Workers' Liberty

By Mark Osborn

The Israeli government plans to withdraw 9,000 settlers and the troops that protect them from the Gaza Strip in mid-August.

Dan Katz reviews Bangkok 8 and the recently published Bangkok Tattoo by John Burdett

Amina Saddiq reviews Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince

Those who haven’t read the last few Harry Potter books will probably laugh when I say that the latest instalment is not only the most interesting, but the most political of the series. I’ll try and explain.

The response to 7/7 from the Respect/SWP axis has been smug, thoughtless, and irresponsible.

The same sort of Islamist terrorists who killed more than fifty people in London on 7 July are also killing people in Iraq, and on a far bigger scale.

A round-up of the latest news from the UK labour movement

On 5 November 2004 the left-led civil service union PCS held a national one-day strike over New Labour’s decision to cut 100,000 civil service jobs. The strike was also officially over the refusal of the government to move towards national pay bargaining.

The Labour Representation Committee conference in London on Saturday 16 July voted to support the new trade unions in Iraq and to recognise that: “the dominant military forces of the ‘resistance’ are Sunni-supremacist and Islamic-fundamentalist. They will crush the new Iraqi labour and women’s movements if they triumph”.

Former Tory Prime Minister Edward Heath, who died on 17 July, has elicited lavish praise from what the bourgeois press likes to call “all parts of the political spectrum”. Tony Blair has described him as “magnificent… an extraordinary man, a great statesman, a prime minister our country can be proud of”, and eulogies from Michael Howard and Charles Kennedy have been similarly gushing and hackneyed.

The Commune had organised itself into nine Commissions or delegations. The Department of public or municipal services involved the general superintendence of public offices such as the Post Office, the Telegraphs, the Mint, the official printing press, the hospitals. Theisz, a workman, took the direction of the Post Office.

In 1894 Ernest Belfort Bax, one of the pioneer British Marxists, wrote a long series of articles on the Commune in Justice, the paper of the first British Marxist group, the Social Democratic Federation. We have abridged and adapted Bax’s narrative account of the Commune. The second part will appear in the next issue of Solidarity.

For the 50 years before the October revolution of 1917, on 18 March every year the socialist movement throughout the world celebrated “Commune Day”. This was the anniversary of the Paris Commune of 1871. There, for the first time, the working class seized power, and held it for nearly two months. This, as Frederick Engels said, was “the dictatorship of the proletariat”. It ended in a horrific massacre of the Parisian workers, but it pointed to the political future of the working class everywhere. Leon

Trotsky, writing in March 1917 during his brief stay in New York, outlined the experience and lessons of the Commune in an article printed here.

As we go to press, AWL members are working on mailing out invitations to our trade-unionists' day school on 17 September.

On 10 July, seven AWL members took part in a protest against the jazz musician Gilad Atzmon performing at the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) summer school, Marxism. In articles Atzmon has said things such as “... we must begin to take the accusation that the Jewish people are trying to control the world very seriously... American Jews do try to control the world, by proxy.” The SWP has refused to condemn his politics.

Over the weekend of 9-10 July, the Alliance for Workers’ Liberty held our annual Ideas for Freedom summer school, an event where socialists and activists can debate, discuss and hone ideas for independent working class politics.

Those of you who have never attended the annual Tolpuddle Martyrs Festival (held this year on 15-17 July) are missing a real treat, especially if you also like rolling in clover and staring up at the star-filled midnight sky.

Dan Katz reviews Bangkok 8 and the recently published Bangkok Tattoo by John Burdett

Amina Saddiq reviews "Harry Potter and the Half-blood Prince"

SWP on MAB; Respect's money; Labourstart; the Socialist Alliance's money; "Unite against terror"

Hatfield Killers Wriggle; Threats to gay rights group; Defend gay refusnik; The great liberal; Support fades for hate law

Carrie Bickers (letters, Solidarity 3/76) criticises the government’s proposed ban on smoking in enclosed public spaces on the grounds that it is a poorly disguised way of “compelling the individual smoker to give up”. From the fact that the proposals would not affect smoking in private homes she leaps to the bizarre conclusion that they make no attempt to protect people from passive smoking.

I do not agree with many of your positions but I found your article on the bombings in London very good, above all the passage: “Political Islam has its own roots and its own logic, and cannot be dismissed as just the ‘bitter fruits"’ of evil US and British policies, any more than Nazism could be dismissed as just the ‘bitter fruits’ of the US/ British/ French carve-up of the world after World War one, requiring no special condemnation or opposition in its own right.”

Much of Maria Exall’s article, “Secularism and religion in a global age” (Solidarity 3-77) was concerned with filling some of the gaps in Soldarity’s coverage of religion and politics — for instance she outlines how trends within Christianity (as well as within Islam) seek to counter and provide an alternative to the “modern world”. On that level much of what she said was fair enough.

This article by Gideon Levy is taken from the liberal Israeli newspaper Haaretz. It gives a vivid picture of life in Gaza.

News from working-class struggles across the world.

Activists from the GMB and No Sweat protested outside the Eritrean Embassy in north London on 14 July in defence of three jailed Eritrean trade union leaders. Tewelde Ghebremedhin (chair of the Food Workers Federation), Minase Andezion (secretary of the textile workers' federation) and Habtom Weldemicael (leader of the Coca-Cola Workers Union) have been detained without trial or charges.

The international conference of “No One Is Illegal” on 25 June called for an international day of action on Saturday 1 October against immigration controls.

Dita Sari, a leading socialist, trade unionist and anti-sweatshop activist in Indonesia, looks at how women and migrant workers are faring in Indonesia today.

Solidarity 3/77 is now online. Read Solidarity 3/77 here; and read Solidarity 3/76 here

By Mike Rowley

There is every sign that the Government plans to use the terrorist atrocities in London as a cover for accelerating its attacks on civil liberties.