Solidarity 140, 16 October 2008

(Tune: “What Do You Want to Make Those Eyes at Me For?”) Toiling along in light from morn ‘til night, Wearin’ away your all for the Parasite; Workin’ like a mule with a number two, Puffin’ like a bellow when the day is through; Steering a load of gravel through the muck and slop Packing a hod o’ mustard ‘til you damn near flop; Trying to bust a gut for two twenty-five, Pluggin’ like a sucker ‘til five. Chorus So whadda ya want to break your back for the boss for, When it don't mean life to you? Do you think it right to struggle day and night, And plow like Hell for the Parasite? So whadda ya...

On Sunday 5 October, my son Joe and his dad went to the “Autism and Music” concert at the Savoy Theatre in London. It was promoted by the Autism Research Centre, which is based at Cambridge University and headed up by Professor Simon Baron Cohen. Most people hear about the difficulties associated with autism and Asperger Syndrome, including social and communication problems, and obsessions. But the obsessions can also give rise to particular talents, which apparently cluster around music, art and maths. So the idea of the concert — and of an arts exhibition at the ICA later that week — was to...

Still trying to get your head round “sub-prime”, “structured finance” and “deleveraging”? You could have done worse than Robert Peston’s guide to how the Super Rich Fucked up all Our Lives. Here the basic mechanics of the financial crash were told quite well. Peston was following up his book Who Runs Britain? How the Super Rich are Changing our Lives [review: www.workersliberty.org/node/10214 ]. But he brought us right up to date with how the system which produced a proliferation of junk (and not so junk) financial goods eventually seized up. Peston spent a long time examining the chain which...

Rent-an-SWPer... at a price Crestfallen though the SWP is these days, it still seems to be trying to pull something pretty outrageous in Stoke. According to a Socialist Party comrade posting on the Socialist Unity website (www.socialistunity.com), the Unite Against Fascism campaign which the SWP leads is demanding that the local anti-racist group NORSCARF provide it with £1,800 for “costs” incurred during the run up to the recent anti-BNP demo in Stoke. One of these costs is apparently the involvement of SWP full-timer Bunny La Roche. Having thoroughly pissed off pretty much everyone on the...

On September 28, supporters of the “Islamic Human Rights Commission” — actually an Islamist group with links to Islamic Republic of Iran — marched through London to mark “Al Quds day”. The day of action is supposedly in solidarity with the Palestinians, but in fact was launched by Ayatollah Khomeini in 1979 to strengthen international support for his Islamist counter-revolution. About 300 people took part, similar to last year. Stop The War Coalition (dominated by the SWP) and George Galloway’s Respect sponsored the march, though only one Respect member was bold enough to turn up, and no SWPer...

Before the First World War most socialist groups and many individuals from around the world were grouped together in an organisation called the Second International (set up in 1889). There were many different types of socialist organisation at that time, and often more than one in the larger countries. The most important and the biggest organisation was the German Social Democratic Party. Socialist activity tended to be organised around two different kinds of demands. On the one hand, day to day “bread and butter” reforms for the working class, such as the eight hour day. This was the minimum...

Listening to Sean, it felt like he was living on a different planet... I heard a caricature description of the left. I felt “is he talking to the SWP or is he talking to the CPGB, is he talking to people in this room or is he talking to people in his imagination?” Quite clearly he’s talking to people in his own fertile imagination, because he wasn’t talking to anybody who’s his opponent in this room. We were told in his AWL leaflets that the main question today is Iran arming itself with nuclear weapons and preparing to attack little Israel. Sorry comrades, you’ve got it the wrong way around...

There is a basic thing missing the arguments of the comrades of the AWL... The world is not composed of a flat system of states which are all equal to one another. The... inequality between these states is not purely economic... There is politically constituted exploitation in the modern world. There are systematic hierarchical links between states... the dominance of one state over another state, dependency of one state on another state. There is only one year post-1945 when British troops have not been in action, in counter-insurgency work overseas. Where have British troops been involved in...

I’m the editor of the Weekly Worker... The Weekly Worker does not publish lies... It’s counter-productive to tell lies, especially when you’re engaged in polemics against another organisation. It’s counterproductive to misrepresent them knowingly. Sometimes we make mistakes as all people do but we do not tell lies, not while I’m editor we don’t. When we said on our front page that Sean Matgamna was excusing a nuclear attack on Iran, that was our understanding of it... He said that faced with the Tehran lunatics — if I may be allowed to paraphrase — Israel’s got the right to self-defence...

Irene Bruegel, a founder of Jews for Justice for Palestinians, died on 6 October, at the age of 62, as the result of a liver disease. We in AWL knew her mainly through our various efforts to construct a “two states” pole for solidarity with the Palestinians since 2000, when events in Israel-Palestine started spiralling into mutual reinforcement of Hamas and the Israeli right. As we have seen from the changing pattern of the responses of passers-by at our many protests outside the Israeli embassy over those years, that grim spiral has driven many people in Britain into concluding that the whole...