Speakers Corner Marxist Platform
Every Sunday 1:30 pm - 4:00 pm


Theatre and Myth of the United Nations

The mass media presents the theatre of the United Nations Security Council as a hot debate between the world’s leaders. Yet our leaders are representatives of Capitalist interests, their disputes and conflicts conceal behind them, the conflicting interests of the main Capitalist powers.

The war on Iraq reveals a universal crisis afflicting all the main International organisations, from the United Nations to NATO, the European Union to the IMF, etc. These bodies were created after World War II to represent the dominant position of the United States. As the power of the USSR increased, the threat of Mutually Assured Destruction hung over the post-Hiroshima world. The US-Soviet Cold War ossified international relations and institutions until the fall of the Berlin Wall.

Now US power faces a new challenge - the economic challenge from Europe, which is reflected in the diplomatic conflict over War with Iraq. During the Cold War, the USSR and USA fought wars by proxy rather than directly. Now the sharp conflict between Europe and the USA opens up a new era in international relations.

The dreams of ‘Peace Freedom and Plenty for All’ proclaimed at the Fall of the Berlin Wall quickly vanished. In the east, instead of Peace, capitalism brought wars from Yugoslavia to the Caucasus and Central Asia. Capitalist ‘peace’ meant national and ethnic war, behind which stood rapacious mafia hoods, egged on and advised by Harvard economics gurus working for the IMF, George Soros, the European Union, the U.S.A. and NATO.

With Russian opposition dissipated the U.S. cajoled the UN to vote for and finance their ‘war to free Kuwait from Iraqi occupation’. U.S. power proclaimed a New World Order, laser-guided weapons rained down on Baghdad followed by murderous sanctions on the people of Iraq. In 1999 NATO’s depleted uranium missiles rained down on Yugoslavia, in the name of ‘liberating Kosovo’. Premeditated murder requires a solid alibi!
In each bloodly slaughter, a new Hitler is conjured out of a hat, and is said to threaten civilization itself. A parade of mad men appear just in time for the next war, “Hussein the dictator”, “Milosevic the ethnic cleanser”, “Bin the Knife of terror”. Each in turn was a man our governments could “do business with”, a memory swept under the carpet by the next ‘urgent crisis’. Whatever happened to the prosperity promised in 1989 as a result of the peace dividend?

In the East, instead of plenty, criminal gangs and ethnic warlords led the battle to plunder the peoples’ property through privatisation. All the institutions of capitalist governance were brought to bear to enforce the pauperisation of the majority. Such poverty brought the collapse of civilised existence to hundreds of millions.

In the West instead of plenty, workers' real wages fell, working hours increased, job security was eliminated and the age of retirement extended. Meanwhile corporate thieves manipulated markets to plunder the planet. In the last ten years inequality increased everywhere. The richest three hundred and fifty people own more personal wealth than the annual income of half the world.

In the South instead of plenty, capitalist economies from Argentina to Angola, from Korea to Venezuela collapsed; helped by means of electronic plunder using computer networks connecting Wall Street, the City of London and other international financial centres. The suffering is unspeakable, the exploitation ruthless, and the ruling capitalists live in ever greater luxury. Fearing revolt, these ruling classes reside in palaces surrounded by armed guards or villas in countries far away from the scenes of their crimes.

The War on Terrorism and threat to Democratic Rights

For more than fifty years we were told Capitalism means Freedom. Now even in the richest and most democratic countries ‘terrorism’ justifies the elimination of the right to trial or jury. Our mail, telephone calls and e-mails are systematically monitored, cameras watch our movements on the ground and satellites observe us from the heavens. So paranoid are the ruling classes that their wealth, power and prestige will be challenged that all are considered potential enemies.

