SLIDESHOW:Latin America Solidarity Conference -- Melbourne, August 2009

SLIDESHOW:Latin America Solidarity Conference -- Melbourne, August 2009

From Peter Boyle

This conference was held on August 29 at the historic Victorian Trades Hall. There were international guest speakers from Venezuela and Chile The Venezuelan Ambassador to Australia, Nelson Davila, also attended among 160 others.

Slideshow

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CRIME FICTION:Jose Latour's old time Havana cesspool

CRIME FICTION:Jose Latour's old time Havana cesspool

Havana World Series: A Novel by José Latour

Latour is a skilled storyteller and seems to bring a fresh POV to all his novels. While known as a crime fiction writer the excuses deployed on the wrong side of the law seem always formatted by a pragmatic approach -- despite what may be the consequences, the crimes always seems like a good idea at the time.

In this case, the 1958 Baseball World Series is a element and backdrop to a heist executed a few months before the victory of the Cuban Revolution. With the Batista dictatorship in hock to the Mob, and real life crim,Meyer Lansky,reaping a windfall from his Havana casino investments, the fly in the ointment isn't just the guerrillas in the Sierra mountains.

Because he keeps competitors out of Cuba, inter mob rivalries look upon relieving Lansky of some of his largesse as an investment worth the risk. So a heist, in Danny Ocean style, seems like a good idea.

Developing a fictional story at such a historical cusp seems a stunning dramatic ploy but the advancing revolution is nonetheless relegated to background fill. Latour utilizes the Cuba of a past epoch as an excuse to explore crime interaction in a Caribbean sin hole with very little dynamic , aside from atmosphere and corruptable government, driven from the historical circumstance.

That wasn't what I was expecting. You have to read novels like James Elroy's American Tabloid to be served political intrigue obsessed with the old regime in Havana as Latour's story could comfortably sit in isolation among the any one of the Oceans Eleven franchises -- prettified with rum and Cuban cigars-- but set in Las Vegas.

Why Latour avoided the import of the impending revolution in his story seems a bit strange as he is now, after emigrating to Spain and more recently to Canada, hostile to the revolution from which he has turned his back. So the self evident question of whether the 1959 Revolution was a good idea or not is simply left hanging and the only happiness pending is the prospect of escaping the Mob's revenge or Batista's torturers.

What a cop out! But one thing's certain: Old Havana -- as run by the likes of Lansky and Batista's cronies -- like any cesspool, needed a thorough cleansing.

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VIDEO:Abortion Rights Protest - Brisbane August 29 2009

VIDEO:Abortion Rights Protest - Brisbane August 29 2009

See why you should come to the abortion rights rally being held in Brisbane, at Queens Park. Rally organised by Pro-Choice Action Collective.

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VIDEO: ¡Chávez - No se va!

VIDEO: ¡Chávez - No se va!

These scenes were filmed in Caracas on December 6 at the first of several mass rallies to commemorate 10 years of the Venezuelan Revolution. I was a participant in the Australia-Venezuela Solidarity Brigade organised twice a year by the Australia-Venezuala Solidarity Network. To join future brigades see: www.venezuelasolidarity.org
--Peter Boyle

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No Business-As-Usual for Socialists

No Business-As-Usual for Socialists

By Ben Courtice

How can a socialist organisation in a rich country with a huge carbon footprint ignore climate change? How can it remain completely aloof from the growing movement to stop climate change?

Australia’s largest socialist organisation on campus is Socialist Alternative, and their record on climate change is almost non-existent. They have a pamphlet on the issue (published some time ago, rarely seen on their stalls). They show up at big protests to sell their magazine (which occasionally has an article on why market solutions won’t fix climate change). In 2008 they had two members who were involved in organising the Melbourne Climate Emergency Rally, but have not lifted a finger since on climate issues. Their forte is handing out leaflets and putting up posters, but they wouldn’t even put up posters for the Switch Off Hazelwood protest on their regular poster runs.

One of the greatest weaknesses of the climate change movement is the lack of youthful and energetic new activists: much of the backbone of the movement is older, experienced or not, coming from suburban groups. The campus environment groups are small and just starting to come together to organise for climate movement events.

Socialist Alternative, who believe in the need for conscious political leadership of the working class (and students) on all matters of oppression, have a claimed 100 members in Melbourne. They have active clubs on several campuses. How much could their membership contribute if they really tried to support the climate movement? Even without abandoning other priorities, they could have a big impact.

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Get Miro

Get Miro

I'm dragging myself back to the front lines after a hiatus. But while on rehab I had another look at Miro -- which used to be called the Democracy Player. If you spend a lot of your online time searching for, watching and listening to audio and video then Miro is a powerful tool so you can do that with ease. It is also a media player -- which offers much better image quality than my usual VLC media player -- and plays everything I throw at it. Especially stunning HD.

