Solidarity 216, 14 September 2011

In Melbourne, Australia, activists picketing the Israeli-owned Max Brenner chocolate shop have caused a stir, and several have been arrested. Workers’ Liberty Australia commented: There are better ways to help the Palestinians. The focus on Max Brenner has led the chief boycott activists to ignore the long-running Palestinian quarry workers’ strike at Salit, and the explosion of strikes by Israeli workers, Jewish and Arab, in recent weeks. Solidarity with those struggles is a better way forward. Sympathy for the rights of activists arrested on these pickets will be automatic; but it does not...

In 2010 veteran Canadian socialist Leo Panitch argued for a bolder response by the left to the financial crisis. For more on the banking and financial sector, see here . A common response of the left to the financial crisis that broke out in the USA in 2007-08 was often a kind of Michael Moore-type populist one: Why are you bailing the banks out? Let them go under. This kind of response was, of course, utterly irresponsible, with no thought given to what would happen to the savings of workers, let alone to the paychecks deposited into their bank accounts, or even to the fact that what was at...

Rosie Woods reviews The Letters of Rosa Luxemburg, published in March 2011 by Verso Books. Many women on the left have their own heroines, women from the past who have inspired them. Sylvia Pankhurst, Clara Zetkin, Minnie Lansbury... Mine has always been Rosa Luxemburg. The Letters of Rosa Luxemburg showed me her personal side. Here are letters written to a variety of friends, lovers and comrades, dating from 1891 until 1919, the last written just four days before her murder by the Freikorps (German far right paramilitaries). They are an interesting and at times very moving insight into her...

Tim Thomas has been attending the Ken Loach retrospective at the British Film Institute marking Loach’s 75th birthday. He begins a series of short reviews. The first film shown was the one Save The Children banned in 1969. “Save The Children”, quoting from the BFI press handout, “were unhappy with the content of the film and were determined not to allow it to be screened, successfully persuading London Weekend Television not to broadcast it. However Loach and Garnett (Loach’s producer) refused to hand over the negative to Save the Children.” The dispute went to court where it was decided that...

At the TUC Congress on 12-14 September, unions backed a demonstration at the Tory party conference in Manchester on 2 October and announced plans for a huge strike by many public-sector unions against pension cuts in November. TUC general secretary Brendan Barber said that “out-of-control traders and speculators razed our economy to the ground... The less you had to do with causing the crash, the bigger the price you are having to pay”. In view of “the collapse of the economic model that politicians and policymakers have backed since the 1980s...”, “the task is to build a new economy that...

US President Obama outlined his new American Jobs Act before a packed Congress, more than half of whom believe the poor and jobless are undertaxed moochers and that the government does not create jobs. The Democrats will have their hands full. The Obama speech signifies that he is again in campaign mode. He’s challenged the conservative contention that “the only thing we can do to restore prosperity is just dismantle the government, refund everybody’s money, let everyone write their own rules, and tell everyone they’re on their own…” Earlier stimulus packages stabilized the economy and...

Normally I wouldn’t dream of grassing up the publishers of this newspaper to the Labour Party bureaucracy. But after nearly 20 years, even the dimmest witchhunter has probably by now twigged the subterfuge that saw evil clandestine Trot entrists the Socialist Organiser Alliance rebrand themselves as the Alliance for Workers’ Liberty. The name is that bit at odds from the usual unimaginative titles deployed by far-left outfits. What’s more, it has a subtly different political flavour. That much was apparent to me the first time I saw a somewhat shy and retiring young AWLer — yeah, I know...

Around 40,000 public sector unionists and their supporters turned out in Sydney, Australia on 8 September to protest anti-worker legislation by the conservative Liberal/National Coalition government of New South Wales. The Teachers’ Federations struck for the day despite the state government getting a ruling from the Industrial Relations Commission that the strike was illegal. At stake are the issues of a public sector wages cap of 2.5%, no legal right of appeal to government regulation of working conditions, thousands of job cuts and further selling of public assets. According to legislation...

The Egyptian Federation of Independent Trade Unions (EFITU) made this statement on 5 September. Over the coming few days hundreds of thousands of workers will exercise their right to strike and organise sit-ins, in defiance of all attempts to intimidate them and prevent them from exercising these rights, such as the law criminalising strikes and protests. The 22,000 textile workers of Misr Spinning in Mahalla have shown that this law does not frighten them, and it will not prevent the strike that they have set for 10 September demanding a new rate for the minimum wage, a 200% rise in bonuses...

“The People’s Pledge” is an all-party campaign that seeks a referendum on Britain’s membership of the European Union by asking voters to promise to only back MP's who support a referendum. The Rail, Maritime and Transport workers’ union (RMT) has become the first union to formally back the campaign. RMT leader Bob Crow was already an individual supporter. By supporting The People’s Pledge, unions enter into a deal with the devil. Backing the campaign, which is focused exclusively on the single issue of the referendum, means getting into bed with some very unsavoury characters. Let’s look at...