Solidarity 128, 6 March 2008

Free speech now!

On 21 February, around 100 students from the University of Nottingham and the local area took to the campus grounds in a demonstration demanding their basic democratic right to free speech. The demonstration followed a number of recent protests at the University where this right had been denied. One of these involved the arrest of a member of the Palestinian Society for “breach of the peace”. The University authorities had called the police while he was protesting peacefully against the abuse of human rights in Palestine. The University had also banned another student from the library after...

Learning more in 32 hours than in 32 ordinary months

It’s very simple. We want to see social change in the world in which we live. We want to see this social change because we are human beings who have ideas. We think, we talk, we discuss, and when we’re done thinking and talking and discussing, well then, we feel that these things are vacuous unless we then act on the principle that we think, talk and discuss about. This is as much a part of a university education as anything else. - - Jack Weinberg, Berkeley Free Speech Campaigner Jack Weinberg was arrested for trespass on the morning of 1 October 1964. His real “crime” was to be the loudest...

Barefaced exploitation by the super-rich

Review of Who Runs Britain? How the Super Rich are Changing our Lives by Robert Peston (Hodder and Stoughton) “No nation”, Frederick Engels once wrote, “will put up with production conducted by trusts [i.e. big, industry-dominating cartels], with so barefaced an exploitation of the community by a small band of dividend-mongers... “The exploitation is so palpable that it must break down...” Engels was too optimistic. Robert Peston is the BBC’s Business Editor; a former journalist on the right-wing Sunday Telegraph; a man who avows that “much of what Margaret Thatcher did was necessary”, and...

Orwell’s antidote to politician speak

It’s over 60 years since Orwell wrote the essay Politics and the English Language —yet its warnings are as relevant now as they were then. Orwell argued that the decline of the English language as a useful tool reflected the political conditions of his time. But it was an inexorable process. He thought the abuse could be stopped. He believed journalists had a particular responsibility amongst writers to show their dissatisfaction. The power of the written word was being undermined by an adoption of Politician Speak. He gave five examples of bad language accusing the authors of “Ugliness’’,...

Back to the 60s

This drama about a 1960s New York advertising agency is a full-on period piece. Its attention to historical detail, clothes, manners, dialogue, is very acute. If you were over the age of 16 in the 1960s this will really send you back there. I was just a child, and this is no Janet and John and pink milk drama, yet I still found it very, very evocative. Smoke-filled rooms. Plastic furniture. Stuffy interiors. Brylcream. Stilettos. But does all that perfectly depicted surface make for a good story? I’m not sure. If you judge by the first episode — which may be a mistake — Mad Men seems more...

Left unity in the 1890s

From the mid-1890s, British socialists tried to unite under one umbrella. Tom Mann, as Secretary of the Independent Labour Party, was at the centre of the negotiations and debates that took place between the ILP and the Social Democratic Federation. These moves, popular with the members, were scuppered by the leaderships, mainly that of the ILP. Left unity was an inevitable question thrown up by the formation of the Independent Labour Party in 1893. Why were there separate organisations of socialists, asked the members. Shouldn’t the groups merge, fuse or federate? Both organisations were...

After the Dictatorship of the Lie

After the Dictatorship of the Lie “The lies dished up and spread by the powerful machinery of government [] can reach everyone, everywhere... We are... in [an] era of the absolute lie, the complete and totalitarian lie spread by the monopolies of press and radio to imprison social consciousness." - Leon Trotsky, 1937. I pondered all these things, and how men fight and lose the battle, and the thing that they fought for comes about in spite of their defeat, and when it comes turns out not to be what they meant, and other men have to fight for what they meant under another name." -William Morris...

Gaza: the dead ends of Olmert and of Hamas

The catastrophic escalation [of the Israeli army in Gaza] comes after a long period of struggling between Israel’s military and Hamas. Due to its commitment to the US imperialism and its loyalty to the Bush administration which carries forward the Road Map plan, Israel refused to acknowledge the Islamic rule in Gaza strip and accept the Hamas proposal for Hudna, ceasefire, which meant recognition of Hamas rule. Under the imperialist pressure, Israel has been willing to negotiate only with Fatah, which is very weak… The influence and support given to the Fatah amongst the Palestinian masses was...

Letter: Nuclear -a blind alley on climate change

I welcome Les Hearn’s participation in our nuclear debate, particularly as I remember reading about climate change in his science column in Socialist Organiser as long ago as 1988-89. However he completely evades the central problems with nuclear (Solidarity 3/127, 21 February 2008). Climate change has apparently given the proponents of nuclear a new lease of life. However nuclear can contribute only on electricity generation, not to the main sources of emissions, namely for heat and for transport. The government’s Sustainable Development Commission estimates that if 10 new reactors displaced...

Once again on “troops out now”

The minority argue that the only principled line on the conflict, and only chance to build independent working-class forces, is to stand sharply opposed to US-UK intervention in the region as well as Islamism. In contrast, the majority argue that we should acquiesce to the occupation of Iraq, since if we demanded that the troops leave and they did, Islamist militias would win out and crush democratic space in Iraq. All AWL comrades say they are for solidarity with Iraqi workers, and the debate is normally posed in terms of what slogans we should add to this position — demands like “troops out...

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