Socialist Review Juy/August 2009 Political meltdown As economic and political crises deal a blow to Labour and the political mainstream, Alex Callinicos looks at how the left can respond. Iran’s new rebellion Peyman Jafari on the stark divisions in Iran’s ruling class and the movement on the streets. A journey on the railroad Cary Fukunaga talks to Christophe Chataigné about immigration to the US - and his acclaimed debut film, Sin Nombre. Refugees organise While Pakistan continues its bombardment of the Swat region, Ali Hassan and Gul Pasad report a mood of resistance from the Jalala refugee camp. Nothing democratic about Nazis With the BNP winning its first Euro MEPs, Anindya Bhattacharyya argues that they are still anything but "respectable". ---- Editorial Some ruling class economists and commentators are already talking up the idea that the worst of the economic crisis is over and recovery is round the corner. In parliament, MPs seem to be under the illusion that having selected a new, Tory, speaker, voters’ confidence in their political structures will promptly be renewed. But this is not so. The deep class anger and bitterness that the recession has provoked will not disappear overnight. The greed of the bosses still appears unabated. Stephen Hester, chief executive of the state controlled Royal Bank of Scotland, is awarded a £15 million pay deal - even as workers in the business are being laid off. Meanwhile, Gordon Brown thought he could get away with a secret inquiry into the Iraq war and had to retreat within hours of the announcement. The ruling class want to regroup and recover. Our job, as socialists, is to prevent that. editor@socialistreview.org.uk ---- Frontlines The economy - don’t believe the hype over recovery Beware talk of "green shoots" in the economy. Even if they prove to be real, job losses will continue to rise for some time to come. That was the message of a new report on the recession from the TUC. It compares data from the current recession with the 1980s and 1990s and states, "Unemployment increases were far greater in the 1980s than the 1990s, but in both recessions unemployment levels continued rising for at least a year after GDP started to increase and remained above pre-recessionary levels for years to come." In fact the report shows that "green shoots", in the form of a recovery in GDP, were seen in the third quarter of 1981 and the first quarter of 1992 - "but in each case this was more like a halfway mark than the beginning of the end". In the case of the recession of the 1980s, unemployment levels did not return to their pre-recession level at any time before the next recession in the 1990s. Looking at the first four quarters of rising unemployment during each recession, the TUC has calculated that the rate of unemployment has increased faster during this recession (30 percent) than in the 1990s recession (22 percent) and the 1980s recession, when the rate of increase was 29 percent. This is a bleak prospect when the latest figures from the Office for National Statistics (ONS) show unemployment in Britain rose to 2.26 million in the three months to April, the highest since November 1996. This is a jobless rate of 7.2 percent, the highest since July 1997. The drop in the number of people in work over the three months was the biggest quarterly drop since comparable records began in 1971. The number of people in work fell by 271,000 to 29.11 million. Young people have been particularly hard hit by the recession - their unemployment rates have risen more quickly than the national rate. In the three months to April, 462,000 people aged 16 and 17 were in employment, 16.5 percent less than in the same period a year earlier. In the same three months 3.5 million people in the 18 to 24 age range were in employment, down 4.8 percent from the same period a year earlier. The unemployment rate in that age group was 16.6 percent, the highest it has been since 1993. In Wales around half of all unemployed people are under 25 according to the ONS. The impact of the recession is not evenly spread geographically. The TUC also revealed the regional variations in the rise of unemployment. Areas of high deprivation are losing jobs at a faster rate than other areas. Areas like the North East, the West Midlands and Yorkshire and Humber have the highest increase in "claimant rates" at between 2.2 percent and 2.5 percent compared to a national rate of 1.8 percent. These figures paint a picture of the human cost of the recession that is borne by those who have least even when the system is booming. For the politicians and bosses the only "green shoots" that they are interested in are those that signal a return of their profits. It’s clear that whatever the economic indicators the fight to defend jobs is far from over. Judith Orr ---- Green cuts The irrationality of capitalism was starkly exposed in April when, despite massively increasing its profits for the first three months of the year, the manufacturing company Vestas announced that it was to shed 1,900 jobs. Of these, 450 were to go at its plant on the Isle of Wight. Such a news item would perhaps not excite much comment in these difficult economic times - except that Vestas is the world’s largest manufacturer of wind turbines. Given the urgent need to deal with climate change the announcement caused disbelief and anger throughout the environmental movement. Many European governments, including Britain, have committed themselves to a huge expansion of wind power, yet Vestas’ management announced that supplies of the turbines exceeded demand. Only the previous month, Gordon Brown was claiming that 400,000 jobs would be created over the next eight years as Britain moved towards a low carbon economy. Unfortunately there is little in the way of concrete plans as to how these jobs are to be created. As the recession deepens, it would seem logical to pump government money into green industries. But the only action that we have seen is Lord Mandelson’s deal offering motorists £2,000 to trade in their old car for a new, more "eco-friendly" model. This arrangement led to some in the environmental movement to argue that the car industry shouldn’t get subsidies. George Monbiot argued in the Guardian, for instance, that if "recession reduces the number of cars on the roads, this opens up the possibility of setting aside motorway lanes for intercity coach travel, catalysing the public transport revolution". But arguing that the closure of whole industries is a good thing if it reduces emissions will do nothing to win those workers facing unemployment to the environmental movement. Instead we need to offer a different strategy. The potential for this was shown by the Visteon workers who occupied their car components plant in the face of redundancies. One press release stated, "Our skills - we can make anything in plastic - should be used to make increasingly needed parts for green products: bike and trailer parts, solar panels, turbines, recycling bins, etc." As the environmental threat grows, the urgency for new strategies grows by the day. The Campaign Against Climate Change, the RMT and TSSA transport unions, and unions representing communication workers, civil service workers and university and college workers have got together to develop a detailed plan for how and where green jobs could be created. The report will be launched at the TUC Congress and the plan is that trade union branches around the country will sign up to it. But unless the fight for green jobs is linked to real struggle, we will wait in vain for government action. This can be taken up by trade unionists facing redundancy, workers in occupation or the unemployed. Martin Empson Campaign Against Climate Change Trade Union Group ---- Teaching Labour a lesson In education, young people from working class backgrounds are struggling with overcrowded classrooms, poor resources and overstretched teachers. Without the advantages of educated families or private tutoring, their choices on leaving school are narrow. Tuition fees make progression to university an impossible dream for many and the education on offer in further education colleges is increasingly directed to narrow, utilitarian "employability" skills, at a time when there are precious few employers taking people on. Funding is based on achievement, so those who are unable to achieve the target qualifications - such as older people, women, second language speakers and people with basic literacy skills - are becoming increasingly excluded. The people who most need education are those bearing the brunt of class closures. The government is removing the bottom rung of the ladder, denying the poorest and most vulnerable sectors of our society the opportunity to climb out of poverty. With youth unemployment running at nearly 18 percent, this government is blighting a generation in a way not seen since Thatcherism. However, up and down the country people are fighting back. Lecturers, students and supporters at London Met University, Soas, Doncaster College, Tower Hamlets College and other institutions are taking to the streets to defend jobs and education. The University and College Union (UCU) recognises that the fight for education and the fight for jobs are indivisible. The way forward is to work together with students, cleaners, support workers, other unions and the unemployed to build militant campaigns that challenge the restrictive trade union laws and take the struggle onto the streets. As branch secretary of the UCU at the College of North East London I’ll be taking part in the protest outside the Labour Party conference on 27 September, called by the UCU and other unions. I’ll be there because this bloated and corrupt government onslaught on the jobs, rights and dignity of ordinary people cannot go unchallenged. We need to be at the Labour party conference to demand that the wealth of our society is not poured into the troughs of fat cats, bankers and self-serving MPs, or blown on illegal wars and occupations, but that it is used to create jobs for all, decent education, public services based on need and a decent future for everyone. Jenny Sutton For more details about the protest outside the Labour Party conference, contact UCU.www.ucu.org.uk ---- The left needs to unite to fight back Labour voters stayed home in droves in June’s European elections. They simply didn’t have a credible alternative to get them to the polling station. This tells us that millions of working class people need an organisation which will stand up for them. One which will fight for more social housing, defend jobs and workers’ rights. One which will oppose all imperialist interventions, resist racism, fight to defend services and oppose the cuts we all know are coming. This desperate need for a left voice for working people is the reason the Socialist Workers Party has published an open letter to the rest of the left, and to activists everywhere, about the need for unity to offer working class people a real choice at the next election. I have stood previously as a candidate in Burngreave ward in Sheffield, and come second three years on the run. When I received over 20 percent of the vote it was one of the best votes for the left for many years - I actually received more votes than the Greens who got elected in another ward. In June, when I went out leafleting against the BNP, people assumed I was standing and had come to ask for their vote. They could not bring themselves to vote Labour and were disappointed when they saw that there was more than one left candidate - it just perpetuated the notion the left cannot unite. As someone who had fought long and hard for a left electoral project this was an extremely frustrating experience. Obviously many of us on the left are scarred by what has happened with previous attempts at unity. Many of us were part of the Socialist Alliance and then fought hard for the Respect project. Its disintegration weakened us all, but however hard it is we must overcome divisions and work towards creating a united socialist alternative. Mick Ibbotson, one local community activist, key to the anti-academies campaign locally and based on one of Sheffield’s large council estates, told me that Labour’s voters will not come out. He said it is a culmination of all the betrayals of New Labour. He believes that without a left alternative, politics will simply be portrayed as moving to the right. This leaves a huge vacuum and he told me that it could be "a real opportunity for the left if they have the maturity to seize it." I don’t underestimate how difficult building a united alternative might be. At a recent meeting I attended one man started with a statement of precisely what a left group would need to stand for. But I believe we need to start from that which unites us, not from that which divides us. Exploring the possibility of working together means talks, maybe a unity conference and local meetings to explore closer cooperation. If we can’t create a full-blown socialist alternative, we can agree to stand on a united platform and support each other’s candidates. Whatever else the European election results show, they are evidence that fragmentation prevents the left from being seen as an option. Hence the combined vote of No2EU and the Socialist Labour Party was only 2.1 percent. There have been encouraging glimpses of what is possible. In Cambridge socialist Tom Woodcock stood as an independent against the bankers’ profits in the local election and won 17.5 percent of the vote. The Barrow Socialist People’s Party won its first seat on Cumbria county council. There will be many places where local activists, trade unionists and socialists have roots and would be well placed to stand and put up a serious and principled campaign. For example, Valerie Wise (featured in the June issue of Socialist Review), the daughter of former Labour MP Audrey Wise, has agreed to stand against Labour in Preston at the next election. The open letter is an important step towards reaching out to all such activists - bringing us together to discuss the way forward. We all need to put aside any doubts we might have and find a way to forge this urgently needed unity in the interests of our class. Maxine Bowler To read the open letter visit www.socialistworker.co.uk. To add your name, email openletter@swp.org.uk ---- Fund-raising the dead If nothing else, Labour is unlikely to suffer embarrassment from dodgy donations this year. In the first three months of 2009 the party only received £254,000 from individuals, compared to the Conservatives’ £2.98 million. Not only that, but of the six individuals who donated more than £10,000 to Labour, only two are actually alive. Four of the top donations came in the form of bequests from deceased Labour supporters, with only one living individual donating more than the dead. Between July and September last year Labour received £7.6 million from individual donors. This fell to £3.2 million for October to December. The majority of Labour donations still come from trade unions (£2.2 million in January to March). But with even the Unison union threatening to withhold the cash, Gordon and Co had better think of some way out. After all, there might be an election soon. PW ---- Wartime boom There is at least one area of the economy doing well. Taxpayers have given some £148 million over the past three years to mercenary groups such as former Tory minister Malcolm Rifkind’s ArmorGroup (the market leader, now part of the G4S security company). Firms were awarded £42 million for 2008-9 for their work in Afghanistan - double the amount allocated to "security" work in Iraq during the same period. But if the whole "war on terror" thing doesn’t pan out well, G4S can always fall back on its other services in Britain. According to its website, these include managing four prisons, monitoring 12,000 electronically tagged offenders and "around 53 million visits to UK properties a year to take meter readings for utility companies". PW ---- frontlines end ---- Column In my opinion Lindsey German Unrepentant empire The long shadow of the Iraq war still hangs over British politics. Instead of assuaging worries about the government’s role in the war, and drawing a line under it, Gordon Brown’s announcement of an inquiry into the war rekindled all the opposition and discontent which led to the mass movement against the war in the first place. Brown’s own goal is quite remarkable. Just days after committing to greater transparency and democracy he announced an inquiry in secret, which would not apportion blame and would be conducted by four knights and a baroness. One of the knights, Sir John Chilcot, sat on the Butler inquiry - widely regarded as a whitewash; another, Sir Martin Gilbert, historian of Winston Churchill, said George Bush and Tony Blair might be compared to Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Churchill; a third, Sir Laurence Freedman, wrote Blair’s Chicago speech on humanitarian intervention in 1999. Hardly an unbiased bunch. Even Butler has now said that Brown is putting his interests before national interest. The military top brass have complained, and the Tories have tabled a parliamentary debate. None of these people objected to the war before it happened. But that was then. Why are they making a fuss now? First, Gordon Brown has hung on as prime minister but he has no real power. His government is at an all time low, with disastrous European parliament election results, a rash of ministers sacked or having resigned over the expenses scandal and strong odds on a Tory government within the year. The second reason is the damage the war did to the establishment. The generals are worried that the military has been permanently harmed by the war and that a secret inquiry will do nothing to redress this. The decision by parliament to vote for war in March 2003 produced contempt for politicians which only increased with the expenses scandal. So the Iraq war marks a political failure in Britain as well as in the Middle East. This matters because the imperialist project remains intact, despite the departures of Bush and Blair. That was clear from Barack Obama’s speech in Cairo last month. It was well received in some quarters and was heralded as a new beginning. Some of it had an appeal. After years of Bush promoting militant Christianity and talking of crusades, Obama’s quoting from the Koran, defending women wearing the hijab and talking about the Muslim contribution to civilisation and learning was a welcome change. However, the speech beyond the soundbites is a rather different matter. Obama mostly reiterated US policy formulated by Bush and Bill Clinton before him. He made it clear that "violent extremism" was the cause of many of the problems between the US and the "Muslim world" and that this justified the war in Afghanistan. He stated, "America’s strong bonds with Israel are well known. This bond is unbreakable." Obama called for a two-state solution and criticised the settlements, but failed to mention, let alone condemn, the bombardment of Gaza which killed more than 1,300 in January. While his speech is credited with forcing an acknowledgement of a Palestinian state from right wing Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel still proceeds with its settlements. Obama also dealt with nuclear weapons, women’s rights, democracy and economic development. Here the message was clear: the Middle East and south Asia could benefit from the modernity and free markets which the US is so eager to spread round the world. He referred to misunderstandings between the US and Muslims. Strange that these "misunderstandings" began when the US started to take a greater interest in the oil-rich region of the Middle East. US troops remain in Iraq and are being poured into Afghanistan. Obama claimed that the US had no desire for a permanent presence or bases in these countries. But there are very few countries invaded or occupied by the US where it has not maintained bases, and there are a string of bases across the Middle East and Asia. There are now more British troops in Afghanistan than there were in Iraq. The rate of deaths of British soldiers there is increasing. But the war is not being won, with talk of it becoming a new 30-year war or a new Vietnam. The legacy of Iraq weighs heavily on the British ruling class and hampers its ability to fight this and future wars. Hence the need for closure on Iraq and why many top military figures and Tories are critical of Brown’s proposal. Brown is too weak not to make some concessions on this. Iraq just won’t go away, and now we have a year’s inquiry to remind people what their opposition to the war was all about. LG ---- Feedback The religion question Terry Eagleton’s The Gods Look Down was certainly one of the more acute and useful books I ever used, but to ask whether the "new atheists" are attacking immigrant communities for their religion (with all religions attacked as a smokescreen) is narrow of Neil Davidson’s review of Eagleton’s latest book, Reason, Faith and Revolution (Books, Socialist Review, June 2009). In the 19th century Jews and Irish Catholic immigrants were attacked for their religion without religion being attacked in general. Lloyd George started his political career in top juniors when he challenged a visitation of school governors and vicar as to why they were putting a Welsh speaking Methodist pupil body through English Anglican school assemblies and religion classes. Religion can be nasty without an immigration backdrop. Religion deserved some of the kicking it got in Europe’s revolutions for justifying the "ancien régimes" and corruption. Accordingly, clergy moved from "instruction" to "education", from fronting wars across history to promoting study sessions and trying to promote social peace and cohesion. All religions behave like social "petrol". They can inspire the arts and a society towards teamwork and achievement; or they create pettifogging authoritarian enforcement of the minutiae of observance that stifles creativity and exacerbates sexual complexes. Worse, there are no rules for which way the cat jumps and it sometimes contrives both at once, as under our own Puritans. Frank Adam Manchester ---- Uncomfortable truths With The Kindly Ones, Jonathan Littell has written an important book (Books, Socialist Review, May 2009). It presents many details of the Nazi crimes, and especially the Holocaust, to a wider audience. This is why critics in Germany, especially from the mainstream left, were not amused when the book was published in German in 2008. Many critiques were quite ridiculous. The book was written in a "pre-Proustian" literary style, one critic complained. In a social democratic magazine there was a discussion whether Littell was right to describe these SS officers as people who could play the violin, sing Schumann songs or quote antique authors in ancient Greek or Latin. The commentator tried to comfort his readers: the SS were at best only "mediocre" violin players. Revealingly, several critics complained that Littell’s book presented "nothing new". This nothing