Solidarity 050, 20 April 2004

Debate and discussion: Undercut the terrorists

In Solidarity 3/49 Alan Johnson objects to the arguments in my article"War on terror, war on rights" about socialists not trusting the state. They are anarchoid, he says. The AWL is in favour of the rule of law - a society with rules which stop people from killing and hurting other people, apart from in some cases of self-defence. The police sometimes do a socially useful job, catching murderers and so on, sometimes well and at other times extremely badly. We don't scream "capitalist tools!" when the police and courts pursue child abusers, prosecute rapists and lock up murderers. But - and...

Socialists and Islam: Enlightenment by force

Gerry Byrne concludes her series of articles about Bolsheviks and Islam "By 1924, the Bolsheviks had turned their attention to Central Asia and the liberation of women there. Their approach combined propaganda about the benefits to women of the soviet law, and encouragement to participate in politics and production, with practical material benefits, education, training, social and medical care. "In the absence of native activists, it was the most dedicated and courageous members of Zhenotdel [Department of Working Women and Peasant Women] who donned the paranja [veil] in order to meet with...

Debate and discussion: The best way to inclusion

Most secular liberal teachers would respect the right of students to express their religious beliefs. But the veil attracts particular discussion because of the signals it consciously and unconsciously sends: girls should cover their hair and faces. A cross, a skull cap or a turban are outward signs of faith and carry their own cultural baggage, but children as young as eight and nine wearing clothing to deflect the attention of men is obscene - no child can be responsible for the attentions of sexual predators who would be interested in looking at a child in that way. We should absolutely...

The third pole: Appeal by the Worker-Communist Party of Iraq

The Iraqi cities have become a battlefield for the two terrorist and anti-human forces of our time. The two poles of this new terrorist war are US terrorism and militarism on the one hand and the terrorism of political Islam on the other. In an attempt to impose its military hegemony on the world, America launched a destructive war against Iraq and destroyed the basis of civility in this country and drove it to the verge of a very grim scenario. By establishing the state on the basis of sects and ethnicities, the US has empowered Islamic and ethnocentric forces, and thus has prepared the...

Debate and discussion: The limits of "no compromise"

Mark Sandell (Solidarity 3/49) claims that I "say there is a mass pro-hijab revolt by French Muslim girls". In Solidarity 3/48 I wrote: "I made it clear in... Solidarity 3/46... that I do not believe that there is a mass revolt of Muslim girls demanding the right to wear the veil". The word "not" changes the sense. A minority of French Muslim teenagers do want to wear the hijab. They see the new French anti-hijab law not as a liberation from parental pressure - in fact, many of their Muslim parents are anti-hijab - but as an imposition by upper-class authority. The predictable result of the...

First person: A political odyssey

Bob Carnegie describes his political itinerary, from young cadre of the Stalinist movement through Maritime Union official to anti-Stalinist revolutionary. I always had a strong underlying humanist bias. I tended not to view things not just from an ideological viewpoint, as was the rule in the SPA [Socialist Party of Australia, a 'hardline' pro-USSR split-off from the Communist Party of Australia]. My moral break from authoritarian state-capitalism, or Stalinism, which still infects the Australian left and the Australian trade union movement to a much larger degree than people realise, took a...

Vote Left Unity, keep up the pressure for national action

By a Civil Servant PCS members in the DWP, Prison Services, Treasury Solicitors and the Office of National Statistics are still fighting pay disputes arising from the 2003 pay round, with no resolution in sight. Yet these disputes are just a forerunner of what could happen in the 2004 pay round. The union has now submitted a national pay claim for 2004 (the first national pay claim since delegated bargaining began), and therefore the whole of the national union should be mobilising to fight for pay this year. We say "should be" and not "will be", as the National Executive (NEC) elections begin...

From the archives: The collective organiser

The phrase "collective organiser" is from Lenin's Where to Begin, an article he wrote in 1901. Here Lenin talks about the kind of publication the Russian socialists, then organised in a scattered collection of local groups, needed to create. We reprint part of the article here. Why is the revolutionary paper a "collective organiser"? For Lenin, "the mere technical task of regularly supplying the newspaper with copy and of promoting regular distribution will necessitate a network of local agents... the skeleton of precisely the kind of organisation we need..." The revolutionary paper has to...

NUT: Campaign for Ian Murch for General Secretary

By Patrick Murphy This year's Conference of the National Union of Teachers (NUT) was one of the most unified in recent memory. Fairly militant policies were agreed on most of the major issues facing teachers, from workforce remodelling to pay and pensions. We even had the bizarre sight of Doug McAvoy keenly embracing Mark Serwotka of PCS and looking to his union and others like it to create a unity of those prepared to defend their members, as opposed to those keen to be partners with Government. As ever, there can be no guarantee that these fine words will be translated into deeds. The...

UNISON Conference: Organise now to stop Agenda for Change!

By Anita Downs (Guy's and St Thomas's) and Nick Holden There is mounting evidence that the proposed new NHS pay scheme, 'Agenda for Change', is bad news for health workers, and possibly unworkable. Unison and Amicus members will be balloted later this year on whether to accept the proposed system for the whole of the NHS. But the 12 sites which are trialling it are reporting massive problems, on top of fundamental objections to the scheme that are unlikely to be resolved before the ballot. Faced with the prospect of seeing the proposals thrown out last year, the leaderships in both unions...

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