Solidarity 450, 11 October 2017

Mehmet Aksoy, a London-based Kurdish socialist activist, has been killed by Daesh while volunteering with the Kurdish YPG national liberation forces. Aksoy, a trained film-maker, was volunteering as a press officer with a unit of the YPG when a Daesh unit attacked his position a short distance from the front line in Raqqa. Aksoy had been active in the Kurdish national liberation movement in London for some time. An editor of the Kurdish Question website and Director of the London Kurdish Film Festival, he stepped up his activity following Daesh’s massacre of Yazidis at Sinjar in 2014 and their...

Morad Shirin of the Iranian Revolutionary Marxist Tendency spoke to Solidarity . Under the Iran Nuclear Review Act, the White House has to certify the agreement every 90 days. He’s done it twice so far but he is saying he may not do it this time. As far as anybody else is concerned — because it’s not a bilateral agreement — the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, between five permanent members of the Security Council, plus Germany, plus the EU, has been voted on by the Security Council, and is part of international law. The IAA says that Iran is complying with the technical side of the deal...

What role did the Cuban working class play in the 1959 revolution? This is the key question discussed in Steve Cushion’s provocative book, A Hidden History of the Cuban Revolution: How the Working Class Shaped the Guerrillas’ Victory , (Monthly Review, 2016). Whilst the book demonstrates the active role workers played in Cuban history during the 1950s, the author is soft on Castroism and inflates the role of the Stalinists. Cuba in the 1950s was ruled by the dictator Fulgencio Batista. His regime was propped up through the trade union bureaucracy, led by Eusebio Mujal, who ruled the Cuban...

Ernest Mandel (1923-95) was the world's best-known Trotskyist for some decades; the interpreter and synthesiser for the "Orthodox Trotskyist" mainstream; and also a prolific writer many of whose books reached readerships far beyond circles sympathising with Trotskyism. Jan Willem Stutje, a Dutch academic professing "a close affinity" to Mandel's ideas, has written a biography which is of great interest for the reasons that biographies are generally interesting, that they help us see how the subject's ideas intertwined with their life and times. A biography might also provide instructive...