Socialist Review Febraury 2009 Contents 10 How can Palestine be free? Anne Alexander sees the Arab working class as key to winning Palestine’s freedom, and Saree Makdisi describes the realities of the conflict. 15 The crisis deepens Joseph Choonara argues that the crisis is going from bad to worse. 18 Chronicles of LGBT Leading LGBT historian Lillian Faderman talks about being a lesbian in the 1950s in the US. 20 From Shah to Ayatollah Naz Massoumi looks at Iran’s revolutionary history and its repeated rejection of imperialism. 23 Revolution of evolution It is 200 years this year since the birth of Charles Darwin. John Parrington examines the theory which transformed modern science. Columnists Dave Crouch page 7 Chris Harman page 14 Naina Kent page 17 Regulars Feedback page 8 Letter from India page 9 A-Z of Socialism page 22 Books A history of African ‘Agitators’ plus other monthly reviews page 26 Culture Obituaries of Harold Pinter and Adrian Mitchell plus monthly reviews page 30 ---- Editorial Gordon Brown should have a warning pasted on the door of 10 Downing Street, "Opinion polls can go down as well as up." In only 18 months Brown has had his share of bounces and falls in the polls. Now as the economy continues to freefall his talk of being the man who could save the world from a slump has lost credibility. But it’s the continuing bailing out of the bankers with public money that is really losing Labour support. Workers across the country face short time working, lay-offs and unemployment. At the same time bankers, widely perceived as the creators of the crisis, appear to be absorbing countless billions of pounds with no visible result. The fact that proposals for a "job-creation scheme of public construction" received 85 percent support in a Guardian poll in late January shows that state intervention is popular - but only if it is on the side of ordinary people. editor@socialistreview.org.uk Editorial ends ---- Frontlines Recession report from Rotherham "We’re not getting the same help we would be getting if we were wearing bowler hats instead of hard hats. It’s one thing for the banks and another for us." The words of one steel union official summed up the anger as steel giant Corus announced that 700 jobs - more than half the workforce - were to go at its huge Aldwarke plant in Rotherham. Workers arrived for their Monday morning shifts fearing the worst after a leaked TV news story the previous day ushered in the blackest day for the town in years. The steel meltdown revealed the brutal reality of the economic crisis in northern industrial towns like Rotherham. In just seven days 1,000 jobs were threatened with being wiped out. A week before - and less than half a mile away - 170 workers at luxury clothing firm Burberry heard in TV and radio broadcasts that bosses wanted to close their factory. The workforce, mainly women, had no idea of what was about to happen until the early morning news bulletins. Some found out when other workers shouted to them as they walked to the factory gates. Bosses show contempt for workers, who are expected to pay for their employers’ greed. One shop steward said: "I heard I was losing my job on GMTV this morning. I went ballistic. I think it is appalling. "We are angry and disgusted that we should be told we were losing our jobs through news broadcasts. There has been no consultation about what was going to happen. This is a good workforce and we feel angry and upset at being stabbed in the back." Thousands more jobs are threatened by the knock-on effect. As many as 50,000 people depend on steel jobs. The number of people out of work in South Yorkshire has risen by almost 2,600 over the last month, according to the latest government figures - up by almost 11,500 on January 2008. The number out of work in Rotherham is up by 580 at 6,172 - an increase of 2,610 or 42 percent on January 2008. And the figures exclude the latest casualties. Rotherham’s older generation talk about there being nothing left for "the young ones" and it is easy to see why. Low paid jobs in call centres often seem to be all that is on offer. Curtain store Rosebys, which was based in Rotherham, was an early victim of the economic slump, and other closures and job cuts have followed. Many shops and pubs are boarded up and closing. Some fear the jobs slaughter could kill the town. Since the heyday when 25,000 steel workers were employed in Rotherham back in the 1950s and 1960s, numbers have declined to a few hundred. In the 1980s Rotherham still had around 10,000 working in steel and the same in the pits, but Margaret Thatcher put paid to all that - though not without a fight. Only one colliery survived the Tory pit closures of the 1990s. Mining villages have been turned into wastelands of social deprivation. Rotherham was the centre of militancy during the steel strike nearly 30 years ago and the miners’ strike 25 years ago. That fighting spirit needs rekindling quickly. Phil Turner ---- Institutional racism Writing in the Daily Mail on the anniversary of the Stephen Lawrence Inquiry last month, Trevor Phillips (opposite), the head of the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC), gave the police a clean bill of health. He described the label of institutional racism as a "badge of shame that has hung over" the police for the past decade, "So, today, ten years on, is the accusation still valid? I don’t think so." What is the evidence? You are five times more likely to be stopped and searched if you are black - and only one in ten searches result in an arrest. Scotland Yard has admitted its officers have been photographing children who are stopped and searched even after they have been found to be innocent. Sandra Moodie, a parent from South London, told how her son, Jordan, had been stopped and searched by plain clothes officers on his way home from school. They found he was carrying only schoolbooks, but took his picture nevertheless. The experience of black police officers themselves is telling - in 2007 almost twice as many ethnic minority officers quit or were sacked in their first six months of service compared to their white colleagues. In wider society institutional racism is stark. Ethnic minority unemployment has remained around twice that of the white population. The highest unemployment rates are those for the black Caribbean, black African, Pakistani and Bangladeshi groups, but Indian men also tend to have higher unemployment rates than the white community. Some highly educated groups, such as those of black African origin, are characterised by a strong presence in professional and managerial posts but they are not doing nearly as well as equally well-educated whites. There is a continuing wage gap, in some cases of £140 per week, between white males and black Caribbean, Pakistani and Bangladeshi males. In November 2008 Phillips declared, "If Barack Obama had lived here I would be very surprised if even somebody as brilliant as him would have been able to break through the institutional stranglehold that there is on power within the Labour Party." While he stepped back quickly from that claim he maintains that it’s not helpful to describe the police force as institutionally racist. Once again Trevor gets it wrong. He is in danger of undermining anti-racist campaigning at a time when we need it as much as ever. Weyman Bennett ---- Thailand: Solidarity with Giles Ungpakorn Giles Ungpakorn, a socialist activist and academic in Thailand, is facing a possible prison sentence after Thailand’s Special Branch charged him with "lèse majesté" - insulting the monarchy - last month. The charges are based on eight paragraphs in the first chapter of his book, A Coup for the Rich, which was published in 2007. It has sold 1,000 copies and is now available online. In it he criticised the coup of 19 September 2006, in which the military seized political power in Thailand. Ungpakorn says, "My most recent academic paper on the monarchy argues that the monarchy is not all powerful and that political and military factions claim royal legitimacy in order to boost their own power and interests. The most notable cases are the 19 September 2006 military coup and the illegal protests by the yellow-shirted People’s Alliance for Democracy, which included violent protests and the shutting down the international airports. Lèse majesté charges in Thailand are notorious for being used by different political factions to attack their opponents." The clampdown on political and academic debate in Thailand affects writers, protesters and bloggers. The Economist reported that one female Thai activist was sentenced to six years in jail in November for a speech at a rally in Bangkok and that "Pirapan Salirathavibhaga, the justice minister, is creating a 24-hour ‘war-room’ to monitor online threats. Thousands of websites have been blocked for alleged lèse-majesté, though anti-censorship groups say the net is cast wide to stifle political debate. Some Thai bloggers have been detained after posting rebellious comments." Lèse majesté carries a maximum sentence of 15 years, and MPs from the government party headed by Abhisit Vejjajiva, which came to office thanks to the connivance of the army, want to increase this to 25 years. Giles says, "I am prepared to fight any lèse majesté charges in order to defend academic freedom, the freedom of expression and democracy in Thailand." Academics and supporters from all over the world have joined in a campaign to defend Giles. This case is significant not only for Giles himself but also for the future of academic and political freedom in Thailand. What you can do: 1) Write a letter of protest/concern to Prime Minister Abhisit Vejjajiva, Government House, Bangkok, Thailand. Fax number +66 (0)29727751. 2) Write a letter of protest/concern to the Ambassador, The Royal Thai Embassy, in your country. 3) Demand that Amnesty International take up all lèse majesté cases in Thailand. 4) Demand the abolition of the lèse majesté law. The print edition of A Coup for the Rich can be downloaded from Giles Ungpakorn’s blog: wdpress.blog.co.uk ---- Tabloid Islamophobia - the web of deceit "They sometimes say if you give a fool a piece of rope he’ll hang himself, and it seems that in this case this person has done exactly that." So said "terror expert" Glen Jenvey to CBS news in 2004, referring to his "sting" of cleric Abu Hamza, which he claims was pivotal in Hamza’s arrest. Perhaps Jenvey should have chosen his words more carefully. On 7 January the Sun ran a front page story with the headline, "Islamic fanatics name Alan Sugar, Mark Ronson and Lord Levy in a hit list of Britain’s leading Jews." The story was based on claims by Jenvey that fanatics were using the online Ummah forum to orchestrate revenge attacks for the siege of Gaza. "Expect a hate campaign and intimidation by 20 or 30 thugs," said Jenvey. There was indeed such a message posted on the Ummah website, from someone calling themselves "Abuislam": "Have we got a list of top Jews we can target? Can someone post names and addresses?" Other users of the forum argued against this. In itself this looks as though Jenvey has made a mountain out of a molehill. But it turns out that he may have made the molehill as well. Moderators at the website released a statement soon after these events, noting that "Abuislam" was a user created from the same computer as another user called "Richard Tims". "Tims" had only posted one item, a plug for sellyourstory.org, a now defunct website dedicated to buying stories on Muslim extremists. The website was plugged across the Net, using a host of user names, although the sloppy punctuation and grammar are consistent (eg "Any hot news on Islamic British based terrorist’s earn cash from http://www.sellyourstory.org"). Interesting, then, that the internet domain name register shows that sellyourstory.org was created by a certain "Glen Jenvey". So, "terror expert" Jenvey (or someone using his computer and style of writing) posted the comments on Ummah and then reported them to the Sun as being written by fanatics. The Press Complaints Commission is now investigating, and the story has been removed from the Sun’s website (but has been reprinted and posted online countless times since). But this is just the tip of the iceberg, because "terror experts" are often in demand in this uncertain world. Another story from 1 January 2009 (still on the Sun website) is under the headline "Terror attack on America ‘soon’". "Ex-spy Glen Jenvey said threats had been posted on an extremist Islamic website," it continues. There are no sources or quotes backing up the claim, so readers just had to trust Jenvey’s word. He also claimed on the globalpolitician.com website that his "terror watchers" had uncovered plans for huge attacks in the run-up to Xmas. "They plan to bomb us and they will destroy and enslave us," he reported - again with no evidence. We also know that Jenvey likes editing his own Wikipedia entry. When someone added a link for a website exposing malpractice by Vigil (an "anti-terrorist" organisation with a close relationship to Jenvey) the user "Glenjenvey" removed the link. He left a comment in justification: "Vigil expose site is placed by a terrorist supporter attacking glen jenvey good name work" (sic). Vigil made the news in November 2006 when it accused Islamist group Hizb ut-Tahrir of links to the drugs trade and terror recruitment. Vigil not only "teamed up with" Newsnight to report its findings, but also featured on BBC File on Four and in a feature in the Telegraph. According to the Telegraph, "Scotland Yard confirmed it was ‘working closely with Vigil, particularly its director and spokesman who has made officers aware of chat-room material. This material will be considered and appropriate action taken’." The Vigil website later included links to the Israeli Defence Force. Vigil, incidentally, claims it is "non-political". As mentioned previously, Jenvey’s claim to fame was his exposé of Abu Hamza. He set up a website called "Islamic News", which he used to allegedly con Hamza into sending him terrorist recruitment videos. (It should be noted that there is little evidence that Jenvey’s research resulted in any prosecution of Hamza, who was charged eventually with possession of "The Encyclopedia of Jihad".) Islamic News linked to the Bin Laden Yahoo! Group and Hezbollah, among other things. But by September 2002 the website changed dramatically, retitled "Jehad is crap" and featuring a long diatribe against Muslims and Palestinians (which doesn’t merit quotation). There is far, far more to be said about Jenvey’s work and connections, and a brief search for his name online uncovers this. With all this in mind, perhaps it’s time that the media, and apparently the security services, stops taking the word of the likes of Jenvey as truth. Patrick Ward ---- Too much bling? Sussex Police and Crimestoppers launched an initiative in January to catch "people with no legitimate income living a lavish lifestyle". The "Too much bling? Give us a ring!" campaign relies on members of the public dobbing in people they suspect have wealth unbefitting their employment. Historically it is ethnic minorities who have suffered in such campaigns, with black men in pricey cars being targeted over-proportionally by police. But a recent poll by the Fabian Society suggests that it is bankers who are seen as having far "too much bling" relative to their workload. 70 percent of those polled also believe that ordinary workers should sit on remuneration committees to decide executive pay levels. PW ---- Name and shame? "Are there names you are likely to encounter or not encounter on an Activities Abroad holiday?" asked Activities Abroad founder Alistair McLean in an email to 24,000 customers. "After a lot of research we came up with two lists of names. "Unlikely: Britney, Kylie-Lianne, Bianca, Tiffany, Dazza, Chardonnay, Chantelle, Candice, Courtney, Shannon. Likely: John, Sarah, Charles, Rachel, Michael, Alice, Lucy, Joseph, Charlotte. Nuff said, innit?" But class warrior McLean’s promise of "chav-free holidays" may have backfired, as customers relayed their disgust and demanded removal from the email list. Sulky McLean sent out another thoughtful email. "I am genuinely sorry if our newsletter caused offence," he said, but "I make no apology for proclaiming myself to be middle class and a genuine contributor to our society… Do you encourage your children to go off and play with the shell suited, Lambert and Butler sucking teenagers who hang around our shopping centres at night?" PW Frontlines end ---- Column In my opinion Dave Crouch BBC: Whose side are you on? The refusal of the BBC’s top management to broadcast the Disasters Emergency Committee (DEC) Gaza aid appeal focused public anger over media coverage of the Israeli assault. The BBC Board’s position had nothing to do with "impartiality". When a dog savages a child, it is not impartial to stand back and watch the child bleed - that is siding with the dog. Hiding behind the shibboleth of impartiality in reality meant that the BBC sided with Israel. The BBC’s extraordinary position was merely the worst moment in its coverage of Gaza. Throughout the events far too much weight was given to Israeli spokespeople, while reports repeatedly stereotyped Hamas as "militants" - invariably "Islamic militants" - while legitimating the Israeli assault as an "operation". So the BBC, along with the rest of the corporate media (except the Independent) bought the Israeli lie that it targeted the United Nations (UN) school in Jabaliya because Hamas was firing rockets from it. Only the Guardian subsequently reported the UN official who said the Israelis admitted they were wrong. At one point the BBC even embedded itself with Israeli troops invading Gaza. The BBC’s justification for its ban on the DEC aid appeal betrays a logic that says both sides in the Gaza conflict were equally to blame for the bloodshed. In the eyes of the pro-Israeli camp, the carnage in Gaza is justified by the context. For this reason we saw far too little of the bloody reality of Gaza on our screens. Broadcasting the DEC appeal would have restored some balance to the BBC’s coverage. Other DEC appeals broadcast by the BBC have been no less "controversial" than Gaza, such as those for Burma, the Congo and Sudan. But clearly the BBC calculates that it can only broadcast disaster appeals if it can get away with ignoring the political roots of disasters. In the Gaza case this is impossible. The BBC chief operating officer Caroline Thompson admitted as much when she told al-Jazeera, "We never say never and clearly, if the DEC came to us with another request when things have calmed down and we didn’t have the same worries about the controversial nature of this, we would look at it again in that light." "Things calming down" means getting back to the status quo, when it becomes legitimate in the BBC Board’s eyes to support appeals if they do not raise any fundamental questions about the causes of suffering. So why was BBC management so craven in siding with Israel? After the disastrous invasion of Iraq with the discovery that the government’s case for war