Anti-Fascism

Dave Morris and Helen Steel, aka the McLibel 2, won another round in their battle against the McDonald’s burger chain at the European Court on Tuesday 15 February. Helen and Dave fought a 313-day court battle against McDonald’s to defend themselves against a libel charge brought by the multinational. The pair – low-waged working class people – had distributed a London Greenpeace leaflet in 1990 titled ‘What’s Wrong with McDonald’s?’. The leaflet accused McDonald’s of exploiting children, paying poverty wages and destroying the rainforest. McDonald’s responded by dragging them to court in an...

In January the International Climate Change Taskforce Report concluded that drastic action was necessary to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and stave off immensely damaging and irreversible climate change. On 16 February the Kyoto Protocol on limiting emissions came into operation. We asked environmental campaigners for their evaluations and for their thoughts on alternative energy sources and use. Less spin please Dr Spencer Fitzgibbons, Green Party spokesperson on Climate Change We keep seeing official reports predicting disaster on climate change, but governments simply go on increasing...

By Martin Thomas The world has the technology to slow global warming. Because of entrenched capitalist interests, that technology is used only minimally. The capitalist drive for profit means using the cheapest energy sources on the market now, pushing sales of “gas-guzzling” vehicles, and taking freight on road rather than rail, without regard for the long-term consequences. Capitalist governments can impose regulations on individual corporations in the interests of capital as a whole. But they do it slowly and hesitantly when the regulation conflicts with such huge interests as the big oil...

I’m convinced by Paul Hampton’s argument about the ineffectiveness of Fairtrade as a way to tackle sweatshops (Solidarity, 3/64). I also find the Fairtrade approach distasteful: it emphasises what is different between people in the developed world and people in the third world over what we have in common. From our end, it sounds like “what can I, who have so much (including a fearful chocolate addiction), do for you, who have so little (no shoes on your feet, no roof over your head, and dirty, illiterate children)?” And in doing that it gives a fundamentally false picture of most people’s...

The Group of Eight (G8) is an alliance of the governments of the world’s richest seven industrialised countries PLUS RUSSIA, and IS DUE TO meet on 6–8 July at Gleneagles in Scotland. Paul Hampton explains why it is important to demonstrate against IT The G8 (now France, United States, United Kingdom, Germany, Japan, Italy, Canada and Russia) was founded as the G6 in 1975, and met for the first time as the G8 in Birmingham, England in May 1998. The G8 holds an annual economic and political summit of the heads of state with international officials, and there are numerous other meetings and...

Liam Conway reviews Shopped by Joanna Blythman In the 1960s, about 80% of UK grocery and meat shopping was done at local grocery shops and butchers. Now about 80% of it is done at the four main supermarket chains of Tesco, Sainsbury, ASDA and Morrisons. These four aim to mop up the other 20%. And it’s not just grocery shopping they’re after... ASDA is the biggest clothes retailer, through its George label, in the country. Tesco, the biggest supermarket chain, controls 12.5% of all UK retailing. Its chief executive, the £3 million-a-year Terry Leahy, says “that leaves 87.5 per cent to go after”...

Sacha Ismail reviews The Manchurian candidate In the famous 1960s film of the same name, American soldiers in the Korean war are brainwashed by Chinese Stalinists to carry out assassinations as part of a power struggle with witch-hunting US McCarthyites. A sophisticated satire on the totalitarian symbiosis between the two Cold War camps? Well, as I haven’t actually seen it, I can’t say. In the remake, Denzel Washington plays a grizzled Gulf War veteran whose memories of the night his platoon only just survived an Iraqi attack seem increasingly contradictory and unreal. When he is plagued by...

Philip Havering reviews Anti-capitalism: where now? Edited by Hannah Dee. Bookmarks, 2004, £6 In his keynote chapter in this book, published by the SWP, Alex Callinicos describes the political differentiation that he sees in the global justice movement. He dates it from the Genoa demonstration of 2001 and, especially, 9/11 and Bush’s war on terror. Three “parties” have emerged: a reformist right associated with ATTAC France; a radical left (Rifondazione in Italy, the LCR in France and the SWP in Britain); and the autonomists. For years the SWP has played along with the leading reformist...

Under the banner of “Corporate Social Responsibility” the big companies and transnationals claim to have changed their ways. BP is now green. Nike promises transparency. Gap spends a packet on rebranding itself as a company that cares about the people who stitch its clothes. They’ve all been green-washed. Everyone is ethical. But all that has happened is that big business — under pressure from campaigners and media scandals — have taken up the demands for Corporate Codes of Conduct and are using ethical-sounding PR as a weapon to fend off scrutiny. Sadly some activists have been taken in by...