Solidarity 464, 14 March 2018

Behind Wakanda’s utopian vision

Firstly, I like Black Panther as a character. My first introduction him was in the highly acclaimed (and short lived) Avengers: Earth’s Mightiest Heroes TV series from 2010. The portrayal of this character was that of a stoic, no nonsense, quiet member of the team, who relied on his instincts and intellect to overcome more powerful enemies. I then decided to read up on him and encountered him in the Fantastic Four comics taking on the ‘Silver Surfer’, again using his superior intellect to take on the all-powerful herald of Galactus, and defeat him. In my eyes, Black Panther was effectively the...

TV fictions and AWL reality

An open letter to Ashok Kumar It’s been said before, and it will bear saying again. If everything published by the Alliance for Workers’ Liberty in the last five decades were to disappear, and if future historians of socialism had to rely on what our political opponents said about us, then the historians would find it impossible to make political sense of the story. On the one hand we are people who do, and have always done, everything we can to help workers in their struggle against employers and governments. We throw everything we have into that. We preach working-class revolutionary...

Tories welcome “modernising” Saudi Prince

This month’s visit to the UK of Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman (MbS), at the head of a large delegation of Saudi military and business leaders, marks a new low for the Tory government. It also indicates a major strategic economic priority for the Tory government, as Emily Thornberry put it, “to plug the hole that will be left in Britain’s trade and growth prospects … after Brexit”. The frequent appearances of Tory Trade Secretary and arch-Brexite, Liam Fox in defending deals with Saudi Arabia was not coincidental. Thornberry might have added that the Tories in their deals with Saudi were...

US teachers declare victory

On Tuesday 6 March teachers in West Virginia, USA, were celebrating winning all five of their demands after a nine-day statewide strike and included an occupation of the Capitol. Teachers defeated an expansion of charter schools (similar to academy schools in the UK), a proposal to eliminate seniority, and a ″paycheck-protection″ bill which would have ended union dues being collected from pay. They won a significant pay rise and a mechanism to change unfair health-insurance practices. Lois Weiner, writing for New Politics just before the strike won, explains how teachers organised. This was a...

Editorial: Trump threatens trade war

On 1 March Donald Trump announced tariffs of 25% on steel imports, 10% on aluminium imports. Other governments are alarmed by this shift towards trade war. The OECD, a consortium of the world’s 35 strongest capitalist economies, has criticised the move. Further argument will come at the meeting of the finance ministers and central bank governments of the G20 (20 strongest countries) in Buenos Aires on 19-20 March. Socialists should be alarmed too, for our own distinct reasons. Socialists do not endorse capitalist free trade. We are not for the unfettered rule of markets. We are for fettering...

LETTERS: Pseudo-political Disneyland & Corbyn's International Friends

Pseudo-political Disneyland I really enjoyed reading Dan Katz’s article on pulling down statues. He makes a number of valid points. Maybe I can add a few details. After it was pulled down, Stalin’s statue in Budapest was smashed up and one part of it was used as an improvised public urinal. Pretty soon after, all parts of the statue disappeared including the boots which initially remained stuck on their plinth. Rumour has it that everything was melted down. There is a vivid reconstructed scene depicting the toppling of the Stalin statue in Marta Mészáros’ film ‘Diary for my Father and Mother’...

Football versus fat-cat developers

A dispute between Dulwich Hamlet Football Club and the owners of their stadium in south London sharply escalated in the week beginning 5 March. Property developer Meadow Residential has evicted the club from their Champion Hill ground. A subsidiary of the company also wrote claiming to have trademarked “Dulwich Hamlet”, demanding the club no longer use the name. Five years ago, US property developers Meadow Residential bought the Champion Hill ground for £5.6 million. They promised that their plans to redevelop the land would include a decent provision of social housing, as well as...

"There is a world beyond the campus" - Vote Sahaya James for NUS President

Students don’t live in hermetically sealed containers, undisturbed by the oppression and exploitation around the world. Yet too often student unions behave as if they do. We constantly hear the rhetoric of the “average student” concerned only with the costs of printing and nights out, as if campuses aren’t implicated in the injustices which define our society. When institutions like Oxford and Cambridge invest millions in offshore funds to develop deep sea drilling, climate justice is an issue for our student unions. When institutions act as border guards, monitoring the attendance of...

Revolt in the degree factory

On Monday 12 March Universities UK and the University and Colleges Union (UCU) announced they had reached an ″agreement″ at ACAS in the ongoing dispute over the USS pension scheme. As details of the ″deal″ came to light UCU members across the country were at first confused as to why the UCU would have agreed such a deal, and then angry. Ten days of strikes had forced employers first into negotiations, then into making an offer. But the offer was a bad one. Pension contributions would go up to 8.7% from 8%; the accrual rate would go down to 1/85 salary a year from 1/75, and pensions would only...

Bad pay deal for NHS

Recent press reports have indicated a possible very bad pay deal arising from talks between NHS employers and the health unions: a 3% pay rise for this year, followed by two years of 1-2%, and losing a day’s annual leave. With inflation running at 3% we face three years of falling pay. And the GMB estimates health workers have already had a real terms pay cut of £2,000 in last seven years. The initial reaction from many NHS workers to these reports has been complete disdain. The deal may also include abolition of Band One (the lowest band on the pay scale). This is necessary, but in reality...

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