Solidarity 197, 16 March 2011

The following report by Irving Howe of a debate on the record of Bolshevism is taken from the US Trotskyist Labor Action , the paper of the Workers’ Party. The debate between Max Shachtman of the Workers’ Party and Liston Oak, managing editor of the New Leader , took place in New York on 8 November 1946. The New Leader was a right-wing social-democratic journal. Liston Oak had been a member of the Communist Party of America. This debate took place on the 29th anniversary of the Russian Revolution — the first in history in which the workers established their own government. The principles of...

Route Irish is Ken Loach’s take on the Iraq disaster. Fergus, played by Mark Womack, is a hired killer (or “contractor” as they prefer to be called), seduced by easy money (£10,000 a month) and working for a smooth ex-army outfit fond of status objects and weekend golf. He enlists a friend of his but this friend is killed after objecting to the murder of a family of Iraqis, a massacre of the innocents. Loach follows Fergus’s dangerous voyage, mainly in the form of skype and mobile phone texts, to discover the facts of the murder. This is his bleakest film since Family Life in the early 1970s...

The Tories are scrapping our jobs, benefits and public services. Now they plan to scrap May Day bank holiday and replace it with a “UK Day”. For socialists May Day is more than maypoles and Morris dancing — it is International Workers’ Day. The idea of a workers’ day began around the demand for the eight-hour day — Australian workers in 1856 coincided a strike with demonstrations, meetings and entertainment. The idea quickly spread to other countries — 1 May 1886 strikes were held throughout the US, including Chicago where twelve were shot dead by police, and organisers were later arrested and...

The Paris Commune came out of the Franco-Prussian war (July 1870-January 1871). After the defeat of the French forces by the Prussian army at Sedan on 1 September 1870 the French Emperor, Napoleon III resigned and a Republic was set up after mass demonstrations in Paris, calling for the Third Republic. With the Prussians marching upon Paris, a newly established “Government of National Defence” was organised. On 20 September 1870, the Prussians began a siege of Paris which would last for four months. When, in October, the French government began negotiations with the Prussians, the Parisian...

“Stealth privatisation.” A “plan to dismantle the health service”. That is what Lib Dem peer and long ago Labour minister Shirley Williams calls Tory Minister Lansley’s Bill to reorganise the National Health Service. The Chairman of the British Medical Association has publicly denounced Tory plans for the NHS. On 15 March a 600-strong emergency conference of doctors voted to reject it and called on the Coalition government to withdraw it. Most doctors agree with Williams that the Tory-Lib Dem Coalition is out to finish what Margaret Thatcher began in the 1980s — dismantling the NHS. Lansley...

The Morning Star newspaper should be consigned to the museum of human barbarity, not promoted by a rag-bag of MPs, greens, nationalists and Stalinists. The Houses of Parliament is entertaining a motion promoting one of the last relics of Stalinism. Early Day Motion 1334 currently has 68 MPs signatures. It notes that the Morning Star is apparently “the only socialist daily newspaper in the English language worldwide” with “strong links with the trade union movement”. The motion “welcomes the different light it shines on news and current affairs than that of other dailies” and calls on the BBC...

We are entirely at the mercy of a gang of Bushites and finance capitalists so it is absolutely essential, under the present circumstances, to reject the AV system. A “yes” vote is Clegg’s last opportunity to salvage any honour from propping up this dangerous state of affairs. We have the duty to deprive Clegg of that honour. A “no” would mean a good chance of splitting the Liberals. Vote NO to AV and build the extra-parliamentary opposition.

Later this month I’ve been invited to debate some of the leading online campaigners in Britain on the role of new media in the revolutions taking place in Middle East. The organisers are calling it “Activism vs Slacktivism” and no, I don’t understand what that means either. But I do know the organisations that will be up on the podium with me — including Amnesty International and Oxfam. I was invited because I’d written something in the Guardian recently challenging the idea that what happened in Egypt could be called “the Twitter revolution”. What I actually wrote was this: “While the media...

When our last issue went to press, there was speculation about a compromise in the battle over union rights taking place in the US state of Wisconsin, allowing Republican governor Scott Walker to push through cuts in exchange for abandoning his attack on collective bargaining. This would have been logical for the ruling class: “remove organised labour from the fight in order to consquer the rest of the working class”, as the US socialist group Solidarity’s Wisconsin blogger put it. Instead, on 9 March, Republican legislators split the “Budget Repair Bill”, removing the fiscal elements so as to...

Last weekend, in Yemen’s capital Sana’a, police attacked opposition demonstrators with gas and live rounds, killing several and bringing the total number of deaths during the recent round of protests to more than 30. Islamists seem to be increasingly visible in the previously non-party and mainly secular opposition movement in the capital. A radical cleric — once an ally of the president — Abdul Majid al-Zindani, has joined the protests. He is calling for an Islamic caliphate. Elsewhere in Yemen various currents, with differing programmes, contend with the weak central government. In the south...