Socialist Review May 2008



Frontlines

Fuel for thought

As of 15 April, all petrol and diesel sold at British filling stations has to be blended with biofuels. The British government, through the Renewable Fuel Transport Obligation (RFTO), and the European Union have continued to push ahead with biofuel expansion despite scientific studies which show that this is one of the quickest ways of heating the planet, and despite United Nations (UN) agencies warning that biofuels are fuelling a catastrophic food crisis. 

In February this year two peer-reviewed studies on biofuels were published in the journal Science. These studies showed that converting land for biofuels releases vastly more carbon than is "saved" by burning less fossil fuels. They confirm that for every hectare of land used for bioenergy crops, another hectare of natural land will be converted for biofuel or food production.

The "carbon debt" from putting more land under intensive agriculture will take at least decades, but in many cases centuries, to repay. Right now people in Argentina's Buenos Aires are choking from smoke produced by some 300 fires burning across 70,000 hectares of what used to be biodiverse farmland and ecosystems. Farmers are burning land in order to create new pastures for cattle as previously grazed fields are now devoted to the more profitable production of soya. 

Just six months ago Paraguay experienced its worst ever fires, and earlier this year the Brazilian government admitted that deforestation and forest fires in the Amazon basin were rising again - all because of high soya prices. 

While tens of millions of hectares of forests are facing destruction, biofuels are now widely acknowledged to have triggered, or at least worsened, the worst global food crisis in decades. According to the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation, global food prices have risen by 57 percent in the past year. However, staple food prices in many countries of the global south have doubled or even trebled, causing millions more people to go without enough food. 

Agrofuels are helping to push up prices in at least three ways: they are rapidly pushing up the demand for food, they are tying the price of food to the rapidly increasing price of oil and they are giving agribusiness, in alliance with energy companies, even greater control over food markets and prices. 

Nonetheless the EU, with the apparent consent of the British government, is set to approve a new Fuel Quality Directive this summer. The British government has warned privately that this will create a biofuel target of more than 25 percent by 2020. Further legislation for a different 10 percent mandatory biofuel target has also been announced. 

Governments will not cease to support the agrofuel industry regardless of the cost to people, the environment and the climate, without strong popular opposition. We are seeing the beginning of a protest movement in Britain and elsewhere, with demonstrations outside Downing Street and some ten other places when the RFTO was introduced.

More such protests will and need to follow - including a Day of Action Against Agrofuels, organised as part of this year's Climate Camp, on 6 August (www.climatecamp.org.uk). 

Almuth Ernsting

Almuth is from Biofuelwatch. You can find out more at www.biofuelwatch.org.uk

END



Guilty as charged

Campaigners have won a landmark legal case against the government over the halting of an investigation into allegedly corrupt arms deals with Saudi Arabia. Lord Justice Moses and Mr Justice Sullivan ruled in the High Court on 10 April that Tony Blair's government had acted unlawfully when they pressurised the Serious Fraud Office (SFO) to abandon the inquiry. The judges described the situation as a "successful attempt by a foreign government to pervert the course of justice in the United Kingdom".

The case, brought by the Campaign Against Arms Trade (CAAT) and anti-corruption group The Corner House, came about after the SFO ended an investigation into allegations of fraud involving Britain's biggest arms manufacturer, BAE Systems, and the British and Saudi governments. 

The close relationship between Britain and Saudi Arabia allowed Margaret Thatcher and Blair to overlook the Saudi regime's appalling human rights record and negotiate the multi-billion pound deals that have ensured a continuing flow of weapons to Riyadh since the 1980s. Rather than demonstrating a triumph for British manufacturing, evidence came to light implying that BAE had provided "sweeteners" to Saudi princes costing millions of pounds.

After two years of investigating, the SFO announced that the case would be terminated. Blair cited national security and the importance of British-Saudi diplomatic relations as reasons, claiming that British lives would be under "imminent threat" if the Saudis stopped sharing intelligence on terrorism. His supporters argued that weapons sales maintain British jobs, although once the inquiry was dropped BAE admitted that most of the production for their latest Saudi deal would take place outside Britain. 

CAAT and The Corner House sought a judicial review, mounting a case that has taken 16 months. The court found that the SFO was investigating Swiss bank accounts that may have been used to hold bribe money, when a threat from Saudi prince Bandar triggered the government's decision to end the proceedings. 

The only imminent threat that the court could find was not to British lives but to the rule of law. The judges stated that "no-one, whether within this country or outside, is entitled to interfere with the course of our justice". They were damning of the government's "buckling" at the knees to a foreign power, and terminating a legitimate inquiry to "avoid uncomfortable consequences". 

The ruling came as Gordon Brown pushed for legislation to allow the government to terminate any criminal investigation by citing "national security", with no meaningful scrutiny by parliament or the courts. The case against the government was made possible only by donations from thousands of supporters and members of the public who believe that arms companies should not be above the law.

Annabelle Williams

For more information go to www.caat.org.uk

END

Olympian failure

When Ken Livingstone lobbied for the 2012 Olympics he argued that the resulting investment was needed desperately by east London, as it had seen none since Victorian times. Yet the games have received a chorus of damnation in recent weeks. A study by the New Economics Foundation (NEF) thinktank has shown that the regeneration of the East End of London was wishful thinking, at best.

This shouldn't come as a surprise. New Labour tends to see "regeneration" through the prism of how much profit can be made by business, blindfolded by its belief in the "trickledown" system. The report states that the games will mean that small local businesses will be unable to compete with the multinational stampede into east London, while residents will be priced out of the area. Indeed, the 1992 games in Barcelona displaced tens of thousands of low income families, while the 1998 Seoul games displaced 720,000. China is currently going for gold, with an estimated 1.25 million already displaced from Beijing. 

Josh Ryan-Collins, the co-author of the NEF report, said, "The regeneration legacy was not just an enlightened addition to the plan for the games - it was central to the bid."

We will be paying more than double what Tessa Jowell, minister for the Olympics, first estimated. The original budget was set at £4 billion, £738 million of which was due from the private sector. The new budget stands at £9.325 billion, with predictions for private investment down to just £165 million. The extra cost will be picked up by direct taxation and the National Lottery - 20 percent of the lottery's total "good cause" budget.

MPs on the Public Accounts Committee last month damned the original budget estimations, saying they "ignored foreseeable major factors" including tax and security. Policing and security costs have risen by £600 million since the original proposals, with the "delivery budget" up from £16 million to £600 million. The bid also omitted a VAT bill of £836 million.

Is it any wonder then, given New Labour's notoriety for its anti-Midas touch on white elephants ranging from Wembley Stadium to the Millennium Dome, that three quarters of British people don't think the Olympics will benefit them? 

One of the tests for whether London was to host the games was the level of public support. Perhaps that public support would have been less forthcoming had they known the true cost.

Patrick Ward

END

No such thing as a safe bet in the market

In April the International Monetary Fund dubbed the growing economic crisis "the largest financial shock since the Great Depression", leading to a one in four chance of a full-blown global recession. There is little doubt that the US economy is already contracting.

The immediate problem is a pool of bad debt, so-called "toxic waste", clogging up financial markets. The waste is a consequence of the scramble to lend money during the property boom of recent years. Arcane financial innovations, which saw debt parcelled out and gambled on by banks, hedge funds and corporations, ensured that the contagion from dodgy mortgages went global.

Now the banks are in trouble. So Citigroup, the largest bank in the world, had to "write down" the value of its assets by £8 billion last month. At the same time it announced 9,000 job cuts, on top of the 4,000 it has already made. Closer to home, the Royal Bank of Scotland has been forced to turn to shareholders in an attempt to raise £11 billion and plans to write down assets by up to £7 billion. As Socialist Review went to press, chancellor Alistair Darling and the Bank of England were preparing a plan to swap £50 billion in public money for the banks' dodgy assets. 

It is not only socialists who might question the logic - or morality - of bailing out some of those most deeply implicated in the crisis. Sections of the ruling class might ask why a government so committed to free market ideology would act in this way. So Vince Cable, the Liberal Democrats' treasury spokesperson, complained, "We cannot have a situation where the banks are able to privatise their profits and nationalise their losses." While Cable represents those in the ruling class who think the banks' profits and losses should both be privatised, socialists argue that, instead, their profits should be nationalised too. The money can then help those in danger of losing their homes or jobs.

The crisis is likely to increase as the financial problems spill over into the real economy. There are already signs of this. A recent survey of medium sized British companies revealed that 45 percent plan to cut jobs and 60 percent are witnessing a fall in profits. In the US unemployment has grown and real pay fallen. Rises in food and fuel prices have amplified the problem and are likely to grow still further as financial speculators look for a new source of profits, and the dollar (in which commodities are priced in world markets) continues to slide in value. 

A consumer downturn in the US will have major implications - it has been a major motor of the world economy. If the US is removed from the picture, China, famed for its export-led growth, is a net importer. 

More importantly, consumer spending absorbs 70 percent of US output. The other 30 percent is bought by companies, in the form of raw materials, investments in new machinery and so on. This investment is heavily dependent on the rate of profit and, as Chris Harman argued in February's Socialist Review, the long-term decline in profit rates is ultimately behind today's problems. A series of economic bubbles combined with rising personal and government debt have helped conceal underlying problems - until now.

For instance, last month General Electric (GE), one of the world's largest multinationals, saw the value of its shares fall by $47 billion in one day. GE was regarded as a "safe bet", a profitable US corporation. But now the Economist magazine can write, "GE's profits grew with the sort of predictable consistency that was made possible by laxer accounting standards and a talent for making good any unexpected shortfall with last-minute sales of assets held by the firm's notoriously opaque finance arm, GE Capital."

GE's profits were not just from making light bulbs and jet engines - they were from credit offered to consumers and other financial investments. It remains to be seen how many other firms have relied on these methods.

Faced with these sorts of problems, Gordon Brown's instincts will be to launch more attacks on workers. His attempts to cut public sector pay have little to do with "inflationary pressures" (which most serious economists agree are only weakly connected to public sector pay) and everything to do with cutting spending so he has more freedom of manoeuvre to bail out his friends in the City. 

For Karl Marx capitalism was characterised by anarchism in the marketplace and despotism in the workplace. Both are likely to grow as the financial meltdown gathers pace.

Joseph Choonara

END

Every libel helps

Tesco in Thailand is suing a columnist for suggesting the supermarket chain "doesn't love Thais". Tesco Lotus, as it trades in Thailand, is demanding £1.6 million for the "blatantly untrue" comments.

Nongnart Harnvilai, tongue in cheek business gossip writer for Bangkok Business News, is the third person to be sued for such "blatantly untrue" comments in recent months. The vice-general secretary of the Thai Chamber of Commerce also faces paying £16.6 million, and two years in prison, after similar criticism. Campaigners fear that this is an attempt by Tesco Lotus to crush criticism of its rapid expansion. The editor of Bangkok Business News said that the column, which ran to just several sentences, was "supposed to be funny".

With this in mind, on to the next story...PW

END

Taking the pics

The average Londoner is captured some 300 times a day on CCTV cameras. 

But the Metropolitan Police have stepped in to clarify who may, and may not, take photographs. Its latest advertising encourages Londoners to look out for suspicious looking photographers, as they might be "making notes about security measures, like the location of CCTV cameras". (Note to Al Qaida: they are located everywhere.)

Other than, say, photographing the MI6 building, it is legal to take pictures in public places. But police recently forced one photographer to delete pictures of the Ipswich Xmas lights, lest he be arrested, while another was challenged for taking "covert" snaps in a Hull shopping centre. 

Standards must be slipping - whatever happened to the hidden cameras of the Cold War? PW

END



In my view Dahr Jamail

Unembedded in Iraq

When a journalist decides to "embed" they can only report on the unit they are with. They see what the unit sees, and limit themselves to what the military decides they will see. In many instances they sign forms granting the military the right to censor their work. It is impossible for such "embedded" journalists to report accurately on how Iraqis are being affected by the occupation.

My type of reportage, like other independent journalists, focuses instead on the Iraqi perspective. I have focused my stories on how rampant unemployment, lack of water and electricity, the US-backed segregation of Baghdad, and the horrible security situation had an impact on Iraqis.

For example, how do parents decide whether to allow their five year old daughter to go to school in those conditions? How do they earn money to buy basic foodstuffs in a collapsed economy and while the US backed government in Baghdad is cutting items from the monthly food ration? How do Iraqis really feel about the occupation? Recent polls suggest that a minimum of 70 percent of Iraqis want the US and Britain out immediately.

