Solidarity 195, 2 March 2011

Hardt and Negri’s musings on the recent uprisings in North Africa and the Middle East ( Guardian , 25 February 2011) are a studied exercise in rapacity. Having mapped the road to nowhere for the anti-capitalist movement a decade ago, these confusionists now seem intent on misdirecting the great revolutionaries who’ve topped dictators. Read the rest of the article here .

The Ecological Rift , the latest book by John Bellamy Foster, Brett Clark and Richard York, epitomises the strengths and weaknesses of the Monthly Review school: “half echo of the past, half menace of the future”. Read the rest of the article here .

The Film Theatre worker lights your way, with the aid of a torch, down the darkened corridor to the cinema/classroom. You take your place at the battered school desk. The lecture has already started, but you pick it up quite quickly. A middle-aged German tutor is lecturing to a class of 20-something students and the subject is Marx’s Das Kapital. You’re confused. The seminar is relevant and engaging enough, but the sense of surreality is heightened by the interspersed scenes. A statue of Marx is swung through a Berlin park skyline, pitching up on what looks like a children’s toy train. All the...

It is true, as the leader of the biggest political party in the new Dail, Enda Kenny, boasted, that the 26 Counties Irish state has had a revolution by way of the ballot box in the 25 February general election. Sort of. The outgoing government party, the party that has been the main party of government, the main party of the Irish ruling class, in the 79 years since it formed its first government in 1932, Fianna Fail, has had a crushing defeat. It lost 57 of its 77 seats. Fianna Fail has had an electoral meltdown like the one that, for a while, the British Labour Party looked like it would get...

Last Monday saw the “Defend Tommy Sheridan Campaign” (DTSC) stage its first public meeting in Glasgow since Sheridan was sentenced to three years in prison for having committed perjury. The DTSC is backed by “Solidarity — Scotland’s Socialist movement”, a flag of convenience for the SP and the SWP. Its website is headed by a quote from Ian Hamilton QC: “Scottish Justice has notched up another political miscarriage of justice alongside that of Al Megrahi and Muir of Huntershill.” According to the DTSC leaflet advertising last Monday’s meeting: “An unholy alliance of the Scottish Crown Office...

Joel Beinin is Professor of Middle East History at Stanford University, USA. He has written extensively on workers’ movements in the Middle East, including for the AFL-CIO’s Solidarity Center. He spoke to Solidarity about the prospects for Egypt’s new workers’ movement. Workers were critical in bringing the reluctant generals to the decision to ask Mubarak to step aside (or force him out, it’s unclear). They also continue to play a role by engaging in strikes since Mubarak’s departure. But there isn’t a nation-wide leadership of the workers’ movement, despite the fact that it has been...

We now have a report of the formation of two new leftist parties, including one that explicitly calls itself a labour party — Labour Democratic Party. Its founding statement says: “Businessmen and political elites have their own parties and groups while workers, despite their critical role in the revolution, don’t have a political party to represent and lead them in the struggle for power.” Kamal Khalil, its spokesperson, is or was a leader of the Revolutionary Socialist group. It appears that the party seeks to base itself on the emerging independent trade union movement, which is a very good...

Despite threats from the army to ban strikes, every day brings more news of Egyptian workers taking militant action to raise their demands in the new situation following the overthrow of Mubarak. Sit-ins, the blocking of major roads, protests outside the offices of employers — and the official state-run, corrupt union federation, the ETUF — and just plain walk-outs have taken place in virtually all sectors from gold miners and coke workers, via textile and transport workers, through to bank employees — who closed the stock exchange — and teachers. It is as if the lid has been taken off a pot...

Achil Guerrier, a member of the Courant Marxiste Revolutionnaire (CMR, Revolutionary Marxist Current) in Morocco, spoke to Solidarity Social-democrats and Stalinists and Maoists hope to see the King become a constitutional monarch. Revolutionary Marxists and the left-Maoists of “Voie Democratique” are for a socialist Morocco and for the departure of the King. Young people split along these lines are using the internet to organise demonstrations. We have so far avoided real debates on the level of politics, but organise joint demonstrations on the basis of social, political and economic demands...

Loumamba, an activist in the Ligue de la Gauche des Travailleurs (Left Workers’ League), spoke to Ed Maltby There are around 100 in the LGT; it was re-founded recently. Our major implantation is in grassroots unions organising in education, the post, phosphate mining, petrochemicals. There is a struggle within the revolution between a moderate current and a radical current. We are co-ordinating this latter current, which has been mobilised by radical left activists and which has existed for a long time. Popular committees still exist in towns and villages and they are protecting the gains of...