new is, however, embarrassing for a Germany that takes part in the occupation of Afghanistan and other humanitarian interventions. It is embarrassing to be reminded that the SS were all part of the German academic elite, with PhDs and some of them even professors. I would not agree with reviewer Mary Brodbin’s claim that Littell does not present a political explanation. The problem might be more that he presents all the theories he knows of, and leaves it to the reader to choose from a wide range of explanations, for example the idea that the Holocaust was an unexplainable archaic crime like the murder of Abel by Cain, or that it was an imperialist device to prepare for a future East European German empire. I do not know whether in the English-speaking world a public debate about the book will develop, but socialists should be prepared to defend it against any neo-imperialist commentators. Thomas Weiss Berlin, Germany ---- Where to in Italy? It’s always good to read articles like Phil Rushton’s (Frontlines, Socialist Review, June 2009). I completely agree that, "The left remains lacking in strategy and new roots in the struggles taking place," and that "a strategy of generalising struggle" is necessary. Can Phil or Socialist Review give us more detail? What is the correct strategy Phil speaks of? Which organisation(s) should socialists in Italy join? Which ones are a waste of time? What lessons have been learnt from the recent past? David Groves Italy ---- Help needed I am currently completing a biography of the late Tony Cliff and I am still trying to fill a few gaps. I would be very interested to hear from any comrades who have recordings of any of the following meetings: ? The Cliff-Mandel debate of 1970; ? The debate between Cliff and Bert Ramelson of the Communist Party on productivity deals in 1970-1; ? Cliff’s speech in the Conway Hall on the eve of the Common Market referendum in 1975; ? The debate between Alex Callinicos and Donny Gluckstein at Marxism 1984 or 1985 where Cliff intervened from the floor. If anyone can help please email me first at ian@ibirchall.wanadoo.co.uk with the words "Tony Cliff" in the subject line. Ian Birchall London ---- feedback end ---- Letter from Northern Ireland Attacks on Roma families have shocked many, argues Goretti Horgan. But politicians must shoulder much of the blame Two stories have dominated the headlines in Northern Ireland over the past few weeks: racists driving out a number of Roma families from their South Belfast homes and the expensive tastes of "Swish Family Robinson" - first minister Peter Robinson and his wife Iris - exposed by the MPs’ expenses scandal. The two stories, of course, are not unconnected. The youths who attacked the homes of the Roma people probably voted for the DUP, the party formerly led by Ian Paisley, now by Robinson. They live in an area known as The Village, a run-down warren of working class streets where many of the homes still have outdoor toilets. The Village is within walking distance of the Lisburn Road, home to fancy restaurants and designer clothes shops that charge hundreds of pounds for children’s clothes. A recent Stormont Assembly report found that working class Protestant boys, particularly in the poorest parts of Belfast, are the most likely of all groups to leave school without basic literacy or numeracy skills. All the statistics about poverty in Northern Ireland show that they are the group most left behind in the "new" Northern Ireland. There’s not much "new", however, about the messages that these youths will have heard growing up. The mantra of Unionist politicians, particularly those of the DUP, is of the need to "defend the Protestant culture". This siege mentality is aimed mainly at Catholic Nationalists, but it’s easy to transfer the sentiment to other groups. There is no evidence to support media reports that fascists organised or encouraged the attacks, and little evidence of organised fascism in the region. But there is little need for fascists when mainstream politicians spread their hate-filled messages for them. The Roma who were chased out of their homes met a triple whammy of prejudice: they were outsiders, Catholic and perceived as similar to Irish travellers. Social attitudes surveys show that Irish travellers remain the minority group against which there is most prejudice in the region. The fact that over 100 people were living in just three or four houses was used against the Roma by local people who said they did not want them in the area, though many of them condemned the violence. But politicians, not the Roma, are to blame for these conditions. Across Britain, Romanian families have no right to benefits or any state support. Extended families help each other out - when one rents a house, others share it and help pay the rent. Most of the men were working as self-employed newspaper sellers at traffic lights, earning as little as £20 for a ten-hour day - not enough to pay rent and feed a large family. The upsurge of anger against the attacks, and the hundreds who attended anti-racist rallies in Belfast and Derry on the Saturday following them, show that the majority of people in Northern Ireland are not racist. However, there is evidence of a rise in racism and the economic situation could encourage further growth. Peter Robinson spent £750 on a briefcase; Iris Robinson paid £300 for a fountain pen. Both husband and wife claimed £4,000 a year for food - more than some of their constituents would get on benefits to cover heat, light, clothing and food for a full year. Together they take over half a million pounds every year from the taxpayer. The collapse in the vote for the DUP in the European elections was caused as much by the expenses scandal as by their being in government with Sinn Fein. However, the DUP-Sinn Fein coalition has to take much of the blame for the poverty and alienation afflicting many parts of the region. Unemployment has rocketed, yet politicians continue to see no alternative to neoliberalism, maintaining plans for more privatisation of services. They refuse to use their devolved powers to humanise welfare reform. They market Northern Ireland as a low wage economy, boasting that wage levels here are 30 percent lower than the European Union average. What Northern Ireland needs urgently is a left alternative - such as People Before Profit in the South - to organise for working class unity against sectarianism and racism and to defend workers’ rights. END ---- Feature Labour collapse, BNP victories - political meltdown The economic and political crises have undermined the legitimacy of mainstream politics, argues Alex Callinicos. As Labour’s support crashes can the left offer answers? Crises aren’t made of whole cloth. They have multiple causes and are explosive precisely because they represent the coming together of the major contradictions in society. Thus the political meltdown in Britain isn’t just about a massive popular revulsion against what the media call the "political class". Its intensity arises from the way in which it has coincided with the global economic and financial crisis. As Jonathan Raban writes of the parliamentary expenses scandal in the London Review of Books, "In another year or season, the story might have had less explosive force, but its publication last month was one of those miracles of timing that are as much a matter of luck as of design. With the recession deepening beneath its feet, jobs evaporating overnight, houses repossessed, retirement portfolios dwindling, the public was in a state of fury at fat cats and hungry for revenge." What the scandal revealed was that MPs identify themselves not with their constituents but with the bankers. Compared to median earnings of just under £20,000 a year, an MP’s annual salary of £64,766 is very good money. But the parliamentarians were looking up, not down - not just at the vast takings not just of investment bankers and private equity bosses, but even of top civil servants and journalists. They wanted their share of the hog-fest of neoliberal bubble capitalism. Labour has suffered more than the Tories over the expenses scandal. There are at least three reasons for this. The first is that Labour supporters still expected better of their MPs. No one is surprised that Tory grandees should claim for cleaning their moats or building servants’ quarters. The residual traditions of working class solidarity in Labour ranks mean that its leading figures are held to a higher standard. The second factor is Gordon Brown’s astonishing ineptitude. If he had defenestrated Jacqui Smith and Hazel Blears early on in the scandal then he might have got some credit for trying to clean out the stables. As it was, Brown’s cowardice and procrastination meant their eventual resignations - and the more calculated departure of James Purnell - almost brought him down. David Cameron was, as usual, much faster on his feet, ostentatiously taking action to force out some of the worst malefactors. Thirdly and most importantly, the expenses scandal has accelerated the decay of Labourism. This is a long-term process, dating back to well before the weakening of trade union organisation in the 1980s. Since at least the 1960s the Labour leadership has increasingly detached the party from its roots in the organised working class, transforming it into an apparatus of professional politicians focused on waging media battles with the rival apparatus run by the Tories. The decay of Labourism This process speeded up under Tony Blair, who used the defeats workers suffered under Thatcher to gut inner-party democracy and embrace neoliberalism wholesale. Incidentally, Blair shouldn’t be denied his share of the credit for popular disillusionment with official politics. After all, he lied his way into war with Iraq and, when this was exposed, rather than being booted out of 10 Downing Street and locked up for war crimes, was allowed to hang on to office for another four years. The spectacle of Blair today, posturing as the Palestinians’ friend and accepting grand prizes for his good works, is a standing condemnation of the British political system. But it’s important to see that this dimension of the political crisis isn’t a uniquely British affair. Labour’s appalling 16 percent of the popular vote in the European parliamentary elections was matched by the centre-left social democratic French Socialist Party. More generally, the past decade has seen an astonishing reversal. In the late 1990s the centre-left held office in the four biggest member states of the European Union - Germany, Britain, France and Italy. Today social democratic governments cling desperately to office in Britain and Spain after bad defeats in the European elections. Elsewhere, from France to Poland, the incumbent centre-right claimed victory - though in fact their score wasn’t that impressive. The Financial Times’s Blairite columnist Philip Stephens gloated over the discomfiture of the left: "Pace the doomsayers who predicted imminent Armageddon, liberal market capitalism has survived… Predictions of a return to the 1930s have proved as misjudged as the reckless complacency of policymakers and economists during the boom years… In Europe the imagined crisis of capitalism has turned into an implosion rather than a resurgence in the fortunes of the ideological foes of the free market." This is pretty silly, in more than one way. First, Stephens is joining in the hubbub of commentary announcing the end of the economic crisis. While economic prediction is always highly uncertain, he is very