While embedding reporters is not new, the current embed programme utilised by the Pentagon was set up as a means of information control. It was tested out during the 1991 US attack on Iraq, and then streamlined into the system we see today. Thus Western journalists who "embed" are unwittingly volunteering to act as propagandists for the US military. 

Yet this is done under the pretext that they are "reporting" when in actuality the military is using them for its own propaganda purposes.

At best, this misrepresentation of the situation is sloppy journalism. At worst, it is voluntarily spreading propaganda. In late February, Iraqi prime minister Nouri al-Maliki, who was appointed by the US and British governments, tried to push through legislation to impose roadblocks ahead of the upcoming provincial elections in October. He did this because he knows that if there were to be a legitimate election in Basra it would be dominated by Muqtada al-Sadr because he has the sheer numbers.

He then thought better of his openly anti-democratic move, and opted to use the military to attack Sadr's base in the south, particularly Basra, and started planning the failed operation the fallout of which we're witnessing now. Maliki attempted to use the Iraqi military - heavily populated by Mehdi Army members - to attack Sadr's base in Basra. 

Needless to say, it has been a dismal failure. Now Sadr is acutely aware of the lengths to which Maliki and Bush are willing to go to stem its position of power. This recent attempt, like the several others previously, has actually increased Sadr's power throughout the south, and Baghdad.

However, this situation is continuing to unfold and is far from being resolved. The only time "law and order" will have a chance of being restored in Basra, let alone the rest of Iraq, is when the occupation is over.

The longer the occupation persists, the worse things get for Iraqis. This is the one constant we can point to throughout the occupation. Of course, David Petraeus, Bush and Gordon Brown won't withdraw troops. That would run contrary to the US National Security Strategy which states, "Our forces will be strong enough to dissuade potential adversaries from pursuing a military build-up in hopes of surpassing or equalling the power of the US. To accomplish this, the US will require bases and stations within and beyond Western Europe and Northeast Asia." 

Withdrawal would also contradict the Department of Defence's Quadrennial Defence Review Report, which says there is a stated ability for the US military to fight "multiple overlapping wars" as they are doing now, and that the military will be used to "ensure that all major and emerging powers are integrated as constructive actors and stakeholders into the international system". How's that for democracy?

My point is, look at those documents, and look at the facts on the ground. Next month the US will open its "embassy" in Baghdad - an "embassy" the size of Vatican City. This is in addition to between six and 12 "enduring" bases. (They don't call them permanent, but, they don't call their bases in Japan or Germany permanent either.)

There is no plan for US withdrawal from Iraq, not until the oil runs out. Let us not forget what US vice-president Dick Cheney said in 1999 before he was sworn in: "By 2010 we [the US] will need a further 50 million barrels [of oil] a day. The Middle East, with two thirds of the oil and the lowest cost, is still where the prize lies."

The US will only leave Iraq is if they are forced out. DJ

Dahr Jamail is the author of Beyond the Green Zone, available at Bookmarks (020 7637 1848). www.dahrjamailiraq.com

END

Frontlines end

Feedback

Driving up profits

I  was interested to read Back On Track (Feature, Socialist Review, April 2008) about the effects of privatisation on public transport. As a bus worker in London, I, and many others employed in the industry, have had first hand experience of these effects.

In 1993 London Transport was privatised and as a result about 20 private companies operate routes on behalf of Transport for London and London Buses. One aspect of this was a 20 percent fall in the wages of drivers and an increase of 20 percent in working hours.

Market-based competition has been a feature of this process. Companies compete for routes across London, with contracts going to the lowest bidder. Wages and conditions, such as sick or holiday pay, are the highest cost to factor into a bid, and companies therefore have a vested interest to keep these costs as low as possible.

In 2004-2005, £555 million was needed in public subsidies to meet the estimated £1,400 million costs of the contracts tendered.

Bus workers have begun to fight back and demand change; a successful two-day strike in 2006 led to a reconvening of the London Bus Conference, its objective being to have all bus workers on the same rate of pay and conditions.

This is a small step that was started after bus workers stood up for their wages and conditions against a system that puts profit before the needs of workers and the travelling public. 

Amanda Logan

London

 

Red Season?

Martin Smith rescues the working class - of all ethnic backgrounds - from the garbage of the BBC's White Season (Feature, Socialist Review, April 2008). 

I am a union shop steward who represents, among others in our multicultural branch, white road sweepers and bin men trying to organise against pay cuts and union busting from a new Labour council intent on employing casualised, mostly east European, agency workers. At times there can be real tension but one of the best points of integration is the recognition that the bosses are the common enemy.

This requires organising migrant workers as well as arguing against racism. While the council fosters divisions, shutting down the main place where workers mix - the canteen - to stop the union from organising mass meetings, our union has helped fight for English classes at work and for agency staff to get permanent jobs. On our last strike we had leaflets explaining the issues translated into Polish, Lithuanian and Russian, and we have seen the beginnings of people joining the union. 

It's time the BBC had a Red Season - one that recognised that within the working class, it's politics and organisation that determine how we view migrants.

Elane Heffernan

London

Islamophobia

Last month's article on Islamophobia (Feature, Socialist Review, April 2008) was an important counter to anti-Muslim attitudes from a range of journalists and politicians.

As a Preston City councillor I am increasingly concerned at the way the Islamophobic atmosphere impacts on Muslims who come to us looking for help.

In the last few months I have accompanied a young niqab wearing woman to a quasi-legal hearing where she was accused of benefit fraud. There was no evidence - it was just that the benefit snoopers did not believe it was possible for her to raise her family on their income. Her crime was poverty, but it was expressed in ways which made her religion and ethnic origin part of the "problem". They asked her if she "understood or needed a translation", even though she was born in Preston and has a broader Lancashire accent than I do.

Two families have come up against social work departments who acted in the most dreadful way. One social worker actually asked - in a formal interview - what team one of the men would support if England played India at cricket.

Islamophobia is increasingly institutionalised within the state. It blights lives and needs to be fought wherever it raises its ugly head.

Michael Lavalette

Preston

Not so happy

Your review of Happy Go Lucky (Culture, Socialist Review, April 2008) wasn't hard enough, but thank you for preparing me.

Good cinema needs a great story or a great picture. We were deprived of both. "Poppy Go Lucky" does not need to hide from cruel reality in her world of fairy tales. Nor does she try to solve any problems.

Little boy gets beaten up at home: she sleeps with his counsellor. She's happy. The boy's gonna be fine. She meets a homeless guy who has no shelter or support: well, she sees him and still manages to stay happy - don't worry about him!

It's difficult to stay stupidly positive once you open your eyes and see all the injustice, misery and grief around you. The trick, I suppose, is to keep your eyes shut. Poppy manages it well. Good for her.  

To stay on the happy side let's thank Poppy for giving us all just grounds to be pissed off. 

Asya Stolberg

London

FEEDBACK end



Letter from Italy

April saw the right deal a devastating blow in the Italian elections. Phil Rushton looks at the reasons for the defeat and how the left can rebuild

The disastrous election results in Italy have sent shockwaves across Europe. It seems incredible that Silvio Berlusconi is back in with a bigger majority than before and that Italy's defence minister is now a fascist, Ignazio La Russa from the National Alliance. 

Equally serious is the blow to the radical reformist left: Rifondazione, the Greens and the Comunisti Italiani, grouped together in the Sinistra Arcobaleno (Rainbow Left Coalition). The combined percentage of the three parties' vote added up to 11 percent, and they then declared they were aiming at 15 percent in the elections, but then finished with little more than 3 percent.

The knock-on effects have not been slow in coming. For example, the head of the Italian employers' organisation, Luca de Montezemolo, immediately launched an all-out attack on the trade unions, calling them an unrepresentative caste, a waste of money and no more responsive to workers than the bosses. When two separate rapes occurred last month in Milan and Rome, in which the alleged attackers were immigrants, they were then seized on by the right to call for "the expulsion of barbarians".

But the radical left is in turmoil. In Rifondazione both its historic leader, Fausto Bertinotti, and the general secretary of the party, Franco Giordano, have resigned their positions, speaking of the need for "self-criticism", and the former majority of the party, Bertinotti and Giordano's base, has split down the middle. 

So what happened? The day after the results, even the CBS news channel said that the campaign of the centre-left was so bland most voters couldn't tell it apart from Berlusconi's. This led to a situation where the party with the biggest publicity machine had the advantage. Yet the centre-left campaign could have articulated the majority of Italian voters' worries about their economic future.

That same economic insecurity, however, enabled the racist Northern League to divert workers' fears of material insecurity from the bosses to immigrants. So while the Rifondazione leadership downplayed the importance of a workplace base in favour of electoral calculations, the party with a real presence on the ground won, and in many cases that was the Northern League. 

So when Montezemolo attacks the unions, one of the first voices reining him in is the Northern League, which perhaps fears that an employers' attack on its worker base would place it in a no-win situation: being able to support neither the bosses nor the workers. 

But, of course, what really played havoc with the centre-left's vote was their performance in government. At one point the minister of defence of the previous right wing government could state that while the centre-right had cut military spending, the centre-left actually increased it, and by double figures. Add to that their refusal to significantly reverse any of the anti-worker or anti-immigrant legislation of the previous Berlusconi government, and the activists of the centre-left were demoralised before the campaign began. 

So what now? The week after the vote an attempt to regroup was held under the banner of the United Plural Left. Nichi Vendola, tipped as successor to Bertinotti, received significant applause, despite reaffirming his close ties with the old leadership. Clearer about the problem was Paolo Ferrero, ex-minister for social welfare, who stated that the parties of the Rainbow Left lost when they "failed to respond to the hopes generated by the elections of 2006".

The anti capitalist left had candidates in the elections in the form of the Sinistra Critica (Critical Left), which recently parted company with Rifondazione. While it did not receive a massive vote, polling less than 1 percent, it has made a name for itself that can be built on. To do so, however, will mean much sharper political proposals. Sinistra Critica has been consistently present in all major national political battles, but it lacks a clear strategy to propose to the movement.

This is a shame, because the opportunities are there, despite the traditional left. Anti-privatisation and environmental campaigns have mobilised thousands, and workers' anger remains high after deaths in a series of workplace accidents. 
A huge debate has opened up about the way forward for the left, but to rebuild in this situation much more ambitious strategies are needed. 

Phil Rushton is a member of Sinistra Critica in Naples

Letter from end



Feature

1968 The Year the World Caught Fire

The events of 1968 inspired a generation and shaped struggles around the world for years to come. Chris Harman, a student activist at the time, looks back at this tumultuous year

Occasionally one year can cast a spell over the decades that follow. 1968 was such a year. Supporters of capitalism still bemoan its impact 40 years on. Nicolas Sarkozy on the eve of his election declared he aimed to eradicate the "harm" that it had done. Before him it had been Tony Blair who blamed "the 1960s" for what he sees as the ills of society today.

Yet you would have great difficulty understanding why the year was so significant from most of the media coverage. It has been dominated by renegades from the left who have turned into right wing fogies, with the likes of Martin Kettle and David Aaronovitch regretting their youthful folly. Interspersed with them has been the occasional ageing hippy recalling with nostalgia overindulgence in drugs and sex. At best what happened is presented as a euphoric student rebellion against conservative social mores: a time of dropping out, dropping acid and, perhaps, challenging old sexual stereotypes. 

There are very different reasons for commemorating 1968. It was one of those moments in history when it suddenly seemed that the coming together of many different acts of revolt could overturn an exploitative and oppressive society in its totality.

The year began with a devastating blow to US imperialism's attempt to crush opposition to its puppet regime in the southern half of Vietnam. There were armed risings against US troops in every city in the country, the brief seizure of part of the US embassy in Saigon, and a battle for Hue, the country's former capital, that lasted for weeks. Television screens across the world featured a US general admitting of one town, "We had to destroy it in order to retake it."

Blown apart was the arrogant assumption of the US ruling class that it could crush resistance anywhere in the huge chunk of the world it dominated. The consequences fed back into the heart of US society. The Democrat president, Lyndon Baines Johnson (LBJ), had looked forward only a few days before to a triumphant re-election; the Tet Offensive meant that an anti-war candidate, Gene McCarthy, enjoyed unexpected success in the New Hampshire primary in March while Johnson declared that he would not be standing again. 

While this was happening, the rival imperialist power in Moscow was also taking a hammering. The Stalinist regime that had ruled Czechoslovakia since the Second World War split apart, allowing students, intellectuals and workers to organise freely and discuss genuinely socialist ideas for the first time, while across the border in Poland students occupied the universities and fought back against police attacks in the streets. 

