So& Wloirkdersa’ Lirbeirtty y No 273 6 February 2013 30p/80p www.workersliberty.org For a workers’ government

Lewisham Hospital: Syriza: reverse Spielberg’s fighting on drift to the right! Lincoln myth page 3 pages 6-7 page 8

Chancellor George DON’ T LET Osborne: his Banking Reform Bill will barely touch the power and THE BANKS wealth of the banks

Antony Jenkins, chief exec of scandal-struck Barclays: waiving a £1 mllion bonus - this year, GET AWAY anyway

Stephen Hester, RBS chief exec, enjoys the Chancellor’s confidence. The bank faces a £500m WITH IT! fine for Libor rate-fixing More scandals: see page 5 2 NEWS

What is the Alliance for Workers’ Liberty? Today one class, the working class, lives by selling its labour power to another, the capitalist class, which owns the means of Fight saves a library production. Society is shaped by the capitalists’ relentless drive to increase their wealth. Capitalism causes poverty, unemployment, the blighting of lives By Vicki Morris community to continue run - opened the library, stocked librarian is a priority. ... the by overwork, imperialism, the destruction of the ning a library in the build - with donated books. funding offered by the environment and much else. Save Friern Barnet Library ing. They had planned to Against the accumulated wealth and power of the Throughout, the cam - council does not cover a full capitalists, the working class has one weapon: solidarity. campaigners are cele - sell the building. paigners have demanded time librarian, but as the The Alliance for Workers’ Liberty aims to build solidarity through brating partial victory in This climbdown result that the library remain inte - two year lease is negoti - struggle so that the working class can overthrow capitalism. We want their fight to save their from a two-year campaign grated with Barnet’s li - ated... this will be kept at socialist revolution: collective ownership of industry and services, local library, closed by by residents, given an braries, staffed by library the front of the conversa - workers’ control and a democracy much fuller than the present system, Barnet Council in April added boost recently by Oc - professionals, and paid for tion. We are strongly op - with elected representatives recallable at any time and an end to 2012. cupy London activists com - by the Council. posed to austerity and all bureaucrats’ and managers’ privileges. Barnet Council has ing to squat the building. The squatters lost their the cuts, especially to the li - With the existing Save We fight for the labour movement to break with “social partnership” agreed to give a two-year case against eviction in De - brary service.” and assert working-class interests militantly against the bosses. Friern Barnet Library lease to a group from the cember and were given a Barnet Council has now Our priority is to work in the workplaces and trade unions, Group, the squatters re- month to leave. supporting workers’ struggles, producing workplace bulletins, helping moved to cut most of its With time running out professional librarians — organise rank-and-file groups. before the library was due We are also active among students and in many campaigns and keeping a proper library to revert to the Council, the alliances. British troops go to Mali service in the borough will campaigners accepted, re - be a fight for all of us, not luctantly, that the only way We stand for: just for Friern Barnet. By Colin Foster French government talks to save it for the time being ● Independent working-class representation in politics. The Labour group will of withdrawing soon. was to put in a “community ● A workers’ government, based on and accountable to the labour have to be pushed to com - On 29 January the Gov - Full French withdrawal bid” to run a volunteer li - movement. mit to reintegrating the li - ● A workers’ charter of trade union rights — to organise, to strike, to ernment announced that any time soon still remains brary. The Council has brary into Barnet Libraries picket effectively, and to take solidarity action. up to 400 British troops unlikely. The Islamist mili - agreed, it seems, to pay ● Taxation of the rich to fund decent public services, homes, education will be sent to Mali to tias have retreated from £25,000 a year running should it win the 2014 coun - cil elections. and jobs for all. help the French interven - the towns to the desert, costs. The partial victory of the ● A workers’ movement that fights all forms of oppression. Full tion, and maybe for over rather than being defeated The local Tory adminis - Friern Barnet Library equality for women and social provision to free women from the burden a year. in combat. tration will try to paint this of housework. Free abortion on request. Full equality for lesbian, gay, A stable and widely- campaign is an inspiration The French troops have as a victory for the “Big So - to all anti-cuts campaign - bisexual and transgender people. Black and white workers’ unity accepted political settle - ciety” idea, but the cam - against racism. now taken control of all ers, but we know that ment in Mali is still paigners reject such a spin. ● Open borders. three main towns in the remote. much remains to be ● Global solidarity against global capital — workers everywhere have north-west of Mali, and the In a statement they say: fought for. more in common with each other than with their capitalist or Stalinist “... putting in place a paid rulers. ● Democracy at every level of society, from the smallest workplace or community to global social organisation. Oppose cuts at Whittington Hospital Freedom ● Working-class solidarity in international politics: equal rights for all nations, against imperialists and predators big and small. By Daniel Rawnsley 570 workers face redun - CAMPAIGN DATES ● Maximum left unity in action, and openness in debate. dancy and, in total, a third bookshop ● If you agree with us, please take some copies of Solidarity to sell — More than 70 people at - of the hospital site is being • Tuesday 12 February, De - and join us! tended a meeting at Cam - put up for sale. fend Whittington Coalition The anarchist and radi - den Town Hall to discuss At the meeting Shirley Public Meeting, Archway cal East London book - Contact us: halting cuts at Whittington Franklin, chair of Defend Methodist Hall, Archway shop Freedom, linked Hospital in Islington. Whittington Coalition, said Close, 7.30pm. to the Freedom Press ● 020 7394 8923 ● [email protected] • Monday 18 February, publishing house Whittington Health Trust involving workers from the The editor (Cathy Nugent), 20e Tower Workshops, Riley hospital was “absolutely es - Campaign Organising Meet - founded in Whitechapel Road, London, SE1 3DG. Board wants to close in-pa - ing, Archway Methodist by Peter Kropotkin in tient wards and reduce bed sential”, but also an uphill ● Printed by Trinity Mirror struggle. Hall, Archway Close, 1886, was firebombed numbers for the elderly and She accused hospital 7.30pm. on the morning of Fri - new parents, close and sell management of intimidat - • Wednesday 27 February, day 1 February. off all staff accommodation, ing workers, saying they Lobby of Whittington Hos - No-one was hurt, but and cap births at the hospi - had warned them to stay Get Solidarity every week! tal at 4,000 a year. pital Board Meeting, 2pm, the store’s stock, and the away from the campaign. details TBC. o archives of the Freedom ● Trial sub, 6 issues £5 newspaper, were badly ● 22 issues (six months). £18 waged o damaged. It is not yet £9 unwaged o Special offer on books by AWL authors known who carried out ● 44 issues (year). £35 waged o n Three-pack: Antonio Gramsci: working-class revolutionary (ed: Martin Thomas); Working- the attack, but Freedom class politics and anarchism (ed: Ira Berkovic); and What is capitalism? Can has previously suffered £17 unwaged o attacks by Nazi groups ● European rate: 28 euros (22 issues) o it last? (ed: Cathy Nugent). Three books for £10 (plus £2.20 postage within due to its links with anti- UK) fascist activism. or 50 euros (44 issues) o The shop has Tick as appropriate above and send your money to: n Four-pack: Gramsci; Anarchism; Capitalism; and How Solidarity Can launched an appeal to 20e Tower Workshops, Riley Road, London, SE1 3DG Change The World (ed: Sean Matgamna). Four books for £12 (plus £2.20 help pay for repairs. postage) Hip-hop artist Skribbo Cheques (£) to “AWL”. has released a mixtape, Or make £ and euro payments at workersliberty.org/sub. n Five-pack: Gramsci; Anarchism; Capitalism; Solidarity; and either Fate of featuring Workers’ Lib - the Russian Revolution (ed: Sean Matgamna) or Treason of the Intellectuals erty member The Ruby Name ...... Kid, to support the ap - (by Sean Matgamna). Five books for £17 (plus £7.40 postage) peal. Address ...... n Six-pack: All six books for £20 (plus £8.30 postage). • “How you can help”, Buy online: www.workersliberty.org/bookoffer. Cheques to AWL, 20E Tower Workshops, Riley from Freedom’s website: ...... bit.ly/11FOVqq Rd, London SE1 3DG. For postage prices for destinations outside UK, email I enclose £ ...... • Download the “De - [email protected]. Offer lasts until 16 February. manding the Impossible” mixtape: bit.ly/URoklV 3 NHS Hunt announces Lewisham cuts. The fight continues

