Solidarity 083, 03 November 2005

Pakistan earthquake: Mobilise labour movement solidarity!

By Farooq Tariq, general secretary, Labour Party Pakistan According to the latest official figures, over 53,000 are confirmed death after the 8 October earthquake. Unofficial figures for the death toll are over 100,000 and more seriously injured. Even after so many days of the most disastrous earthquake in Pakistan, there are areas that no one has yet reached to help the victims. That is mainly true of the area close to the “line of control” that separates Kashmir into Indian and Pakistani held areas. Only helicopters are able to reach the area. The military controls all the helicopters. They...

German socialist women’s movement — self-organisation and class unity

During the nineteenth century, the emerging workers’ movement began to develop its policy on the “woman question”. Some of the early, “utopian” socialists argued strongly for women’s liberation. Ferdinand Lassalle led the “proletarian anti-feminists”, opposing votes for women and urging male workers to strike against women’s entry into industrial labour. Marx and Engels opposed Lassalle, arguing that women’s work was a step forward, a precondition for liberation. In 1875, the Socialist Labour Party of Germany — later to become the Social Democratic Party (SPD) — was formed. The party went on...

Students are workers too

By Daniel Randall, NUS National Executive (personal capacity) In these columns, I’ve talked a lot about why students should unite with workers, especially those who work on their campuses such as lecturers, cleaners, librarians or catering staff. But a decade of huge attacks on education funding have meant that more and more students are forced to enter the labour market themselves. Students are workers too. And students are working for increasingly long hours and increasingly poorer pay. Government propaganda about how much more university graduates can expect to earn is not much consolation...

Leda and the Swan

A sudden blow: the great wings beating still Above the staggering girl, her thighs caressed, By the dark webs, her nape caught in his bill, He holds her helpless breast upon his breast. How can those terrified vague fingers push The feathered glory from her loosening thighs? And how can body, laid in that white rush, But feel the strange heart beating where it lies? A shudder in the loins engenders there The broken wall, the burning roof and tower And Agamemnon dead. Being so caught up So mastered by the brute blood of the air, Did she put on his knowledge with his power Before the indifferent...

Tracking the jihadists

Rosalind Robson reviews Insurgent Iraq, Al Zarqawi and the new generation The politics of Loretta Napoleoni in this book are a bit hard to pin down. A (perhaps syndicated) article by her in a recent issue of Socialist Worker tended to suggest that she was sympathetic to al Zarqawi, or at least understood him to be a product of repression and brutality (in Jordan). The implied line was that we have to understand the sinner more and condemn him less. Her approach to research (also evident in her book Terror Inc.) is to document and detail the facts about Islamist jihadist groups without much...

Right, wrong and the cash register

Michael Wood reviews Lord of War From the opening credits through to the very final shot, Lord of War is a bitter, angry, film, but also a very funny one. I enjoyed it immensely. It’s directed and written by Andrew Niccol, who also directed Gattaca and wrote The Truman Show. It follows the life of a Ukrainian immigrant and arms dealer called Yuri Orlov, played by Nicolas Cage. Orlov progresses from a youth selling guns to local gangsters, to triumphs avoiding arms embargoes in order to supply weapons to brutal dictators. Essentially this is a farce — we move from one ridiculous and absurd...

Respect: a barren conference

At the end of October, the Respect Unity Coalition unveiled a list of sixty resolutions (http://www.respectcoalition.com/?ite=900) which have been submitted to their conference (19-20 November). Many are merely a rehash of existing policy — applying to the post-7/7 climate their positions of “troops out of Iraq now” and defending the “Muslim community” and, in effect, all its beliefs. It is worth noting, however, the lack of transparency in the wording of resolutions so that they can mean different things to different people. For example, National Council’s resolution 1 says that “domination...

Adams in the chamber of commerce

by John O’Mahony This “historic” picture of Sinn Fein president Gerry Adams, cat-that-got-the-cream grin fixed in place, schmoozing with the members of the Dublin Chamber of Commerce, tells us what Sinn Fein is now and where its leaders are intent on going. It is a symbolic picture, too. The Irish bourgeoisie was very hostile to the Easter Rising of April 1916. Not only did their leading newspaper, the Irish Independent, urge the British to shoot the wounded Marxist socialist trade union leader, James Connolly, for his part in the Rising (too weak from his wounds to stand up, he was strapped...

Save our schools!

By Pat Murphy, secretary, Leeds NUT On Wednesday 26 October something of huge significance happened to British politics. Tony Blair finally and decisively came out as a Tory. The Education White Paper launched that day promises to completely tear up the state schooling system and replace it with a market free-for-all. The gravity of the threat is sugar-coated with talk of parental choice and “freeing schools from the dead hand of bureaucracy”. In reality local parents will lose control of the state school system, schools will choose pupils rather than the other way round and the dominant power...

What we do

The AWL held the second of our new series of political day schools on 22 October (in London) and 29 October (in Sheffield). Attendance at the London school was good (twice the number that we had at the first day school of the series), but the Leeds attendance was a bit disappointing (smaller than at the first of the northern day schools, in Sheffield). We discussed globalisation and imperialism. Most of the time was given over to three sets of small-group discussions — one critically evaluating four different assessments of globalisation current on the left, the second assessing six different...

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