When we demonstrated against the Vietnam War on 17 March in London, there was not just revulsion at the barbarity of US imperialism - with the chant, "Hey, Hey LBJ, How many kids have you killed today?" - there was also the feeling that we could fight and win amid a world in turmoil. It was the most militant demonstration anyone could remember as tens of thousands us tried to break through the police lines outside the US embassy in Grosvenor Square.

Just two and a half weeks later came the assassination of Martin Luther King in Memphis. People rose up in every black neighbourhood in the US, attacking symbols of authority, with young African-Americans turning away from the civil rights movement's goal of peaceful integration into existing US society towards the overtly revolutionary ideas of the Black Panthers. A week after this there was a similar eruption of angry militancy among West Germany's students at the attempted assassination of one of their leaders, Rudi Dutschke, after a hate campaign by the right wing Springer media empire. Tens of thousands took to the streets with red flags in an attempt to close down its newspapers. 

May was the most amazing month. What began as a small group of activists defending themselves against a police attack outside Paris's Sorbonne university escalated into a "night of barricades" involving tens of thousands of students who drove the police from the area and caused trade unions to call a one day stoppage and demonstration in solidarity. That then showed millions of workers their potential power. Strikes and occupations spread, closing down radio, television, airports and cutting petrol supplies, until the whole country was paralysed by a general strike of up to ten million workers that had grown from the bottom up. 

France's President de Gaulle had ruled with dictatorial powers for ten years, brought to power by parliament panicking in the face of the threat of a military coup. Now he was visibly humiliated. People in their millions laughed at his speeches denouncing the movement. The strikes made it impossible for him to implement a referendum that was meant to bring it to an end. The world's media talked of "France's May revolution". 

In June it was the turn of the students of Yugoslavia to precipitate their country's biggest political crisis for 20 years as they battled with police in Belgrade to chants of "Down with the Red bourgeoisie." 

Defiant salute

August saw the Brezhnev regime in Russia set out to crush the ferment in eastern Europe by sending its tanks into Czechoslovakia and kidnapping the country's leaders - and get a shock as it met massive passive resistance from virtually the whole population. Meanwhile, anyone who believed in "American democracy" got a sharp lesson as thousands of police viciously attacked anti-war demonstrators outside the Democratic Party convention in Chicago as it chose the pro-war nominee, Hubert Humphrey, as its candidate despite him not winning in a single primary.

The Olympic Games were in Mexico City in October. They were the occasion of a massacre much worse than any we have yet seen this year in Tibet. Police cornered a demonstration of tens of thousands of students in a square away from the city centre and opened fire from surrounding buildings, killing hundreds. They forbade the press from reporting what had happened. The world's media and politicians chose to ignore the blood flowing in the streets. Instead they reserved their condemnations for victorious black US athletes who gave defiant clenched fist black power salutes on the podium - and were immediately banned from sport. 

That month also saw an event whose consequences were to ricochet through British politics for the next 30 years. The armed Northern Ireland police force viciously attacked demonstrators from the nationalist ghetto of the Bogside in Derry who demanded civil rights. Inspired by the rebellions elsewhere in the world demonstrators fought back - the beginning of a great revolt against the sectarian statelet Britain had established when it partitioned the island in 1921.

But there was more to the year than just a series of exciting events. Each upsurge of struggle inspired those involved in the next, creating the sense of an international movement. People who otherwise might have regarded their struggles as over particular grievances saw they had much more general significance. 

As with any great upsurge of revolt, no one expected it. The 1950s and early 1960s had been one of those periods in history in which the structures of existing society seemed frozen. The ruling powers had contained and rolled back the rebelliousness and ferment of the inter-war and wartime years. The US and the USSR had divided the world between themselves, not only geographically but also ideologically. If you did not accept the inhuman behaviour and dogmatic utterances of one you were expected to line up with the inhuman behaviour and dogmatic utterances of the other. Russian dissidents were thrown into labour camps or psychiatric hospitals, US dissidents were driven from their jobs by the Un-American Activities Committee, imprisoned like Dashiell Hammett, expelled from the country like Charlie Chaplin or deprived of their passports like Paul Robeson. 

The time when the CIO unions in the US had been a radical force was long since past; the union movements in France and Italy had been divided and their power apparently broken; Britain's union leaders were the bastions of the pro-US and pro-nuclear weapons right wing inside the Labour Party; the National Union of Students was part of a CIA international front. 

A stultifying conformity pervaded social life. The family was taken to mean the man working while the woman toiled in the home waiting on him with complete responsibility for childcare. Women were expected to kowtow to men, young people to look up to their elders, black people to be thankful when occasionally they were not discriminated against. In the Southern part of the US, black people were still subject to the separate and unequal "Jim Crow" status which denied them voting rights and any redress against racist thugs and police.

Liberal and Labour apologists for the system claimed its remaining ills could be cured by peaceful and patient endeavour for small reforms within existing structures. They spoke of an "affluent society" that was delivering rising living standards, of an "end of ideology" and the demise of the working class as it embraced "middle class" consumerism. It was a message which even influenced adamant opponents of the system like the German-American philosopher Herbert Marcuse. He portrayed a "one-dimensional" society of people so enmeshed in the ideology of "consumerism" as to rule out any revolt in its advanced industrial heartlands.

Hardly noticed by anyone were changes beneath the surface of society that were undermining the existing structures and ideologies which justified them.

These were bound to find expression first among young people. At all times in any society they are more likely to kick back against oppressive and exploitative conditions than their elders, worn down from bearing the weight of the past. Such kicking back grows in magnitude the greater the contrast between the official conformism and the conditions in which people live. And students are especially sensitive to the contrast in present day capitalism. They are herded together in their thousands and expected to become proficient practitioners of ruling ideologies that make little sense. They also find it much easier to argue out and give organised expression to their feelings than do workers, even young workers, since they are not bound to machines or office routines eight hours or more a day. 

So it was students who were the first to move in 1968, giving the impression that expressions of more general social crises were a specifically student issue - the impression that so much media coverage of 1968 seeks to perpetuate.

Already the early 1960s had seen some dissent. There had been mass demonstrations against nuclear weapons in Britain; thousands of black and white students had taken part in the civil rights movement in the US; French students had resisted the Algerian War. There was a new flourishing of such activity in 1966 and 1967, with the first protests against the Vietnam War in the US and Britain, the radicalisaton of German students after the police killed a demonstrator on a Berlin protest, the adoption of the concepts of black power and armed self-defence by African-American student activists, revolts against professorial authoritarianism and appalling conditions on the Italian campuses. The impact of 1968 was to gel these different movements together. 

The Tet Offensive brought the sudden realisation that those who ruled over us were not all-powerful. So it was that in the first months of 1968 there was a rash of protests in Britain, mainly by students, against Labour ministers for supporting the Vietnam War and against Conservative politicians like Enoch Powell, Duncan Sandys and Patrick Wall for their racism. These were initially minority protests of perhaps a couple of hundred students. But a couple of years earlier they would not have been bigger than a couple of dozen. When the authorities tried to discipline protesters, hard arguing and insistent agitation by these minorities were able to swing previously liberal "moderates" - and even some outright Tories - into supporting the radical position.

In the early months of 1968 the student movements in Germany and Italy were much bigger than anything happening in France. French activists complained to one of our comrades that they did not have a movement like ours in Britain. The language of the movements was increasingly revolutionary but usually in terms of "student power" and students as "the new revolutionary class." 

Those who were more radical looked to the notions spread by Che Guevara (who had been murdered by the CIA only months before) that revolution would come from armed actions in the most remote areas of Third World countries and that Western workers were "bought off" by "consumerism". This could divert them from making connections with wider numbers of people here.

This began to change with the May events in France. People suddenly saw the possibility of revolutionary change much nearer home and one which came from below, involving the mass of people. The media concentrated on the student battles with the police in the Latin Quarter of Paris. But by the third week of May the spectacle of the working class holding to ransom the government of a major capitalist country had an impact on those fighting back against the system everywhere. 

Great revolts cause a fantastic widening of people's horizons. Those who would have laughed at the idea of revolution in 1966 - or at least deemed it impossible - were taking it seriously in the summer of 1968. When Britain had its biggest Vietnam demonstration, in October 1968, the most popular slogan alongside "Victory to the NLF" (the Vietnamese liberation movement) was "We will fight, we will win, London, Paris, Rome, Berlin"; the most popular placard was of a clenched fist with a spanner and the words "Workers' Control".

Only a small minority within the student movement anywhere became committed revolutionary activists - but that minority was many times bigger than that of only six months before. The ideas of a much wider number of people were turned upside down by the experiences of the year. They began to listen, argue and discuss, and to read Marxist texts which had been all but excised from university syllabuses. The forms of social conformism that had underpinned the old ideas were also challenged. 

Some of the changes were superficial but symbolically important, as when male students gave up wearing suits and shaving for jeans, beards and long hair. 

There had been a very small counterculture on the margins of mainstream society in the late 1950s and early 1960s, characterised by a mixing together of those into hallucinatory drugs, left wing or pacifist ideas, avant-garde theatre or poetry, folk music and eastern religions. This counterculture had begun to find a wider audience with the "summer of love" in 1967 and the rise of the hippies. Its audience grew much greater because of the events of 1968, but also more political. It even began to influence the western world's dream factory in Hollywood, with a new wave of directors and actors producing films previously unimaginable. But in the process it was easy for people to confuse changing their own lifestyles with the revolution.

Wave of occupations

There were more profound challenges to the old conformism, even if often mixed up with the lifestyle approach. It was in 1968 that the Women's Liberation Movement was born as women activists began to challenge the sexist assumptions which the young men who had been radicalised brought with them into the new movements. The next year saw the first open organisation of gay people.

Very important for the future was the way activists drew lessons from the French events, lessons which led them to take up revolutionary Marxist ideas which had only been held by handfuls of people previously. They saw that it was not just "the people" in general that had shaken French society, but the workers. 

The new student revolutionists of Italy (a fair number converts from the Catholic student organisations) turned to the factories and played an important role in the workers' strikes which swept the country in its "hot autumn" of 1969 (sometimes called its "May in slow motion"). The slogan of Students for a Democratic Society in the US had been "Half the way with LBJ" in 1964; at the end of 1968 its activists declared themselves to be "Marxist-Leninists". In Britain students went from occupations and demonstrations to leaflet the docks and the factories.

Such efforts were to be immensely important in the years that followed 1968. The French slogan after May had been "Ce n'est qu'un début" - it's only the beginning. And across the world as a whole it was only the beginning. 1969 saw student demonstrations transformed into a mighty rising of car workers in the Argentinian city of Cordoba and an autumn wave of occupations and strikes in Italy. 1970 saw the biggest yet wave of student protests in the US after Nixon and Kissinger extended the Vietnam War to Cambodia and the national guard shot students dead at Kent State University, Ohio. 1972 saw a great upsurge of popular struggle in Chile and, at the end of 1973, an occupation by Athens students which turned into a huge popular uprising that caused the Greek military dictatorship to collapse six months later. 1974 saw a coup which overthrew the 40 year old fascist regime in Portugal and opened up 18 months of ferment with revolutionary characteristics. 1975 saw a rising tide of struggle against Spanish dictator Franco that caused his heirs to begin to dismantle his fascist regime within months of his death. And in Britain we went through the biggest wave of industrial struggle for half a century, culminating in the fall of the Tory government of Edward Heath.

Students who had been radicalised by the events of 1968 were able in these years to find common cause with a layer of workers and together create networks of activists committed to social revolution in the factories, mines, docks, offices and schools. 

The importance of such networks was one other lesson of the May events in France. For, if de Gaulle was helpless in the face of the rebellion from below through most of May, at the end of the month he finally found a way to bring it to an end. He relied on the cowardly willingness to compromise of those who dominated the official structures of the working class movement. Union leaders were prepared to end the general strike by getting workers back to work, one section at a time, in return for partial concessions. And the political leaders were so thrilled by the prospect of a general election that they urged an end to the strikes, even though by doing so they broke the momentum of the movement and enabled de Gaulle to win the election.

That pattern too was repeated elsewhere in the years that followed, culminating in agreements by official leaders of the workers' movements in 1975 and 1976 to campaign against strikes in the interests of "partnership" and social peace with the "social contract" in Britain, the "historic compromise" in Italy, and the "Pact of Moncloa" in Spain. Employers were not slow in seizing the opportunity to begin rooting out socialist activists and inflicting severe defeats on workers' movements that had once threatened them. 

