Solidarity 110, 19 April 2007

A fresh start in Iran?

As the dust continues to settle on the row over the captured sailors, a much more interesting and potentially earth-shattering story is unfolding in Iran. In Solidarity 3/109 Paul Hampton examined the description of the workers’ movement contained in a new book, Iran on the Brink* by Shora Esmailian and Andreas Malmby. Mick Duncan spoke to these activists and authors, who here expand on some of the themes of their book. SE/AM: Iran has a long history of class struggle. The key dates of this history are : • 1906: the Constitutional Revolution. The Shah was forced to accept the formation of the...

Repression of Iranian workers continues

By Paul Hampton The theocratic regime is stepping up repression in an attempt to quell the burgeoning workers’ movement in Iran. Last week an appeal court passed sentence on four leaders of the Saqqez protests in Iranian Kurdistan in May 2004, which marked a turning point for the new movement. On 13 April the Kurdistan Court of Appeal sentenced Mahmoud Salehi to one year in prison, effective immediately with three years suspended. The court also confirmed two years imprisonment for Mohsen Hakimi, Jalal Hosseini and Borhan Divargar, but suspended the sentences for three years. The three were...

The “nine eleven truth” movement

By John Moeller A meeting in the Casa, the former headquarters of striking dockworkers in Liverpool. Nowadays it is the usual location for left wing events in town. The hall is so crowded that some listeners have to stay outside in the corridor. It might be triple the size of a normal lefty audience. Who has attracted this many people? It’s Mr David Shayler. Shayler used to work as a spy for the British Security Service, until he discovered that his employer doesn’t stick to the usual official ideals of liberal democracy (the branch he worked for tried to kill the Libyan leader Gaddafi with a...

Support Samina and her children fighting to stay

From No One is Illegal Immigration controls are racist towards all those wanting to come or remain. They are based on the crudest nationalism. They have a particular, and often hidden, effect on disabled people. For instance it is a myth that NHS services are free at the point of treatment — since 1982 free treatment has been denied those judged not “ordinarily resident” here. All non contributory benefits — including disability living allowance and incapacity benefits — are subject to immigration status tests. This government has ensured that since 1999 care in the community legislation has...

Defend legal aid!

By Mike Rowley State legal aid is a vital lifeline for many people who cannot afford to pay a lawyer, including people with problems with debt, police and this country’s endlessly persecutory immigration authorities. Naturally, therefore, New Labour has decided to “marketise” the legal aid system. The government set 2 April as the deadline for law firms dealing with socially valuable work to sign a new “commission contract” under which they will receive fixed fees fro each case, no matter the individual circumstances of the client or the complication of the case, instead of being paid by the...

A country of spies

Dan Katz reviews The Lives of Others (Das Leben der Anderen) In East Germany in 1984, just before Gorbachev and Soviet glasnost, a Stasi (secret police) agent Gerd Wiesler sets up a surveillance operation on playwright Georg Dreyman. Dreyman has been being targeted by a senior Communist Party official, not for political reasons, but because he wants to sleep with Dreyman’s girlfriend, Christa-Maria Sieland, and therefore wants to gather “evidence” against Dreyman. Wiesler wires up Dreyman’s East Berlin flat, and he and an assistant set to work monitoring their victim 24 hours a day. Dreyman is...

Kurt Vonnegut was a socialist

Mike Wood admired Kurt Vonnegut “The year was 2081, and everyone was finally equal.” Kurt Vonnegut’s prediction for the future. Kurt Vonnegut has died at the age of 84. He was a science fiction author who remained prolific, acerbic, and radically left wing right up until his death. Vonnegut served in the US army during the Second World War and was famously held as a prisoner of war in Dresden during the allied bombing. He was imprisoned in an underground meat locker and as a result survived the firestorm. His most famous and highly regarded novel centres on these events and is named after the...

The SWP and the Falklands War

In 1982, the SWP, still retaining bits of the “Third Camp” (independent working-class) political tradition exemplified by the old slogan “Neither Washington nor Moscow, but international socialism”, took a roughly similar attitude to the British-Argentine war over the Falkland Islands to that of Socialist Organiser, the forerunner of Solidarity/Workers’ Liberty. The 4 April 2007 Socialist Worker rewrites their position (without saying that it is doing so), the better to square it with their current politics. In 1982, the SWP was quite clear that there was no anti-colonial issue involved in the...

Permanent Revolution: all mouth

Unlike the SWP, Permanent Revolution, the group expelled from Workers Power last year, are quite consistent. They supported Argentina in the war and still think they were right to do so. They have posted to this effect, attacking the position of Socialist Organiser/Workers’ Liberty not only on their own website, but on ours too. So you’d think that they’d be pleased to receive an invitation to debate the issue, and broader questions of anti-imperialism, in a public forum? But no. Permanent Revolution are continuing another Workers Power tradition: the combination of revolutionary bluster with...

The Sailors, Iran and Liar-King Tony's Britain

By John O'Mahony The saga of the sailors and marines captured by Iran on the high seas on 23 March, held for 12 days, and then freed on 4 april, tells us a great deal about Britain now, on the even of the 10th anniversary of Liar-King Tony's coronation. Captured by a state usually depicted in the British press as a bitter enemy, and as a possible future target for military attack, these serving military personnel nevertheless crumpled in a few days. Some of them went on Iranian TV to make Iranian government propaganda. They endorsed the Iranian account of what had happened, acknowleged that...

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