Solidarity 077, 21 July 2005

The workers of Paris triumph (1)

In 1894 Ernest Belfort Bax, one of the pioneer British Marxists, wrote a long series of articles on the Commune in Justice, the paper of the first British Marxist group, the Social Democratic Federation. We have abridged and adapted Bax’s narrative account of the Commune. The second part will appear in the next issue of Solidarity. The Paris Commune of 1871 occupies a peculiar position in the history of the proletarian movement. It forms the culmination of the first period of modern socialism — a period in which the elements of prior movements were still clinging to it. The distinction between...

When the working-class first took power

For the 50 years before the October revolution of 1917, on 18 March every year the socialist movement throughout the world celebrated “Commune Day”. This was the anniversary of the Paris Commune of 1871. There, for the first time, the working class seized power, and held it for nearly two months. This, as Frederick Engels said, was “the dictatorship of the proletariat”. It ended in a horrific massacre of the Parisian workers, but it pointed to the political future of the working class everywhere. Leon Trotsky, writing in March 1917 during his brief stay in New York, outlined the experience and...

What we do

As we go to press, AWL members are working on mailing out invitations to our trade-unionists' day school on 17 September. The day school, at St Mary's Community Centre in Upper St, London N1, is designed as a working event, with workshops in a variety of forms allowing dialogue and practical sessions as well as the traditional lecture-plus-questions type. Trade union activity is central for the AWL because organised working-class action is central to socialism, and trade unions are the main form of working-class organisation in Britain today. But not just any trade union activity. We are in...

Taking on anti-Semitism

On 10 July, seven AWL members took part in a protest against the jazz musician Gilad Atzmon performing at the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) summer school, Marxism. In articles Atzmon has said things such as “... we must begin to take the accusation that the Jewish people are trying to control the world very seriously... American Jews do try to control the world, by proxy.” The SWP has refused to condemn his politics. Sure enough, after only a few minutes of leafleting at the event at which Atzmon was playing, we were ordered to leave the building by SWP national secretary Martin Smith, even...

The left and us

Over the weekend of 9-10 July, the Alliance for Workers’ Liberty held our annual Ideas for Freedom summer school, an event where socialists and activists can debate, discuss and hone ideas for independent working class politics. This year, in the aftermath of both the G8 mobilisations and the London bombings, the need for those debates event was even more apparent than usual. While the governments of the richest countries throw crumbs of aid to the governments of the poorest (in order to “open up the markets” of countries rich in natural resources); while fascistic religious bigots blow up...

Politics and culture al fresco

Those of you who have never attended the annual Tolpuddle Martyrs Festival (held this year on 15-17 July) are missing a real treat, especially if you also like rolling in clover and staring up at the star-filled midnight sky. Organised by the South-West regional TUC and sponsored by unions and other groups (including No Sweat), Tolpuddle is a political event with guests from international trade union struggles and a march through the village where one of Britain’s first trade unions was born. But the festival is also a cultural event — with many, mainly folk, musicians featured. Every year the...

The Buddhist Detective

Dan Katz reviews Bangkok 8 and the recently published Bangkok Tattoo by John Burdett Just at the point when I become sick to death of standardised, dull US detective stories and their badly-written British counterparts something comes along to cheer me up: Sonchai Jitleecheep, a Thai detective who is also a flawed and extremely ambivalent character The important thing about noir crime is to put a person who already has lots of problems into a situation where they have little room for manoeuvre. Squeeze them and see what happens. Sonchai has a lot to contend with. For a start he is a Buddhist...

The most political Potter

Amina Saddiq reviews "Harry Potter and the Half-blood Prince" Those who haven’t read the last few Harry Potter books will probably laugh when I say that the latest instalment is not only the most interesting, but the most political of the series. I’ll try and explain. Each book starts with a new academic year at Harry’s school, Hogwarts: when the series began Harry was ten but he is now almost seventeen, and Rowling has changed both the tone and subject matter accordingly. There is still some of the earlier over-the-top jolliness, but the tone is now much darker. This is a book for older...

Looking left

SWP on MAB; Respect's money; Labourstart; the Socialist Alliance's money; "Unite against terror" SWP: DON'T KILL PEOPLE, JOIN MAB Up till now the SWP’s promotion of the Muslim Association of Britain has been mostly indirect — co-sponsoring anti-war demos, endorsing MAB members as Respect candidates and so on. Now they are promoting their friends in this offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood explicitly. “Instead of killing ordinary people” (!!!), writes prominent SWPer John Molyneux in the Guardian on 14 July, “they [young Muslims] should channel their anger into political action. They should...

Writing on the Wall

Hatfield Killers Wriggle; Threats to gay rights group; Defend gay refusnik; The great liberal; Support fades for hate law HATFIELD KILLERS WRIGGLE The engineering giant Balfour Beatty has admitted that it was guilty of breaching safety standards before the Hatfield train disaster in October 2000 in which four people died. The company’s dramatic change of plea came after it was formally cleared by an Old Bailey judge last week of a corporate manslaughter charge. However, this admission is not all it seems. Balfour Beatty accepted some particulars of the allegations but not others, while the...

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