Solidarity 482, 17 October 2018

Europe for the whom?

An open letter to the Europe For the Many conference on 26-27 October from Greek socialist Theodora Polenta. Dear Comrades: I am looking forward to attending the event "Europe for the Many: a left strategy for transforming Europe" on 26-27 October. But I am concerned about the fact that the conference's top-billed speakers are the Portuguese prime minister and the Greek finance minister. Are the current 2018 Syriza-ANEL government and its financial minister part of our European socialist vision? Can they be our inspiration or our partners in pushing a radical Labour government forwards? No...

New facts on undercover cops

More than a thousand political and campaigning groups have been targeted by undercover police operations over the years since 1968. In the latest instalment of a slowly-accumulating mass of revelations, the Guardian on 15 October published a list , compiled by the Undercover Research Group, of 124 groups within which police agents were placed between 1970 and 2007. The undercover cops quite often enticed activists (generally women) into sexual relationships, and even had children with them. The list also records claims that in some cases the cops acted as provocateurs, making the groups...

Samir Amin, 1931-2018

Samir Amin, who died this year at the age of 87, was one of the foremost writers of the “dependency theory” which, in the 1960s and 70s came, many left-wing activists came to think was “the Marxist theory of imperialism”. Many even thought it was “Lenin’s theory”, although the whole structure of the theory was different. Amin, of Egyptian-French background, lived most of his life in France, and was in the French Communist Party then associated with Maoists. The basic idea of “dependency theory” was that ex-colonial countries were underdeveloped because of a drain of surplus to the richer...

“Rise Up” remains seated as Berlin marches against racism

Somewhere between 150,000 and 250,000 people marched through Berlin on Saturday 14 October in a protest against “racism, social exclusion and the shift to the right (‘Rechtsruck’)”. The “#Indivisible” demonstration was backed by a range of individuals and organisations — around 4,500 of them — that Stand Up to Racism could only dream of. Official publicity for the demonstration declared: “We are for an open society of solidarity, in which human rights are indivisible and in which it is a matter of course that there are a multipicity of ways in which people can decide how to live their own...

Discussing left antisemitism

Workers’ Liberty branches around the country have in the last month been organising meetings on left antisemitism, discussing what this phenomenon is and how to fight it. Meetings have taken place in Sheffield, Lewisham, King’s Cross, Oxford, Bristol, Northampton, Brixton, Newcastle, and Durham. The attitude from some in the Momentum and Labour leaderships has been to treat the question as one of embarrassing public relations optics, perhaps to be dealt with by expelling a few of the worst offenders; serious discussion and debate of the issues, involving proper historical analysis, has not, on...

Support Turkish construction workers!

The Turkish government has detained hundreds of construction workers after they demonstrated against conditions at the building site of Istanbul’s new airport. There have been long-running complaints from workers at the building site of the currently under construction airport in Istanbul, which if completed would be the largest airport in the world. Workers have complained about appalling living conditions, insufficient pay, as well as massive health and safety violations. The government has confirmed the deaths of 37 workers over the four year construction project, but workers claim that...

Women rise up against Bolsonaro

Jair Bolsonaro [the leader in the race to be president of Brazil] is known as the man of three Bs. B for Bala, the army bullets. Jair Bolsonaro was trained in a Brazilian military school during the dictatorship. He came into politics through campaigning to increase officers’ salaries. In 2016, he dedicated the vote he cast in parliament in favour of impeaching Dilma Rousseff, Brazil’s elected president standing in for Lula (Workers’ Party, PT), to the recently deceased colonel Ustra, who had tortured Dilma Roussef as a young guerrilla. According to Jair Bolsonaro this is ethical, the way the...

Jews and Arabs standing together

Above: Activists from the Standing Together movement. As part of an ongoing series of interviews with leftist activists in Israel/Palestine, Daniel Randall of Workers’ Liberty spoke to Hannah Pollin-Galay, an activist in Standing Together, a cross-party movement organising Jews and Arabs against occupation and in favour of social and economic equality. By profession, Pollin-Galay is a Yiddish and Holocaust researcher at Tel Aviv University. DR: What is the shape of the movement against the “Nation State Law”? Does it offer hope for a renewed movement, uniting Israeli-Jews and Arabs, against...

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