By Jill Mountford, “An A&E of the type de - guments for solidarity in country facing crisis point, Save Lewisham scribed (by Hunt) is little support of the NHS. To put wondering what to do with Hospital Campaign more than an Urgent Care pressure on Unite and the the eye-watering deficits as unit. Patients will still have TUC to call a national a result of paying hand over organising committee to be transported to other demonstration in defence of fist on PFI contracts. The re - (pc) hospitals because we will the NHS. organisation of Lewisham no longer have acute provi - The workers in the hospi - Hospital and the South Lon - When he was just an op - sion here.” tal also have to become bet - don Health Trust is a test position MP and looking Later this year a new ter organised. Now is the case for the government, for votes, Jeremy Hunt, Trust will be formed time to look at how a work- but they cannot afford to with David Cameron’s (Lewisham together with in or occupation to keep the wait around to see how it support, campaigned to three hospitals from the old hospital could work And if goes over the next three save his local A&E (the now bankrupt South Lon - the bulldozers do come years. Royal Surrey Hospital) don Healthcare Trust). onto the hospital campus, Thousands on the streets, more battles ahead If they are to implement from closure. That was Under these plans services how do we organise to stop their plans for the NHS, then. currently provided by the demolition? belief that Hunt could ig - missioning Groups (CCGs) they will need to open up a Lewisham will be wound As Health Minister he is nore the strength of local continue to commission number of second fronts in down over three years. Pa - WRECKERS closing down hospitals, cut - opposition. services, and health work - their war on universal free tients will be transferred to The cuts to Lewisham ting jobs, selling off and Over the coming months ers to choose to work at health care. More sham con - already over-stretched Hospital make no sense. giving away services, and we have to make sure the Lewisham hospital, are nec - sultations and reconfigura - neighbouring hospitals. generally “reconfiguring” energy and angry determi - essary to keep the hospital For the last three years tions will soon be taking the Health Service to his Hunt has allocated just nation of the campaign con - going. That way it is hard Lewisham has been in the place, followed by more heart’s content. £36 million to get those tinues to grow and is ready for the service to be closed. top 40 hospitals list. It has cuts and closures. On 31 January, only five ready to cope with and able to fight on a num - There are many proposals no financial deficit, it has Just two years off a gen - days after 25,000 people Lewisham patients. ber of fronts. on the table to keep the state-of-the-art services, and eral election where the NHS Dr Louise Irvine, Chair of marched to defend campaign going. it is bang in the centre of will be centre stage, we the Save Lewisham Hospi - ● Lewisham Hospital, Hunt PLANS A shop front on the one of London’s, indeed the should be demanding tal Campaign, says “Hunt announced plans to down - Very careful consideration high street funded by the country’s, most deprived things from Labour. At last tells us he has accepted the grade state of the art A&E is now being given to council; areas. year’s Labour Party confer - recommendations on the ● and maternity units, to legal challenges. A newspaper outlining No sense at all unless ence policy was passed to basis of ‘100 lives per your point of view is slash elderly care and ac - These are not to be dis - the arguments to be distrib - “liberate the NHS of PFI annum saved’ but this is formed by Tory ideology. claimed children’s services, missed; winning a stay of uted across the borough debts”. Yet Shadow Health just a snapshot figure of a Jeremy Hunt is not working to sell off or demolish parts execution is useful as part into neighbouring boroughs Minister Andy Burnham national assessment, not lo - freelance. He’s doing a job of the hospital campus, to of an overall strategy to de - an●d around London. has merely said that he will cally accurate in the context on behalf of the government sell off land. And this was fend the hospital and A conference to bring of the model proposed. As a abolish elements of the dressed up as a concession proved to be useful in other together hospital campaigns and the class he politically GP, I can state unequivo - Health and Social Care Act. to the magnificent commu - hospital campaigns such as from around the country to represents. The Tories and cally that these proposals What does this mean? nity campaign! in Gloucester and Chase share ideas and plan coordi - the snivelling coalition bag As we move closer to are going to cost lives.” Hunt says the 285,000 Farm. nated action in defence of carriers, the Lib-Dems, are the general election, we Hours after Hunt’s an - out to wreck the NHS. strong population of In the meantime we have ou●r NHS. should make sure that in - Lewisham will still enjoy nouncement, 400 people to make sure that everyone A pledge for health The Health and Social dividual Labour candi - 75% of its newly refur - converged on the hospital understands that it is “busi - workers in Lewisham to Care Act is set to reorganise dates give their full and bished (to the tune of £12 to show their support for ness as usual” at Lewisham stay with the hospital and the NHS so that it is little unconditional support to the campaign and in soli - million) A&E. This is pure Hospital. Urging patients to fig●ht to defend its services. more than a brand, a logo rebuilding the NHS as a spin. As Chidi Ejimofo, darity with the hospital choose Lewisham, GPs to Taking the campaign to on contracted out services. priority for the next Lewisham Hospital A&E workers. The mood was one refer patients, Clinical Com - the unions, winning the ar - There are more than 20 Labour government. consultant, pointed out: of anger and, for some, dis - hospital trusts across the Q & A: How workers can save Lewisham Hospital

By a Lewisham health ernment to back down. This managers; we use our tionary. This doesn’t fit nated action can be taken. structure and resources for worker is why we have to force the judgement and experience with today’s capitalist In A&E it would mean such a network. But the government to leave to make the practical deci - model. That’s why the gov - working with the Ambu - unions in Lewisham hospi - When a service is threat - Lewisham Hospital alone. sions about how best to pro - ernment wants to destroy it. lance Service to make sure tal are either not willing, or vide the service from patients are not taken away ened with closure, our not big enough to take on tactics must aim to keep And how can workers do day-to-day and week-to- Can workers take over? from A&E. It would mean this? week. Workers will have to all other departments con - this role. the service open and run - While the community ning. Strike action just The Trust’s management This reality of how things have a flexible strategy tinuing to provide support campaign will continue and won’t work. The thing that has calculated it is in its in - get done is normally hid - which changes as events services to A&E. workers can do is keep terests to try to maintain den. By challenging man - unfold. In maternity it would give courage to workers, working! services at the hospital. But agement it becomes clear In the first place we need mean mothers continuing to the essential task now is for management could change that workers, in any organi - an organised network of choose Lewisham, mid - workers to organise. We its mind or be replaced. sation, when they act collec - workers who are prepared wives and GPs continuing will not build this kind of But isn’t the main focus When workers are in - tively, have the real power. to act, in contact with the to refer there. network overnight and so the community campaign? structed to start closing They can take over the community campaign, with It will be necessary for we need to make it a prior - The campaign has down services, they will workplace. They are able to workers in other work - workers in other hospitals demonstrated how impor - have to refuse to do this be in control. places and crucially neigh - to act in solidarity with ity now. tant Lewisham is to local and keep the services open. bouring hospitals. Lewisham, to prevent sham The campaign has been people. The thousands on By disobeying a manage - So you want a revolution All grades, all job groups, or not-as-good services organising meetings for the streets to defend it has ment instruction workers in Lewisham Hospital? will have to be united in being set up in other hospi - staff; this needs to continue. boosted the morale of the immediately raise the issue We just need workers to this network. tals as a justification for Most importantly, the staff, and got attention in of who is in charge of the do what is necessary to en - This network will initially closing services at unions need to be re - the media. service. sure that safe health serv - gather information about Lewisham. newed to in order to make But it hasn’t changed In today’s society we as - ices continue to be provided which services are being them a fit structure for a Hunt’s mind. When it sume it is management who in Lewisham Hospital. threatened at any given So this “network” is in proper workers’ struggle comes down to it no is in charge; normally staff In some ways the idea of time. This information will place? against the closure of our amount of demonstrations do as they are told. the NHS itself — universal be communicated across the Sadly not. Traditionally a hospital. are going to force the gov - But we don’t just obey free health care — is revolu - network so that co-ordi - union would provide the 4 COMMENT Debating France’s role in Mali