As the workers' movement went down, so did the other movements born of 1968. By the 1980s capitalism in crisis was taking bitter revenge on the hopes of that year, and by the 1990s a new conformism seemed all dominant, embodied in Blairism and neoliberalism.

There are differences with old conformism of the 1950s and early 1960s. The old suppressed open discussion of sexuality; the new extols its transformation into a commodity. The old confined women to the home; the new witchhunts mothers who will not work for poverty wages. The old believed in the right of white Western governments to use bombs and tanks to subdue vast areas of the world; the new preaches using them for mass killings in the interests of "humanitarian intervention". The old believed in deference to the upper classes; the new in the divine rights of entrepreneurs and venture capitalists. 

Just as there was pessimism among much of the left in the 1950s and 1960s, so there is today. Neoliberalism had its shadow in postmodernism, with its claim that any total challenge to the system is both impossible and dangerous. Its stranglehold has loosened in recent years, but its paralysing effects still linger on. And some of the older generation contrast their own rebellious years with the supposed complacency of today's younger generation. They forget that the millions who marched against the Iraq war are many times greater in number than those who marched against the Vietnam War. They forget how confused and sometimes demoralised the left was before the French May. Above all they ignore the way the very dynamic of capitalism itself, with its continual transformation of economic relations, forces masses of people to rebel against it, even when they themselves least expect to.

1968 showed a generation how such revolts can erupt, interact with each other and enable millions to see the possibility of a new world. That's something hated by the likes of Sarkozy and Blair. It is something the rest of us should rejoice in. 

Chris Harman's The Fire Last Time and A People's History of the World are available from Bookmarks bookshop

END

1968 and me

Sherrl Yanowitz / Berkeley

Racism dominated life in the US in the 1960s. Segregation wasn't just in the South, with black people being murdered when they fought for human rights. De facto segregation was rife in the North. I was a student at the University of California in Berkeley, with 30,000 students on one campus. 

Our generation had grown up during the civil rights movement. In 1964 white students from Berkeley went on the Freedom Rides - to desegregate interstate buses - and spent that summer teaching in Alabama and Mississippi Freedom Schools. Many of my friends put their lives on the line doing that.

Every 18 year old man in the US had to register at a military draft board ready to be shipped off to fight in Vietnam within weeks of being called up. Working class youth, especially black youth, were the hardest hit. But by 1964 politically active Berkeley students faced expulsion and immediate call-up. I had a friend, Nicolai, who was drafted. He shot two of his toes off during training rather than be shipped to Vietnam. 

It was relatively easy to occupy draft boards, but the Bay Area was a major staging point for the war with large naval dockyards. They were boarding troops and loading ships with weapons and tanks. We would try to march to the dockyards and stop the ships going; people lay down on the railway lines to stop military trains. 

On one demonstration we were stopped at the Berkeley-Oakland border. The National Guard stood across the road with drawn bayonets. If they were given the word I don't know if they would have charged, so that time we had to retreat. 

By 1968 it seemed the war had been going on my whole life. When the US was defeated in 1975 I felt I had won. All my friends and I felt like we were actually fighting the war alongside the Vietnamese.

Maggie Falshaw / West Yorkshire

I joined the Labour Party in 1964 when I was 14. Getting rid of the Tory government after 13 years was worth celebrating. But Harold Wilson's Labour government soon lost its attraction. At first I accepted it couldn't do much because it only had a majority of four. Then in 1966 it was re-elected with a majority of 96. My expectations rose, but soon so did my disappointment. 

With some school friends I helped to set up a branch of the Labour Party Young Socialists in Ossett. We raised money for the anti-apartheid struggle in South Africa, and organised benefits for strikers like the Hull seamen and the 145 engineers sacked and replaced by cheap labour at the Roberts-Arundel factory in Stockport. Ossett is a small town. The only political parties were Labour, the Liberals, "independents" (Tories) and one Communist Party member. There was no viable alternative to Labour. 

In the spring of 1968 I went to the Young Socialists conference. It was a revelation. Here were people putting into words what I felt. One of the best speeches was made in defence of Rudi Dutschke, a German revolutionary student leader who survived an assassination attempt. 

After the conference I approached the comrade who made this speech. This was my introduction to the International Socialists, who later became the SWP. I joined and have been a member ever since. 1968 was a real turning point for me.



Alan Watts / Australia

I got involved in a left wing bookshop run by Bob Gould in Sydney, which was at the centre of the movements of 1968. There were always anti-war demonstrations going on. I remember one ended up outside a hotel where US troops stayed. But we weren't anti-soldier: we had parties and sometimes the soldiers came along. I was 27, and some of them were much younger than me and in a terrible state from the trauma of war. 

Once 15 of us went into the Blue Mountains, it was just a weekend away on a jolly - drinking and political meetings. When we came back there were newspaper reports about it claiming we were receiving Viet Cong guerilla training! Our trip was even raised in parliament. 

There was a confidence among the Australian working class. They weren't about to take any bollocks from the employers. The unions had negotiated a deal that if inflation increased so did our wages. The English weren't always that popular - we were "whinging poms" - so people could be guarded and unfriendly in the factory. But, as with any situation, you have to establish yourself. 

When the government decided to break the link with inflation we organised a strike, and I spoke at a mass meeting. We got the money, and after that I was alright, not just a whinging pom.

Eddie Prevost / London

As a young docker in 1968 Eddie Prevost was faced with a dilemma when his workmates went on strike to support the racist politician Enoch Powell. He describes how the events of that year challenged his political beliefs

I had joined the Communist Party (CP) when I worked for Briggs Motor Bodies in 1958. I liked their position on imperialism and their then orientation on the working class. As a 14 year old I had read the Daily Worker and opposed the US in Korea.

When the Tet Offensive began, in January 1968, the bravery of Viet Cong troops was inspiring. It confirmed my political position. However, events in Czechoslovakia and France shocked and disturbed me. The sight of Russian tanks in Prague seemed no different to US troops in Vietnam. How could one socialist state attack another? I remember the chair of the Royal Docks liaison committee arguing the CP line - that the Russians were saving socialism from plots by the West. But the sight of ordinary workers on the streets confronting the tanks gave the lie to this.

In France the role of the French Communist Party (PCF) in trying to keep revolutionary students separated from the workers, and to mediate their struggle with the capitalist state, seemed to fly in the face of class realities. I increasingly questioned the CP's political programme, the British Road to Socialism, which suggested that through electing left wing Labour and Communist MPs the ruling class could be legislated into oblivion. These factors led to my eventual break with the CP. 

Enoch Powell's 1968 "Rivers of Blood" speech further exposed the CP's failures. The speech became a major topic in Britain. He received 110,000 letters, mostly supporting his position. In the Royal Group of Docks, where I worked, it became apparent that things were going much further. The National Front (NF) had organised some meat porters and dockers who were in the process of setting up a meeting, calling for a strike in support of Powell. 

Should we attend this meeting and oppose it? If we lost the vote, did we go on strike? If we didn't, could it be used against us as an excuse not to abide by future unofficial strike decisions? We were thrown into confusion, and the CP was caught off guard. I decided, rightly or wrongly (I was wrong), not to attend. I would go to work. There was no way I would support a racist strike. 

On the day of the meeting discussion in my gang was sharp and nasty. But I stuck to my guns. Those events around Powell were among my worst moments as a politically involved worker, but we learnt lessons we would never forget. In the late 1970s we organised the fight against racism much more successfully.

1968 showed that the cracks in state capitalist power were widening, and that revolutionary struggle was back on the agenda, big time. That was where my future lay. After the dock strike in 1972 I joined the forerunner to today's SWP, the International Socialists.

Michel Certano / France

There had been an accumulation of grievances and unhappiness about working conditions since 1966. In the first months of 1968 there were grievances around our salaries, pensions and the return to the 40-hour week among other things. 

Despite a 15-year ban, the CGT trade union called on the workers to march in Paris on 1 May. The government was scared of intervening and this in return gave confidence to the workers. 

Then the student movement, with their own demands, led the struggle. During the night of 10 May the barricades went up, with some workers joining them. The battle between the demonstrators and the police lasted for four hours. There was massive repression and the next morning the CGT called a one-day general strike for 13 May to protest at police violence. So on 13 May workers protested across France. This one-day strike was very strong in Paris and in the other big cities. 

We started the occupation of our factory at Renault Billancourt on 16 May. We held meetings every day where workers could vote on the continuation of the strike. Workers at Renault had a long history of great struggles and that's why it was so important to have these meetings.

I was 25 years old at that time, and we were occupying the factory every day and night. This movement was exhilarating for us young people. Then the students wanted to get inside our factory, but we refused because it would have been used by the bosses as an excuse to send in the police, as in 1938 and 1950 [when 6,000 police were sent to evacuate the factory]. 

Some 25,000 workers were on strike in our factory. Renault Billancourt had the biggest concentration of workers. That was the reason why the strike was so important. 

President de Gaulle had to rush back from a trip to Romania because we had started the occupation. The prime minister, George Pompidou, said, "Now it's serious." Everyone knew what Renault represented. It wasn't some small factory, it was the biggest factory in France which fought for most of the social benefits like the third paid holiday week, the fourth, and so on. All the benefits won at Renault eventually found their way across the whole of France. 

It's one of the reasons why the government and the bosses didn't want to negotiate. They hoped to crush us. And if they did manage to crush us it would have been an enormous defeat for the French working class. But our victory gave confidence to successive generations of workers. 

I think that's the lesson of May 1968 - the acquired confidence. And that's why the ruling class today wants to reduce May 1968 to the barricades and the change in morals, because working class confidence is too much of a danger to be talked about. 

Michel Certano's book Mai 1968 - Renault Billancourt (in French) is available from www.i-editions.com



Mike Davis/  San Diego

The earthquakes of Saigon, Prague and Paris shook even the most right wing corner of Southern California. In 1968 I was an apprentice butcher, cutting the tonsils and adenoids off beef tongues while dreaming that, perhaps, "sous la plage, les pavés" (to invert the famous slogan of that May). My wife and I belonged to a groupuscule (who didn't in those days?) that was distinctive in being composed entirely of young working adults: a couple of school teachers, a delivery driver, a secretary, some telephone company electricians, and a Marine Corps conscientious objector. 

Two nights a week we convened over spaghetti to plot our collective escape to San Francisco (I ended up in LA instead) and to argue over "what is to be done". In the midst of one particularly intractable wrangle over Trotsky versus Mao, we decided to appeal to the highest authority available: the philosopher Herbert Marcuse in La Jolla, San Diego. 

He'd just returned from overwhelming, almost unnerving adulation in Paris and Frankfurt, and seemed quite relieved to spend an evening quietly emptying a beer keg and yarning about carrying messages for Rosa Luxemburg in 1918. When we attempted to solicit his opinion about our internal dispute, he laughed and urged us not to worry unduly about "theology": "The world is on fire - just follow the light." We tried.

Eamonn McCann/ Derry

For me 1968 was about the birth of the civil rights movement. Originally a campaign for basic demands, it stands out as a significant moment in the narrative of Irish history. The black civil rights movement and Martin Luther King earlier in the 1960s had excited the imagination of people here. The influence of the student movement and reports of militancy from around Europe were also in the mix - Northern Ireland is not an isolated place. 

I was a Labour Party member then. The movement was very broad - a hubbub of ideas, aims and perspectives, many of them half formed. There was the student organisation, People's Democracy - an unformed, amorphous organisation, which had advantages in the early stages of the struggle. But its great disadvantage was that it was very difficult to carry things through or to have any political growth or deepening understanding, since things would change from meeting to meeting. 

The situation in Northern Ireland as it has developed is very different to other struggles in 1968. Here events detonated then gave rise to the IRA's armed struggle and increasing sectarianism. But it's important to remember there were other possibilities glimpsed in 1968. We have to try and keep the memory of them alive and make them a reality.

END

1968 ENDS

A to Z of Socialism

L for Lenin

There have been many revolutionary upheavals in the past century, each one unleashing the huge creative energy of millions of people. Mostly these revolutions have been beaten back, with the reassertion of class power and a return to the "norm" of exploitation, poverty and war.

The one exception to this is the 1917 Russian Revolution, and the crucial difference was made by Lenin and the Bolshevik Party he built.

Before Lenin socialists had aimed to group all workers into one broad party. After all, Marx had said that "the emancipation of the working class can only be the act of the working class". But Marx also argued that "the ruling ideas in society are the ideas of the ruling class" - so that most workers, most of the time, are not revolutionaries.

Lenin rejected the idea held by some revolutionaries that people would naturally or spontaneously move towards revolutionary politics. He thought it as ludicrous as the idea held by reformists that capitalism could naturally evolve into something more humane.

