Solidarity 127, 21 February 2008

The real reasons to criticise Ken Livingstone

The mayor of London receives the salary of a Cabinet Minister - that is, £137,579 per annum plus expenses. The latter are bound to be high. In 2005 Livingstone went to visit the right-wing Republican Mayor of New York, Rudi Giuliani, from whom he hired the infamous Bob Kiley to oversee PFI on the Tube. Last year he went to the annual jamboree of the ultimate capitalist club, the “World Economic Forum” at Davos in Switzerland, as well as leading a “delegation of London ambassadors” to India, while highly-paid members of his staff went to Venezuela to meet Hugo Chavez. The total cost of foreign...

Temporary and agency workers fight

Last week a group of cleaners at Stansted airport were told not to come to work the next day as they were no longer required. Most are from Eastern Europe and Africa. All are agency workers. Temporary and agency workers are in a particularly precarious position. They can be hired and fired almost at will. They have no guaranteed hours or permanent contract of employment. They often work for lower wages and receive less favourable sick pay and other ‘perks’ than the directly-employed colleagues they work alongside. Added to this, scams and abuse such as categorising these workers as “self...

Letters: The catatrophist mindset

A footnote to Pat Longman’s review of The Shock Doctrine (Solidarity 3-126). Capitalism has always been full of “hard-faced men who did well out of the war” — or out of whatever recent disaster may have thrown society off balance. It may well be that since the early 1990s the governing circles of capital have been become more triumphalist, less concerned for stability, more confident about plunging into crises with the belief that the gains in terms of subsequent “restructuring” will outweigh the losses. George W Bush’s invasion of Iraq — a project plainly deemed a crazy excess by the top...

The tragedy of Pierre Lambert

Pierre Lambert was in his time one of those “orthodox Trotskyists” who kept a banner of anti-Stalinist revolutionary Marxism flying in the worst years of Cold War and declining class struggle. More: comments from Vincent Presumey, Karim Landais, and others They tried — incoherently, but they tried — to resist the move of most “orthodox Trotskyists”, in the early 1950s, to see the Stalinist parties as the “owners” of all short-term revolutionary possibilities; they tried to sustain the idea of building an independent revolutionary working-class party against both capitalism and Stalinism. Today...

Migration blues

Continuing a history of the Blues Beginning around the First World War, millions of black US Southerners moved north to cities like Chicago, Detroit, and New York. Known as the Great Migration, this population movement changed the course of American history. People left the South to escape the oppressive racist system, but also, and more importantly, because of the job opportunities and promise of economic security in Northern cities. Blind Blake sang about getting a job at Mr Ford’s place in’ Detroit Bound Blues. Jobs in the automotive industry were an important factor pulling African...

Iraq by allegory

Already hailed as a masterpiece, this film is one of the bookies’ favourite for the Oscars, particularly for Daniel Day-Lewis’s portrayal of oil man Daniel Plainview. His performance certainly dominates the film — he is central to all but two scenes in the film — and it is as subtle and understated as it is masterful. The cinematography and look of the film are pitch perfect too, the production only being a little undermined by Johnny Greenwood’s (of Radiohead) unsubtle orchestral score that inserts a sometimes shrill note of discordance and unsettled wrongness. That contrasts too much with...

What some soldiers know

You carry the pearls of war within you, bombs swallowed whole and saved for later. Give them to your children. Give them to your love. From: Dreams From The Malaria Pills (Barefoot) These are poems out of the Iraq War. Many are located by title or sub-heading at precise places or moments on a battlefield whose contours are exactly those where civilians try to live their non-combatant lives: a city ring-road or central square, a town’s back-streets, a child’s bedroom, a riverbank. Turner writes from Ashur Square in Mosul when a 2000-pound suicide-bomb is detonated, from the haunted alleys of...

New Labour calls on “the nation” to sort out youth

From binge drinking and the problems associated with it, to privatisation, the dumbing down of education and low paid, “flexible for the bosses” work, life under New Labour has a bit of everything bad for working class youth. At work, millions of working people are paid a pittance, and the younger you are the worse it is. To add insult to injury the Tories, the government and the media have stepped up the crude cultural bigotry about youth, while competing to find the best solutions to their bad behaviour based on developing ever more coercive interventions. There seems to be no end to the...

Socialism for the rich!

“All comparisons with the 1970s are absurd”, squeaked one of Gordon Brown’s media people, embarrassed about the Government’s decision on 17 February to nationalise Northern Rock. “The man running it has credibility in the City, it will be run on a commercial basis..” There is nothing “welfare-state”-ish about this nationalisation! No, sir! “Credibility in the City” is still the highest principle! Actually nationalisation cannot but be a “social” measure. It is even a “welfare state” measure. Only... the “welfare” being tended to is the welfare of the rich. According to the writer Gore Vidal:...

Teachers: Vote yes for action!

Around 200,000 teachers in the National Union of Teachers (NUT) will receive ballot papers from 28 February asking them to vote for strike action on pay. The importance of a yes vote and a good turnout in this ballot cannot be overstated. A good result would lead to the first national teachers’ strike in over twenty years. The strike is planned for Thursday 24 April. More importantly, teachers are the first group of public sector workers to respond to a pay offer for the 2008 pay round. A successful ballot and strike action could set the tone for more widespread action across the public sector...

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