Solidarity 222, 26 October 2011

Workers’ Liberty members have been participating in the Occupy London protest camps (some staying semi-permanently and others visiting) at St. Paul's and Finsbury Square. The atmosphere at the camps is incredibly febrile — all sorts of politics and perspectives are buzzing around, with impromptu meetings and discussions springing up all the time, and the daily General Assemblies taking in everything from how to liaise with trade unions to setting up “healing spaces”. Some ideas in the camp AWL members disagree with — there is a religious and spiritualist element, a strong presence from the...

In reporting the recent occupy and protest movements that have sprung up across the world, the bourgeois media has focused most of its attention on developments here and in the US. However, discontent has reared its head internationally, with unprecedented rebellion and protest erupting everywhere from Chile to Belgium to Mexico, to name but a few. In Chile, nearly six months after they began, student protests show little sign of abating. One of the demands of Chilean students is a not-for-profit education system that is free for everyone. Chile’s education system is one of the most privatised...

What’s behind the series of crises in the eurozone? As Karl Marx explained over 100 years ago, a developed credit system both gives greater elasticity to capitalist production and accentuates capital’s tendencies to overproduction and overspeculation. From the early 1980s to 2008, global credit markets expanded enormously. They developed a dizzying variety of new forms of credit, and a dizzying speed at which different forms of credit could be exchanged with each other. That expansion helped propel the expansion and restructuring of capitalist production known as “globalisation”. It set the...

By Martyn Hudson Paul Hampton ( Solidarity 221) takes issue with my statement that Stalinism was born of the workers ‘movement. I’ll reply to the accusation that I am misrepresenting Serge in a forthcoming article on Serge, Trotsky and Kronstadt but for now I would like to correct one misapprehension. Although I think that Serge’s theoretical work on the USSR is important, I think his critical analysis of Stalinism actually lies in his fiction — specifically The Case of Comrade Tulayev and Midnight In The Century; the analysis of the rise of the bureaucracy was in earlier novels such as...

By Martin Thomas Some readers have found Jayne Edwards’ opposition to punishment in schools ( Solidarity 220) naive and unrealistic. Yet, in Queensland, Australia, many of the most stressed schools use a student discipline scheme which explicitly rejects all punishment. It does not abolish the dolours of capitalism and poverty, and it is far from perfect, but in my experience (across dozens of state high schools in and around Brisbane) it works better than punishment-based systems. If students disrupt classes, the teacher (using a prescribed script) asks them what they are doing, what the rule...

It’s not often that data from upmarket estate agents features prominently in Trotskyist newspapers. But comrades will thank luxury residential property specialist Knight Frank for the news that wealthy Greeks have spent £250 million on homes in London over the last year. That’s just for houses and flats worth £2 million and above, mind you. No doubt others will be slumming it in the kind of hovels that a measly £1 million buys you in the capital these days, but you get the general picture. It’s a safe bet that the story is the same in Paris and New York and other cities favoured by the world’s...

Muammar Qaddafi, who was killed by Libyan rebels on Thursday 20 October after 42 years ruling the country as a despot, had more than $200 billion stashed in bank accounts, investments, and property around the world, or about $30,000 for every child, woman, and man in Libya. That is the latest estimate, from the Los Angeles Times (21 October). The death of Qaddafi, in Sirte, led the National Transitional Council to declare final victory in the war which has raged in Libya since protests began there on 15 February, inspired by the upheavals in Tunisia and Egypt. On 22 October, the general...

On Friday 21 October US president Barack Obama announced that the 46,000 US troops still in Iraq (down from a peak of 170,000) will all leave the country by 31 December 2011. The US had been negotiating to keep 30,000 troops and some bases in the country, and then at least to keep 3,000 trainers. In the end it has had to comply with the letter of the deal which George W Bush signed with the Iraqi government in late 2008 after first and unsuccessfully (in summer 2008) trying for a deal which would license US troops to remain in Iraq for many years, in large numbers and with large powers. The...

After elections in Tunisia the neo-liberal, Islamist party Nahda will probably be the biggest party in the new Constituent Assembly. As of 25 October the votes are still being counted, but Nahda is estimated to have won around a third of the vote. The following article was written by Wafa Guiga, a Tunisian activist and member of the Nouveau Parti Anticapitaliste (NPA) living in France. Some days away from the election of the Constituent Assembly, the political debate is focused on the question of religious identity, in order to hide the social and democratic problems which persist despite the...

The London borough of Lambeth has some of the worst levels of child poverty and youth unemployment in the UK. Yet the local Labour Council are slashing services for children and young people. Those services have already been cut by over £12 million worth of cuts in 2010-11. They have almost destroyed the Adventure Playground Service, restricted opening hours in One O’clock Clubs and carried out mass sackings. We are now facing a further £13 million in cuts. Join the demonstration, to demand Lambeth stop making cuts! Save Youth Services, Save Children’s Services, Save Free Education. Saturday...