Solidarity 328, 18 June 2014

In the four weeks since the coup, the military have repressed, but not eliminated, dissent. The wave of protests immediately after the coup was a big step and a break from the past. Showing enormous courage, Thai working people demonstrated in their hundreds and thousands. At first the military seemed nonplussed, then they started their crackdown. Even after rounds of arrests, people continued to protest in large numbers, finding inventive ways to organise such as changing the sites to places where they were not expected. Arrests of activists have become widespread, mostly followed by release...

“Orientalism was ultimately a political vision of reality whose structure promoted the difference between the familiar (Europe, the West, “us”) and the strange (the Orient, the East, “them”).” Edward Said Edward Said’s 1978 book Orientalism is a retort to his conceptualisation of a dual camp schema of the world. It effectively inverts this dual camp but with a method devoid of class politics. Said opens his book with a quote by Karl Marx: “They cannot represent themselves; they must be represented.” The tone is thus set for a necessary antidote to a paternalistic and patronising western system...

Sam Williams has written 16,000 words to claim that Russia is not imperialist, even when its tanks are rolling through other nations. He describes the old Stalinist states “the former socialist countries of the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe.” In those days there was “no true Soviet imperialism”, claims Williams, because “wealth was not accumulated in the form of capital, and therefore not in the form of finance capital — there was not a single kopeck of finance capital.” Any other view is down to “imperialist Western propaganda and its bought and paid-for historians.” And Russia retains its...

According to the curators Paul Gravett and John Harris Dunning and artistic director David McKean, the exhibition explores the British Library’s collection of comics and plumbs the depths of private collections, to show the history of British sequential art, as well as its writers and artists. It partially succeeds. The curators wanted to show the political history of comics, the medium’s ability to subvert, and its role as a medium for analysing class, sexuality and ethnicity, not to mention the many occasions when it has become the subject of political battles. The exhibition has some very...

Vladimir Derer who was the leading figure in the Campaign for Labour Party Democracy (CLPD) for forty years after its foundation in 1973 has died at the age of 94. Although almost unknown other than amongst Labour activists, he was the Labour left’s leading strategist at the height of its influence in the 1970s and 1980s.His strategic vision made CLPD, the most effective organisation on the Labour left through to the New Labour years and the present. Tony Benn was rightly regarded as the Labour left’s outstanding leader and communicator of the period but he was often wrongly credited with...

On Wednesday 11 June, the Al-Qaeda-oriented Sunni Islamist group ISIS seized control of Iraq's second-biggest city, Mosul. It has taken several other cities in the Sunni-majority north and west. Before 11 June it already had control of Fallujah and much of Ramadi, and of significant areas in Syria. Nadia Mahmood of the Worker-communist Party of Iraq told Solidarity : "What's going on now with ISIS is a new phase of the sectarian violence which reached its peak in 2006-7 with the bombings in Samarra". That simmering sectarian civil war died down in 2007-8 and after. But, said Nadia: "After the...