Solidarity 233, 8 February 2012

In November 2002 the Russian mathematician Grigori Perelman posted his proof of the Poincaré conjecture on the internet. The conjecture had been formulated in 1904 by the French mathematician Henri Poincaré and is no abstract, dusty problem, but deals with the possible shape of our universe. By 2006 Grigori Perelman’s solution had become widely accepted. He was awarded the Fields Medal (the maths version of the Nobel Prize), had jobs offers from leading universities, and was awarded $1 million (the Clay Institute prize for solving one of the seven “Millennium” maths problems). Perelman refused...

Part two of an article by the Bolshevik revolutionary Karl Radek about the 1921 Kronstadt sailors’ uprising. First published in Bulletin Communiste , 1 April 1921. Translated by Ed Maltby. Part one is here . Once the Russian counter-revolutionaries received news of the uprising, they forgot about the [political] abyss separating them from Kronstadt. Savinkov, aide to Kerensky, who had had 10,000 peasants shot on the Galician front when they refused to take part in the murderous June offensive of 1917, Savinkov, who in his Warsaw newspaper Svoboda, printed on Polish government money, boasts (24...

In January 2012 Helle Thorning-Schmidt, the Social-Democrat leader of the leftish coalition government which took office in Denmark after the general election of 15 September 2011, reported on her first 100 days in office; and Denmark took the presidency of the European Union. The Danish government is unusual in Europe because it took office with promises to increase (some) social spending, to ease off immigration restrictions, and to reduce deportations. On that basis, the Red Green Alliance in Denmark, a coalition including most of Denmark's revolutionary left groups, declared “unconditional...

January polls in the Netherlands show a left-of-Labour party, the Socialist Party, ahead of all other parties. If an election were to be held now, the SP would be the biggest party in the 150-seat proportional-representation parliament, with 32 seats, way ahead of Labour with 17. Among low-income voters, the SP got 32% of preferences in a poll taken on 22 January, ahead of Labour with 14%. The governing right-wing parties, VVD and CDA, and the PVV which supports their coalition, would still have 62 seats, down from their current 82, and the remaining seats would be shared among smaller parties...

In 1888 a great upsurge of unskilled workers in Britain began when workers at Bryant and May match factory in Bow went on strike after one of them — a known “troublemaker” — was sacked by the sweatshop bosses. Like the thousands of workers who participated in the strikes and union organising which followed the Bryant and May “spark”, the largely female matchworkers wanted to end all the injustices they, their mothers, fathers and all the people of their community had suffered at work. What does New Unionism tell us about being a “troublemaker” at work today? The basic lessons are superficially...

The push for new cuts in Greece is backed up by ever-increasing “carefully” leaked scenarios of a disorderly Greek bankruptcy as early as March and the expulsion of Greece from the eurozone. Merkel and Sarkozy are exercising severe pressure on the Greek government to reduce Greek labour costs further towards the levels of Portugal and Bulgaria. The Greek media were jubilant that Papademos has forced the Troika to withdraw its demand for the abolition of the 13th and 14th months’ wages traditionally paid to Greek workers. But what Papademos has agreed with the Troika will take from Greek...

A 24-hour general strike of Greek workers has been called for Tuesday 7 February by the GSEE (private sector) and ADEDY (public sector) unions in response to the three-party coalition government’s agreement to make yet further cuts as demanded by the EU/ ECB/ IMF Troika as conditions for the second bailout fund and “private sector involvement” (PSI) in reorganising Greece’s debt. Under the pressure from the base, GSEE and ADEDY have been forced away from the negotiating tables and into reminding themselves of some of their trade-union vocabulary. “What is happening right now is not...

The AWL is growing. We now publish Solidarity weekly, setting up new branches and expanding all areas of our activity. If we are going to continue this, we also need to expand our sources of funds. That’s why we’ve launched an appeal to raise £20,000 by the end of August. A donation from you, or a regular standing order, will help. We need money to: 1. Continue publishing Solidarity as a weekly; 2. Establish a fund for publishing high quality books and pamphlets; 3. Improve our website; 4. Organise events such as our New Unionism dayschool and our Ideas for Freedom summer school; 5. Organise...

On 1 February, the first National Health Service hospital to be handed to private management, Hinchingbrooke Hospital in Cambridgeshire, went over to its new bosses. The Government’s Health and Social Care Bill will push the NHS into radically more privatisation and marketisation. Health minister Lord Howe told a conference of private healthcare operators in London, in September 2011, that they would have “huge opportunities” once the Bill was through. The next several weeks are crucial. The Government has taken the Bill to its last stages in the House of Lords, after which it will have to...

The editorial in Solidarity 231 seems to say: 1) We are against independence for Scotland because we favour larger units, etc. 2) However we are also in favour of breaking up the existing larger unit of the UK into three separate units (Scotland, Wales and England: a “democratic federal republic”); 3) Having broken the larger unit of the UK into the smaller units of Scotland, England and Wales, we then move the latter units back to a closer unity as fast as is compatible with the wishes of the population. But the general principle enunciated in (1) is inconsistent with what is advocated in (2)...