Solidarity 165, 7 January 2010

Against both Islamists and empire

The following (abridged) article by Farooq Tariq from the Labour Party Pakistan was first published on the International Viewpoint website on 28 October 2009. The conditions he describes — daily suicide bombings by supporters and allies of the Taliban in Pakistan — have worsened. On 1 January a bomb killed 75 people at a volleyball game in North-West Frontier Province. You can read it in its original form on the LPP website here . What do to about religious fundamentalism? Once again Pakistan has become the focus of world attention. Every day there is news of the latest suicide attack or...

Frank Henderson, 1925-2009

“It is not easy to persist in the struggle, to hold on, to stay tough and fight it out year after year without victory; and even, in times such as the present, without tangible progress. That requires theoretical conviction and historical perspective as well as character. And, in addition to that, it requires association with others in a common party” — James P. Cannon, Trade Unionists and Revolutionists, 1953. I cannot precisely remember when I first met Frank Henderson, but it must have been in 1974 when I was a student member of the International Socialists (IS, was a forerunner of today’s...

Materialism vs creationism

Bruce Robinson reviews A Critique of Intelligent Design: Materialism versus Creationism from Antiquity to the Present by John Bellamy Foster, Brett Clark, and Richard York, Monthly Review Press. 150 years after Darwin’s Origin of Species, religious opponents of the theory of evolution are attempting to gather forces around the idea of “Intelligent Design”, the very old idea that nature and humanity are the products of some form of divine creation and purpose. Claiming that Darwinism is just one (incorrect) theory among many, its proponents are fighting battles in the US and to a lesser extent...

"Workers are the power and strength we need"

Vestas occupier and activist Ian Terry who was in Copenhagen to speak at the Klimaforum and take part in Workers’ Climate Action activity against Vestas, spoke to Dan Rawnsley. You spoke in the Klimaforum on left alternatives to capitalism. How do you feel the meeting went? There seemed to be a lot more interesting conversations coming from the floor than the panel. It is good that a lot of people from different backgrounds and from all over the world were coming together and recognising that the climate issue is a left issue. But it felt like there was an absence of the Danish left. You were...

Climate activists challenge Vestas in Copenhagen

Workers Climate Action activists at the Copenhagen climate summit (7-18 December) marched in to the entrance hall of the 18th-century Odd Fellow palace, where the multinational wind turbine manufacturer Vestas was holding a drinks party, with banners and a megaphone. We remained there for around half an hour, chanting slogans and handing out leaflets to partygoers. Eventually Danish police arrived, without any of the event organisers confronting us first, and the protest was forced outside. We continued to use the megaphone to voice our opposition to Vestas’ appalling record on workers rights...

Harrow, 13 December: Far-right flop masks anti-fascist shortcomings

Sixteen AWL members were among 200 anti-fascists who turned out to stop the far-right in Harrow on 13 December. By ourselves we would have outnumbered Stop Islamisation of Europe (SIOE) who staged an anti-Muslim demonstration outside Harrow mosque. Despite boasting that they would mobilise 1,500, extending invitations to other far-right groups, in particular, the English Defence League (EDL), on the day SIOE was exposed as amounting to not much more than one man, Stephen Gash, his website, and his Danish friend Anders Gravers. For on the day, about 15 of them turned up. For two hours, in the...

The Tories made society more unequal - and so have Blair and Brown

The richest 10% own 44% of all wealth in the UK. They own, of course, the great bulk of the shares and other financial assets in private hands; they also, less obviously, own the big majority of the wealth held in pension-fund assets. Quite a lot of people outside the top 10% may own a house. But the top 10% hold about 37% of real-estate wealth, too. Inequality of income has also been rising. Its big jump came in the 1980s, with the Thatcher Tory government. But since 1997 inequality has continued to rise, more slowly, and mostly driven by runaway rises for the very well-off. New figures from...

RMT decides not to back "son of No2EU"

Prospects for the "son of No2EU" coalition for the coming general election look poor. The Executive of the RMT rail union has adopted a policy on the General Election that does not include backing the coalition. The groups which took part in the "No2EU" coalition for the Euro-elections of June 2009 - the Communist Party of Britain (Morning Star), the Socialist Party, and the Alliance for Green Socialism - have been meeting since then to try to agree on a new coalition for the general election. RMT rail union general secretary Bob Crow has been taking part in the talks, but not the RMT as such...

Ten lessons from Copenhagen

The Copenhagen climate talks were an utter failure. But what lessons do Marxists argue climate campaigners should draw from this experience? 1) Sober up on global geopolitics. Globalisation and neoliberalism live on – but at the behest of national states and their capitalist governments. Capitalist rivalry - the new imperialism between the existing US hegemon and the emerging challenger China - shaped the failure of these talks. The rest of the states are dancing to tune of one or other of these colossuses. The divide is not primarily between rich and poor countries – rather the real divide is...

Iraq: "There is a political system which is a reality... but very crisis-stricken"

Muayad Ahmed, a leading member of the Worker-communist Party of Iraq, spoke to Solidarity in November, while the Worker-communist Party was still planning to contest the election. There was a lot of pressure for "open lists", so that the names of the candidates are known to the people. That has been agreed on: open lists. And voters can now do their own lists when they tick this person from one list and that person from another list. The electoral law decided that representatives will be elected on a local level, rather than the whole of Iraq being one constituency. The problem with this is...

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