Of course, capitalism constantly gives workers cause to fight back, and these struggles often push them towards revolutionary ideas. But Lenin argued that the task of socialists isn't to sit back and watch, but to intervene in these struggles, fight to steer their direction and give conscious theoretical expression to workers' revolutionary impulses. So, Lenin argued, the Bolsheviks should not just support strikes, but also encourage workers to oppose anti-Semitic pogroms.

This requires a "combat party" which unites revolutionaries so that they can more effectively influence the movement, rather than a party that encompasses all strands of working class thought. 

It is on precisely this basis that the Bolshevik Party was formed in 1903 after a split with the Mensheviks, who wanted a broad party. The Bolsheviks were a democratic centralist party - which meant that once they had come to a decision every member was expected to put it into practice. 

This structure enabled the Bolsheviks to overcome two difficulties. Capitalism tends to divide the working class, often making struggles separate and sectional. Any good activist will be influenced by the people around them, by the reactionary ideas which exist among workers, and by the nuts and bolts of their campaign. 

Furthermore, any party has a tendency towards conservatism, as activists become used to a particular mode of activity and resistant to change. Because they brought together revolutionaries involved in various campaigns from each area of the country to debate the way forward, and because they then implemented decisions collectively, the Bolsheviks were able to withstand these pressures.

In 1905, when Russia was gripped by revolutionary mass strikes, Lenin argued with the Bolshevik committee members for the need to "open the gates of the party". The young workers on the barricades may not have read Marx's Capital but they certainly understood the need to organise for a revolution, and should be actively recruited to the Bolsheviks.

When the social democratic parties of Europe were swept by a wave of patriotism into backing the First World War, Lenin was confident that workers wouldn't back the carnage for long and made sure the Bolsheviks not only opposed the war, but wanted Russia to lose.

In April 1917, just two months after the overthrow of the Tsar and his replacement with a parliamentary provisional government, Lenin argued - against much of his own central committee - that these changes were not enough. The soviets, or workers' councils, thrown up by the February revolution, pointed to a new form of state beyond capitalism. The Bolsheviks had to "patiently explain" to workers who had just made a revolution that they didn't need the provisional government and could take control of society for themselves.

Through 1917, by fighting with workers to win immediate demands and by arguing, and proving in practice, the best way forward for the movement, the Bolsheviks' ideas were able to win the support of the majority of the working class. In October 1917 the soviets took state power.

Trotsky compared the Russian Revolution to a steam engine. The people were the steam and the Bolsheviks were the piston box, without which the steam's energy would dissipate and drive nothing. Nevertheless it was the "steam" that drove the revolution, not the party.

Across Europe near-revolutionary situations failed to produce revolutions. Foreign invasion, and the resulting famine, eventually devastated the Russian working class and allowed for the formation of a layer of bureaucrats with their own separate interests. Joseph Stalin was able to give voice to these bureaucrats, rise to power and defeat the Russian Revolution. But this should not blind us to the few brief years in which the Russian working class proved that another world is possible.

Lenin understood that the battle between reform and revolution was everywhere. He developed a method of organisation capable of decisively tipping the balance in favour of revolutionaries. Still today, at the core of every argument - whether over the way forward for a Stop the War group or how a trade union branch committee relates to seemingly apathetic members - is a clash of worldviews.

Lenin's genius was to build a party that was always a step in front of the movement, arguing for the revolutionary way forward. But the party was only one step in front, so it was still a part of the movement, and capable of learning from it - there is no point being correct in theory if you cannot make your theory relevant to people's everyday experiences.

Academics and historians will never forgive Lenin's genius, which is why his name will remain a dirty word as long as capitalism remains intact.

Dan Mayer

Further reading:

A Rebel's Guide to Lenin by Ian Birchall; State and Revolution by Lenin; Lenin and the Revolutionary Party by Paul Le Blanc

END

Feature

More than bread and butter

What impact has the recent strike wave and protest had on Egyptian society? Egyptian revolutionary socialist Hossam el-Hamalawy argues that the struggles of the working class are central to the growing confidence of the opposition movement to dictator Hosni Mubarrak



The mass demonstrations and strikes that have swept Egypt over the last year have transformed the opposition movement. For decades Egyptians lived in fear of the regime - opposition activists were rounded up, imprisoned and tortured, and strikers gunned down - now this has changed. The two days of rioting in the textile mill town of Mahalla al-Kubra recently have shaken the regime. The Mahalla intifada - as it is now called - is part of a wider phenomenon engulfing the country. We are living in an era of growing militancy. 

Today's protests have their roots in the movement in solidarity with the second Palestinian Intifada that erupted in 2000. This triggered the biggest demonstrations in the capital, Cairo, and nationally, since the 1977 bread riots. That rebellion was brutally crushed, but its shadow continues to haunt the US backed regime of Hosni Mubarak. Young students were at the heart of the pro-Palestinian demonstrations. One of the slogans raised during the period was "The road to Jerusalem passes through Cairo." These protests spilled over into protests against the regime. People started to ask, "Why is our government not doing enough to help Palestinians? Why is the regime supplying energy to Israel?" (Egypt is Israel's main gas supplier.)

These small protests then developed into an anti Iraq war movement that resulted in two days of mass protests of up to 50,000 in Cairo during 2003. Protesters burned pictures of Mubarak alongside those of Western flags. The government responded with mass arrests. The anti-war protests broke the taboo surrounding criticisms of the regime. Workers were suffering in the factories, but also seeing televison pictures of the protests in downtown Cairo. This has had a revolutionising impact on people's psyche and given them more confidence to move later.

Everything changed on 7 December 2006. Egypt's prime minister Ahmed Nazif - a neoliberal and big supporter of structural adjustment programmes - promised public sector workers a bonus to cover rising prices of basic commodities. When the government stalled payment of these bonuses, workers in Mahalla struck for three days demanding he make good his promise. The majority of garment workers in the company are women. They shamed the men into action and together they occupied the factory. The police attempted to put the factory under siege, but failed to break the strike. The victory in Mahalla triggered the biggest and most sustained wave of strikes in Egypt since the end of the Second World War. Mahalla always sets the tone for working class politics in Egypt. If Mahalla is on the rise the labour movement will be on the rise. If it loses this means a downturn in the movement. 

Militancy

Virtually all the textile mills along the Nile Delta in the north went on strike from December through to the spring of 2007. The militancy spilled over to other sectors. The cement workers went on strike, followed by the railway drivers - who blocked the trains by sleeping on the rails. Cairo tube drivers lowered their train speed in solidarity. In all of these struggles the victory in Mahalla always resonated. 

Back in the 1990s using the word "strike" was unimaginable; it was considered old fashioned. Now it's on everyone's lips. In Egypt we have a proverb: "If you want to get something from the dog tell him 'you're my master'." Now people say, "If you want to get something from the dog, tell him we're staging a sit-in." This tells you something about the change in political culture. 

In the 1990s there was a general fear of organising, and arguments about working class struggles were not welcome. The main pillar of the labour movement, the textile industry, had been decimated by years of neoliberal restructuring. In 1976 the estimated number of blue collar workers in the spinning and weaving sector was roughly half a million. This had dropped to 209,000 by the turn of the century. That's why the left in Egypt are surprised to see the strongest resistance to the regime today coming from textile workers. 

Now the working class has proved itself, the impact on the opposition is clear. On 6 April 2008 opposition groups got together to discuss how to make solidarity with a new strike called by Mahalla workers over the national minimum wage. Some called for a general strike, others for small local acts of solidarity. The general strike call was ambitious and unrealistic, but it signalled a big shift, as many inside the opposition have not had faith in working class struggles till now.

The strike on 6 April was a watershed. The government panicked and flooded Mahalla with state security forces. Across the country opposition activists were rounded up and solidarity action was crushed. The planned strike was abandoned, leaving the government to crow about how they won the day. But at 4pm that day a spontaneous demonstration broke out in the centre of Mahalla. Egyptian police opened fire with rubber bullets and tear gas, but the demonstrations grew to over 40,000. Many of the Mahalla kids were chanting "Palestine style" as they threw rocks: "The revolution has come. The revolution has come." The police went berserk, killed at least two people and rounded up hundreds.

These political and economic protests are now being fuelled by the rising price of food. Egyptians today have turned to bread when they once ate things like macaroni and rice. This has driven the price of bread even higher. Fights have broken out among those queuing for bread - with at least 15 killings in queues in the last two months. This shortage is feeding a growing sense of desperation. When the police announced last month in Giza that they had discovered a stash of Molotov cocktails and weapons, they thought it belonged to a terrorist group. They then discovered it was just ordinary citizens arming themselves to get bread. The regime is panicking. Mubarak has sent in the army to start baking bread and open new bakeries. People have come out on the streets. They have nothing to lose any more if they can't find anything to eat.  

I have been a socialist for ten years. I remember in 1998, when we would be voted off coordinating meetings for pro-Palestinian protests for talking about Mubarak too much. If you chanted "Down with Mubarak!" you would not necessarily find many people with the courage to repeat it after you. Now you find ordinary citizens, not political activists, chanting "Down with Mubarak!" and setting his pictures alight.

The Muslim Brotherhood was originally blamed by the regime for the strikes, which was ludicrous because historically it has never enjoyed support among the working class. The Brotherhood is the largest opposition force in the country but its base of influence is the professional middle classes and the lower middle classes as well as some sections of the elite.

However, it has expressed support and solidarity with the working class. There are increasingly factions within the Brotherhood who would prefer a more militant confrontation with the regime, and more coordination with the secular opposition. But they do not have a clear economic agenda that can address the problems of neoliberalism, privatisation and low wages - they have little to say to the striking workers. Nevertheless some of them are being drawn to the left.

It has become clear that small protests in downtown Cairo are not the place to be any more. If you want to be taken seriously about bringing down the regime you have to look at ongoing strike waves in the provinces. 

These strikes will continue because the economic conditions that sparked them still exist. And the strikes are not just about bread and butter issues. They include a great level of political sophistication. When you strike in a dictatorship, against state owned management, you know you will be confronted by state backed trade unions, that your factory will be surrounded by state security troops who might kill or kidnap you afterwards, and torture you or abuse your family. So to strike at all is a political decision. But you can see the economic consciousness turning into political consciousness. Mahalla strikers carried banners saying "Down with the government", while chanting against the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. 

Now they call for a rise in the minimum wage, chant against the president, his son and heir, Gamal Mubarak, and the police. This is what German revolutionary Rosa Luxemburg wrote about in her classic 1905 book, The Mass Strike. The situation in Egypt today is a classic application of how economic demands spill over into political demands which in turn feed economic demands. Workers and strike leaders in those factories have put forward demands for independent legal unions.

The accumulation of all of these factors means Mubarak faces a big challenge to keep the insurgent working class down. In the 1980s and 1990s he got away with shooting down striking workers because we were going through an industrial downturn then and people were afraid. But now, when one factory goes on strike, you find other factories, if not striking in solidarity, issuing statements of support. Our independent media has been reporting on the events, so workers in the textile sector know what happened to their brothers and sisters in Mahalla and elsewhere. 

Those who fought the police during the Mahalla uprising were mainly the urban poor, but because of the way capitalism has evolved in Egypt, class structures are sometimes elusive. This means that in one family you can have one industrial worker, his brother may be working in the informal sector, and their third brother could be the owner of a small plot of land that he farms with his wife and kids. So if the rioting was done mainly by the poor they will have relatives in the factories all over Mahalla and they are all angry. 

The Mahalla workers have settled down for now, but people are still angry, and their demands have not yet been met. This struggle is not over.

For updates on the Egyptian struggle go to Hossam's website, www.arabawy.org

END

Feature

Britain's hidden labour army

The deaths of 23 Chinese cockle pickers in 2004 exposed the appalling working conditions of thousands of migrants in Britain. Hsiao-Hung Pai, author of a new book, Chinese Whispers, describes her quest to tell the stories of such workers and why going undercover was the only way to get at the truth 



Xiao Fan came to say goodbye. He had decided to return home, to Tianjin in north China. "I can't live a life like this any longer, hiding myself in the kitchen every day, fearing the next immigration raid. When it's so hard to earn even a pittance, it leaves you no dignity. What is the point? I've had enough." 

He looked at a photo of his son, which he showed me. "When I left home, he was only eight. Now he's taller than me!" Seven years in Britain have earned him an apartment in his city, which he couldn't have afforded without coming to work in the dark kitchens here. He has also been able to help his sister with her medical treatment. Healthcare is not for everyone in China today. "I've done it for my family. I have no regrets." 

