Solidarity 558, 5 August 2020

"American Carnage"

When Donald Trump gave his inaugural speech to a poorly attended crowd in January 2017, he spoke of ending “the American carnage”. Carnage isn’t a strong enough word for the three-pronged crisis the country now faces. The Covid pandemic rages — 150,000 deaths and rising. Expect half a million virus fatalities come election time in November. Trump’s behaviour continues to make a dreadful situation far worse as he undermines the advice of his own public health experts and continues to promote quack remedies, disinformation, and conspiracy theories. Trump no longer recommends swallowing...

Military, bureaucracy, business élite

Whilst the mythos surrounding the independence struggle in Algeria of the 1950s and ‘60s, and the subsequent canonization of its central revolutionary party, the FLN, remains strong; less attention is paid by sections of the so-called “anti-imperialist” or ‘Third Worldist” left to the deficiencies of the clique that assumed power following independence. The remnants of the independence generation now represent a stuffy gerontocracy composed of the military in alliance with unelected members of the political-bureaucratic class and the business elite, known as “Le Pouvoir.” The challenges of a...

How the Bolsheviks governed

The 1917 October Russian revolution produced the world’s first workers’ state. But how did the Bolsheviks govern? Historian Lara Douds has mined state and party archives in Moscow to produce an excellent book, Inside Lenin's Government: Ideology, Power and Practice in the Early Soviet State (2018) on how the central apparatus operated. In the early period of Soviet power, the Council of People’s Commissars (Sovnarkom) rather than party bodies governed. Douds argues that “in no way could the party central committee be viewed as the effective government of the nascent Soviet regime. Instead, it...

Once Upon A Time In Iraq

The five-part BBC series Once Upon a Time in Iraq is interesting, and worth watching. And that is despite its peculiar omissions. Where is the struggle of the Kurds for freedom? Why no consideration of the fact that the state which benefited from the US war was, ironically, Iran? Once Upon a Time is, instead, a story of the grandiose hubris of the US political elite, their political stupidity, their glib carelessness, their lack of concern for working-class Iraqis, and about the devastating impact of the disaster on the Iraqi people. Certainly, that is part of the truth. Paul Bremer, George...

Victor Serge's notebooks, 1936-47

Above: On the boat to (eventually) Mexico (1941), Victor Serge on the very far left of the photo. The passengers also included the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss and the artist André Bréton. Notebooks: 1936-1947 by Victor Serge, reviewed by John Cunningham. The Notebooks are translated by Mitchell Abidor and Richard Greeman, and published by New York Review of Books , 2019. Paperback, £17.99. Any publication of works previously untranslated into English by Victor Serge can only be welcomed. Serge was a Belgian-Russian whose life is both a chronicle of and an eye-witness to the struggle for...

Previously untranslated articles by Trotsky on antisemitism

Articles by Leon Trotsky on antisemitism and Jewish questions, translated into English by Stan Crooke. • The Decomposition of Zionism – And What Might Succeed It (1904) • The Tsar’s Footsoldiers at Work (1908) • The Tsar's Footsoldiers at Work (1909) • The Jewish Question in Romania (1913) • Under the Sign of the Beylis Affair (1913) • "Stalin never had qualms about using antisemitism" (1936) The 1909 "Tsar's Footsoldiers" has had a previous English translation, as chapter 12 of Trotsky's book 1905 : online here . The 1913 article on Romania has had a previous English translation, appearing in...

Anti-racism: different approaches

Introducing the 2002 edition of his 1987 book There Ain't No Black in the Union Jack , Paul Gilroy was pessimistic about how curbs on immigration were entrenching racism, and about the potential of the working class. Yet he wrote: "The convivial metropolitan cultures of the country's young people are still a bulwark against the machinations of racial politics". Black people have been living in Britain for centuries, but in small numbers, maybe 0.2% of the population in 1951. The much bigger "minorities", since the 19th century, were Jewish and Irish immigrants. But by 1971 black people were 2...

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