Solidarity 100, 20 October 2006

Is Jon Cruddas a left candidate?

Jon Cruddas, the Labour MP for Barking and Dagenham who worked as Tony Blair's trade union fixer between 1999 and 2001, has officially announced his bid for Labour deputy leader and was due to hold a rally in Dagenham on the evening of 18 October to launch his campaign. There is no doubt that Cruddas' campaign will play to the left. His campaign website argues that Labour has “lost its way” and promises to “infuse ordinary members around the central values of equality, fairness and a rejection of the politics of hate”. The BBC website quotes him attacking Blair's foreign policy for breeding...

No sex workers please... we’re feminists

This year’s programme of events at the Women’s Library in London focuses on prostitution. But a series of events completely excludes sex workers, sex workers‚ organisations, as well as anyone speaking from a perspective that supports sex workers’ and migrants’ struggles in the UK and abroad! This is a serious political choice that calls for socialist feminists to make visible our dissent. The fact that this has happened in a place which is usually an interesting feminist space is a stronger reason to react: this is also our space! A number of women around the International Union of Sex Workers...

“Good” feminists and “bad”

by laura schwartz On 21 October women from the student activist group Education Not for Sale have organised a conference, Feminist Fightback 06 (www.fightback.org.uk). In the course of organising that event they uncovered some hypocrisy of in parts of the feminist movement. Despite widespread calls for more young women to involve themselves in feminist activism, some radical feminists actively block the engagement of groups who don’t pass a political test. Among some feminists there is a consensus that the only “feminist” position on sex work is to support more repressive laws and...

North Korea and nuclear weapons

By Sacha Ismail North Korea’s underground detonation of a nuclear device on 9 October, with the threat of more tests to come, should be a cause of major alarm for the labour movement and left internationally. So should the Bush government's push for sanctions against North Korea and the increased possibility of conflict in the region. Unfortunately the crisis has elicited a distinct lack of internationalist, “third camp” responses. In Britain, we are used to the leaders of the labour movement supporting nuclear weapons. At this year’s TUC Congress, the General Council tried to force the RMT to...

Not in my name?

Jim Radford, a member of Lewisham Respect sent this letter to the Respect office on 8 October. Re. your unsigned declaration of opposition to Jack Straw’s comments on the niqaab. (http://www.respectcoalition.org/?ite=1199) I have supported Respect since its inception and have encouraged comrades in other progressive groups, like the Socialist Alliance and the Green Socialists, to do so, on the grounds that whatever less important differences we might have it provided a real opportunity to build an effective anti-war party around George’s principled stand, that could hope to attract votes and...

Class struggle in the 12th century

Darren Bedford reviews Robin Hood (Saturday BBC1) The traditional Robin Hood story goes like this. Young Saxon nobleman returns from King Richard’s crusade full of idealism and good-will towards his fellow man. He is outraged at the injustice that Richard’s brother, John, and his henchman like the Sheriff of Nottingham are perpetrating against the downtrodden Saxon peasantry. He becomes an outlaw and leads a “merry band of peasants in various acts of larceny-based wealth redistribution”. It’s a jolly tale, and for all the fuss about how the BBC’s new series has “updated” the legend, what you...

Hagiography, not biography

Harry Glass reviews The Fidel Casto Handbook by George Galloway This is pure hagiography of the last grand Stalinist autocrats by one of his most loquacious apologists. It is the modern equivalent of a biography of Josef Stalin by Stalinist Albanian supremo Enver Hoxha. It is a requiem for Stalinism by one its last loyal servants. The timing of its publication was perhaps originally intended to coincide with Castro’s death, following his illness last summer. But Casto lives on. So this book reveals more about Galloway than it does about Castro. It lays bare Galloway the fawning despot-lover...

When John Rees justified ditching working-class socialism

Paul Hampton reviews Imperialism and Resistance by John Rees (SWP pamphlet, 2006) John Rees is the new pope of the SWP, establishing himself since Tony Cliff’s death as the main driver of its politics. Yet his new book is remarkably thin: light on the substance of imperialism today, poor on arguments between socialists with absolutely monstrous political conclusions. Rees calls the world order that has arisen since the end of the Cold War “the new imperialism”. He argues that it is highly unstable. He believes that military rivalry between the great powers — the kind last seen between 1914 and...

Hungarian workers against Stalinism

By Dan Jakopovich Fifty years have passed since the great uprising of the Hungarian people against the Stalinist dictatorship. In order to fully understand the developments which led to the Revolution of 1956, it is necessary to take into account the defeat of the Hungarian Soviet Socialist Republic of 1919, followed by brutal repression and the proto-capitalist dictatorship of Miklos Horty*. Still others who managed to escape were killed in Stalin’s purges, including the leader of the Hungarian Communist Party Bela Kun. The minority that wasn’t physically exterminated was forced underground...

1930s America: workers sit down for union rights

Mass industrial unions were created in the USA during the mid-1930s as a result of a series of bitter and extremely violent battles between workers on one side and capitalists and their police. National guards and hired thugs were used and spies employed by detective agencies were sent to infiltrate the labour movement. Labour legislation, most of it during FD Roosevelt’s “New Deal” Federal government encouraged the organising drive of the unions. In 1934 the US adhered to the International Labour Organisation that had been set up under the League of Nations in 1919. The Wagner Act (National...

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