Solidarity 062, 18 November 2004

Some people argue that we must support the US/UK occupation of Iraq, despite everything, because the US/UK forces offer the only realistic way of defeating the Islamists there. Similar arguments were used, for example, during the Korean War of 1950-3, to claim that socialists should back the USA’s war there because it was the only realistic option for defeating Stalinism. This reply by the American Marxist Max Shachtman to the argument about Korea remains relevant, in its essentials, to the arguments about Iraq today. Some people refuse to learn. Others refuse to remember. And still others...

Mark Serwotka, general secretary of the civil servants’ union PCS, has called for a one-day public-sector general strike in early 2005 over pensions. At a TUC lobby of Parliament on 16 November, he declared: “Unions across the public sector need a united campaign in the face of the growing pensions crisis. It is a crisis, which unless the government take steps to seriously address, raises the possibility of unions across the public sector taking united action in a one day strike in the run up to the general election.” PCS members struck for one day on 5 November over government plans to worsen...

The UK’s pension fund bosses control about £600 billion. Meanwhile the basic state pension has been progressively run down so that today, at £79.60 per week, it is only 15% of average earnings. On present trends it will be down to 10% of average earnings by 2020. The New Labour government’s latest effort to patch up the scandal, Pension Credit, sets a floor income of £105.45 for pensions, about 20% of average earnings. Even the end-of-welfare USA has a basic state pension at 25% of average earnings. Now employers are shutting down the final-salary pension schemes which promised more security...

In the event the American forces met less resistance than they expected from the political Islamist “insurgents” in Fallujah. Although pockets of fighting continue, operation Phantom Fury was over much quicker than we (or they), expected. Many of the Islamist/Ba’athist fighters seem to have deserted their “stronghold” before the attack. They will regroup and may fight in other Sunni cities. Right now the US forces are in Mosul “clearing” what they call “pockets of resistance”. The fact that less damage was done than might have been will be very little comfort to the people of Fallujah when...

In this article Leon Trotsky discusses the Bolsheviks’ efforts to break the grip of religion on the people of Russia after the workers’ revolution of 1917. Trotsky explains that simple scorn and administrative methods are not sufficient. Only together with an increase in humanity’s conscious control over both its own social and economic structures, and its interactions with nature, can criticism of religion be effective. Religion often gains its strongest hold among the poorest, and feeds on frustration at the inhumanity and uncontrollability of capitalism. Marxists believe that drawing people...

Uri Avnery, a leader of the Israeli peace group Gush Shalom, was in 1974 the first Israeli to start conducting talks with Arafat's representatives. In 1982, he was the first Israeli to meet with and interview Arafat. Yasser Arafat will be remembered as one of the greatest leaders of the second half of the 20th century. He is sometimes compared to Nelson Mandela. But Arafat’s task was a thousand times more difficult than that of Mandela, who spent 28 years in prison and so remained totally untainted by external struggles and internal struggles and of any association with terrorism. And in the...

When he died, Yasser Arafat left the Palestinian people facing the threat that the prospect of a viable independent Palestinian state, side by side with Israel, is disappearing into the mists of history’s lost possibilities. He had presided over a quasi-government notorious for the venality and corruption of its members. Because he ruled as an autocrat, he left the leadership of the Palestinians to be decided by what may turn into a very destructive factional free-for-all. Reportedly he left a personal fortune of hundreds of millions of dollars. Indeed, Arafat was no hero for socialists and...

In 1959, based in Kuwait, Yasser Arafat started a magazine called Our Palestine. In the guise of another variant of Arab nationalism, the magazine, and the small group linked to it, al Fatah, in fact promoted something new: a distinct Palestinian nationalism. For most people then the Palestinian question was a “refugee problem”, and a problem of “Arab land”, not the question of the rights of the Palestinian nation. The Arab states refused to integrate the refugees, and used them as a standing argument against Israel. Their proclaimed plan was to reclaim the “Arab land” occupied by Israel and...

A report by Cécile Hennion and Rémy Ourdan translated from the French daily Le Monde of 3 November 2004. No-one had envisaged these nineteen months like this. For the Iraqi people, subjected to violence, paranoia and depression, Bush is the enemy, Kerry is the unknown. Baghdad is an occupied city. It’s difficult to describe, but there’s always something in the air to remind you of this. The American occupation is Abu Ghraib, it is torture, and it is the prisons and the systemic humiliations. It is a green zone, a huge Americo-Iraqi camp planted in the heart of the city, supposed to symbolise...