Solidarity 254, 22 August 2012

Roger Casement was a former British diplomat and anti-slavery campaigner who became an Irish revolutionary nationalist. He was arrested in April 1916, three days before the Easter Rising was due to begin, and tried and hanged for treason. William Butler Yeats, perhaps Ireland’s most famous ever poet and certainly the best-known poetic chronicler of the 1916 movement, wrote this piece to demand that his remains were returned to Ireland. Yeats’ politics – about Irish national liberation, and pretty much everything else – were shifting, and often confused. But this poem finds him at perhaps his...

Rebels Against Zion, edited by August Grabski is a collection of Jewish left “anti- Zionism” essays that ultimately shows the descent into incoherence of anti-Zionism over the twentieth century. The sheer panorama of perspectives in the book renders a consistent thread of anti-Zionism implausible. And the closer one gets to today, the clearer it becomes that much of anti-Zionism is merely a cover for left anti-semitism. The principal virtue of the book is the long essay by Workers’ Liberty member Stan Crooke, which forensically deconstructs the politics of the boycott, divestment and sanctions...

Some of us have been waiting patiently for four years, but now the newest Batman franchise has come to an end. Despite the other major blockbusters of 2012 (The Avengers and The Amazing Spider-Man), The Dark Knight Rises still drew major crowds and induced great excitement and expectation. Tom Hardy’s Bane from this latest instalment was actually more terrifying than Heath Ledger’s chilling Joker, purely through his eerie semi-calm and less overtly crazy and wild behaviour. He was a harder villain to outsmart because he had so many safeguards and tricks and structure to his plans. It was an...

The tiny group Socialist Action (still formally Trotskyist but in practice highly Stalinist) has recently published an article, ‘Two classes, two responses to the crisis’ which purports to offer a working-class alternative to austerity. It does no such thing. After decades of “entryism” into the Labour Party so deep that it has become indistinguishable from careerism, Socialist Action have long dropped any attachment to revolutionary socialism. What they offer here is a sort of reheated national-Keynesianism with a working-class gloss. It contains nothing in the way of working-class struggle...

Vicky Karafoulidou and Yannis Karliampos, Syriza members, spoke to us in a personal capacity and told us that Golden Dawn is quite strong in Thessaloniki, especially in the peripheral areas of the city where people have never seen an African or Asian immigrant. Racism in Thessaloniki is not quite as bad as in Athens, but even in Thessaloniki immigrant workers are too scared to take part in neighbourhood assemblies, for example. Albanian and Russian immigrants to Greece, from the 1990s, have become quite well-integrated; but then many of them are racist towards to the more newly-arrived African...

Two or three square kilometres in northern Athens look like no other place in Europe. The sidewalks are filthy and the paving stones are mostly broken. The roads are in disrepair. Most walls are wholly covered with graffiti or posters. Around 10 or 11am, people can be seen climbing down the scaffolding outside derelict or half-finished buildings where they have spent the night. People — and not just the obviously destitute, but tie-wearing OAPs and mothers — rummage through bins for food scraps. The amount of human misery concentrated here is staggering. Next to the National Archaeological...

The Socialist Party of Azania argue that when apartheid ended South African bosses “won” the unimpeded right to exploit the working class and to strike-break, locking-out workers as a matter of course when they have a dispute. That settlement, CODESA [Convention for a Democratic South Africa], is in large part to blame for the tragedy at Marikina they say. To help our understanding of the events we reprint an extract from their statement on the massacre. The Marikina massacre is the direct outcome of CODESA, where workers are first expelled from the premises of the mines where they are...

The final total raised in our fundraising drive was £18,096. We didn’t raise our £20,000, but have no doubt the money readers, supporters and members have generously given us over the year has made it possible to keep on producing this paper this year. Thank you. The fundraising AWL branches to make plans to raise money through into the autumn. And London for instance we plan to put on a fundraising gig in October. We will report on this and other plans soon. You can continue to help us by: * Taking out a monthly standing order. There is a form at www.workersliberty.org/resources. Please post...

20,000 London bus workers win a clear-cut victory in the first London-wide bus strike since 1982. Unite’s demand was for a £500 bonus payment to compensate for the increased workload caused by the Olympics and they finally won £577. What is the response published in Solidarity ? Not to celebrate the victory — oh no! That would be too simple and waste the opportunity to attack the London leadership of Unite. So the unnamed author of the piece that Solidarity published belittles the result as “a very minor and limited victory” and even dismisses the campaign for the bonus as a “diversion.” (...

I don’t quite know where to start unpacking the claim that socialist feminists who feel that Julian Assange has a case to answer are really “liberals” who “don’t mind being raped by imperialist ideology”. Yet such a contention — which would have been inexcusably offensive even if there were any indications that it was meant sardonically — was recently advanced in all seriousness by a Trotskyist bloke on an AWL woman member’s Facebook page. Although I have to confess that a shameful lack of knowledge of feminist theory leaves me open to much gentle ribbing from female comrades, even I was taken...