Solidarity 188, 12 January 2011

ABC's of Marxism: A is for Alienation

Up until the recent student protests, sociologists would moan about “apathetic youth”: they were “selfish” and “uninterested” in the world. How much of this was “apathy” and how much an understandable reaction to a world where mainstream politics seems boring and irrelevant? The student protests came at a point when the political world shifted with the election of a government more clearly hostile to students and the young. The shift brought a hammer down upon the heads of school and college students. They could no longer hide their contempt for the political system. Their alienation from...

Down with Harry Potter!

Daisy Thomas writes ( Solidarity 3/187, review of ‘Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows’) that “A lot of people, myself included, have grown up with Harry and his friends. Some people only really got into reading because of Harry Potter...” Since when do esoteric fantasy-stories help to explore class-structures, and not cover them up? Don’t they stop young people reading better books? Is this what we want children to grow up with? Can Marxists approve such literature?

Why the Tea Party brews up

When capitalism crashes, the ambulances first come for the wealthy. The next wave of ambulances comes for their luggage and their attendants. When it is time to come for the working-class victims, there is a budget crisis and the ambulance corps is decommissioned. The walking wounded are left to fend for themselves, dazed and disoriented. Where is the outrage? Where is the fightback? Where is the left? It is not that the American left lacks a sophisticated understanding of power, of how wealth subverts democracy or how it domesticates the media and pollutes public opinion. It is not that the...

The inspirational Jayaben Desai

An indication of the regard in which Jayaben Desai was held was the fact that on a miserable December weekday morning over one hundred people turned out for her funeral. A good proportion were there to show their respect for the inspirational woman who came to represent the Grunwick strikers of 1976-1978. Many photographs of the strike show a diminutive Mrs Desai towered over by large policemen, but she was never intimidated by anyone. When she walked out of the photoprocessing plant she said to the manager: “What you are running here is not a factory, it is a zoo. But in a zoo there are many...

Italy: "Protesting is part of everyday life"

A reform of Italian universities eventually approved by the Italian Parliament on 23 December was met by protests. Violent clashes occurred on 14 December in Rome, over the vote of confidence won by Berlusconi. These ended with 57 police and 62 people injured, 15 million euro worth of damage and 41 arrests. These demonstrations followed those of 24 November when 18 train stations were occupied. Students tried to break in the Senate House, a chamber of the Italian Parliament. That has never happened before in the history of Italy. Then they headed to the private house of the Prime Minister and...

Will the Mark Kennedy case help our fight for the right to resist?

I was sitting in a room, in a small Nottingham school. I should think the curtains were closed and the lights on. I was surrounded by people discussing what up to that moment had been a top secret plan to take over Ratcliffe-on-Soar coal fired power station. I had not been party to the plan before this point, but had been invited along because of my involvement in Workers Climate Action by a close fellow activist. I was wondering why I had come. It wasn’t that I didn’t agree with the sentiment: closing down a coal fired power station for a week to save 150,000 tonnes of CO2. It wasn’t even...

Jack Straw: helping racism, not women's rights

Former Labour home secretary Jack Straw has described young white women as “easy meat” for sexual abuse by Pakistani men. After two Asian men who raped and sexually assaulted young women in Derby were given indefinite jail terms, Straw said that there is a “specific problem” of Pakistani men who “target vulnerable young white girls” and called for “the Pakistani community to think much more clearly about why this is going on”. In fact the judge who sentenced Mohammed Liaqat and Abid Saddique said that he did not believe the crimes were “racially aggravated”, arguing that the ethnicity of the...

Britain trains Bangladeshi death squad

US embassy cables leaked by Wikileaks reveal that the UK government has been training a paramilitary death squad in Bangladesh – in the name of “counter-terrorism”, naturally. The Rapid Action Battalion is estimated by human rights activists to be responsible for 1,000 murders since its establishment six years ago, in addition to a record of kidnapping, extortion and torture. Last year, it was used against garment workers during their huge strikes. Since three years ago – under the Labour government – Britain has been training these killers in “areas such as investigative interviewing...

Tories want to help your boss sack you

The government is attempting to introduce a new charter of employers' rights that will give bosses much greater freedom to sack workers. The proposals include an extension of the qualifying period for an unfair dismissal claim from one year to two, meaning that no worker will be able to claim for unfair dismissal within their first year of employment. The charter also includes a plan to charge for the right to lodge an employment tribunal, with government sources suggesting the fee will be towards “the higher end” of the £30-£500 bracket suggested by bosses' organisations. Leading figures in...

No to political Islam! Solidarity with Pakistani secularists, socialists, workers and women

On Monday 5 January Salman Taseer, governor of Punjab (Pakistan's largest province) and a former Pakistani People's Party MP was shot 27 times by his bodyguard Mumtaz Qadri in Islamabad. Taseer was killed by Qadri because of his support for the reform of the long established blasphemy law which has led to people being incarcerated for insulting the prophet Muhammed. 
The shooting is the latest symptom of the rise of religious conservatism and right-wing radicalism in Pakistan, and Islamist attempts to rid the country of what they call 'Western extremism'. In fact Pakistan already has some of...

This website uses cookies, you can find out more and set your preferences here.
By continuing to use this website, you agree to our Privacy Policy and Terms & Conditions.