Solidarity 527, 4 December 2019

A mess on antisemitism

On ITV’s This Morning , 3 December, Jeremy Corbyn finally apologised for antisemitism in the Labour Party, after a week in which he had resisted calls to do so following Orthodox chief rabbi’s Ephraim Mirvis’s statements. Politically, the delay signals uncertainty at best. Worse, in the 26 November interview with Andrew Neil where he first refused to apologise, Corbyn was asked repeatedly whether the phrase “Rothschild Zionists run Israel and world governments”, tweeted by a Labour council candidate in Liverpool, is antisemitic. (Apparently the tweeter remains a candidate, for now, after his...

XR condemns Hallam on Holocaust

Extinction Rebellion bigwig Roger Hallam has been widely condemned, including by much of XR, for comments belittling the significance of the Holocaust. Speaking to German newspaper Die Zeit . Hallam said: “The fact of the matter is, millions of people have been killed in vicious circumstances on a regular basis throughout history… [The Holocaust was] almost a normal event... just another fuckery in human history”. We don’t know Hallam’s motivation or underlying political prejudice here. But to put the Holocaust in the context of other mass killings in history does not require talking about it...

Why we're "paper-sellers"

Over the decades, pretty much every socialist effort of any substance has been organised round, and defined to the broader public by, a newspaper or magazine. The movement’s chrysalis stage, in the 19th century, of secret societies and of attempts to establish utopian model communities in remote areas, was different, but the rule holds since then. It is an oddity of today that there are socialist groups which have no regular publication, the SWP splinter groups Counterfire and RS21 for example. But they are small and not-very-active groups. Today, too, as of old, the “apparatchik” layer in the...

To defeat salafi-jihadism, rebuild hope

Jack Merritt and Saskia Jones were killed by Usman Khan on 30 November on London Bridge in an attack which has been claimed by Al Qaida as its own. About the similar but larger massacre, in Manchester, in the run-up to the 2017 election, we wrote: “Cults of death run through the history of fascism. The Spanish Falangists (part of Franco’s forces) had the slogan Viva la Muerte, Long Live Death. “For the death cult to reach the pitch of suicide attacks on randomly chosen civilians... (world-wide, more often what the Islamists see as the wrong sort of Muslims than non-Muslims) requires a...

Liz Truss and antisemitism

In remarks of 27 November, Trade Secretary Liz Truss described the well-evidenced plans to discuss selling the National Health Service to US health firms as a “conspiracy theory”, which she linked to antisemitism. Her remarks harm the struggle against that bigotry, and show a callous disregard for the real threats faced by Jewish people, including from genuine antisemitic conspiracy theories. Leaked government documents, which the government had tried to keep secret, confirm what Donald Trump and Woody Johnson said publicly in June – that the NHS and drug pricing are on the table in post...

Socialism for us, not for the rich!

A June 2019 speech by Bernie Sanders delivered at George Washington University (and abridged here) on what he means by socialism. With so many crises converging upon us simultaneously, it is easy for us to become overwhelmed or depressed — or to even throw up our hands in resignation. In the year 2019 the United States and the rest of the world face two very different political paths. On one hand, there is a growing movement towards oligarchy and authoritarianism in which a small number of incredibly wealthy and powerful billionaires own and control a significant part of the economy and exert...

The New Deal: starting socialism or saving capitalism?

The above is a cartoon from the US Trotskyist paper Socialist Appeal , 11 July 1939, portrays Roosevelt (“FDR”) making a show of attacking conservative plutocrats (“Tories”). In parts of his speech not reprinted here, Bernie Sanders expands on the idea that his socialism is a continuation and expansion from where the New Deal of Roosevelt, president from 1933 to 1945, left off. Roosevelt himself saw it differently. In 1935 he explained: “I am fighting Communism… I want to save our system, the capitalist system… “To combat crackpot ideas, it may be necessary to throw to the wolves the forty-six...

Slates in the Momentum election

Momentum, the Labour left organisation set up by people from the Jeremy Corbyn leadership campaign in 2015, will be running elections for its National Coordinating Group (NCG) in early 2020. Momentum shut down almost all its internal structures in early 2017, and since then has been pretty much run by electronic communications “trickling down” from its office. It has focused heavily on mobilising people for internal Labour Party elections and the general elections in 2017 and this year, rather than creating space for political debate. However, it still claims 40,000 signed-up members, and some...

Against the school hijab ban demand

See here for wider debate in Solidarity on the ban of the hijab in schools . In his most recent letter defending his demand for a hijab ban in schools, David Pendletone says “I … do not think that you need to have a solution [of how a ban might be enforced] to support a ban of the hijab for children in primary schools”. This is absurd and deeply irresponsible, given the counter-productive and dangerous consequences of many (I would argue all) possible scenarios of enforcement. What it reflects is that this demand seems founded more on an insistence that ‘something must be done’, more than on...

Beyond co-existence, to solidarity

Alon-Lee Green and Sally Abed, activists involved in the Jewish-Arab socialist movement Standing Together in Israel, spoke to Daniel Randall from Solidarity . What’s your assessment of the current political situation? Alon-Lee: Our leadership committee will meet tonight [27 November], and will be discussing the strong likelihood of a third election. The political system in Israel is in deep crisis, a crisis of representation. Confidence in the capacity of the political system to deliver change is decreasing. We hear a lot of people saying they won’t vote in a third election. They’re saying...

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