The free movement of Capital, Migration, Refugees and the free movement of Labour

A few hundred of the world's largest companies dominate all trade. The workers in all countries are combined in a world social division of labour, yet the accumulation of the wealth produced is private and individual. Capital moves into every corner of the world enriching the few and impoverishing the many, whilst labour is prevented from free movement by borders, visas and poverty. Political repression, economic, ecological and military crises drive millions to flee persecution, or seek a path to a more prosperous life through migration. In the era of capitalist expansion whole nations like the USA grew strong on the basis of immigration. Now refugees and immigrants are persecuted, and labelled as 'parasites' or potential 'terrorists'. Human freedom can only be based on the free movement of labour.

Freedom from Capitalism

All thinking mankind subconsciously cries out for real freedom. Freedom from the constraints placed on our individual, group and societal creative power. Freedom from that parasitic army of directors, shareholders, landlords, supervisors, managers, police, standing armies, etc. Freedom from those vast governmental and corporate bureaucracies working for the capitalist class and the landlords, and only needed by them. Consuming the vast majority of wealth is not the only crime of this system, they stunt, restrict and imprison every aspect of human development, from the creative vitality of the young to the wisdom of the old. All is shackled to the needs of the market.

Weapons of Mass destruction and Terrorism

We are told the war is because of Iraq’s biological weapons. The United Nations' report into the consequences of invading Iraq, reveals that bombing will destroy the essential infrastructure of survival, so epidemics of life-threatening water borne diseases will affect millions. More than ten years of sanctions on pharmaceutical supplies to Iraq have inflicted genocide, by means of the deprivation of chemical drugs. In Africa tens of millions suffering from AIDS are unable to purchase drugs to prevent them dying. Are these not forms of chemical and biological warfare?

Information Warfare and the control of the Mind

Ever more sinister weapons are developed in the most powerful nations, and military control reaches into the social order, warfare needs soldiers and civilian support or acquiescence. War enters the realm of information war, the battle to win the minds of the masses to their own subordination. Through accepting capitalism’s right to forcefully suppress others, we accept and recreate our own subordination. By rejecting our own subordination we begin not only our personal, but also the universal liberation of mankind.

Colin Powell and Jack Straw concoct nightmare terror scenarios, to scare US and world opinion into submission. If that is not sufficient tanks are sent to Heathrow Airport, imminent terror attacks are prophesied, and in the United States the people are told to prepare for gas attacks. This is information war against the people by their own governments.

Democratisation of the Means of Communication

This mass media serves the ruling classes, fostering the illusion that it challenges the misuse of power, that it objectively informs the mind. Overall the mass media serves as a means of misinformation and stupefaction, and will continue to do so as long as capitalist companies and their Governments own the television and radio stations. The means of mass communications must be democratised and opened to all mankind. There are no technical reasons for private or governmental monopoly of the mass media - the reasons are exclusively politico-economic.

Just as the railways in the 19th century brought workers in one city into union with workers nationwide, so the Internet brings workers together worldwide. On the Internet, our independent means of mass communication, corporate junk everywhere tries to occupy cyberspace as if the purpose of communications is exclusively material gain. On the basis of this chimera, the greatest stock market bubble in history was created, transferring astronomical sums to the world richest, for the most idiotic ‘ideas’. But we have turned this weapon against them, we have used this means of communication to forge links, to discuss anything, question everything, combine everywhere and act universally.

From means of enslavement to means of liberation

The means of producing the wealth of the world accrue to the hands of ever fewer. Technology sends probes into the distant heavens, telescopes stare backwards four billion years. We engineer the structures of human life and create nanomachines the size of a human cell. We communicate with each other at lightning speed on machines which can liberate us from the necessity to work for food, healthcare, education and shelter. The technologies of liberation shaped with our hands and brains are twisted by capitalism into new means of exploitation, enslavement, control, domination and terror. The software languages governing the functional operation of computers and thus of modern society, are claimed as the intellectual property of private individuals and companies.

The products of our labour, which we neither own nor control, are turned against us. The means of liberation become the means of enslavement. Human society requires scientific and rational plan: the revolutionary reorganisation of economic, social and political life through public ownership of the commanding heights of the economy, under democratic control of the producers and consumers.


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