Solidarity 357, 18 March 2015

View from Syriza's left

Syriza’s Central Committee met at the end of February to discuss the interim agreement made with European leaders over Greece’s debts. An amendment from the Left Platform characterised the agreement as a retreat from Syriza’s commitment to reverse austerity. This was defeated by a narrow margin, with a number of people from Tsipras’ majority grouping within Syriza supporting the position. Antonis Davanellos, a member of the Internationalist Workers Left (DEA) and a Syriza Central Committee member, wrote this article. (Abridged from a translation first published here ). [Syriza] is a broad...

Release Shilan Ozcelik!

On Friday 12 March, around 50 Kurdish solidarity activists held a demonstration outside Holloway Prison in north London to demand the release of Shilan Ozcelik. Ozcelik was arrested earlier this year at Stansted Airport, and has recently been charged with a terrorist offence for allegedly trying to join the YPJ's women's protection units in Rojava. The YPJ are linked to the Democratic Union Party (PYD) in Syria, an affiliate of the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK). According to the Guardian "...the charges against Ozcelik are understood to relate to the Kurdistan Workers party (PKK), which is...

Defeatism and a deficit of agency

Len Glover's response to my article 'Why I'm not voting Green' ( Solidarity 356) seems to sidestep my argument. I wondered at the time of writing if I was too repetitive in places. Obviously I was not repetitive enough! Yes Len, I agree, Labour's programme is inadequate and lacks inspiration, that's why I explained that we are socialists fighting within Labour for a working class programme. Your letter appears to begin by arguing not against me, but against the Labour front bench, from whom I have already distanced myself when I argued that to socialists, Labour is an arena for our...

Not much of an economic recovery

According to the Tories, pay is now, at last, inching ahead of inflation again. Probably not even that is true, on average. Analysis by the Resolution Foundation found that the median (middling) increase in real pay (pay compared to price inflation) in 2014 was zero, after being negative ever since 2010. The conservative Institute for Fiscal Studies reckons average real income, adjusted for household composition, at £461 in 2014-5 compared to £473 in 2009-10. Official statistics show the net rate of profit for manufacturing companies in late 2013 as the highest since 2002, and for service...

Why the banks should be confiscated

The HSBC scandal rumbles on, and it’s only the latest of many scandals about the big banks to break since 2008. Yet the mainstream debate never considers taking the banks under public ownership and democratic control, and radically transforming them. One or two top bankers caught particularly red-handed may be eased out, with lavish pay-offs and pensions. Some banks are nationalised, and handed to the same sort of managers as before, to be run as before, and privatised as soon as state aid can make them profitable again. That’s all. All the mainstream debates assume that we need banks run...

The “precariat” of the 19th century

The Newport rising of November 1839, when a few thousand men from the south Wales valleys, many of them armed, marched in protest at working-conditions and for the right to vote, was the subject of a recent BBC documentary presented by actor Michael Sheen. Sheen’s brief was to explore the reasons behind political apathy (e.g. very low turnouts in elections) in a place otherwise known for its restlessness and radicalism. Retracing and walking one of the routes taken by the rebels into Newport, Sheen retells the story of the Welsh Chartism which inspired the Rising which ended in violent...

The rise of “Islamic state” in Iraq and Syria

Cockburn’s 160 pages are an introduction to the rapid rise of Islamic State (IS) across Iraq and Syria. Recycling material from articles in the Independent and London Review of Books Cockburn charts how Islamists from various groups came to dominate the Syrian rebellion after 2012 and changed it from one of predominantly secular and democratic opposition to the ultra-conservative. In which Saudi Wahhabism and Saudi and Gulf state funding played a big role. Cockburn argues here, as he has in the past, the invasion of Iraq created a sectarian war between Shia and Sunni. Subsequently a US-backed...

The Socialist Workers' Party and Syriza

On 26 February 500 demonstrators marched in Athens denouncing the Syriza-led government’s deal with the Eurogroup finance ministers and demanding that Greece repudiate its debt and quit the EU. Some of the demonstrators — not on the initiative of the organisers, it seems — smashed up shops, set cars on fire, and threw molotov cocktails. The organisers were Antarsya, the left coalition in Greece in which SEK, by far the most important group outside Britain linked to the SWP here, is a leading force. Antarsya, in coalition with a left-reformist pro-EU-exit group, scored 0.64% in Greece’s January...

The schooling of “Jihadi John”

The revelation that three high-profile Islamist militants, including Mohammed “Jihadi John” Emwazi, attended Quintin Kynaston school in North West London, has prompted Education Secretary, Nicky Morgan to call for an inquiry into the school. The history – which reads like a socialist parable – will be lost on Morgan, but it is worth retelling. Mohammed Emwazi, Choukri Ellekhlifi, and Mohamed Sakr all attended Quintin Kynaston in the early 2000s. 70% of the children at the school were from Muslim background. The head at the time, Jo Shuter, was known as “Blair's favourite head teacher”. Within...

What will unions do in the election?

The big unions are working on a drive to encourage people to register to vote in time for the general election (by 20 April). And in the last quarter of 2014 Unite, Unison, and GMB each gave the Labour Party £1 million for its election campaign. Missing, though, is union activity aimed at raising issues and mobilising workers not only to vote but also to put demands on Labour. The only thing like even Unison's anaemic "Million Voices for Change" campaign of 2010 (formally still going, but only formally) is the "Action for Rail" campaign of the rail unions. One reason is changes in the law. Law...

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