probably wrong. In early June two eminently mainstream economists, Barry Eichengreen and Kevin O’Rourke, published a detailed statistical comparison between the present crisis and the Great Depression of the 1930s. This shows that "world industrial production continues to track closely the 1930s fall, with no clear signs of ‘green shoots’" and that "world stock markets have rebounded a bit since March, and world trade has stabilised, but these are still following paths far below the ones they followed in the Great Depression". They conclude, "This is a Depression-sized event." What has happened is that the financial markets have got over the terrible fright they suffered with last autumn’s crash. They are now excited about evidence that the rate at which some big economies are shrinking has slowed down and that China’s growth rate is rising. This has led to intense speculation in commodities markets, which is pushing up the price of oil in particular. All of this looks more like another round of bubblenomics than the end of the crisis. At some point the world economy will stop shrinking. But it is more likely than not that this will lead not to a new boom but to a prolonged period of stagnation. The crisis happened because of the way in which the US ruling class came to rely on letting the financial system rip to compensate for underlying low profitability. But now - for all the flurry of good news stories - the banks are bust. It is going to take a long time to fix the financial system. As the Keynesian economist Paul Krugman put it, "The risk for long stagnation is high… The idea that we sort of bounce along the bottom is all too easy to imagine." Secondly, only the most vulgar of Marxists would predict that a serious economic crisis necessarily favours the left. Everyone knows that Adolf Hitler was the main political beneficiary from the Great Depression of the 1930s. In the Guardian another Blairite columnist, Martin Kettle, offered a more sophisticated take: "As in the 1930s, recession has hurt the parties of the left rather than strengthened them, while benefiting a range of parties of the right. National paranoias have not sprung up again in the virulent form they did in the fascist era, any more than communism has, but they are prospering modestly in new ways. The frequently expressed hope, including by [David] Miliband, that the financial crisis ought to generate a ‘centre-left moment’ has proved elusive. If anything, this is a centre-right moment. The social market, with a dash of protectionism, is today’s winning formula." Both Stephens and Kettle offer the same cure. As the former puts it, "What was missing last week was a centre-left prospectus recognising the benefits of globalisation while promoting wider distribution of its opportunities." Now who does that sound like? Kettle is more explicit, demanding that the centre-left "rediscover the instinct for creative adaptation that Blair taught it". In other words, back to Blairism. This is remarkably cheeky, given that it was Blairism that got us into this mess in the first place. The social democratic victories of the late 1990s were the historical moment of social liberalism. In other words, centre-left governments brought to office by popular revulsion against neoliberalism continued with free market policies. Blair was brashest pursuing this political course, but Lionel Jospin’s Plural Left government in France privatised more between 1997 and 2002 than its six predecessors combined. In Germany the Red-Green coalition that held office under Gerhard Schröder between 1998 and 2005 forced through Agenda 2010, which was designed to make labour markets more "flexible". This helped German capitalism sharply to force down real wages. Even Brown’s apparent conversion to Keynesianism in response to the economic crisis hasn’t stopped him plodding on relentlessly with the programme of privatising public services that he inherited from Blair. The advent of social liberalism is an important factor in the popular withdrawal from mainstream politics that is evident right across Europe (participation in the European elections fell to a record low of 43.24 percent). All the major parties embracing the neoliberal "pensée unique" (single thought) deprived voters of a genuine choice. The revulsion against economic and political elites has found expression in the referendums rejecting the European Constitutional Treaty in France and the Netherlands in 2005 and the Lisbon Treaty in southern Ireland a year ago. But social liberalism has also been a catastrophe for the social democratic parties themselves. Successive defeats have fragmented the French Socialist Party: in the European elections it lost votes both to the Front de Gauche, an alliance of breakaway Socialists and the Communist Party, and to the left Greens. The German Social Democratic Party, squeezed between the centre-right and the more radical challenge from Die Linke, saw its share of the vote fall to a historic low. The historic parties of the Italian left have simply vanished from the political scene. In the Spanish state the Socialist Party under José Luis Rodrígues Zapatero, brought to office thanks to popular revulsion against the Iraq war, has used its efforts to dismantle the historical legacy of Francoism to give a left spin to its version of social liberalism. But the impact of the economic crisis, especially severe in Spain, seems to have hit the Zapatero government hard. The great ‘moving right’ show Social liberalism, in other words, is the disease, not the cure. Nowhere is that more evident than in its homeland - Britain. But what the decay of New Labour has produced is a political shift to the right that has set David Cameron firmly on the path to 10 Downing Street and has pitched two British Nazis into the European Parliament. It’s important not to overstate this shift. The British National Party’s (BNP) vote actually fell in the two constituencies where it won seats. The Nazis got in thanks to massive abstentions by Labour voters. One can certainly find in popular opinion ugly attitudes towards migrants and asylum seekers. These are fed by the mainstream parties - think, for example, of the odious remarks frequently made by Phil Woolas, minister of state for borders and immigration. And the disastrous decision of a section of the trade union bureaucracy, and even parts of the radical left, to embrace Brown’s slogan "British jobs for British workers" has further reinforced anti-immigrant attitudes. Nevertheless, there is very little sign of the kind of generalised shift to the right in British society that brought Thatcher to office 30 years ago. Cameron has modelled himself on Blair, using the same kind of soft media skills to reposition the Tories in the centre. And his victory in the next general election, even if highly probable, will be by default. Winning a 28 percent share of the vote in the European elections, barely up on the Tories’ performance in the previous elections in 2004, is hardly evidence of an imminent landslide. All the same, the left and the workers’ movement had better get ready for a Tory government. Brown may stagger on till the autumn or even next spring, held in place by Peter Mandelson’s dark arts and Labour MPs’ fear of a wipe-out if a coup forced an earlier general election. But whenever the election comes it will almost certainly usher in the Tories. And their government will be a nasty one, less out of ideological conviction than because of the expectations the City will place in it. The financial and political elites have convinced themselves that the government’s massive borrowing to prevent economic collapse is creating an enormous fiscal crisis that can only be addressed through drastic cuts in public spending. Whichever party wins the next election it will be expected to act in the light of this judgement. The government’s budget figures assume that, after taking into account inflation, debt repayment, and social-security payments and the like, departmental spending will fall by 7 percent between 2011 and 2014. But the Tories are preparing enthusiastically for the task. George Osborne, Cameron’s shadow Chancellor of the Exchequer, has boasted to business leaders, "After three months in power we will be the most unpopular government since the war." According to the Financial Times, "Mr Osborne is indeed preparing for an eye-watering budget within weeks of a Tory election victory, imposing the cuts - and probable tax rises - he feels are necessary to rein in borrowing of £175 billion…a year. No wonder he expects to be unpopular." Workers, in other words, must expect vicious attacks. But this is no reason to opt for the flipside of the idea that economic crisis always favours the left, and assume the worst. The experience both of the 1930s and the 1980s is that major recessions tend to polarise society politically. The Great Depression saw, not just the triumph of Hitler and Franco but, partly in response, great working class insurgencies - France in 1934 and 1936, the sit-down strikes in the US in the mid-1930s, the Spanish Revolution of 1936-7. In the end the right won, but there was nothing inevitable about this, any more than there was about Thatcher’s victory over the miners and other groups of workers in the 1980s. Because the crisis is not over, we can expect social and political polarisation and major struggles produced by the bosses’ efforts to restore profitability. There is absolutely nothing predetermined about the outcome of these conflicts. As Gramsci pointed out, in the kind of "organic crisis" with which we are now confronted, the ideological and political cohesion of the contending social forces and the quality of leadership they receive will be decisive: "A crisis occurs, sometimes lasting for decades. This exceptional duration means that incurable structural contradictions have revealed themselves (reached maturity), and that, despite this, the political forces which are struggling to conserve and defend the existing structure itself are making every effort to cure them, within certain limits, and to overcome them. These incessant and persistent efforts (since no social formation will ever admit that it has been superseded) form the terrain of the ‘conjunctural’, and it is upon this terrain that the forces of opposition organise." Challenge for the radical left But, if we are brutally honest about our own strengths and weaknesses, it has to be admitted that the radical left is in pretty bad shape. Across Europe there emerged in the past decade a radical left that sought to offer a principled alternative to neoliberalism and war. Particularly in the wake of the giant anti-war demonstrations of 2002-4, it looked as if it was really going places. Things are different today. The situation in Britain is particularly shaming. The net result of a decade’s sustained efforts at socialist regroupment was that the two main fragments of Respect (once the most promising product of these efforts) - namely the Socialist Workers Party and the supporters of George Galloway and Salma Yaqoob - chose not to stand candidates in the European elections. A third fragment participated in the No2EU slate along with Bob Crow of the RMT and the Socialist Party, which got even fewer votes than the perennial Socialist Labour Party backed by the rump of the once mighty miners’ union. In Italy the picture is even grimmer, with none of the fragments of the old Communist Party succeeding in gaining a seat in the European Parliament. Even more striking were the disappointing results