Solidarity 219, 5 October 2011

Léonce Aguirre 1951-2011

By Martin Thomas Léonce Aguirre, a leader of the New Anti-Capitalist Party in France, and before that of the LCR (Revolutionary Communist League), died suddenly from meningitis on 29 September. He was 60, and had been an active Trotskyist since youth, first in his native Switzerland, then from 1976 in France. He was a ready polemicist, and in the late 1990s, when I knew him best, leader of an opposition group in the LCR called the “Révolution tendency”. I first met him during France’s great strike wave of late 1995. A contingent of AWL members had gone to a demonstration in Paris, and sought...

The markets strangle Greece

In capitalist booms, credit is easy. No-one wants to hold onto cash. The wealthy plough their cash into business, or lend it out on easy terms. In slump or depression, the opposite happens. Everyone is nervous about lending or agreeing to deferred payments. Businesses want hard cash. This cycle is working itself through in a new capitalist world where there is no hard cash, only different forms of soft cash. Hence the way that crisis-management methods are constantly unable to find firm ground. Marx started Capital volume 1 with the statement: “The wealth of those societies in which the...

Physical threats and slander: how the SWP treats other socialists

Young AWL members experienced first-hand some of the worst of the SWP’s political culture on the TUC demonstration in Manchester on 2 October. An SWPer threatened to attack two AWLers (one male and one female) for being “Zionist racists”. The SWP comrade, herself a young woman, had taken umbrage at the presence on an AWL stall of our pamphlet Two Nations, Two States: Socialists and Israel/Palestine and made several visits to the stall, each time with more fellow SWPers to back her up. One “exchange” ended with her being dragged off by her friends after she had grabbed an AWLer by the shirt and...

Predators? Demand Labour and unions fight them!

By Martin Thomas Myself, when I first read Ed Miliband’s Labour Party conference speech (27 September), I dismissed his attack on “predators” as an unmemorable empty throwaway remark. I was wrong. If it was throwaway, then it was thrown away onto a terrain where it has been a stifling consensus in mainstream politics for decades to be “intensely relaxed about people getting filthy rich” (Peter Mandelson, 1998), and yet where now, with the crisis, millions can see that the drive for filthy riches has made society ever more cruel to the majority and economic life ever more destructive. The...

Middle East: the workers emerge

By Clive Bradley Until the beginning of 2011, North Africa and the Middle East had been dominated by authoritarian regimes and dictatorships for decades. Popular opposition, too, had been muted. The so-called “Arab Spring” — now Autumn — reveals that profound social and political changes had been taking place “beneath the surface”. Common to most of the uprisings has been on the one hand, growing resentment — especially among youth — of the repressive regimes, and on the other frustration at general social inequality and in particular the closing down of opportunities for, eg, university...

Nawal El Saadawi: "Only the beginning of the revolution"

Egyptian feminist and novelist Nawal El Saadawi died on 21 March 2021, aged 89. In July 2011, while visiting London, she spoke to Solidarity . Saadawi later adopted a soft attitude to the 2013 military coup and the regime it installed, which is still effectively in power. For our very different attitude, see here and here . What opportunities have opened up for women as a result of the democracy movement, and what are the problems? The problems of the revolution in Egypt and the problems of women are connected... US/UK/Israel don’t want the revolution. They want the outcome of the revolution...

Seize the loot from the predators!

“Companies are sitting on huge cash reserves”, reports a writer in the Financial Times (3 October). “In the US, for example, companies had $1,200bn (€880bn) stashed away in cash and short-term liquid investments at the end of last year”. The banks, bailed out by governments in 2008, are sitting on even huger cash piles. Central banks anxiously stuff more and more cash into the commercial banks, hoping that this will ease up credit and stop a new sharp economic downturn. And yet global capitalism is on the brink of a new crash, and set for a long period of economic depression and high...

Serge's differences with Trotsky

Martyn Hudson thinks that Trotsky and Trotskyism have been unfair to Victor Serge. One of the claims he makes I haven’t read enough about to judge. Did Trotskyists really accuse Serge of being an accomplice to the murder of Ignace Reiss? Or was it that they saw him as being mixed up in Dutch quasi-Trotskyist leader Henricus Sneevliet’s mishandling of the affair? Serge shared Sneevliet’s sympathy for the Spanish POUM (the Unified Marxist Workers’ Party, an anti-Stalinist, verbally revolutionary but in fact centrist formation), defending it against Trotsky’s political criticisms. What does...

Tea Party threat to healthcare

By Graeme Kemp The so-called US Tea Party is indeed “chilling” ( Solidarity 218). If the next US president is a Republican, the Tea Party will move closer to power. Obama’s modest health care reforms will be rolled back. It will literally be “business as usual” as the heath care companies boost their profits even more. Yet the US health care system was always pretty costly and less efficient than its right-wing supporters claim. There is a warning here for the UK, I think. As Tory cuts affect the NHS, further privatisation of health care will be presented to us as inevitable and the only way...

Rules can help children

By Cathy Nugent Although I agree with the basic argument Jayne Edwards makes ( Solidarity 219) — that using patience, sympathy and reasoning is the best way to help a child develop self-control, self-esteem and a “moral” viewpoint — I think she misses some points and overstates her case. 1. It is my experience (which is admittedly not vast) that primary school teachers want to be rational and sympathetic with children. That is not the picture Jayne paints. But the fact that teachers cannot always be responsive to individual children’s needs must be less to do with approaches to teaching and...

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