Solidarity 147, 12 March 2009

A council relief centre worker’s blog

Tuesday 10 February 2009 Last night — not many evacuees stay overnight, but they have horrific stories. A grandmother from Darwin whose daughter and three grandchildren died at Kinglake trying to escape, people who have lost their home and are just waiting to hear what's happened to their loved ones. People drive into the centre with great urgency wanting to donate. A bloke drove up fast at midnight and got out of his ute really aggro. He had an esky full of drinks "for the kids", bars and can openers. He was also pretty full and stank of alcohol. I thought he was going to biff me he was so...

Gender, Race and Class — Conference Report

Around 300 people attended Gender, Race and Class, a feminist activist conference on Saturday 14 February. The conference was the product of months of planning, with the main initiators (Feminist Fightback) and the broader organising group contacting, discussing with and inviting different organisations and individuals who we thought would share political ideas in common: left, socialist, anarchist and anti-capitalist. This was no easy task but the positive outcome was very much evident on the day — 15 lively workshops, the majority resolving to take forward collaborative political activity on...

“Bankers” occupy the DWP

Twenty-five activists dressed as bankers staged an occupation at the Department for Work and Pensions on Monday 9 March. Taking over the lobby of the Department for Work and Pensions’ Adelphi House they leafleted staff throughout the building. Carrying banners saying “Target the rich not the poor” and “Stop the Welfare Abolition Bill”, sat in front of the entry barriers and refused to leave. The aim of the protest was to highlight that fact the Welfare Reform Bill was designed by bankers, penalises the poor, and abolishes income support for single parents and incapacity benefit. The Bill which...

Spanish holidays and dialectics

Perhaps Woody Allen is just a dirty old man. His relationship with, and marriage to, his adoptive step-daughter is well publicised. And recent films, such as 2005’s Match Point, have centred not so much around the philosophical conflicts and neuroses of his earlier works as on his latest muse Scarlett Johansson's cleavage. After a series of damp-squib releases set in London, Allen has moved onto Barcelona — and taken a great deal of controversy with him. The involvement of the Catalan tourism authorities in funding Vicky Cristina Barcelona sparked a debate around whether the film was anything...

The invisible people of fashion

Having enjoyed London Fashion Week, Molly Thomas looked again at The Fashion Conspiracy, by Nicholas Coleridge Let me get this straight, I like labels. Designer ones. I like fashion and I’d like to be someone who wears clothes with designer labels on them. Therefore, my critique of The Fashion Conspiracy is not entirely impartial. However, the book is based on an interesting point. They may be lovely clothes with lovely labels on them but where do they come from? The author attempts to trace the journey of the clothes from idea to product to possession. It shows how something that starts off...

Art, the grind, and the tutor

Review: The Pitmen Painters by Lee Hall (Lyttleton National Theatre) Lee Hall’s play has orbited the country with great acclaim following its initial run last year at the National. Hall, is most famous for writing the popular Billy Elliot. The Pitmen Painters another political fable of our times, although this time, it is true events which have inspired Hall’s work. The Pitmen Painters were a group of Ashington miners who in the 1930s organised their own “Art Appreciation Class”. The class did not appreciate the slides their hired tutor had brought and instead agreed to paint pictures...

“No 2 EU” is not an adequate platform

“Trade Unionists Against the EU Constitution” is planning to run lists in the 4 June election for the European Parliament, and on 4 March won the support of the Executive of the rail union RMT for that. • More: www.workersliberty.org/no2eu Should socialists like AWL who believe that New Labour has stifled working-class political representation, and who argue for unions to back independent working-class challenges in elections, back this initiative? Not on present lines. Politically, the lists do not even pretend to speak up for the working class against the capitalist class. They confine...

Stop the Royal Mail sell-off!

The Postal Services Bill, under which the New Labour government plans to sell off 30% of Royal Mail, was brought to the House of Lords for its second reading on 10 March. The legislation should come to the House of Commons within the next two or three months. The Government seems intent on ramming through the privatisation by using Tory support for it to overwhelm a probably sizeable rebellion by Labour MPs. Although New Labour, like all other capitalist governments, has suddenly been convinced of the need for public ownership of banks in order to save the economic system from disaster, it is...

Dispute/Discussion: Nationalist strike - an inconvenient truth

Solidarity’s approach to the recent construction strikes was very poor. While they were a national news issue and a major focus for everyone interested in how the British working class respond to the crisis, we wobbled and ended up downplaying the massive threat of nationalism to our class. We did not heed Trotsky’s advice in the Transitional Programme: “To face reality squarely; not to seek the line of least resistance; to call things by their right names; to speak the truth to the masses, no matter how bitter it may be.” The key reason these strikes spread was because they touched a...

The political psychology of Irish Republicanism

“Ireland occupies a position among the nations of the earth unique... in the possession of what is known as a physical force party — a party, that is to say, whose members are united upon no one point, and agreed upon no single principle, except the use of physical force as the sole means of settling the dispute between the people of this country and the governing power of Great Britain..." James Connolly, Workers’ Republic, July 1899. Download as mobi Download as epub Download as pdf 1916 Victory in defeat Civil war Connolly’s socialist republicanism The Communist Party of Ireland The...

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