Solidarity 192, 9 February 2011

LabourStart has just completed the first ever large-scale, global survey of trade union use of the net. More than 1,300 union members participated in the survey, nearly all of them from English speaking countries (the survey was in English). Much of what we learned will surprise no one. But some of the results were important and in some cases unexpected. Here is some of what we learned... Nearly everyone uses Facebook. If you’re on Facebook, you probably already know this. But those who aren’t may think that Facebook is some kind of passing fad, or something used by students only. The survey...

There are two competing economic narratives in the American economics and business press explaining why, with recovery of the stock market and the purported increase in corporate profits, the economy is failing to produce job-generating expansion. The Keynesians — for lack of a better description — worry that the anemic government stimulus package is an insufficient offset to the overall decline in private sector spending. Consequently, they argue, the economy is poised on the precipice of a deflationary spiral. Businesses are therefore hesitant to add to productive capacity or use more of...

Recently I had a day in an inner-London school supply-teaching Religious Education. In the first lesson I was helping a regular teacher with a year 8 class. The teacher instructed the students that Muslim girls and women must wear headscarves and loose-fitting clothes. I murmured to her that lots of Muslim girls and women do not wear headscarves, and some mainly-Muslim countries have laws against the headscarf. Of course, replied the teacher. But this is as much as the students need to know for Key Stage 3! Actually, that particular school had lots of Muslim girls who didn’t wear headscarves...

I found Sean Matgamna’s article (“The Guardian goes ultra-left”) in Solidarity 3/191 problematically one-sided. We clearly differ on how much attention to pay to the opinions of the Guardian , but even setting that disagreement aside, the article presented a view of the refugee question that began at the admittedly very unpleasant realities of bourgeois diplomacy and didn’t go much further. To pose as an ultimatistic demand the “right” for all the Palestinian refugees and their descendants to displace the current inhabitants of the homes (or land) from which they (or their ancestors) were once...

Selling Solidarity at the Unite Against Fascism protest in Luton on 5 February, I got a lot of hostile reactions from SWPers to our front page headline “No to Islamist counter-revolution” (in Egypt). Nothing articulate, but the hostility was plain. On the way back to London I talked to comrades who had been at the other anti-EDL protest in Luton on the day, mainly of local Muslims in Bury Park. From the Muslims they had had no such hostility. They had sold lots of papers, had good discussions, and found people agreeing that yes, it would be very bad if the Muslim Brotherhood took power in...

The “People’s Convention” against cuts called by SWP and LRC on 12 February should be a chance to make good the damage done by the SP’s coup in the National Shop Stewards’ Network (creating a new SP-line “anti-cuts movement”) and the Coalition of Resistance (anti-cuts campaigning as an exercise in listening to lots of celebrities speak). To take that chance, all the SWP needed was good sense, telling them to make the conference practically-focused, open for serious debate, and unity-oriented. But four days before the conference there is no agenda — just an ever-longer list of workshops and...

Tommy Sheridan, the former leader of the Scottish Socialist Party, has been sentenced to three years in jail for perjury. Unlike other self-promoting fake-left demagogues such as George Galloway, Tommy Sheridan has a respectworthy background in socialist politics and has been an impressive class fighter. Many would have found it difficult to sympathise with him after a chemically-pure fit of egomania led him to foolishly smash up the SSP (at one time a project with great potential) in order to preserve his public image. As his eventual sentencing shows, that was all for nothing. The wreckage...

Tim Flatman, who has recently returned from the region, concludes a series of three articles about South Sudan. The process of referendum has had positive consequences for grassroots independent political organisation in South Sudan. People had to come together to demand separation for themselves (as political parties were by law banned from doing so). It has been the central demand of many groups whose purpose was previously primarily social, those traditional structures which still exist, etc while specific forms of association have also sprung up to fill the political gap. Southern Sudan...

On 12 January 2010, Haiti was rocked by an earthquake which killed 230,000 people. One year on, in the capital Port-au-Prince, between 1.3 and 1.7 million people continue to live in squalid tents with little hope of moving. Despite the huge sums of money charities and aid organisations received in a show of international solidarity following the quake, less than 30,000 of those displaced have found permanent homes. A recent cholera outbreak killed more than 3,300 people; and of the 20 million cubic metres of rubble created by the disaster, less than 5 per cent has been cleared. Already the...

With the aid of an overwhelming police operation and in the absence of any effective counter-mobilisation, the anti-Muslim racists of the English Defence League marched and rallied through Luton. Anywhere between 1500 to 3000 EDL supporters (media and police estimates vary) massed from across the country for what the organisation called a “homecoming” event. At the same time, up to 1000 anti-racists and perhaps as many more local people – mainly from Muslim, Pakistani backgrounds – took to the streets to protest and defend the most vulnerable areas of Luton. Elsewhere in the city a UAF...