Solidarity 262, 26 October 2012

After 15 years of writing about wizards, magic and sorcery, ostensibly for children, J K Rowling has turned her hand to writing a novel for adults. The Casual Vacancy had no magic for me, although Rowling’s magic touch meant 2.6 million copies were sold before the book actually hit the streets. Poor old Rowling is rightly angry (and very frustrated) about class-ridden Britain. She's angry about racism and sexism, the small-minded petty bourgeoisie, the smug self-righteous middle class. She’s angry about violence against women and abuse of children. And oddly, given Rowling’s proven ability to...

Antoinette Konikow (1869-1946) was a feminist activist and founding member of both the Communist Party USA and the American Trotskyist movement. Born in the Russian Empire, Konikow attended school in Odessa in the Ukraine before emigrating to Zurich where she attended university. It was in Switzerland that she became politically active, joining Georgii Plekhanov’s Emancipation of Labour group, the first Russian Marxist group and a forerunner of the Russian Social Democratic and Labour Party. In 1893, Konikow came to America and studied as a physician. Almost immediately she joined the...

Material conditions for socialist education and self-education are better than they’ve ever been. Much socialist literature which previously you could read only if you could get into a good library is now freely available on the web. Vastly more has been translated. Thanks to second-hand book sales moving onto the web, printed books which you’d previously find only by searching second-hand shops are now also easily available. Thirty years ago, if a newcomer started reading the Communist Manifesto, and wondered who Metternich and Guizot were, they were on their own. These days the Workers’...

Labour councillors in Hull and Southampton have broken the cuts consensus by responding to labour movement and community pressure and vowing to defy cuts. In Southampton, two councillors have been suspended from the ruling Labour group after they refused to vote for cuts to Oaklands swimming pool. Councillors Keith Morrell and Don Thomas have formed a “Labour Councillors Against The Cuts” group on the City Council. The cuts to Oaklands were part of a “mini-budget”, and although the fight currently focuses on reopening the pool, the councillors are clear that the attack on Oaklands is just the...

Birmingham City Council’s Labour administration has forecast it will lose almost half its current controllable expenditure by 2017. The council spends about £3.5 billion each year, but much of that is set by central government policies beyond its control. The “controllable” part of the council’s budget is about £1.2 billion, and it is set to lose £600 million. Council leaders warn of “the end of local government as we know it”. Northamptonshire’s Tory council has presented council unions with a choice for April 2013: 3.6% pay reduction and other cuts; or more than 300 compulsory redundancies...

AWL members sold several hundred copies of this newspaper on the 20 October TUC demo in central London. Our paper has two prices — 80p waged and 30p unwaged — to make it more accessible to people on low incomes. But on the demo, and regularly on street and estate sales, people ask us why we don’t copy the Metro, a paper read by hundreds of thousands of people, and give Solidarity away for free? Wouldn’t we then be able to “compete” with the mainstream media? In a word — no. A revolutionary socialist paper produced by a small group is never going to “compete” with the reach of a mainstream...

The chief things to press in the unions are mobilisation now against the attacks; democratic discussion of a strategy of ongoing action to win; and clear union demands on a Labour government to replace the Tories. With those, a 24-hour general strike — in other words, a bigger version of 30 November 2011 — could greatly increase confidence and solidarity. Without them, it would be just a protest. The TUC congress in early September voted to consider a general strike. Len McCluskey of Unite, Mark Serwotka of PCS, and Bob Crow of RMT, backed that call on 20 October. Socialist Worker and the...

The TUC General Council is supposed to be committed to investigating the practicalities of a general strike. Unite’s general secretary Len McCluskey asked the crowd in Hyde Park on Saturday if they wanted a general strike. and got a resounding yes. The National Shop Stewards Network and the Socialist Party are asking the TUC to name the day. In fact we already have a day: 14 November. As things stand, there are plans for simultaneous general strikes in five countries, three major —Spain, Portugal and Greece — two minor — Cyprus and Malta. Saturday‘s large CGIL rally in Rome heard calls for a...

Mainstream media coverage of the labour movement is, as we all know, awful. But just how awful it is became clear following the TUC demonstrations on Saturday, 20 October. The BBC, to its credit, led the news at nine o’clock with coverage of the march and rally. But it chose not show any of the trade union speakers — not even a soundbite — and instead showed a few seconds of Labour Party leader Ed Miliband saying something stupid and being booed. That was so predictable that it could almost have been written before the event even took place with the film clip of Miliband added later. That was...

Despite becoming the favourite hunting-ground of global corporations greedy for cheap labour stripped of rights, China still claims to be “communist” or “socialist”. So it has a good health service? Better, surely, than shamelessly neo-liberal Britain? The Chinese people don’t think so. So great is their frustration that in 2010 (the latest year with official figures) there were 17,000 protests or attacks directed against doctors or hospitals in China. In a recent case, Wang Hao, a trainee doctor at a hospital in northern China, was stabbed and killed by a 17-year-old whom he had never even...