of three very different formations in which much higher hopes were placed - Die Linke in Germany, the Nouveau Parti Anticapitaliste (NPA) in France, and the ex-Eurocommunist Synaspismos and its far-left allies in Syriza in Greece. Is there an objective explanation of this failure? The low level of popular participation in the European elections and the fact that they don’t determine the fate of national governments - which still have the lion’s share of power in the EU - no doubt makes them accident prone and peculiarly liable to become the vehicle of protest votes. This helps to explain the strong performance of UKIP in Britain in both 2004 and 2009. But this kind of explanation doesn’t seem satisfactory. Why should it be only the populist right that picks up protest votes? The anti-war movements and the social struggles of the past decade represent a significant popular constituency for the radical left. Moreover, two countries bucked the trend. In Portugal the Left Bloc continued its steady electoral advance, winning 10 percent of the vote and three seats. And in southern Ireland Joe Higgins of the far-left Socialist Party became an MEP, while the People Before Profit coalition made an important breakthrough in Dublin’s local elections. Southern Ireland experienced one of the biggest financial bubbles in the mid-2000s and is now suffering a brutal economic squeeze. Here at least the radical left was able to articulate some of the immense popular anger that this has provoked. In France, where social resistance to the crisis has been particularly intense, the three fragments of the radical left - the Front de Gauche, the NPA, and Lutte Ouvrière - got around 12 percent of the vote between them. This isn’t a bad combined result, but it would have been a lot more impressive had it been achieved by a single unified political force rather than by three rival slates. What can only be described as the failure of the radical left in the European elections demands of its different sections the most serious and self-critical examination of their strategies. The diversity of the different political formations and their national situations means that there is no general recipe that can be offered. At most one can say that what is required of us is two things. First, a determined effort to support and strengthen resistance to the effects of the crisis and to make it as focused and sustained as possible. Secondly, a readiness to practise the art of politics in the style of Lenin and Gramsci, which means combining a strong principled stance with the tactical flexibility and willingness to compromise necessary if we are to concentrate the maximum of forces against the common enemy and to seek to fracture its own ranks. Once again, Gramsci put it very well: "[Marxism] is not the instrument of government of the dominant groups in order to gain the consent and exercise hegemony over the subaltern classes; it is the expression of these subaltern classes who want to educate themselves in the art of government and who have an interest in knowing all truths, even the unpleasant ones, and in avoiding the (impossible) deceptions of the upper class and - even more - their own." We are going to need these qualities very much here in Britain. In the first instance, we need to build the broadest possible unity in action to isolate and drive back the BNP. The wave of protests that greeted the election of Nick Griffin and Andrew Brons to the European Parliament was magnificent, but it was only the start of the sustained effort needed to build a mass movement that can start to reverse the Nazis’ advances. But, secondly, we need to get our act together electorally. This requires, on the part of the different fragments of the radical left, an acknowledgement of our collective failure. This isn’t important for reasons of moral upliftment, but because all the different currents need to recognise that they lack an electoral project of their own that can offer the needed alternative to New Labour. Only then can we begin to explore the possibilities of unity seriously. As long as we each harbour the illusion that we can make the breakthrough on our own, we are sunk. The reason why, between about 2004 and 2006, Respect captured a real mood was that, amid the great anti-war mobilisations, it represented the coming together of very different political forces to try to build a more united left. That moment cannot now be recaptured, and all those involved need to learn the lessons of the experience of Respect’s rise and fall. Any future project of left unity will no doubt take a very different form. Achieving it won’t be easy. We are divided by past conflicts and also by important political disagreements - for example over the strikes against foreign workers. But a more united radical left must happen. It would be simply criminal to allow the Tories and the fascist and populist right to benefit from the decrepitude of Labourism. END ---- Feature Iran’s new rebellion Iranians have taken to the streets as the divisions in the ruling class have sharpened into open conflict, writes Peyman Jafari The fallout from the presidential election on 12 June precipitated the biggest political crisis in Iran since the 1979 revolution. The official results gave the incumbent president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, 63 percent of votes, compared to 34 percent for his main rival, the reformist Mir Hossein Mousavi, who then accused the government of vote-rigging. In the following days hundreds of thousands took to the streets of major cities, defying the riot police and shouting, "Where is my vote?" The crisis has also shown that the conflict between opposing forces within the ruling elite is coming to a head. Both elements have consequences that go far beyond the elections and mark a watershed in the history of the Islamic Republic. This year’s election campaign was the liveliest since the early days of the revolution. Supporters of the four candidates actively campaigned on the streets. Students organised "free zones" for discussions in universities. Newspapers wrote critical articles that circulated on the internet. For the first time candidates debated with each other live on national television. Ahmadinejad called the other candidates henchmen of the powerful ex-president Akbar Hashemi-Rafsanjani, who he describes as corrupt. Moussavi argued that Ahmadinejad had ruined the economy, created poverty and isolated Iran internationally. He also accused him of taking the country towards dictatorship. Moussavi promised political freedoms and rights for women and minorities. As the election campaign intensified it opened up an unprecedented political space. Thousands of young people threw themselves into political activity and almost 40 million cast their votes. At 85 percent the turnout was much higher than in 2005 (63 percent in the first round and 48 percent in the second round). Moussavi’s campaign gained momentum and the huge "green" movement emerged on the streets and the internet in support. Moussavi’s rallies in Tehran, Isfahan and Tabriz drew tens of thousands. While Ahmadinejad’s supporters were less visible in the media, their numbers should not be underestimated. In 2005 he was elected on a populist platform, with a promise to fight poverty and to put "the oil money on the tables of the people". Over the following two years he visited 350 towns and villages, received nine million letters and handed out approximately $10 million in cash. Some sections of the urban and rural poor benefited but many others suffered the consequences of a dwindling economy at a time when oil revenue was at a record high. When Ahmadinejad took office inflation was at 16 percent. Now it is around 25 percent. According to Iran’s central bank, the living costs for an urban family almost doubled over the past four years - exceeding wage rises. The estimated monthly wage for a worker is $223, which is well below the poverty line. Unemployment went up, officially nearing 13 percent - in reality it is somewhere between 20 and 30 percent. Inequality remained high - the richest 20 percent of the population receives half of the national income. Various surveys among Iranian youth have shown that they view economic hardship as their biggest problem and are worried about the growing gap between rich and poor. Workers’ discontent has regularly spilled over into strikes. From February to May of this year thousands of school teachers went on strike to demand wage parity with other public sector workers. One of the strike leaders explained, "Our pay is ridiculously low. A school teacher with a masters degree takes home less than $300. In a city like Tehran, any family of four with an income less than $500 a month is living under the poverty line." At least 100 of the teachers were arrested after they staged a protest in front of the parliament. Another wave of arrests occurred on International Workers’ Day, which has become a rallying point for labour activists. This symbolises the modest revival of a labour movement across the country. The selection of Moussavi as the candidate of the reformists was a conscious choice. The leaders of the reformist movement decided to tap into the disgruntlement of the working class. Saeed Hajjarian, the strategic brain of the reformists, admitted in 2004 that the reformists had represented the interests of the middle class. After their defeat by Ahmadinejad’s populism in 2005 the reformists understood they had to change. Moussavi, who had served as prime minister in the 1980s and was widely associated with egalitarian politics, seemed the perfect man for the task. He held his first meeting as a presidential candidate in March in Tehran’s Nazi Abad - a working class neighbourhood. He was greeted with the chant "Mir Hossein ghareman - hamiye mostazafan" ("Mir Hossein hero - supporter of the downtrodden"). During his campaign he promised a "future without poverty". Just before the elections the Iranian Labour News Agency conducted a survey that predicted a 54 percent victory for Moussavi. Among the participants 71 percent of professionals, 69 percent of workers and 62 percent of students supported the reformist candidate. It is not unreasonable to assume that the working class vote was split between Ahmadinejad and Moussavi. Rupture at the top The election was the catalyst that turned the tensions within the political elite into an open war between the contending factions. These tensions have existed since the 1980s. Moussavi was a leading member of the "left" faction that promoted a state capitalist economy and protection for the poor. The right - with which current Supreme Leader and then president Ali Khamenei, was associated - defended the interests of the merchants (bazaaris). Rafsanjani, then the chairman of Majlis (Iran’s parliament), cunningly manoeuvred between both, earning him the nickname of "the shark". The 1980-8 Iran-Iraq war and the authority of Supreme Leader Ruhollah Khomeini held these factions together. In the early 1990s business circles and the bazaar became more vocal in their opposition to state intervention in the economy. As the populists were losing ground due to economic problems, a new faction inside the regime emerged around Rafsanjani, who had become president in 1989. This faction became to be known as the "modern right" or the "pragmatists" and sidelined the "left" by aligning itself with the "traditional right". Having enriched himself and his family by dominating foreign trade in carpets and pistachios, Rafsanjani