Solidarity 123, 6 December 2007

Review of Imaginary futures — from thinking machines to the global village by Richard Barbrook, Pluto Press, 2007. This book is a history of the future, the history of an ideology, which, over the last 60 years, has sought to colonise our conceptions of the way the world is going. The book starts in 2005 with Richard Barbrook returning to the scene of the New York World’s Fair, which he had first visited as a seven year old in 1964. Some of the original exhibition remains and he is struck that “for decades, the shape of things to come has remained the same. The hi-tech utopia is just around...

A key factor in trashing the possibility of a united public-sector fightback this year against Gordon Brown’s 2% limit has been the decision by the civil service union PCS, although it already had a live ballot mandate for action, to withdraw into prolonged “consultations” of its membership while the POA and CWU strikes and the Unison health and local government ballots came and went. Having “consulted” and announced that PCS members supported further national strike action, the PCS leadership then... decided to call off any further national action, at least for the time being. The main force...

Open Letter to an SWP Student Dear Comrade, If different sections of the left can work together to defend NUS democracy, why can't we work together to present a united challenge to those who are attacking democracy in the elections at the next NUS conference? That was a question that members of Workers’ Liberty were among the many people asking SWP and Respect students at the NUS Extraordinary Conference on 4 December. The response was universally positive — with a crucial exception. In the first left/pro-democracy caucus held that day, NUS executive and SWP national committee member Rob Owen...

On 29 November Edinburgh City Council’s SNP/Lib-Dem coalition administration announced plans to axe a thousand jobs. The announcement was e-mailed to staff even before the City Council unions had been informed. Seven areas have been targeted for cutbacks, but home care services and home-helps are to bear the brunt. Other areas targeted by the Council include administration, call-centres, procurement, trading standards, and strategy. Given that a large number of the posts are part-time — the one thousand posts translate into 882 full-time equivalents — and also involve a high proportion of...

“United Russia” (UR) — the political party which backs Russia’s President, Vladimir Putin — won an easy victory in the elections held on 1 December for the Duma (the lower chamber of the Russian parliament). At the time of writing, early results indicate that UR won 63% of votes cast. The pro-Kremlin and ultra-nationalist Liberal Democratic Party of Russia picked up nearly 10% of the votes, and the equally pro-Kremlin “Just Russia” party scored just over 7%. The only opposition party to win seats in the Duma — the nationalist, conservative and clerical Communist Party — won just over 11% of...

The left-wing website Indymedia seems to have allowed itself to be manipulated by the anti-semitic right again. A recent report on the site, citing the Iranian-government-sponsored Press TV (for which Yvonne Ridley works) as source, claims that French president Nicolas Sarkozy is a former agent of the Israeli secret police Mossad. The Indymedia posting adds: “This would explain the country’s new alignment with the ‘Neo-Cons’.” So if Sarkozy were a proper French bourgeois politician, he couldn’t be “neo-con” inclined, or friendly to the US administration? Only the secret intrigues of “the...