Solidarity 348, 7 January 2015

Review of Costas Lapavitsas' Profiting without producing , Verso 2013 Capitalist exploitation is not just by the boss extracting from the worker, in return for a meagre more-or-less “living wage”, an expansible value-added which may be something like three times what’s paid out in wages. It also comes from making working-class households pay interest on debts which they run up, often on disadvantageous terms, because of their relative poverty and relative lack of power in the markets. This “other” exploitation is not a new idea. Costas Lapavitsas quotes references to it from Marx’s Theories of...

The second edition of Class against Class, the miners' strike 1984-5 is now available. New items include a review of “The Battle for Orgreave” by the late Rob Dawber, an account of Lesbians and Gays Support the Miners, and retrospective analysis of the importance of the strike. From the introduction: Between March 1984 and March 1985, British miners fought one of the great epics of working-class history. In scope, intensity and duration their strike is unique in the history of the British labour movement. At issue in that strike was the fate of the “social democratic” welfare-state “compromise...

John Cunningham reviews Private Island: Why Britain Now Belongs to Someone Else, by James Meek (Verso Press) and How To Speak To Money by John Lanchester (Faber and Faber). Both these books perform a valuable service to those concerned with mounting a sustained critical analysis of how capitalism in its present day forms actually works. Although neither author draws any radical conclusions from his analysis, there is rich material in these pages to learn from. Much of what James Meek has to say about the state of the British economy will probably come as no surprise to readers of Solidarity...

Greece will have new parliamentary elections early, on 25 January. According to all recent opinion polls, the left party Syriza, which lost the June 2012 election narrowly to the conservative New Democracy (ND) party, is now well ahead of ND. On all the poll figures, Syriza and the Greek Communist Party (KKE) between them will win a parliamentary majority on 25 January. The early elections followed the failure on 29 December of the ND-led government's third attempt to get Parliament to elect a new President. A wave of celebration followed outside the parliament. The movements that have been in...

2014 closed with the election of Jim Murphy and Kezia Dugdale as leader and deputy leader of the Scottish Labour Party. Murphy won 56% of the total electoral college vote (split three ways between: MSPs and Scottish MPs and MEPs; individual Labour Party members; affiliated trade unions), against 35% for left-wing challenger Neil Findlay. The third candidate, Sarah Boyack, won 9%. In the deputy leadership election Kezia Dugdale won 63%, against 37% for left-wing challenger Katy Clark. Murphy and Dugdale both won clear majorities in the elected representatives’ and individual members’ sections...

In the run up to the general election in May, Workers’ Liberty will be supporting the Socialist Campaign for a Labour Victory , which combines advocating a Labour government with using the election to boost working-class struggles and raise the profile of socialist ideas. We call on other socialists and labour movement militants, whatever your affiliation, to join the campaign. Any version of the Tories remaining in office — by themselves, in coalition with the Lib Dems or, worst of all, in coalition with UKIP — would be a disaster for the working class. Yet the only alternative government is...

Colin Foster ( Solidarity 347) professes to not understand why I was irate with Jon Lansman’s article in 343. In the immediate aftermath of a discussion at Workers’ Liberty’s conference where I, alongside other comrades, argued for a more critical approach to Labour, we publish an article that argues simply that the current Labour leadership shouldn’t be got rid of. Can Colin really not understand why I was irate? Colin characterises the column as bland, he might have added right-wing! How else would you describe an article with no content except defend Miliband? During the period between 1987...

Jon Lansman, editor of the Left Futures blog, spoke to Martin Thomas shortly before the Scottish Labour leadership election result. MT: In 2010, several factors suggested the possibility of a new start in the Labour Party. A new leader was emphatic that he was not Tony Blair. The fact that we had that new leader came from the unions asserting themselves more. In July 2011 Unite announced a new political strategy, at least potentially more assertive again. The Labour Party had an influx of new members, not large hy historical standards but sizeable by recent standards. There was an apparent...

Workers' Liberty member Patrick Murphy is standing for Deputy General Secretary of the National Union of Teachers, in a ballot running from 6-26 January. Patrick is standing for a radically different vision of how the union should be run, one where the union is controlled from the workplace. He is calling for workplace branches to form part of the NUT structure, and for one union for all school workers. Teachers are facing the worst attacks in a generation, and the leadership of the NUT has not led a campaign that was serious in making the government back down. Patrick calls for positive...

Events in Ukraine in 2014 divided the left in Britain, just as they divided the left internationally. In Britain one the organisations most vociferous in arguing that the Maidan protests were dominated by fascists, culminated in a fascist-led coup, and then triggered a genocidal civil war against the forces of the anti-fascist resistance was Workers Power (WP). (For the reality of the Maidan protests, see here .) WP maintained this position throughout 2014. Indeed, its end-of-the-year ‘analysis’ of the sham elections held in the south-east of Ukraine in November can legitimately be described...