Solidarity 389, 13 January 2016

Influential historian Benedict Richard O'Gorman Anderson died on 13 December in Java, the Indonesian island that did much to form his outlook as a scholar of south-east Asia and theories of nationalism. Anderson was born on 26 August 1936 in Kunming, China, to an Anglo-Irish father and an English mother. His father was a commissioner in the Imperial Maritime Customs Service, and the family moved to California in 1941 to avoid the Japanese invasion during the Second Sino-Japanese War. From there they moved to Ireland in 1945, and Anderson studied at Cambridge, before receiving his PhD in...

The Danish Girl, starring Eddie Redmayne as Lili Elbe and Alicia Vikander as Gerda Wegener, offers an emotional and inspiring depiction of a trans woman's struggle to claim her identity in the early 20th century. The film follows the real-life story of Lili Elbe, a trans artist and one of the first people in the world to undergo gender reassignment surgery. Born Einar Wegener in Denmark in 1882, she became a successful landscape painter under this name. When studying at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in Copenhagen, she met Gerda Gottlieb, who she married in 1904. Gerda was also a very...

Review of Frank Rosengarten's The revolutionary Marxism of Antonio Gramsci The first, and longest, essay in this book is a warm appreciation of the interaction between Gramsci and Trotsky. The Prison Notebooks contains some sharp and, as even the mild-mannered Rosengarten puts it, "unfair" attacks on Trotsky's ideas. Yet, as Rosengarten documents, Gramsci had learned a lot from Trotsky in 1922-3. He was sympathetic to the 1923 Left Opposition. He opposed Stalinist "Third Period" policy in much the same way that Trotsky did, and "did not give any credence to the Stalinist slander of Trotsky"...

Janine Booth continues describing the history of what took place at Gallipoli. Part one can be found in Solidarity 388. Guy Dawnay, one of Hamilton’s staff officers, went to London to tell the truth about what was happening. On 14 October, Britain’s Dardanelles committee sacked Hamilton, replacing him with Sir Charles Monro. By this time, the Allies were evacuating 600 men per day due to sickness and injury. Monro studied the situation, and recommended abandoning the campaign and evacuating Gallipoli by the end of October. But Churchill denounced Monro with the words ‘He came, he saw, he...

At the start of December David Cameron called Labour MPs who were voting against British bombing in Syria “a bunch of terrorist sympathisers”. He claimed he had a “moral duty” to bomb. As of the beginning of January, actual British air strikes in Syria have been so few as to be militarily meaningless. The first British bombings were on 3 December, on Daesh wellheads. A US source quoted in Private Eye described them as less than worthwhile. After further strikes on 3, 5, and 6 December, there have been no operations up to early January, other than an unmanned drone on Christmas Day. David...

The International Organisation for Migration (IOM) reported shortly before Christmas that more than one million migrants had made their way into the European Union, Germany in particular, in 2015. The overwhelming majority of these migrants made risky sea crossings, mainly from Turkey to Greece. Nearly 4,000 drowned. The EU’s statistical office Eurostat reported that 942,400 people have claimed asylum. The number of migrants in 2014 was a quarter of this figure. The figures sound high - from a certain vantage point, that of UKIP perhaps, who don’t want any more migrants; or from the point of...

The squalid Saudi-led — and Western-backed — war on Yemen continues. The Saudis are attempting to impose their own man — Abdrabbuh Mansour Hadi — on the country. Hadi has little support in Yemen and is currently in exile in Saudi Arabia. The Saudis face a movement led by Houthi militias. The Houthi are a minority strand of Shia Islam, whose heartland is in north Yemen. The Houthis have support from forces loyal to former president, Ali Abdullah Saleh. The Saudis fear that the Houthis are instruments of Shia Iran. Around 3,000 civilians have died since the Saudis started bombing in March 2015...

Danielle, a student nurse at Kings College London, spoke to Solidarity about the campaign to stop the government scrapping bursaries for nursing students. How did the campaign get started? I was in the library one day found myself getting annoyed about the bursary cuts, and the wider picture of the NHS — I was really furious. I started an event for a protest and 300 people said they were coming within an hour. It escalated from there. I needed some help, so I put out a message for a meeting in the uni, and we set up a committee. We’ve set up a national committee from there. So that’s how it...

With the Housing Bill, and various associated ancillary legislation, the Tories have launched an all-out offensive to destroy social housing, especially council housing, once and for all. There are a number of provisions put forward including the ending of security of tenure and the ruling that all council tenants must submit to a review of their tenancy every two to five years. The Tories do not specify what happens after their housing status is reviewed, but George Osborne and several other cabinet ministers have given every indication they “will be required” to move into private rented...

While the Eurozone is embarking on a very moderate period of recovery, alarmist predictions are multiplying about the overall trajectory of the world economy: “Chinese growth slows, world economy suffers”, was, for example, a headline in Le Monde of 20 October 2015. “On the economic front, there is also reason to be concerned” says Christine Lagarde [1], and Jacques Attali [2] announces that “the world is approaching a great economic catastrophe”. Click here to get article as pdf Let us begin with a brief overview: world growth is slowing, mainly in the emerging economies with the exception of...