Solidarity 131, 24 April 2008

The new film Three and Out is a comedy about a London Underground driver who suffers two “one unders” — people throwing themselves under his train — and then deliberately goes for a third in order to get a pay off. Here a Workers’ Liberty member who drives trains on the mainline and was previously a Tube driver, and experienced a “one under” himself, responds. In 2001, when the woman threw herself under my train, I had no warning it was going to happen. She threw herself on the tracks, then changed her mind and tried to climb up, but couldn’t. She didn’t die, but was smashed up pretty badly...

Review of two new books The Saladin Murders and the Bethlehem Murders by Matt Rees . In the last ten years detective fiction fans have been introduced to sleuths from South America, various bits of Asia, Africa and all over Europe. Generally this globalisation has improved my life. But the authors of noir and detective fiction don’t often do politics. And if they do, they might mess it up (e.g. Henning Mankell spoils his Kurt Wallender books when he begins to believe he understands how the world works). Omar Yussef from Bethlehem ticks the right boxes: ex-alcoholic, grumpy, etc. Yussef is not...

Continuing a series on the history of the blues By the beginning of the 1960s, genres influenced by African American music such as rock and roll and soul were part of mainstream popular music. White performers had brought African-American music to new audiences, both within the US and abroad. In the UK, bands emulated US blues legends, and UK blues-rock-based bands had an influential role throughout the 1960s. Blues performers such as John Lee Hooker and Muddy Waters continued to perform to enthusiastic audiences, inspiring new artists steeped in traditional blues, such as New York-born Taj...

Whilst the participation of Rifondazione Comunista and other parties of the “radical left” in the Prodi government of 2006-08 was clearly a serious mistake and has been belatedly acknowledged as such by Bertinotti himself (see il Manifesto, 6 April 2008), Hugh Edwards is wrong to concentrate his fire on Bertinotti and the PRC (Solidarity 3-130). Whatever its many faults, the Rainbow Left is clearly part of the workers’ movement, standing on a platform that wants to get rid of all types of agency work, link wages and pensions to inflation, enhance employment protection in small enterprises...

Solidarity’s current debate about the future of the nuclear industry appears to be an argument at cross purposes. Martin Thomas, Les Hearn and others have argued that nuclear is not as dangerous or as lethal as some other energy sources like coal. If only we had a planned economy under workers’ control without a £70 billion Trident replacement project in the pipeline, then nuclear would be a good idea. I think its useful to look again at Marx’s metaphor of the “metabolic rift”. As the grandfather of historical materialism, Marx not only developed a radically practical philosophical worldview...

In August 1994 the Provisional IRA declared a ceasefire in its “Long War”, which by then had lasted 24 years (interspersed with some previous, temporary ceasefires). The 1994 ceasefire was interrupted by a partial return to bombing between February 1996 and July 1997, but eventually the ceasefire proved permanent. The Provisionals entered negotiations. Today former IRA members sit in a Belfast coalition government with Ian Paisley's Democratic Unionist Party. The Provisionals have abandoned their previous goal of forcing a united Ireland by military struggle, and instead gone for mainstream...

The London Democratic Association advocated the overthrow of the English ruling classes by means of revolution. They rejected outright any limiting of the Chartist movement to pacifist — or “moral force” — principles. The LDA Objects declared: “We frankly state, that we consider the everlasting preaching of “moral force”, as opposed to “physical force” to be downright humbug; for ourselves we shall be well understood in saying, that we are prepared to adopt all just means within our power for achieving the salvation of our country, so far as we can affect that object. We are resolved to be no...

On 23 April, the Guardian published a letter from the three Tower Hamlets Respect councillors linked to the SWP, Oliur Rahman, Rania Khan and Lufta Begum, which denounces the “extremist” views of Islamist organisations like al-Muhajiroun, calls on the government to “stop” them and requests a meeting with Tower Hamlets police to discuss the issue. (See www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2008/apr/23/uksecurity.bbc ) On one level, it is quite encouraging to hear left-wing Muslim activists display such stark hostility to Islamic derived fascism. Like socialists in Muslim-majority countries from Indonesia to...

Christian Picquet, former editor of the Ligue Communiste Révolutionnaire paper Rouge, will no longer be able to hold on to his full-time post in the LCR office after the poor level of support won by his tendency at their recent conference. Picquet is the leading figure in the Unir (meaning “unite”) tendency in the LCR which calls for the unity of the entire “anti-neo-liberal” left on the model of Germany’s Die Linke and is thus very critical of the LCR’s current “new anti-capitalist party” project as too left-wing. At the LCR congress in late January Picquet was a leading advocate of the...

In a magnificent display of working-class solidarity, dockworkers in Durban, South Africa, refused to unload 77 tonnes of Chinese weapons bound for Zimbabwe. The An Yue Jiang left China just days after polls closed in Zimbabwe’s presidential elections with a cargo of three million rounds of AK-47 ammunition, 1500 rocket-propelled grenades and more than 3000 mortar rounds. Chinese officials claim the cargo is “perfectly normal trade” — true enough as each year China exports more than $1 billion dollars of weapons in exchange for cash, raw materials and influence. The Stalinist bureaucracy...