Solidarity 604, 1 September 2021

The kidnapping of brides has been banned for decades in Kyrgyzstan, an ex-USSR Central Asian Republic lying north of Tajikistan and Afghanistan. The law was tightened in 2013, with sentences of up to 10 years in prison for those who kidnap a woman to force her into marriage. Previously it was a fine of 2,000 soms, about £20. Despite that, the medieval practise of ala kachuu (“take and run”) persists to this day. The Women Support Centre in Bishkek has estimated that 12,000 forced marriages take place every year and very few perpetrators are convicted. About 80% of the girls kidnapped accept...

From 23 August, environmental activists from across the UK descended upon London for thirteen days of bold and creative direct action against climate change and its financing, XR’s “Impossible Rebellion”. It was smaller than previous pre-Covid rebellions, but still numbered thousands every day. And not just for a single march, then a coach home: for marching, actions, and confrontation with the police all day long, day after day. Class-struggle and workplace activists, from Workers’ Liberty, “Empower the Unions”, and beyond, have been participating: supporting the protests, while trying to...

20 August was the 45th anniversary of the start of one of the most important struggles in British working-class history, the two-year strike by Grunwick film-processing workers in North West London. This is the first of two parts of an abridged version of an article written by Jean Lane in 1998: full version with photos, links and resources here . On 7 November 1977, a pitched battle took place on the streets of Brent, North London, between police and thousands of workers. It was part of the Grunwick workers’ long struggle for union recognition (1976-8). Many of the lessons were similar to...

The peoples of Afghanistan are being overrun. Those who can, will flee; some will submit to a new regime extinguishing women's rights and personal liberties, as well as collective civil rights; some will be massacred. The Afghan army, nominally over 300,000 strong, equipped, funded, and trained by the USA over 20 years, offered almost no resistance to the Taliban advance, even though the Taliban is still mostly a scrappy militia of young men with Kalashnikovs on motorbikes or pick-up trucks. The militia warlords of Afghanistan's north who were able to hold their areas against the Taliban from...

We opposed the US invasion of Afghanistan and always refused positively to support the US and NATO military presence there. We have never sloganised for "US troops out of Afghanistan", because that would suggest some support for a Taliban victory. For a long while we have said that further years of the US operation would most likely worsen the horrors when the US would, inevitably, eventually, some time, withdraw. That prediction has been confirmed. Probably an even halfway competently-managed withdrawal relatively soon after 2001 would have produced fewer horrors. Probably any US policy more...

1921: Britain concedes defeat in Third British-Afghan War (1919-21). King Amanullah begins modernising reforms. From 1953: Mohammed Daoud Khan as prime minister under the monarchy builds ties with the USSR and introduces more modernising reforms, especially for women. 1973: Daoud overthrows the monarchy and speeds up reforms. 1978: The PDPA (Afghan Communist Party) overthrows Daoud in a coup and further speeds up measures to transform Afghanistan on the model of the USSR. It is quickly pitched into civil war with a revolt of the countryside under the leadership of landlords and clerics. 1979...

In conflicts between big powers like the USA, and reactionary forces which conflict with those big powers without to any degree fighting for national-liberation or democracy, socialists must support neither side. We instead fight for the "third camp" of the working class and the oppressed, against both the big powers and forces like the Taliban, even if that "third camp" is at present weak and undeveloped. Workers' Liberty has long argued that way. Most other groups on the British left have disagreed. In 2001 some explicitly advocated siding with the Taliban ("anti-imperialist united front"...

Afghanistan’s “Great Saur Revolution”, in April 1978, and the Russian invasion of Afghanistan that flowed from it 20 months later, at Christmas 1979, were two of the most important events of the second half of the 20th century. The invasion led to the so-named Second Cold War. Their failure to subjugate Afghanistan in a nine-year colonial war was one of the things that shattered the self-confidence of the Russian Stalinist bureaucracy, and contributed to its downfall. The April 1978 revolution was a freakish event — an army and air force officers’ coup controlled by the Peoples Democratic...

The Plymouth shooting of 12 August which left five people plus the perpetrator dead is the latest in a series of incel-related mass shootings that have occurred since 2014 in the US, Canada, Germany and now the UK. Some have called for the killing to be described explicitly as misogynistic terrorism. That is certainly understandable. The murderer had had a history of posting misogynistic and homophobic comments online. Short for “involuntary celibate”, the word “incel” refers to an online subculture that has developed over the past decade where people (overwhelmingly male) dissatisfied with...