which the Taliban is strong) or across the desert Challenging traditional models borders (over twice the Letters length of the Afghanistan/ As a vocal supporter of same sex marriage, I was very Pakistan border). interested by Jack Saffrey-Rowe’s confrontation with I find it difficult to agree with Martin Thomas’ statement With secular Tuareg de - Phillip Hammond MP regarding same sex marriage ( Sol - in the Solidarity 272 (30 January): “Better troops out now mands compounding the idarity 272). than an African Afghanistan.” complexity, and the However, I was deeply disappointed that he wrote that he The differences between the French action in Mali and the Malian government prob - felt that people in an incestuous relationship is “invalid”. US-led action in Afghanistan are as important as any simi - ably having less political There is no compelling reason to treat incestuous couples larities. credit and clout than the as some sort of verboten aberration, when incest is as old and For a start, the French are in Mali at the invitation of the pro-US government in as enduring in our culture as homosexuality. More recently, Malian government (admitted not a democratically elected Afghanistan after the Tal - a phenomenon known as Genetic Sexual Attraction has been government), and all credible reports show overwhelming iban’s defeat in 2001, a “mopping-up” operation by French studied, where close relatives who first meet as adults often popular support from Malians for the French action. troops is likely to suck France into a neo-colonial role. experience overpowering sexual feelings for each other — Additionally, this is not just a French action. It is supported There is neo-colonial push as well as pull. France is inter - isn’t the “I can’t help the way I am” argument the first one by the African Union and west African countries are send - vening in a region where it has been the colonial or neo-colo - trotted out to justify LGBT liberation? ing troops to fight alongside the French. nial power for over 130 years, and has large economic Critics such as Phillip Hammond are entirely right in say - The form of Islam espoused by the groups (including al- interests. ing that if society accepts gay relationships, then there’s no Qaida fighters dislodged from Libya, Somalia and other for - France already had troops in many neighbouring countries reason why siblings can’t get married — our responsibility mer sanctuaries) who have attacked Mali has nothing in — Senegal, Chad, Ivory Coast, Burkina Faso, Niger, and should be to defend the right of any consenting adult to have common with Islam as actually practised in Mali. Mauretania. whatever relationships they want with any other consenting In fact, these Islamists can properly be considered fascists Since landing troops in Mali, France has also sent soldiers adult, not to be outraged at the comparison in the horror of and have destroyed the shrines to Sufi saints and precious to guard the uranium mines owned by the French multina - our own unthinking taboos. tional Areva in Niger. If we are divorcing marriage, relationships and sex from collections of ancient manuscripts in Timbuktu. Better French withdrawal than a neo-colonial quag - the traditional model for making babies, as we have and as The Islamists have even outlawed music: a thoroughly im - mire. perialist and alien measure, as Malian music, by such per - we continue to do, then the idea of prohibiting sibling rela - formers as Salif Keita, Mory Kante and Ali Farka Toure, is Martin Thomas, London tionships or treating them as out of the ordinary also stops famed and loved across Africa. making any sense. And if you are currently saying to your - The cultural vandalism of these fascists is, of course, self, “Well, ok, but what about the possibility of deformed merely an adjunct to their brutality towards the majority children?!”, ask yourself this: do you have a problem with Slogans for Syria same sex sibling relationships? Malian population. Proper concern over likely reprisals It is a matter of months before Jack and I will be able against the Tuareg population should not blind us to the fact As Tom Unterrainer (letter, Solidarity 272) notes, Solidar - to marry the people we love — I hope it will not be too that the majority Malian population have greeted French much longer before everyone will be able to do the same. forces as liberators. ity headlines on Syria used to feature text like “Down The French invasion is not our way of doing things, and with Assad!” Sarah McCulloch we should of course note the possible dangers of “mission No-one reading our recent comment on Syria ( Solidarity creep” and a long-term presence that becomes increasingly 269: bit.ly/119BC1p) can think we’ve become less hostile to oppressive and unpopular. Assad. So what’s changed? But to simply denounce the French action and call for In 2011 and early 2012, “down with Assad!” was shorthand SWP and the EU “troops out now” is the worst kind of irresponsible fake- for “support the opposition which is fighting to oust Assad”. ”anti-imperialist” posturing of the sort that the AWL and Our articles expressed that support, despite also criticising Solidarity usually avoids. and warning. Jim Denham, Birmingham Now, as Tom himself notes, the secular and democratic re - The Left volt in Syria has been sidelined by the dominance in the op - position of ultra-Islamist, sectarian, and often gangster-like Neo-colonial quagmire militias. Thus a shift in our attitude. Under the headline “No We could still use the words “Down with Assad!” while easy solution in or out”, Jim is right that control of the towns of north-west Mali explaining that we now give them a different meaning: a call Socialist Worker (2 Feb) by French troops is a lesser evil than control by Al Qaeda on the other Ba’thist rulers to get rid of the dictator. describes the divisions and its allies. Such a palace coup would be welcome. Realistically no which exist in the ruling By all accounts most people in Mali (and not just the gov - “bourgeois peace”, no deal between the rulers and the oppo - class and the Tory party ernment installed by a military coup last year) see it that way. sition which allows some breathing space for secular and over Europe. For the purpose of teasing out and following through de - democratic forces to revive, will happen without it. It identifies these divi - bates on the left, we should note that the groups which de - But to make our slogan the demand for a palace coup is an - sions as rooted in the diver - nounced AWL as insufficiently “anti-imperialist” for other matter. Demands on the second-rank despots to push gent interests and strategies refusing positively to support the Taliban in Afghanistan, aside the top despot are not a means to mobilise mass activ - of different groups of capi - Saddam Hussein in Iraq in 2003, Argentina in the South At - ity. If they have any political effect, it can only be to encour - talists, concluding that “Neither group really knows what lantic in 1982, etc., when they were “fighting imperialism”, age people to look for a way forward not in self-organisation to do for the best to pursue profits except to make us pay”. have refused to follow their own logic: none of them posi - but in speculation on rifts among the rulers. Yet another box on the same page sides with one of the tively backs the jihadist militias. A third option would be to have a slogan like “Down with two capitalist factions, saying that SW will “argue to vote However, I think we should look at things in the logic of Assad! Down with the sectarian militias!”, analogous to the to leave [the EU] in any referendum”. their development, rather than as snapshots. call “Down with the Shah! Down with Khomeiny!” which “The EU is a club for bosses” (and the UK isn’t?) … “In French withdrawal does not mean Al Qaeda victory. The ji - some socialists (not us, alas!) advanced for Iran in 1978. this crisis the EU has been used as a negotiating commit - hadist militias — an alliance of three Tuareg and Arab But in Iran there was a powerful workers’ movement and tee to push through austerity” (unlike the British cabinet groups, totalling a few thousand fighters, with little popular a sizeable left. “Down with the Shah! Down with Khomeiny!” and parliament?) … “We should oppose the EU as part of support — could not have conquered the densely-populated could have been made reality by a political reorientation of confronting the bosses’ agenda” (what is it they oppose, black-African south of Mali, where the population is at odds the left and the workers’ movement such as, in principle, the bosses bit, or the Euro bit?) with them not only politically but also linguistically and cul - could have happened quite quickly. Despite the protest that “socialists have no truck with turally. We are as yet far from that in Syria. The cry “Down with the nationalism of the Tory right”, the inescapable conclu - Continued French presence in Mali is, on the other hand, Assad! Down with the sectarian militias!” would be slogan - sion is that workers in Britain have something to gain unlikely to be a short-term affair defined by its official “good ising in mid-air. And, to my mind, one of the lessons we must learn from Britain leaving the EU. But SW gives no actual ex - reason” — pushing back the jihadist militias. It is likely to planation of why this might be the case. have a neo-colonial logic, much more so than the US pres - from movements like Lenin’s Bolsheviks is that — con - Arguing for British withdrawal from the EU cuts ence in Iraq or Afghanistan, let alone NATO operations in trary to the habits of most would-be Trotskyists for many against building links with workers in other European Libya. decades now — it is not always necessary or desirable to countries, and plays into the hands of the nationalist The jihadists have only retreated into the desert areas have a snappy slogan. right. (maybe three times the area of southern Afghanistan in Colin Foster, London 5 WHAT WE SAY

