Solidarity 309, 15 January 2014

Depicting a barbaric history

Solomon Northup, on whose autobiographical memoir 12 Years a Slave is based, was lucky by the standards of most of the thousands of “free negroes” kidnapped and sold into slavery in the Southern United States. His release in 1853 and the story he went back North to tell boosted the abolitionist movement which a decade later helped destroy slavery in the US. Yet, after regaining his freedom, his colour meant he was unable to testify against his kidnappers in a Washington D.C. court. Like Steve McQueen’s first film, Hunger, 12 Years is often difficult to watch, unflinchingly brutal in its...

Claiming our lives

Vicki Morris reviews a major exhibition of works by Nottingham-born artist Paul Waplington. The Paul Waplington exhibition at Nottingham Castle showed works from what the exhibition notes call “a recent but by-gone age”, the 1970s and 80s. A Central TV documentary about Waplington, broadcast in 1984, forms part of the exhibition. In it the artist comes across as the original “Grumpy Old Man”, mourning the passing of this by-gone, almost golden, past. Happily, Waplington’s pictures — even of the East Midlands (he now lives in sunnier, rural Portugal) — are the opposite of grumpy: warm...

How to get cops off campus

Recent collusion between management and the police at the University of London during student solidarity with striking university workers has raised the question of university autonomy from state intrusion. Michéal MacEoin looks at a rich history from Latin America. Spanish and, later, Spanish-American institutions in Latin America based themselves on the medieval University of Bologna in Italy. They conceived of themselves as corporate communities of scholars. This contrasted with a different medieval model, from Paris: controlled by masters, with students as academic and political...

Help us raise £12,000 by October

2014 began with brutal repression of the Cambodian garment workers — five workers were murdered by the military police and many others jailed, after a successful fight to increase their bare subsistence wages. The best new year’s resolution socialists can make is to fight harder to put an end to this brutal capitalist system. How to begin, and how to sustain a fight against capitalism? And, indeed — how to fight? Educating ourselves — in theory and the historical, global experiences of working-class fighters — makes a huge difference. In the long-run only well-educated revolutionaries can hope...

Stop fracking and the “dash for gas”

The risk of catastrophic climate change, which could have a devastating impact on human and other life on earth, is growing. In May 2013, the Manu Loa observatory in Hawaii, USA, recorded 400 parts per million of carbon dioxide (CO2) in the atmosphere for the first time. 400ppm is acknowledged by some climate experts as a key “tipping point”. We need a rapid transition away from dependence on fossil-fuel-based energy sources, and towards renewable and sustainable sources. The market cannot be relied upon to oversee such a transition. Avoiding climate barbarism needs socialism — democratic...

Australian victory boosts lobby Bill fight

The Transparency of Lobbying Bill pushed by the Government is being debated in the House of Lords from 13 January. It puts more trade union spending under legal limitations in the months before a general election - the TUC reckons that the text could lay the basis to ban all union conferences in that period — and greatly reduces the allowance for “within-limit” spending. On 17 December the fight against this Bill got a boost when the High Court of New South Wales, in Australia, ruled unconstitutional a similar but more drastic law enacted by the Liberal (Tory) government in NSW in February...

Michael Gove makes an ass of himself

Michael Gove appears to be walking a path separate from any other Coalition cabinet Minister. It’s not that he is necessarily more right-wing or callous than his gruesome peers. It’s just that in his pronouncements and actions he appears to be more concerned to carve out his own reputation as a peculiarly contrarian scourge of left-liberal Britain than to promote a coherent government programme. From the hugely expensive and wasteful free school programme to the derided provision of King James bibles to every school in England, Gove often looks like a man ploughing his own lonely and quixotic...

Turkey: pro-US or Putin path?

Recent developments in Turkey represent a new crisis within the political establishment. On the surface we see an investigation into corruption initiated by the judiciary. The scandal reached the top of the ruling AKP (Freedom and Justice Party) and government officials, even Prime Minister Erdogan’s son. A cabinet reshuffle followed, with many ministers being forced to resign by Erdogan. On one level this is a power struggle between the Gülen movement and the Erdoganists. The AKP and the Gülen movement are both soft-Islamists, but with different roots. The Gülen movement holds many positions...

Duggan verdict: no justice

A statement from the Black Power Caucus of the National Campaign Against Fees and Cuts (NCAFC) on the verdict from the inquest into Mark Duggan’s death. Azelle Rodney, Jean Charles de Menezes, Mark Duggan; these are the names of just a few of the people that have died at the hands of the Metropolitan Police, an organisation that is apparently there to protect the people of London. To many people in the city however, it has always been nothing more than an aggressive and institutionally racist organisation, solely dedicated to preserving the unjust status quo, quelling any dissent and unafraid...

Council cuts loom again

As local councils prepare their budgets for the financial year 2014-5, they face reductions in their income from central government which by 2015-6 “will bring to 43% the total cuts to local authority funding announced by this Government”. So estimates the councils’ umbrella body, the Local Government Association, adding that “the money available to deliver non-social-care services... is predicted to shrink by 66% by the end of the decade”. Central government pressure squeezes even tighter because it goes with decrees forbidding councils to raise council tax — the major element of their income...

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