Solidarity 269, 9 January 2013

Welcome to 2013. We’d like to invite you to devote some of the New Year energy with which you are undoubtedly effervescing to help Workers’ Liberty hit its fund appeal target of £15,000. Workers’ Liberty has big plans for the New Year. We’ve expanded our industrial work, setting up new workplace bulletins and increasing the frequency of existing ones. Our educational work is expanding, with reading groups on Capital and Trotsky running in London, as well as a study course on Marxism and trade unions. We’re publishing several of our existing books in e-reader formats, as well as planning to...

The coalition government says it will have cut nineteen billion pounds per year, or an average of £760 per year per household, from welfare benefits by 2014-5. It’s only as much as would be got by a 4.5% supertax on the incomes of the top 10% (not touching their wealth), or a 0.4% tax on their wealth (not touching their income). For the worse-off, whom it mainly hits, the £760 a year cut is a lot. £760 is an average; many households are losing much more. A lot of those losses will come in 2013. The Government’s Mid-Term Review, which gives the £19 billion figure, promises in general terms...

Back in the 1930s, a certain breed of starry-eyed European leftist was eager to make the case that the USSR somehow represented “a new civilisation”. Proof of the superiority of Stalin’s economic policies, they insisted, was to be found in continued expansion, even at a time when western capitalism was deeply mired in depression. The techniques by which this was achieved could therefore felicitously be overlooked in polite Fabian circles. Fast forward to now and you find several writers ready to take a parallel stance in the case of China, and Loretta Napoleoni is a prime example. Maonomics...

January and February will be busy months for Workers’ Liberty. As well as taking part in many broader movement events and activities, we have a number of important dates of our own coming up. On the weekend of 12-13 January three of our trade union groups or “fractions” are holding meetings to discuss their plans: school workers (teachers and support staff) in Nottingham and PCS members (civil servants and others) in London on the Saturday, and health workers in London on the Sunday. On both days, a number of student members and supporters will be participating in the first meeting of newly...

Dave Quayle, the chair of the Political Committee of Unite, and Tony Woodhouse, the Unite Executive chair, have backed the campaign to defend Bob Carnegie, the Australian trade unionist facing legal charges for his role in a community protest in Brisbane. The Wirral 9515 branch of Unite also passed a motion of support, and sent a very generous donation of £500 to the UK arm of the campaign. The Leeds branch of the Labour Representation Committee, which pledged its support in November 2012, has also sent a donation. This money was spent on producing a new leaflet explaining Bob’s case, copies...

On 2 January the United Nations reported that the war between the Assad dictatorship and opposition groups in Syria has cost a minimum of 60,000 lives since March 2011. It is getting worse. Over the last five months, deaths have been running at over 5,000 a month. Bashar al-Assad, whose family has ruled the country with an iron hand since 1970, responded with a speech on 6 January dismissing all opposition as “enemies” of Syria and “criminals”. “The conflict is one between the homeland and its enemies, between the people and killers... Western powers [have taken] an opportunity to transfer as...

The prospect of elections in February have dramatically opened up and sharpened the contradictions inherent in Monti’s technocratic regime. Support for its draconian cuts and repressive reforms by the two major parties had seen their fortunes decline significantly. Berlusconi’s PDL nearly disintegrated. There was a wave of abstentionist contempt for the political class in general. The Five Star Movement, a radical anti-Monti, anti-party, anti-austerity populist force achieved significant breakthroughs in some northern cities and in Sicily. By December the Five Star Movement was polling around...

A slow revolution is taking place in the realm of drugs legalisation. In November 2012 Colorado and Washington states decriminalised cannabis for recreational use in popular referenda. 2012 also saw the first ever clinical trials of ectasy backed by the British government and broadcast on national television. A increasing number of high profile bourgeois politicians have called for an end to the illnamed War on Drugs. There are many good reasons for the bourgeoisie to want to legalise drugs. In 2003 the UN estimated that the international black market in drugs was worth £321.6 billion US...

Immigrants facing deportation staged protests in late December at the Morton Hall detention centre in Lincolnshire. Some detention centre staff were injured. Morton Hall is used to detain “illegal” migrants before they are deported. Around 50 were involved in a protest about conditions in the centre on Christmas Day, while 40 were involved in a further incident on 30 December. Initial reports, including from the Prison Officers Association (POA), which represents detention centre staff, spoke of a “riot”, but an independent inquiry has since suggested that the POA’s version of events was...

Ahmed Rashid, the best-known writer on Afghanistan, thinks a full Taliban takeover of the country “unlikely” after the US and its allies withdraw most of their forces at the end of 2014. The government can retreat to defending Kabul. Its army is surely more fragile than its large numbers would suggest (200,000), but not zero. Kabul’s population has increased from 0.5 million in 2001 to 4.5 million now (out of the country’s total population of 30 million). A large proportion of the increase is refugees returning after the Taliban fell in 2001, so most of the city’s population would support...