Solidarity 543, 14 April 2020

The pandemic, wars, and socialism

Martin Thomas' article on the similarities and differences between this pandemic and the Second World War omits several major differences that make the pandemic more favourable for socialist politics. First, wars are fought against other nations and the capitalist class has to work hard to whip up nationalist spirit. The power of nationalism during first World War mobilisation was sufficient to break the mighty Second International as workers rallied around their capitalist leaders. By contrast the pandemic is an attack on the human species by another organism. The frontline soldiers of our...

Italy: the bankruptcy of our rulers and the necessity of a new order

For the last 30 years or so we have heard little from those in power but the virtues and the inevitability of capitalism. Today we are witnessing in the face of the ever-spreading coronavirus epidemic a failure so total that literally it manifests itself in the lives of everyone on this earth. The scale of the virus"s effects where no country is immune liquidates distance or lines of combat, metaphorical or otherwise. Emblematic is the idea of Security! Bandied about by every political rogue and racist charlatan against immigrants, poisoning the mind and sowing division among workers, with the...

The Sixties Left in the USA

An SDS national council meeting, 1963. SDS would grow dramatically, convert dramatically to variants of Maoism, split and disperse dramatically Book Review: Michael R. Fischbach, The Movement and the Middle East: How the Arab-Israeli Conflict Divided the American Left, Stanford, Stanford University Press 2020 It is the conceit of this volume that the history of the American New Left and its residual legacy can be fruitfully reexamined in terms of the divisions that arose in the anti-war movement over the Palestinian (Arab) conflict. According to the author, “the major split in the Left came...

Schools and the pandemic: update

Easter holidays Were it not for the virus, most schools would now be in their two-week Easter break. The union nationally has been arguing that work in that time must be voluntary and that everyone should get two weeks holiday at some agreed point around the period, and in reasonable blocks, not a day here and a day there. That is certainly happening in Lewisham and as far as I can see across London and probably further afield. Bank Holidays The joint advice from the unions (NEU and the two leadership unions NAHT and ASCL) said they expected schools to be closed on Good Friday and Easter...

Tower Hamlets council on brink of mass sacking

On the afternoon of Wednesday 8 April, the Labour council in Tower Hamlets, East London, pulled back at the brink of sacking its entire workforce and re-employing them on worse terms. Just a few days before their deadline, Mayor John Biggs and Chief Executive Will Tuckley said they would delay - but only until "early summer" (unspecified) so the threat remains live. The move is not motivated by an immediate budget crunch. Central government's decision on funding to councils for the financial year beginning April 2020 included no new cuts, and, since then, in the pandemic, central government...

Reminiscences of Ted Knight (1933-2020)

I am saddened by the death of Ted Knight (30 March 2020). I knew him well long ago in the Orthodox Trotskyist organisation of the late 1950s and early 1960s.

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