Battle of Ideas

In this issue of Solidarity, we have excerpts from an interview with West Coast US docks activist Clarence Thomas. Thomas calls for the US labour movement to get serious about challenging police racism and violence.

The British labour movement needs to get serious too.

The editorial in last week’s Solidarity suggests a "programme for active working class unity" in response to the Black Lives Matter demonstrations. The article falls short in three main respects.

When I worked long ago in a notoriously unhealthy and dangerous steel works, Stanton near Nottingham, we often had disputes about safety.

When I first worked there the plant had the worst industrial accident record in the East Midlands region. Worse than any colliery. Deaths, limbs lost, massive burns, and cancers and lung disease as a result of fume inhalation.

• History Of The Left
• Socialist Realism
• Films On Labor And Big Business
• Peace, Imperialism And The Third World
• Racism and anti-racism
• Feminist Films
• Sexual Freedom
• Anti-Authoritarian Struggle Films
• Environmental And Farm Struggle Films

History Of The Left

On Tuesday 5 May the Uyghur Solidarity Campaign will coordinate a second wave of online protests against high-street companies whose suppliers used forced Uyghur labour in China. For those who don’t know, the Uyghurs are an ethnic group whose nation, East Turkestan, is held under Chinese control and ruled as ‘Xinjiang’ province (literally ‘New Frontier’).

Last time the target of the protests was Apple – this time, Gap.

Review of "Searching for Socialism: The Project of the Labour New Left from Benn to Corbyn".

An SDS national council meeting, 1963. SDS would grow dramatically, convert dramatically to variants of Maoism, split and disperse dramatically

World War One, like the Covid-19 pandemic, pushed capitalist governments into "socialistic" measures of public control of economic life.

World War Two would do so even more. And by then governments in Britain and the USA, having to deal with stronger labour movements and sorely remembering the revolutionary tumults at the end of and after World War One, conceded a stronger "social" element and more liberties in their state control of economic life.

Photo by Florencia Viadana on Unsplash

The simple connection between socialism and science fiction is that sci-fi imagines alternatives to the status quo. Frequently, this involves implicitly critiquing our present society or projecting possible outcomes of existing social trends. More to the point, sci-fi tends to imagine change at the level of the entire human species, such as by envisaging how humanity will evolve socially through the application of scientific inventions and discoveries.

The sociologist Robert Fine, who was a long-time sympathiser and sometime activist with Workers’ Liberty, passed away on 9 June 2018 at the age of 72.

As our series of book reviews to commemorate his life illustrates, Fine dedicated his scholarship to many far-reaching topics in social and political theory. These topics include the rule of law, the anti-apartheid movement and independent trade unions in South Africa, racism and antisemitism, and the political thought of GWF Hegel, Karl Marx, and Hannah Arendt.