Solidarity 513, 17 July 2019

Hipster reformism and the technological fix

Bruce Robinson reviews Aaron Bastani's 'Fully Automated Luxury Communism' Back in 2013-14 there was a lot of excitement on the left about “left accelerationism” and the prospect of a transition to a “post-capitalism” fuelled by technological advances based on information. Aaron Bastani coined the meme of “Fully Automated Luxury Communism” (FALC), and it led a fitful life on the Internet. It has now returned in the form of a book which sets out to be a manifesto. Since 2015 Bastani has moved from a politics rooted in “post-workerist” thinkers to become a born-again supporter of Jeremy Corbyn...

“Islamophobia”? It’s anti-Muslim racism

Pragna Patel from Southall Black Sisters spoke to Martin Thomas from Solidarity about the controversy over the Government’s rejection of the All Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) definition of “Islamophobia” . We were against the idea of having a specific definition of “Islamophobia”. Racism against Muslims exists. It is pervasive and needs to be resolutely challenged. “Islamophobia” conflates legitimate criticism of religion, which groups like Southall Black Sisters have always engaged, with racism towards people of a particular minority. The use of the term “Islamophobia” makes it very easy...

Corbyn in the 1980s

The Times of 6 July 2019 ran an article by Dominic Kennedy, "Corbyn's hard-left blueprint revealed", attacking Jeremy Corbyn for his links in the 1980s with Socialist Organiser , a forerunner of Solidarity . Sean Matgamna, editor of Socialist Organiser in the period described, talked to Solidarity . We have serious political differences with Jeremy Corbyn as leader of the Labour Party. But Corbyn has the record of an honorable, serious left-winger, who - unlike many others who had some association with Socialist Organiser in the 1980s - did not change his coat in the years of Blair's New...

Leonardo and the oligarchs

Cath Fletcher reviews 'The Last Leonardo' by Ben Lewis (William Collins, 2019) On 13 April 2019, The Times splashed on the headline “Fresh doubt over world’s most expensive painting”. Accompanied by a picture of the Salvator Mundi, controversially attributed to Leonardo da Vinci in a National Gallery exhibition of 2011, the newspaper reported on claims in Ben Lewis’s book The Last Leonardo that the attribution was now in doubt. The Salvator Mundi sold at auction for $450 million in November 2017 (a picture of Christ holding a crystal globe, its title means Saviour of the World). The buyer is...

Why and how the left has shifted on Israel

Susie Linfield, author of The Lions’ Den: Zionism and the Left, talked with Martin Thomas from Solidarity . Many of the eight writers you analyse had their thinking on Israel shaped by Stalinism. But you don’t mention Stalinism. That was most true of Maxime Rodinson. He was a Stalinist, and even after he left the Communist Party, he remained a Stalinist. Then in some ways he substituted what he called the Arab Revolution for the Soviet Union. He was acutely aware of the regression, autocracy, dictatorship of the Arab states. But at many times he tried to overlook that. Isaac Deutscher was...

“Labour should work with Standing Together”

Israel is in a very dark place. We have a very right-wing coalition government, there are more elections in October, the formal opposition is not left wing. Netanyahu has aligned himself with Donald Trump, Modi in India and Orban in Hungary and right wing leaders internationally. Israel is doing huge damage to its reputation and standing internationally, and is the only country whose right to exist is continually questioned. The Israeli Labour Party has been in decline for some time. But even the genuinely left wing parties like Meretz and Hadash, which is the Arab-Jewish Party, have not made...

Greece’s election: end of a chapter

The 7 July election in Greece confirmed the trends that emerged in the Euro elections: • a comfortable ND (New Democracy, equivalent of the Tories) dominance that revolved around engaging the centre right and alt right voters • a lack of momentum from Syriza (the leftish party that has governed since 2015), which paid the price of its capitulation and transformation into a pro-memoranda, pro-austerity party • the weakness of the anti-capitalist Left to persuade and inspire • the continuing fall of the Golden Dawn, leading them out of Parliament for the first time since 2012. Abstention was at...

Diary of an engineer: Clocking in

I’m a first year engineering apprentice at a Combined Heat and Power (CHP) plant in Sheffield. The plant takes domestic black bin waste and burns it at high temperatures to heat steam, which drives a turbine and an electricity generator. The excess steam from the turbine is then used to heat water, which is pumped around the city to heat buildings — such as the local swimming pool. This morning I cycled the two miles to work in the sunshine, all downhill. Because it’s midsummer, lots of work is taking place on the District Heating network while demand for heat is low, so my route passed a lot...

Land and the oligarchy

The appearance of two books on landownership in Britain, within the space of a year or so, is yet another “flagging up” of the growing importance of the “land question” and a “wake- up call” for the Left. We have to take the question of the land on which we live – who owns it, how it is exploited, how the overwhelming majority of us are excluded from it – much more seriously than we have in the past. Guy Shrubsole’s Who Owns England? (William Collins, 2019) gives us a long term overview of how the land in England has been progressively exploited and expropriated by an obscenely wealthy elite...

All out strike at BEIS

Cleaners and catering staff at the Department of Business, Energy, and Industrial Strategy (BEIS) began an all-out, indefinite strike on 15 July. This is extremely significant. It’s the first all out strike in a Whitehall government department for decades. The demands include the London living wage, sick pay, and direct employment. The union is paying full strike pay. We won’t let these members be starved back to work. Fundraising for the strike funds is one of the best things activists in the wider labour movement can do to help these workers win. On Thursday 18, there’ll be a joint march of...

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