Solidarity 125, 24 January 2008

Will the stock-market crash of 21 January continue, or ease? We don't know. But what about the monolines? The monolines? They are a fairly specialised part of the financial sphere. Yet their current crisis could have huge repercussions. That is how capital works. Hiccups in the tricks and speculations of tiny cliques of financiers can wreck the livelihoods of millions. In early 2007, low-security, high-interest mortgage lending in the USA went into crisis. By the end of 2006, those "subprime" mortgages totalled about $1.5 trillion, of which $600 billion had originated in 2006 alone. A lot of...

An editorial in the Financial Times (21 January) summed up well the Government's new plan for the collapsed bank Northern Rock. "The plan is this. Northern Rock will issue billions of pounds in new bonds... and repay its debt to the Bank of England. Private investors will [take over the bank]. And to make it work the bonds - all £30 billion or so - will carry a government guarantee... "The package amounts to a subsidy [from the Government to the Northern Rock shareholders and its putative buyers] and it may be worth billions of pounds... "[But] the political attractions are obvious. The...

For the shareholders and potential buyers of Northern Rock, the Government is all smiles and graces. Another few billion pounds? Yes, sir, of course! For millions of public sector workers, it is a different story. The Government is insisting not only on a limit of around 2% on pay rises - which, with inflation at 4%, means cuts in real wages - but also on locking that in with settlements lasting three years. A first blow against that policy is possible on 31 January, when members of the PCS civil service union in the Department of Work and Pensions may strike against a three-year below...

To write, as Sacha Ismail does, that U.S. "Republicans and Democrats are ... almost identical in policy terms" betrays either a startling ignorance of American politics or a form of ultra-leftism. The version of this article in the printed paper is slightly abridged . In either case, he gets it wrong about the parties in general and about the differences between the Democratic candidates in particular. To put this as clearly as I can: on every single policy issue that concerns American voters, regardless of their class, Democrats and Republicans come down on different sides. While it's true...

Pierre Lambert, leader of what for a long time was the biggest force in French Trotskyism, died on 16 January 2008 at the age of 87. His organisation - now called the "Workers' Party", and about to relaunch itself as the "Independent Workers' Party" - has in recent years focused most of its efforts on the "defence of the [French] Republic" and a call for French withdrawal from the European Union. In the 2007 presidential election it ran Gérard Schivardi as "the candidate of the mayors". But there is more to the history. This is a translation of excerpts from an article by Vincent Présumey. The...

The French revolutionary left is discussing the formation of a "new party". An important milestone in that discussion will be the congress on 24-27 January of the LCR (Ligue Communiste Révolutionnaire). [This is a longer version of the article than appears in the printed paper] The LCR is linked to the "orthodox Trotskyist" current of thought of writers like Ernest Mandel; its best-known figures today are Olivier Besancenot and Alain Krivine. Three sets of "theses" are to be debated at the congress. Like the AWL, but unlike most other would-be Trotskyist organisations, the LCR is open about...

The 2006 election demonstrated a tentative move to the left by the American electorate. The discontent is not likely to abate any time soon. But a left that fails to force a break with the Democrats will find that this new aspiration for change will eventually dissolve into anti-political skepticism and despair. This is a longer version of the article than in the printed paper. Click here for another article on this issue by Sacha Ismail, and response by Eric Lee . The impenetrable fact about the American political process is its preeminent success in denying its rank and file all collective...