Solidarity 367, 10 June 2015

464 shot by US cops this year

Thirty-six year old African-American man Kevin Allen was shot dead by police in Lyndhurst, New Jersey on Friday 29 May. Kevin was shot in a public library after apparently resisting arrest for violating his probation and pulling out a knife. Police have released a report claiming that officers had “no choice” but to shoot Kevin after “pepper spray and officers' batons had failed to subdue him”. But nobody is likely to lie still and calm after being pepper sprayed! The idea that the police, with all the force at their disposal, could not “subdue” a man in a small library room, housed in the...

HSBC tries to play the victim

The HSBC banking group is threatening to leave the UK over very the mild regulations on the financial sector that have been implemented since the 2008 crash. HSBC bosses have previously said they are considering moving the operation, probably to Hong Kong, in response to new banking levies. The bank’s chief executive, Stuart Gulliver, is set to lay out the banks plans for making the decision to an audience of top bankers on 9 June. The loud speculations about the possibility of upping sticks is believed to be timed to put pressure on Tory chancellor George Osborne, who will be delivering a...

Class struggle and Marxism in Russia

Viktoria and Sergei, activists in the Workers’ Platform, a Russian Marxist group based in Perm and Kaluga, talked to Solidarity . Solidarity : what are the conditions like for activists? Viktoria: In Russia, in the economy, there has been a process of neo-liberal reforms. There is a lot of discontent as the regime puts on pressure and repression. But we are still able to organise workers in independent trade unions. The most active of our groups is in Kaluga, an industrial city near Moscow where there are lots of factories like Peugot-Citroen, Volkswagen, Samsung, and other transnational...

US docks: automation versus union power

Members of the American International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU) have just agreed a five-year deal with the employers federation, the Pacific Maritime Association (PMA). The deal covers 20,000 dockworkers at twenty-nine US west coast ports. The nine-month-long war of attrition by the PMA which preceded the deal was the latest stage in an employers’ offensive against US dockers stretching back to the early 1960s. Before then, working conditions on the docks had been dictated by the ILWU’s victory in the 1934 US West Coast dockers strike. The 1934 strike saw the ILWU effectively win...

Two visions of Podemos

“I don’t want to be a “hinge”. I want to win. And in a context of complete ideological defeat in which they have insulted and criminalised us, where they control all of the media, to win the left needs to stop being a religion and become a tool in the hands of the people. It needs to become the people … I know that this pisses off people on the left.” Pablo Inglesias, General Secretary of Podemos Last month broad grassroots political platforms supported by Spain’s left anti-austerity party, Podemos, won municipal elections in Barcelona (Guanyem Barcelona) and came close to winning in Madrid...

The old new

Unlike many who emphasise the novelty of any given period, and insist that some innovative new approach must be adopted, John Cunningham (“It is not ‘business as usual for the left”, Solidarity 366, 3 June 2015) at least has the honesty to admit that he doesn’t know what that new approach is. “I take no pleasure from the comments I make here”, John says, “as I have no alternative to offer.” Honest, but nevertheless frustrating. If John believe socialists must undertake a “radical rethink of just about everything”, it’s no good just saying so. He has a responsibility to at least make some broad...

300 Ukrainian LGBT activists march and defy far-right's threats

300 LGBT activists and their supporters took part in a March for Equality in the Ukrainian capital of Kiev last Saturday (6th June) despite threats by the ‘Right Sector’ organisation to drive them off the streets. It was the fourth attempt in successive years to stage such a demonstration. The 2012 March for Equality was abandoned when 3,000 protestors turned up to prevent it from going ahead. (Ukraine was one of the first post-Soviet countries to decriminalise homosexuality, in 1991. But popular anti-LGBT prejudices remain widespread.) In 2013 over a hundred LGBT activists defied a court ban...

Where did ISIS come from?

It is true that ISIS is a dangerous force that has started a devastating war in the Middle East in which the results are beheading, raping and ruining the traces of civilisation. It is true that ISIS wants to drag civilised societies into the same primitive Sharia reign of Islam. But the worst and most dangerous thing is that it tries to drown the civilised world in blood, terror and killings, as a means to grab the power and wealth of society. ISIS is a black spectre overwhelming human society. As a bourgeois force carrying the banner of Islam, ISIS has a strategy for the world-wide political...

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