Solidarity 463, 28 February 2018

The US constitution famously states that “the right of the people to keep and bear Arms shall not be infringed”; historically, revolutionary democrats insisted on this right as a guarantee against arbitrary state power and the development of tyranny. But the early United States was a society composed predominantly of independent small farmers, with only a small urban population. It is obvious that carrying a gun around your farm is different from carrying a gun in the hot house of a big city packed with people, full of social tension and with numerous potential flashpoints for violence...

Almost 400,000 people are trapped in Eastern Ghouta, the last enclave on the outskirts of Damascus that is still not under the control of Bashar al-Assad’s Syrian regime. The UN Security Council has asked for a month-long ceasefire and for a humanitarian corridor to be opened up to allow civilians to leave. Putin, on whose army and air support Assad has relied, has instead called for a daily five-hour “humanitarian pause” Russia’s call will carry more weight than the UN’s. Meanwhile, one of the regime’s worst bombing campaigns has been allowed to kill 500 people in eight days. The ceasefire...

Salih Musleem was formerly the co-president of the Kurdish Democratic Union Party, the political arm of the Kurdish Peoples Protection Units (YPG), in Syria. He was invited to take part in a conference on the Middle East, but was arrested in a hotel in Prague by Czech security forces following a request from the Turkish Government. He has now been released. The Turkish government accused Musleem of being a terrorist. As a matter of fact, it is Turkey and Erdogan who have backed ISIS and terrorist groups… who has victimised civilians in Syria, assassinated its political opposition within Turkey...

The ruling right-wing Law and Justice (PiS) party is backing a law to further restrict abortion in Poland. Polish feminist Magdalena Zielinska spoke to Solidarity . Currently abortion is only legal in three cases: when it is the result of rape or incest; where it threatens a women’s life; or when the foetus is sick or damaged. This set-up is described as a “compromise”. But it is not a compromise with women: it is a compromise between the church and the state. We have church law! The Polish government is currently discussing a ban on what they call “eugenic abortion”, where doctors detect...

On 24 February, around 20,000 people gathered in Tel Aviv in Israel to protests against the deportation of African asylum seekers. Protesters carried signs reading, “No to deportation”, “We’re all humans” and “Refugees and residents refuse to be enemies”. The protest was a response to tensions between local residents and recently-arrived migrants. The protest — which, if scaled up to the UK population, would have numbered about 140,000 — came after the Israeli state began to jail African asylum seekers who refused to leave Israel of their own accord. On Tuesday 20 February, asylum seekers at a...

Last month, the German metalworking and electronics industries waged their most intensive struggle for years. More than 1.5 million workers downed tools in three 24-hour stoppages. The 24-hour strikes allowed them to make a strong show of economic force. The strikes meant between 770 and 980 million Euros’ worth of lost production. Little wonder, then, that the Gesamtmetall employers’ association wanted to prevent open-ended strikes. Unions and employers have agreed to a wage increase of 4.3% over two years from April 2018, and a one-off payment of 100 Euros. From 2019, employees should...

The horrific act of fascist violence on the 3 February in the central Italian town of Macerata, where eight young west Africans were gunned down by a neo-fascist thug, has highlighted the level of putrefying decadence of the major political contenders for office. All of them, from the inveterate xenophobes and the racist (northern) Lega, to the now-not-so-populist 5 Star Movement, through to the resurrected corpse of Berlusconi’s Forza Italia and rounded off by the Renzi-led Democratic Party of government, instinctively chorused that the answer to the ever-more palpable violent presence of neo...

See more coverage of student protests here. As Solidarity goes to press, staff at 64 universities are on the fourth day of strikes over pensions which began on Thursday 22 February. Seven more universities are due to join in coming weeks. There has been a strength of feeling on the picket lines unprecedented in recent university disputes. A thousand people joined a protest at Bristol, and at many other campuses numbers have been in the hundreds. The University and College Union (UCU) has already processed 3,000 new membership applications, with an estimated 2,000 more in the queue. At Reading...