Help us raise £15,000 Adam David Morton, a senior lecturer at the Univer - sity of Nottingham, says that our book, Antonio Gramsci: Working-Class Revolutionary is “straight onto the reading list of [his] third-year ‘Gramsci & Global Politics’ module”. Murray Kane, Australian socialist activist, said: “Al - though only 70 pages long, [it] is remarkable in contain - ing more insights than many a full length book on Gramsci.” British socialist activist Richard Price wrote: “This pam - phlet ... can not only stimulate discussion upon the philo - sophical aspects of Gramsci’s thought, but it can also force socialists to think more deeply about their relation - ship to the rest of society, and how to transform it.” Peter Thomas, the author of The Gramscian Moment and winner of the Fondazione Istituto Piemontese Antonio Gramsci’s Premio internazionale Giuseppe Sormani Prize in 2011, spoke at the book’s launch and praised the book’s contribution to the field of Gramsci scholarship. Expropriate the banks! We were able to publish and distribute this book be - cause of the financial support we received from readers of Solidarity . With more such support, we can publish more Fiddling around with ring-fences isn’t enough. To organ - tion insurance (PPI). The Financial Ombudsman Service re - books. ise investment for social benefit; to redress inequality; to ceived 180,679 new complaints between October and Decem - In 2013, we plan to publish a collection of the writings give any reforming government the means it would need ber 2012 on PPI. of American socialist Max Shachtman on the ideas of to fend off the pressure of global financial markets — Barclays, HSBC, Royal Bank of Scotland and Lloyds have Leon Trotsky, again developing the real legacy of a revo - there is no alternative but to expropriate the banks and also had to set aside £700 million so far for compensation for lutionary theorist whose work is obscured not only by his high finance. mis-selling complex derivative products like interest-rate own eventual political mistakes but by the distortions of a hostile orthodoxy. They should be converted into a public banking, mortgage, swaps to small businesses. To help us publish this book, and continue to rein - and pension service, under public ownership and democratic Barclays is being investigated about claims that, in 2008, it vigorate a tradition of independent, critical Marxist and workers’ control. made a loan (i.e. from the money deposited with it by cus - thought, please donate to our fund appeal. Help us The last five or six years have indicted the banks. Even the tomers) to the government of Qatar so that Qatar, in turn, by: conservative Financial Times columnist Martin Wolf admits, could buy Barclays shares, and then the bank could claim ● though without drawing full conclusions, that: “Banks, as that it had enough of its own funds to avoid the annoyances Taking out a monthly standing order using the form presently constituted and managed, cannot be trusted to per - of a state bail-out. below or at www.workersliberty.org/resources. Please form any publicly important function, against the perceived None of those scandals can be explained away as an un - po●st completed forms to us at the AWL address below. interests of their staff [meaning their top bosses, not the rou - derstandable blunder of immaturity. These banks have been Making a donation by cheque, payable to “AWL”, or tine clerical staff]. Today’s banks represent the incarnation of operating for hundreds of years. In the years running up to do●nating online at www.workersliberty.org/donate. profit-seeking behaviour taken to its logical limits, in which the crisis in 2008, both bankers and governments assured us ● Organising a fundraising event. the only question asked by senior staff is not what is their again and again that the management and regulation of ● Taking copies of Solidarity to sell. duty or their responsibility, but what can they get away banking had reached near-perfect excellence. Get in touch to discuss joining the AWL. More infor - with”. mation: 07796 690874 / [email protected] / AWL, Yet the banks control the bulk of the fluid, mobile wealth CAPITALISM 20E Tower Workshops, 58 Riley Road, Lon - don SE1 3DG. in society. They stand at the crossroads where investment de - It is in the nature of capitalism that bankers always push ` cisions are made. into ventures which offer extra profit. They know some will The control of investment funds by the banks makes it ap - go wrong, or be found out — but then they’ll pay a fine and Total raised so far: £7,044 parently not “realistic” to invest in health, education, wel - carry on. That’s business. 44 We raised £88 this week from fare, and other public services, but very “realistic” to invest In 2008 the British government, like others, poured vast 7,0 sales of literature and donations the £38 billion currently being put by property developers quantities of cash, credit, and guarantees into the banks to £ and increased standing orders. into building new luxury housing in London at an average of keep them afloat: a total of £1,107 billion, something like the Thanks to Ed, Eric and northern £2.5 million a dwelling. equivalent of £18,000 for every child, woman, and man in the comrades. Banks are also a vast engine of inequality. UK. After being bailed out by the taxpayer in 2008, banks made There was much talk then of a radical improvement in the Standing order authority about £35 billion profits last year. That is a sum comparable regulation of banks. Very little has come of it. Lobbying by to the total cuts planned by the coalition government in ed - the bankers has made the new regulations looser than was To: ...... (your bank) ucation and welfare for five years. predicted in 2008...... (its address) CUTS Banks were nationalised then, but that just meant that the government put money into them and left much the same ...... The banks and other financial firms paid out £13 billion in bankers running them, on exactly the same criteria as before. bonuses in 2011-2. That £13 billion, plus £7 billion from It was more like “compensation without nationalisation” — Account name: ...... the huge salaries paid to top bankers, would be enough without any public control, that is — than the old socialist from one year to cover all the £20 billion cuts the coali - demand of “nationalisation without compensation”. Account no: ...... tion has planned to the NHS over five years. A few bankers have resigned — like Barclays boss Bob Di - Sort code: ...... The economic crisis which exploded in 2007-8, and still amond, with a “golden goodbye” of £2 million — but mostly lumbers on, was generated by the collapse of an ever-more- the top bankers are still shamelessly taking home truckloads Please make payments to the debit of my precarious spiral of profit-seeking gambits by the banks. of loot. Now more and more scandals come to light. They are confident enough to voice outrage when chancel - account: Payee: Alliance for Workers’ Liberty, Banks were rigging the Libor interest rate — the published lor George Osborne, under pressure from MPs, says that he account no. 20047674 at the Unity Trust Bank, benchmark rate at which banks borrow from each other — will legislate so that if banks break new rules about ring-fenc - 9 Brindley Place, Birmingham B1 2HB (08-60-01) and thus skewing huge numbers of financial transactions ing their investment banking (large-scale dealing in financial markets) off from their retail banking (their “High Street” across the world which use that benchmark. Amount: £ ...... to be paid on the ...... day Barclays, RBS, and the Swiss bank UBS have agreed to pay business), then they can be forcibly divided into separate in - ...... fines for the rigging. Investigations continue. Under pressure, vestment-banking and retail-banking businesses. Penalised of (month) 20 chancellor George Osborne has pressed RBS to deduct the for breaking the rules! That shouldn’t happen to us, say the (year) and thereafter monthly until this order is bankers! cost of the fines it has paid to US authorities from the bonuses The TUC should dust off the policy for “full public own - cancelled by me in writing. This order cancels it pays to top bankers. After taking part in the biggest finan - ership of the [banking] sector and the creation of a pub - any previous orders to the same payee. cial scam in history, the bank bosses don’t personally get licly owned banking service, democratically and fined, or sacked, or jailed: some have their bonuses reduced, accountably managed”, decided by its congress last Date ...... and that’s all September, and campaign for it. Unions should press for British banks have been forced to set aside £12 billion for the Labour Party to take up the demand. Signature ...... compensation payments to those mis-sold payment protec - 6-7 From revolutionary Syriza: rev syndicalism to Trotskyism By Theodora Polenta Greece’s three-party coalition government, under the leadership of Antonis Samaras and the right-wing New Democracy (ND) party, is trying to stabilise itself. It is trying to construct an alliance with the most reac - Our Movement tionary and backward elements of the Greek population — By Michaél MacEoin conservative older people, and petty bourgeois layers who yearn for “law and order”. And it could succeed. Alfred Rosmer (1877-1964) was a leading figure in the The latest polls are showing a stagnation of support for the French revolutionary syndicalist union movement at left-wing party Syriza, which nearly won an election in June the turn of the 20th century. Along with many others in 2012. Of course the polls cannot be trusted, but it would be that movement he joined the French Communist Party foolish to ignore their evidence. when it was created after the Russian revolution. Later One on 10 January gave first position in ND to 29%, with he became an ally of Leon Trotsky. Syriza coming second with 28.5%. Another on 19 January shows Syriza leading by just 0.1% (18.8% Syriza, 18.7%, ND). Rosmer was born in America, the son of a worker who A third shows ND and Syriza tied with 29.5%. had fled France after the Paris Commune of 1871. In 1884 In each case, the same poll company had Syriza well ahead the family returned to France. Rosmer became attracted to in late 2012. anarchism while working as a proof-reader. Why can’t Syriza extend its support, faced with a govern - Rosmer became a militant in the revolutionary syndical - Above: Rosmer in Moscow ment that continues a policy of brutal austerity against the ist Confédération générale du travail (CGT, Generation 1919 (to the left of Trotsky). working class and the people? Confederation of Labour). He worked alongside Pierre Rosmer was on the Executive Because Syriza leaders have been increasingly making Monatte, founder of the journal La Vie Ouvrière . Committee of the Third their positions more “rounded” — in fact moving more and When the CGT caved into patriotism and backed “na - International more to the right. tional unity” during World War One, Rosmer followed Syriza’s leaders have arbitrarily (without consulting Monatte in opposing the war from a revolutionary inter - organisations. He said: “We Syriza’s committees) replaced the policy of refusing to repay nationalist perspective. Although they were in a tiny mi - want to unite the boldest and Greece’s debt with one of renegotiation of the debt in a Eu - nority at first, their efforts laid the groundwork for an most class conscious from rope-wide framework. anti-war movement. It was through this political work that among the proletariat and to Syriza leaders such as Giannis Dragasakis have declared Rosmer met his lifelong partner Marguerite Thevener, and create from them a tightly that “Syriza will not take unilateral action against the first encountered Leon Trotsky. welded minority, which alone Troika”. The policy of nationalisations has disappeared from Disgusted by the hypocrisy of parliamentary politics and will be capable of inspiring the the statements of prominent members of Syriza. distrustful of the social democratic parties many revolu - masses and drawing them with Syriza’s central leader, Alexis Tsipras, went to Berlin on 14 tionaries in the syndicalist movement such as Victor Serge, it.” January to meet German finance minister Wolfgang Schäuble Monatte, the Industrial Workers of the World’s “Big Bill” “When Tanner had finished and declared a shared commitment to “achieve primary sur - Haywood and Rosmer were inspired by the Russian Rev - his speech, Lenin spoke in the following terms: ‘The defi - plus” (though “through the fight against tax evasion and olution and came over to the consistent revolutionaries of nition which you have given of your conception of the rev - wealthy tax evaders”). Tsipras also said he agreed on the the revolution, the Bolshevik party. olutionary movement coincides completely with ours. But need for “structural changes that will allow the establishment Serge summed up this thinking: “The unity of thought we give this minority a different name: we call it ... the of an effective state,” but added that there need to be a “Eu - and action gave Bolshevism its original power; without en - Communist Party’.” ropean solution to the debt problem” with a “generous hair - tering into doctrinal questions we can define Bolshevism This conception of the revolutionary party as the van - cut” and “terms of development”. as a movement to the left of socialism — which brought it guard of the most conscious elements of the working-class At a speech to the Brookings Institution in the USA (22 Jan - closer to anarchism — inspired by the will to achieve the has been buried under decades of Stalinism, with some uary), Tsipras said: “We look for allies, but the policy of Ger - revolution immediately.” would-be Trotskyist propaganda groups now operating as many is catastrophic. Here [in the US], we can find allies to In 1920 Rosmer travelled to Moscow and took part in the if they are the vanguard parties of the future. prevent disastrous policies”. debates at the Second Congress of the Communist Interna - The growth of Stalinism in Russia and the Communist The Syriza leadership’s shift to the right has disappointed tional. International led to Trotsky’s supporters in the European the working class. That is reflected in the polls. The workers The Bolsheviks’ desire to attract the best elements from Communist parties being ousted from the leadership and and youth who voted en masse for Syriza — and, the most revolutionary syndicalism is evident in the debates on the later being expelled or quitting. In France this included advanced of them, joined Syriza — want a radical Syriza that role of the Communist party in the revolution. Lauding Rosmer, Monatte and Boris Souvarine. will confront the vested interests of the capitalist class and their role in opposing the war when the Second Interna - The Rosmers were amongst Trotsky’s staunchest allies. its political representatives, a Syriza that will smash the tional crumbled, Trotsky spoke of his “common ground” Although Rosmer later developed political differences with Memorandum, and not a Syriza that tries to reconcile the in - with Rosmer and argued that the revolutionary minority Trotsky, he remained close and took part in the Dewey terests of the financial oligarchy with the interests of the of syndicalists “was a portent of the future development, Commission set up to counter-act the falsifications of the workers. which, despite their prejudices and illusions, has not hin - Moscow Trials. When the Fourth International was Syriza leaders increasingly present the changes they want dered these same syndicalist comrades from playing a rev - launched, it held its first congress in Rosmer’s suburban as peaceful, common-sense adjustments. Alexis Tsipras has olutionary role in France, and from producing that small Paris home in 1938. said: “The Memorandum is already dead... we will re-nego - minority which has come to our International Congress.” After World War Two, Rosmer agreed with Trotsky’s tiate the loan agreement without the Memorandum... because Illustrating the bridge between revolutionary syndical - widow Natalia Sedova that the socialist conquests of the the cost of the exit of Greece from the euro is greater for the ism and Bolshevism, the following year Rosmer recalled Russian Revolution had been extinguished, describing the eurozone than the cost of rescue...” But the Memorandum is the intervention of Jack Tanner from the British Shop Stew - Soviet Union as “nothing but a great power, military and anything but dead for workers and the people. Salaries and ard Network “who on the whole shares the standpoint of militaristic…distinctive only by the brutality of a totalitar - pensions are being cut to starvation level, trade union rights the French syndicalists about the labour movement, op - ian regime”. are being smashed, official unemployment is at 27%, public posed the role defined by the Communist Party, and in jus - In his later years, Rosmer kept the flame of anti-Stal - services are being dismantled, and taxes on the majority are tifying his opposition he stated how he conceived the inist Marxism alive as a living link to the genuine Bol - being increased. organisation of the revolutionary struggle in the workers’ shevik tradition. In the last few months ND and the government have un - GREECE verse drift to right!

