Solidarity 218, 28 September 2011

Greece: real choice is workers vs bosses

The Greek socialist group Okde has made the following response to the latest developments in the Greek debt crisis. Call a general strike! Overthrow the government! Defy the IMF and EU rules! Don’t pay the debt! The new austerity measures that the Greek government has announced are only the beginning of a new barrage of anti-working-class and anti-social measures that the supposedly socialist Government of PASOK is intended to take in the rest of 2011 and the following years. They are the continuation of the austerity measures taken in previous years, in the name of the Greek debt and...

Nationalise the banks!

By Michel Husson The crisis has taught us a lesson: “neoliberal Europe” was a badly-conceived thing, which has become more and more rickety over the years and appears to be incapable of standing up to the “stress test” of crisis. Right now, there are only two ways out: either everyone is going to take their marbles home and quit; or the whole edifice will have to be rebuilt, from top to bottom. But sticking plasters are being stuck over sticking plasters. How things turn out in Greece will serve as a barometer for this whole stop-starting process: everyone knows that Greece won’t be able to...

Ken Loach: Calls to action

Tim Thomas completes his series of articles inspired by the BFI’s Ken Loach retrospective. Ken Loach is a committed film-maker with 50 years experience of the film business and a prodigious output amounting to nearly a film a year over that period. He is a progressive influence and has struggled hard against TV and film censorship. He demands politics be taken seriously and he invites argument. That is why his turn to Respect has to be challenged because it didn’t just contribute to the demise of the Socialist Alliance, it indicated an adventure. He has also expressed support for the free...

Victor Serge: a life in revolution

Victor Serge lived an exemplary life as a revolutionary and was a witness to some of the most significant moments of that century of defeat and crimes against the working class. Particularly significant was his documentation in both his fiction and in his journalism of the ‘midnight in the century’ of the Stalinist purges And what a curriculum vitae! Born in Belgium to revolutionary Russian émigré parents Serge quickly joined the ranks of the anarcho-syndicalist movement and was jailed for his participation in the terrorist activities of the Bonnot gang. On his release he participated in the...

A widdershins writer

By Daisy Thomas You know the books that draw you in and won’t let you leave until you’ve read every page? I had that feeling with Mike Carey’s Felix Castor series. The series mixes detective work with a science-fiction twist. The “detective”, Castor, is a professional exorcist, operating in an early 21st century London where ghosts, zombies and loup-garous (were-kin) are becoming numerous and active. Carey seems to have modelled aspects of Castor upon himself. Like Carey in real life, Castor in the books hails from working-class Liverpool. Castor was a teenager there in the 1980s (Carey in the...

Come All You Coal Miners

This song was composed by Sarah Ogan Gunning. Sarah was born in 1910 in Bell County Kentucky. One of fifteen children she was the daughter of a coal miner who was a keen trade unionist. In 1925 Sarah married Andrew Ogan. Andrew was a member of the (short-lived) Communist Party-led National Miners Union. Unemployment hit the mining community of Kentucky and many migrated — the Ogans end up in the slums of lower East Side, New York City in around 1935. Sarah later married Joseph Gunning, a skilled metal polisher and migrated once again to Detroit in the early 1940s. It was while she was in New...

Why we defend bourgeois democracy

The democracy that exists in Britain today was not handed down from above; it was won by centuries of struggle. Marxists insist that this democracy is profoundly limited. We call it “bourgeois democracy”, by which we mean elements of popular self-rule intertwined with and limited by the domination of the distinct minority that owns the means of production. Why do we defend this democracy against attempts to replace it with military or dictatorial rule? What is it we value in bourgeois democracy? The refusal of some on the left to acknowledge the difference between, for instance, Qaddafi’s...

Save jobs and services, not bankers' wealth

Samuel Brittan, a conservative columnist in the Financial Times, argued on 24 September that the crisis demands “a Treasury directive to [state-owned] banks to replace profit maximisation with a requirement to promote economic recovery”. The labour movement should demand that all the banks and high finance are expropriated and put under democratic control with a priority of saving and improving services and jobs, not maximum loot for bosses and shareholders. Neo-liberalism, and capitalism itself, are signalling their delirious inhumanity and infirmity. “Global economy pushed to brink”...

Children: no more threats and punishments

By Jayne Edwards I am a midday assistant at a primary school. The observations I have made in my job have confirmed what I think about how children are treated by all those who have authority over them — teachers, teaching assistants and the midday staff. Control of children is maintained by the threat of something bad happening to them — get sent to the head, call in parents, low scale public humiliation or just shouting to reduce them to tears. Even “good” teachers demand this kind of conformity. Children who are considered bad or naughty are always in trouble and it is these same ones how...

AWL debates the crisis

“Global economy pushed to brink” read the front-page headline of the Financial Times as the AWL’s national committee met on 24 September to discuss amendments and redrafts of the main documents up for debate at AWL annual conference on 22-23 October. We decided that the conference agenda should be geared around the challenges posed by a very-possible new capitalist crash, and an almost-certain extended capitalist depression. The rest of the left — from the mainstream Ed Miliband and Ed Balls, through the left union leaders, right to groups like SWP and SP — have been timid on the economic...

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