I've shifted my (audio) podcasts over to Miro and while it is designed to facilitate subscriptions to internet TV channels I prefer to use its drop down menu and manually go to the originating web page to see whether I want to either watch or listen to the media file online or download it.

Best of all, Miro will supply me with descriptive summary notations so that I can decide whether I want to download the file. This means I can brows the file topics and review contents before selecting exactly what I want to download and view/listen. This beats most (audio) aggragtors I've used by a very long bandwidth mile.

Unlike iTunes or other players there are no ads!No flashy promoes. No buy this.;get that .No visual pollution stealing your bandwidth.

MiroGuide has an extensive and very useful audio and video activism listing.

Miro also offers one click torrents and will even download/seed non media torrents such as (umm) programs -- legally of course . Miro is a great introduction to Bit Torrents.

Miro is an easy free download from the getMiro site.

If you think as I do that maybe something like this is the likely route online media will take -- then take Miro for a spin.My own channel feed on the MiroGuide can be accessed through the button below.

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Cuba's organiponicos -- it's cool to dig!

Cuba's organiponicos -- it's cool to dig!

The BBC has a interesting short presentation on Permaculture in Cuba: The vegetable gardeners of Havan

Havana has almost 200 urban allotments - known as organiponicos - providing four million tonnes of vegetables every year - helping the country to become 90% self-sufficient in fruit and vegetables...

If you check out the permaculture Label here on Leftclick You'll access much more about this phenomenon.

But hey! The Cubans have made so radically chic to be a red green thumb as my a refit of my own kitchen garden (pic above) attests. I call it Little Havana.

It's now so very cool to dig!

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Edward Bond: Saved by Marxist Noir

Edward Bond: Saved by Marxist Noir

I've been rather ill and the malady down time has forced me into a considered "retreat" -- in the sense as the Catholic Church promotes "retreats".

And for some reason I've got caught up in considering the plays of Edward Bond (pictured left). Forty years ago, his break through play, Saved (first produced in 1965)had a massive impact upon me and I've been an occasional student of his ever since. I was perhaps very fortunate that in 1969 I caught maybe the only production of a Bond play in Australia, Saved -- directed by Arne Neeme during a drama festival at Monah University.

That was my moment, you see. My Wow!

Bond presents himself as a socialist but one who has addressed social issues with such consideration that it is so hard to find his equal anywhere.I guess this is why I came back to Bond because he offers serious thoughts on big topics in a dramatic way that he has to be compared to people like Bertolt Brecht or I guess, at least in his aggressive presentation of the human condition , to William Shakespeare.

Bond in fact wrote a play about Shakespeare -- Bingo - and it gives you a feel for his approach to his material:

Bingo: Scenes of Money and Death is a 1973 play by English Marxist playwright Edward Bond. It depicts an aging William Shakespeare at his Warwickshireenclosure home in 1615 and 1616, suffering pangs of conscience in part because he signed a contract which protected his landholdings, on the condition that he would not interfere with an enclosure of common lands that would hurt the local peasant farmers. Although the play is fictional, this contract has a factual basis. Bingo is a political drama heavily influenced by Bertolt Brecht and Epic theater.

and rewrote one of Shakespeare's plays as Lear.

Bond also has a habit of writing long introductions to his plays when they are published and these prologues are crafted like manifestos. So if you missed out on the meaning in one play, you'll be re-delivered the point of it in the written intro to its published form.

But I'm not interested in Bond just because he is political or because he is neglected or writes polemical tomes. I'm interested in Bond because he makes such good sense. Of course you have to take my word for it unless you read his plays -- as they have almost fallen from the English language repertoire and never got much of a footing in Australia -- or his writings on his plays (or interviews about them).

While he is an English playwright. he now is in exile and in France and in other theatres across Continental Europe, Bond is god.

And what strikes me so much is that Bond was out of step with the sixties and the subsequent wave of heady radicalism because he was so determined to be concrete and essential. Like Brecht, he is a heir to German Expressionism ( the expressionism we perhaps know best as it panned out in Film Noir over three decades) but with a Marxist twist.

So it is Marxist Noir -- the kind that Rosa Luxembourg nailed with the adage that our human choice is "socialism or barbarism'.

He is indeed prone to doubts, to pessimism and to horror because that is what we are all prone to -- but Bond's saving grace is that he is absolutely certain of the imperative for social change. And in an odd way -- and it is indeed odd for those of us schooled in Brechtian style epic theatre -- he doesn't let his craft get in the way. To discuss Bond presumes you are going to talk about the ideas in his plays. As he once wrote in one of his introductions:

"If a house is on fire and I shout ,"Fire! Fire!" I don't want people to comment on my shouting ability,I want them to join in the fire fighting." --Edward Bond [Plays: Two]

And its that sort of engagement that has bought me back to Bond: a bleakness diluted by the promise of social change.