represented the interests of the new industrial capitalists. Rafsanjani’s economic liberalisation backfired when inflation approached 50 percent and inequality grew, leading to riots in 1992 and 1995. Realising the lower classes had become increasingly alienated from the state, Khamenei blamed "cultural decay" and enforced "Islamic norms". This only increased people’s alienation as important changes in society were taking place: the increasing participation of women in education and the labour market, the growing proportion of young people (70 percent of the population is under the age of 30) and changing ideas about the role of religion. In 1997 the "reformist" Mohammad Khatami was elected president. Khatami’s faction was largely made up of middle class professionals, intellectuals and bureaucrats. It came to power by reacting to the pressures from below with the promise of political reforms. Rafsanjani first supported Khatami, who continued with economic liberalisation, but distanced himself later, fearing that the protests of students, women and workers would grow out of control. For the same reason Khatami allowed the right to suppress the movement. The disillusionment from this experience laid the ground for the election of Ahmadinejad in 2005. Khamenei, who lacked the authority of Khomeini among the clergy, aligned himself with Ahmadinejad to strengthen his own position as Supreme Leader. Ahmadinejad represents the interests of the state bureaucracy, and the Revolutionary Guard, who have developed their own economic interests. Around 80 percent of the economy is owned by the state, and the Revolutionary Guards control more than 1,500 economic projects. It is no surprise that the majority of the members of Ahmadinejad’s cabinet in 2005 came from their ranks. From its inception the Islamic Republic has contained a contradiction between elected institutions such as the parliament and the president, and unelected institutions such as the Supreme Leader and the Guardian Council. The recent conduct of Khamenei suggests an attempt to dramatically shift the balance in favour of the latter. This explains not only why Moussavi has challenged the election outcome but has sided - at least for the time being - with the street protests, which give the reformists leverage. Rafsanjani’s support for Moussavi stemmed from his desire to open up oil revenues and channels for profit-making to Iran’s capitalist class, but he wouldn’t hesitate if a deal with Khamenei would achieve the same result. The election and its aftermath have shown that the divisions inside Iran’s ruling elite have become unmanageable and will lead to new and bigger political crises in the near future. More importantly, the future depends on what happens on the streets. Speculation about vote rigging is less useful than realising that a significant number of Iranians, represented by millions who protested and put their lives on the line, did not trust the election outcome and demanded its annulment. The movement that erupted on the streets of Tehran, Isfahan, Shiraz, Tabriz, Mashad, Babol, Rasht and Orumiyeh was semi-spontaneous. The first protests occurred immediately after the election result was announced. On Monday 15 June more than a million people responded to a call by Moussavi’s party for a march, even though it hadn’t received permission. In fact, Moussavi only showed up to give a speech after his advisers told him hundreds of thousands had gathered. In the following days the movement demanded leadership from Moussavi, yet still marched when he discouraged them. They courageously stood firm against state repression, chanting "Tanks, guns, Basiji, have no effect any more" and continued into the night with chants of "God is great" from the roofs - reviving the slogans of the 1979 revolution. Those participating were not just "the trendy, young, sunglassed ladies of northern Tehran. The poor were here, too, the street workers and middle-aged ladies in full chador," reported Robert Fisk. Other journalists and participants have corroborated Fisk’s observation. Sahar, a student from Tehran University, said people were shouting "With chador and without chador, down with the dictator." Nurses and street cleaners walked side by side. A group of young socialists, who have started to print a newspaper called The Street, reported that the marchers shouted "Ministry of work, so many without work!" as they walked past the ministry of labour. This movement brought together people from different classes around a set of democratic demands, most importantly free and fair elections, freedom of organisation and the end of repression. While throwing themselves unreservedly into the struggle to win these demands, socialists in Iran have to argue that Rafsanjani and Moussavi have different interests to those of the working class. However, the best way to challenge the middle class leaders is not to publish abstract manifestos, but to become part and parcel of the movement to achieve its immediate goals. Finally, it is important to note that the protests in Iran are not demanding foreign intervention or economic sanctions. "What happens in Iran regards the people themselves, and it is up to them to make their voices heard," said Nobel Peace Prize winning Iranian human rights activist Shirin Ebadi. Imperialist powers are already trying to take advantage of the situation in Iran. "After Ahmadinejad’s re-election, the international community must continue to act uncompromisingly to prevent the nuclearisation of Iran, and to halt its activity in support of terror organisations and undermining stability in the Middle East," said Avigdor Lieberman, Israel’s extremist right wing foreign minister. His deputy, Danny Ayalon, made it clear, however, that even if Moussavi had been declared the winner, Iran would still be "a threat". This poses a particular task for socialists in the West. At the same time as we support and organise solidarity with the movement in Iran we have to challenge our own governments’ imperialist interference in the region. ---- Column Union-made Unjum Mirza Orchestrated demolition The 48-hour strike action taken by RMT tube workers that brought London to a virtual standstill in June has a number of lessons for us all. In the immediacy our strike was about securing a decent pay rise and defending existing agreements on compulsory redundancies. Over 1,000 jobs have been threatened and London Underground Limited wanted to rip up agreements won in 2001 following strike action by RMT and Aslef. June’s strike followed two ballots for industrial action. The first secured an over 80 percent yes vote but was threatened with a legal injunction. The union decided to re-ballot in order not to "taint" any action we took. We were all preparing for another legal challenge. However, management had another plan - to take us on. They interfered directly in the democratic process of our ballot - the managing director sent out a personal letter to all staff urging people not to strike. But we got an even bigger yes vote. Meanwhile, Boris Johnson and transport commissioner Peter Hendy secured extra transport to undermine the strike. The British Transport, Met and City police were far more "active" during our strike than in recent times and the media did everything it could to demonise the union. Passengers struggling to work were portrayed as embodying the "spirit of the Blitz" in defiance of the strike. Management turned a blind eye to safety rules and procedures. Meanwhile, disgracefully, Aslef general secretary Keith Norman told the London Evening Standard, "Our members are not involved in this dispute… In the past Aslef drivers would have refused to cross picket lines in support of a rival union. This, however, is evidently not the case today." In defiance of their leadership some Aslef members did refuse to cross picket lines. This was intended to be an orchestrated demolition of our strike. According to these plans, it was supposed to collapse after 24 hours after which a general drift back to work was expected. The opposite happened. The strike firmed up. The strike was really about the balance of forces on the job. Over the past two years management have stepped up their bullying and harassment of reps and members generally in an attempt to demoralise the workforce in the run-up to the 2012 Olympics. Their agenda speeded up with the onset of the recession, which they’ve used as an excuse to stitch up and sack members and create a climate of fear. Their endeavour is to take on not just the RMT, but trade unionism, and not only because of the Olympics. Taking on a key organised section of the working class can send a double message. It tells transport workers that resistance is futile but it also sends a message to all workers that you can’t fight in a recession. However, we’ve seen the inspirational workers’ fightbacks at Waterford Crystal and Visteon. Waterford workers were invited to RMT branches across London and raised £2,000 in a week. Visteon workers and postal workers were invited to our mass meeting where we talked of coordinating action. Quickly RMT members saw this was not just a run of the mill pay and conditions fight. It was a fight for our class, in defence of the right to work and in defiance of bosses’ attempts to have workers pay for their crisis. Solid picket lines appeared across the capital including in the richest square mile on the planet at Liverpool Street. There around 60 pickets, reps and activists spoke at an open air rally behind RMT banners, the Unite Against Fascism banner and a banner in remembrance of Ian Tomlinson, who died during the G20 protests. The fight on London Underground has not gone away. There may be battles here, there may be postponements there, but it will come back - the key is preparation. There are danger signals as well. Just as the "British jobs for British workers" demand has no place in the trade union movement, Aslef’s leadership’s call to cross picket lines must be resisted. We can never allow scabbing to be made respectable. The clearest lessons for us all are: workers can fight in a recession and we can win, and the tradition of solidarity is fast being re-learnt. I don’t really have much care for the first ten of the ten commandments but the eleventh is one we must all share: "Thou shalt not cross a picket line." UM Unjum Mirza is Political Officer, London Transport Region, RMT (pc) ---- Interview A journey on the railroad Sin Nombre tells the story of a Honduran immigrant family on a dangerous train journey through Mexico to the US. US filmmaker Cary Fukunaga talks to Christophe Chataigné about his astounding and gripping debut Why did you choose immigration as the subject for your first film? It seems like a risky choice. I didn’t really think about it in those terms. I did a short film while still at film school. It was my second year project, not my thesis project, which typically as a film student you save for your calling card film - the film that you think might start your career. For your second year film you can just do whatever you want. And rather than do something ridiculous I wanted to do a serious film, more about today’s issues. I read this story about a trailer that was abandoned in Texas with immigrants inside it, and some of them ended up dying. It seemed like the perfect story to tell in the short story format, and because there’s a limited location - it’s isolated - it seemed a little bit easier to accomplish on a film student budget. So I made that film [Victoria para Chino] and it went on to have a life