Third Camp Marxism

Joe Biden has announced the end of US support for Saudi-led offensive military operations in Yemen, arguing in a foreign policy speech that they have “created a humanitarian and strategic catastrophe”. The details remain to be seen, but we should use this shift to exert pressure on the British government too.

29 January saw a fire in Napier army barracks, in Kent, which is being used to house several hundred asylum-seekers. Simultaneously the site was in the middle of a Covid-19 outbreak, with over 130 positive cases. Clearly the poor, cramped living conditions are driving waves of deadly infection.

Home Secretary Priti Patel’s response? Assume the fire was a deliberate act of arson (without evidence) and rubbish claims that the accommodation was at all sub-standard (because it was fine for soldiers, despite having been uninhabited for ten years).

“Things are harder for our generation than they were for our parents. But in one respect we are luckier than our parents. We have begun to learn and are rapidly learning to fight — and to fight not as individuals, as the best of our parents fought... but for our slogans, the slogans of our class. We are fighting better than our parents did. Our children will fight better than we do, and they will be victorious.”

Lenin, The Working Class and Neo-Malthusianism (1913)

Fighter against "extremism" John Woodcock (Lord Walney), with two far-right Turkish politicians

On 7 February, the former right-wing Labour MP John Woodcock — now Lord Walney, a Tory supporter, and the government’s official for “countering violent extremism” — announced via the Daily Telegraph that the government had asked him to do a new “inquiry” into “extremism”.

The Chinese state has announced a sexist strategy to stop the “feminisation” of Chinese boys. It thinks the nation’s teens are too delicate, timid and effeminate.

Every now and then on Twitter, users will post about their distress at being diagnosed with a terrible illness. The replies to these posts are almost always full of people making “helpful” suggestions: to forego meals and subsist off fistfuls of turmeric; to subscribe to expensive and miraculous yoga courses; homeopathy.

The illnesses are very real; but the remedies often tell you a lot more about the people proposing them than about how to get well again.

The latest edition of Off the Rails, a zine for mainline railway workers, featuring material collated from the Off the Rails blog.

Click here to download the PDF.

This is a tidied-up transcript of a speech in a discussion with Emma Runswick of ZeroCovid at the Workers' Liberty Zoom forum on 14 February 2021.

I'm not an epidemiologist, and the labour movement is not a university faculty of epidemiology. So we don't think we can second-guess the scientists about the science of the pandemic.

We try to educate ourselves in the science, and we try to make intelligent judgements and comments where the scientific opinion is divided, as it often is, but we understand our limits.

The GMB union called off strikes of British Gas engineers planned for 12-15 February, after British Gas agreed to further negotiations over the terms of a new contract the company plans to introduce.

On 18 February, PCS will begin balloting our members at the Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency (DVLA) complex in Swansea for strikes over health and safety concerns. Bosses there have forced workers to work in unsafe conditions, with more than 2,000 workers coming into work. There have been over 500 positive Covid cases at the site since September 2020.