Solidarity 460, 31 January 2018

On Monday 29 January, many women took off their scarves in many parts of Iran, especially in Tehran, put it on a stick, and got on boxes and waved it around, like the woman from the iconic picture from early in the movement. The action is referred to as “the girl from Revolution Street”. That is where the first woman did this action — on top of an electricity substation on Revolution Street. People have laid flowers at that substation since then. The pictures of people copying her are being posted on the hashtag “Girl from Revolution Street”. It is a radical act. It is a huge thing to do. The...

By 56 to 44 per cent the delegates at the German SPD’s Extraordinary Party Congress (Sunday 14 January) approved coalition negotiations for a new “Grand Coalition” (GroKo). But this will not end the crisis of social democracy: on the contrary. After the Young Socialists (JuSos) and smaller SPD state associations had tried to stop the GroKo, Martin Schulz and the entire SPD party leadership had to go in with all guns blazing to win delegates to give special permission for coalition negotiations with the right-wing CDU and CSU parties. Always the same message: the results of consultation might...

At the end of January, the world’s elite met in the exclusive Swiss ski resort of Davos to discuss how to maintain and improve their position in the economy. Both the setting and the speeches were utopian, as the politicians and bankers professed the virtues of neoliberalism. While millions were spent on round-the-clock security and caviar, we were told of the dangers of largesse spending by the state and the need to slash public services. Life is tough at the top. There is growing discontent with capitalism around the world and it is being expressed in several different ways. It has...

Anti-capitalist and feminist writer Ursula K. Le Guin passed away on 22 January, aged 88. Le Guin primarily wrote science fiction and fantasy but, not wishing to be discussed in narrowly restrictive (and often implicitly depreciative) genre terms, wished simply to be known as an “American novelist.” In books such as The Dispossessed , The Left Hand of Darkness and The Word For World is Forest , Le Guin explored huge political themes: revolution, anarchism, life in a communist society, gender, sexuality, religion, colonialism, environmentalism and more. One of Le Guin’s most valuable...

Turkey’s incursion and bombing campaign in Kurdish controlled area of Afrin is a worrying escalation in a prolonged stand-off on the Syrian border. Erdogan’s hostility to the expanding territory now under the control of Kurdish forces has been held back by the support of both Russia and the US for the Kurdish forces. But as relations have thawed between Turkey and Russia, the dynamic has changed. More than 25,000 pro-Turkish fighters have been drafted into the offensive operation “Olive Branch.” There have already been several villages captured despite Kurdish forces driving some of them back...