Solidarity 521, 16 October 2019

American democracy at a crossroads?

As impeachment inquiries unfold, a nagging question plagues American democracy with renewed urgency: Can Trump in fact be removed from office, either electorally or procedurally? Lest anyone dismiss such apprehensions as an indulgence in left paranoia, consider this. In the 2016 presidential debate, Trump refused to say whether he would accept defeat. “I’ll keep you in suspense, “ he declared and stoked anticipatory fears in his supporters that the election could be “rigged.” Along these lines, he has subsequently and routinely made the fact-free assertion that his defeat in the popular vote...

“Two states” is the only road to equality

John Strawson disputes the argument that the “two states” policy in Israel-Palestine — self-determination for both nations there — has become “unviable”. John Strawson is a professor of law at the University of East London, a former visiting lecturer at Birzeit University in the West Bank, and a former activist (in the 1970s) in the International Marxist Group. He develops his argument in polemic with Perry Anderson, who is now a professor at University of California Los Angeles, and who has been a leading figure in the New Left Review editorial team since 1962. Perry Anderson announced a new...

The message from Andrew Murray

Ever the Stalinist nostalgic, in his new book The Fall and Rise of the British Left , Murray laments the passing away of “a largely vanished world of working-class power” and the fact that “none of the scenarios which gripped the left I grew up with in the twentieth century appear fully plausible any more.” What is to fill the vacuum? Murray’s answer is not: Slough off the dead weight of Stalinism, re-assert the centrality of independent working-class politics, and reforge a labour movement fit for the overthrow of capitalism. Instead, and this is his explanation for Corbyn’s election as...

The island, the refugees, and the yachts

I started coming to Symi, a tiny Greek island in the Aegean, closer geographically to Turkey than the Greek mainland, 30 years ago. Missing a few years in the middle, I resumed coming five years ago. In these five years, the island has seen many refugees being washed up on its harbour side; mainly from Syria plus some from Afghanistan, Iraq, and sub-Saharan Africa arriving from Turkey just across the water. Although there was consternation on the island from residents who themselves were suffering the effects of the collapse of the Greek economy, the response to the refugees was (and continues...

Whistle-blowers: the real villains?

On Monday 7 October, the Morning Star carried another article by Zoltan Zigedy (pen-name of Greg Godels, American blogger and regular contributor to the website “Marxism-Leninism Today – The Electronic Journal of Marxist-Leninist Thought”). The article first appeared on Godels’ own blog and then on the “Marxism-Leninism Today” website before making it into the pages of the Morning Star. The headline asks the question: “TelephoneGate: Who Looks Worst?” The strapline give an indication of the answer: “Zoltan Zigedy reports (sic) how the drive to impeach Trump has masked the sinister dealings of...

Lampooning love

I Love You, You’re Perfect, Now Change , which ran last week at the Network Theatre, London, presents a sequence of comical vignettes of different stages of relationships and romance. Highlighting the problems of relationships in capitalist society, the show immediately draws comparisons between gender roles and attitudes, with the men possessing overbearing egos, while the women are waiting at home for telephone calls, or for the final seconds of a football match to arrive. The musical ran for 12 years off-Broadway in New York in 1996-2008. This production intertwines scenes of heterosexual...

What Prevent does and doesn’t “prevent”

It’s not just Islamists and the SWP who criticise the government’s Prevent programme. In some ways, the targeting of Islamism is just a welcome bonus for the Conservatives, since the core point is to increase the government’s ideological control over education and other areas where children are present. Prevent was “revised” in 2011 along with the launch of two other projects, the promotion of “British Values” and the deputisation of teachers, social workers, healthcare workers and so on as immigration officials. All three of these measures were part of an increasingly jingoistic tone forced...

The case for a four day work week

Struggles over working hours, the amount of each day over which workers are compelled to sell our labour power to a boss, were foundational for the early labour movement. Karl Marx called the Factories Act of 1847, which restricted the working day to 10 hours, “the first time that in broad daylight the political economy of the middle class succumbed to the political economy of the working class.” Shortening working hours claws back some time from our employers, and widens the amount of time during which where we go and what we do is not determined by direct instructions from capital. The...

Sixth form colleges strike

We’ll be striking in 25 colleges on 17 October, and then again on 5 and 20 November. The feeling I pick up is that oversized classes, workload, management bullying, interpretation of directed time agreements are the big issues, exacerbated by issues of funding and pay. Sixth Form teachers’ pay has fallen behind school teachers’ pay. We probably need a 15% rise to get us back to the relative level of 2008. There’s been a general pay freeze, but that has been eased in schools and continued in the Sixth Form sector. The government is trumpeting the end of austerity, but the Sixth Form sector is...

UVW reinvents the wheel?

The AGM of United Voices of the World (UVW), on 5 October, packed out the meeting hall, with nearly 10% of the membership turning up. There was no delegate system. Anybody could come and take part in the embryonic UVW democracy. I’m happy to give a certain amount of leeway to UVW. They are a relatively new union that has often deployed effective, aggressive industrial tactics and organised previously “unorganisable” workers into a fighting force to turn the tide against outsourcing at universities around London. The launch of Sex, Cultural, Design, Architecture and Charity worker sections this...

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