Solidarity 076, 7 July 2005

Anna Rzymska, from the Revolutionary Left Current in Poland, reported on the situation of the labour movement and the left in Poland at the international meeting organised by the AWL in Paris on 18 June. Currently, we have a Social-Democrat government, until the next elections on 25 September. The Social-Democrats are ex-members of the Communist Party. The right will win a majority at the next parliamentary elections in September. Four years, the Social-Democrats had the support of 40% of the population but now two of the biggest Social-Democratic parties will only just scrape the five per...

Click here for the series on The Roots of Bolshevism of which this article is part Jack Cleary continues his analysis of and selection from Lenin’s 1902 book What is to be Done? Arguing that the educational work of Marxists was essential if the “spontaneous” working class trade “unionist” movement were to become socialist, Marxist movement, Lenin cites the experience of the German labour movement. “Recall the example of Germany. What was the historic service Lassalle rendered to the German working-class movement? It was that he diverted that movement from the path of progressivist trade...

The BNP lost its only council seat in London on 23 June when a 51% vote for the fascists turned in to a 51% vote for Labour. The BNP always were in for a hiding to nothing in Goresbrook after their councillor simply gave up after a few months of doing very little at Barking and Dagenham council. However what really put the final nail into their coffin was the strong community campaign which has developed to oppose them in Goresbrook. Anti-fascist magazine Searchlight and Dagenham Labour Party have organised a very effective campaign against the fascists in Barking and Dagenham. This is in...

Residents of Aspland estate and Marcon Court have been successful in their campaign (as reported on in Solidarity) to force Hackney Council to back down from its plan to privatise their estates. The Council’s Cabinet will discuss the issue on 25 July, and was going to vote on a recommendation to transfer the estates to a new landlord, and to demolish Marcon Court and rebuild it with a majority of private flats for sale. Now, the recommendation will instead be to note residents’ opposition, pull the estates out of the “Review”, and put them into the Decent Homes programme with the rest of...

Up until recently I didn't have that much time for Bob Geldof. The lyrics to Do They Know It’s Christmas? were ill-conceived and the recent Band Aid 20’s repeat performance was even more ridiculous — given that the main cause of the crisis in Sudan that it was meant to help was war and not famine. However, watching Geldof in Africa made me to reconsider the man. Geldof on Africa was very good because it showed all the different sides of the continent — not just the war, disease and starvation, but also the astounding natural beauty and the more mundane, but still remarkable, everyday life of...

The idea around which HG Wells constructed his late-19th century novel,"The War of the Worlds", is as simple as it is terrifying. Alien beings land on earth. Their technology is as vastly superior to what humanity has achieved as that of the invading early 16th century Spaniards was to the technology of the Aztecs of Mexico and the Incas of Peru. Despite the tremendous cities they had, the Aztecs and Incas were still confined to late Stone-Age technology, and had neither the wheel nor metallurgy (other than in easily accessible and easily worked gold). More. The intellectual capacity of Wells’...

On one level Batman Begins is a simple story about a man who dresses up as a big rubber bat and fights crime. It’s just good old-fashioned summer movie kind of fun. However there is another way to roughly summarise the film. Humanity is essentially evil, and if left to their own devices any large group of people will drop into lawlessness and anarchy. The only thing that can stop this happening is one great man rising above all the rest and keeping order by dealing out harsh, impromptu, justice on those who get out of line. Occasionally evil people threaten society and we can’t afford to...

The liberal left, from the Guardian op-ed writers to the Socialist Workers Party, has tended to see modern political Islam as an automatic response of the oppressed and dispossessed of “the Muslim world” to “imperialism”, “the West”, and global inequality. It’s a simplistic view which is not much endorsed by any of the detailed studies of Islamism which have been published in the past few years. Clive Bradley surveys the literature. Tariq Ali is one of the most forthright advocates of the “left liberal” consensus arguing that the heavily Islamist-influenced “resistance” in Iraq should be...

There is sharp disagreement about the nature and meaning of imperialism on the left, with two broad schools of thought emerging. Two recent books sum up the differences very clearly. Paul Hampton reviews John Bellamy Foster and Robert W McChesney eds. Pox Americana, Exposing the American Empire (Pluto) and Leo Panitch and Colin Leys eds. The Empire Reloaded: Socialist Register 2005 (Merlin) A view about neoliberalism which is largely a fable is expressed lucidly by Immanuel Wallerstein in Pox Americana. He argues that after 1945 the United States was dominant economically, militarily and...

Having read your report on UNISON conference (Solidarity 3-75) I saw it failed to mention an outcome of an issue covered by your paper on 28 April 2005. “The Race-hate election: Why don’t unions answer Tory Racists”. Your article correctly criticised the article in UNISON Labour Link News entitled, “Ten things the Tories did to you. That article included a fact that the asylum applications had increased by 45% under the Tories; this of course is not something we should consider bad i.e. something the Tories did to us, there being plenty of examples of the Tories’ attacks on us such as...