Solidarity 073, 12 May 2005

Joan Trevor reviews the documentary “Cinema Iran” (Channel 4) and looks at some of Iran’s cinematic output On the surface, Iranian cinema is everything US cinema isn’t, so Mark Cousins began his Cinema Iran programme interviewing movie goers in New York. “Why do you go to the movies?”, he asked. “It’s a fantasy, right?”, they answered. Then Cousins gave the very ordinary scene he was filming — unbeautiful people in everyday clothes walking along a New York street on a wintry day — the Hollywood blockbuster treatment. Filmed it through a letterbox window, slowed it down, blurred it a bit, shot...

From Eric Lee, Labourstart We have received a report from Geneva regarding the arrests and detention without trial of three trade union leaders in Eritrea. You may remember Eritrea — it is sometimes in the news because of its ongoing conflict with Ethiopia (from which it won its independence several years ago). But what you may not know is that the country is a single-party state which brutally represses dissent. Two of the union leaders were arrested on 30 March. On 9 April, the head of the Coca-Cola workers’ union was also picked up. It is believed that he was about to lead Coca-Cola workers...

by Tony Osborne Some Councils, like Hackney where I live, are scrabbling to get on the Arms Length Management Organisation (ALMO) ladder. They think this is the only way they are likely to raise the money after years of (their own!) neglect and mismanagement, to comply with central government’s directive that all Council homes must reach a “Decent Homes” standard by 2010 However, this is by no means guaranteed even if given ALMO status. Some ALMOs are reaching the end of five-year contracts. What are the Councils in those areas thinking about now? Do they now take homes back under direct...

Click here for the series on The Roots of Bolshevism of which this article is part Lenin’s What Is To Be Done?, written in late 1901 and early 1902, is one of the most important books ever written. Certainly it is one of the most important socialist texts in existence. Yet it is often seen, even by people who are not antagonistic to Lenin and his work, in the grim retrospective shadow of Stalinism. This, we are told, is the book in which Lenin expounded his notion of a highly centralised party of “professional revolutionaries”, and therefore, whatever Lenin’s intentions, it was the seed of...

Houzan Mahmoud from the Worker-communist Party of Iraq talks about her recent visit to Iraq. Houzan is a UK representative for the Federation of Workers’ Councils and Union in Iraq. Interview by Martin Thomas In Baghdad, you have the feeling that this society has been abandoned. There is a vacuum of state institutions. All the news is of explosions, kidnappings, and beheadings. From six or seven in the evening, in some areas, it’s too risky to move around. Generally, what you see on the streets are men in cars, buses, taxis. There is no system of traffic control, so the streets are really...

The SWP and the ‘clerical-fascists’ In Britain the SWP usually claims that it is a “slander” to say that their allies, Muslim Association of Britain, are an offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood, the biggest Islamic fundamentalist party in the Arab world. But the latest number of the SWP’s magazine IS Journal carries an article saying that the left in Egypt should work with the Muslim Brotherhood itself, which SWP founder Tony Cliff, when he was still active in the region, called “clerical-fascist”. The article regrets that the Brotherhood has softened: “The higher ranks of the Muslim Brothers...

European Stalinism began to collapse with the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. The former USSR satellites on whose people Russian Stalinism had imposed totalitarian dictatorship for nearly 50 years began to free themselves from Russia overlordship. Stalinism in the USSR itself collapsed completely when an inept hard-line Stalinist attempted coup failed, in August 1991. The collapse of Stalinism destroyed the vicious counterfeit of socialism that had ruled there in the name of socialism and communism, but really in the interests of the Stalinist bureaucratic ruling class. It thereby created...

John Strawson is a law lecturer at the University of East London, and also teaches at Bir Zeit University, in the occupied West Bank. He spoke to Solidarity about the special council (conference) which the Association of University Teachers (AUT) has called for 26 May after protests from its members about the decision of its regular conference, on 22 April, to impose an academic boycott on two Israeli universities, Haifa and Bar-Ilan. What would you like to see come out of the AUT special council? That the council reverses the boycott and adopts a positive policy encouraging academic links...

A grassroots activist, socialist and outspoken critic of the current FBU leadership has been elected General Secretary of the Fire Brigades Union, defeating incumbent Andy Gilchrist. Matt Wrack beat Gilchrist by 12,833 votes to 7,259, in a poll which saw 40% of the union’s membership voting, a high turn-out for a union election. The “old guard” around Gilchrist are continuing their efforts to smear Wrack, and others, for their involvement in “Grassroots FBU”, a rank and file body formed after the union collapsed to defeat in the pay strike last year. They are presenting a report to the FBU...