Solidarity 408, 8 June 2016

Bogdan Denitch was born in Sofia, Bulgaria, in 1929. His father was a Serbian diplomat. In 1940 Bogdan went to London when his father moved to the Yugoslav embassy there. Eventually Bogdan came to New York in 1946. He enrolled at City College New York and soon joined the Young People’s Socialist League, YPSL, the youth group of the Socialist Party. Maurice Isserman, in his biography of Michael Harrington, who by the 1960s and 70s would become the USA’s best-known socialist, describes how Bogdan Denitch recruited Harrington to the YPSL. He met Harrington, then a devout Catholic, a member of the...

Jeremy Corbyn and John McDonnell and their close associates probably never expected to get where they’ve got now, where their words get the weight and attention due to the alternative government. Many rank and file left-wing activists, too, have been surprised suddenly to find themselves in the centre of large left-wing meetings where ideas are discussed about changing the economy and society wholesale. The whole view on life of socialists in the Marxist tradition is based on the conviction that recurrent socialistic upsurges are built in to the structure of capitalism, but that they will be...

Why is Solidarity making the weak social democratic argument that migrants are an “economic and cultural boon” ( Solidarity 407)? Socialists oppose immigration controls because they mean more prison camps, barbed wire and people drowning at sea — not because migrants bring “us” boons. The advocates of immigration controls want a world where movement is micromanaged in the interests of capital — a fine balance of achieving just right level of unemployment, racist tension and super-exploited “illegal” labour. Around the world people are on the move. We either respond by trying to halt that...

The strike in France for the withdrawal of the “labour law” is continuing to spread slowly, and this week alone it has won over the waste treatment centres; it is continuing in the refineries; it is supported by thousands of local groups of activists, in particular CGT members, who are active in logistics and transport centres. Meanwhile, on 2 June we saw 30,000 demonstrating in Le Havre, and 45,000 in Marseilles. There is also a strike at Amazon, and in the Bio Habitat firm. No-one is still keeping count of incidents of police brutality in the strike movement, but a threshold was crossed in...

One of the activities of the US-based Anti-Defamation League (ADL) is to conduct global surveys to gauge levels of anti-semitism. Their 2015 survey was conducted in the US, Argentina, Iran, Turkey and fifteen Western and Eastern European countries, including the UK, and concluded that 220 million people in the 19 countries surveyed held anti-semitic views. They asked their respondents if the following statements were “probably true”, or “probably false.” Placing the bar high, the ADL concluded that answering six out of eleven questions meant the respondent held anti-semitic attitudes. The...

“Against stupidity, the gods themselves struggle in vain”, Goethe. Towards the end of January, “mostly supine” MPs passed a bill after a “clueless debate”. The Psychoactive Substances Act which is intended to ban “legal highs” (novel psychoactive substances — NPSs) is “one of the stupidest, most dangerous and unscientific pieces of drugs legislation ever conceived." “Watching MPs debate...it was clear most didn’t have a clue. They misunderstood medical evidence, mispronounced drug names, and generally floundered. It would have been funny except lives and liberty were on the line.” Not my words...

Well, it probably seemed a good idea at the time. On 31 May Neal Lawson – chairperson of the “influential left-wing think tank” Compass – penned an open letter to the SNP calling for a “progressive alliance” with the Labour Party. The letter might best be described as obsequious (synonyms: servile, ingratiating, unctuous, toadying, oily, greasy, grovelling and oleaginous). Its tone evokes that of someone fallen on hard times trying to tap a loan: “Most esteemed Sirs! Mindful of your legendary munificence, I turn to you in my hour of need. Struck down by the vagaries of fate, I would humbly...

"I've got a disability and a low education, that means I've spent my whole life working for minimum wage. You're going to lift the tax-free threshold for rich people," said truck-driver Duncan Storrar, in a question to a Liberal government minister on Australian TV on 9 May. "If you lift my tax-free threshold, that changes my life. That means that I get to say to my little girls, 'Daddy's not broke this weekend, we can go to the pictures'. "Rich people don't even notice their tax-free threshold lift. Why don't I get it? Why do they get it?" Government minister Kelly O'Dwyer replied, ineptly...