leashed ideological warfare against the left in general and in with the leaders of the alternative “management models”, particular against Syriza. They are targeting the trade union within the framework of IMF, such as Rousseff in Brazil and movement or any other movement which ventures into “ille - Kirchner in Argentina. gality” (meaning, any collective and social organisation that Yet the overthrow of the Memorandum will not come by challenges the core values of the capitalist system). following Obama’s model, or Rousseff’s, or by reformist illu - The offensive started in December 2012 with the storming sions. It will come through the escalation of working-class by police and evacuation of squats which were well-con - struggles while building the anti-capitalist left. nected with neighbourhood and community movements. Syriza is due to hold a congress in the coming months. On “Villa Amalia”, a squatted former high school in Athens, was Sunday 3 February, its Central Committee met, and Syriza’s an oasis for cultural events and daily solidarity, and a fortress Left Platform put down four amendments: of resistance against the spread of the fascist vermin in the • that Syriza should avoid taking important initiatives Agios Panteleimonas area. The police said they had found without involving the collective bodies of the party (this was glass bottles and masks there and “criminalised” the squat - a reference to meetings like the one with Schäuble) ters; the government declared that it would cleanse Athens of • that Syriza should reaffirm that it will re-nationalise all all squatting. the privatised companies, starting with those that are of Syriza was cornered and bullied for not wholeheartedly strategic importance to the economy condemning and denouncing the squats and for embracing • commitment to a government of the left (and not the cen - and supporting illegality. Syriza’s leaders responded, after tre-left, let alone one with sections of the “patriotic-populist” long hesitation, by eventually condemning “illegality” and right); initiatives for joint action and a united front to KKE declaring its faith in the constitution and parliamentary and Antarsya and other left forces democracy, while still denouncing the government’s at - • that Syriza should realise that the EU leaders, the IMF, tempts to distract the public from the burning issues of the and the USA, despite all their differences, will share an in - cuts “Memorandum” imposed by the European Union, Eu - tense hostility to a government of the left operating outside ropean Central Bank, and IMF. the strait-jacket of Memorandum-restricted parliamentary Syriza’s shift to the right was also signalled in Tsipras’s democracy. Syriza should prepare for confrontations to tour of Latin America in late December 2012. His itinerary come, and realise that a government of the left cannot play off excluded, as probably too radical and left wing, Chavez’s the different big-power blocs to gain a position of tolerance. Venezuela and Morales’s Bolivia, opting instead for talks The Left Platform argues for a new wave of radicalisation. It calls for new re-orientation of Syriza’s leadership and rank and file organisations towards the working-class movement, with particular emphasis on the youth, in order to overthrow the three party coalition government and all governmental policies. Syriza should link its perspective for a government of the left with every struggle that erupts in the industrial and social field. STRIKE As a first step Syriza must mobilise to radicalise and politicise the 20 February general strike in support of workers’ rights and collective bargaining called by the union confederations GSEE and ADEDY. Ruling circles in the EU are now saying that the chances of Greece leaving the euro are eliminated because of Greece sticking to the memorandum austerity packages. All that, however, remains dependent on continuation of the resolute implementation of austerity and harsh neolib - eral restructuring. Syriza should once again underline that it will not accept any blackmail, and will stick to its progres - sive anti-memorandum proposals regardless of threats about the position of Greece in the eurozone. Syriza eventually condemned “illegality” of the Villa Amalia If Syriza sticks to its promise that when in government it squat (top). Then Tsipras met Latin American politicians who will abolish the Memorandum and all the laws introduced are, like Brazil’s President Dilma Rousseff (bottom), “on under it, what do Syriza’s leaders really think the response of message” with IMF policies the EU/ ECB/ IMF Troika will be? Will they accept the democratic will of the people and con - tinue to provide the loan installments? Will they sit down to a government of the left upon its infancy. They will strike talk with Syriza? Or will they carry on being inflexible and without mercy, they will cut the funding, they will move to stating that any bailout funds will be provided only on con - push Greece out of the euro. dition that Syriza will stick to the Memorandum program? They will want to make an example of Greece, so that no The cost to the EU’s big powers of the exit of Greece from one else dares to challenge their policies, their hegemony and the euro would indeed be great. But the political cost to the the profits of the bankers and bondholders EU leaders of continuing the bailout fund without Greece fol - A frightened and compliant Syriza, a Syriza which ulti - Cameron says he wants to renegotiate the terms of lowing the Memorandum would be huge. mately accepts the framework of its opponents, will not be Britain’s terms of membership of the EU. The anti-EU able to resist effectively. If it is accepted that Greece is bailed out without imple - And unless Syriza shows a will to resist effectively, it faction in the Tory Party, who put pressure on Cameron, menting austerity measures, then Spain, Italy, Portugal, and want further attacks on workers’ rights and living quickly lose its base in the world of resistance and Ireland will demand similar treatment. standards. among thousands of leftists who saw in the Syriza proj - Global capitalists, despite their conflicts among them - ect the greatest hope in decades. selves, including the Greek capitalist class, will try to smash 8 FEATURE The Lincoln myth on film

By Sacha Ismail short-term emancipation as a greater evil, and worked to save what he could of slavery until events — the action of the The “second American revolution” was a two decade- slaves, the growing strength of anti-slavery activism in the long political and social upheaval, from the 1850s to the North, and the threat of losing the war — overwhelmed him. 1870s, which freed millions of black slaves (the Civil War, Far from being “realistic” policy, the conservatism and 1861-5) and drove towards a more radical transforma - racism of his faction undermined the Northern war effort, tion of United States society (Reconstruction). lengthened the conflict and cost many thousands of black The radical phase of this revolution was defeated in the and white lives. 1870s when the dominant sections of the Northern ruling Spielberg’s film does not attempt to deal with any of this. class betrayed the former slaves and allowed them to be de - It avoids doing so by setting its action around events right at prived of political rights in order to enforce labour discipline the war’s end, with the passing by Congress of the Thirteenth in a new, capitalist South. Amendment to the US Constitution, which banned slavery. The real heroes of this drama were, in the first instance, the It was a very close vote. slaves themselves, who destroyed slavery through what This sounds dramatic, and in the sense that the Amend - black historian W E B Du Bois called “a general strike” of ment showed how far things had moved during the four mass rebellion and desertion, and went on to demand full years of the war, it was. For almost the first two years of the equality and briefly push Southern society in a more demo - conflict, the Lincoln government had insisted that it had no cratic, egalitarian direction. They were helped by white “Rad - intention of touching the “peculiar institution”; Congress had icals” in the North who with the coming of war moved from actually passed an earlier Thirteenth Amendment guarantee - the despised, persecuted left fringe of US politics to reshape ing slavery for ever, only for this to be short-circuited by the war’s outbreak! But by 1865, slavery was already dead — so Northern public opinion and even dominate Congress. Daniel Day Lewis as Abraham Lincoln Steven Spielberg’s new film, Lincoln , written by playwright much so that even the Southern leadership was discussing Tony Kushner, pretty much writes out the story of black self- freeing slaves in order to use them as soldiers. Moreover anti- emancipation. Right at the start we see a black soldier criticis - slavery Republicans had already won an election which a this battle-scarred fighter against slavery and racism is also ing Lincoln’s inertia and conservatism, but this theme is not month later would dramatically increase their Congressional rewritten as a political understudy to Lincoln, and when it developed. The two black characters in the film, White House majority. This was in no sense a make-or-break moment. comes to it cannot answer the great leader’s arguments. servants, were real people who in real life were political ac - A more interesting film would have looked at the argu - The real Stevens was part of the last batch of bourgeois tivists — but not in Spielberg’s version. Lincoln includes de - ments of 1862-3, when, against Lincoln’s stubborn resistance, politicians in the US who were in any sense progressive or pictions of white Radicals, including one of the greatest of anti-slavery forces outside and inside Congress pushed for revolutionary. His death, after which 20,000 Americans, them, but in a way that is dismissive and misleading. the freeing and arming of the slaves, the recruitment of black black and white, marched at his funeral, heralded the end of The film stands in what is now the dominant tradition of troops in the North and other revolutionary measures judged an era. The defeat of his goals produced the US of today – an serious Civil War history, not to mention official commemo - necessary both morally and in order to win the war. A really advanced capitalist economy and bourgeois democracy, one ration: what has been called “Lincolnolatry”. This view casts interesting film would have explored some of the ironies – shaped by a peculiarly reactionary political legacy, even after Lincoln as a — perhaps uniquely — just and wise leader, such as Lincoln issuing his famous Emancipation Proclama - the “Second Reconstruction” of the 1950s and 60s. who won the Civil War and ended slavery by resisting both tion in order to undercut the more radical policy agreed by The year the last Southern Reconstruction government fell the rebelling Southern slaveowners and Northerners who Congress, so that taken literally the Proclamation returned to the white supremacist counter-revolution, 1877, was the wanted to go too far, too fast, whose policy would have un - many people to slavery. same year that US capital and labour confronted each other dermined Northern chances of victory. Had he not been Instead Lincoln presents the Radical Republicans as naive bloodily in a virtual workers’ uprising — the first national killed his approach could have laid the basis for a more de - idealists, who in the decisive crunch were pulled by Lincoln railworkers’ strike. The best of the Radicals and anti-slavery sirable settlement of the issues posed by Reconstruction. rather than pushing him. activists were finding their way into the labour movement; This Lincoln myth is wrong. Lincoln won the election, and Thaddeus Stevens, the dominant figure in the Radical-led the Republican leadership, having betrayed black Americans, entered the Civil War, and departed life with his assassina - House of Representatives, is treated sympathetically and was now purely a party for the ruling class. tion in 1865, a white supremacist opposed to equality for the given what I thought was the most moving scene in the film. There can be no doubt which side the real Abraham ex-slaves and all black people. His real goals are stated: to win complete racial equality and Lincoln would have been on. While opposing slavery on an abstract level, he regarded give the former slaveowners’ land to the former slaves. But Django, Lincoln, and the most revolutionary idea

Unchained . Tarantino and Spielberg have now made their German soldiers as they can. In the end, their efforts combine films about American slavery, just as previously they both with those of a French Jewish women also seeking revenge made films about the Nazi Holocaust — Schindler’s List and on the Nazis. Eric Lee Inglourious Basterds . Django too is a story not about good white men who come And those four films reflect two very different approaches to free the slaves, but about a slave who frees himself. Even “The emancipation of the working class must be the act to the issue of emancipation. though Django is assisted by a white German (the magnifi - of the workers themselves” — that’s a phrase which will Spielberg’s films — which are largely historically accurate, cent Christoph Waltz, who played a terrifying Nazi in Bas - be familiar to most Marxists and originates in the Rules extremely well crafted, and well-intentioned — are accounts terds ), it is he — and not Waltz — who deals the death blow of the International Workingmen’s Association which of how a gentile (Shindler) risked everything to save the Jews Marx drafted. to the slave-owners in the film. and how a white man (Lincoln) did the same for black slaves. One could make the argument that while Tarantino’s take A century later, Max Shachtman wrote that “When speak - Spielberg chose when taking on the giant subjects of slav - on slavery and the Third Reich may prove more satisfying, ing of socialism and socialist revolution we seek ‘no conde - ery and the Holocaust to focus on those two men. He could the reality is that it wasn’t black slaves who brought down scending saviours’ as our great battle hymn, the have made different films, could have focussed his Holocaust slavery and it wasn’t armed Jews who defeated Hitler. It was International, so ably says. We do not believe that well-wish - film on, say, the Jewish fighters who battled the Wehrmacht a mostly (though not entirely) white army led by a white man ing reforms — and there are well-wishing reformers — will in the final days of the Warsaw Ghetto. He could have cho - that brought an end to the Confederacy. And it was the allied solve the problems of society, let alone bring socialism… We sen one of the many Black slave rebellions that preceded the armies — particularly the Red Army — that destroyed the believe that task belongs to the proletariat, only the prole - American Civil War — for example, the story of Nat Turner German Reich. tariat itself. That is a world-shattering idea. It overshadows who led an uprising 1831 that resulted in some 160 deaths. So yes, Spielberg’s view may be the more accurate one, but all social thought. The most profound, important and lasting Instead he chose to focus on brave white men (the aboli - thought in Marxism, the most pregnant thought in Marxism tionists) and a brave gentile (Shindler). Tarantino’s reflects an aspiration — the hope that the op - is contained in Marx’s phrase that the emancipation of the Tarantino made a radically different choice when he de - pressed, slaves and others, can liberate themselves and in - proletariat is the task of the proletariat itself. It is clearly the deed that only they can do so. cided to make films about Nazi Germany and the American This is, as Shachtman wrote, “the most pregnant most revolutionary idea ever conceived, if you understand it South. thought” in Marxism, and while one can be fairly certain in all of its great implications.” Tarantino’s films are fantasies — and unlike Spielberg’s are I thought of this “most revolutionary idea” the other day as that Quentin Tarantino has never heard of the great third often hilariously funny, even if brutally violent. camp socialist, it is his films — not Spielberg’s — that I watched two recent acclaimed films on the same subject — Tarantino’s “basterds” are American Jewish soldiers sent Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln and Quentin Tarantino’s Django most closely realise that idea. into Nazi-occupied Europe to kill — and scalp — as many 9 FEATURE Keeping their dreams alive