that was unexpected. It travelled to a lot of film festivals and won awards. While doing the research for the film I learned about Central American immigration, which I had never heard of before in terms of immigrants riding on top of freight trains and facing gangs. Some of the people on the trailer were from Central America. In fact, there’s a line in the short film where one of the guys wants to kill a kid - a little kid inside who’s crying at a checkpoint. He says, "Some of us have come further than you." The idea was that for Mexicans it’s easy because they take a bus to the border and then they deal with the smuggling across the border. But for Central Americans and Brazilians and even Cubans sometimes, they have to go through Central America and across Mexico, which is extremely dangerous. How did you research it? Firstly newspapers and longer forms of investigative journalism. Then in the summer of 2005 I went down to Central America and southern Mexico and did my own research. I brought a friend who had produced the short film. We organised academic research, meeting professors in universities in Chiapas. They put us into contact with the head of the state security, who got us into the prisons. Then from the prisons we went down to the border and started meeting immigrants and other rights groups - as if I were writing a research paper, basically. Then the plan was to jump on the freight trains, but after about two weeks of doing research like that, my friends (another friend had joined us) said they didn’t want to get on the freight trains, understandably. But I decided I was going to do it. So I did the freight trains at the end of our three weeks in Chiapas and I rode across Chiapas with about 800 immigrants. That was the first train ride I did of three. It must have been a difficult journey to take. Yes, a lot of stuff you see in the film is based on that train ride - small details about how people react and the kind of conversations people have; what they do to protect themselves; how people spread the word if there’s attacks and things like that. It’s all based on that trip. The scene where the migrants wait for the train at night - it’s dark and there’s this floodlight, which gives the train an ominous look. It made me think of a deportation train. That’s interesting. That comes from the nights I spent at the train station with the migrants. It’s scary when the train arrives. You feel it in your stomach; you feel nauseous. It’s big and noisy and you’re tired and your nerves are more sensitive. So I tried to put on screen how I remember feeling about it. You show scenes of people helping - some lob fruit up to the immigrants on the trains but then later we see kids on the side of the tracks throwing rocks at them. The rock-throwing part was from a guy I met on the border of Texas, a young guy who spent about three weeks crossing. There was a bunch of kids throwing rocks at them, heavy rocks, and their parents were just standing there doing nothing about it. How did you come across the Mara Salvatrucha gang? They’re part of the environment. What took a long time was finding out exactly how they were involved and why. Because a racketeering gang exists to make money - a gang is not always for protection. So if there’s no money to be made it’s hard to figure out why they exist. So most of the time most members of the gang denied they had anything to do with immigration. It took about a year and a half before anyone would say, "This is how it works, this is how we make our money from immigration." In southern Mexico the Mara control some drug dealing, some weapon smuggling, but they also control the train lines, so they are able to make money by taxing people on their territory. They tax the smugglers who are already charging the immigrants, so they are basically a middle level, another addition to the fee an immigrant pays to cross Mexico. You ensure none of the characters are one-dimensional, especially the gang members. I spent a lot of time asking the gang who bought things like toilet paper and how they did shopping in the house they all lived in together. They usually don’t get asked those questions. I just didn’t know how this household would work. How do you go shopping when you’ve got a face full of tattoos, you’re going to buy Mr Clean to clean toilets and other stuff? Your film succeeds in dealing with the issue of immigration because of your script. You don’t lecture people about the issue. Was there a tension between the subject and your artistic direction? I didn’t want to make it a film about an issue per se, because that’s just not an interesting story. When you try to make a story out of an issue it just ends up feeling contrived. So it just tries to stay with the characters first and I didn’t really think about whether I was going to talk about immigration laws or gang laws or things that people on the street level wouldn’t talk about. We told the story. That was it. How did you work with real migrants? That was towards the end of the film. We’d already done four or five weeks of shooting before that. In all the scenes that take place in Tapachula they were all extras, not real migrants. I’d have to place them, tell them how to sit, organise the different groups of extras so that it seemed realistic. Once we had the real immigrants I didn’t have to tell them anything - they know how to sit on top of a train! By the time I was shooting I was so used to travelling with immigrants and my actors were getting to meet them and spend time with them, hear their stories. I thought it was good for the people I was working with that they got to see and experience what I had experienced. Do you think people’s views of immigration will change when they see the film? I do think films can influence people, and especially influence them to learn more. When I was growing up I’d watch a movie and something would really fascinate me and I’d go and learn a lot about it. But to change people’s minds I think it takes much more time and you have to hit them personally, so I’m not sure I expect the film to change people’s minds. If someone’s anti-immigration they’re going to be anti-immigration after the film - they’ll probably think the film is some kind of propaganda. And someone who is pro human rights is still going to feel that way after the film. My philosophy in film school was the idea of filmmaking as what the griots do in Africa - you collect stories then you record them. The story’s not meant to be any more than a record of a time. So this is Mexican immigration 2007. The issue is very topical in Britain today as we have just had two fascists win seats in the European parliament. Always in times of economic strife people become way more jingoistic and isolationist. It’s hard, but the reality is that it’s always easier to point the finger at the outsider, but that’s rarely the root of the problem. What are you working on now? I’ve just now really started to put effort into writing a new film. This one is not at all like Sin Nombre, it’s more fantastical, maybe it’s going to be a musical. So you are quite happy to change genre, but do you still want to tell a story that has roots in today’s world? Absolutely. I wrote a film in 2007 based on a Nigerian novel called Beast of No Nation. I still really like the script. It’s a straightforward script, about a child in an unnamed West African country - it could be Sierra Leone or Liberia; it could be Nigeria 30 years ago. But right now it’s difficult to make that film, so I’m hoping to make it in a couple of years. But in between maybe I’ll make something more escapist. I’d like to mix it up. I’d just rather try a lot of different things and hopefully each film can stand on its own, and I will not be pigeonholed as someone who makes films about real life and has no imagination. Sin Nombre is released on 14 August ---- Column In Perspective Chris Harman Double edged ‘democracy’ The people of Poland demanded democracy in 1989 - but 20 years on the economy is still controlled by a tiny elite Anniversaries do not always bring people the joy they expect. Last month was meant to have seen a celebration by Poland’s rulers outside the shipyards in the city of Gdansk. It was to commemorate political changes in Poland and Hungary in the summer of 1989, which saw the first free elections for more than 40 years. Gdansk was seen as the great birthplace of the opposition movement in Poland, and prime minister Donald Tusk, who claims to be the heir to that movement, naturally wanted to celebrate there. But then he moved the celebration to Krakow, at the other end of the country - out of fear, Polish radio reported, that "the anniversary might turn into a brutal battle between police and trade unionists". This would have been politically very damaging for him, since it was the workers of Gdansk who began the process that led to the changes being celebrated. It would also have revealed something about the real significance of 1989. The Western media have always presented the year as a breakthrough for freedom and democracy on the one hand, and as proving the economic bankruptcy of "socialism" on the other. It was the illusion shared at the time by the great majority of those leading the opposition movements, as GM Tamás, the first oppositionist to win a seat in the Hungarian parliament, argues in the current issue of International Socialism journal. For millions of workers, students, peasants and intellectuals, the questions of freedom and democracy were important. Without them they were unable to express their own feelings through independent trade unions and lacked even the limited influence over the behaviour of rulers provided by parliamentary processes. But the changes of 1989 only produced a circumscribed version of freedom and a very limited form of democracy. There was freedom of speech - but the means of exercising that freedom remained in the hands of a very small privileged group, as state ownership of the media gave way to millionaire ownership. The democratic institutions established were, like those in the West, confined to political issues in the most narrowly defined sense. The mass of people could not exercise any control over the economic questions that determined much of their everyday lives - what was produced, for whom and how. The reforms were deliberately double edged. One set gave the mass of people marginally increased control over the state. The other set ensured that this did not give them control of the economy and instead put that into private hands. The near bankruptcy of the economic methods practised in Eastern Europe and the USSR was real enough by 1989. After rapid rates of growth in earlier decades signs of recurrent crisis were more and more visible. Poland, which had undergone a severe crisis in 1970, entered another in the late 1970s which turned into a deep slump in the early 1980s. Hungary had avoided such problems previously by borrowing vast sums from Western banks to celebrate "goulash communism", but now its economy too was in deep trouble, since what had been borrowed had to be repaid. Meanwhile the USSR was entering an economic crisis of its own. The economic crisis caused deep splits between the rulers about how to get out of it and threatened to produce an upsurge of popular anger. This had happened in Poland in 1980. There was the rise of the greatest workers’ movement in history, with the union Solidarnosc, created by delegates from occupied shipyards and factories, exercising for 16 months a counter-power nearly as powerful as the