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CRIME FICTION:Lisbeth Salander in situ and in Stockholm

CRIME FICTION:Lisbeth Salander in situ and in Stockholm

The Girl Who Played with Fire by Stieg Larsson


Volume Two of the trilogy which is an addictive page turner primarily due to the main protagonist -- Lisbeth Salander.

All the other devices Larsson has used are second fiddle to this core characterisation which take the books (I've read two and a third is to be published in English in October) to an exceptional level.

It is nonetheless good story telling and whatever may be your hesitancy when you first begin to read these pot boilers -- Lisbeth will win you over as something very real in a hostile world.

The core themes about misogyny and media spin are buoyed up , as in Volume I , by another conspiracy driven plot line. All rather shallow except for.... our heroine.

The contrived plotting doesn't really dwell in the identifiable real world of our own experience of big money and credibility -- but really once you engage, you're hooked and of the millions who are reading Stieg Larsson's trilogy, many of those are reading the 400 odd pages in each volume in one sitting.

So something is happening between these covers. While Larsson's moralism is laid on pretty thick through the person of Lisbeth's partner in sleuthing, Mikael Blomkvist — a crusading journalist and publisher -- you can't complain that he has chosen to target sex trafficking as the novels' primary exposee.

Liberal good will carries these novels a long way but in order, inevitably, to settle upon an explanation of why things occur as they do, you have to be ever ready to accept another conspiracy of complicity.

Sweden has a history of socially engaged crime fiction and the main writers in the genre feed off one another. But with Larsson the exploration is very insular and shallow with no attempt to explore anything broader than a few on hand evil bastards who seem to come out of the Ikea woodwork fully kited out for their role.

But with Lisbeth Salander in situ and in Stockholm, all is forgiven.

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CRIME FICTION:Leonardo Padura Fuentes: the imperialist vulture and the making of Havana Noir

CRIME FICTION:Leonardo Padura Fuentes: the imperialist vulture and the making of Havana Noir

Havana Black: A Lieutenant Mario Conde Mystery by Leonardo Padura Fuentes

My rating: 3 of 5 stars
I intend to write a more general review of the crime fiction of Leonardo Padura Fuentes on another occasion.While I'm no expert on Cuban literature I'm going back and forth between Padura and those fellow crime writes, unlike Padura, such as José Latour, who have turned their back on the revolution in order to get a feel for the fictional dialogue that is in motion.

And it is fascinating -- almost, in its own way, unique. If there is indeed a Havana Noir driven by evil and violence -- where is that coming from? What's its root source? I mean, what's the motivation for the criminal deeds?

If you are going to write crime fiction set in Cuba what crimes do you invent to tell your story?

I'm not suggesting that Cuba is free of crime but you'd expect the crime pattern to be a little different from what we may be used to in our comfortable capitalisms. What's also fascinating is how politically engaged these novels are in the way that their narratives are played out within the chronology of the Cuban experience -- the 1959 revolution, the relentless blockade, the Angolan war, Marielistas and the exile community in Miami, etc.

And bearing down, investing the cultural context with a very dark noir, is the impact of "the Special Period" and the consequential growth of income disparities and the Black Market.

So in a remarkable way, Cuba today is ripe for crime fiction because it is ripe for crime in the plebeian way it has not been for some time.

While we so often associate crime fiction with a sort of decayed cynical capitalism, wherein the state op or the PI explores crime as a symptom of a broader decay, in Cuba the same etiology prevails. And inasmuch as I've read enough stuff to make a ruling, inevitably the criminal experiences there -- both for real and in the writer's imagination -- are skewed by the refraction of Cuba's experience of the festering sore of imperialism which bears down upon the island like an opportunistic vulture -- performing at one and the same time the role as promised land and as brutal master who can so often only be embraced through some form of corruption.

This isn't so very hard to comprehend. Any Cuban knows that to survive in the belly of the neighbour to the north, you'll need gringo dollars and to accumulate those in Cuba ain't an easy ask.So what you see is this back and forth ambivalence in regard to the US threat and the US promise. It aint easy to primitively accumulate capital in Cuba so exile isn't a easy or necessarily clean way out of the rigors and deprivations of the "Special Period".

But embedded among all this is, in the case of Leonardo Padura Fuentes at least, is the frustrated aspirations of Cuba's 'lost generation' -- those like the post war baby boomers who enjoyed the fruits of the 59 revolution, only to yanker for more of what they cannot quite put their finger on. In that sense, Havana Noir -- esp Padura's novels of the Inspector Conde quartet -- panders to the frustrations and pessimism of a revolution now stuck in a sort of historical idle mode.

