Solidarity 561, 2 September 2020

Free to move, free to stay, free to live!

A new start towards redoubling work by the pro-free-movement left was made at a protest at the Home Office on Wednesday 19 August, bringing together a wide range of socialist groups and migrants' rights campaigns, including Labour Campaign for Free Movement, Lesbians and Gays Support the Migrants, Southall Black Sisters, Mutiny, Socialist Resistance, Red Flag, RS21, Momentum Internationalists, Workers' Liberty, and many others. A follow-up meeting called by the initiators of that protest on 29 August discussed future plans, including, should the pandemic conditions permit it, a national action...

NHS mobilisation can break low-pay trend

It seems unlikely that health workers will get a pay rise without strikes or at least the threat of strikes. Other public sector workers have got small pay rises, but no public sector workers have got good pay rises. Millions of key workers - our colleagues who risked their health and lives working alongside us through the lockdown - still survive on poverty pay, without sick pay, annual leave, pensions or in many cases without even guaranteed hours. The pandemic has revealed a division within the working class between unionised workers with fairly decent pay, terms and conditions, and largely...

China and the Uyghurs

The Morning Star has a problem. How does a newspaper claiming to stand for “Peace and Socialism” defend a regime that denies basic democratic rights and has incarcerated an estimated million Muslims in what look very much like concentration camps? An article by one Carlos Martinez (MS July 14) denounced “increasingly hysterical and absurd” criticisms of China, citing “four main lines of attack being pushed on a daily basis by the US and British ruling classes”: That the newly introduced National Security Law is an attack on the basic freedoms of the people of Hong Kong and violates China’s...

Join Rosa Luxemburg's march

Dana Mills concludes her new short new biography, Rosa Luxemburg (Reaktion Books) , with the appeal: "See that you join Rosa Luxemburg's march". "The extraordinary force of her [Luxemburg's] legacy marches on beyond her politics… The idea of unequivocal commitment for social justice for all is returning to our streets. The shadow of the little great woman is marching on, arguing for freedom from oppression and equality in dignity for all". Mills asks us to see Luxemburg as a model. She highlights Luxemburg's "empathy towards the victims of… violence", her "ability to remain committed to...

In defence of algorithms

As the editorial in Solidarity 560 said, the "condemnation of 'algorithms' [around the exam grades fiasco] was unfair on algorithms. If algorithms do not produce reasonable results, it is because humans have messed up". The point is worth a few further words, because hostility to "algorithms" in general can become obscurantist technophobia. An algorithm is a precisely-defined list of instructions, to do a calculation, or for that matter e.g. to bake a cake (in which case it is called a recipe). No more, no less. Algorithms can be badly done, as the ones for grades this year were. They can be...

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