community, which insists on supporting Obama mostly as a matter of racial pride.
.steve-harvey-640x360 .
 political and social analysis for the consumption of his gullible followers.—P. Greanville
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Dispatch from: The Hollowverse

The religions and political views of the influentials.

Who is Steve Harvey?

Steve Harvey, whose full name is Broderick Steven Harvey, was born in Welch, West Virginia and grew up in Cleveland, Ohio.

Harvey is a devout Christian. I’m assuming he would call himself a Baptist, because in 2012, he tweeted:

#2012Hoodie Awards: Best Church : First Baptist Church of Glenarden – Washington, DC1

Regardless, Harvey is way into Jesus. Check out this video of him, where he gets into what he would say if he had the opportunity to “introduce” Jesus Christ to a room full of people. It shows an incredible devotion and an impressive knowledge of the Bible and Christian tradition.
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SIDEBAR: 

Steve Harvey: True Uncle Tom
By Prince Solomon—(who makes sense)

Harvey has credited God for his success as an entertainer as well. He said at a stand-up show in Las Vegas:

God has given me a life far beyond anything I ever dreamed about. God is, man, God is something else man.2

His devotion to Christianity translates into an unapologetic, aggressive disrespect for atheists. He once said on the Tyra Banks show, giving dating advice to women:

You are sitting up there talking to a dude and he tells you he’s an atheist, you need to pack it up and go home. You talking to a person who don’t believe in God… what’s his moral barometer? Where’s it at? It’s nowhere.3

The comments were unsurprisingly controversial and Harvey was asked to expand on them during an interview with Joy Behar, who was filling in for Larry King on his popular interview show. Harvey didn’t back down, calling atheists “idiots,” expressing skepticism over the theory of evolution and the Big Bang theory and saying that if someone tells him they’re an atheist, he simply walks away.4

Guns blazing for Obama

Harvey is a Democrat, and most of his political activity involves endorsing, defending or hosting one Obama event or another. He interviewed Michelle Obama on his television show. He was incredibly moved to have had the experience:

Of all the shows, she came on mine. That was pretty important, kind of major for me. That kind of makes me feel very validated, because some other shows have put in requests for her, and she came here first.5

On his radio show, he talks about the “sickening” anti-Obama movement, defending the president’s health care program and calling out the president’s critics by name. Perhaps most controversially, Harvey called black activists/academics Cornel West and Travis Smiley “Uncle Toms” for criticizing Obama.6 That’s about the worst thing a black person can call another black person and Harvey, again, was asked to clarify/apologize for his comments. He sort of did, saying:

In retrospect, I probably should not have called these men ‘Uncle Toms.’ I wear so many hats that sometimes as a comedian, I cross the line, which I will continue to do. I apologize for referring to them that way. But everything else I said, good. I’m not retracting my statements, I’m just apologizing.7

Harvey’s got a mouth on him, and it’s probably what made him the celebrity he is today. Whatever works, right?



The new aristocracy in Britain

There's a widening gap in wealth around the world. Britain and the US are among the leaders—and most unequal of nations.

There’s a widening gap in wealth around the world. Britain and the US are among the leaders—and most unequal of nations.

Jordan Shilton, wsws.org

Remarking on social conditions at the end of the 18th century, Thomas Paine wrote, “The contrast of affluence and wretchedness continually meeting and offending the eye is like dead and living bodies chained together.”

More than 200 years later, Paine’s scathing critique of social inequality can be applied even more forcefully to modern day Britain, as the release of the latestSunday Times annual Rich List last weekend proves.

Britain’s wealthiest 1,000 individuals now control wealth equivalent to one third of total economic output, or £519 billion (US$877 billion). Over the past decade, the number of billionaires has trebled, giving the UK the dubious distinction of being the country with the most billionaires per head of population in the world. The amount of wealth required to obtain access to the hallowed circles of the UK’s richest 500 individuals has more than doubled over the past decade, and is up nearly 20 percent in just one year.