When I waved Xiao Fan farewell at the station and saw how relaxed he finally was, I remember that morning when he called me four years ago. I could hear anxiety in his voice. It was the morning after the sea swept away 23 young lives at Morecambe Bay. "Ah Hui is dead. He's dead. I can't believe it. He's dead." Ah Hui was his colleague. They spent day and night working together in the dingy kitchen of a south London Chinese takeaway before Ah Hui decided to move to a job at Morecambe Bay to improve his income. 

"I didn't know lives could be lost so easily working in this country," Xiao Fan said. Xiao Fan imagined himself having the same destiny as Ah Hui - he knew that he too could have been there that night. For me, like Xiao Fan, the tragedies at Morecambe Bay and Dover were not only saddening stories on the TV screen. It was what happened all around me, and it had a personal impact. I saw people losing their friends and colleagues; losing their parents and their only breadwinners. While multinational corporations globalise their exploitation of workers, workers are pushed to risk their lives crossing borders and trying to earn a living for their families. The death of workers for corporate profits is a direct testimony to the barbarism of the system under which we live. 

These tragedies motivated me to begin a fact finding journey. I set out to listen to the stories of Chinese migrants and document their working lives. In doing so, I followed many people's lives, some of them from when they arrived in Britain to when they decided to return home. 

I knew that gaining access to a workplace could be very difficult, especially when workers have so much to fear: the possibility of their identity being revealed, of losing their job or being arrested and deported. 

The lack of access, in the case of mainstream journalists, can lead them to reinforce prejudices. A team of cockle pickers once told me that a journalist from a local newspaper in Liverpool knocked on their door soon after the Morecambe Bay tragedy. He wanted hot news, but he didn't know how to interact with them. He left without talking. The next day, the cockle pickers were shocked to hear that their house had been named "House of Horror" in the newspaper headline. 

On one occasion I was setting up interviews with the help of a Chinese chef. He said to me, "How can you really know about their lives if you don't live it yourself? It's not something you can understand in an interview or two." 

The idea of actually spending a few days with my interviewees also came up in the process. Some people challenged me about the idea of undercover work and subterfuge. But didn't veteran undercover reporter Gunter Wallraff say that sometimes we need to use deception to expose social deception? 

Over the following two years I went undercover in a variety of workplaces - in a food processing factory in Suffolk; a book packaging factory in Birmingham; on a leek farm in Northamptonshire; as a domestic worker in a private household in London; as a dim sum trolley pusher in London's Chinatown; and as a receptionist in a brothel in Burnley. Living and working alongside the workers, I was then able to make realistic observations about their working life and see the structure and patterns of recruitment and the below-minimum working conditions in the informal economy. It allowed me to witness evidence of systematic abuse of these migrant workers' rights. 

It is precisely the systematic nature of the exploitation that makes it so horrific. Britain maintains the illegality of this hidden workforce, and in doing so benefits from the misery of the informal economy. By denying people's right to work and keeping them underground, Britain gives the green light to corporate manslaughter, slave wages and forced labour. Zhang Guo-Hua wouldn't have been worked to death if he had been given the right to work. Lin Yun and Ah Hua wouldn't have been physically attacked if they were allowed to enter Britain in a legitimate way. Xiao Fen wouldn't have ended up working in the sex trade if she was permitted to work and not paid a third less than the national minimum wage working in a restaurant kitchen. 

In 21st century Britain workers are not entitled to basic protection and cannot be guaranteed minimum standards of working conditions because they are without documents. Currently, there are between 700,000 and 1 million people in Britain who are leading this ghost-like existence. Within the European Union there are 5.5 million undocumented people filling labour shortages without any entitlement to rights. 

I wanted to demonstrate what this means through telling the workers' own stories. They are speaking for themselves. My book, Chinese Whispers, is narrated from their voices. It is them talking about their struggle: their once in a lifetime decision to migrate for work; their journey in Britain; moved on from job to job to fill the need for temporary seasonal labour; the way they cope with daily exploitation, institutional racism, social exclusion and marginalisation in a country that needs them but doesn't recognise their rights. 

Having documented their struggle, I argue that we need to move beyond the current migration debate about numbers and their effects. It's time to ask: what is Britain doing for the undocumented as workers and as human beings? What should Britain do in order to protect and uphold the rights of workers, regardless of their immigration status?

We need to ask these questions: When immigration controls are weakening the labour movement and dividing Britain's workforce, what are our unions doing? What do they say and do about immigration controls? Are they taking part in the fight against the recent immigration raids that are putting undocumented workers out of work and making them homeless and destitute? Are our unions doing next to nothing? 

We need to argue for the regularisation of workers' status. But we need to do it critically. What kind of programme are we backing? We should be very suspicious of regularisation programmes whose criteria exclude certain groups of undocumented migrants. We need to question programmes that give employers more power to determine workers' status and their future working life. 

Fundamentally, we need to argue that the right to work across borders is a human right not to be bargained with or compromised. 

Chinese Whispers is out this month and published by Fig Tree. It is available from Bookmarks.

END

Column

Union-made

Calling for recognition

Pat Carmody

Every night, all around the country, in the 21st century factories known as call centres, some 750,000 workers will breathe a collective sigh of relief as they get the signal that their shift has finally come to an end. The signal to stop work in the call centre I work in is a manager flicking the main switch off and on - "flashing the lights".

It's a moment of glee as workers are released from the monotony of repeating themselves for hours and the stress of attempting to convince someone to part with a slice of their wages or pension. At that moment, we can all relax. Or perhaps not.

Callers (as we are referred to) will often come under pressure from a manager for not achieving targets or for spending too long away from the phone (a well known mantra ringing in our ears from our superiors is, "Dial, dial, dial! Keep dialling!"), or to be pulled up for breaching a petty rule.

But if job insecurity isn't the worry, paying the rent and bills will certainly cause concern. I invited a colleague for a drink after work one evening. "Sorry, Pat," he said, "I am absolutely skint." "What do you mean you're skint? We only got paid a few days ago." "Honestly, Pat, I have just paid my rent and bills, bought my travelcard, and stocked up my fridge and freezer for a month. I have £30 to see me until the end of the month." Then there are the sofa-surfers, dragging their rucksack between friends' homes.

What chance has a young worker to find a deposit and rent in London when you are earning between £6 and £8 per hour? This is the main factor behind a staff turnover of 200 a month, while those who remain dream of escaping to a better job. 

Early in 2006 a fellow caller told me that we were earning less than our colleagues doing the same job at the Bedford site. This was due to a cut in pay rates for new callers in 2004. There had been no increase since 2002.

I suggested meeting in a pub with anyone wanted to change this. I expected a handful, but we got 20 callers. People talked about how they felt the company did not recognise their efforts. All sorts of issues were raised, but mainly it was pay.

A petition was agreed, and in following weeks more than 200 staff signed. Crucial, though, was the intervention by an older caller who said, "If we don't get organised in a union, nothing will happen."

Not everyone agreed, but enough signed up and were willing to take around the petition and ask colleagues to join the union. We also made announcements in the callers' rest area. There was resistance from colleagues to joining at first, but this was broken down over time. Persistence was a virtue, but showing that the union could win little victories was the key. A campaign by callers won the reinstatement of a longstanding colleague who had been sacked on a trumped-up charge.

Our union bulletins and emails ensure that workers are more informed by the union than by management. We also felt that we needed to find more imaginative ways to engage our young workforce.

We have held two union parties, and a film showing of Bread and Roses introduced by the director Ken Loach. At all these events the union grew. Young workers who had joined a union for the first time in their lives were taking a lead.

It was this recent injection of new blood that saw the success of the "badge day". They designed the "Pay Up" badges with the Communication Workers Union (CWU) logo and they won virtually the whole of the call centre to wear them - whether union members or not. Action beyond this has been discussed, but was put on hold when the pressure forced management to concede pay increases of 13 to 15 percent for the vast majority of callers. This was the first increase in six years. 

The fact that we now have more than 100 members means that the CEO has started talks about recognition with CWU officials.

The lesson I have learned is this: taking the first steps to organising in your workplace will do no harm, in fact it will be harmful not to do it. PCPat Carmody is a Communication Workers Union rep. He writes in a personal capacity

END

Feature

Israel, The holocaust and the nakba

Sixty years ago half of Palestine's population was expelled when the state of Israel was created. Acclaimed anti-Zionist historian Ilan Pappe  looks at the legacy of the Nazi persecution of Jews, and the complicity of world leaders, past and present, in maintaining the occupation in Palestine 

Very few matrixes can be as sensitive as that of the Holocaust, Israel and the Palestinian Catastrophe of 1948 (known as the Nakba). It is no wonder that very few people in the past have attempted to comment on the nexus between the Holocaust, the Nakba and a solution for the Palestine question. To all intents and purposes, researchers, journalists and essayists who were, and still are, interested in the Palestine question preferred to deal with each of the subject matters separately - as if there is no connection whatsoever between them. But the connection is there and is highly important both for students of the Israel/Palestine question and for the future of this torn country. Sixty years after the dispossession of the Palestinians, the event that shaped the present Middle Eastern political crisis, it is high time also to involve the Holocaust and its memory in our overall attempt to understand the "conflict" and contribute towards its solution.

Various factors contributed to the demise of the Palestinians in 1948. The most important of them was Zionist ideology and later on Israeli policy. The Zionist movement wished ever since its appearance on Palestine's soil in the late 19th century to take over as much of the country as possible and create on it a Jewish state. The effort to achieve it began in earnest with the onset of British rule in Palestine in 1917. Judaising Palestine meant de-Arabising it. So an important part of the vision was an effort to have as few Palestinians as possible within the future Jewish state.

The vision became a plan and reality when Britain, after 30 years of rule, decided to leave Palestine in February 1947. About a year later, at the beginning of 1948, the Zionist leaders decided that the best means of making the vision of a Jewish Palestine possible was by forcefully dispossessing the Palestinians from their homeland. Within less than a year, between February and October 1948, the Israeli army systematically uprooted and destroyed more than 500 villages and 11 towns. Half of Palestine's native population was ethnically cleansed in those months. Their material and cultural possessions were taken over by the Israelis and their presence on the land was nearly wiped out. 

British legacy

The ethnic cleansing of Palestine, however, could not have been executed had it not been for some additional factors. The British mandatory government was responsible, since it did not interfere, when it could, in the early stages of the dispossession. The expulsions were carried out while its officials and soldiers watched. Indirectly, Britain was also made culpable by its destruction of the Palestinian leadership during the 1936-1939 revolt. The British exiled and killed many of the Palestinian leaders in those years. The absence of an able political leadership and the disappearance of capable military men left the Palestinians literally defenceless in the face of the Jewish forces in 1948. 

The Arab world also played a negative part. The impotence of its armies and the lack of commitment of its leaders turned the hope of a pan-Arab solidarity movement into a farce. The Palestinians surrendered their affairs in the hands of the Arab League, a move that proved to be a colossal mistake. The League did not represent their aspirations nor could it protect them.

But the most important factor, quite often overlooked, was the international complacency in the face of the ethnic cleansing. This Israeli policy could not have been contemplated, let alone implemented, had it not been tolerated by the international community. The Zionist and later Israeli leaders knew they could rely on the passivity and silence of the international community.

On the face of it, this should not have been an obvious assumption. After the Second World War when the Cold War period had just begun, the main powers competing for world hegemony needed the goodwill of the Arab world. Moreover, the more conscientious sections of Western society were increasingly supporting the anti-colonialist emotions and movements throughout the Arab world. True, the two leading ailing colonialist powers of the day, Britain and France, were still trying to maintain their presence and influence in the Arab world, but at least for the sake of appearances they too had to adhere to the notion that all the Arab peoples in all the Arab countries were entitled to be independent and sovereign. And when France was particularly reluctant to grant even this symbolic independence to Algeria - preferring the interests of its settler community there - public opinion in Europe, and beyond, rallied behind the Algerian liberation movement. 

The people of Palestine and their national movement should not have been an exceptional case study, had it not been for the Zionist movement's interest in their country. They easily passed the test of being recognised as a modern day "nation" or "people". But they were already exempted, towards the end of the First World War, from the international promise to allow the Arab nations or peoples to become independent. Strategic considerations, Christian Zionism among Britain's leaders and a fair share of anti-Semitism led London to support the settlement of European Jews away from Europe in the midst of the Arab world. Although the British declared famously in 1917 that this would be done without prejudicing the rights and aspirations of the indigenous population, of course it did. It impinged upon their basic rights for nationhood, self-determination and independence - rights granted to everyone else in the Arab world. This was done against staggering statistics: 90 percent of the population were Palestinians, and out of the 10 percent Jews, quite a few were Orthodox Jews who regarded Zionism as an aberration and interference with God's will.