was based on lies, Tony Blair set out to crush media criticism by making an example of the BBC. The government mounted a massive assault on the corporation when a BBC reporter, Andrew Gilligan, dared to report that the government had "sexed up" its case for war. The Hutton report, published five years ago, whitewashed the government and caused the resignation of the BBC’s top two managers, Greg Dyke and Gavin Davies, plus the sacking of Gilligan. As a result, a wave of fear washed through BBC management. The BBC’s reporting of the "war on terror" has not been the same since. A series of books, reports and conferences by critics of the BBC then sought to drive home the advantage, accusing the corporation of being liberal and even left wing. All cited the Hutton report - even though academic research has proved that the BBC largely sided with the government during the run-up to the Iraq war. Cowed BBC senior managers sought to drag the corporation even further to the right. One result was the BBC’s disgraceful "White Season" last year, which gave free voice to racists in the name of a new "radical impartiality". The columnist Yasmin Alibhai-Brown neatly summed up what has happened, accusing the corporation of "a profoundly illiberal agenda". "Day after day the BBC arranges for an anti-immigration and anti-asylum mood to grow," she wrote, and, "BBC shock jock presenters and producers know their fortunes can only get better." The Palestinian-Israeli conflict is not a football match in which the media can treat each side equally. It is, in the words of veteran Middle East correspondent Robert Fisk, "a massive tragedy of blood, sorrow and revenge" so "it is the job of journalists to be impartial on the side of those who suffer most". This is the impartiality that we must demand from the BBC. We need to campaign alongside BBC journalists who share that vision for a BBC that truly serves the public, not the government. DC Dave Crouch is chair of Media Workers Against the War. He writes in a personal capacity. Frontlines end ---- Feedback Crises and democracy Rosa Luxemburg’s contribution to progressive thought is a timely reminder of the challenges that face the European left (Socialist Review, January 2009). The deputy governor of the Bank of England has admitted that this is the greatest economic crisis in human history, yet the European left has never been weaker. Luxemburg’s eventual political failure, and the total defeat of a European socialist movement stronger than anything we see today, should chill us all. It should be clear that in the "Atlantic" economies there is no effective left to speak of. The only forces that have benefited from the crisis are those of the European right. As Britain’s economy continues to plunge we may well see the British National Party’s support boom on a scale that the left can only dream of - and given recent moves to abandon electoral politics altogether, a distant and unrealistic dream. The world has been stunned by the abruptness and depth of the economic crises, and yet the European left, itself born from the only critique that can explain this crisis, is lost in bitter infighting. Unless we wish to miss the greatest opportunity to remake the world in a century, we must unify and transform ourselves to ensure that European socialism again becomes a living, democratic mass movement. Loki English Germany Bolivarian snub The cutting of diplomatic ties with Israel by Hugo Chavez and Evo Morales has been an inspiration to the rest of the world. Hundreds of thousands have taken to the streets, calling upon their own governments to take such action. Yet again the projects taking place in Venezuela and Bolivia are standing out from the crowd. However, as highlighted by Mike Gonzalez (Socialist Review, January 2009), the movements in Latin America face great challenges. As the global economic crisis deepens, the working class and poor are the ones suffering as the battle over the continent’s natural resources increases. The breadth and intensity of the resistance are what will define their future. Such hurdles are not far away for some. Venezuelans are set for the ballot box again this month as the two-term limit on elected office is debated. This amendment to the constitution was turned down in the 2007 referendum. It will be yet another defining moment in the Bolivarian process and for the movement in Latin America in general. Steve Henshall London Party politics Gary Younge writes about Barack Obama’s historic victory (Socialist Review, December 2008). I believe it was a report by him in the Guardian that noted that, in the "open caucus" version of Democratic "Party" primaries, Republicans could participate. Not only do nebulous platforms replace the admittedly vague British manifestos in US politics, but balloon-fest congresses replace European-style party conferences. There are nearly 50 million Americans who have no health facilities other than charity - no wonder the more progressive of the 56 US unions are perennially seeking to create their own version of the (theoretically) collegiate Labour Party. In Britain 15 TUC trade unions still remain in affiliation with Labour. John McDonnell chairs a dozen British unions’ parliamentary lobbies and there are some 500 MPs and peers who have been, or are currently, union members. Yet even this has been incapable of forcing the repeal of Thatcherite anti-union legislation. One major population segment not organised in Labour Party affiliation is the pensioners. James Purnell, when appointing ex CBI chief Lord Turner to chair the 2006 Pension Commission, explained the absence of any National Pensioners’ Convention panel members (the NPC is the largest, most democratic and most representative campaigning pensioners’ body, I believe) in terms of wanting to "see consensus emerge, not a rehearsal of interest-groups’ arguments". Now Gordon Brown has appointed Joan Bakewell as the "pensioners’ voice". How patronising! It reveals that the Labour leadership fears the organisation and experience of campaigning pensioners’ bodies and the fact that they are (gradually) focusing on a common programme. D Shepherd London Terkel’s politics There’s no dissent from me from Mike Gonzalez’s excellent appreciation of Studs Terkel (Obituary, Socialist Review, December 2008): undoubtedly the US working class’s greatest, now alas departed, oral historian. But there was one omission from Gonzalez’s piece. For a magazine of Socialist Review’s necessary political boldness, where are his politics obituarised? I feel if we fail to record Terkel’s astute politics and just mention his documentation role, we not only do him a dishonour but fail to account for his vast energising role on the world left. He was a historian who warned the world, and his own poor, of the hollow reality of the endlessly repeated US capitalist dream. Larry Iles Eastbourne Feedback end ---- Letter from India India’s ruling class is growing ever closer to US imperialism, reports Kavita Krishnan The Indian media lost no time in naming last year’s Mumbai terror attack "26/11" or "India’s 9/11" - displaying unseemly pride in India’s enhanced "status" as a US ally and a target of global terror. In contrast to such a sentiment, thousands of workers, agricultural labourers, young people and students marched to parliament in the Indian capital of Delhi on 12 December 2008, a fortnight after the Mumbai attack, with slogans and placards that told the Indian government to "stop importing terror and economic crisis from the US!" Addressing the march, CPI(ML) General Secretary Comrade Dipankar said that "some sections of the media and politicians are trying to peddle dictatorship, army rule, war with Pakistan and partnership with the US as solutions for India’s security. Pakistan’s own experience is proof that this is a recipe for disaster. India’s ruling class - both the Congress and BJP parties - are hell-bent on shackling India to the globally hated US imperialist policies, and thus importing the US’s economic crisis as well as terrorism onto Indian soil." Since the Mumbai attack the Indian parliament has passed an amendment to its "Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act" that brings back almost all the draconian provisions that had led to the repeal of the Prevention of Terrorism Act (POTA) some years ago. Also a National Investigation Agency (NIA) Act has been passed in the same session of parliament, ostensibly to streamline the work of the state-based intelligence agencies that tended to work at cross-purposes. One commentator suspects, in the establishment of the NIA, "a direct link with the strategic alliance sealed with the USA," pointing out that the "FBI has actually been trying for the past two decades to open outposts in India". This suspicion might appear far-fetched, were it not strengthened by certain bizarre developments. Anita Udaiyya, a fisherwoman, is said to be an eyewitness to the landing of the terrorists on Mumbai’s shores. Said to have gone "missing" for a couple of days, she later claimed that she had been taken secretly to the US by the FBI for questioning. Though officials are rubbishing her claims, her statement has been vouched for by her neighbours. Whether or not her claims are true, the Indian authorities are not denying that the investigations into the Mumbai attack have virtually been taken over by the FBI. In Indian ruling circles there is some anxiety about Barack Obama’s pronouncements on Kashmir (echoed more provocatively by the British foreign secretary David Miliband on his recent visit to India). While Indian rulers may be chary of a US-brokered Kashmir solution, they are nevertheless doing all they can to facilitate an increased US presence in the region. The US has intensified its efforts to entangle India further in its military misadventures. Recently the Indian army chief even hinted that India ought to send troops to Afghanistan as a strategic counter to Pakistan, pointing out that India has already been providing "soft assistance" there. There was no reprimand by the Indian government for such irresponsible foreign policy statements. George W Bush was asked in his farewell press conference if the moral authority of the US had not been dimmed by him. He replied that he might be hated among the "elite" (parts of Europe), but he was loved in less privileged parts of the world - like India. This claim was inspired, no doubt, by Indian PM Manmohan Singh’s gushing words on his last visit to the US; "Indian people deeply love you, Mr Bush." At a time when even Obama had to admit in his inaugural speech that the credibility of the US is at an all-time low, it is indeed galling for Indians, with their legacy of resisting colonialism, to watch their ruling class lavish love on and lend legitimacy to the US’s most reviled representative. The US electorate recently delivered a crushing verdict against the Bush regime; as parliamentary elections draw closer in India, it is to be hoped that Indians will deliver as decisive a blow to their rulers for the disastrous "strategic partnership" with US imperialism. Kavita Krishnan is on the editorial board of Liberation, the monthly magazine of the CPI(ML) Letter from end ---- Feature How can Palestine be free? Israel’s war on Gaza provoked huge protests across the world. People are asking what the solution is for Palestine. It lies with the working class in the region, argues Anne Alexander. Recent struggles in Egypt show that the road to liberation goes through the streets of Cairo The recent attack on Gaza has exposed the brutal nature of the Israeli state to millions around the globe. Gaza remains a potent symbol of Palestinian resistance. The area is crammed with refugees and their descendants who fled ethnic cleansing by Zionist militias in 1948. They suffered decades of direct Israeli occupation and the theft of their land and water by Israeli settlers. They have seen their already weak and stunted economy strangled by Israeli policies of "closure", transformed into a near total blockade since 2005. Yet rather than surrender, growing numbers of Palestinians in Gaza turned to Hamas, rejecting a policy of collaboration with their oppressors. Gaza’s suffering also demonstrates that the "two-state solution" is both unjust and unworkable. Unjust, because it would legitimise the ethnic cleansing which turned Gaza into a gigantic refugee camp in the first place and condemns future generations of its inhabitants to continued poverty, dependency and isolation. Unworkable, because the assault on Hamas makes it clear that neither Israel nor its backers in the US will permit a Palestinian state to exist unless its leaders agree in advance to capitulate to their demands. Hamas’s contestation of the 2006 Palestinian elections showed that the Islamist movement was serious about creating a Palestinian state side by side with Israel, even if it still argued that this was just a step towards the future liberation of the whole of Palestine. Hamas’s election victory made it clear that the majority of Palestinians agreed with this stance. In addition, Hamas explicitly offered a long term truce, conditional on Israeli withdrawal to the pre-1967 borders. Yet Israel’s response has been to blockade and then attack Gaza, to grab more land in the West Bank and to attempt to destroy Hamas. Moreover, Israel has not acted alone, but with the full support of the US - and its client state, Egypt, which polices Gaza’s southern border. However, if there is hope in the Palestinians’ desperate situation, it is because Gaza also acts as a bridgehead between the Palestinian resistance and the struggle against the Arab regimes. This connection was made obvious in January 2008, when tens of thousands of Palestinians swept aside the Egyptian border guards and poured into northern Sinai. With protests multiplying in the streets of Cairo, Egypt’s president, Hosni Mubarak, suspended the siege and invited Hamas into negotiations, breaking the boycott of the Islamist organisation enforced by Israel and the US. These talks paved the way for the six-month long ceasefire between Hamas and Israel agreed in June 2008. As Amman-based political analyst Mouin Rabbani notes, this ceasefire was "no less of a political blow than its 1981 ceasefire - brokered by the US and UN - with its previous Palestinian arch- nemesis, the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO). Once again, it was making agreements with a foe it had assiduously worked to delegitimise and place beyond the pale of permissible engagement by others." The crucial factors in this breakthrough were the defeat inflicted on Israel by Hezbollah in Lebanon in 2006, Hamas’s continued refusal to surrender, and the Mubarak regime’s fear that events at the border with Gaza would set off a chain reaction of explosive protest inside Egypt. Mass movement in Egypt Mubarak’s fears are rooted in the growth of a mass movement for change from below over the past decade. The different strands of the movement have brought hundreds of thousands onto the streets in protest since 2000. The wave of demonstrations began with protests by school and university students in solidarity with the Palestinian intifada in 2000 and 2002, followed by huge anti-war marches against the invasion of Iraq in 2003. December 2004 saw the birth of Kifaya, the first popular movement in three generations which has crossed the "red line" of direct challenge to the legitimacy of the presidency. Kifaya forged links between democracy activists, opposition groups, students and even reform-minded judges to mobilise protests against dictatorship and repression across Egypt in 2005. Even more significant has been the emergence of a new workers’ movement, triggered by mass strikes in the textile industry starting in December 2006. Every sector of the Egyptian economy has been shaken by workers’ protests, strikes and factory occupations. Textile workers, rail workers, teachers and civil servants are among those who have won pay rises, improved conditions and forced the sacking of corrupt and abusive managers. The workers’ movement is driven by economic motors: the spiralling cost of living is the major force pushing workers into action. However, a broader political consciousness is developing fast in the most advanced sections of the movement. Workers can see the connection between the regime which starves their children and sends riot police to beat them off the streets, and the oppression of the Palestinians. Thus it has been in those sections of the workers’ movement which have gone furthest in the economic struggle, such as the Mahalla textile workers and the tax collectors, where the call for solidarity with the Palestinians has found the strongest echo. One of the striking tax collectors interviewed by filmmaker Nora Younis in December 2007 put it like this: "We are going to hell, but our country is backing Israel and the US." Egyptian workers have long whispered such things in private, looking over their shoulders in fear of Mubarak’s secret police. Spoken in public, in the midst of a strike by 55,000 tax collectors, during a ten-day occupation of a street in central Cairo round the corner from the cabinet offices, these words represent the potential for something not seen in Egypt since the 1940s: the coalescence of the anti-imperialist protest movement with the social power of the Egyptian working class. Events in 2008 give glimpses of how this movement could develop into a force capable of shaking the Egyptian regime to its core, and therefore breaking the weak link in the chain which binds the Palestinians. In April 2008 the town of Mahalla al-Kubra exploded into an uprising as the security forces suppressed a strike by workers at the Misr spinning plant. Tens of thousands battled with riot police and cut the railway line to prevent reinforcements arriving. Although the protests were eventually quelled, shops shut and workers stayed at home across in Egypt in solidarity with the textile workers’ demands for a rise in the national minimum wage. A movement on this scale confronts the Egyptian regime with difficult questions. Can it send riot police to Gaza to keep the Palestinians besieged at the same time as putting down workers’ strikes and street demonstrations? How should it respond if workers start to call for opening the border with Gaza, or sending arms to Hamas and backing up their rhetoric with action which shuts the Suez Canal, the Mahalla textile mills, the railways and the tax collection system? If they know anything of Egyptian history, Mubarak’s advisers should realise that these are more than just fantasies. In the early 1950s the dying days of the Egyptian monarchy saw struggles over the cost of living fuse with a mass anti-imperialist movement against the British military occupation. Workers brought the Suez Canal Zone to a standstill and marched on Cairo, demanding bread, jobs and arms to fight for liberation. The police deserted the regime and joined the guerrilla struggle against the British, while army officers plotted the coup which would overthrow the monarchy in July 1952. It is idle to pretend that such a future is inevitable. But