Separate statistics show that the top 1 percent, or 600,000 people, possess more wealth than the poorest 55 percent of the population, or 33 million people. Of the nation’s £9.5 trillion in property, pensions and financial assets, the 1 percent control a staggering £5.225 trillion. Just the five richest families in the UK are wealthier than the bottom 20 percent, the 12.6 million people now living below the poverty line.

The emergence of the modern-day financial aristocracy at the top of society has been directly connected to the impoverishment of ever broader layers of working people. Over the past 10 years, the wealth of the richest 1,000 people in Britain has doubled. During the same period, state finances were raided to provide a multi-billion bailout to these very same layers, whose ill-gotten gains were achieved through acts of financial speculation and outright criminality.

For the working class, the bank bailout ushered in an era of unprecedented attacks on its living standards and social services on which millions depend. While the rich wallow in wealth, the use of food banks has reached unheard of levels, wages have been slashed and public services eliminated or privatised.

This is part of an international process, one seen in every country. The financial crisis of 2008 was a signal for the ruling class to embark on the deepest assault on working people since the 1930s in order to take back all of the concessions it was forced to make in the postwar period. The consequences of such policies were illustrated by an Oxfam report published earlier this year showing that the richest 85 individuals possess more wealth than the poorest half of the world’s population, 3.5 billion people.

Whereas some sections of the establishment would have been embarrassed by such appalling levels of social inequality a generation ago, the major Sunday newspapers carried reports on the Rich List devoid of even the mildest criticism of the obscene accumulation of wealth at the top of society. Not a word of protest was raised at the claim by Phillip Beresford, compiler of the Rich List, that the accumulation of multi-billion-pound fortunes by a financial oligarchy “brings more jobs and more wealth for the country.”

The truth is that the super-rich oligarchs featured in the Rich List are a parasitic caste, sucking up all of society’s wealth. The gargantuan sums held by the elite have been accumulated through financial speculation, rather than by investment in the productive economy. London has become the global billionaires’ playground precisely because it is synonymous with financial deregulation and the corrupt practices this has produced, including the fixing of the Libor lending rate.

Any talk of economic recovery applies exclusively to the wealthy. The stock markets are higher than ever, property prices in London are stratospheric, while wages for the vast majority continue to stagnate or decline. The economic growth figures touted as marking an end to the crisis come overwhelmingly from the financial sector, which accounts for over 40 percent of Britain’s economic output.

The uncritical acceptance of the repugnant levels of social inequality by all the major political parties is striking. All sections of the political establishment are bought and paid for representatives of the financial oligarchy and have been pursuing right-wing nostrums for years proclaiming social inequality to be the natural order of things. According to this schema, the rich rise to the top because of their talents and success, and the rest of society must be grateful for what wealth generated then “trickles down.” Ever since Thatcher began her offensive against the working class in the 1980s, this has proved devastating for working people.
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Some 104 billionaires are now based in the UK – more than triple the number from a decade ago – with a combined wealth of more than £301 billion.  It means Britain has more billionaires per head of population than any other country, while London’s total of 72 sterling billionaires is more than any other city in the world.

_________

The Labour Party in power seamlessly took up from where the Conservatives left off, privatising public services and encouraging the growth of a vast financial sector ever more divorced from the broader economy. When the financial crisis erupted in 2008, it was Labour that implemented the bank bailout and began enforcing a programme of brutal austerity. Its trade union allies have not organised a single major strike to oppose the devastating assault on the jobs and living standards of working people.

Today the maintenance of even the basic necessities of daily life for the vast majority is incompatible with the existence of a financial aristocracy, whose vast wealth contributes nothing to society. That is, not a single problem confronting working people can be resolved without a political struggle being waged against the root cause of ever worsening social inequality, the capitalist profit system.

Society must be liberated from the grip of the parasitic caste standing at its apex and dictating all aspects of political and economic life, through the formation of a workers’ government and the implementation of a socialist system of planned production for need, not profit.

This essential task is possible only by the unification of the working class in Britain with its brothers and sisters throughout Europe and internationally. It is the task to which the Socialist Equality Party in Britain and our German sister party, the Partei für Soziale Gleichheit, are dedicated and which forms the essential basis of our campaign in the European elections.

Jordan Shilton is a cultural critic with wsws.org