Workers' Liberty

By Colin Foster

The USA's Iraq Study Group, led by Republican old-stager James Baker, is due to present its ideas on 6 December.

In the run-up, another leading Washington think-tank has put out a report on Options for Iraq (29 November). The New York Times has published two leaked top-level memos: one (29 November) written on 8 November by new US National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley on ideas for a "major adjustment" of US Iraq policy; the other (3 December) written by Donald Rumsfeld on 6 November, shortly before he was pushed out as Defense Secretary.

By Amina Saddiq

Workers at the warehouse in Wigan supplying JJB Sports outlets across the UK, whose strike action last month forced their employer to make major concessions on pay and bonuses, are balloting again over the sacking of their GMB rep Chris Riley, who was interviewed in the last issue of Solidarity.

Solidarity is opening a discussion on whether or not we should call for the troops to get out of Iraq now. Short contributions to that debate are welcome.

Solidarity with Iraqi workers! Troops out now!

Kim Moody is a labour historian, teacher and activist in the United States. He is prominent in Labor Notes, a rank-and-file bulletin for working-class militants. He is the author of several books, including Workers in a Lean World. He spoke at the AWL's 2006 Ideas for Freedom event.

UCU conference slams leaders over pay deal

By Pete Radcliff, Derby University UCU secretary

ON Friday 24 November, the University and College Union's Higher Education sector conference passed verdict on the AUT and NATFHE leadership's handling of their abortive pay dispute earlier this year.

ON Thursday 23 November a new group in Scotland was set up to build solidarity with the Iraqi trade union movement. The group will meet in Glasgow. In line with TUC, STUC and Women's TUC conference policies, the comrades involved pledged to support all secular Iraqi trade unions and women's organisations. The group will be called Iraq Union Solidarity Scotland (IUSS) and will work with other IUS groups in England. The group is aiming to have a public meeting in early February.

By David Broder

THE five-month popular occupation of Oaxaca, Mexico, was crushed on the 27-29 October when thousands of federal riot police invaded the city, killing at least three protesters and an American journalist working for Indymedia. Hundreds were reported to be injured. The city had been under the control of the Popular Assembly of the People of Oaxaca (APPO), a coalition of indigenous, trade union and student activists created in response to the state governor Ulises Ruiz's failed attempt to evict striking teachers in June.

By Martin Thomas

Just as veteran US foreign-policy "fixer" James Baker is expected to publish proposals to calm Iraq through cooperation between the USA and Iraq's neighbours Iran and Syria, Lebanon has lurched towards a return to civil war - this time between the Lebanese constituencies aligned with Iran and Syria, and those aligned with the USA.

by Joan Trevor

The left-wing newsletter Lettre de Liaisons* (no.197, 26 November 2006) have some insightful comments on Ségolčne Royal's victory to be the Socialist Party (PS) candidate in the 2007 presidential election. (Royal won 60.6% of the 170,000 votes cast in an internal party ballot.) They say that far from Royal representing "the only way to stop Sarkozy", as she is touted in the media, she might be the candidate of choice for the French ruling class. Nicolas Sarkozy's abrasive style could quickly bring him into conflict with the trade unions and wider society if he wins the presidency; and he is too friendly with George Bush.

By Martin Ohr

In the same week that Derek Wall was elected principal male speaker of the Green Party, Leeds and four other West Yorkshire city councils announced the privatisation of Leeds Bradford International Airport. Leeds council is run by a Tory-Lib Dem-Green coalition.

By Paul Hampton

Hugo Chávez was re-elected president of Venezuela on 3 December, but the
prospects for socialism in Venezuela depend on a conscious break with the
so-called Bolivarian revolution.

• City bankers "earn" £9 billion in Christmas bonuses
• Top executives get £1 million each - 90 years work for cleaners on
minimum wage

By Sofie Buckland

As City bankers prepare to rake in record bonuses this Christmas, the armies of cleaners who keep the City running are being paid the bare minimum to maximise profits.

By Yevgeny Yevtushenko

Yevgeny Yevtushenko who wrote this denunciation of Russian anti-semitism, was the USSR's licensed-rebel poet in...the late 50s and early 60s.
"Over Babiy Yar/ there are no memorials....I am frightened...Dreyfus. I am he...I am also a boy in Belostok...the public-bar heroes are rioting...the corn-chandler is beating up my mother..."

By Steve Cohen

Whatever the merits of Tony Blair's recent retrospective apology for Britain's leading role in the slave trade it would be less hypocritical if his government was not developing a modern system of slavery and the reintroduction of sweated labour through the reshaping of immigration controls.

Editorial in current "Solidarity"
In 2003 George Bush talked of a worldwide drive by the USA to erect bourgeois democracy and American-style capitalism across the globe, wherever "dictatorial" and heavily state-regulated economies existed. He saw no limits to US power, no insuperable obstacles to an American-engineered transformation of the globe into more or less developed replicas of itself.

"In fact, every sect is religious." — Karl Marx

Many years ago I read with riveted fascination a big book on the history of a controversy that has more than a little interest for citizens of a socialist movement that has reduced itself to a sprawling archipelago of self-sealing, self-intoxicating, self-blinding sects - the dispute about "Who wrote Shakespeare?".

It was called Shakespeare's Lives, and written by S. Schoenbaum.

The dispute has raged for well over a hundred years now and rages still.

Shakespeare wrote "Shakespeare", you say? But very little is known about William Shakespeare of Statford upon Avon. What little is known about "the Stratford man" deepens the mystery that must attach to "Shakespeare", whoever he was. How could anybody be so universal, know so much about so many different sorts of human beings and human situations?