it is certainly possible. Within Egypt, it will take the conscious intervention of activists determined to make the links between the struggle against the regime and the fight for Palestinian liberation by harnessing the power of the strike movement in the service of both causes. Socialists in Egypt are best placed to make these connections, but they can find an audience of millions who have been inspired by the strike wave and are raging with anger at the plight of Gaza. The Muslim Brotherhood is Egypt’s main opposition movement and has historic links with Hamas. Although the Brotherhood’s leadership has often been reluctant to turn rhetoric in support of the Palestinians into mass protests in Egypt, it is under increasing pressure from its own base to do so. On the Palestinian side, it means abandoning the idea that Palestinians alone can achieve liberation. The grotesque spectacle of the world’s fourth largest military power raining white phosphorous shells onto UN schools packed with refugees shows just how unequal the military contest is. But it will also require the end to the principle of "non-intervention" in the internal affairs of the Arab regimes. In other words, what is needed is an appeal over the heads of the corrupt Arab leaders for a borderless intifada, not only in Egypt but around the Arab world. AA ---- Gaza and the Palestinians - an unsustainable injustice Israel’s brutal attacks have inflicted untold suffering on Gaza’s beleaguered population. Yet Israel, despite its military might, has not succeeded in its mission to smash Hamas, Saree Makdisi tells Socialist Review The assault on Gaza was described implicitly by Israel and the media as a war of military and economic equals. What were the living conditions in Gaza before the war? Even after redeploying soldiers and Jewish colonists from inside Gaza in 2005, Israel retained control over Gaza’s airspace, borders, territorial waters and natural resources (including an offshore natural gas field for which British Gas holds a contract) and even the territory’s population registry. Israel is considered to be the occupying power in Gaza, as it has been since 1967. That means that international law holds Israel, not Hamas, accountable for the welfare of the civilian population of Gaza. Since 2005 (actually long before that, but things got much worse that year) Israel has been acting in a manner directly in violation of its responsibilities to the civilian population as the occupying power. Instead of allowing people their right to come and go from the territory, to import and export goods, to develop economically and so on, Israel locked Gaza up in 2005. They turned it into a giant prison, and, in the words of the then UN Special Rapporteur on Human Rights, John Dugard, threw away the key. Three years of isolation and siege (which got even worse in 2006 and 2007) destroyed Gaza’s economy, deliberately reduced 80 percent of the population to grinding poverty, and made them dependent for their day to day survival on food handouts from international aid agencies. In late 2008 Israel cut off even that nutritionally insufficient assistance (as it has on other occasions as well). It has also, with the blessings of its high court, reduced electricity supplies to Gaza (and since Israel bombed the territory’s only power plant in 2006, Gaza depends on electricity supplies from Israel). So when this war started, the people of Gaza were already suffering from lack of access to food, water (which requires energy for pumps) and medicine. There were already growing signs of malnutrition, skyrocketing rates of anemia and stunted growth in children. The war came on top of all that. What was Israel’s plan? Was it really to destroy Hamas? Israel turned to Gaza in order to reassert itself militarily after its stinging defeat in Lebanon in 2006, almost exactly in the way in which a bully will turn to someone weak in order to reassert himself after having been faced down by someone else. This was done partly for domestic political purposes, to enhance the poor electoral prospects of the current defence and foreign ministers - both of whom are contenders in next month’s elections - and partly in order for Israel to project to the Palestinians yet again the message that they must learn to submit to Israel’s will; to accept, in the memorable 2002 words of Israeli general Moshe Yaalon, "that they are a defeated people". As usual Israel failed. Israel is keen to separate Hamas from the general Gazan population. What is the reality in the light of Hamas’s 2006 election victory? The reality on the ground is that Hamas and the other armed Palestinian factions in Gaza (including Fatah factions, by the way) resisted over three weeks of Israeli bombardment, inflicted losses on the invading Israeli army, prevented the Israelis from capturing territory (other than the open fields which were never contested) and continued to fire rockets at Israel. In a word, they utterly prevented Israel from attaining a single one of its declared objectives. Compare that to the performance of the pretender to the Palestinian Authority (PA) presidency, Mahmoud Abbas (I say "pretender" because his term expired and yet other countries continue to treat him as though he were the PA president), who has never looked weaker, more craven, more submissive, more unimaginative and less appealing to Palestinians. He was unable even to participate in the Arab summit in Qatar because, he said, the Israelis wouldn’t let him. Who would you support if you were a Palestinian living under occupation? As was revealed in 2006, and now again today, Hamas enjoys popular support not because of its Islamicism, but because it refuses to submit to Israel in the way that Abbas and others like him have shown themselves willing to do, no matter the cost to their people and their cause. What is the role of Egypt? Why has it closed its border with Gaza? The Egyptian government is profoundly unpopular and lacking in legitimacy. Nothing worries it more than the rise next door of a popular movement that also gained the legitimacy of a proper democratic election, such as has never been held in Egypt’s history. Of course, it’s terrified of Hamas and of the message that Hamas holds out - again, not the Islamic message, but the political one: don’t submit, don’t accept Israeli or US dictates, stand for what you believe in and insist on your rights. Those are the main drives of Hamas rhetoric. So Egypt’s role is to support Israel’s siege of Gaza, and, in general, to support the US-Saudi-Israeli front. In this they are in cooperation with the deeply unpopular and illegitimate Arab governments against their own peoples and against any local drive to self-determination (Hamas in Palestine, Hezbollah in Lebanon). Mubarak said himself (to Europeans) that he wants Hamas to be defeated. But Egypt is hampered by two major considerations. First, the anger of its own people, who draw lines which even Mubarak will not dare cross; and second, its awareness that what Israel would like to do is to permanently, legally, separate Gaza from the West Bank and East Jerusalem (they are all considered one territory, legally speaking), and to foist Gaza and its problems onto Egypt, which is the last thing that the Egyptians want. So Egypt is actually in a really awkward position. What about Israel’s use of white phosphorous and using Palestinians as human shields? Can you imagine the British army and air force in response to IRA bombs in Britain in the 1970s, which killed far more people than all the rockets ever fired by Palestinians at Israel, cutting off Northern Ireland from the outside world, stopping supplies of food, medicine, electricity and fuel from getting through and then showering densely populated neighbourhoods of Belfast with white phosphorous, high explosives, one-tonne bombs, depleted uranium and dense inert material explosive (an experimental weapon that basically shreds the human body)? What does this level of violence, directed against a besieged, exhausted, hungry, thirsty and terrified civilian population - half of them children - with no possible avenue of shelter or escape, tell you about Israel’s attitude toward the Palestinian people? What is Barack Obama’s administration’s policy? It’s too early to tell, but all the signs are that it’s going to be a replay of Bill Clinton’s administration. Given the people that Obama has appointed, any attempt at peacemaking will most likely take the form of the Clinton-era proposals of Oslo and Camp David, which will basically serve to protect Israel’s claim to Jewishness, Israel’s military and political needs, and Israel’s natural resources needs, and to proceed with the fiction of a Palestinian statelet that will in fact amount to little more than an archipelago of isolated territorial islands cut off from each other and the outside world by Israeli power. That’s what was on offer under Clinton’s presidency. How do you get to the one-state solution that you advocate? Israel has a strong economy and a huge army. Do you think that the neighbouring Arab masses have a role to play? The prime minister of Israel, Ehud Olmert, has said on more than one occasion that when the Palestinians turn from the Algerian paradigm (struggle against occupation) to the South African paradigm (one person, one vote), Israel will lose. Israel systematically privileges Jews over non-Jews - inside Israel, in Jerusalem, in the West Bank and in Gaza. For example, Jewish citizens of Israel have rights that are denied to the non-Jewish citizens of the state (ie the Palestinian citizens of Israel, to whom Israel refers using the deliberately misleading and deracinated term "Israeli Arabs"), beginning with the Law of Return. This is a nationality law exclusively for Jews. In fact, judicially speaking, Israel does not recognise the existence of Israeli nationality, only Jewish nationality, so Jews who are not citizens actually enjoy rights and privileges denied to citizens who are not Jews. In the West Bank, there are different road networks and different legal and administrative systems for the Jewish colonists and the non-Jewish, Palestinian, indigenous population (Palestinians are subject to military law, for example, while Jewish colonists are subject to Israeli civil law). In both Israel and the occupied territories Palestinians face obstructions, limitations and prohibitions to which Jewish people are not subject. And yet, in the overall land area under the control of the Israeli state (that is, Israel plus the occupied territories) there are approximately equal populations of Jews and Palestinians. This level of injustice is simply not sustainable in the long run. There is nothing that Israel fears more than the Palestinian demand for equality in a reconstituted democratic and secular state. The Palestinians have a huge role to play in this struggle, but the other big role falls to people outside, and in particular to people in Europe and the US, who are in a unique position to bring pressure to bear in the form of a boycott, divestment and sanctions campaign modelled on the one that brought down apartheid in South Africa. Israel’s recent rampage in Gaza has put that campaign back on the agenda of concerned citizens everywhere. Saree Makdisi is the author of Palestine: An Everyday Occupation, published by W W Norton and available from Bookmarks Bookshop, 020 7637 1848 Feature ends ---- Column In perspective Chris Harman India: Poverty behind the tiger India’s growing economy has benefited a corrupt elite. But the masses only get poorer November’s deadly attacks in Mumbai had one peculiar side-effect on the British media. Journalists were forced out into the streets and discovered that the vast majority of the city’s population are still poor. Since then the deep contrast between the lives of India’s upper middle class and that of the mass of people has been emphasised in Aravind Adiga’s Man Booker Prize winning novel, The White Tiger, and Danny Boyle’s rags to riches film Slumdog Millionaire. Such revelations have not been welcomed universally. The Indian elite prefer the other media message of India as a new economic giant. So Amitabh Bachchan, former host of India’s Who Wants to Be a Millionaire, complains that Slumdog Millionaire portrays "India as a Third World dirty underbelly developing nation and causes pain and disgust among nationalists and patriots". Both media messages reflect something real. There has been industrial and economic growth in India, in sharp contradiction to the old left orthodoxy from writers like economists Paul Baran and Andre Gunder Frank who saw this as impossible. India’s manufacturing output today is about six and a half times greater than at the end of the 1970s. This growth has produced a burgeoning upper middle class. City streets are clogged up with expensive cars as well as the auto rickshaws used by the lower middle class. These changes have caused some to switch to a different view, pioneered 40 years ago by Bill Warren and embraced today by former Marxists Meghan Desai and Nigel Harris. Capitalism, they say, means development and that is positive. A version of this view led the Indian Communist Party (Marxist) two years ago to help drive peasants from their land in West Bengal to provide greenfield site for Tata Motors. Yet India shows clearly that capitalist development has not meant a general improvement in people’s lives. The growth in middle class girths is accompanied by the continued skeletal thinness of the workers and the poor, with half the population chronically malnourished. Statisticians have in recent years faced a strange anomaly. One lot of figures shows average rural incomes rising. But another shows average peasant food consumption falling. Class differentiation within the peasantry means that some are buying a few of the cheaper mass consumer goods, while the majority have to cut back on the necessities of life, with farmer suicides reaching record levels. Life is barely better for the great mass of people in the cities. The number of jobs in the "organised" manufacturing sector (that is, jobs with employment rights), at around 6 million, was no higher in 2005 than in 1991. Alongside these are 17 million manufacturing and 43 million other workers in the "unorganised" sector with no rights and daily incomes rarely higher than 30 to 50 rupees (at a time when rice costs 20 rupees a kilo). And now an Indian business lobby group is forecasting the destruction of "up to 10 million jobs over the next three months as many struggling companies shut up shop in the face of plunging export markets." A World Bank report on India has estimated that 40 percent of growth had ended up in the pockets of a mere 1 percent of the population - or as Karl Marx would have put it, there has been "an accumulation of wealth on the one side, of poverty on the other". The White Tiger is a powerful novel because of the stark way it shows this. Its fictional protagonist is driven by family poverty to seek work in Delhi as the driver and general servant to one of the new yuppie class. He soon realises the rest of his life is going to be spent at the beck and call of a class of people who can squander in one minute more than he will earn in a year. He witnesses the reality of Indian democracy when one of his jobs is to carry his master’s bribes to the "socialist" politician whose electoral victory is meant to provide hope for the poor. The protagonist of Slumdog Millionaire escapes from poverty by winning a TV show, and that of White Tiger through crime - robbing and killing his master, and using his loot to establish himself as a much acclaimed entrepreneur in the country’s software capital, Bangalore. The image of entrepreneurial success as coming through crude crime is, of course, a caricature, but only a slight one. India’s other great software centre is Hyderabad, where the authorities built a whole satellite town, Cyberbad, to cater for Satyam Computers and its 25,000 employees. The company’s boss, Ramalinga Raju, has been India’s young entrepreneur of the year. While I was in Hyderabad over the new year all the city’s political parties, including the Communist Party, declared their wholehearted support for his role in "creating jobs". Two days later he admitted to a £1 billion fraud on the company’s books and was arrested. While all this was happening the country’s media was concentrating on one thing - the whipping up of war hysteria against Pakistan. Capitalism in the Global South does not always mean the complete stagnation of Baran and Gunder Frank. But neither does it involve the raising up of the mass of population. It means growing poverty in the midst of growing wealth, sudden obliteration of people’s hopes by economic crisis, the lauding of the most corrupt, and the use of national and ethnic hatreds in a concerted attempt to prevent the growth of class feeling. CH Column ends ---- Feature The economic crisis deepens Joseph Choonara looks at a new phase of the economic crisis that could see whole countries go bankrupt The global economic crisis is entering a new phase. The first phase came as concerns over subprime mortgages and the "toxic" assets derived from them spread, leading to repeated attempts by central banks to "inject liquidity" into the financial system to prevent it seizing up. The second phase began in autumn 2008. The decision to allow the US investment bank Lehman Brothers to go bust caused panic. As markets fell governments responded with spectacular bailouts. The logic of this phase was to push states towards ever more drastic methods, including nationalisations, to absorb some of the risk that banks and other corporations had exposed themselves to. It was accompanied by a growing crisis in non-financial sectors, including the near-collapse of the biggest American motor manufacturers. The new phase will see renewed efforts by states to stabilise the system, including further bailout plans and stimulus packages in the US and Britain. More extreme methods will bring other risks. The danger of banks going under may be replaced by that of whole states going under. At the same time the crisis in the real economy will deepen. Indeed the three aspects of the crises - the problems afflicting the financial system, the non-financial economy and the state - are now tightly bound together and mutually reinforcing. States attempt to encourage banks to lend; banks are reluctant to do so because the recession increases the risk that corporate loans and mortgages will default; states are forced to step up their intervention, even as their tax revenues fall and spending on unemployment rises; governments are forced to borrow more or to print money; this undermines their currencies and further sharpens the financial crisis. A survey of the system The economy was key to Barack Obama’s election as US president. His poll rating went up each time the Dow Jones fell. He now has at his disposal the second of two $325 billion packages designed to try to rescue the US banks. A further $800 billion package is before Congress. Relative to the size of the economy, this already exceeds the level of intervention