Solidarity 059 ESF Extra, 7 October 2004

Socialist links

The AWL draws on the “Third Camp” tradition in revolutionary socialism, stemming from the ideas of Leon Trotsky, and developed after Trotsky’s death by people such as Max Shachtman and Hal Draper. We seek to link up with socialists in other countries who refer to the same “Third Camp” tradition, or share to some degree the same essential conclusion — independent working-class struggle rather than identification with an umbrella “anti-imperialist camp”. Before 1989–91, the idea of the “anti-imperialist camp” was used to justify socialists aligning themselves with the USSR and the Stalinist...

Stop Islamist violence against women!

From the Organisation of Women’s Freedom in Iraq In one of the public health sectors in the city of Mosul, the Islamists have committed several misogynist crimes, in their thirst for blood and hatred for women. The Islamist terrorist savages can not tolerate women working feed themselves and their families. They want them blindfolded, covered by hijab and heavy rags, thrown in the kitchens of their houses serving as slaves. They want them humiliated, with no opinion or character or a normal life like any sane human being of our time. Political Islamist groups exploit the chaos, lack of...

ESF rogues' gallery - Tariq Ramadan: not our ally

Tariq Ramadan is one of the top-billed speakers at the European Social Forum, appearing on a panel to present “Voices of resistance and alternatives from the global South”. In fact Tariq Ramadan is not from “the global South”, but a professor in Switzerland. His Islamism, presumably, is supposed to authorise him to speak for “the South”. This choice by the ESF organisers is a betrayal of Muslim socialists and democrats, and secular and non-religious people in mainly-Muslim countries and communities. A dossier in the French Marxist magazine Critique Communiste (spring 2004) explains what...

Pour une Europe unie des travailleurs

Contre les europhobes et contre les capitalistes européens ! Par Sean Matgamna. Il y a deux lignes fondamentales qui s’offrent au mouvement ouvrier face à l’Union européenne. La première est de partir de ce que la bourgeoisie a créé et d’unifier la classe ouvrière à travers l’Europe pour combattre la bourgeoisie sur un programme de réformes sociales et démocratiques, pour aller vers la transformation socialiste par une révolution prolétarienne à l’échelle européenne. Une telle approche n’implique pas de soutenir ce que les capitalistes et leurs serviteurs font, ou la façon dont ils le font...

The Blairite Ken

The Greater London Authority and Ken Livingstone are supporting the London ESF. A demonstration of the progressive politics of the London Mayor perhaps? Not quite. John Bloxam examines his record. In June this year Livingstone intervened into a pay dispute on the London Underground to say that members of the RMT union should cross picket lines. He was urging people to scab. This is a disgrace, but one that comes on top of many other disgraces. Ken Livingstone joined the Labour Party at the end of the 60s, at a time when the left was streaming out of the Labour Party in disgust with the Wilson...

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