Solidarity 221, 19 October 2011

Housing benefit cuts sharpen

The Tories’ planned cuts in housing benefit will cause hardship for hundreds of thousands of working-class families. Many will be left homeless and destitute. Before April this year, housing benefit awards were based on the cheapest half of private rents in any given area. Under new rules they will be based on the cheapest third of rents. But even if people rent in the cheapest end of the market, benefit will still be cut if the rent is above a set limit for the property size. Initially this will affect families needing larger homes, but eventually, as capped amounts are unlikely to be able to...

A love letter to a fantasy city

After London and Barcelona, Paris has become the latest city (outside of his native New York) to get the Woody Allen treatment. Although he has visited the French capital before (in 1996’s Everyone Says I Love You, for example), his latest work, Midnight in Paris, gives it a proper going over. You can always tell when Allen really wants to get stuck into a city if he puts its name in the movie’s title — think Manhattan or, more recently, Vicky Cristina Barcelona. The film’s opening montage is a litany of the most clichéd shots of Paris imaginable — the Eiffel Tower, the Champs Elysées, the...

Italy’s indignados confront the State

On Saturday 15 October, around 200,000 converged in Rome to march and rally and once more underline a burning hatred for the putridly corrupt regime of Silvio Berlusconi and an equally burning determination to found the means to get rid of it. But this time these sentiments embodied something vitally different in Italy’s notoriously fragmented and divided radical terrain. For the first time almost every element of radical protest and action — from the metalworkers of FIOM, the “base unions” [rank-and-file networks] of COBAS, university researchers and students unions, social centres from every...

Occupy, organise...fight for a workers' government

In Greece this spring, workers and students occupied Syntagma square in Athens and the space at the White Tower in Thessaloniki. They were drawing inspiration from the Tahrir Square mobilisation in Egypt. Now their example, and Egypt’s, has spread worldwide, first with the “Occupy Wall Street” movement in the USA, and then on Saturday 15 October with similar demonstrations and occupations across the world. As we go to press on 18 October, hundreds of people are camping outside St Paul’s Cathedral, in London, seeking to establish a rallying-point for a democratic solution to the economic crisis...

Back the Danish government?

By Martin Thomas Bjarke Friborg reported ( Solidarity 220) that Denmark’s Red Green Alliance (RGA), after doing well in the 15 September parliamentary elections with 7% of the vote, is supporting the new government led by the Social Democratic Party (equivalent of the Labour Party in Britain). Two arguments could be made for supporting the government. Without RGA support, the government alliance would have only 80 votes in parliament, while the “Blue Alliance” round the conservative Venstre party, which led the outgoing government, has 87. And the Danish Social Democrats, unlike similar...

Blame capitalism, not Jobs

By Liam McNulty Jérôme E Roos ( Solidarity 220) rightly argues that the almost cult-ish response to the death of Steve Jobs earlier this month represents a highly developed commodity fetishism amongst fans of Apple products. I do not share the brand identification-cum-cult membership of some Apple users, but I do own an iPhone for purely functional reasons. I find it efficient at accessing emails on the move, checking the news and, yes, organising political activity. The development of mobile technology, facilitating the spread of social networking capacities and the means of communication is...

The real Serge

By Paul Hampton Martyn Hudson ( Solidarity 220) goes much further than Serge did in claiming continuity between the regime established after the 1917 workers’ revolution and Stalinism. Serge answered those who argued that “the germ of all Stalinism was in Bolshevism at its beginning” by stating that “To judge the living man by the death germs which the autopsy reveals in the corpse — and which he may have carried in him since his birth — is that very sensible?” But Serge’s “germs” are for Martyn a full-blown infection, if not the stench of gangrene. Martyn argues that some civil war practices...

Fox: real story and tabloid story

A man with no visible means of support manages to make a living in a pretend job funded by “charitable” funds. His job involves travelling (first class) around the world, misleading people into thinking he is an adviser to a government minister. He abuses this stolen privilege to help foreigners decide what is supposed to be British foreign policy. The perfect story, you would think, for rabid denunciation by the Express, Sun or Mail? Or investigation by the Taxpayers’ Alliance? Apparently not. It was left to the Guardian to expose what Adam Werritty was up to, to reveal that Defence Minister...

Strike wave explodes in Greece

A wave of occupations, strikes, demonstrations and other forms of action is erupting across Greece against the cuts imposed by the Pasok government. New cuts are to be voted on in Parliament on 20 October. Every day additional measures are added to the package. New taxation will cost an average Greek family 1500 to 2000 euros annually, or more than a month and a half’s wages. Utility workers and trade unionists have occupied the printing offices of the utility company GENOP-DEH in an attempt to block and disrupt the printing and distribution of the regressive property tax bills, which were to...

“Consumer democracy” in France

Nearly three million people took part in each of the French Socialist Party’s two rounds of voting to choose its presidential candidate for 2012. The SP’s “primary” was partly modelled on the US primary system, but with a big difference. In most states of the USA, voters are obliged to declare a party affiliation when they register to vote (though they can register as “other”), and a Democrat or Republican affiliation gives them the right to vote in Democrat or Republican primaries. The SP devised its own system of qualifying to vote in its primaries: voters had to pay one euro and sign a...

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