Solidarity 090, 23 March 2006

Keep up the pressure to free Iranian bus drivers

Five imprisoned bus drivers, all members of the executive board of Tehran's bus workers' union, and Sattar Amini, a metal worker, were released on bail on Saturday and Sunday 18 and 19 March. However, the head of the union, Mansoor Ossanlou, and Afshin Bahrami, an auto worker from Iran Khodro car plant, remain in prison. On Saturday Ebrahim Madadi and Yaghoub Salimi were greeted with flowers and embraced by their colleagues outside Evin Prison in Tehran. Three other members of the union’s executive, namely, Mansoor Hayat Gheibi, Gholamreza Mirzaee and Ebrahim Noroozi Gohari, along with Sattar...

Vote Socialist Unity - Defying disillusion

Charlie McDonald, an activist in the civil service union PCS, will be standing alongside local tenants' leader (and RMT union activist) Janine Booth for Socialist Unity in Hackney Central ward, east London, in the council elections on 4 May. Charlie works at the Department of Work and Pensions Hackney processing centre, in the ward. He told Solidarity: "From my work, I can see that conditions are hard for working-class people in this area. "If you go in to the Job Centres, all the jobs available are low-paid - security guards, office temps, that sort of thing. "We work on benefit payments, and...

The truth about Marxism and religion

By Paul Hampton Read this article in French here . An article, “Marx and religion” by Anindya Bhattacharyya in Socialist Worker (4 March 2006) argued that Karl Marx and Frederick Engels were not very hard on religion and scorned “liberal” contemporaries (especially Bruno Bauer) who were. The article is largely rationalisation, reading back into history the SWP’s current politics of courting some Muslims organisations. It fails to represent the complexity of Marx and Engels’ views on religion: their fundamental atheist outlook; their opposition to organised religion; the place of religion in...

hamas victory: “a terrible defeat”

The Ligue Communiste Révolutionnaire (LCR) has been debating the left’s response to the victory of the Islamist party, Hamas, in the Palestinian legislative elections on 25 January 2006. An initial response by Nicolas Qualander appeared in the LCR’s paper, Rouge, of 23 February. We print here a translated extract of a reply to Qualander by Christian Picquet published in Rouge, 2 March 2006. Often, when confronted by reactionary ideological forces that challenge the established order while resting on the exasperation of the oppressed, the revolutionary left has tried to reassure itself by...

From the archive: Sicily and the Sicilians

This 1860 article by Karl Marx is a concise account of the struggles of the people of Sicily for freedom through centuries. So is the politics of it, in his last paragraph. Marx loathes the French emperor Napoleon III and says that he will do what he will do in Italy for dynastic and imperialist reasons. Marx nonetheless thinks that “any change” — even a French intervention in Sicily — “must be for the better”. Better than the ongoing slaughter of Sicilians by their own savage Bourbon government. Throughout the history of the human race no land and no people have suffered so terribly from...

Who are our allies against Islamism?

In Solidarity 3/89 we published an open letter from Martin Thomas (of the Alliance for Workers’ Liberty), urging Maryam Namazie of the Worker-communist Party of Iran to withdraw her support for the “March For Free Expression” in London on 25 March. On the formal basis of supporting the right to lampoon Muhammad, the march organisers would put her on a platform with the rabidly right-wing and British-nationalist Freedom Association, a group which prides itself above all on its work in trying to break the Grunwick strike in 1977. The open letter also (secondarily) took issue with Maryam Namazie...

A great story messed up

Mike wood reviews v for vendetta This could’ve been great. It is after all based on an angry story about the overthrow of a British fascist regime, originally written as an attack on Thatcherism and British nationalism in the 1980s. Its central character, V — remaining anonymous throughout — is an idea, the personification of the Vendetta the government has earned from its people. He is the homicidal product of medical experiments conducted on concentration camp inmates. What a great concept! Unfortunately this isn’t a really great film. Instead it’s a garbled mess with just enough of the...

Cheerleaders for someone else’s “revolution”

Pablo Velasco reivews Venezuela and Revolution in the 21st Century by Joseph Choonara, Socialist Worker pamphlet The emergence of an independent labour movement in Venezuela has been one of the most exciting developments in Latin America in recent years. The formation of the UNT, whose leadership includes many class struggle militants, is a welcome development after forty years of domination by the bureaucratic and corrupt CTV union federation. Embryonic elements of workers’ control in some factories show that the labour movement has the potential to challenge both state and capitalist control...

Will it be a new “May ’68”?

Yves Coleman, a revolutionary socialist based in Paris gave Solidarity some thoughts on the anti-CPE revolt. Is France facing a new May ’68 [when student protests eventually sparked a ten million strong general strike]? Today (20 March), I would say no — but everything can change if the working class (and especially the private sector workers) starts to move. Tonight the unions rejected a general strike in favour of a “day of action” in a week’s time — a perfect technique to bury the movement. There are a number of differences with 1968. Students are divided about their methods of action. Not...

Socialist feminism makes its mark

By Tammy Love When Education Not For Sale Women was coming together in August 2005, we discussed whether describing ourselves as “socialist feminists” was too radical and might alienate the feminist left. Seven months later, both candidates in the NUS women’s officer elections were describing themselves as “socialist feminists”, proof that in a relatively short amount of time we have been able to influence the direction of the student women’s movement. Our main objective at conference was to use ENS to repoliticise the Women’s Campaign. This year’s conference was the smallest liberation...

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