Solidarity 136, 24 July 2008

Dealing with abuse

In Tamar Yarom’s film six young Israeli women talk about their experiences during compulsory military service in the occupied territories. The women describe their roles in the physical and psychological abuse of Palestinians as well as their deliberations over alerting the press to the ritual abuse. The film is an exploration of how these women might face up to and deal with these memories and responsibilities. The title is a line from the functional protagonist — a woman who wants to track down a photo of herself taken beside a dead Palestinian with an erection — “to see if [she’s] smiling”...

Us and them

Is there ever a point to examining the lives of the idle super-rich. Do we really need to know about the hyper-disfunctionality of their family life? Wait a minute — isn’t that the question they usually ask about us plebians? Whatever. Savage Grace looks at the lives of Brooks Baeckelands (heir to a fortune made by his grandfather, the inventor of “bakelite”), wife Barbara and son Tony. Little Tony, who grows up to stab his multiple-abusive mother. Little Tony who was left to take care of his often suicidal mother, because his father ran off with Tony’s girlfriend. Nice. Better I suppose to be...

CWU debate report not accurate

The article "A watershed moment in union politics" in Solidarity 3/135 contained misleading comments about the events at the CWU Conference earlier in the month. Firstly, it made reference to the motion that called for the CWU to campaign to reverse the decision of the 2007 Labour Party Conference in Bournemouth to restrict democracy. This motion did not "fail to reach the floor". It was on the agenda but was not reached due to a prolonged debate on a motion that called for the CWU to disaffiliate from the Labour Party and support a new workers’ party. The motion on the Bournemouth changes...

Socialists and Barack Obama

The following article is by Malik Miah, one of the editors of the US socialist magazine Against the Current. We print it in the interests of debate and to relate to an issue that extends beyond the American left. We invite our readers to write contributions to this discussion. Now that Illinois Senator Barack Obama has become the presumptive Democratic nominee for president, what does it say about US civil society? What stance should progressives and socialists take? When Obama crossed that 2118-delegate threshold with the final primaries in Montana and South Dakota, all African Americans —...

Ideas for Freedom 2008: Traditions and Tasks

“It is the specific duty of the leaders to gain an ever clearer understanding of the theoretical problems, to free themselves more and more from the influence of traditional phrases inherited from the old conception of the world, and constantly to keep in mind that socialism, having become a science, demands the same treatment as every other science — it must be studied.” (Friedrich Engels, The Peasant War in Germany) One hundred and sixty people attended Workers’ Liberty’s annual Ideas for Freedom event on 11-13 July. It was a vibrant and youthful affair. The central theme of the school was...

Review of "Global emergency" by Roy Wilkes

In "Global Emergency: the Battle Against Climate Change", Roy Wilkes, a supporter of the International Socialist Group and with it George Galloway's Respect Renewal project, argues that climate change is a product of the epoch of capitalism and that it is no accident that the commodities which have come to epitomise capital in the modern era, the car and the aeroplane, are based on fossil fuels. He is clear that it is capital’s drive for profit that determines the insatiable demand for fossil fuels as well as the bourgeois disregard for the consequences of capitalist production, which has...

Coal-fired power? No thanks!

The fight to prevent dangerous and runaway climate change means that the energy regime in modern capitalism cannot be a matter of indifference to socialists. The pressure point now is the drive by power generation companies to build a new wave of coal-fired power stations. There are plans for seven new coal-fired power stations in the UK (and many others in Europe), starting with Kingsnorth in Kent. In August environmental campaigners will set up a “Climate Camp” near this site to protest at the programme. Elliott Robinson examines the background. The climate case against new coal stations is...

Radovan Karadzic: The politics of ethnic chauvinism

The capture in Belgrade of Radovan Karadzic, who bears political responsibility for the murder of many thousands of Bosnian Muslim civilians in the mid-1990s, undoubtedly reflects the “turn to the west” of the current Serbian government. He had been living and working in Belgrade, protected by other Serb nationalists. It is good that he has been captured and good that he will be punished. The pity is that the relatives of his victims in Bosnia won’t have the chance to hang this mass murderer! The western governments will not be looking forward to having what happened in Bosnia in the mid-90s...

Are the unions getting tough on Labour?

At the Labour Party National Policy Forum starting on 24 July [2008], the unions want to get a “Warwick 2”, a second version of the list of concessions obtained by them at a Policy Forum in summer 2004, in the run-up to the 2005 general election. The Labour Party’s finances make it very likely that the unions will get something. The Labour Party is in deep debt; businesses and the wealthy have cut their donations, disillusioned by Labour’s repeated financial scandals and the probability that the Tories will form the next government; Gordon Brown has no-one but the unions to bail him out...

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