Solidarity 331, 16 July 2014

A coalition of students and organisations has come together to call a national demonstration for free education on 19 November in central London. Members from NCAFC, the Young Greens, SWP and The Student Assembly are organising under the banner ‘Free Education: no cuts, no fees, no debt’. The plan already has the backing of various sections of NUS. One of the aims of the demo is to spark further action against the government’s agenda of privatisation and fees, and further combat the idea of universities being treated as businesses. The demonstration follows up on NUS national conference...

The White House has announced plans to spend $3.7 billion deporting 52,000 children to Central America. The majority of these children come over the southern border into Texas from Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador, countries which are rife with drug wars and have been devastated by decades of US intervention. Money is going to be spent on care for the children whilst they await detention and electronic tracking devices (in the form of ankle bracelets), enhanced border control and transport. Obama has even proposed changing current laws to make deportations quicker and easier, by removing...

Patrick Cockburn writes in The Independent (13 July): "Since the capture of Mosul by the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (Isis) on 10 June, Shia women and children have been killed in villages south of Kirkuk, and Shia air force cadets machine-gunned and buried in mass graves near Tikrit." "In Mosul, Shia shrines and mosques have been blown up, and in the nearby Shia Turkoman city of Tal Afar 4,000 houses have been taken over by Isis fighters as 'spoils of war'. Simply to be identified as Shia or a related sect, such as the Alawites, in Sunni rebel-held parts of Iraq and Syria today, has...

Despite promising to defend the town to the last man and the last drop of blood, pro-Russian separatists pulled out of Slaviansk the weekend of 5-6 July. Kramatorsk and some smaller population centres were also abandoned. The separatists regrouped in Donetsk. In an article entitled “We Left Slaviansk in Order to Return to Kiev”, Igor Druz (adviser to the self-styled “Minister of Defence of the Donetsk People’s Republic”) explained: “What would have happened if the Russian army had decided to defend Moscow to the end in 1812, or Kiev in 1941? Paris would not have been captured. And nor would...

Dan Gallin is a life-long union official so his memoirs might not seem an obviously thrilling read for revolutionary socialists. But his career has been about as different from the standard dull trajectory of union officialdom as one could imagine. Gallin has been a stateless exile, a member of the heterodox Trotskyist movement of Max Shachtman and Hal Draper, and was expelled from the United States for subversive activities. Rising through the ranks of the International Union of Food workers, he clashed with CIA infiltrators and Soviet bloc bureaucrats, and succeeded in turning the IUF into...

On 7 July, I attended a meeting at the House of Commons, hosted by Jeremy Corbyn MP, about honour killings in Iraqi Kurdistan. The meeting was called by the Kurdish and Middle Eastern Women’s Organisation (KMEWO). Before this meeting, I have to say that I knew very little about the plight of some of the women in the region. The statistics and stories I heard have inspired me to take action on this issue and to ask others to do the same. Women worldwide suffer structural and systematic oppression at the hands of men. We are beaten, raped, burned and killed by spouses, partners, family members...

Ben Hillier, editor of the Australian socialist paper Red Flag, has written a reasoned and balanced article discussing the extent to which neo-liberalism has wormed its way into our daily lives and our thinking as well as into evil government policies (Red Flag, October 2013). Socialist Worker increasingly tells us week after week that people everywhere are "angry", that the ruling classes are losing their grip, and that mobilisations are "brilliant". Against that "one more heave" school of socialist thinking, Hillier makes a strong case for sobriety. He does it without lapsing into defeatism...

Geopolitical Economy: After US Hegemony, Globalisation and Empire by Radhika Desai is a wretched apology for some of the worst regimes on the planet, dressed up as critique of political economy. It demonstrates how the language and words of the classical Marxist tradition can be absconded and transformed into a world view subservient to the ruling classes of certain powerful, and ultimately imperialist or sub-imperialist states. Desai takes the idea of uneven and combined development (U&CD), which she attributes to the Bolsheviks rather than specifically Trotsky, and turns it into a means of...

According to a report by the an independent government advisory committee, non-British born migrants face a high level of exploitation while policies designed to offer workers some minimal protection are only weakly enforced. The Migration Advisory Committee report The growth of EU and non-EU labour in low-skilled jobs and its impact on the UK published last week looks at the 13 million jobs in the UK that are classified as low skilled (requiring little or no training) which comprise about 45% of UK jobs. 2 million are held by immigrants, half of these are recent migrants mainly from Eastern...

Firefighters in England and Wales began strike action on eight consecutive days this week, in an increasingly acrimonious and protracted battle over pensions. The Fire Brigades Union (FBU) has organised strikes from 6 until 8 in the morning and 5 and 7 in the evening from Monday to Thursday, and on Monday week. Friday’s strikes are 6-8am and then 11pm-1am. On Saturday the strikes are 11am-1pm and 11pm-1am. On Sunday they are 5-7pm. The union also commences action short of a strike from 7pm on 21 July. The FBU said it called the extended action because the government is merely ploughing ahead...