Science and Technology

Why we don't oppose nuclear power

We recognise that climate change alters the conditions in which we formulate our socialist politics. Climate change is ultimately caused by capitalist social relations of production, which permit capitalists to simultaneously exploit wage labour while despoiling the ecology of the planet for the pursuit of profit. Climate change is already impacting on working class communities across the globe. Floods, drought, wild fires and storms are frequently in the news. Climate change is already affecting food supplies, ecosystems, water and health. It is already integral to government policy on energy...

Organising for revolutionary socialist ideas

The Alliance for Workers’ Liberty (AWL) met for our annual conference on 26-27 October at the University of London Union. The purpose of the AGM is to review our activity over the previous year, debate and decide policy, agree our political priorities, and elect our National Committee. The conference noted some significant successes. AWL has been integral to the Save Lewisham Hospital campaign, which has beaten back Tory attempts to cut maternity and A&E services, preparing the hospital for closure. We helped coordinate the international campaign to defend Australian trade unionist Bob...

Atomic Energy: for Barbarism or Socialism? A Socialist Manifesto From the Dawn of the Nuclear Age

A comprehensive Trotskyist response to the new age which opened with the American atom bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945. It was published in Labor Action, New York, at the end of 1945. "The impact of the bomb was so terrific that practically all living things, human and animal, were literally seared to death by the tremendous heat and pressure engendered by the blast." - From a Tokyo broadcast describing the result of the atomic bomb dropped by a Superfortress on Hiroshima. The explosions in Hiroshima and Nagasaki of the missiles that were produced by the United States for the...

Inequality kills!

Average life expectancy in the UK is one of the lowest among comparably affluent countries in the world. Government fixes focus on life style. But that would be to ignore some of the complex underlying causes as well as political responsibility. Les Hearn reports. In 2008, the WHO reported that life expectancy not only varied widely between countries (a girl in Lesotho has a life expectancy 42 years less than one in Japan) but within countries also (children born eight miles apart in the Glasgow area have 28-year differences in life expectancy). These facts come from the report of the WHO’s...

Wrong on “NIMBYS”

Contrary to Martin Thomas’ view ( Solidarity 274), Cumbria’s anti-nuclear lobby cannot simply be dismissed as parochial NIMBYs. Nuclear power, which generates harmful waste products that last for millenia, is one of the extreme examples of capitalism’s ecological blindness. If we had democratic control of the means of production then I doubt we would now be burdened with a large nuclear waste legacy. However, Martin Thomas is a practical man and would not appreciate these “what ifs”. As he says, the waste exists. Are we simply going to dump it on Mexico or Sweden? I believe the rational...

Nationalise pharmaceuticals!

After the success of Bad Science, Ben Goldacre (doctor and debunker*) has now taken on the pharmaceuticals industry (“big pharma”) in his latest book Bad Pharma. While admitting that “without medicines, there is no medicine”, he shows that the science behind new drugs is consistently distorted to further the interests of the industry. The main way this is done is to routinely hide much of the data relevant to judging the efficacy and safety of new drugs. Over a quarter of the 365 pages of text is devoted to this missing data. The gold standard behind any effective medicine is the randomised...

AIDS: where have we got to?

Just over 30 years ago, the disease soon to be called AIDS (acquired immunodeficiency disorder), but then termed GRID (gay-related immune deficiency), was first reported in the US. Sufferers predominantly came from the “four H’s”, homosexual men, heroin users, haemophiliacs and, curiously, Haitians. Many had unusual infections, including a type of pneumonia, and a rare cancer (Kaposi’s sarcoma). Death rates were high, the cause being infections that the body was unable to fight, due to the loss of a vital component of the immune system, CD4+T lymphocytes or T helper cells. Quite soon, it was...

Higgs is here!

In January, we reported that CERN was tentatively claiming that Higgs bosons had been created in high energy collisions of hadrons in the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) (“Higgs ahoy!”, Solidarity 229, 11 January 2012). They were not certain enough that the signals detected were those of Higgs bosons and said they would be searching further this year, after the LHC’s scheduled shutdown and re-opening. Now, after analysing trillions and trillions more proton-proton collisions, they have come up with enough evidence to have “5 sigma” certainty (99.99997%) that they have discovered the Higgs boson*...

Fracking: good, bad and/or ugly?

Fracking, or hydraulic fracturing, is a technique for getting methane gas out of shale rocks. The gas, which is a fossil fuel, can then be burnt to provide energy for power stations to generate electricity. Because methane has a lower proportion of carbon than coal and oil and can be burnt more efficiently, many see it as a transitional fuel, allowing continued use of fossil fuels but reducing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. This would buy time while alternatives were developed. According to this model, fracking would help by increasing the availability of methane. There are two types of...

Uses of religion

While it was good to read the interview with Andrew Copson of the British Humanist Association ( Solidarity 242), it was disappointing to see Ira Berkovic falling into the trap of a formulaic denunciation of Richard Dawkins’ supposed views on religion. Dawkins does not “conceive of religious belief as merely a stupid, wrong idea”. As he explains in The God Delusion, the ubiquity of religion strongly suggests that it either has survival value or, his preferred theory, it is linked to psychological propensities that have survival value. In other words, religious beliefs are a by-product of...

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