Tim Thomas previews Ken Loach’s new documentary, The ically. So you must see this film, no matter how old you are, Spirit of ’45 no matter whether you are a man or a woman, no matter what your sexual orientation is or what your culture might Ken Loach’s documentary, to be released in March, is be, or whether you are in Cameron’s England because your probably not going to be seen at your local cinema. You village has been bombed by British imperialists or by the cler - are more likely to be offered Sylvester Stallone in Bullet ical-fascism born from this same imperialism. Don’t let them to the Head (two stars and totally worthless). split us. But Loach puts it better than I do: Spirit of ’45 should be shown in every cinema in the land “The Second World War was a struggle, perhaps the most but it won’t be; you can maybe catch it on Film Four. You considerable collective struggle this country has ever experi - might guess the reason why! enced. While others made greater sacrifices, the people of The production team (Sixteen Films) are letting groups Russia for example, the determination to build a better world book it for public film showings. Getting this film shown de - was as strong here as anywhere. Never again, it was believed, pends on you. would we allow poverty, unemployment and the rise of fas - It is a film about the General Election of 1945, which was cism to disfigure our lives. won by Labour because the working class had had enough of “We had won the war together, together we could win the the appalling conditions they endured in the 1930s. They had peace. If we could plan to wage military campaigns, could seen fascism, fought against it and won. Here was the prom - we not plan to build houses, create a health service and a ise of a better world, better living conditions, better health, transport system, and to make goods that we needed for re - housing, an end to the corruption of a coal-owners’ state. Per - After the war, they wanted a different peace construction? haps a socialist state instead. “The central idea was common ownership, where produc - We are told and shown what it was like before and after the GPs, the railway workers, the miners seem to shine with tion and services were to benefit all. The few should not get and then we are shown what it is like now. We see the de - rich to the detriment of everyone else. humanity, and the men and women in the crowd that adu - “It was a noble idea, popular and acclaimed by the ma - struction of all the heroes’ and heroines’ ideals — the selling lated Margaret Thatcher’s first victorious conference seem so jority. It was the Spirit of 1945. Maybe it is time to remem - off of coal, steel, water, electricity, transport and the termi - intensely mercenary, so filled with hatred and triumph over ber it today.” nation of the hope of the Labour Party’s “Clause Four”. what had been built and was now to be destroyed for the All this we see through the eyes of ordinary people. And sake of a quick profit and the gangsterism of the banks. how wonderful they are and their stories are. It is not by any No matter what ideological disputes we may have with • If you want to book this film for a public showing, write subtle design of the film maker that the eyes of the nurses, Ken Loach, he has the ability to make matters clear cinemat - to: [email protected] Is Gove irreversible? By Pat Yarker ment (driven by relentless data-tracking which turns pupils learning on children through his primary curriculum re - into objects) rather than the provision of a broad and forms. On the day of the June 1987 General Election journalist rounded educational experience for all. He admits last summer’s mid-course shift of GCSE grade Peter Wilby, then education editor of the Independent , Gove has forced the pace of “academisation”, and many boundaries was unfair to pupils but does nothing to correct predicted that “The return of a Conservative govern - opportunists have scrabbled to back him. Last month a re - the injustice. ment… will mean the break-up of the state education port produced by the self-appointed “Academies Commis - Loud in support of the right of parents to choose a school system which has existed since 1944”. sion”, published by edu-business Pearson and the for their child, he imposes academisation on targeted schools It has taken twenty-five years, but it looks as if Wilby will academy-sponsoring Royal Society for the Encouragement regardless of parental opposition. see his prediction come true. of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce (RSA), had fulsome He traduces decades of achievement by state schools, espe - Education Secretary Michael Gove’s war aim is now clear. praise for the initiative. cially comprehensives, and lies about what they do, claim - In one electoral term he will fragment the education system COMPLETE ing they “neglect the brightest”, “avoid competitive sport”, and parcel it out amongst academy sponsors (and supporters Former Ofsted Chief Inspector Christine Gilbert, who and are “happy with failure”. He delights in denigrating the of free schools) so that a future Labour government would chaired the Commission, looked forward to the complete work and commitment of the staff in such schools. baulk at restoring a unified state comprehensive system. Be - academisation of the secondary school system before Academisation has cost £8.3 billion so far ( New Statesman , yond this he hopes, in a Tory second term, to see the law the next election. 3 December 2012). While voting for cuts and austerity, Gove changed to enable widespread schooling for profit. has overspent on his own programme by £1 billion. He Gove has built on the breach made in the state-maintained The primary sector, where only 5% of schools are acade - knows whatever money he needs to smash one of the main mies now, can, apparently, wait a little longer. At the launch education service first by Kenneth Baker’s City Technology pillars of the welfare state will be forthcoming. Colleges and then by New Labour’s City Academies policy. of the report no dissent was tolerated from the floor, and By April last year, more than half of England’s 3,261 state none was forthcoming from a platform which featured, TWIGG among others, the Director of the Institute of Education. secondary schools had become, or were about to become, Gove is helped by the utter lack of meaningful opposi - Academisation has been accompanied by a “war on teach - new-style Tory Academies. tion from shadow Education Secretary Stephen Twigg. These schools are funded directly from Whitehall and run ers”. Just before Christmas Gove told the Times he had set his by businesses, “faith” groups, charities and the fee-paying department on a “war footing”. Identifying his chief enemy Last month, Peter Wilby, writing this time in the Guardian , sector. These organisations sponsor academies in their own as organised labour in schools, he has gone looking for trou - gave Twigg the chance to confirm a Labour government interest, and do so competitively. In the process they wreck ble. would rebuild a unified state education system and reverse any prospect of locally-developed co-operation between He abolished national pay scales, and in a further provoca - the ruination Gove has caused. Twigg gave no such under - schools, a hallmark of the previous Local Authority-based tion urged Heads to challenge teachers taking part in the cur - taking. In his mind, at least, Gove’s project is already irre - dispensation, and developed for the benefit of all children in rent “work to contract” action. He is boosting anti-union versible and the war lost. a wide geographical area, irrespective of which school they initiatives in schools, and pushing to change the law on in - Parents, education workers, students, and socialists will attend. dustrial action there. take a more resolute line, aware that working-class interest Some academy pupils are now even denied the chance to Gove’s media-savvy self-presentation hides a spectacular cannot be served by an education-system devoid of demo - attend an alternative educational establishment (such as an cynicism. He is contemptuous of the educability of working- cratic accountability, strait-jacketed by belief in fixed innate class children and fawning towards those edu-businesses Further Education college on day-release) purely because “ability”, in thrall to free-market liberalism, and content to that establishment is run by a rival sponsor. whose future profits he is committed to boosting. His emol - replicate an unjust social order while siphoning public Mounting evidence indicates that many academies shape lient and urbane talk deflects attention from his coercive and monies into private pockets. their intake by covert selection, and continue to mould it destructive actions. After a quarter-century and more of retreat, appease - through the overuse of exclusion. He discourses on the importance of a highly-qualified ment and aiding the enemy, how much longer will it be Some academies institute draconian regimes to ensure cadre of teachers, but ensures academies can hire (cheaper) until Labour again commits to a fully-comprehensive uni - compliance, locking down pupils and preventing teachers staff lacking Qualified Teacher Status, and cancels funding fied state-maintained education system fit to nurture the from working in self-directed ways. They use the pressure for teachers trying to gain a Master’s level qualification. intellectual and emotional growth of all children together exerted by a national regime of floor-targets, testing and He declares he will scrap modular exams post-16 to en - and every individual child? League Tables to justify a blinkered focus on exam-attain - courage “deep thinking”, but is about to inflict more rote- 10 SWP CRISIS Where did it all go wrong?

