Marriage
Is it just me and Jimmy Somerville that feel this way, but is there something missing from the campaign for same-sex marriage? Where is the broader campaign for the recognition of the rights of all couples (regardless of sexuality) not to get married or sign up for an equivalent institution which is legislated and controlled by the state? The issue of the reasons behind the historic and continued state sponsorship of marriage (or its equivalent) seems to have dropped off the agenda.
I am concerned about the absence of this debate for several reasons. First, marriage has been the foundation of religious organisations because it has traditionally been a means of controlling private property (and access to property and assets) and women. Second, and this may go some way to partly explaining the support from many Australian bourgeois politicians for same sex marriage, it (or any equivalent) is an institution which equates human relationships with property and consumerism.
The key aspect for the bourgeois state of a marriage is the ability to acknowledge joint ownership and joint purchases of property (whether it's land, cars, CDs, plasma screen TVs etc), health care and any other goods working people may, if circumstance allows, have the ability to purchase. For people who choose not to marry and who do not base their relationships on the joint ownership of things your options are getting worse and worse.
You will find it getting harder and harder to be able to prove to the state that you are in a relationship. This will limit your ability to do ordinary everyday things and will limit your freedom of movement in a capitalist state controlled world. You will find it very hard, for example, to prove your worth and relationship to the state if you just want to be with your partner, who is living overseas. I can only imagine how much bloody harder it is for refugees who are in de facto relationships to prove their relationship exists.
The time is now to campaign for progressive, non-private property based/consumerist human relationships.
"Not the church, not the state!"
Kim Linden
(via email)
Snowy River
The NSW Labor government's intention to privatise the Snowy River Mountain Hydro Electric Scheme is a further move to the right. It confirms the correctness of the early observers of the ALP such as Lenin, Zinoviev, V Gordon Childe (historian) and EE Judd, secretary of the Socialist Labour Party, who stated that the ALP was a bourgeois party.
Farmers and all country residents will be adversely affected by this retrogressive measure. In last week's
presentation of ABC TV's Stateline program by Quinton Dempster, opposition to privatisation came from people who believe it will be to their determent.
The intention to sack 5000 public servants by a government that uses a label of Labor furnishes further evidence of its acquiescence to bourgeois ideology.
The Socialist Alliance offers a very good alternative to the ALP because it is based upon working class ideological principles. Its members cannot be influenced by the privileges and status symbols offered by the ruling class, in contrast to the majority of parliamentarians who consider them to be of importance.
Bernie Rosen
Strathfield, NSW
Iraq
Over the last three years the US government has sacrificed more than 2000 of its soldiers' lives as a result of the war in Iraq which it initiated primarily to protect its own citizens. Since there was never any reason to believe that Iraq under Saddam Hussein posed a threat to Americans on anything like this scale, the war has been a national security fiasco and tragedy for the US.
Brent Howard
Rydalmere, NSW
Rice
United States Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice is using the terms "international community" and "world community" with gay abandon when she speaks of Iran, and the Middle East in general. We are all part of the world community or the international community and she has no right whatsoever to speak for most of us. Most of us are opposed to her policies or the policies of the United States. What she is really speaking for, the community she is speaking for is a cabal of arrogant world leaders such as Tony Blair, John Howard and George Bush and a few others that like to align themselves with them occasionally, not the real people of the world.
The atrocities we see on our TV screens, committed in the name of democracy or religion or some other spurious excuse for domination of one group over another are horrifying to ordinary people.
Rice cannot deny the absolute hypocrisy of the attitude of the West towards Iran, which has signed the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, and their attitude towards Pakistan and India, both of which have developed atomic bombs and neither of which has signed the Non-Proliferation Treaty. It is absolutely scandalous.
Col Friel
Alawa, NT
From Green Left Weekly, March 29, 2006.
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