Solidarity 231, 25 January 2012

Remploy workers to strike

Workers at two Remploy sites will strike on 26 January against the semi-privatisation of their factories. Remploy, a government-owned manufacturing company established in 1945 specifically to provide protected employment for disabled workers, has faced a number of attacks – including part-privatisations and sell-offs – in recent years. Now its Chesterfield and Springburn (Glasgow) sites face merger with private orthotics firm Websters to create a new part-private company, R Healthcare. As a result, non-disabled apprentices and shopfloor workers have been taken on with substantially worse pay...

PCS stalls in pensions campaign

The “refusenik” unions in the pensions battle will meet this week to discuss the next steps… even if those steps are just to stand still. The National Executive of the Public and Commercial Services union (PCS), although aware of the University and College Union’s decision to set 1 March as the next pension strike day, has decided not to put a definite date to the “refusenik” meeting, and has not committed to supporting the UCU’s proposal. The PCS, on paper the most stridently “rejectionist” of all national unions, will therefore essentially attend the meeting in listening mode. PCS has also...

Southampton battle not over

Trade unions at Southampton City Council have declared that their battle with Tory bosses over job losses and pay cuts is “continuing”, as the dispute stretches into its twelfth month.

Matt Lygate: the passing of a Scottish leftist

Matt Lygate — founding member of the Workers Party of Scotland (Marxist-Leninist) in the 1960s, bank-robber in the 1970s, and briefly a political celebrity in the early 1980s — died last week. Born in Govan in Glasgow in 1938, Lygate emigrated to New Zealand in 1959 in order to avoid national service. After his return to Scotland six years later he was increasingly drawn into the political orbit of dissident Communist Party members and Scottish nationalists. In 1967 he became a founding member of the Workers Party of Scotland (Marxist-Leninist). The WPS declared itself to be “based...

Chinese workers fight for democracy

I was leading a meeting last November at Liverpool University’s Guild of Students on the question of a socialist response to the politics of multiculturalism and assimilation. During the discussion, the predominance of “cultural relativism” in left academia became explicit — perhaps, I wonder now, a liberal postcolonial hangover from the crimes of the British Empire. I recalled a special edition of the BBC’s “Question Time” programme, broadcast from Shanghai in 2005. When an official of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) was posed a question about universal suffrage and democratic rights from...

Fight the power...with counterpower?

Tim Gee claims to have “a single idea which explains why social movements succeed or fail”. Two hundred pages later I am not convinced. Gee’s theory of “counterpower” is that “the resistance of the oppressed is a major driver in history”. Agreed. That is the principle which guides my politics and activism. But here the idea is developed in a confusing direction. “Power is when the few control the many; ‘counterpower’ is when the many resist the control of the few.” But from the historical examples Gee uses it is evident that he is interested in winning genuine social change — to talk about...

Lies, ant-semitism and conspiracy theories

Umberto Eco’s protagonist is a spy (who is not particular about which state police he serves), a forger, an agent provocateur and a stool pigeon. In other words, Simone Simonini is the worst kind of low life, and as revolting a fictional character as you will ever encounter. Simonini is an invention. Every other character in Eco’s book is real. All the events — whether as backdrop or integral to the plot — really happened. As the text is sometimes a pastiche of 19th-century adventure story it doesn’t read like history. We meet Simonini in the late 1890s. Old, physically failing and suffering...

Verse against the odds

This collection includes 60-odd pieces of political verse written over the last quarter-century, most of them originally published in Solidarity or in one of its forerunners. To devote yourself to the cause of the self-emancipation of humanity, to revolutionary socialism, in an epoch of catastrophes for that project, is to expose the heart as well as the mind to the corrosions of repeated setback, disappointment and defeat. Some of the pieces in this collection celebrate working-class struggle and the great working-class victory in 1917. Many explore the experience of defeat and the aftermath...

SOPA: “a baby-step towards something worse”

The passage of the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the Protect IP Act (PIPA) through the US Congress has been temporarily postponed. The bills would give the US government wide-ranging powers to act against web-based copyright-infringement. One of SOPA’s major effects would be to introduce prison sentences of up to five years for the streaming of copyrighted material. Websites containing user-uploaded content could find themselves liable for the actions of their users, something which, in the words of liberal commentator Jon Stewart, would “break the internet”. The bill’s most high profile...

Resist the “John Lewis economy”

Nick Clegg’s advocacy of a “John Lewis economy” in which more workers own shares in “their” company is nonsense, an attempt to put a progressive spin on the massive assault on working-class living standards and rights which his government is overseeing. Claiming that politicians are “too often cowed by corporate power” (yes) and denouncing “crony capitalism” (yes), Clegg has called for a “well-rewarded workforce” through more “employee share ownership”. Clegg’s soundbite is illiterate even in its own terms. John Lewis workers do not own shares in the company. It is a mutual company, without...

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