On 3 February the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) National rather than the threat of sanctions...” Luxemburg was no spontaneist opponent of centralism – Committee met and voted to authorise the smaller Central Yet Cliff, who had seen the predictions of imminent revo - in fact she was a defender of her own conception of central - Committee to expel members of the opposition which has lution for what they were just two decades previously, was ism against Lenin’s. But equally she understood the impor - developed within the SWP since the run-up to its 4-6 Janu - taken aback by the scale of the events of 1968. He attributed tance of apparently spontaneous action and what it can teach ary conference. Former Socialist Worker journalist Tom the failure of the French May to end in revolution to the lack us, and believed no one had an organisational model that Walker has already quit and published a long analysis of of a disciplined revolutionary organisation... The loose, would be correct for all situations... Luxemburg is, in my view, the best place to start in fur - the SWP. We print extracts. Full text: bit.ly/twalk undisciplined IS group looked to him ill-suited to the task of ther reading if you want to understand the problems of challenging for state power. The first charge levelled at any opposition is that they are the SWP... Start with her relatively short 1904 work, Or - Cliff began... to push for more Leninist discipline in the “outside the tradition”, either because they have con - ganisational Questions , then from there — and especially group. In doing so he provoked a bitter faction fight that sciously abandoned it or because they never understood if you think 1917 invalidated her earlier criticisms — read ended with many of the IS’s most prominent members walk - it in the first place. But let us go back a little into the his - The Russian Revolution , written in 1918 and posing ing out. It was after their departure that, in 1977, Cliff de - tory of the International Socialism (IS) tradition, and ex - some hard questions about the Bolsheviks’ theory and clared the transformation of the IS into the Socialist Workers amine exactly what is and isn’t part of it. practice... Party — a party designed for revolutionary possibilities that The SWP traces its roots back to the IS of the 1960s and 70s, by then were receding. It emerged into an era of defeats, and from there to the 1950s Socialist Review group. This which Cliff later called the “downturn”. • More: bit.ly/s-w-p then-tiny tendency, led by Tony Cliff and expelled from the Revolutionary Communist Party, was born out of the crisis of LIBERTARIAN post-war Trotskyism. The failure of the second world war to Shorn of its more libertarian elements, the SWP had a When SWP became “Leninist” end in revolution had seen the Trotskyists’ perspectives sys - newfound rigidity. It became unable to change course, and had difficulty relating even to a struggle on the scale tematically falsified. They were attempting to deny this in In the 1960s, a central SWP (IS) text was a pamphlet by various ways, and collapsing into placing their hopes in Stal - of the 1984-5 Miners’ Strike. Tony Cliff on Rosa Luxemburg. In 1968 the pamphlet inist regimes of one sort or another. Then the defeat of that great strike turned the “downturn” Against the orthodoxy of “official” Trotskyism, Cliff’s was reprinted, with its argument unchanged — but a from a reverse to a rout. The party went further in locking it - crucial concluding paragraph reversed! This comment is group was deeply heterodox. Realising the mess it was in, its self down... from an article on “The Politics of IS”, written by Sean members devoted themselves to rethinking and debating. By the turn of the century, when the leadership recognised They developed new theory as they attempted to find a way the new political radicalisation of the anticapitalist move - Matgamna, and published by the Trotskyist Tendency, out of the rut... ment and attempted to look outwards once more, the party forerunner of AWL, at Easter 1969. [This] from then-member Jim Higgins’ More Years for the was deeply scarred by its years of insularity. It came out of In Luxemburg , edition ’68, Cliff is a changed man! Locust ... give[s] a feel for the spirit of the group: “In these the bunker, but could not break with the bunker mentality. days of harsh ‘Leninist’ orthodoxy, it is hard to recall the at - The result has been protracted crisis... Nowhere is the result more startling than in the final mosphere at the cusp of the Socialist Review Group and the Nevertheless, the real IS tradition is surely to be found in paragraph of the chapter on Luxemburg and Lenin. International Socialism Group. The regime was relaxed and the iconoclastic spirit of those years [1950s]... activity was directed by persuasion and moral pressure 1959 edition: “For Marxists in advanced industrial countries, Lenin's original position can much less serve as rather than a federal structure where each branch sent a rep - a guide than Rosa Luxemburg’s, notwithstanding her resentative to a committee. The initial argument was more overstatements on the question of spontaneity.” Real history of SWP about the impracticality of federal structure, now the group 1968 edition: “However, whatever the historical circum - Tom Walker’s picture of SWP history is askew on impor - was larger, than about any theory, let alone about “challeng - stances moulding Rosa’s thoughts regarding organisation, tant points. ing for state power”: bit.ly/cliff68. Bit by bit, without ever these thoughts showed a great weakness in the German saying it had been wrong in the “Luxemburgist” period, the revolution of 1918-19.” Tony Cliff wrote his text on state capitalism in Russia in group took to calling itself “Leninist” and “Trotskyist”. 1948. Many Trotskyists proposed varied ideas on the USSR Of course people change their minds. When Marxists Lenin’s focus was on the means to fight for political clar - do so it would be good to know why and how... In this in the 1940s, and drew conclusions. Cliff remained in the ity; the IS-SWP “Leninism” was administrative centralism. case there is a mystery: one and the same exposition (with - majority of the Revolutionary Communist Party (the British It turned nasty as soon as political battles spilled beyond the Trotskyist group of the time), without differentiation on im - old family discussion circle mode. In December 1971 IS ex - out supplement) leads to opposite conclusions. Why? mediate political issues. pelled the Trotskyist Tendency (forerunner of AWL), essen - How does Comrade Cliff reach his conclusions?... Cliff and others were not expelled from the RCP, but from tially for being a “permanent faction”; in 1973, another The IS attitude to the question of the Leninist Party has the Trotskyist group created within the Labour Party after group, for having excessive differences with majority poli - been... contempt for the idea of organising a small propa - the collapse of the RCP. The immediate issue was the re - tics; in 1974, yet another, for refusing to dissolve as a faction ganda group as a fighting propaganda group. fusal of Cliff’s co-thinkers to back North Korea in the Ko - after annual conference. The current change — motivated allegedly on the May rean war. The stance of the Trotskyist majority led by Gerry The alleged libertarian Jim Higgins was, as chair of the IS Healy can surely be criticised; but it is exaggeration to ac - [1968] events in France but seemingly owing as much if Executive and then National Secretary, central in imposing not more to the happy coincidence that the Group had just cuse the majority Trotskyists of “placing their hopes in Stal - the new regime. He then fell foul of it himself. He and co- too many members to make federalism comfortable: after inist regime”. Moreover, in December 1952 Cliff’s Socialist thinkers were expelled in 1975 after a row not about regime Review group switched to a line on Korea, emphasising the but about a push by Cliff for “steering left”, towards “raw all, what conclusions were drawn from the Belgian Gen - call for US and allied troops to get out, which was in prac - youth who wanted to chop the head off capitalism”, and eral Strike in 1961? — has resembled not so much a recti - tice not much different from the majority’s. away from patience in trade-union work. fication of theory and practice by serious communists, as ORTHODOX IS (SWP, from 1977) did not become “unable to change an exercise in the medieval art of palimpsestry. SR was, in all but Cliff’s theory on Russia, a variant “or - course”. More’s the pity. It veered from “steering left” to The leadership does not have a clear conception of the thodox Trotskyist” group. In 1958-60 it switched to call declaring an all-stifling industrial “downturn”; etc. party that needs to be built. “Whether the IS group will itself “Luxemburgist”. It conceded that Healy’s SLL It dropped its 1979-88 “downturn” orientation not at the by simple arithmetic progression grow into a revolution - were the real “Trotskyists” and “Leninists”, but deplored turn of the century, but at the end of the 1980s. By the early ary party, or whether the party will grow from a yet un - 1990s it was claiming that vast revolutionary recruitment that “Leninism”. formed group is not important for us” (Political was possible with an effort. In 1992 it called for a general Rosa Luxemburg wrote a polemic in 1904 against Lenin’s strike (after insisting during the 1984-5 miners’ strike that it Committee document, October 1968). On the contrary, it pamphlet on the 1903 congress of the Russian Marxists and was fantasy); soon it had banners saying: “Paris 1968, Lon - is vital. the subsequent unilateral annulling by the Mensheviks of don 1994”. If the strategy is one which expects any big changes the congress’s decision on the editorial board of the paper In the meantime, it had shifted its world orientation away from the shift to come in the already organised labour Iskra . Lenin replied, rightly I think: “I must point out that from those elements of “Third Camp” politics it once had. movement (all experience in the past suggests that this is Rosa Luxemburg’s... article does not acquaint the reader From 1980 it opposed the Iran-Iraq war on both sides; in the likely way a real mass revolutionary movement will with my book, but with something else”: bit.ly/vilreply. 1987 it shifted, with thin excuses and no accounting, to back - develop in a country like Britain) rather than by arithmeti - By June 1906 Luxemburg was, and remained, clearly on ing Iran. cal accretion, then this decrees the need for us to build a the side of the Bolsheviks against the Mensheviks: bit.ly/rl- That shift set the framework for subsequent turns, in - bol. It is not true that she and Lenin had rival “theories of cluding the Respect fiasco and the shift from April 2002 cadre movement to be able to intervene. The lack of a clear the party”: subsequent “Luxemburgism” was concocted in to explicit alliance with political Islam continued these strategy on the relationship of IS to the class and the or - the 1930s from snippets of her writings: bit.ly/rl-fi, days with its call for votes for the Muslim Brotherhood ganised labour movement is obvious. Consequently IS is being built as a loose, all-in type bit.ly/ho-rl. in Egypt. of group. Lacking a strategy the leadership looks al - In 1968 Cliff proposed that the group (now called IS) Martin Thomas switch back to having a committee elected by its conference, ways for short cuts. 11 REPORTS NUT rank and file pushes for strikes Cleaners demand By Darren Bedford win.” The same mood had the Local Associations Net - term. I am going to ask of the Executive meeting prevailed at the much big - work have distributed a members in my school to on 27 February. Activists at National ger London meeting on 19 bulletin making the case for send emails to Exec mem - dignity Union of Teachers (NUT) January. action now. bers lobbying them, and I “pay briefings” have 32 activists attended a Joe Flynn reports: “[The would encourage others to • Local Associations Na - called on the Executive to meeting in Sheffield, where night after the 30 January do the same.” Several NUT Associa - tional Action Campaign — By Rebecca reverse its decision of 24 Deputy General Secretary briefing], another NUT tions have called a lobby nutlan.org.uk January and name dates Kevin Courtney spoke. email arrived in my inbox, Galbraith for strikes against Gemma Short, from very stridently announcing Michael Gove’s pay re - Rotherham NUT, said: that strike action was a Ballot in anti- On Saturday 2 Febru - forms as soon as possi - “There was a good range of question of not whether, ary, around 70 cleaners ble. comments from people but when. It also included victimisation fight held an angry and in - there, not just the left ei - a reasonably punchy sum - spiring protest at the The London briefing on Barbican Centre in 30 January had an almost- ther. A rep from Barnsley mation in bullet point form Teachers at Bishop Challoner talked about the problem of the pay changes and London. unanimous show of hands School in East London will hold for a strike in March. Joe of having been marched up how dreadful they are. Cleaners at the City of an indicative ballot for strikes Flynn, from Croydon NUT, the hill and down again “We need to keep the London Corporation’s told Solidarity : “Speaker and the lack of leadership pressure on at the remain - against the victimisation of an prestigious arts centre from the union.” ing pay briefings. Judging after speaker expressed be - NUT rep. are demanding pay in - Meetings also took place by what some of the Lon - creases to £8.55 an hour wilderment at the lack of School managers are taking strike action announced so in Newcastle, Manchester, don executive members (the “London Living far and emphasised that and Birmingham, with said at the London Re - revenge for a successful campaign to resist a draconian Wage”) from their cur - one day of action alone more due in Brighton (9 gional Council meeting on observation and inspection policy. rent wage of £6.19. would not be enough to February) and Norwich (13 4 February, the Exec is very One female worker February). Supporters of unlikely to call a strike this who was pregnant was forced to work with dan - gerous chemicals and Hospital strikers burn Liverpool jobs fight carry out unsuitable tasks. She very nearly lost her baby. The man - By Ollie Moore ager responsible for this dismissal notices denied a connection be - still works at the Barbi - tween the proposed job can and working prac - Around 10% of the work - cuts and the new invest - tices remain the same. force at the Royal Hospi - ment, but a Unison official Mitie is refusing to tal in Liverpool could be said: “I cover most NHS recognise and negotiate at risk of losing their jobs, trusts in the Merseyside with the Industrial as bosses announce a area and I'm not aware of Workers of Great Britain five-year plan to shed 600 any trust that’s looking to (IWGB), which organises posts. shed up to 600 posts.” many of the cleaners at Hospital unions have Private sector workers in the centre. said they believe the cuts the area also face a battle The cleaners’ demands plan is part of a project to for jobs, as bosses at glass go far beyond a Living fund investment in a new firm Pilkington look to cut Wage; they want to be site as part of a Private Fi - 150 jobs across sites in the treated with dignity. nance Initiative (PFI) north west. They are also Placards said: “We are scheme. The site, which looking to make cuts to not the dirt we clean”. workers’ pension schemes. By a health worker Trust, who face pay cuts of the current group of work - was greenlighted by the The GMB union said the Cleaners from the Bar - up to £2,800, struck for five ers. Suggestions from strik - government in June 2012, moves “could well lead to bican were joined by Strikers from Pinder - days following the Trust’s ers that money was being will cost £450 million. industrial action”. many other cleaners fields, Pontefract and decision to issue dismissal wasted paying consultants Local NHS bosses have from workplaces across Dewsbury Hospitals and reengagement notices Ernst and Young £3 million London, giving their sol - burnt their dismissal no - to hundreds of workers. to cut their pay were met idarity. Workers from tices during a protest The Trust has stated they with blank faces. different industries also A meeting of strikers at Foxconn workers outside their Hospital are prepared to look at al - came to support this im - the end of the strike en - Trust Board meeting last ternative plans with trade portant struggle. dorsed the idea that the week. unions, but in the Board win union vote The cleaners are now dispute should be esca - balloting for strikes and Medical secretaries, re - meeting their lead negotia - lated with an indicative intend to fight until they ceptionists, and other tor made it clear they ballot of all union mem - win. admin workers from Mid would not negotiate on the bers in the hospital. Workers of the Cleaners at the Univer - Yorkshire Hospitals NHS level of cuts and that the “savings” must come from world sity of London also ral - lied as part of their “3 Cosas” (“3 Causes”) By Ira Berkovic campaign to win sick Agency workers’ fight continues pay, holiday, and pen - Workers at Foxconn, sions equality with their Agency workers em - paign of direct action, in - after he led a successful China’s largest private- directly-employed col - ployed by the Trainpeo - cluding demonstrations sector employer, have leagues. campaign for union recog - sentatives. The campaign also ple agency on London and pickets at Tube sta - won the right to elect The move is the first of nition amongst canteen involves catering, se - Underground, without tions and LUL and Trans - their representatives. its type at a large firm in work since 16 January, workers. China, and is the result curity, and mainte - port for London offices. Workers and supporters Foxconn, which manu - have voted unanimously of substantial pressure nance workers The RMT is also organ - will rally outside facturers electronic goods for strike action to win from Foxconn workers employed by Balfour ising action against Sodexho headquarters for the likes of Nokia and Beatty Workplace and their jobs back. who have been involved Sodexho, which runs staff (1 Southampton Row, Apple, is easing its control in strikes, protests, and Aramark. Trainpeople workers canteens on the network. WC1B 5HA) at 8am on 7 of its in-house “union” even riots over the past and will allow employees will use the ballot man - Sodexho is victimising February. few months. • More: iwgb.org.uk date to continue their cam - RMT rep Petrit Mehaj to elect shop-floor repre - Workers plan action to & Workers’ Liberty Solidarity defend Bob Carnegie