during the New Deal of the mid-1930s. But even the drastic measures being discussed are unlikely to match up to the scale of the crisis. The disclosure of the subprime losses by two major banks in January showed that the first banking bailout had not addressed even the most basic problems. Bank of America announced losses of $15.3 billion and Citigroup $18.7 billion. According to the Financial Times, the announcements "confirmed what many experts have long suspected: the subprime losses of 2007 were a bullet that fatally wounded the banks. Many lost so much money on toxic subprime mortgage-related derivatives that they have been essentially insolvent for more than a year." New York economist Nouriel Roubini now estimates total US financial losses at $3,600 billion - a hole that is not even close to being filled. Elsewhere the five biggest European economies - Britain, France, Italy, Germany and Spain - are all expected to shrink this year. According to the Financial Times, "European industrial production collapsed in November…business confidence surveys suggest the bottom of the recession - set to be among the worst since the Second World War - has not yet been reached." European states are also bearing the burden of collapsing financial systems. For instance, Ireland was forced to nationalise its third largest bank, Anglo Irish, in January and may be forced to do the same to the two biggest. Such measures are driving up government debts across Europe. Total public debt in the Eurozone was expected to reach 75 percent of total gross domestic product. Credit ratings agencies, responsible for assessing the risk attached to debt, downgraded Greece, Spain and Portugal’s credit rating in January. This vote of no confidence will make it harder for them to fund their spending. It is likely to lead to sharp cutbacks that will be particularly perilous for the Greek state where a powerful workers’ and students’ movement has emerged. The crisis is spreading from the periphery of Europe to its core - just as talk of governments defaulting is spreading from the pages of Socialist Review to those of the Financial Times: a "default by a small country could wreak havoc on the markets for credit default swaps and might even destroy financial institutions in other Eurozone countries". But the real basket case is Britain. Jim Rogers, who once worked alongside famed investor George Soros, claimed in a recent interview, "The UK has had two things to sell to the world over the last 25 years: the North Sea [oil] and that’s drying up…and the city of London…the UK’s financial asset is a disaster and it’s not going to revive." His conclusion: "I would urge you to sell any sterling you might have. It’s finished… I would not put any money in the UK." His advice was heeded. Last month the pound collapsed to its lowest level against the dollar in 23 years. Last autumn Gordon Brown boasted that he had saved world capitalism. Now it is clear that he has not even rescued British banks. Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS) was set to announce losses of up to £28 billion, the worst in British corporate history, as Socialist Review went to press. The profits made by the Lloyds part of the new Lloyds Banking Group (LBG), about £1.2 billion, will be wiped out by the £4.8 billion losses made by HBOS, which it absorbed last year. The government is the majority stakeholder in both RBS and LBG. Brown has announced a new lifeline for the banks - involving the government insuring risky loans. But many commentators realise that the logic of the situation is to push the government towards the nationalisation of the entire banking system, which would make such insurance irrelevant. A new package of tax and spending measures is also expected this spring. This comes in the wake of official confirmation that Britain is in recession. The final three months of 2008 saw the worse contraction since the depths of the crisis of the early 1980s. The decline was not led by the financial sector but by manufacturing - in other words the real economy is also in meltdown. No area of the globe is immune from the crisis. The economies of East Asia, heavily dependent on exports, have begun to feel the pain. The Chinese economy contracted in the final months of 2008, a development that is likely to cause growing social unrest as job growth grinds to a halt. The Japanese and South Korean economies are also expected to shrink. These developments, and the fall in revenues for oil producing countries, will have an impact on economies such as the US that depend on external sources of finance. The roots of the crisis What we are witnessing is not simply a financial or banking crisis. It is a systemic crisis of capitalism. This is rooted in something Karl Marx identified 150 years ago - a long-term tendency for the rate of profit (the return capitalists receive on their investment) to decline. The decline in this rate of return appears as a crisis for the whole system because it governs how fast capitalists can invest - the impetus driving capitalism’s expansion. The post-war period was characterised by a long-term decline. From the 1980s the decline was arrested by attacks on workers’ pay and conditions, accompanied by a growth in personal debt that supported their ability to spend despite restricted wages. In addition, rises in asset prices - including, the financial assets derived from mortgage lending and other credit - created the illusion of profitability. Now these illusions are being stripped away. This analysis has important implications. If this were merely a banking crisis or a momentary loss of business confidence, it could be solved by the methods advocated by Brown. If it is a systemic crisis, then what we are seeing is far more profound. It is a crisis that would have broken far earlier had it not been for the bubbles of credit and inflated asset prices. Either a new bubble is required to keep the system ticking over or a fundamental process of restructuring through crisis is needed to clear out the system and allow expansion. But the changes to capitalism since the last major crisis of the 1930s make such restructuring more difficult. In particular the growth in the size of corporations and the way in which they are bound together through finance makes it a painful process. Allowing an unprofitable multinational to go under can risk bringing down a whole chunk of the system. The expanded role of the state within capitalism means that the stakes are higher - bailing out a company is one thing, bailing out a country quite another. The impact of the crisis Crisis intensifies the tensions that run through capitalism. It sharpens the conflicts between states. Increasingly governments have focused on defending their markets from competitors and boosting their exports. This has been accompanied by a growing war of words. Obama went further than his predecessors when he claimed that China was "manipulating" its currency to boost its exports and pledged "aggressive moves". Expect more political clashes and, potentially, even military conflict. Tensions are also growing between those at the top of the system and those at the bottom. In Britain an offensive on workers is already under way. Many companies have used the recession to attack pay and to sack workers. The numbers claiming dole increased by 34.4 percent in the 12 months to November 2008. Young people have been hit particularly hard - the number of those aged 18 to 24 without work rose to its highest level since 1995. Two thirds of companies with more than 500 employees have already cut jobs. More attacks are on the way. The Financial Times’s special supplement "Managing in a Downturn" advised managers that in a recession "employees recognise that a firm cannot continue to do what it did in the past. The downturn lowers their resistance to change" it is a "ready-made external rationale to justify painful decisions that would appear extreme in better times". In the poorest countries the impact will be even greater - the agony of starvation, disease and mass unemployment. Such devastation may even engulf some more developed countries. One recent survey of states that could see a complete meltdown included Hungary, Bulgaria, Romania, Argentina, Venezuela, Ecuador, Mexico, Russia, Ukraine, the Baltic States, Pakistan, Indonesia and South Korea. Fighting back But this is not the end of the story. Recent struggles, for example those in Egypt, Greece and much of Latin America, show that the capacity of workers to resist remains intact. So far the crisis has not stimulated an upsurge in workers’ struggle in Britain. Economic crisis always leads to a combination of fear and anger among workers - fear that they will lose their jobs, but also anger that they are expected to pay for the failings of a system they do not control. So far union leaders have related to the fear and sought to contain the anger, calling off strikes and arguing that workers cannot fight during a recession - an idea that can become a self-fulfilling prophecy. They have, for the most part, strengthened their support for Gordon Brown and struck deals with bosses to try to protect jobs. The danger of such a strategy was seen recently at JCB. Workers were pressed to accept a 34-hour week to save jobs. Managers welcomed the reduction in the wage bill and then axed 1,000 jobs anyway. Then, in January this year, they announced plans to cut 684 more. The unions should have demanded that a tiny fraction of the money handed to the banks was used to nationalise JCB and save jobs with no loss in pay. But Britain is not immune to struggle. In a recession groups of workers can suddenly decide they have no option but to fight to save jobs and defend their pay. Such a fight can come from groups with few traditions of struggle or from more established groups where socialists and other militants are able to gain a hearing. And there is the possibility of a sudden escalation of the crisis - like that in Argentina in 2001-2 when the shutdown of the banking system sparked the emergence of a mass movement. In this context the role of groups of socialists, rooted in workplaces and localities, capable of giving political direction to the anger and generalising struggles, is vital. Joseph Choonara is the deputy editor of International Socialism, www.isj.org.uk Feature ends ---- Interview: Lillian Faderman Chronicles of LGBT struggles Lesbians faced appalling official discrimination in the US in the 1950s. LGBT historian Lillian Faderman tells Rita Mcloughlin that although conditions have changed dramatically we still need to fight for more What was it like coming out as a working class lesbian in the 1950s? The 1950s were probably the worst time ever to be a lesbian in the US. I look at what the Western world is like now for lesbians and it’s a different universe. Of course I recognise that young lesbians might have trouble with their families and still feel that there are certain jobs where they can’t be out, but they have no conception of the constant fear lesbians lived in then. I was a working class lesbian and I first came out after meeting a woman in a working class lesbian bar called the Open Door. It was 1956 and I was still a minor with a phoney ID. I describe in my memoir, Naked in the Promised Land, what it was like even walking down the street. Once I jaywalked across the street holding hands with my first lover who was a very butch woman - she was dressed, as it was considered in those days, like a man. Now everyone wears pants and tailored jackets but then that wasn’t the case. This policeman stopped us, ostensibly for jaywalking, made us get into the car and drove around the block and parked. It was very threatening. He made her get out of the car. I had no idea what he would do. I thought I was going to be arrested but he just lectured me, saying I didn’t look like somebody like Jan (the woman’s name) and that she was bad business. Finally he just let us both go. When I did interviews for my book, Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers, I heard many worse horror stories of butches and femmes who were picked up and sometimes raped, and I heard horror stories about raids on bars. There were many times when I got to bars just after a raid had taken place, where the bar was empty with just vice squad officers around. Could you tell us about how lesbians were treated during the witchhunts of senator Joseph McCarthy? It was particularly middle class women who were concerned about their livelihood during the McCarthy era. If you were a teacher or you worked in any kind of government position and it was discovered that you were lesbian, you could be fired on the grounds of immorality. There were witchhunts of lesbians working in government positions and they were frequently fired. I was an undergraduate in my first semester at UCLA and when students entered we had to take a battery of tests. I remember well questions that kept appearing on a psychological test all freshmen had to take such as, "Have you ever dreamt of kissing a person of the same sex?", "Do you have affectionate feelings, or erotic feelings, towards a person of the same sex?" But all of us who were homosexual knew if we were smart enough to get into UCLA we had to say no to any question like that. Once when I was doing research I ran across an article published in a journal called School and Society in 1954, four years before I became a freshman. It was co-authored by the dean and associate dean of students at UCLA and the thrust of it was that it was the job of deans of students around the country to ferret out homosexuals and make sure that they got treatment for their homosexuality and changed. If they were unwilling to change they were to be expelled from college lest they spread the disease of homosexuality to other students. That was the atmosphere. We had constant reason to be wary, to be in hiding, to try to masquerade. What were the main differences between the middle class lesbian groups and organisations and the working class lesbians’ bar culture? There was a huge divide. Middle class lesbians for the most part by the 1950s - it was different in earlier eras - were terrified about going to bars. There were occasional exceptions. There was a cocktail lounge, for example, in Los Angeles that I was familiar with. The style was a holdover from the earlier era where the entertainer and co-owner of the bar, Beverly Shaw, modelled herself on Marlene Dietrich. She would sit on the piano and sing, wearing a skirt with high heels and a man-tailored jacket and a bow tie. Middle class lesbians felt pretty conformable going there. The rumour was that Shaw paid the vice squad off, so it was a safe place. But for the most part middle class lesbians were terrified of the bars because they were often raided. That was true in all the big US cities. Lesbian or lesbian and gay bars weren’t safe and the names of everyone who was arrested would be in the newspapers. You would risk losing your job, and middle class lesbians who had extensive training as teachers or social workers or nurses didn’t want to blow it all by being arrested. Instead they would have house parties and extended circles of friends who could do things that they considered safe. For working class lesbians it would have been much harder to invite 20, 30 or 40 friends over to your small digs. So the only place to socialise or form a community was in the bar. For many working class lesbians the bar culture was an absolutely wonderful thing because that’s where they formed friendship circles. They could be who they were - if they were butch they could dress in butch garbs. Yet it was so dangerous. There was also another danger. Alcoholism was so big in the lesbian community in the 1950s and 1960s because you couldn’t stay in the bar unless you bought a drink, and you couldn’t nurse one drink all night: you had to have several if you wanted to stay. The 1969 Stonewall riots saw lesbians and gays fight back against the police in New York. How big a turning point were these events? The Stonewall riots were certainly an important icon for gay men and lesbians, but at the same time that the riots took place, feminism was becoming very strong in the US, and lesbian feminism was starting to emerge. Lesbian feminism was vital for many lesbians, particularly in the 1970s, more vital for them than the Stonewall riots. It was an absolutely wonderful era in the US. All sorts of publishing houses were founded and bookstores devoted to women’s books were established. So much lesbian feminist philosophy, social philosophy, was written in the 1970s - it was a renaissance of lesbian thought. What impact did the civil rights movement have on the radical ethnic minority homosexuals? The civil rights movement had a huge impact on ethnic minority homosexuals, but on other lesbians and gay people as well. I don’t think Stonewall would have happened if there hadn’t have been a history of black protest and Latino protest, or Chicano protest as it was called in the US in the 1960s, and even the Native American and American Indian protests and Asian-American protests that happened in the 1960s. Slowly women looked around - all women - and realised that they were participating in the civil rights protests yet they weren’t free as women and it was time for a women’s movement. Also, and I think this is so interesting and significant, the work around civil rights finally raised the idea that gay people weren’t free either, and so those protests began. Without the civil rights movement of the 1960s there wouldn’t have been a gay or a feminist movement or a lesbian feminist movement. In Britain today many argue we have equal rights as gay people due to legislation and social acceptance. But there are those of us who say we still have a long way to go. How close do you think we are to gaining equality? The bar is always raised. Expectations get higher and higher, which is wonderful. In the 1950s there was no way I would have dreamt of even having this conversation. Even 30 years ago there is no way I would have dreamt that I, as an academic, would have been able to write openly about homosexuality. There is no way I would have dreamt that our new president would have asked an openly gay bishop, Gene Robinson, to give an invocation at the pre-inaugural celebration. That would have been incredible. Yet I’m a product not only of the 1950s but also of the present, and I want more. I want the right to marry now, not only because my partner and I have been together for 37 years and it would be good for society to recognise that, but for practical reasons as well. There are over a thousand federal privileges that married heterosexuals have that we don’t have. We have made so much progress, but the more progress you make the more you see there are still steps to take before real equality. It’s wonderful that we can now be brave and bold enough to say we want it all. In the 1950s we would have said, "Just stop persecuting us - that’s all we ask for." But now we are asking for more - it is our right to ask for more. We’re not there yet, but we’re so much further than I would