It did not work, though. The Palestinians rejected the imposition of a colonialist project on them, despite the full European support for it. Up to 1939 Europe, and in particular Britain, developed second thoughts about Palestine. International public opinion had to make a new decision in 1947, when Britain, in despair at its entanglement there, passed the question to others. 

In 1947 the statistics were still very much in the Palestinians' favour. Objectively, they had what was needed to be regarded by the international community as a legitimate nation demanding its right for self determination and independence. They were two thirds of the population and owned more than 90 percent of the land. The Jews were mostly newcomers from the previous three years and had managed to buy only 7 percent of the land. Compared to 1917, the Palestinians had an even more distinct national identity and a clearer vision.

But this was all ignored by the international community that used the United Nations (UN) to pass a decision on Palestine's future on 29 November 1947, the famous partition resolution. Instead of granting the Palestinians independence in Palestine, the UN suggested allocating them less than half of the country and proposed they would share the economy and currency with the Jewish settlers who were allocated a larger part of it. Their capital, Jerusalem, was expropriated as an international enclave. Only one factor led the UN special commission on Palestine, and all those powers behind it, to abandon every conventional principle of statehood and independence for the sake of satisfying the Zionist movement: the Holocaust. 

One can read again and again the arguments put forward by everyone involved in proposing the partition resolution and later on the admittance of Israel as a full member of the UN, while Palestine was erased from the international public agenda, and see clearly that the Holocaust was the sole argument. 

The argument for a Jewish state as  compensation for the Holocaust was a powerful argument, so powerful that nobody listened to the outright rejection of the UN solution by the overwhelming majority of the people of Palestine. What comes out clearly is a European wish to atone. The basic and natural rights of the Palestinians should be sidelined, dwarfed and forgotten altogether for the sake of the forgiveness that Europe was seeking from the newly formed Jewish state. It was much easier to rectify the Nazi evil vis-à-vis a Zionist movement than facing the Jews of the world in general. It was less complex and, more importantly, it did not involve facing the victims of the Holocaust themselves, but rather a state that claimed to represent them. The price for this more convenient atonement was robbing the Palestinians of every basic and natural right they had and allowing the Zionist movement to ethnically cleanse them without fear of any rebuke or condemnation. 

The most bewildering arithmetic done by the UN, in the name of the international community, towards achieving this formula was to include the number of Jews in Europe in the overall demographic calculation of the balance in Palestine. Hence, Palestine was now the land of the Jews of Europe, including those who had not yet arrived there and those who never intended to arrive there. As such they were a majority in Palestine. 

The Zionist movement had the military power to both ethnically cleanse Palestine of its original population and to face a military confrontation with troops from various Arab armies sent to try and prevent the creation of a Jewish state. However, it needed the Holocaust memory to silence any criticism of its ethnic cleansing operation and to prevent any international pressure on it to allow the return of all those expelled from the land after the 1948 war. Europe's guilt at allowing Nazi Germany to exterminate the Jews of Europe was to be cured by the dispossession of the Palestinians. 

This created what the late Edward Said called a chain of victimisation. The Palestinians became the victims' victim. This concept was never accepted by Israel and its allies; nor was it ever endorsed by the European political elite that felt very comfortable with the formula of Israel being the only and exclusive victim of the Holocaust and the only victim in Palestine. 

The Israelis went the other way in two directions that complemented each other. On the one hand, they felt secure from any Western pressure and continued the dispossession of the Palestinians - until today. The limits to their actions in the past, and quite probably in the future, were well defined by the late Israeli journalist Aryeh Caspi: as long as the Israelis do not do to the Palestinians what the Nazis did to the Jews, they are within the legitimate and moral boundaries of civilised behaviour. The repertoire of actions within those limits was, and still is, quite horrendous, as the latest Israeli actions in the Gaza Strip testify. The other direction was to Nazify the Palestinians so as to justify further the actions against them. 

Justice

The European political elite seems still to suffer from the same timidity as it did in the past. This fear, rooted so clearly in Europe's tragic Jewish history, hinders severely any chance for a comprehensive and lasting peace in Israel and Palestine. It is true that the main block for any effective pressure on Israel is the US. But any chance of balancing it or causing it to redirect its course depends very much on Europe. 

One of the main stumbling blocks in the way of such a change is Germany, for obvious reasons. However, Germany as a society and government has an obligation not only to the Jewish people, but also to the Palestinians. It was right and just that the first decades after the Holocaust were devoted to reconciliation with the Jewish world. Germany as a whole did face its past boldly and did not deny the horror of the Holocaust. Now the time has come for the Germans to pay attention to the victims' victim - Germany is not that far a link in the chain of victimisation and cannot spurn responsibility. 

There are other strategic reasons for trying a new approach to the Palestine issue than the one that puts all the blame on the Palestinians and disregards their legitimate rights such as the right of the refugees to return and the right of the rest of the Palestinian people to live without occupation, oppression and discrimination. The continued violence in Israel and Palestine has the potential of dragging not only the Middle East into endless wars but also Europe - as is very clear from the events of the last decade.

But this naive article is about morality and justice - justice, something which I found is very important to a younger German generation; a generation that knows that as a nation they faced head-on their own past evils and expect the Israelis to do the same. You can meet them as volunteers in the occupied territories and in the various European solidarity campaigns for Palestine. These young men and women should be a source of pride for Germany, as were the young Germans who volunteered in Israel as part of the reconciliation. 

We will all need them, because history teaches us that evil, occupation and dispossession do eventually come to an end. There is always a danger of revenge and retribution on such a day. Maybe a group of people who were brought up boldly facing the Nazi genocide, and became aware at first hand of the Israeli occupation and its horrors, would facilitate a restitutive justice for all - like the one we had in post Apartheid South Africa and not a retributive one - such as the one we witnessed in Rwanda.

Judging by the speech recently given by the chancellor, Angela Merkel, in the Israeli Knesset, Germany is not likely to play any constructive role in bringing peace to Israel and Palestine. Merkel presented an embarrassingly biased and one sided pro-Israeli position. In her address the chancellor did not mention the occupation, even in passing, and only praised Israel as a paragon of justice, democracy and civilisation. This will only strengthen the more aggressive and violent aspects of Israeli policy and actions. It also left the Palestinians with no hope for a different future, and without hope despair sets in which in turn produces violence. 

We all need closure from the 20th century - not in order to forget and not even to forgive, but for the sake of building a normal and healthy life. This is true about victims and victimisers alike. Germany can play a very positive role in bringing that about in Palestine. Now is the time, before it is too late. 

Ilan Pappe's latest book is The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine. His new book The Bureaucracy of Evil will be published later this year. Pappe will also be talking at Marxism 2008. For more info go to www.marxismfestival.org.uk

END



Reviews

Books

The Fire Last Time byChris Harman

Of all the articles, features, memoirs and books devoted to 1968, The Fire Last Time: 1968 and After, by Chris Harman, the editor of International Socialism journal, is still, by some distance, the best. Its merits are easy to summarise.

First, it is not written in a spirit of nostalgia. I have no problem understanding why people are nostalgic about 1968 - indeed it is much better than being nostalgic about the World Cup or Harold Wilson and Old Labour - but nostalgia is a poor basis for history or analysis. 

This is especially true when the nostalgia for a certain historical moment becomes mingled with nostalgia for lost youth. In my experience, far more people were at Grosvenor Square (the 17 March Vietnam Solidarity Campaign demonstration that ended in a punch up with the police in front of the US embassy) in memory than were there in fact. Far more people like to think of themselves as part of "the movement", and think of the movement as far larger than was often the case. The attendance at Grosvenor Square from my university was ten people in one minibus. 

By the same token nostalgia can lead to a massive underestimation of the significance of events which didn't happen to impinge on the narrator's memory. Harman has none of this. It is an "objective", ie impersonal, not neutral or non-partisan, history which deals with the past in order to understand the present and shape the future.

Precisely because of this, it offers a clear, accessible and accurate account of what happened in many different countries in that dramatic year. The focus, rightly, is on the US and France, but Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, Mexico, Ireland and Italy are also covered, while the student revolt in Britain, in which the author played a not insignificant role, is treated as a ripple from the storm. 

Of course there is a weakness here, acknowledged in the prologue, in that events outside of North America and Europe, such as the Naxalite Revolt in India or the rise of al Fatah in Palestine, are not given their due. But this is down to lack of space and Harman is always clear that 1968 was a world revolutionary process.

However, Harman's prime concern is not to describe or even to inspire but to understand. And this is where The Fire Last Time really scores. 

For Harman, 1968, for all its unique features, was not some mythical golden moment that fell from the skies, but a period in which the class struggle, which is continuous under capitalism, burst into the open with particular intensity. It was, therefore, a revolutionary moment like those in the past (1848, 1871, 1917, 1936, 1956, etc) and others to come in the future. And it is to be analysed by means of the Marxist method. This means beginning with the development of the forces of production and its impact on social relations.

Harman shows how the post-war economic boom produced a period of relative social peace in the 1950s and early 1960s, which he calls "the long calm", but also how within this calm economic and social contradictions gradually accumulated and intensified - "a slow train coming". 

He particularly stresses how economic expansion produced a massive process of urbanisation and proletarianisation which undermined and clashed with the conservative social structures inherited from the more rural past (such as the racist Jim Crow laws in the US South or the Protestant ascendancy in Northern Ireland) leading to explosions when the boom began to falter.

The same boom, he argues, produced a big increase in the number of students and a change in their social status, thus preparing the ground for the student revolt which played such a prominent role in 1968. 

Harman is an enthusiast for the student struggle and gives it its full due as a revolutionary catalyst, but he doesn't make the common mistake of seeing 1968 as being "just" or "all" about students. Although it had a degree of autonomy, the student revolt was fundamentally a reflection of the wider economic, social and ideological crisis in society, and was able only to offer a serious challenge to the established order when it linked up to wider social forces, above all the working class, as in the 10 million strong French general strike. 

It is impossible to do justice to the range of The Fire Last Time in a short review but it should be said that it deals with far more than just the events of 1968, analysing the whole wave of massive workers' struggles that continued through to 1974. It includes how the ruling class was eventually able, with the aid of the reformist leaders, to bring the upheaval to an end and move onto the offensive, thus inaugurating a downturn in class struggle.

But again it is Harman's ability to combine detailed concrete analysis of specific struggles with a firm grasp of the broad movement of history that makes this such an outstanding work and still so relevant today.

John Molyneux

The Fire Last Time is published by and available from Bookmarks at the special price of £5

END



Muqtada al-Sadr and the Fall of Iraq 

Patrick Cockburn

Faber and Faber

£16.99

"The most dangerous man in Iraq" is how Newsweek described Muqtada al-Sadr in December 2006. The young Shia cleric has certainly been cast in many contradictory roles. Is he a leader of Iraqi Arab resistance to the US occupation, or a tool of Iran? A commander of sectarian death squads or a force for Iraqi unity? Patrick Cockburn peels away the layers of exaggeration and hypocrisy in the Western media's portrayal of Sadr, revealing a clever and cautious political leader, who has been one of the most dogged opponents of the US occupation. 

Not so much the biography of a man, but the story of a movement, Cockburn's account draws on his long experience of reporting from Iraq, interweaving personal recollections and interviews from 1977 to the present day. As he rightly emphasises, the Sadr movement's appeal cannot be explained simply in religious terms. 

The movement has its roots in the rise of the Iraqi Shia Islamist movement since the 1970s. For Cockburn, declining support for the secular opposition forces - such as the Communists - was largely a reaction by Shia Iraqis to the increasingly sectarian behaviour of the state. Other accounts of the same period provide a different perspective, for example emphasising the impact of Communist collaboration with the Baathist regime in the 1970s, or arguing that this era was marked by the brutal repression of Shia Islamist groups, but not by a general campaign of sectarian persecution. 

The Sadr movement was, as Cockburn makes clear, also a reaction against the historic parties of the Shia Islamist movement. Muhammad Sadiq al-Sadr, Muqtada's father, set about building a movement in the 1990s which was self-consciously Arab, in contrast to the pro-Iranian policies of the other major parties. Another key feature of the Sadr movement is its appeal to the Shia working class and urban poor. The loathing middle class leaders of the Dawa party feel for Muqtada is not only a reflection of their estimation of him as a political rival, but also their fear that his movement represents in organised form millions of Iraq's poor and dispossessed.

