Solidarity 337, 24 September 2014

Over 300,000 marched in New York on Sunday 21 September, as the UN Climate Summit met there. About 40,000 people marched in London, and other marches took place in cities across the world. After the march some protestors moved onto Wall Street with the #floodwallstreet action. Highlighting the danger of raising sea levels, protestors covered the area with blue dye to symbolise water. Police arrested more than 100 protestors in Wall Street, and injured many.

There are some promising policies such as a rise in the minimum wage to £8, the scrapping of zero-hour contracts, repeal of the Social and Health care bill, reversal of the 50p tax cut, repeal of the bedroom tax and exclusion of the NHS from the EU-US trade agreement. However, I would not exactly call these policies progressive. Yes they will hopefully improve the lives of those on low incomes, but they will do little to bring about real social change. Or enable those from all sections of society to enter into positions that have for so long been dominated by the upper classes, particularly...

It was advertised in the Labour Party conference fringe guide as an NUT (National Union of Teachers) meeting with Tristram Hunt, the Labour shadow minister for education, but turned out to be something different and more interesting. It started earlier than advertised in the guide. When I got there, the room was already full, with maybe 100 people. NUT deputy general secretary Kevin Courtney was there, but it was not an NUT meeting. It was an hoc event organised by an individual activist, Emma Hardy-Mattinson. And Hunt was not scheduled there. Hardy-Mattinson is a right-winger in NUT terms...

Until reading Guy Standing’s book A Precariat Charter I had not come across the term “precariat” although I understand that it has been in circulation for some time, as early as the 1950s. So what is it? According to Standing, the precariat is “an emerging class characterised by chronic insecurity, detached from old norms of labour and the working class”. The precariat has few of the democratic rights associated with citizens and are, in fact, denizens — another word that had me reaching for the dictionary. A denizen is an outsider, someone who is frequently denied many of the political rights...

The IS (“Islamic State” movement), originally ISIS (Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant), has now eclipsed Al-Qaeda in ferocity and publicity. How? ISIS has been written off as a product of Western and Syrian intelligence agencies managing to pull together a number of disenfranchised senior military figures who have had expert training. Much of that narrative just isn’t true. The most important figure in the rise of ISIS died five years before it came into being. Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. who would lead the proto-ISIS group until he was killed by a US airstrike in 2006, travelled as young...

The revolutionary socialist newspaper Workers’ Dreadnought (1914-24) published this poem on its front page, heading an article entitled “Soldiers ask what they are fighting for” on 20 October 1917. Britain was over three years into a war which its rulers had initially told their citizens would be “over by Christmas”. By this time, many, many families had lost loved ones, and poverty and hardship were biting at home. Belligerent governments were casually dismissing peace efforts, and it was not even clear what they aimed to achieve or under what conditions they might agree to end the war...

A hundred and fifty years ago, on 28 September 1864, the working-class movement took a huge step forward with the founding of the International Working Men’s Association. A meeting at the St Martin’s Hall in London brought together radical and socialist delegates from around Europe, to set up the organisation which would become known as “The First International”. In 1848, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels ended their Communist Manifesto with the famous and ringing declaration: “Proletarians of all countries, Unite!” But in many ways, their theoretical elaboration of an international proletarian...

In an otherwise excellent piece on the TUC’s passing of an idiotic resolution on Ukraine, Dale Street writes that “for the first time since the Second World War the territory of a European country has been seized by that of a neighbouring big power.” That doesn’t sound right — and it isn’t. In fact there have been several occasions since 1945 when European countries have been the victims of aggression by neighbouring big powers. There was the Turkish invasion of Cyprus 40 years resulting in a division of the country and an occupation of its northern part that continues until the present day...

The following is an extract from an interview by the Russian Socialist Movement with Dmitry Kozhnev, a former engineer and trade union activist in Kaluga (Russia) and member of the Workers’ Platform of the RSM. The conditions under which trade union activity takes place (in Russia) have changed in recent months. Anybody who wants to now tries to cover up their dirty little games with “patriotic” rhetoric. Accusing everyone who is dissatisfied and opposed to the current state of affairs of being supporters of the Maidan [Ukrainian protest movement of 2013/2014] and of Banderism [right-wing...

See also the response here Scotland is not settled. The whole British political system has been unsettled. The majority on 18 September against separation — 55 to 45 per cent — was bigger than expected, and Solidarity is glad the vote went that way. We said “reduce borders, not raise them”. But the Scottish National Party reports an influx of 10,000 new members. There is a storm on Twitter with the #45 hashtag, with which the 18 September percentage for separation spookily link their cause to the feudal-reactionary revolt of 1745, which started in Scotland. The frantic promises of further...