have dreamt in the 1950s than we could ever be. Interview ends ---- Feature Iran: from Shah to Ayatollah With the failure of the "war on terror" has come an emboldened, increasingly influential Iran. But as world leaders look for ways to exert their authority on the country, Naz Massoumi looks at Iran’s revolutionary history and its repeated rejection of imperialism Iran, because of the great leadership of the Shah, is an island of stability in one of the more troubled areas of the world," said US President Jimmy Carter on his New Year’s Eve state visit to Iran in 1977. He spoke too soon. Just a week later the Shah’s police shot and killed dozens of theology students as they protested in the religious city of Qom against a scurrilous attack on Ayatollah Khomeini in a pro-government newspaper. One year later, on 16 January 1979, following months of demonstrations and a general strike, the Shah was forced to leave Iran. The Iranian Revolution of 1979 came as a surprise not just to the US ruling class but to nearly all foreign observers. How had Mohammad Reza Shah - the megalomaniac monarch who had ruled Iran with an iron fist for nearly three decades - been toppled so quickly? How had this powerful insurrection, involving tens of millions of people, been led by a frail 76 year old Shia cleric? There is no doubt that the modern history of the Middle East would be very different had it not been for its abundance of oil. In 1908 Iran was the first country in the Middle East where oil was discovered. As Britain switched from coal to oil to fuel its battleships, intervention came in form of the Anglo-Iranian oil company. Iran received a mere £105 million of the profits in comparison to Britain’s massive £700 to £800 million share. The consequence, following a popular nationalist movement, was the election of the liberal nationalist Mohammad Mossadegh as prime minister and the nationalisation of Iranian oil in 1951. Outraged by its imperial castration, the British government immediately organised an international oil boycott before looking to the US who had replaced them as the post-war regional imperialist power. Their answer was a CIA-masterminded coup headed by Kermit Roosevelt who, arriving in Iran with suitcases stuffed with cash, toppled the popular Mossadegh from power in August 1953, reinstating the young Shah to his Peacock Throne. Ironically, Mohammad Reza Shah used Iran’s increased share of oil profits achieved by the nationalist movement (from 16 percent to 50 percent) to continue a programme of state-driven industrialisation. This process did little for the majority of Iranians. In 1960, 80 percent of Iranians were illiterate and only 1 percent had access to a medical facility. Worried by the fragility of his claim to power and frightened by rising political unrest, the Shah suppressed all political dissent and built a massive military machine, increasing his armed forces from 120,000 to around 400,000 by the time of the revolution. Inequality and military rule were underlined by massive contradictions. Alongside new factories, forms of production existed not changed for centuries. Encircling cities, where the elite embarked on one-day shopping trips to Paris, shanty towns grew. But this process of uneven capitalist development brought into existence an indigenous bourgeoisie and a modern working class. And this came into increasingly sharp conflict with the Shah’s autocratic form of rule. By the mid-1970s opposition was coming from all sections of society - women, national minorities, the clergy, the urban poor, the bazaar (merchant capitalists), intelligentsia, students and the young. A successful uprising by shantytown dwellers to save their housing from being bulldozed in the summer of 1977 ignited a confidence in the poor and working class that precipitated new protests. The Shah’s response was to increase repression. On "Black Friday", 8 September 1978, the Shah’s troops armed with tanks and helicopter gunships shot live rounds at protesters in Tehran’s Jaleh Square. Some 1,600 died, unaware they were violating a new curfew. But the regime would not be brought to its knees until the intervention of what was now the largest social force - the working class. Following the massacre at Jaleh Square machine-tool workers from the city of Tabriz walked out. They were soon followed by workers at the giant steel mills in the city of Esfahan. By October workers from nearly every section of the labour force were coming out. The oil workers struck in November, causing a 10 percent drop in the world consumption of oil. The Shah’s response was to send in his troops. But by December millions, including soldiers, were demonstrating against the Shah. On 31 December, only one year after Carter’s toast to the Shah, a general strike brought the national economy to a halt. If the working class was so central in the fall of the Shah, why was a socialist revolution not possible? The answer, quite simply, is that it was. Even though this was a new and inexperienced working class, the committees from the mass strikes developed quickly into factory councils known as shoras - spontaneous organs of workers’ power. Initially striking over economic grievances, they very quickly made political demands. By December 1978 they were calling explicitly for regime change. Unfortunately the politics of the religious (Mojahedeen) and secular left (Tudeh Party and Fedaayeen) had a damaging impact on this process. With illusions in variants of Stalinism, the principal forces on the left all had one thing in common - their total lack of faith in the Iranian working class. Preferring to side with the "progressive" sections of the bourgeoisie (including Khomeini himself) the left fatally abandoned working class politics. Lack of effective socialist leadership meant the shoras never developed into fully fledged workers’ councils. Instead the lack of leadership and independent organisation in the working class opened the revolution up to other forces. And, just like previous Third World revolutions, the vacuum was filled by a new middle class - the Ayatollah Khomeini, clerics, Islamist students, doctors, lawyers and professionals. There is much confusion about Khomeini’s Islamic movement. Many regarded and still regard Khomeini as a "fundamentalist". This isn’t so. Fundamentalism refers to the literal interpretation of religious scriptures, whereas Khomeini fashioned a radical reinterpretation of Shia Islam, under influence from the popular Shia theologian Ali Shariati who had attempted to incorporate the ideas of Frantz Fanon and Karl Marx into Islam. Khomeini was more typical of a Third World bourgeois nationalist. His anti-imperialist slogans were dressed in religious language. One slogan was "Mostazafin [oppressed] of the world unite." Khomeini was able to outmanoeuvre the left. On 4 November 1979 Khomeiniites mobilised Islamist students to lay siege to the US embassy, taking its staff hostage. The siege gave the Khomeiniites the mantle of anti-imperialism. The left, in complete disarray, could only offer their support. But once Khomeini had won leadership of the revolution, he went about building a capitalist state, although an independent one. What followed was the brutal repression of all opposition, the control and eventual removal of the shoras, restriction on freedoms and women’s rights, and the reversal of many of the revolution’s gains. In September 1980, with US backing, Saddam Hussein’s Iraq invaded Iran, hoping to bring down the revolutionary government and concerned that the Iranian Revolution could spread through to Iraq’s large Shia population. The consequence was a devastating eight-year war where over a million perished on both sides. Khomeini called the invasion a "godsend". It provided the opportunity to consolidate power. With intensified nationalism and the country united against a foreign power, dissidents were brutally silenced as "foreign agents". Indeed, the institutionalised repression of the Iranian Revolution should be seen in this context rather than being seen as exclusive to political Islam. Like the revolutions of Russia in 1917 and France in 1789, it occurred in the shadow of foreign intervention. Islamic movement It wasn’t just repression of the opposition that brought Khomeini to power. The Islamic movement mobilised millions especially from the poorest sections of society. It was now accountable to this movement. Consequently, absolute poverty was abolished, the shanty towns were dismantled, the property of the Shah’s elite redistributed to the poor, welfare programmes set up and the majority given free access to health and education. The new regime drew popular support from the millions who had participated in the revolution and who now benefited materially from it. But the final and most important reason why Islamism triumphed was that it delivered on the long and popular desire in Iran for national independence. Three decades ago radical Islam presented itself to the population as a way forward, articulating the desires of the majority more effectively than other political forces. Even the democracy movement, which emerged after the end of the Iran-Iraq War, regards itself as a continuation of the revolution, attempting to return to what its activists regard as the revolution’s ideals. The fact that many do this within an Islamic framework indicates the significance of the political movement that won leadership of the revolution. The left’s failure was to ignore the potential of workers to lead the revolution, even though it was the working class that had brought down the Shah’s regime. Compounded by the fall of the Communist regimes in 1989, Islamism has filled the vacuum left by the bankruptcy of Stalinism and nationalism in the Middle East. Any left in Iran or the region must now relate to this reality, if it is not to make the same mistakes. The "war on terror" has been the US ruling class’s most recent attempt at rebalancing regional forces in its favour but it has achieved quite the opposite. Iran has extended its influence in the region and a hostile Hussein has been replaced with an Iran-friendly Shia- dominated government. This has left the US ruling class paralysed and divided about what to do. Barack Obama’s election, with his plans of "talking" to Iran, appears to resolve these contradictions. But with his decision to send more troops into Afghanistan, appalling silence over the massacre in Gaza and a secretary of state, Hilary Clinton, who has said she would "obliterate" Iran, it’s probably too soon to pull down those "Don’t Attack Iran" banners. Thirty years on, the US ruling class is still trying to get over the hangover of losing its "island of stability". A lesson for Obama would be to draw parallels between 1978 Iran and the strike waves that have gripped Hosni Mubarak’s Egypt in recent years - a US-sponsored dictatorship doesn’t last forever. Feature ends ---- A to Z of Socialism T is for Trotsky In a world dominated by capitalist crisis and war the life and writings of Leon Trotsky can offer socialists some pointers on the way forward. Trotsky was central to leading two revolutions in Russia - the 1905 Revolution, which was crushed by Russia’s brutal Tsar, and the victorious 1917 Revolution which ushered in for a brief time the most liberated and radical society we have yet seen. He was the key organiser of the insurrection through which the revolution took power in October 1917. He also defended the fledgling new society leading the revolutionary Red Army to victory against more than a dozen invading armies. Trotsky also lived through the darkest moments of the last century - the slaughter and nationalist fervour of the First World War, and later the growth of fascism. He saw the revolution he had helped to lead crushed - by international isolation and the brutal rise of Stalin. Exiled from Russia in 1929, Trotsky was forced to move from country to country, always in danger and isolated from wider socialist forces. But he knew he was fighting for the future of socialism and refused to go quietly. He was murdered by a Stalinist assassin in Mexico in 1940. It is hard to think of any other figure in the 20th century who so embodies the combination of theory and practice. He was as much at home writing about 19th century literature as he was riding a horse into a crucial battle. No area of human experience was off limits - Trotsky wrote and read widely on history, politics, culture and philosophy. He wrote insightfully about the struggle for women’s liberation and the limits of formal equality. He also tackled many questions of strategy and tactics and wrote what probably remains the most important work on how to stop fascism. Trotsky was an internationalist. He was a great supporter of struggles against colonialism and saw the revolutionary potential of such movements. The global economy was far less integrated in his day than it is today, yet it was clear to Trotsky that revolutionaries have to understand the world as a global system. So the nature of economic development, the balance of class forces, the specifics of national politics and the movements of resistance can only be understood in relation to the total picture. It was this insight that meant that Trotsky, like Lenin, insisted that for a revolution to succeed it had to be international - the challenge to capitalism would have to start somewhere, of course, but the key to its success would be the spreading of that struggle. This understanding also helped Trotsky to develop his theory of permanent revolution which solved the question of how socialism could be possible in a country - like Russia at the time - where workers were in a minority. Trotsky saw that development in Russia was not just following the same stages as industrial development in older capitalist countries such as Britain or Germany. Instead the most advanced technology was springing up right next to much older and more primitive methods. This created concentrations of workers at the heart of the economy with political and economic power beyond their size. Trotsky identified these workers as the only coherent group with both the interest and ability to drive through a successful revolution and so create the potential for socialism. He opposed the idea that dominated at the time - and which later became the orthodoxy on the Stalinist left - that there had to be a revolution to establish full capitalist development before a socialist revolution could happen. In 1917 Trotsky was proved right about the dynamic of the revolution. His theory is important today for understanding the potential for socialism in much of the Global South or the Middle East - where there is the same pattern of "combined and uneven development", as Trotsky called it, and the same concentrations of powerful workers. Trotsky’s political life was shaped by his profound commitment to socialism from below - that the emancipation of the working class should be the act of the working class. This led Trotsky to develop useful guidance on the united front - looking at how revolutionaries should work with other working class people in a principled way, while still organising independently. It also meant that he was one of the most enthusiastic supporters of the soviets - the workers’ councils that grew out of the 1905 Revolution and that in 1917 became the organs of workers’ power. Trotsky’s commitment to socialism from below brought him into a bitter conflict with Stalin over the future of revolutionary Russia. This was not just a fight between two headstrong individuals, but a battle between the ideas and the forces that Trotsky stood for - spreading the revolution and strengthening workers’ control - and Stalin’s determination to use the state to drive up Russia’s industrial capability to compete on a world stage. Stalin brought in his First Five Year Plan in 1928, which saw millions of poor Russians worked or starved to death. The following year he expelled Trotsky from the country. Stalin’s counter-revolution went on to reverse all the gains of 1917. Trotsky was the first revolutionary socialist to begin to develop a detailed critique of Stalinism. He called Stalin the "gravedigger of the revolution". His analysis didn’t go far enough - it was developed by the next generation of socialists - but he began the task of fighting theoretically as well as practically to save socialism from its association with the crimes of Stalin. Trotsky kept alive a strand of socialism that remains true to Marxism and insists on the power of ordinary people to do extraordinary things - to change the world for the better and to create a new way of running society based on need, not profit. Esme Choonara Esme Choonara is the author of A Rebel’s Guide to Trotsky published by Bookmarks Further reading: Isaac Deutscher’s trilogy on Trotsky; Trotsky’s Marxism by Duncan Hallas; Trotskyism After Trotsky by Tony Cliff; The Permanent Revolution, The History of the Russian Revolution by Leon Trotsky A to Z ends ---- Feature Charles Darwin: Revolution of evolution Charles Darwin and Alfred Wallace formulated the theory of evolution and fought for its acceptance across the scientific community, writes John Parrington I recently made a pilgrimage to Westminster Abbey. I was not there for religious or aesthetic reasons, but to visit the grave and honour the memory of Charles Darwin, who was born 200 years ago this month. I have always found it rather ironic that Darwin is buried in such an important religious institution, given that his theories provided the first scientific support for the idea that life on earth arose by a purely natural process, and not through the design of some supernatural being, thus removing one of the main justifications for god. But as a pillar of the British establishment and a friend of many clergymen, Darwin’s life was full of such contradictions. So nervous was he about the revolutionary nature of his discovery that he held off from publicising his ideas for many years. In fact Darwin might never have published his famous book, On the Origin of Species, had it not been for a certain Alfred Russel Wallace. It was Wallace who independently came up with the idea of evolution by natural selection, communicated this in a manuscript that he sent to Darwin, and thus pushed the latter into finally putting his theories in print. Yet although Wallace’s joint role is honoured by a small plaque in Westminster Abbey, most people know Darwin’s name but few will have heard of Wallace. Unlike Darwin, Wallace was a socialist who campaigned against capitalism and imperialism. It ought therefore to be of interest to socialists in this year of celebration of Darwin’s achievements, to learn more about Wallace, the fame he acquired as the co-discoverer of natural selection, his subsequent lapse into obscurity, and how this has affected the development of evolutionary theory and its influence upon society. Charles Darwin was born on 12 February 1809 into a rich and powerful family. His paternal grandfather was Erasmus Darwin, a famous scientist who came up with his own theory of evolution, while his maternal grandfather was Josiah Wedgwood, of