US officials, by contrast, underestimated Muqtada and the Sadrists, igniting in March and April 2004 a simultaneous uprising by the Mehdi Army - the Sadrist militia - and the Sunni resistance groups around Fallujah. Cockburn documents US alarm as a sign that armed resistance to the occupation was beginning to coalesce on a national scale: fighters from Fallujah reinforcing Muqtada's Mehdi Army in Najaf, Shia donors queuing to give blood for the wounded of Fallujah.

Cockburn is pessimistic that such cooperation could ever have evolved into a genuinely national resistance movement. His account also - understandably, given its focus - has little space to discuss the theological and political divisions among Iraqi Sunni Islamist parties, and their interaction with the Sadrists. Nevertheless, this book remains a fascinating introduction to Muqtada al-Sadr and his movement.

Anne Alexander

The Second World 

Parag Khanna

Allen Lane

£25

Parag Khanna argues in The Second World that the moment of US supremacy is over, and that it is now the allegiances and actions of countries in what he terms "the Second World" (Eastern Europe, Central Asia, South America, the Middle East and East Asia) that will decide whether China, the European Union or the US dominates the 21st century. 

There is a lot that is positive about this book. It offers the general reader bite sized chunks of information about the histories and general political and economic situations of over 30 countries in a style that is both engaging and informative. There is no doubt that Khanna has done his research, having visited all the countries he writes about during the course of researching the book, but this is supposed to be an exploration of political and social landscapes, not a travel guide. 

Khanna's style is gripping, and in many ways it is the fluidity in his prose that keeps one reading, although much is left unsaid. One of the main frustrations with this book is the repeated sense that, just as Khanna is about to get to grips with a country properly, he's moving on to the next one. Because each country and region is allowed such a small space, there is a continual sense of issues not being fully explored or just plain dropped for lack of space.

For example, in his analysis of China and Tibet, Khanna correctly points out that China has invested heavily in Tibet, but does not explain what the benefits to the Chinese economy will be. There is no mention of the estimated £128 billion worth of mineral reserves that secretive Chinese research has uncovered, or of the fact that, for all China's investment, education and health spending in Tibet lags far behind the rest of China. 

Additionally, Khanna believes that Tibet will ultimately become much more prosperous than its neighbouring countries, but does not explain how this prosperity will come about. It is also hard to see how the Tibetans themselves will benefit from this, given that, as Khanna points out, they are increasingly "an uncomfortable and marginalised minority" in their own land due to heavy Han Chinese immigration. 

Socialists will find much to disagree with here, but should not be put off. Khanna's analysis of the US today is particularly interesting, offering historical examples of reasons for the collapse of previous empires. This, coupled with his explorations of modern US poverty, healthcare, foreign policy and racism, makes a compelling argument, leaving the reader ultimately convinced by Khanna's assertion that the time of US supremacy could be drawing to a close. Quite what will come next, however, seems still very much open for debate. 

Charlotte Bence



Paisley

Ed Moloney

Poolberg Press

£13.99

This book is the one of the best places to start when it comes to an assessment of the role in the Northern Ireland peace process of both Ian Paisley and his former deputy, Peter Robinson - who has just replaced Paisley as first minister. 

Ed Moloney is one of the most experienced and knowledgeable commentators on the Troubles. His previous book, A Secret History of the IRA, is probably the best account of how the Provisionals' leaders came to realise that the armed struggle could not win and embarked on a journey that would take them into a power-sharing executive. 

In many ways the current book is a companion to that work, albeit a minor one. It is an attempt to understand why Paisley, the most intransigent of unionist leaders, ended up in government with Sinn Fein. It's an important question, and for the most part Moloney succeeds in providing an answer. His main conclusion is that Paisley went into government with Sinn Fein "because he could, and because the Provos made it possible."

This seems to me to be perfectly correct. The irony is that the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) became the dominant Unionist party by bitterly criticising other Unionists' involvement in this "peace process". But as Moloney shows, this was a deliberate strategy, crafted by Peter Robinson in particular, to supplant the marginally more moderate Official Unionist Party as the major Unionist political force. In this at least, it was successful, and Moloney's book is at its best when showing how this was achieved. 

However, the book is perhaps weaker on the broader political relationship between the DUP and Sinn Fein. Moloney argues that politics in the North has long been characterised by a kind of symbiosis between Sinn Fein's "radical" (armed) Republicanism and the brand of extreme Unionism represented by Paisley. The argument is too simplistic. As Moloney recognises, the Provos were created out of a need to defend Catholic communities against Loyalist attacks, and moved on to assault the state they saw as the source of genuine nationalist grievances. Paisley played a key role in this, and Moloney highlights it very well.

But he stretches the argument too far when he suggests that, if Paisley had not played this role, the extremely modest proposals for reform tabled by supposedly more "moderate" Unionists like Terence O'Neill in the late 1960s might have won over the majority of Nationalists, and four decades of bloodshed could have been avoided. 

A lot of this is wishful thinking and glosses over the nature of the state the DUP is pledged to defend. 

Paisley may now have departed the scene but, for his successors, power sharing is the best way, for the moment, of maintaining the Northern state. The tragedy is that Sinn Fein has failed to develop policies that would undermine the Unionists' base in working class areas, and so cannot easily provide an alternative. Indeed, its agreement with the DUP on large areas of policy, from corporation tax to privatisation, is a key explanation for the apparent ease with which it is able to govern jointly with them. 

Northern Ireland needs a politics that breaks out of the twin ghettoes of Republicanism and Unionism, and speaks to its citizens on the basis of what they have in common, both with each other and with their working class brothers and sisters in the rest of Ireland. 

Kevin Devine

Cell Block Five

Fadhil al-Azzawi

AUC Press

£10.99

Aziz sits in a Baghdad café. Suddenly police are all around him. They bundle him off to prison. All the while he's proclaiming his innocence. Aziz ends up in Cell Block Five - a ward for political prisoners - without having committed any political crime or any other crime. At first he's distraught and keeps trying to regain his freedom - there has been a mix-up with his name and surely the authorities will soon realise their mistake and let him loose. 

Time goes on, however, and Aziz remains a Cell Block Five inmate. Daydreams are at first his only solace. He wants to be an outsider and not care about what is going on inside the prison walls. But life seems to become more real on the inside than on the outside where Aziz drudged on working in an office. In Cell Block Five Aziz finally has to take a stance. He has to listen to the other inmates. And he has to realise the absurdity of a system that won't release him simply because it would be an embarrassment to the police who have caught the wrong man, a man without a file and with the wrong name.

On the inside Aziz sees the tortured become the torturers and the trusted become informers. The other inmates as well as the police torture him. Although all of this takes place in a dream-like story with poetic undertones, it is clear that Aziz's experiences are close to the heart of Fadhil al-Azzawi, the author. 

Al-Azzawi, who was born in Kirkuk, studied English at Baghdad University and was a member of the poets' Kirkuk Group in the 1960s, was jailed in Iraq for three years before fleeing the Baathist regime for East Germany in 1977. He wrote Cell Block Five, the first Iraqi prison novel, in 1971 and the book was published outside Iraq the following year and even made into a film in Syria. Now for the first time English readers can discover Cell Block Five, translated by William M Hutchins who also translated Naguib Mahfouz's Cairo Trilogy, among other Arabic-language works. 

This short, compact novel is sincere. It tells of a Kafkaesque situation and inhumane behaviour in humane, even beautiful, language. 

Ingrid Lamprecht



A Floating City of Peasants

Floris-Jan van Luyn

The New Press

£21.99

China's economic boom is largely powered by migrant workers, peasants who have moved to the cities in the largest migration in human history. Currently there are between 120 and 150 million migrants in the cities, yet very little is known about their lives and ambitions, which makes this book particularly welcome. A Floating City of Peasants is reportage rather than history, taking the life stories of some 20 or 30 people to give a vivid sense of the migrant experience.

Migrants get the worst jobs and housing while being excluded from education and healthcare and blamed for street crime. Although this sounds familiar, there are big differences with the West. Migrants in China mostly don't face outright racism (apart from Muslim migrants from the western provinces, but van Luyn doesn't include any of them in this book). What they do encounter is widespread prejudice about "backward" peasants, which can make integration both more and less difficult than in the West.

Another major difference is that as many women migrate as men (if not more). In the new industrial zones they are preferred as factory workers for their greater dexterity and (supposed) docility. In the cities they become domestic workers or are drawn into the ever-growing "entertainment" industries, often meaning thinly disguised sex work. 

But while van Luyn is explicit about the dangers and hardships of migrant life, he is careful to show migrants as actors, rather than just victims. This is partly done through a series of accounts of the migrants' home villages, showing how rural life has become increasingly difficult over the last ten years. Equally important, though, is what the migrants want for the future. 

Almost none of them are content with their lives, and all want better for their children. They see their current work as making that more likely. Migrant workers do strike, riot and organise collectively, though those experiences aren't reflected here. But even when speaking of their personal ambitions, there's a powerful sense of the confidence and changed horizons that the experience of migration has brought to people.

They know that, even if they are disposable individually, collectively they are essential to the Chinese economy. Van Luyn illustrates this by describing Chinese New Year: 

"When the peasant workers leave the city en masse - which they do once a year - a large part of public life is completely at a standstill...coal is no longer delivered, no one picks up the garbage in the narrow alleys, door to door deliveries of milk, vegetables and beer are halted...all construction projects are interrupted, and factories close temporarily. Without the peasants, the city functions at half power."

Since this book was written, the number of migrant workers in southern China has fallen. It is too soon to tell if this is permanent or just a blip, but one government survey found that in the majority of villages they studied there was no one left to migrate. If that's true, the future of the Chinese boom seems even more uncertain. 

Charlie Hore



Labour and the Challenges of Globalization

Eds: Andreas Bieler, Ingemar Lindberg and Devan Pillay

Pluto Press

£19.99

Modern capitalist agriculture employs a few tens of millions, while 3 billion peasants still make up about half the world's population. A peasant's productivity is a fraction of 1 percent of that of a "modern" farm worker. The neoliberal drive to force poor countries to open their markets to "free" competition in food production means depriving these peasants of their livelihoods, driving them into the cities.

Economic growth in some of the global south's mega-cities (even in China and India) is insufficient to absorb the influx of rural migrants into full employment. The deregulation of labour markets and absence or destruction of welfare states help the bosses to exploit high unemployment through a rapid expansion in "precarious" or "informal" employment such as temporary, illegal, self-employed or part-time work without employment rights.

Others are forced to migrate to richer countries to make a living, often outside formal employment. In the south permanent jobs are a minority, while richer countries are seeing trends in the same direction.

This book draws together reports by authors from various countries, looking at how workers and their organisations are responding to the growing working class and the changes in its composition.

A key function of collective union organisation is to prevent undercutting pay and conditions by workers competing for jobs. Unions dealing nationally with transnational corporations encouraging workers to compete in the race to the bottom are struggling to achieve this. International coordination of bargaining and solidarity has delivered some results, but is underdeveloped.

Global union membership is now concentrated in the public sector and among regular employees of larger companies - a shrinking proportion of the global working class. Representing only a relatively secure, privileged layer would reduce unions' legitimacy to speak for the whole working class, reducing political influence.

This book isn't an easy read. Some chapters are dry and academic in style, while still annoyingly vague. It doesn't claim to provide all the answers, and there's much you could take issue with, but it is airing many issues the labour movement urgently needs to address (and which can't be covered here).

To win change, the global working class must unite despite real divisions. The book argues that unions should be more of a global social movement - challenging neoliberalism, making alliances with organisations of "precarious" workers and with other social movements, rather than being "social partners" with the international organisations which promote neoliberalism.

Ian Allinson



The Northern Clemency

Philip Hensher

Fourth Estate

£17.99

The Northern Clemency is a novel set very firmly in the era of Thatcherism against the backdrop of the miners' strike, privatisation and the selling off of council housing. It recounts the histories of two Sheffield families, both of middle management class. 

Mr Sellers is a manager with the electricity board, who has beavered away to stockpile coal to help defeat the National Union of Mineworkers, thus enabling the sell off of nationalised electricity. His reward is a gold-plated switch valve and early retirement. Meanwhile, Mr Glover, busily mortgaging council house buyers, loses the respect of his youngest son, and his wife has an affair. 

Hensher aims to emulate the classic family sagas of the 1930s, but his literary style sometimes obscures the comic political ironies that run through his novel. He illustrates the social chaos of Tory Britain, picturing callous money laundering upper class drug dealers, women working as strip