The Conde quartet -- the four seasons comprise:

• Pasado perfecto ("Havana Blue", 2007), 1991
• Vientos de cuaresma ("Havana Yellow", 2008)), 1994
• Mascaras ("Havana Red", 2005), 1997
• Paisaje de otoño ("Havana Black", 2006), 1998.

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Successful state conference in WA – membership trebles

Successful state conference in WA – membership trebles

Socialist Alliance had a very successful WA state conference on August 15. Between 60 and 70 people participated over the day, peaking at over 50 people for the evening public meeting and cultural night.

The conference was marked by its broad participation including panel presentations by representatives of the Socialist Party and the Communist Party. Greetings were presented by representatives of Friends of Palestine WA, the Australia-Cuba Friendship Society and the campaign against genetically engineered crops in WA.

Seven people joined or renewed their membership in the Alliance at the conference. These new members mean that we have passed the threshold that represents a trebling of our WA membership in 2009. We are aiming to reach 100 financial members by the end of the year – the highest membership the Alliance has ever had in WA.

The highlight of the conference was the public meeting with retired coal miner Graham Brown and Sudanese musical group WAZA. The conference also discussed the election campaign of Socialist Alliance member Sam Wainwright for the Fremantle Council and the Alliance’s work in the campaign for a safe climate.

The conference also established an education committee for the Alliance, decided to formally affiliated to the Friends of Palestine and changed the name of the Resistance Centre to the Perth Activist Centre. Participants also wrote solidarity messages to each of the “Cuban five” – anti-terrorists imprisoned in US jails.

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Emperor Rupert vs free internet content

Emperor Rupert vs free internet content

By Peter Boyle

Since its launch in February 1991, the content of Green Left Weekly has been available free on the internet. A full archive of every article published win is available on its website www.greenleft.org.au.

As a result, Green Left has gained many new readers. Some 10,000-15,000 log on to the website each day – many times the readership of its printed copy. The internet also gives Green Left a global reach. Many of its readers and writers are brought together from many corners of the world.

The level or support and respect that Green Left Weekly has generated over the years was on show with the many messages of congratulations it received during the celebrations of the paper's 800th issue. It has become a global alternative media project.

But unfortunately this does not help us pay the bills! The subscribers and individual copy buyers of the hard copy Green Left Weekly shoulder the main burden of keeping this important project afloat.

All publications face a similar opportunity and challenge from the internet. But not all publications are responding to this challenge in the same same. About a week ago, News Corporation Chairman Rupert Murdoch announced that his media empire begin charging readers of online versions of its newspapers in the coming year. He was spurred by News Corp's US$3.4 billion loss this year (compared to A $5.4 billion profit the previous year).

The narrow profits-above-all-else perspective of a billionaire media emperor like Murdoch inescapably points him in this direction. The only question is whether Emperor Rupert has the power to force other capitalist media corporations to follow suite.

Murdoch's first paper to start charging for online access, maybe by November, will be The Sunday Times. Other News Corp titles, including The News of the World and The Sun, will charge for web access within a year. "I believe that if we're successful, we'll be followed by other media," he told MoneyWeek.com.

Well, perhaps the other media corporations will follow Murdoch - or perhaps they won't. But whatever those corporate money-grubbers do, Green Left is not about to follow them. We want to help change the world not make a profit.

Yet we also have to pay the bills. So what's our solution? We rely on the power of solidarity.

We are currently running a drive for more subscriptions. If you read it on the internet, please consider taking out an internet subscription (hard copy subs are also available). Introduce Green Left Weekly to a friend, workmate, fellow political activist or relative, or your university or municipal library, or trade union or political organisation by giving them a gift subscription.

About this time last year, we ran a similar Buy A Subscription For A Friend campaign and our readers responded strongly boosting our subscription base significantly and introducing many new readers to Green Left.

If you'd like to purchase a subscription or find out more, please email subscriptions@greenleft.org.au or phone+61 2 9690 1220 (outside Australia) or 1800 634 206 (free call within Australia).

Donations are also welcome. You can ring us on the same numbers to donate or make a direct deposit at: Greenleft, Commonwealth Bank, BSB 062-006, Account No. 00901992. You can also send a cheque or money order to PO Box 515, Broadway NSW 2007.

* Promo Youtube video on the Green Left people's powered media project here.

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A people's power media project asks for your support

A people's power media project asks for your support

Green Left is a people's power alternative media project. It is Australia's leading progressive publication but the internet also gives it global reach. Many of its readers and writers are brought together from many corners of the world. Please help write for, distribute and support it!

We are currently running a drive for more subscriptions. If you read it on the internet, please consider taking out an internet subscription. Introduce Green Left to a friend, workmate or relative by giving them a gift subscription.

Subscriptions hotline: 1800 634 206 (free call from anywhere in Australia)

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VIDEO: Guide to Video Advocacy : Filming

VIDEO: Guide to Video Advocacy : Filming

Watch all videos in this series.

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