pottery fame. Despite this, for the first decades of his life Darwin failed to distinguish himself, first dropping out of medical studies in Edinburgh because he hated the sight of blood, and subsequently entering Cambridge to study for the profession of clergyman very much as a second option. Yet Darwin was gaining great skill as an amateur naturalist, and it was this that allowed him to seize the opportunity presented when he was offered an unpaid position as scientist on board the Beagle, a naval surveying ship bound for the farthest corners of the globe. The five-year voyage was the making of Darwin, providing him with the wealth of observations of the natural world that established him as one of the foremost scientists of his age and provided the raw material for his revolutionary theory. But despite coming up with the idea of natural selection as early as the late 1830s, Darwin kept his ideas out of the public domain for more than two decades. The fact was that evolution by natural means was viewed as a dangerous and subversive idea in early Victorian society. At a time when the Chartist workers’ movement was challenging the established order in Britain and revolution was raging on the continent, for Darwin to associate himself with such radical ideas would have seemed a very risky proposition to someone of his social position. But then, in 1858, he received Wallace’s manuscript. Wallace was far less worried about offending respectable Victorian society as he already held many radical views. Born on 8 January 1823, the eighth child of a family that never had much money to spare, Wallace had to work for a living from an early age and gained most of his education at evening classes run by the Mechanics’ Institutes for working people. It was there that he was exposed to the ideas of such radical thinkers as Thomas Paine and Robert Owen. Fascinated by the natural world, Wallace voyaged as widely as Darwin, first to the Amazon basin and then to Indonesia. But while Darwin travelled as a gentleman of independent means, Wallace’s travels were entirely dependent on his being able to pay for them by selling books describing his travels and the animal and plant specimens he collected during them. It was a precarious existence, and one punctuated by various tropical illnesses that at times brought Wallace close to death’s door. It was while suffering from one bout of malaria that Wallace came up with the theory of natural selection. A popular idea about science is that new theories arise through patient accumulation of facts. But scientists also need some starting intellectual framework to make sense of those facts. In groping their way towards the concept of natural selection, both Darwin and Wallace became aware that in any species there is a great deal of variation. However, it was through reading a book - Thomas Malthus’s An Essay on the Principle of Population - that both men realised that evolution could occur if some variants were more favoured in the struggle for survival than others. Population Malthus argued that poverty is inevitable given that populations increase exponentially while food supplies increase only arithmetically. This piece of intellectual nonsense conveniently ignored the fact that human society has the means to continually improve the means of food production. It nevertheless served as a very useful justification for all sorts of reactionary measures in the mid-19th century, such as abolition of welfare support for the poor and their confinement in prison-like workhouses. However, for both Darwin who read the book after his voyage on the Beagle and for Wallace who remembered it while delirious with malaria, it served as the intellectual stimulus that allowed them to realise it was the struggle for scarce food supplies in the natural world that decided which variants of a species would survive to produce related offspring, and which would perish. For Darwin, Wallace’s letter was a wake-up call. As he put it to his friend, the geologist Charles Lyell, "If Wallace had my manuscript he could not have made a better short abstract! [...] So all my originality, whatever it may amount to, will be smashed." He was almost ready to concede priority, but in a "gentleman’s agreement" arranged by Darwin’s friends, Wallace’s manuscript and an unpublished essay Darwin had written in 1844 outlining his ideas, were both presented at the Linnean Society on 1 July 1858. Yet today we refer to the theory of natural selection as Darwinian rather than Wallacian. So why has Darwin’s fame grown ever greater since his death, while Wallace’s name is now hardly remembered? A key factor is that Darwin did not only come up with the theory of natural selection but also spearheaded a worldwide movement that publicised and promoted the idea, and thereby led a revolution that ended up overturning previous conceptions of the natural world. The publication of On the Origin of Species played a central role in this process. This year also marks the 150th anniversary of this major scientific work, which was first published on 24 November 1859. Whereas the meeting at the Linnean Society went almost unnoticed by the public, Darwin’s book became a literary sensation, selling out almost immediately and going on to become an international bestseller. Its success was due to the fact that it was written in a highly popular, readable style, but also because of the vast wealth of observations drawn from the natural world that Darwin presented to support his case. The two decades that he had been working on his theory had been far from wasted. Darwin was an obsessive note-taker, even keeping a record of the scores of each backgammon game he played with his wife every night for most of their married life. He once joked to his friend, the botanist Joseph Hooker, that he was "a complete millionaire in odd and curious little facts" about the natural world. But such obsession was a great asset when it came to persuading others of a theory in which the devil was definitely in the detail. Darwin also seems to have been a master tactician when it came to rallying others in support of his cause. He spent most of his life at his home in the quiet little village of Down in Kent, debilitated by a mysterious illness that some believe was due to the tropical Chagas disease, others to a psychosomatic disorder brought on by the burden of delivering such a controversial message to the world. But Darwin’s apparent isolation in this provincial backwater was deceptive, for he turned his house into the hub of a social network that eventually reached deep into the global scientific community. Among his other activities, Darwin was a prolific letter writer, exchanging around 14,000 of them with nearly 2,000 different people in his lifetime. He used these exchanges to collect information to support his theories but also to recruit new supporters across the world. Most importantly, Darwin collected around himself a group of mainly younger scientists who were willing to go out and crusade on his behalf - individuals like Thomas Huxley, who was so passionate about Darwin’s theory that he said he was willing to "go to the stake" to defend it. It was Huxley who, when asked by Bishop William Wilberforce whether he claimed descent from a monkey through his grandmother or grandfather, famously replied that he would "rather be descended from a monkey than use great gifts to obscure the truth". In fact the movement that grew up around Darwin was about far more than scientific theory - it also represented a challenge to the scientific establishment. Up to the publication of On the Origin of Species, the study of the natural world had been dominated by rich amateurs. But men like Huxley represented a new breed of middle class professionals whose dream was of a scientific meritocracy where talent, not birth or money, was the main factor determining success. The battle for the supremacy of Darwinism provided an opportunity for recasting science in this image by overturning the influence of the gentlemen scientists. That this revolution was presided over by a country squire living a life of leisure on his landed estate is merely another of the ironies of Darwin’s life. Wallace never had enough money to be a gentleman amateur, but he also struggled to find a place in the new scientific hierarchy, never managing to find a permanent position in a museum, university or other academic establishment. His situation was probably not helped by his radical views on subjects such as land nationalisation and women’s rights, and his opposition to war and imperialism. Wallace eventually found financial stability mainly through the efforts of Darwin, who managed to secure a government pension for him in recognition of Wallace’s contribution to science. Perhaps it was partly gratitude for these efforts that led Wallace to accept the role of one of Darwin’s loyal supporters, rather than trying to set himself up as his rival. But there also seems to have been a genuine admiration between the two men for each other’s ideas that transcended any potential rivalry. Certainly Darwin was well aware that Wallace’s scientific achievements extended well beyond his co-discovery of the process of natural selection and included recognition of the importance of natural boundaries in the formation of species and the use of colour by some animals to deter predators. There remains one important difference between Wallace and Darwin in terms of their scientific legacies, and that is their views on human evolution. The question of how humanity itself had evolved was side-stepped by both men in their initial publications about evolution. But Darwin tackled the subject head on in his 1871 book, The Descent of Man, in which he argued that despite the apparent uniqueness of human behaviour and society, they too are ultimately a product of natural selection. Remarkably, in this respect the country squire proved more of a revolutionary than the socialist. For despite his radical views on other subjects Wallace could never accept that the complexities of the human mind could have come about through a process ruled purely by blind chance. Instead he argued that spiritual forces must have helped guide human evolution, much to the dismay of Darwin, who told Wallace, "I hope you have not murdered too completely your own and my child!" What Wallace did recognise was that human beings are quite different from any other species in that we have the capacity to learn from past generations and develop technologies that allow us to transform our environment in a progressive fashion. It is this that has allowed us to develop the marvels of modern culture - art, literature, music, computers, genetic engineering, space rockets, to name only a few - in a time period during which our biological make-up has hardly changed. What Wallace did not grasp was that such capacities could "emerge" without any need for supernatural assistance by a purely material route in which the growth of human culture and the development of the human brain mutually stimulated each other through a process of positive feedback. Darwin himself never guessed the precise sequence of human evolution. This was left to Frederick Engels, who first realised that humans must have initially begun to walk upright, thus freeing their hands to use tools, before their brains could develop. Science has since proved Engels right, although it is rare to find any acknowledgement of his contribution in any textbooks. In this year of celebration of Darwin’s achievements there is still much to be learned from Alfred Russel Wallace. In the years since Darwin’s death his evolutionary theories have been a key weapon in the fight against ignorance and superstition, which is why they are still hated by many on the religious right. But they have also at times been used to justify racism and imperialism, attacks on women’s rights, and even the working practices of "robber-baron" capitalists like JD Rockefeller. Wallace vigorously opposed such misuse of the theory of natural selection. In contrast to those who sought to excuse imperialist expansion by reference to the need to discipline and educate "savages", and even Darwin himself who could sometimes lapse into talking about "inferior races", Wallace argued that all human beings are essentially equal. Indeed he counterposed the morality of the "primitive" people he encountered to the "social barbarism" of Victorian England, and the harmonious manner in which they coexisted with nature to the environmental destruction being wreaked by the industrial revolution. In an age of global economic crisis, war and global warming such a message remains a most pertinent one today. Feature ends ---- Reviews Books Africa’s ‘Agitators’ by Jonathan Derrick Armed uprisings, protests and revolts, some lasting years, marked the first attempts of European powers to divide and colonise Africa. From the 1880s, European forces were often paralysed by mass resistance - Italy’s devastating defeat at the hands of Ethiopia in the Battle of Adowa in 1896 or the 1879 Zulus’ victory in the battle of Isandhlwana, for instance. Where there were no centralised states, "guerrilla" resistance continued for years - such as the Igbos of south-eastern Nigeria. This was repeated across the continent. In the Congo famine and forced labour led to massive depopulation. But during this time there were continual uprisings. Colonial records, for example, show that by 1908 the rebellion of Batetela soldiers had lasted for 13 years, with free communities living temporarily outside the control of King Leopold’s private empire. Eventually these movements of large scale rebellion and "uncoordinated" resistance were crushed. These bloody victories were often achieved because of superior European weaponry. The motives of European powers were clear to an early generation of Western-educated Africans. The book’s author, Jonathan Derrick, quotes the pioneer Gold Coast (today’s Ghana) nationalist Joseph Ephraim Casely Hayford in 1903; "The cry of gold calls up the spirit of strife. The love of gold dissipates the love of man; for is not the love of gold the root of all evil?" Africa’s ‘Agitators’ is devoted to the resistance and the activists of the first scramble for Africa and the period between the two world wars. It also examines the important relationships that developed with European militants and organisations. The First World War was a vital event in the political formation of many of the African agitators - French West Africa drafted 170,891 soldiers; many fought and died in the trenches in France. The book also discusses the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution. The revolution recast international politics, calling for the immediate end of colonialism - an idea previously supported by a tiny minority - and sought to build organisations and alliances with those already fighting for independence and equality. As Derrick writes correctly, "Communists were almost alone in accepting the idea of colonial independence", but also for "liberation for the oppressed classes within colonial territories". A new vision seemed to open up to agitators across the continent. Josiah Gumede, a South African activist, visited Moscow in the 1920s and described how his eyes were opened to the reality that it was not the white man "but the capitalist class which grinds the faces of white and black the world over". New parties and groups emerged. Soon after the French Communist Party (PCF) was formed in 1920, other groups dealing directly with the "national question" arose. One such group was the Union Intercoloniale, which was founded in 1922 in Paris and brought together an array of activists from Vietnam, Africa and the Caribbean, such as the Vietnamese Ho Chi Minh and the French-Senegalese Lamine Senghor who were both important figures in campaigning against French imperialism. African ‘Agitators’ includes a fascinating description of the campaign against France’s 1925-26 colonial war in Morocco. This was the largest movement against a colonial war in Europe at the time. Action committees were set up across France, and the campaign included an appeal for French soldiers to fraternise with the Moroccan rebels. The book also shows the disastrous results of Stalin’s policies in the years following 1928, when he insisted that Communist Parties should not take part in common struggles alongside social democratic or nationalist organisations. The great strength of Derrick’s impressive book is that it does not see African resistance as an imported phenomenon, where African agitators simply accepted the dictates of Western communist or socialist parties. He shows how these activists, often based in the West, developed their own political ideas on questions of independence and colonialism, and frequently provided organisational homes that challenged racist and imperialist politics in the West. I feel slightly churlish to criticise such a useful and thorough study, but there are two problems. One is precisely the detail provided in the book. Occasionally the text is weighed down by too many facts and can, at times, feel like a bureaucratic history. The second is a failure to analyse Bolshevik and Marxist interpretations of imperialism that are often alluded to but dismissed as "flawed". This prevents Derrick from seeing the role and development of class politics on the continent, and the importance of early strikes. But these are minor points in a book that provides, in one volume, the story of African agitators and revolutionaries between the wars who resisted the scramble for Africa and colonisation, and fought for independence and socialism. These fighters have been, for too long, hidden from our history. Leo Zeilig Africa’s ‘Agitators’ is published by Hurst, £17.99 ---- Who Will Write our History? Samuel D Kassow Penguin Press £10.99 This book, subtitled Rediscovering a Hidden Archive from the Warsaw Ghetto, is not composed of the archive material itself. Though enriched by many extracts from it, it is the story of Jewish historian Emanuel Ringelblum and the compilation of the "Oyneg Shabes" (Yiddish for "Joy of the Sabbath"), an archive documenting life in the Warsaw ghetto. Well before the Second World War, Ringelblum was already committed to recording the experience of Polish Jewry. Jews in Poland were confronting major questions as to their future: secular or religious, nationalist or socialist, in Palestine or the diaspora? Each answer had its political grouping. Ringelblum was a member of Left Poalei Zion whose goal "was a binational Palestine for both Arabs and Jews; to achieve it would require the pressure of world revolution and the collapse of British imperialism." He was a Marxist historian who believed that establishing a materialist history of the Jews, as opposed to a "mythical" religious history, would build the foundation for future Jewry. The first part of the book is devoted to the historians and activists who dominated the debates in the 1930s and shows how political theory was key to the historiography that Ringelblum and his associates practised. They rejected Jewish bourgeoisie nationalism