By Ira Berkovic fashion, putting his pas - sion, energy and solidar - Australian construction ity to work.” workers and dock work - International support ers will take action on has also continued to Monday 11 February in flood in, with messages of solidarity with Bob solidarity received from Carnegie, as construc - the Swedish Dockwork - tion bosses begin their ers’ Union, the Philippine court case to victimise Airlines Employees’ Asso - him for his role in a suc - ciation (PALEA-ITF), All cessful construction Pakistan Federation of dispute in August-Octo - United Trade Unions (AP - ber 2012. FUTU), Intersindical-CSC Paddy Crumlin, the Na - Catalan Workers’ Union, tional Secretary of the Trades Union Interna - Maritime Union of Aus - tional of Workers in the tralia (MUA), which rep - Building, Wood, Building resents dock workers, and Materials, and Allied In - the CFMEU, which repre - dustries (UITBB-WFTU), Around 200 activists marched on Birmingham Town Hall to protest cuts on 4 February, storming its balcony and displaying a sents construction work - and the Left Party of Lux - banner. Birmingham is one of five councils facing a legal challenge over council tax benefit cuts. ers, have called on their emburg. British and Irish members to take action on construction union 11 February. The Queens - UCATT also backed the land Council of Unions campaign. has also backed the cam - UK-based supporters of paign and is lending its the campaign will also support to protests and rally on 11 February, at other actions on the day. 1pm outside Broadgate Council tax Tower near Liverpool The move represents a major breakthrough for Street, London. The tower the campaign in terms of was a major construction winning official backing project for Lend Lease, the from major Australian parent company of Abi - unions. group (the company Crumlin said: “The bringing the case against Bob). benefit cuts hit poor legal case against Bob is a Lend Lease is also in - simple case of corporate volved in attacks on By Pete Gilman council tax will lose some Moreover, according to are devastated at the bullying. The actual dis - working-class commu - of the benefit they cur - the government’s impact thought of this additional pute with Abigroup, nities in south London, From April, the system of rently receive. assessment of the 660,000 burden when they are al - which is owned by Lend where leaked docu - funding council tax bene - Because of “redistribu - households adversely af - ready struggling to pay for Lease, was settled and, in ments recently revealed fit is being “devolved” to tive factors”, and certain fected, 420,000 contain basics such as food and fact, as part of the settle - that its planned “regen - local authorities, but with exemptions that will re - someone who is disabled heating.” ment, Abigroup agreed eration” of the Heygate only 90% of funds being main, this loss will be sub - — people who are likely to This must be seen in the not to pursue legal action Estate, currently home already be suffering from made available. stantially higher than 10%. context of the Tory on - against a number of to over 3,000 people, This cut, coming on top government attacks on ben - slaught against the welfare workers. will provide just 79 so - Thus, every local author - of all the other cuts, se - efits. “But, they are putting a state, the privatisation of cially-rented properties. ity will face a 10% shortfall verely limits the alterna - full legal press on against the NHS, the closure of which has to be made up. It tives open to councils, and CHALLENGE Bob. Bob faces a jail sen - is to be left up to individual is particularly pernicious Already, residents are critically-needed hospitals, tence and over a million • London rally - councils to decide how to because it will hurt (in - mounting legal chal - the proposed skyrocketing dollars in fines, as well as on.fb.me/12phY1B do this, but it will almost deed, it is designed to hurt) lenges against five coun - rent increase, and George thousands of dollars in • Brisbane rally - certainly mean that those the very poorest and most cils (Birmingham, Osborne’s deliberate de - legal expenses. on.fb.me/TDLxJ4 who pay no or very little vulnerable in society. Hackney, Haringey, struction of hundreds of “What did Bob do dur - • Campaign supporters Rochdale, and Sheffield). thousands of public sector ing his support for the list - bobcarnegiedefence. jobs. All while the Tories community protest? He Boom for profiteers Lawyer Alex Rook said: wordpress.com/ give tax concessions to acted in good trade union “Residents are facing a supporters postcode lottery as to how multimillionaires. According to research last year. the new council tax rebate The Tories are encour - by investment bank 60% of the contracts system will be imple - aged and emboldened in Seymour Pierce, the awarded in 2012 were mented. People living public sector is likely to from local authorities their attacks by the timidity across the road from each be contracting-out £101 rather than central gov - of the Labour Party and other but in different bor - billion worth of work by ernment, but the bankers union leaders. oughs could face a signifi - We need a national 2014-15. say “healthcare is also cantly different council tax campaign of resistance, seen as a growth market, Already the value of bill because different coun - linking up, involving, and with the value of private contracts awarded each cils have different policies. sector deals rising from mobilising all those under year has doubled in four “Some councils are pass - £157 million to £552 mil - attack, led by trade years since 2008. The rise ing on cuts from the Gov - lion between 2008 and unions, to reverse the has not been steady, but ernment to everyone other rapidly increasing in the 2012”. Tory onslaught and save than pensioners, hitting the the welfare state. poorest hardest. Our clients