Solidarity 312, 5 February 2014

All that is solid melts into air

Jeremy Deller is a populist artist in the best sense of the word. His 2012 retrospective was entitled ‘Joy in People’ and his works are often concerned with everyday life and the things people do with their leisure. They sometimes involve their direct participation as with his procession through Manchester and his recreation of the Battle of Orgreave during the miners’ strike. He has been described as a social cartographer and shows a deep interest in working class culture and history expressed through his use of the style and materials of trade union banners to transmit his 21st century...

Against anti-LGBT repression, equality now!

On 7 February, the Winter Olympics will begin in the Russian city of Sochi. The competition, which will be attended by athletes and sports fans from hundreds of countries across the world, will be overshadowed by the rise of homophobia and the persecution of LGBT people in Russia. This repression has taken both legal forms, proscribing the rights of LGBT people to demonstrate and agitate for their rights, as well as informal, “popular” forms, such as the harassment and assault of individuals by violent gangs. Homophobic laws are not new to Russia. Homosexuality was banned under the Stalinist...

It is anti-imperialist!

Yes, as Luke Hardy says ( Solidarity 311), the rights of the Russian-speaking minority in Ukraine should be respected. For example, Russian should be recognised as an official language. Luke is also right that the leadership of the opposition in Ukraine is bourgeois and, much of it, right-wing. He could legitimately add that the EU and the USA are fishing in troubled waters. But I think he’s wrong to deny the anti-imperialist dimension of the struggle. A book by an Ukrainian dissident, Ivan Dzyuba, translated into English in the 1970s, recounts how in Lenin’s day the Bolsheviks deliberately...

Marxism in the 1960's and 1970's

Jelle Versieren’s generous review of Antonio Gramsci: working-class revolutionary ( Solidarity 311) offers a wealth of background information and context-setting. A central assessment, however, seems to me skewed. He writes that the “new wave of energy” in the intellectual affairs of the left over the whole long period from 1956 (Khrushchev’s denunciation of Stalin, and the consequent turmoil in the Communist Parties) through the turmoil of the late 1960s and early 1970s to the early 1980s (when “Eurocommunism” mutated into a drift towards plain bourgeois liberalism) produced two main...

Students will rally on 6 February against police crackdown

A national student meeting hosted by Birmingham Defend Education on 29 January was attended by around two hundred activists from all over the country. It was called by anti-cuts groups involved in student occupations last term. The meeting agreed a number of demands to orient the student movement and around which local groups can agitate. These include free education with living grants, the writing off of student debt, and support for better pay and conditions for higher education workers. Responding to the wave of repression on universities last term, during which dozens of students were...

Syria: 2 million refugess

The UN high commissioner for refugees (UNHCR) has asked EU states to take 30,000 refugees from Syria. Up to the end of January, the UK had refused to take any. Home Secretary Theresa May insisted that Tory immigration targets were more important than Syrian lives. Prompted by pressure from Labour, the government has now agreed to take just 500 refugees. It remains outside the UN scheme which has seen states such as Germany take in 10,000. The refugee crisis in Syria is becoming even more acute as the exodus from the civil war fast outpaces neighbouring states’ capacity to provide for them. 2.1...

Higher education walk out, more action to come

Higher Education workers walked out last week in a national dispute over pay. UCU members staged a two-hour strike on 28 January in protest against the government’s pay offer of only 1% increase. The strike was the second of three stoppages planned by the union. Student activists joined workers on picket lines at a number of campuses, although some students at Warwick organised “student lectures” to fill in for striking staff. The UCU urged students concerned about missing lectures to lobby management to resolve the dispute, rather than undermining workers' protests. The third, day-long strike...

Yorkshire ambulance staff take action

Members of UNITE in Yorkshire Ambulance service took two successful days of industrial action in a dispute over issues including rotas and meal breaks. UNITE are also still in dispute over the Trust's decision to derecognise them last year. UNISON, the majority union in the service, have also rejected the terms and conditions package, after a 70% reject vote from members. The branch has threatened to ballot for action if the Trust don't back down on the proposals. After many staff were down banded last year and UNISON failed to put up any fight against this union members made sure on this...

Leicester teachers fight back

Teachers at Gateway Sixth Form College in Leicester are in dispute over classroom observation policy. The dispute has been running since last September, but has recently resulted in National Union of Teachers (NUT) members striking for five days in a two-week period. Notice of a further nine days of action in February has been given. This action has been supported by all 61 members of the union, with up to 45 NUT members from the college on the picket line each morning. Attempts to reach a resolution have been thwarted by management’s refusal to accept a maximum number of three observations...

Racing towards inequality

If you think that the economic crisis afflicts us like a curse from heaven, you should read Capital in the 21st century , the latest book by Thomas Piketty. This is a longer version of the article than in the printed paper. . Not for the answers it offers, which are tame. Piketty, who is very close to the Socialist Party [French equivalent of the Labour Party], and was the economic adviser of Ségolène Royal [SP presidential candidate in 2007], limits himself to wanting to regulate capitalism by way of a world-wide progressive tax on capital. This is a "useful utopia", he says, a way to...

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