which "privileged the myth of Jewish cultural cohesion over the reality of a Jewish people dominated by class conflict" and studied ordinary Jews’ everyday lives. They used interviews, questionnaires and everyday objects, mobilising resources within a community to collect information. Ringelblum’s organisational skills led him to the Aleynhilf, a self-help society which was cross-party and provided him with the network and contacts he used to help his secret archival work. Kassow’s use of the archive gives many insights into how democratically-run house committees provided for collective needs, how orphanages, refugee centres, and the all-important soup kitchens run by various political parties were organised. There is bitter anger for the Judenrat (German-imposed Jewish council) and the corrupt Jewish police, and graphic accounts of disinfection ordeals, begging and hunger. By 1942 100,000 people had died in the ghetto. The Oyneg Shabes contributors chart the change from when people running the house committees and soup kitchens really helped, to their despairing realisation that the result of "this activity is simply that people die more slowly from creeping starvation". Writing for the archive itself became an activity that could prolong, though not save, lives, by the tiny extra stipend and keeping a sense of purpose amid chaos. Ringelblum’s optimistic primary motivation, to provide a firmer future for Jews, becomes a determination to record honestly and comprehensively their efforts to stave off destruction. Kassow mirrors Ringelblum in his meticulous obsession that every individual be named and given as much biographical detail as possible. For Kassow as well as for Ringelblum’s contributors this is a way of rescuing the dignity of each person from the inhumanity of collective mass death. Miriam Scharf ---- The Way of the Women Marlene van Niekerk Abacus £9.99 Milla, an elderly Afrikaner woman, lies dying of a wasting disease on her farm in South Africa. Paralysed and bedridden, only able to communicate by blinking, she is dependent for the most intimate bodily functions on her "coloured" maid, Agaat. It is the relationship between these two women that is the subject of this monumental and startlingly moving book. Tracking back over 50 years, we gradually piece together the story of how Agaat, born with a stunted arm and subsequently abused and abandoned by her parents, was adopted as a five year old by Milla to become part-daughter, part-servant on her isolated farm. It is a one-sided account, as it is narrated by Milla. The dying Milla is forced mutely to listen to Agaat reminisce over their life together as she reads Milla’s diaries aloud. Milla thinks she detects Agaat’s sarcasm, but is powerless to stop her. Back in 1950 Milla had seen it as a religious covenant to tame the "wild creature" into a "civilised human being" and she is caught between hesitant affection for Agaat and an acceptance of the rules of apartheid. She remembers not to hold Agaat’s hand in public. When Milla gives birth to a son, Jakki, after eight years of trying for her own child, Agaat (now aged 11) is relegated to full-time servant, moved to a room in the backyard and kitted out in a black uniform with starched white apron and cap. "I know you don’t like things on your head but you’ll just have to like it or lump it," Milla tells her. But Agaat’s close connection with the newborn son brings a much more subversive and damaging shift in power. Milla’s longed-for son places all his trust and affection with the maid, and Milla and her husband, Jak, are sidelined. The loveless marriage becomes increasingly tense as they watch the maid take charge in every area of the farm. Agaat is able to whisper to Jakki, "I am a slave but you are mine." Yet Agaat’s relative privilege on the farm isolates her from the other workers, who she in turn controls with the harsh discipline, backed up by food rations and religious rhetoric, with which she was tamed by Milla. Translated from Afrikaans, this powerful and extraordinary book is written on many levels. It’s about exploitation, possession and unequal relationships - the relationships between servant and master, child and parent, landowners and the dispossessed. This work could be seen as an allegory of colonial exploitation, apartheid and the precarious steps towards reconciliation. But the author is apparently keen that we should not see it as too neat a symbol of the transformation of power in South Africa. However, the comparisons are tempting. Not long after democracy arrives in South Africa in the mid-1990s, Agaat faces the prospect of personal freedom with Milla’s imminent death and the farm being handed down to her. She is likely to become the new "baas" - the madam has taught her maid every trick in the book. This is a big book in every way: 600 pages long, sometimes confusing, but often breathtakingly lyrical and well worth the effort. Mary Brodbin ---- Global Political Economy - A Marxist Critique Bill Dunn Pluto Press £19.99 As the ideological grip of neoliberalism unravels in the midst of the current economic crisis, this book paints a picture of the dynamism and chaos of the capitalist system and traces its twists and turns over the last century. Part one deals with competing theories of political economy. Bill Dunn explains that, as Britain became the richest country on the back of the political revolutions of the 17th century and the establishment of a parliament, classical political economy developed in relation to deep political and social upheavals. Liberal theorists such as Adam Smith, describing the world as they saw it, opened the door to the likes of David Ricardo and Karl Marx who began to theorise the developing class contradictions in society. Before moving on to theories in the classical Marxist tradition as developed by Marx, Frederick Engels and Vladimir Lenin, Dunn looks at "critical" theories of the 1970s covering constructivism, feminism and green critiques. In the second part of the book the author examines the shift from the feudal mode of production to capitalism and the key transformations in capitalism through the Second World War and the long boom that followed it. The final section of the book, and in many ways the richest, concerns itself with theories surrounding contemporary analyses of globalisation. The changes in the nature of global trade, transformations in the global working class, the impact of the debt crisis on the developing world and the new imperialism are all covered here. Thoroughly referenced throughout and with graphs and tables on every other page, Dunn provides a survey of the system useful both to students of the subject and to those wanting an introductory map of capitalism’s history. One drawback is that you are frequently left with the feeling that you could read a whole book on each sentence Dunn has written. At the same time, one of the book’s great strengths is in its function as a "jumping off" point for further reading. Simultaneously very broad in its scope and dense in its analysis, Dunn’s book does occasionally make assumptions about his reader’s level of understanding (which indeed he apologises for in his introduction). If you’re looking for a soundly argued reference book on political economy from a Marxist perspective, this is a good place to start. Be warned, however, that the sheer amount of ground it covers in a mere 300 pages doesn’t make it a light read. Alan Kenny ---- Darwin’s Sacred Cause Adrian Desmond and James Moore Allen Lane £25 This year marks the 150th anniversary of the publication of one of the most important scientific works of all time, Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species. This book transformed the way we see not just ourselves, but all life on earth. There are two "big ideas" in Darwin’s theory of evolution. One is that there is a tree of life; according to this idea all the different forms of life on earth have a common ancestor. The other idea is that of natural selection; this is, roughly, the claim that certain characteristics become more prevalent because they make organisms better suited to the environment in which they find themselves. But how did Darwin come up with these ideas? One view is that he was a hard-headed scientist doing detached hard-headed empirical science. However, in Darwin’s Sacred Cause, Adrian Desmond and James Moore (who also wrote the highly acclaimed Darwin) claim that this is not in fact the case. Desmond and Moore argue that to understand why Darwin started thinking about the origins of species we have to appreciate his moral anchorage in the high tide of the British anti-slavery movement. Darwin’s family and many of his friends actively campaigned for the abolition of slavery and Darwin himself abhorred it. The abolitionists argued that blacks were not "subhuman", or beasts to chain, but rather they formed part of the unity of the human race. The anti-slavery tracts that Darwin read and his family distributed implied a single origin for black slaves and their white masters, a shared ancestry. Desmond and Moore’s proposal is a striking one not only because it recognises that a researcher’s personal and social milieu affects their findings but also because it suggests that one of the most important scientific theories ever was developed in response to a disgust with slavery and a belief in the unity of humanity. However, I am not fully convinced by the account offered for two reasons. The first is that if a moral passion was indeed firing Darwin’s account of evolution, why then - as Desmond and Moore themselves note - is there next to nothing about human origins in On the Origin of Species? If his abhorrence of slavery is what drove his account of evolution, why does he not mention the unity of humans? The second is that, even if Desmond and Moore are correct, their account offers no explanation about the origins of the second of Darwin’s big ideas, namely, natural selection. In short, Desmond and Moore’s proposal is fascinating (if lengthy) but ultimately it is not totally convincing. Terry Sullivan ---- A People’s History of Poverty in America Stephen Pimpare The New Press £17.99 More than 2.5 million Americans lost their jobs last year, spreading fear of a return to the "hungry thirties" across the working class. In an attempt to deflect attention from their own failures, our rulers have urgently attempted to recreate a distinction between the "deserving" and "undeserving" poor. This book will be a useful resource for anyone who wants to dispute their logic. It tells the story of how the richest country in the world has, since its inception, held a swathe of its citizens in a state of poverty, and how welfare and charity have been used as ideological weapons against them. The chapter on the relationship between the extreme poverty of white workers and farmers in the Deep South and its connection to the continuation of slavery after the Civil War is particularly well argued and concludes that the white poor were themselves economically damaged by racism. Another excellent feature of the book is the way it explores patterns of self-help and community resistance to poverty. Pimpare is more than happy to allow people to speak for themselves, and much of the text is made up of testimonies taken over a 200 year period. Taken together, they explain how little has changed in the callous attitudes of the rich, and how poor people still refuse to be demonised. Yuri Prasad ---- IQ Stephen Murdoch Duckworth Overlook £8.99 Stephen Murdoch follows the development of IQ tests, their rise to prominence and the way they have been used to attack groups within society. Such tests have come a long way since the Victorian street booths filled with bizarre gadgets to test the public, but the goal remains the same: to categorise humans by something known as intelligence. This book shows how the first tests were really quite comic, with groups of psychologists fumbling in the dark trying to gauge a human characteristic they can hardly define. However, Murdoch takes the reader on a disturbing journey as these exams gained further credibility and were used in more abhorrent ways. The fact both that this highly complex attribute was presumed to be an inheritable trait and that the tests available were believed to be accurate played into the hands of eugenicists. Such theories based on dodgy science helped lead to the sterilisation of 60,000 US citizens, and later over 200,000 disabled people being slaughtered in Nazi Germany. This is an incredibly engaging critique of the way intelligence has long been perceived, but it does lack substantial ideas or discussion on what intelligence could be. The author attacks the tests’ failure to offer a real insight into thinking and the complete lack of socio-economic factors taken into account, further concluding that the IQ test has not really come far since the 19th century public booths. Steve Henshall ---- New in paperback & children’s books Gang Leader for a Day by Sudhir Venkatesh (Penguin £8.99) Venkatesh enters the Chicago gang world at the height of a crack epidemic to produce a fascinating piece of research into the lives of struggling working class families living in a violent society. ---- Matter by Iain M Banks (Orbit £7.99) Banks’s latest novel of feudal wars and interstellar travel makes it into paperback. This is the latest of his stories about the Culture, a highly advanced "utopian" civilisation - an engaging epic of space, politics and chainmail. ---- Evolution Revolution by Robert Winston (Dorling Kingsley £10.99) Robert Winston charts the advances in biological science in this lively book for young people. It covers scientific progress from the revolutionary ideas of Charles Darwin to the 21st century mapping of the human genome. ---- Chains by Laurie Halse Anderson (Bloomsbury £10.99) Isabelle and her sister are slaves sent to New York at the time of the war of independence. Isabelle tries to keep herself and her sister safe at a time when "lives were valued like weights of meat or bundles of vegetables". BOOKS END ---- Culture Harold Pinter: 1930-2008 By Sam West Harold Pinter was the greatest writer of dramatic English we had. He wrote mouth-filling meals for actors, where what you want is who you are, and what you say to get it is provoked by what was said to you only a second earlier. I got to say his words on stage, screen and radio, and I count myself lucky. His first full-length play, The Birthday Party, contains what Pinter came to think was the most important line he ever wrote: "Stan, don’t let them tell you what to do." At 18 he had become a conscientious objector - a decision which marked him as a non-conformist for life. But Pinter’s work isn’t just dry, agit-prop drama of resistance. There is also what Michael Billington calls "a yearning for some lost Eden". There is a hinterland to Pinterland. I’ve just finished a run of T S Eliot’s The Family Reunion, which Harold was due to see the week he died. Eliot’s frustration with language in Burnt Norton - "Words strain,/Crack and sometimes break, under the burden,/Under the tension" - could have been written for Pinter. And like Eliot, he has a fecund relationship with his own unconscious. Much is made of Harold’s mystery, as if he guarded the meaning of his plays like a jealous wizard. But something stranger is going on. The characters turn up; they want to speak, and he lets them speak. He said of the first line of The Homecoming, "What have you done with the scissors?", that it "came right out of the blue into my head, followed by an image, followed by me". In Betrayal, which I was in recently, one of the characters is haunted by the memory of a child being tossed up and caught again in a kitchen. It is Pinter’s own memory, and it encapsulates perfectly the exhilaration and fear we feel when hurtling through his atmospheric unconscious. It is sometimes said in this country, that like Woody Allen and the "early funny stuff", Pinter’s first full-length plays are the real deal, and the later, shorter political pieces don’t cut it. But Harold’s work has always been political. From the interrogation of Stanley in The Birthday Party and the baiting of Davies in The Caretaker, he understood our capacity for cruelty, our need to dominate, our use of language, memory and silence as weapons. By the 1980s his plays were only one act, but they still pack a punch. In the 20-minute Mountain Language, a relentless account of the muzzling of an entire people, a guard harangues a woman: "Your language is forbidden. It is dead. No one is allowed to speak your language. Your language no longer exists. Any questions?" In countries where forced silence is a way of life the later short plays are more often revived. But even here, like in Ellie Jones’s brilliant 2007 montage of short Pinter’s plays, they can knock you sideways. As a screenwriter of 26 films Pinter became world famous - nominated for two Oscars, part of a literate mainstream we now lack. David Hare summed up their themes: "adultery, violence, alcohol, class and sex". I was in one, Reunion, the story of a Jewish boy and an aristocrat who become friends in 1930s Germany. When the aristocrat expresses a liking for Hitler, the friendship ends. Only in 1988 does the Jew return to Germany to find out what happened to his friend, to discover that he was implicated in the plot to kill Hitler and executed. For Pinter, brought up in the fascist-fighting East End bartering bits of Webster with his fast Hackney gang, the marriage of childhood loyalty and resistance to authority was perfect; the screenplay is a little gem. In 2005 Pinter won the Nobel Prize in Literature; the committee cited how he "uncovers the precipice under everyday prattle and forces entry into oppression’s closed rooms". He was too unwell to travel to Stockholm, but he recorded the lecture, and it emerged as one of the most powerful and sustained diatribes against injustice ever filmed. In a voice hoarse from illness, he told us, "The invasion of Iraq was a bandit act, an act of blatant state terrorism, demonstrating absolute contempt for the concept of international law." The Nobel Lecture was totally ignored by the BBC. My last real memory of him was doing The Homecoming on radio, playing Lenny to his Max. He landed in the studio like a cross planet, scowling at the microphone; we orbited him nervously. The play was in his bones, the north London language bitten off in chunks. He was a brilliantly dangerous actor, a supportive director, a fanatical cricketer (the perfect blend of solidarity and antagonism - a team game built around a personal war) and a playwright of true power. He had a righteous anger second to none, and he used it. That passion is rare and useful, and I will miss it, and him, terribly. SW Sam West is an actor and theatre director ---- Revolutionary Road Director Sam Mendes Release date: out now This is a story about two people who rejected the American dream. The scenario of the mother at home with two children in a suburban house with a white picket fence while the father commutes to a corporate job was the thing of their nightmares. Instead, as