Solidarity 230, 18 January 2012

Unilever workers launch rolling strikes

Unilever workers are planning an 11-day series of rolling strikes across its 12 sites in England and Wales, beginning on Wednesday 18 January. The company, which manufactures a wide range of leading food, cleaning and other domestic products, is closing its final-salary pension scheme despite admitting that there is no financial imperative to do so. Unilever is the third biggest consumer products company on earth, and its CEO is paid nearly 300 times that of its average employee. These attacks will see workers’ pensions cut by an average of 20%, and could see them lose out by 40% in the worst...

Sharp on technology, soft on capitalism

Mark Lynas has written a provocative book that deserves to be read and discussed. Lynas is a long time green activist who has ditched many of his old taboos, including those against nuclear power, GM crops and organic farming. His change of heart on those issues is persuasive, although his accommodation with capitalism make his political judgments unsatisfactory. The “god species” is a metaphor for how powerful humans are in terms of their impact on the Earth’s whole system. Lynas says we’ve entered a new geological era — the Anthropocene, which began late in the 18th century. Humanity now has...

Walking through Capital with David Harvey

David Harvey’s Companion to Marx’s Capital may become the most widely-used handbook for studying the great “critique of political economy” which Karl Marx published in 1867. Harvey’s book has a clear, brisk, and unpretentious style, in contrast to some other guides to Capital thick with lectures on how the author has detected some otherwise-unnoticed complexity in Marx’s argument. It includes frequent, and often useful, comments on contemporary relevance. It is a write-up from nearly 40 years of almost continuous conduct of study classes and reading groups on Capital; and, in effect, the...

History as Twitter feed

Paul Mason is fascinated by the Facebooking, tweeting, text-messaging young activists he has met across the world in the revolts of the last two years. He goes so far as to say that they are “the human archetypes that will shape the twenty-first century. They effortlessly multitask, they are ironic, androgynous sometimes, seemingly engrossed in their bubble of music — but they are sometimes prepared to sacrifice their lives and freedom for the future”. He speculates that with these young people it may be “possible to conceive of living [an] ‘emancipated life’ as a fully-connected ‘species...

Building the revolution

I bought tickets back in November for the “Building the revolution” show at the Royal Academy and was given a 10 am admission time. When I phoned to ask if it would be possible to come later, they told me not to worry — the show was not very popular and it wouldn’t be crowded at any time. So the good news is, they were wrong. When I finally did get to see this exhibition, subtitled “Soviet Art and Architecture 1915-1935”, it was absolutely packed with people. Clearly many are interested in the subject. On a cold Saturday afternoon in London, there were hundreds of people of all ages walking...

Italy's corruption crisis needs workers' solutions

The so-called “united campaign” of Italy’s three main trade union confederations against Prime Minister Mario Monti’s first austerity measures ended as quickly and as farcically as it began in mid-December. A call for a four-hour strike did not signal determination to build all-out resistance to attacks on pensions and living standards. Rather, it was a pathetic call for “fair play”; a calculated and cynical gesture to allow Monti, the “neutral technocrat”, to make a propaganda exercise, showing the masses that “as we are all in this together, the rich will also be seen to suffer”. But the...

Tasks of the Greek left

Class struggle is cutting through the whole of Greek society. The Winter of Discontent is not over; it is just starting. It is the duty of the revolutionary left to place itself in the vanguard of struggles against the poverty and destitution of the working class, with a revolutionary anti-capitalist manifesto, and a united front logic and culture, in connection with the strategic aim of the revolutionary overthrow of the system. Greece needs a revolutionary left which is going to reinvent politics not as a technique to manipulate the masses but as a medium for the self-liberation of the...

Greece: rank-and-file strike call for 17 January

A strike has been called for 17 January across the Athens region by all the rank-and-file “ergatika kentra” (workers' centres) of the region. It could be the first step towards the political unification and coordination of the different struggles in Greece. The 400 workers on continuous strike at the Elliniki Chalivourgia [Greek Steel] steel company have sent a message to 17 January strikers: “On 17 January you are not striking only in solidarity with the 400 workers of Elliniki Chalivourgia. Every one of us is striking for our class against our employer and against the class of employers. The...

Make Labour fight the cuts!

Len McCluskey, general secretary of Unite, on 17 January condemned the Labour Party leaders’ move to endorse the Government’s continued pay freeze (real-wage cut) for public sector workers, and to stress that they will not commit to reverse the coalition cuts, or indeed to make any social-spending promises at all for a new Labour government. Paul Kenny, general secretary of another big union affiliated to Labour, has also condemned the move, and threatened talk of his union withdrawing support from Labour. Union activists should make these statements by McCluskey and Kenny a signal for a...

Victor Serge and Kronstadt

Victor Serge is often held up as a libertarian revolutionary critic of the Bolsheviks’ suppression of the Kronstadt rebellion (“Victor Serge and the question of Kronstadt”, Solidarity 3-229). However, which Victor Serge? In the aftermath of the revolt, Serge was a pretty uncritical supporter of the Bolshevik policy. In ‘The Tragic Face of Revolution’, published in La Vie Ouvrière on 21 March 1922 he said the Kronstadt rebellion was a “revolt of the peasant, petty bourgeois mentality” around the programme “freedom of small trading” and “for the soviets against the party” — slogans that were not...

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