Solidarity 353, 11 February 2015

For Syriza to triumph, it is not enough for it to play tough with the European Union. not enough to bypass the structure of the European Central Bank to find individual national allies, not enough to refuse to cooperate with capitalist auditors. Greece has already lost 30% of its GDP since the peak before the crisis, with unemployment standing at 25%, a decline only comparable to that seen in the US during the Great Depression. Syriza is fighting for fiscal leeway to revive the public sector, slow the pace of job cuts, raise pensions and boost consumer demand in an effort to revive the Greek...

Tony Crosland’s The Future of Socialism was published in 1956. Crosland had been a Labour MP (and would be again) but had lost his seat in the 1955 general election. Labour had won power in 1945 on a welfare state programme that included the creation of the NHS and a new system of benefits. Their Keynesian policies aimed at full employment, limited nationalisation and the first steps to decolonisation. By 1948, this programme had been implemented and divisions began to open within the Labour government and Party. The majority of the leadership wanted to go no further in limiting capitalism...

Since the Greek debt crisis broke in early 2010, Costas Lapavitsas has advocated Greek exit from the eurozone. He argued for that in an interview with Solidarity back in May 2010 and has written much about it since then. He is a Marxist economist specialising in the study of financial systems, a professor at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London, and, since 25 January, a Syriza MP in the Greek parliament. Straight after 25 January, he published a new book, Against the Troika. It has a foreword by Oskar Lafontaine, who was SPD minister of finance in Germany in 1998-9 and later...

A spectre is haunting Europe — the spectre of Syriza (not yet of communism). All the powers of old Europe have entered into a holy alliance to exorcise this spectre: Draghi and Schäuble, Dijsselbloem and Renzi, French “Socialists”and Christian-Democrats... Two things result from this fact: 1. Syriza is already acknowledged by all European powers to be itself a power. 2. It is high time that Syriza should openly, in the face of the whole world, publish their views, their aims, their tendencies, and meet this nursery tale of the spectre of Syriza with a manifesto of the party itself (and an iron...

For the Tories, education is about training children and young people to follow instructions and to jump through stereotyped hoops, and grading them accordingly. That approach works poorly even to develop job skills, and very poorly to help young people become confident, cooperative, practically-competent, informed, critically-minded, imaginative thinkers. It does work to classify most young people as "failures" and accustom them to subordination; and to "sort" the labour market into a hierarchy. It does create sort-of "markets" in which students compete with students, teachers with teachers...

I am starting to feel that Colin Foster is deliberately misunderstanding me ( Solidarity 352). In November, Solidarity chose to publish an article by Jon Lansman. The headline was “Labour needs anti-cuts policy, not a new Blairite leader”. The article said nothing about an anti-cuts policy nor how anyone might get Labour to take up such an anti-cuts policy. It said much about how a new Blairite leader would not help, but nothing about what anyone could do about it. The article, I restate for the umpteenth time, did not tell Solidarity readers anything they didn’t know, nor argue for anything...

Labour say they will cut tuition fees from £9,000 to £6,000 if they win the general election in May. This is part of a two-stage plan in which fees will eventually be replaced with a graduate tax. Whilst both of these options are better than the current system, they are still not good enough. The proposals should be rejected in favour of free education for everyone funded by taxing the rich. As long as there is a price tag on education, no matter how low, there will always be someone who cannot afford it. It reinforces the idea that universities are businesses. Students will request “value for...

He’s promised to bring back the sale of alcoholic drinks at football matches. He’s pledged to make Labour the true patriotic party, patriotically committed to the patriotic interests of patriotic Scotland. And he’s been photographed jogging along the Clyde wearing a Scotland team football top. But none of this has been enough for Jim Murphy, the recently elected leader of the Scottish Labour Party, to achieve a reversal in the party’s poll ratings. According to a recent poll in sixteen Westminster constituencies in Scotland (fourteen held by Labour, and two by the Lib-Dems), Labour will hang...