Solidarity 405, 18 May 2016

Education, not exam factories!

Between 16 May and 29 June, students in Britain’s schools will write around 16 million exam papers. A scurry of marking will then, in August, produce a stream of gradings, which will be used to exert market-type discipline on students, teachers, and schools. Notionally exams are a way to test knowledge and skills. Exams which really do that, and certify people as competent to be surgeons or surveyors, make sense. But the school exams are only the basis for a vast sorting exercise. Some students will get good enough grades in GCSE to study A level subjects which will get them into “good”...

“Peak stuff”? Time for socialism!

Steve Howard, a manager at Ikea, says: “In the west, we have probably hit peak stuff. We talk about peak oil. I’d say we’ve hit peak red meat, peak sugar, peak stuff... peak home furnishings”. Other people studying retail markets have come up with similar ideas. Kevin Jenkins, a manager at the Visa credit-card company, says: “We increasingly see a trend for consumers to spend more on experiences rather than on products”. Lorna Hall, a market researcher, says: “People are interested in servicing a lifestyle rather than buying stuff”. Dan Nixon of the Bank of England comments that orthodox...

Letter: Make high salaries public

Elizabeth Butterworth is right to highlight the threat the Tories’ White Paper on broadcasting poses to the BBC (“Don’t Close the BBC!”, Solidarity 404). One minor reservation: it’s hard to argue with the “White Paper calling for presenters’ wages to be made public”. Shouldn’t we be in favour of the high salaries paid by the Corporation to its executives and “stars” being made public? On the issue of bias towards and interference from Government, I think this operates on three levels. Firstly, there is interference by ministers in programming, by lobbying or seeking to influence the...

Leaving principles for later?

At the Lutte Ouvriere fete on 14-16 May, we met comrades from IZAR (Revolutionary Anti-Capitalist Left), a group expelled in 2015 from the “Mandelite” (Fourth International) organisation in Spain because they called for a stance more independent from the leadership of Podemos, the new broad leftish party. The following critique is part of a document published by IZAR with sympathisers in France, the USA, Germany, Greece, and Italy. “There has been no balance-sheet on the many attempts to build ‘broad parties’ over the last 25 years by the sections of the Fourth International. “Whether in the...

Higher university fees and private providers

The government’s Higher Education White Paper, released on Monday 16 May, is a clear ideological attack on students, workers, and universities as public institutions. Here are our initial responses. Free Education is “value for money” One of things we keep hearing about from the government is that universities need to be “value for money”. This value will come from bringing in more “choice” for students in where and what they study. This is very much an illusion and we should treat it as such. When you have to pay at least £9,000 a year upfront, you don’t have a proper choice. Students are...

Venezuela: shift to the right

The government of Nicolás Maduro in Venezuela is in trouble. Destabilisation after the death of Hugo Chavez has fractured the government’s political base. An economic crisis due to low oil prices, and mobilisations by the political right, have brought the government to a state of collapse. The following text is an extract from an interview with César Romero of Marea Socialista (MS), a socialist organisation, which last year left the government party, the United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV). Though this group are some distance from us politically — we are more critical of the “Bolivarian...

French railworkers strike

On Wednesday 11 May the Hollande-Valls Socialist Party government in France forced the anti-worker Labour Law through without a parliamentary vote, using a piece of the constitution which allows laws to be adopted without a vote unless the government loses a vote of no confidence. Trade unions and left activists have been fighting the law for months, and college and university students have been staging protests and sit-ins against the law. The government has also been trying to change conditions for railworkers in the state-run SNCF. The fight against the Labour Law is closely linked to this...

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