Solidarity 241, 11 April 2012

[A text of the Irish Trotskyists of the Revolutionary Socialist Party, 1947] On Easter Monday 1916, some hundreds of republicans and socialists rose in arms in Dublin to overthrow the centuries-old British rule in Ireland. Among their leaders was James Connolly, who for most of the years since 1896 had been the leading writer and agitator for socialism in Ireland and amongst the Irish in America [1903 -1910]. Ever since 1916 Connolly’s name has been widely honoured in nationalist Ireland, and ever since then significant minorities have tried or pretended, in one way or another, to continue his...

On 30 March The Guardian published a video recording showing Mauro Demetrio, a twenty one year old from Beckton, East London, being subjected to racial abuse and violence by police officers in the back of a police van after his arrest during the riots in August 2011. In the soundtrack, one officer admits to strangling Demetrio and calls him a “cunt”. Another officer, PC Alex MacFarlane, can be heard justifying the assault because Demetrio would “always be a nigger”. A couple of days after the Demetrio recording, evidence was published that on the same day in August 2011, also in East London...

The exchange on Bayard Rustin ( Solidarity 239, 240) was fascinating. I met Bayard in 1949, when I was a young student at UCLA. He had a profound effect on me, and when I came to New York in 1956 to work for Liberation magazine, he was one of the editors (the others being Dave Dellinger, A. J. Muste, and Roy Finch) who met weekly. And then I went to work for War Resisters League, where Bayard, as Executive Secretary, was my boss. He and Muste were my two primary mentors. We have essentially two Bayards. The one up to 1963 was a radical pacifist. He was not linked to Max Shachtman or to the...

Whilst I was delighted that Solidarity 240 contained not just one but two articles about Italy (Hugh Edwards, “Strike wave sweeps Italy”, and Kate Devine, “Italian feminism resurgent?”) and agreed with much of their content, I did feel that cumulatively they gave a somewhat skewed impression of the current role of women in Italian politics and public life. Although the Berlusconi period marked a nadir in this respect, the controversies of the last four months over pensions and Article 18 have in fact seen three strong intelligent women as their principal protagonists — Elsa Fornero, the...

There are both timeless and concrete arguments for the workers’ government slogan (discussed in ‘Greece: a workers’ government?’ Solidarity 239). The Communist International resolved at its Fourth Congress in 1922: “As a general propagandistic slogan, the workers’ government (or workers’ and peasants’ government) can be used almost everywhere.” As Trotsky said the reason for this, and for the slogan’s educative potential, is that it “opposes the working class as a whole politically to all other classes, i.e., to the groupings of the bourgeois political world.” A more pressing purpose...

Tory commentator Charles Moore speculated in his Daily Telegraph column that the leadership of his own party is deliberately seeking a high-profile confrontation with the labour movement in order to contrive its own “miners’ strike moment”. In Moore’s own words, “all hell broke loose” after the speculation (which spoke of a “private message” being handed down from Tory HQ to constituency activists) was misinterpreted as Moore leaking an actual document. He has since issued a public apology. But the government’s response to the threat of strike action by fuel tanker drivers, including Francis...

The contentious character of the Republican primaries has revealed one startling fact. The Democratic Party under Obama has come to occupy so much of the political terrain, from moderate right to centre left, that there is no space for the Republicans to define themselves beyond the realm of sheer lunacy. The Republicans’ Obama Derangement Syndrome, as this condition has become to be known, is characterised above all by a shared certainty that the US is marching in lockstep down the path to a Fascist-Stalinist-atheist-Islamic hell-hole bankrolled by Hollywood liberals and abetted by a sinister...

On 10 March 16-year-old Amina Filali killed herself by swallowing rat poison. Amina had been badly beaten during a forced marriage to Mustapha Kellak, a man who had raped her. Although there have been some limited legal improvement in the position of women in Morocco, the state still allows a rapist to marry an underage victim as a way of avoiding prosecution. The law — known as Article 475 — says a “kidnapper” of a minor can marry his victim so that dishonour is not brought on her family. Legislation designed to outlaw all forms of violence against women, planned since 2006, has yet to appear...

Mass murderers, and especially those who execute children at point-blank range, are not normally objects of one’s sympathy. It is possible, I imagine, for Nazis to “understand” the motives of a mass murderer, especially one who targets Jews. But one hardly expects the same sort of understanding or sympathy on the left. And yet this is precisely what we find in the latest issue of Socialist Worker . In a full-page article following up on the Toulouse killings, Jim Wolfreys mentions in the second paragraph that Mohamed Merah’s first attacks took place on the very same day as an American soldier...

The landslide victory of George Galloway in Bradford West has been hailed by many on the left as a “victory” for our side. Tony Mulhearn of the Socialist Party — and Trade Unionist and Socialist Coalition (TUSC) candidate for mayor of Liverpool — writes “I applaud George Galloway's victory”. Anindya Bhattacharyya writes on the Socialist Worker website that “his win is a boost for the left in Britain”. Meanwhile the Labour Party leadership has thrown itself into a fake “soul searching” exercise, promising to reflect on the defeat and learn the lessons. Such a tactic dodges the need for real...