Solidarity 191, 2 February 2011

X Factor toxins

Daniel Randall ( Solidarity 3-190) says he doesn’t want to get snobbish about the fact that people like watching the X Factor. Fair enough. Except socialists should not abandon critical judgement in an effort to be laid back and non-judgemental. The X Factor, and most shows like it, really are toxic viewing. The drum ‘n’ bass producer Goldie, interviewed in the Observer on 30 January 2011, could not have put it better: “Think about the people who aren’t making it on there [i.e. on the X Factor]. Think about how dysfunctional they feel, how failed they feel, a panel of people going: ‘Sorry you...

Why do floods happen?

Why do floods happen? And why so fast rising? In Queensland, it had rained fairly continuously for a long time before the floods suddenly arrived. Their depth, some 5m in Brisbane, was also far greater than the depth of the rainfall. Are the recent floods in Australia, Brazil, Sri Lanka and Pakistan, the forest fires in Russia and so on, symptoms of CO2-induced global warming and climate change? I don’t know, and neither does anyone else. The science of climate is an inexact one, being better with long-term general predictions than short-term ones relating to quite small areas of the Earth. It...

Workers film and video

“Workers Film and Video” is a new website which aims to bring together into a single site links to footage of key events in working-class history. Material already accessible through the site, which was set up only earlier this year, includes both historical material, such as the 1905 Russian Revolution and the German Spartakist Uprising in 1919, and also more contemporary material, such as last year’s workers’ protests in Egypt. Not all of the footage to which is the site links is unedited footage of events. The site also links to debates and documentaries about topics such as the French...

Private Peaceful

Stephanie Ann Cooper (age 10 years) went to see Private Peaceful at the Greenwich Theatre (now on tour). This is a story about a boy called Tommo Peaceful. It’s about the First World War and about how young working-class men in Britain were taken for granted by their bosses and expected to kill young German working-class men. All these people were innocent, it was not their war. Tommo is the only person in the play. There are lots of characters whom Tommo acts out while in a prison cell waiting to meet the firing squad who are going to kill him the next morning. The firing squad is not the...

Egypt: what the left is saying

Socialist Worker ’s coverage of the Egyptian uprising is useful because their comrade, Judith Orr, is on the ground and thus able to paint a vivid and often moving picture of the burgeoning movement. It also contains some extremely important factual nuggets, like the report from Monday 31 January that “three factories are now on indefinite strike until Mubarak falls. One is a steel mill that produces 70 percent of Egypt’s steel... Also news that workers in two Cairo factories, one textile company another a printing press, have dismissed their bosses.” However, Orr’s reporting lacks any...

Egypt: support democratic revolution and workers' freedom

As Solidarity went to press on 1 February, Hosni Mubarak, dictator of Egypt since 1981, declared that he would not stand in the country’s presidential election in September, and would work until then for an orderly transition. His rule had been fatally damaged since the Egyptian army, on 31 January, declared that it would not use force against the demonstrators on Egypt’s streets, and even that it recognised the demonstrators’ demands as “legitimate”. The main demand of the demonstrators had been that Mubarak should go. He probably will not make it to September. The blows of the world economic...

The Guardian goes "ultra-left"

“Revealed: how Palestinian leaders gave up on refugees”. There were no two readings which either the quick-glance or the pause-and-reflect-on-it reader could make of the front page headline on 25 January. Or of the smaller bullet-point straplines: “Papers show PLO accepted just 10,000 to return”. “Rice suggested resettlement in Latin America”. “Negotiations accepted Israel as ‘Jewish state’.” This was all presented as “revelations” from leaked Palestinian documents, but, as John Strawson pointed out in a letter to the paper the following day, none of the information was new. Which paper was...

The militant working-class suffragist

“Women do not want their political power to enable them to boast that they are on equal terms with the men. They want to use it for the same purpose as men – to get better conditions. Every woman in England is longing for her political freedom in order to make the lot of the worker pleasanter and to bring about reforms which are wanted. We do not want it as a mere plaything…” (Selina Cooper, Wigan Observer 1906) A millworker from the age of 12, and daughter of a navvy, Selina Cooper (née Coombe) was born into a big working class family in 1864. She was a trade unionist, suffragist and...

Southern Sudan: starting to build social movements

In the first complete results of a referendum, 99% of South Sudanese have voted to secede from the north. Tim Flatman recently spent three months in South Sudan and continues a series of articles on the future of a new country, set to become independent in July. Jobs, working rights, public services and control of resources are the current demands of southerners. They are important not only in themselves, not only because they impact on the environment in which social movements operate, but also because they are a precondition for further political organisation. And implementing separation...

Italian car workers strike agianst Fiat bosses' attacks and austerity

Tens of thousands of Italian workers in the metalworkers Fiom-Cgil union and the USB union took part in a nationwide strike on Friday 28 January. The strike was in protest at the attempts by Fiat car company in Turin to implement draconian work conditions and reflected the fear that this could spread to other car manufacturers. Fiat’s conditions will mean intensification of the workload, reduction of rest and mealtimes and a severe curtailment of rights to sickness benefits. Fiom, which represents the largest component of metalworkers at Fiat, is now deprived of its right to represent its...

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