Those who believe that William Shakespeare of Stratford upon Avon did not write the works of "Shakespeare", are called the "anti-Stratfordians".

How, they ask, could the small town petty-bourgeois, with at best a grammar school education, have known courts and palaces and the secrets of the princely exercise of state power? How could he have known the things which the author of "Shakespeare" knew, and knew so amazingly well that plays he wrote about the politics of a different world, can still talk to us - Richard III, or Hamlet, or Macbeth, or Coriolanus, for example - about the essentials of our own political world, 400 years later?

However you look at it, there is, as well as a dearth of hard fact about the man, an awe-inspiring mystery about the genius of Shakespeare. It is the same sort of mystery as you confront in Mozart, but far greater and with no obvious solution.

From early childhood Mozart produced a wonderful profusion of musical patterns, as if he were a medium for some force outside himself. But Shakespeare dealt with character, situations, History.

Where Mozart can, perhaps, be explained by the qualities of a unique but more or less self-sufficient musical-mathematical mind trained from infancy by his musician father, Shakespeare did not deal with patterns in his own mind, or only with patterns of sound, but with patterns in society, psychology and history. How did he know? How could he know? Where did he learn what he knew? What experiences shaped and instructed, honed and stocked that wonderful mind about the world and its inhabitants?

For now, the mystery of Shakespeare is irresoluble, and maybe it always will be. We simply do not know. And that not knowing is very unsatisfying.

Enter the anti-Stratfordians. Their game is to find the most likely "alternative Shakespeare" from among public figures who were Shakespeare's contemporaries, men about whom, unlike "the Stratford man", much is known, and who had a background that might explain Shakespeare's knowledge of power, people, kings and cabals.

So who was "Shakespeare"? Who is hiding behind that name? Was he the Jacobean pioneering philosopher of science and one-time Lord Chancellor of England, Francis Bacon? Or Christopher Marlowe? Marlowe died more than 20 years before Shakespeare - but can you prove that he really died in a tavern brawl in Deptford, that he, a sometime government spy involved in plots and political intrigue, did not go into hiding on the continent and there write "Shakespeare"? No one can!

Or was it, perhaps, the Earl of Oxford? Or of Southampton? There are other "alternative Shakespeares", among them Queen Elizabeth I. Shakespeare outlived her by a dozen years. But if you know, with burning conviction that "Shakespeare" couldn't have been Will Shakespeare, you won't let petty details like that clutter up your theory. They are easy to explain away.

Sects have formed around favoured candidates - Marlovians, Oxfordians, Baconians. All of them try to prove the unprovable, sometimes by way of sifting through texts for secret encrypted messages from the "real Shakespeare".

Rejecting chaste scientific restraint, and the unsatisfying, "I don't know", all of them have gone on from the paucity of information about "the Stratford man", to the conviction that "Shakespeare" was Bacon, Oxford, Marlowe. They display passionate conviction, and certainty taken to the point of obsession. But they have only subjective grounds of intuition, inclination, sympathy and antipathy on which to mount their conclusions. It is probably no accident that one of the founders of the first, Baconian, school of anti-Stratfordians was named... Delia Bacon.

The anti-Stratfordians, inevitably, depend on the suppression and arbitrary selection of evidence, and on an impatient dismissal of what science tells them or, to the point here, what it can't tell them, and on special pleading for their own candidate. They fill the void in what we know and can hope to know with fantasies and projections, thrown up arbitrarily and subjectively.

And thus, over more than a hundred years, the anti-Stratfordians have created a paranoid sub-culture of warring sects that parallels and overlaps with both religious and political sectarian formations, of which they are, I suppose, a hybrid specimen.

One of the beauties of the game is that anybody can play. All you need to 'know' is that "Shakespeare" could not possibly have been the man fools have called "the Bard of Stratford-on-Avon". After that. your opinion is as good as that of anyone else. Sigmund Freud was an anti-Stratfordian; so was the arch Tory, Enoch Powell. Anybody can play!

One man, a once-prominent Tory, Duff Cooper, wrote a whole book about it - he was an Oxfordian -after it came to him in a flash of intuitive knowledge, one day in a World War I trench, that that yokel Shakespeare couldn't possibly have written those plays. Class snobbery, rampant class conceit, seems to be a prime component of all the anti-Stratfordian schools - the gut conviction that "Shakespeare" couldn't have been that pleb from the hick village in Warwickshire.

In his own time, Shakespeare was sneered at by some of his university-educated rivals - whose denunciation survives - as a mere grammar school upstart crow trying to steal the plumage of his betters. The anti-Stratfordians are their still-snobby descendants.

Unlike Kitsch-Trotskyist groups, which begin, or whose political ancestors began, as rational political formations, the anti-Stratfordians are not subject to the brutal but health-regenerating blows of experience. They start by discounting the only available "experience" - the evidence, such as it is -and take off from there.

Impervious to criticism, riding their intuitions, sympathies, antipathies, narcissisms, obsessions, as witches in Shakespeare's time were said to ride their broomsticks, they can go on forever, for as long as Shakespeare is read and performed, and they probably will - "stretching out to the crack of doom"!

by Amy Fisher

In his foreword to the Government's white paper on the replacement of the Trident nuclear missile system, Tony Blair writes of the need to "deter" countries who might "seek to sponsor nuclear terrorism". In fact, the system exists for no other reason than to reinforce British imperialism's power to terrorise.