Solidarity 318, 26 March 2014

Left solidarity needs to venture offline

Bruce Robinson ( Solidarity 316) is right. My claim that networked communications foreclose politics was too extreme. I revised it in the version of the essay that appeared in my book Democracy and Other Neoliberal Fantasies. There I express the idea as the displacement of politics. (The terms “foreclosure” and “displacement’ come from psychoanalysis. The implication of “foreclosure” is that only psychotic acting out and violence is possible. The implication of “displacement” is that political action takes place not in the site of antagonism but elsewhere.) Why exactly was my earlier claim too...

Lesser evilism is no way to stop advance of the Front National

The first round of the French municipal election has seen a strong showing for the far-right Front National, with turnout falling to an historic low of 38.72%. The election is being seen as a blow to President Francois Hollande. His Socialist Party is set to receive 43% nationwide, against 48% for the centre-right UMP opposition. Exit polls suggest that the FN has received 5-7%, an alarming level of support given that it was represented in fewer than 600 of the 36,000 municipalities in play. The fascists had their strongest showing in the socialist stronghold of Henin-Beaumont in northern...

Teenage Gezi victim dies

15 year-old Berkin Elvan, who was hit by a police canister in the head during the Gezi protests in June 2013 and had been in coma since then, died on 11 March. He was hit in Istanbul’s Okmeydani neighbourhood when he went out to buy bread. He became one of the symbols of the Gezi protests. News of his death has created a burst of anger leading to numerous protests across the country. His funeral was a huge protest participated in by hundreds of thousands of people. They expressed their anger at the AKP government and its police force. But the police did not hesitate to attack the funeral as...

529 death sentences

An Egyptian court has sentenced 529 supporters of the Muslim Brotherhood to death. The judge in the central city of Minya took only two court sessions to issue the death sentences, and lawyers for the defence had no opportunity to argue their case. In the summer of 2013, hundreds of thousands of Brotherhood supporters took the streets in protest at the army’s coup against the government of Mohamed Morsi. The military brutally suppressed these demonstrations and declared the Islamist organisation illegal. In Cairo, over 900 protesters were killed as the state dispersed a pro-Morsi sit in. It...

Lithuania: anti-LGBT laws blocked

Amidst the admonitions and international condemnation following the recent introduction of draconian anti-gay laws in Nigeria and Uganda, news from Lithuania (13 March), where a bill proposing Russian-style “gay propaganda” laws was blocked by MPs, came as a relief to LGBT rights activists. A majority of members of the Lithuanian Parliament voted to bring the proposal to a vote (39 in favour, 34 opposed, with 20 abstentions). However, the anti-gay legislation was defeated because of parliamentary rules that require a threshold of votes to be reached as well as a majority. Petras Gražulis, the...

1,600 post jobs to go

Royal Mail has announced plans to cut 1,600 jobs. The cuts, mainly of back-room and Head Office jobs, come in the wake of the privatisation of the service late last year. Unite and the CWU union, both of whom have many members working in the post, have said they are considering balloting for strike action. A spokesman from Unite claimed the job cuts had been calculated to make the service more attractive to the market. Almost four months ago, the CWU agreed a deal with management that would give Royal Mail workers a 9% pay increase and a range of guarantees against zero-hour contracts and...

G4S killers to stand trial

Three G4S security guards are to be charged with the manslaughter of Jimmy Mubenga, an asylum seeker who was killed during attempts to deport him from the UK. Mubenga died in 2010 on a plane at Heathrow Airport. As the plane awaited take-off, Mubenga was physically restrained by the guards. He died of coronary-respiratory failure. Mubenga had lived in Britain for 16 years. He had fled here from Angola, where, as a student movement leader, he fell foul of the governing regime. In 2012, the Crown Prosecution Service decided against bringing charges against either the security company G4S, or...

A “trade union party”?

The Annual General Meeting on 29 March of the Campaign for Labour Party Democracy will discuss the idea of proposing to the unions that they set up their own semi-party, tied to Labour by an agreement but able to campaign autonomously. A motion from Jon Lansman calls for “exploratory discussions... to seek to establish (after the general election)... a ‘trade union party’... along the lines of the Co-op Party - that is to say a political party to further the political interests of the trade unions by seeking an agreement with the Labour Party (rather than by opposing it or replacing it)...” It...

Bosnia: a new kind of social movement

A visit to Tuzla in Bosnia-Herzegovina, March 2014. Click here to download as pdf This visit took place after recent mass demonstrations in Tuzla, Sarajevo and other Bosnian towns where workers, the unemployed and students were protesting against privatisation, impoverishment, and the corruption of politicians. There were small demonstrations on two days that were brutally attacked by police and then 10,000 people in Tuzla, a tenth of the population, turned out in protest. Several government buildings were set alight, the Tuzla canton government resigned and the same day a large meeting of...

Ukraine's Autonomous Workers' Union statement on Crimea

On February 27, 2014, pro-Russian chauvinists of Crimea, supported by Berkut riot police and Russian Black Sea Fleet committed a military coup in Crimea. Right now it’s already obvious that the government of “Russian Unity” movement headed by Aksionov is no more than a puppet of the Kremlin regime. We don’t regard Ukraine’s territorial integrity and inviolability of its borders as a value, we are against violent “pacification” of Crimea, but we think that the status of Crimea should be defined with due regard to the opinion of the Crimean Tatar minority. The latest events show that Putin is...

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