In-depth analysis

The first part of this series, ‘The origins of Bangladesh and Pakistan’s 1968’, was published in December 2021.

Friedrich Hayek

Philip Mirowski addresses the left, very broadly defined — “people who have taken it as a fundamental premise that current market structures can and should be subordinate to political projects for human improvement” — but with “a simple message: Know Your Enemy before you start daydreaming of a better world”.

Over the decades much of the British labour movement has come to celebrate the stormy Grunwick strike of 1976-78. That does not mean the dominant forces in our movement have absorbed what was important about it.

Clive Bradley reviews The Dawn of Everything: a new history of humanity, by David Graeber and David Wengrow (Allen and Lane).

“The predominating type among the present ‘Communist’ bureaucrats is the political careerist, and in consequence the polar opposite of the revolutionist. Their ideal is to attain in their own country the same position that the Kremlin oligarchy gained in the USSR. They are not the revolutionary leaders of the proletariat but aspirants to totalitarian rule. They dream of gaining success with the aid of this same Soviet bureaucracy and its GPU.

In 2002, when India and Pakistan seemed on the edge of armed conflict in the Kashmir region, Solidarity already described India’s rule in its Jammu and Kashmir state as “unbridled state terrorism against the Kashmiri people”. Since then things have worsened considerably.

The impact of the pandemic has been worsened by, and in turn worsened, many forms of economic and social inequality. In Solidarity 578 I summarised evidence from the Marmot and Deaton reports.

August 1976 saw the start of one of the most important struggles in British working-class history: the two-year strike by Grunwick film-processing workers in North West London. Below we republish an overview of the strike and its significance written by Jean Lane in 1998, with a short introduction from 2012. The kind of lessons Jean highlighted in 1998, both the strike's magnificence and its defeat, were still relevant in 2012, as they still are today.