Solidarity 098, 7 September 2006

AWL women are supporting Feminist Fightback, an activist conference for women’s liberation that will take place on Saturday 21 October in London. There is a widespread revival interest in women’s liberation, particularly among young women, but the combined efforts of liberal and radical feminists over the last twenty years have made too many people feel that feminism doesn’t speak to them. As the Fightback launch statement puts it: “Too many people think that feminism is about being made to feel guilty for what we do with our bodies or how we express our sexuality; about a group of “experts”...

20 young AWL members and sympathisers went to the Reading and Leeds music festivals over the August bank holiday weekend this year...to pull pints. The beer tents at Reading and Leeds, as well as many other smaller festivals, are run by Workers’ Beer (“Thirst among equals”!), an organisation set up by Battersea and Wandsworth Trades Council to raise funds for organising while allowing left-wing groups and campaigns to earn some much needed cash by providing volunteers. As well as raising about £2000 for Workers’ Liberty, we continued the tradition we began last year in support of the Gate...

By Sacha Ismail The 2 September issue of Socialist Worker contains a lengthy article by Anindya Bhattacharyya attacking the use of the term “Islamofascism” to describe Islamist movements like Hizbollah. Bhattacharyya locates Bush and other neo-conservatives’ use of the term in a drive to find a new enemy to fill the role played by Stalinism during the Cold War. The condemnation of Islamism as “fascistic” and “totalitarian” is linked to the idea “that Communism and fascism were twins” and the theories of totalitarianism wielded by Western Cold Warriors in their struggle against the USSR...

Fifty years ago this year, in 1956, perhaps the greatest technological revolution of the 20th century started. It was much more prosaic, “low-tech”, and distant from advanced scientific discoveries than the innovations with computers and microelectronics, but has arguably had a greater social and economic impact. It was “containerisation” — putting seagoing cargo into big, standard-sized metal boxes. Over the decades it has reduced global sea transport costs hugely, driving the economic processes of “globalisation” more than any other technological factor. The USA did not start to develop its...

“The only true prophets are those who carve out the future they announce.” James Connolly Ted Grant defined Marxism, in my hearing, as the “science of prediction”. Grant made many “Marxist” predictions, about the Stalinist states, the, so-to-speak, predetermined evolution of the Labour Party and many other things. He got almost everything spectacularly wrong. The only prediction of his that came true was his often-repeated assertion that he would outlive all his contemporaries, all his one-time comrades, all his once-upon-a-time political rivals. He did. He was 93 when he died on July 20 2006...

It is over twenty years since the final collapse of the left-wing Liverpool Labour council of 1983-6. Through that council, the avowedly Marxist “Militant Tendency” had the leadership of a mass workers’ movement which could have shaken or defeated the government. Arguably it marked the highest point ever (so far) of active mass influence for would-be revolutionary Marxists in Britain, higher than anything achieved by the Communist Party when it was a revolutionary party in the 1920s. Yet the battle ended in fiasco. The importance of learning the lessons is as huge as were the opportunities...

May 83 Labour makes gains in elections for one-third of Liverpool City Council’s seats and wins the Council from the Liberals (who have controlled it since 1973). Militant supporters are central in the new council Labour group. November 83 20,000 people join a march to support the Labour council’s demand for the return of grant money withdrawn over the years by the Tory government. 29 March 84 Budget day for the council. Despite a one day strike by council workers and a big demonstration at the Town Hall, Labour’s ‘unbalanced’ no-cuts budaet is defeated by three Labour right-wingers voting...

Martin Thomas reviews In the Belly of the Green Bird: The Triumph of the Martyrs in Iraq, by Nir Rosen. Right from summer 2003, according to Nir Rosen’s new book, politics in post-invasion Iraq was dominated by Islamists who defined their enemy, more or less interchangeably, as America, “the Jews”, secularism, Israel, “the Masons”, or “Zionism”. In Iraq, with a long-subdued Shia Muslim majority and a long-dominant Sunni Muslim Arab minority, political Islam could hardly avoid also being sectarian, a matter of Islamist fighting Islamist as well as Islamist fighting infidel. Rosen’s book shows...

Bruce Robinson reviews Circular Breathing: The cultural politics of Jazz in Britain by George McKay. As it has spread from its American roots, jazz has been assimilated by many national cultures round the world. Circular Breathing deals with two aspects of the way this happened in Britain. The first is the importance of British jazz’s relationship to the left and a range of political movements such as CND and the anti-racist and women’s movements. So, for example, the adoption by CND of New Orleans-style marching bands in the Aldermaston marches of the late ’50s helped spark the “trad boom”...