young and idealist lovers, everything seemed possible. Frank Wheeler (Leonardo DiCaprio) and April (Kate Winslet) planned to break conventions and live their dreams. We see this in flashback as we watch them being drawn inexorably deeper into the very life they despised. Frank Wheeler is now one of the commuters who, lemming-like, pour out of the station every day - although he maintains a cynical distance with the conviction that he’s different from the rest. But for April the reality of being housebound with children, however pretty their house on Revolutionary Road, is soul destroying. This is the decade before the Women’s Liberation movement and it was this sort of experience that inspired Betty Friedan to write The Feminine Mystique. We follow the divergence of their aspirations and the tortuous disintegration of their relationship. In one powerful scene, Kate Winslet makes breakfast the morning after she and Frank have had their biggest argument. From a distance all looks normal. She appears as a "Stepford wife" automaton, whisking eggs as the coffee brews. But as the camera lingers on her you see the rage, bitterness and suppressed emotions written across her face. It is chilling and an astonishingly controlled piece of acting. If Friedan’s "problem with no name" could be encapsulated in one film frame this would be it. Based on the superb novel by Richard Yates, Revolutionary Road shines a light on how the pressure to conform can crush people. Everyone around the Wheelers is affected by their attempt to break from the suffocating mould of their lives, for it places a stark mirror in front of their own. It asks who is sane and rational - those who challenge society’s expectations or those who accept them? The one character who can see through all the crap is a psychiatric patient, while April is advised to see a doctor. She is one of the generations of women encouraged to believe their feelings of frustration and emptiness were a problem that could be solved by therapy or tranquillisers. Women’s oppression was experienced and treated as a psychological disorder. Revolutionary Road has its flaws. One is the miscasting of Leonardo DiCaprio. He can act but he simply doesn’t have the physical presence of the man he is playing. Frank hankers after the intensity of living he experienced during the war, yet DiCaprio looks like he would have been in short trousers ten years previously, not fighting in the army. The film occasionally has the feeling of being a filmed stage play and I found the reconstruction of 1950s Americana too self-conscious. But this is a thoroughly thought-provoking film that reveals brutal truths about society through the broken dreams of one couple. Judith Orr ---- Tokyo Sonata Director Kiyoshi Kurosawa Release date: out now This is a film for our times, telling the story of a salaryman - the administration director of a healthcare equipment company - in his forties (Ryuhei Sasaki, played by Teruyuki Kagawa), who loses his job when the administrative functions of the company are outsourced to China. The film opens with this event, but it is clear from early on that there is already a lot of tension at home in the suburbs. His wife (played with little dialogue but great intensity by Kyoko Koizumi) spends her time doing housework and cooking and caring for their two sons. The elder, Takashi, appears in the house rarely, often coming home in the morning after his father, who refers to him as "a mess", has left. The younger son, Kenji (an extraordinary performance by 13 year old Kai Inowaki), is at school and longs to take piano lessons, which his father refuses to allow. There seems to be little trust and affection in the house and Sasaki’s apparent need to impose his will on the rest of the family only increases as his authority and status in the world outside crumble to nothing. Afraid to tell his wife he is unemployed, Sasaki sets out each day in his suit and tie, but spends his days queuing in the job centre and the free soup kitchen, or sitting in the library. It soon becomes apparent that he is far from alone in his deception: the queues of mainly shabbily dressed jobless workers are peppered with men in suits. One, a former friend from high school, has programmed his mobile to ring five times an hour so that he can pretend to have important business conversations about deals and contracts. Another poignant moment comes when Sasaki takes a job cleaning in a shopping mall, and, changing back into his suit in the toilets that he has been cleaning on his hands and knees, he sees his supervisor also leaving in a suit. The film is very cleverly directed by Kurosawa, famous for his psychological horror movies. He creates a feeling of claustrophobia and mounting tension, and somehow shows us the familiar becoming strange - for example, when Sasaki looks at the people heading for the train to go to work as he has done on countless mornings, but with a totally different perspective. He is no longer really part of it. The colours are mostly drab and drained: yellow, dusty white, grey, brown. Practically every shot is framed by some kind of barrier: a set of shelves, banisters, a fence, a gate, a door, telegraph wires; things are hidden, obscured. The camera rarely pulls back to show sky or open space, and when it does so in a few scenes - on a bridge, by the sea, and at the end - it signifies at least partial liberation. The problem with a film which is essentially about the alienation and despair of living under capitalism is that, short of a revolution, the characters are going to have to go on living with it, but that would make for a pretty boring movie unless something happens. In this case a lot of stuff happens, as the unstable situation explodes into a series of violent events, which produce a kind of resolution. The director has said he wanted to provide a glimmer of hope, but the way he does it will strike many people as unsatisfactory. Nevertheless, it is a film which grips the viewer from beginning to end, and paints a bleak picture of late capitalism and its impact on human relationships. Sue Sparks ---- Doubt Director John Patrick Shanley Release date: 6 February 1964 was a volatile year in the US. President John F Kennedy had been assassinated the year before, and there was a new growing air of questioning long established institutions such as the Catholic church. The civil rights movement had yet to explode onto the scene, but nevertheless racial integration in schools was taking its first tremulous, tension-ridden steps. Considering all this, perhaps the film’s title could not have been better chosen. As a reflection and critique of a working class community in the Bronx in 1964, a story centred round the Saint Nicholas parish, director John Patrick Shanley weaves intricately complex issues, namely race and the hierarchical nature of the Catholic church. The result is an incredibly gripping, emotional knock of a film, one that almost reduced me to tears. Doubt starts with a sermon from the parish priest Father Flynn (played by Philip Seymour Hoffman), who seems to contradict any preconceived judgments of the conservatism of the Catholic church, especially at that time, with his friendly and relaxed relationship with the parishioners. This is even more acute in comparison to the incredibly stern and intimidating principal of the parish school, Sister Aloysius (played by Meryl Streep), whose draconian and arbitrary rules keep both the students and the other nuns in complete submission. We are also introduced to Sister James, whose youth and enthusiasm for teaching history to her students also serve to emphasise the differences between them. However, as the story unfolds, so do the different characters themselves, and I found my respect for the character of Sister Aloysius growing. When a suspicion forms in her mind that the first black student to attend the school, Donald Miller, played by Joseph Foster II, is receiving inappropriate attention from Father Flynn, the events that follow are a deeply emotional, albeit somewhat detached, account of the changing of the times. As Sister Aloysius struggles to prove her fears, while also grappling with the strict procedures of communication between the nuns and priests of the church, her strength and compassion shine through, completely humanising her in the process. Streep plays the character with a conviction that electrifies the dynamic between Father Flynn and Sister Aloysius, showing the duality of the nature of many people of the church, the human kindness that so often gives birth to severity. This film is troubling as it illustrates the depths to which prejudice and bigotry can affect people’s lives. Although it doesn’t necessarily bring anything new to the table in terms of the history of social and political change, it refreshes the ways in which we could perceive these changes. Millie Fry ---- Three Monkeys Director Nuri Bilge Ceylan Release date: 13 February Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s previous film, Climates, confirmed him as Turkey’s premier internationally acclaimed art director. The stylish and bitter Three Monkeys follows up his previous themes, using its thriller plot to concentrate on lives where no one can relate to each other and no one can get away from each other. A man is killed in a hit and run accident committed by Servet, a politician. So as not to hinder his run in the forthcoming elections, Servet pays off his driver, Eyüp, to take the rap and serve his prison term. He loses the election anyway, the money fails to provide opportunities for Eyüp’s wife and son, and Eyüp’s return from prison worsens the family situation, leading ultimately to murder. The film has a strong undertow of political criticism. Servet is played excellently by Ercan Kesal, whose insincerity is a coherent aspect of the character’s self-serving amorality. That his driver will accept money to go to jail on his boss’s behalf is a symptom of the inequality of life in the hopeless urban sprawl. The television announcement of the "forgone conclusion" of the victory of Erdogan’s Islamic AKP party is listened to by Eyüp’s wife from a comatose position on the sofa - her deathlike stupor roused only when her attention turns to the spots of blood that her son, Ismail, has trailed across the floor. This general sense of listlessness spreads out across the film. Long close-ups linger on silent faces and a still, distant camera records the fairly meaningless conversations. Within this minimalism the film is kept alive by a strong sense of style which strengthens the thread of suspense and even bleak humour. Arbitrarily lingering on details like the whirring blades of a fan gives the drab ordinariness of the world an abstract mystery. The three monkeys of the title refer to hearing, seeing, and speaking no evil - although this doesn’t stop plenty of evil being done by characters who gradually lose the sympathy of both one another and the audience. Three Monkeys is built around the lack of sincere communication, on how the blocks on fulfilment find expression instead in mutual violent anger. The resulting film is exciting, imaginative and emotional. Louis Bayman ---- Gran Torino Director Clint Eastwood Release date: 20 February Walt Kowalski - played by the film’s director, Clint Eastwood - is a retired car worker and gun-toting Korean War veteran who despises everyone and everything around him. His wife has just died. His sons, all-American salesmen, are alien to him. His neighbourhood has been taken over by Asians who look like the Koreans he has killed. Barely a sentence comes out of his mouth that is not contaminated by racism and rage. The monotony of his bitter life is broken by Sue, feisty teenage daughter of his Hmong neighbours - victims of the US war against Vietnam. His shell is pierced by her brightness and refusal to take his sourness seriously. Gradually he is drawn into his neighbours’ world. He is overwhelmed by their generosity. His prejudices are undermined. He is touched by their tragedies. His consciousness changes. On every level this film far exceeded my expectations. I did not expect to roar with laughter at the words of a rabid racist. But I did, including when he rebuffs an earnest Catholic priest hovering around his grief like a buzzard: "Why should I confess to a 27 year old over-educated virgin just out of priest school who likes to hold old women’s hands and promise them eternity?" I did not expect to be moved by the relationship that develops between Walt and his neighbour’s son, Thao. But I was, and deeply so, especially at the end. I did not expect an assault on US materialism and foreign policy, although perhaps I should have after Clint Eastwood’s 2006 film, Letters from Iwo Jima. Gran Torino is more subtle. The war hero Walt has a festering emotional wound, caused by the horror of what he did in Korea. His sons, inheritors of the country he fought for, are made soulless by greed and ignorance. Warmth and hope come from the collective spirit of the Hmong. The film virtually demands that the US should seek redemption and make amends for its past wrongs. The film is not without weaknesses. Walt’s racist banter with his Italian barber could imply that racist language shouldn’t be taken too seriously, that words can’t harm. On occasion, understated symbolism is rammed home with klaxons, underestimating the audience. But the film’s strengths far outweigh the weaknesses. The acting is superb, including by the non-actors playing the Hmong characters who were recruited entirely from Hmong communities after a nationwide search. Clint is at his squinting, scowling, snarling best. The pace and plot are excellent. The dialogue is sharp. I suspect Gran Torino will mean very different things to different people. For me it is a thought-provoking and highly watchable film that reviles racism, materialism, the desolate neighbourhoods that breed gangs and, above all, the US’s imperialist wars. Clint. Nearly 80. What a man. Clare Fermont ---- Vicky Cristina Barcelona Director Woody Allen Release date: 6 February The critic Joe Queenan recently described Woody Allen’s career as a "corpse that has been awaiting interment for years". With each new release, increasing numbers of critics and audiences have come to the same conclusion. Things have got so bad that two of his films in the last decade - Hollywood Ending and Scoop - were not even given a release in British cinemas. But some people are still eager to see the latest Woody Allen. The French and Spanish markets in particular have enabled him to keep turning a small profit. So it is no accident that his last four films have all been made in Europe, with European co-funding. The first three were shot in Britain, but with Vicky Cristina Barcelona, Allen has opted for a Catalan setting. A romcom of sorts, it is not a bad film, and it does have its moments of wit and insight. Allen’s continued ability to attract A-list actors also pays off as Javier Bardem and Penelope Cruz invest far more in their stereotyped roles than the film deserves. Although shot in Spain, it lacks much feeling for the place and frequently resembles an advert by the tourist board. Barcelona - which, according to the title, is one of the three key elements of the film - functions merely as a scenic backdrop for the adventures of two wealthy American friends, Vicky and Cristina (Scarlett Johansson and Rebecca Hall), who are enjoying a lengthy holiday in the region. They are introduced to us by the narrator as two opposites, particularly in regard to love. One is ultra-cautious; the other likes to live dangerously. With this theme established, the story then throws Juan (Bardem), a tormented artist who’ll make them question who they are and what they want, into their lives. It is schematic and clichéd, but amusing enough to warrant a look when it reaches television. But the big question that hangs over it all is how such a great director has fallen so low, and is now content to churn out mediocre films. One theory suggests that Allen lost his way as the milieu that he had made his own on screen - the liberal New York intelligentsia - disintegrated in real life under the pressures of the neoliberalism that convulsed the city after its bankruptcy in the late 1970s. Deprived of his specialist subject, and bruised by the scandals surrounding his personal life, Allen lost his mojo and has drifted ever since. Ben Windsor ---- Obituary Adrian Mitchell 1932-2008 There is always opposition to the dominant culture - sometimes hidden, sometimes out in the open: a radical cultural tradition that accompanies our struggles for a different society, to give shape and meaning to our desire for another way of hearing, of seeing, of feeling. I got this from many people as I was growing up, and the poet Adrian Mitchell was one of those people. Everything stopped for a moment when I heard of his death on 21 December. In that instant I remembered all those times he stood before me, the poetry of love and life and anger and outrage filling whatever space he had come to perform in. I stood with him in the middle of Piccadilly on 15 February 2003 - speechless, as we felt 2 million human beings for peace and against war moving around us like a slow, wide river. Adrian was momentarily the rock midstream. In 1969 I picked up an anthology of poetry called Children of Albion: Poetry of the "Underground" in Britain. I used to duck when I saw or heard the word poem. On reflection I think it was the word "underground" that intrigued me. The cover showed a naked man, arms outstretched and light bursting out from all around him. This, I assumed, must be Albion. It turned out to be a painting by William Blake called Glad Day and was in celebration of the French Revolution. Inside the book was a revelation, dozens of poets who wrote in a language I understood. And there I found Adrian. His poem, To Whom It May Concern, a savage attack on the Vietnam War, was a poem that he adapted for every war since, including the present one in Iraq (Tell Me Lies about Iraq), and one about Blake. Later I discovered that Blake was part of our radical past when we had a Hornsey International Socialist branch outing to see a play in celebration of Blake’s life and work called Tyger, written by Adrian. We were all taken in to his giant heart that night. Adrian is gone now but the poems will stay. He arches over my life, that socialist anarchist pacifist poet who wrote in the rhyme of a talking blues, referring to jazz, be-bop and Beethoven, filling supermarket trolleys with fun and scorn, always letting us into his dreams and desires, wearing his heart on his sleeve - where it should be. All his books carried an Educational Health Warning: "None of the work in this or any of my other books is to be used in connection with any examination whatsoever. But I’m happy if they’re read aloud in schools." Make sure you read them aloud when you get up, before sleep, looking in the eyes of those you love; carry them to demonstrate; take them as a weapon to strike our enemies with. Thanks, Adrian, we’ll get there in the end. Roger Huddle Culture ends ---- Socialist Review ends