Solidarity 532, 29 January 2020

250 million strike in India

The Hindu-chauvinist BJP Indian government is meeting serious resistance. Trade unions have been taking action. The Modi government was forced to back off a series of economic reforms including privatisation and attacks on workers’ rights after strikes in 2015, 2016 and 2019. Those issues have not gone away. Ten India trade union federations called a one-day general strike on 8 January against the government’s economic policies (the eleventh federation is affiliated with the Hindu chauvinist movement and did not strike). The workers were joined by farmers in their action. It brought out...

New decade, old approach?

Three years after Stormont collapsed, following the Renewable Heat Incentive (RHI), power-sharing returned to Northern Ireland on 11 January and a new Executive was formed. The general election on 12 December punished both the main parties, the DUP and SF. There was growing anger at the continuing deadlock, which saw a crisis in public services — NI has the longest NHS waiting lists in the UK and schools are under huge financial pressure — while legislators still received their salaries. A well-supported health workers’ strike for the restoration of pay parity with UK NHS staff (broken by the...

Labour leader: the contest so far

At the moment at least, I am not supporting any of the candidates for Labour leader. In hustings, I think, activists should ask pointed questions, and ask members to judge the candidates by their responses. For example, no candidate has yet committed to work for wide democratic reforms in Labour’s still-largely-Blair-made structure. None has backed the Free Our Unions call for them to respect the 2019 Labour conference decision for repeal of all anti-union laws. None has said that they will seek to lead on-the-streets and industrial campaigning against Johnson. Rebecca Long-Bailey,Salford and...

Bob Sutcliffe 1939-2019

Bob Sutcliffe, a well-known Marxist economist for over fifty years, and at one time a comrade of ours in the Workers’ Socialist League of 1981-84, died on 23 December 2019, aged 80. I last talked with Bob about 10 years ago, when I was seeking interviews and discussions with Marxist economists about the 2007-8 crisis and its aftermath. Bob explained that his health was bad, and he couldn’t contribute, but he was, as ever, friendly, helping me with introductions to other economists. He was then, and had been for some years, working as a university teacher in the Basque country of Spain. When I...

The politics of Jewish victimisation

Orthodox Jews in the New York metropolitan area alone have been the victims of no less than a dozen attacks in the last few weeks. Women have been smacked across the face, spat upon, and had their wigs ripped off. Men have been assaulted with chairs and one whacked so hard with a brick that he lost all his teeth. A woman and her child were pelted with eggs, another mother beaten with her child in tow. Jews have been harangued and baited on public transportation. Jews have been targeted in the streets, in their houses of worship and online. And in the most dramatic attacks, three people were...

The uprising in Iraq

Iraq is in a constitutional limbo. Adil Abdul-Mahdi has resigned as prime minister, but he is still in office, as a caretaker. On 26 December Barham Salih, the president, refused to accept the nominee of the ruling bloc of Islamist parties. Salih threatened to resign himself. There is deadlock, and both Abdul-Mahdi and Salih are still in office. The entire ethno-sectarian political regime of Iraq is in a deep crisis though the power is still in their hands. The ruling Shia political Islam parties and their militias and intelligence forces have so far killed hundreds of the people of the...

Moving forward, turning outwards

On 18 and 19 January, Alliance for Workers’ Liberty members from across the country met for our annual conference to debate and democratically decide upon our programme and priorities for the class struggle ahead of us, and elect our committees. The conference opened with a discussion on a document which provided a comprehensive Marxist analysis of the climate crisis. It argued for a socialist environmental transitional programme, fighting for worker-led “just transitions”, and for a united front approach to campaign on issues such as fracking, new fossil fuel plants, and the Socialist Green...

Exclusion first, politics second?

Labour Transformed, launched apparently by some of the backroom people of The World Transformed (TWT), held its second meeting at Westminster University on 25 January, after a first meeting on 14 December. We saw about 30 people go in, and are told the numbers later rose to maybe 50. TWT, a spin-off from Momentum, has organised “festivals” of debates and workshops on the fringe of Labour Party conference since 2016. LT has made no mention of the second meeting on its website or social media. People claiming to speak for the (anonymous) organisers — for example in urging the staff of...

The Washington No Show Trial

For all Trump’s talk of witch hunts and show trials, impeachment proceedings against him in the US Congress have turned into one big noshow trial. No new evidence allowed. No witnesses permitted. No documents released. The suggestion that if they were to hear witnesses it would have to be behind closed doors, for fear of what the American public might otherwise learn, reeks of the kind of behaviour expected in Putin’s Russia or Saudi Arabia rather than the USA’s supposed beacon of democracy. The impeachment trial has become a travesty. All parties know Trump is guilty as sin, but also expect...

Salvini down, but Meloni up

The outcome of Italy’s regional elections on Sunday 26 January in Calabria and Emilia Romagna was markedly contradictory. In Calabria the combined forces of the reactionary bloc of the country’s CentreRight, capitalising on the freefall of the Five Star Movement since it became Italy’s leading party in the March 2018 election, romped almost casually to victory. It defeated a candidate of the centre-left bloc, led by the Partito Democratico, an outfit, like its opponents, long mired in the deadeyed exercise of cynically serving the needs of the rich, powerful, and criminally corrupt of the...

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