state. That movement had been crushed by a military coup at the end of 1981. But governmental documents show that a wave of smaller strikes in Poland in 1988 created fear of a new surge of counter-power. It was then that they agreed to unprecedented "roundtable" discussions with oppositionists. Those at the top decided they had to accept reform in order to prevent revolution - that "things had to change in order to remain the same". The negotiations were, by and large, with intellectuals - not direct representatives of the workers. The intellectuals sold the reforms to the workers by arguing that the market and democracy were twins - one promising prosperity and the other freedom. There was always a central fault in such talk. The old regimes of Eastern Europe were not based on the democratic planning under workers’ control that Karl Marx and Frederick Engels had seen as the essence of socialism. Not only were they run by self-appointed rulers with enormous privileges, but they were also linked into the world capitalist system by high levels of economic and military competition with Western states. This determined their economic dynamic and increasing propensity to stagnation and crises. The changes of 1989 could not do away with such propensities. It was not possible to deal with problems caused by the world market by increasing exposure to that market. The recessionary tendencies in Eastern Europe and the USSR turned into deep slump in the early 1990s. There were various degrees of recovery in the late 1990s and early 2000s, but only for Eastern Europe to be the region of the world where the effects of the present economic are most acute today. People swapped one sort of capitalism for another and are discovering it was not a great bargain. Hence the sour note to the celebrations. CH ---- Feature Refugees organise in Pakistan Ali Hassan and Gul Pasand of International Socialists Pakistan visited the Jalala refugee camp near Peshawar and found a mood to organise against the military assault Most people living in the camps come from the Swat and Buner districts of the North-West Frontier Province. They are very poor and know nobody in the cities. They are peasant workers, very small landholders and associated with lowly professions. However, they are angry to be described as beggars. One, Nisbat Khan, said, "Look at our conditions. This place is filthy and full of insects and other harmful creatures. I found a poisonous snake and killed it and when I showed it to a policeman he said, ‘You haven’t killed a Taliban! Why are you so proud of your catch?’" A young girl was shadowing us from camp to camp. When we asked her about her story it made both of us cry. Her mother and father were killed by bombs from the military. Shaista is 12 years old and came from Swat. Now she just wanders around in the camps; she has nobody left. People have the harshest words to say about aid relief. Jalal Khan, a middle-aged father of five, said, "The government gave us nothing. State officials come, take names, addresses, numbers and go back - we get nothing. This has happened many times. Relief is mere propaganda." The universal opinion among the hundreds we’ve met is that the Taliban had done nothing harmful. Generally people acknowledge that the military operation is due to the presence of Taliban, but everyone blames their forced migration on the indiscriminate bombing by the Pakistani military. Baghdada Khan, a schoolteacher, told us, "Look at the wire around my camp; my wife’s clothes are hanging over there. This is utterly shameful for me and it is all due to the military - they bombed our area day and night. The children were the worst affected. They cannot bear the horrific sounds of explosions and cry for hours out of fear. I migrated because I cannot bear seeing people killed in my neighbourhood and my children crying and I’m not able to do anything." Children are also the worst affected in the camps. There is dirty water, widespread disease and almost no sanitation. There is no medicine or medical help. In the Jalala camp they start distributing lunch at 1pm but there is a queue of thousands from 10am. One woman said, "I have been feeding my kids with boiled leaves for the past six days." At first refugees were reluctant to talk. But when we told them that we were not from any NGOs or state organisation and our purpose was to stop the military operation the response was tremendous. When we showed them the work of Jang Mukhalif Committee Karachi (Anti-War Committee Karachi), and propaganda material of the International Socialists, the migrants genuinely welcomed our campaign. When asked if they would help launch a struggle against the military operation people were very forthcoming. They offered all kinds of support and gave their contact numbers. One of the angry young men was Shahroze. He said, "Whenever you call us we will come with you, stage sit-ins and whatever is possible because protest is absolutely necessary if we are to get out of these camps and go back home." When we put up an International Socialists poster denouncing the military operation and the attacks on Pashtuns, people started kissing it. There was great jubilation and one man came forward and said, "If anyone touches this poster I will take him to task." There were many volunteers who came forward to distribute the anti-war leaflets. People took us around and showed us the horrible conditions. They also gave us phone numbers of other activists and leading people in the camps who will help coordinate anti-war efforts. In Peshawar and Mardan we met many people of the left. However, on the question of the war and military operations we found them confused and ready to oppose one another rather than form a joint platform against the military operation. Some say that those associated with the Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP) cannot be part of an alliance against war because the PPP is waging the war. Some intellectuals generally identified with the left openly support the military operation. Activists of the left are often inactive because of such differences and confusion. We came to the conclusion that, instead of trying to convince people who are not ready to act, we should move around in the camp and meet people and organise them in order to mobilise resistance, and hope that in the process others may join. We have found many young and angry people who want to resist the military operation. Bakht Khan, an outspoken young man, said, "We will join the preparations for a big demonstration and will bring women as well." Considering traditions this is a big step forward but Bakht said this was necessary because "if our women are forced to live in these hot and humid camps then why can’t we stage a sit-in on the roads? What is the difference? This war is not going to end if we are to keep sitting tight in the camps". After three days of meeting hundreds of refugees and activists in Peshawar and Mardan, an 18- member committee has been formed. People won’t accept the horrific conditions of camp life. They are going to resist and the most important thing right now is to mobilise as many activists as possible. We will now visit other camps, interview people, spread the message about our campaign and announce a demonstration through a press conference. There is a profound belief among the refugees that "resistance can work". ? ---- Feature Nothingdemocratic about Nazis How do we challenge the Nazi British National Party now that it has won two seats in the European parliament and is attempting to appear part of the mainstream? Anindya Bhattacharyya argues we have to start with an understanding of the nature of fascism The election of two members of the fascist British National Party (BNP) to the European Parliament in June has triggered a variety of reactions. Most people are rightly shocked and disgusted that Nick Griffin and Andrew Brons, a pair of hardened racists with a long history of involvement in Nazi politics, grabbed enough votes to become Euro MPs. But the BNP’s electoral advance has also opened up a series of arguments in the media and the population at large. In particular, there is a section of the establishment which insists that the BNP must now be treated as a legitimate political organisation and accorded the same rights and privileges given to any other party. The people who make this argument typically say that, while they personally find the BNP’s views reprehensible, they believe the party has won a democratic mandate. That was the reaction of many right wing commentators, who were outraged when a BNP "victory" press conference outside the Houses of Parliament was disrupted by protesters from Unite Against Fascism (UAF). Griffin had wanted to pose as a dignified and respectable politician - instead he ended up scurrying away from demonstrators with an egg splattered over his suit. The egg incident brought a smile to the faces of millions of people who hate the BNP and were glad to see Griffin get humiliated. It made clear that any attempts by the BNP to gain political respectability would be sharply challenged by anti-fascists. But it also led to a debate in the media about what kind of organisation the BNP was and what sort of tactics should be used against it. It’s important to understand that the BNP did not get its two seats because of a sudden lurch rightwards in the population at large. In fact the BNP’s vote dropped from the 2004 European elections in both regions where it gained seats, the North West of England, and Yorkshire and the Humber. The BNP pulled only 6.2 percent of the vote nationally and only 2.1 percent of those eligible to vote. Nevertheless, anger at the recession, disgust at the MPs’ expenses scandal and disillusion with all the mainstream political parties meant that many people did not vote. It was this drop in turnout that led to the BNP getting in - a drop that was sharpest among Labour voters in the party’s traditional heartlands. The Labour vote in Yorkshire and the Humber was just over half what it polled in 2004. Perfect storm Whatever the dynamics behind the election, the fact remains that the BNP did manage to ride what Griffin called a "perfect storm" to win seats. Almost immediately this led to calls for the party to be brought in from the cold. Senior journalists started to wonder out loud whether the previous informal ban on granting the BNP editorial space was "sustainable". Much of these arguments traded on the lazy assumption that the BNP’s racism somehow becomes politically acceptable if enough people vote for it. Under this logic the BNP view that black and Asian people in Britain are "racial foreigners" who should be "repatriated" is now apparently 6.2 percent OK, and would be 20 percent OK if the BNP polled 20 percent of the vote. There is nothing "democratic" about these spurious arguments. For starters, there can never be anything democratic about the state licensing the oppression and persecution of ethnic minorities. More fundamentally, democracy has to be based on equality. An organisation like the BNP that denies that equality cannot be considered democratic. But the BNP is not just a racist party. It is a fascist organisation, dedicated to continuing the political project of Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini. It is important to understand this because fascism poses a specific threat to democracy, and all progressive politics, that marks it out from other forms of right wing reaction and bigotry. The Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky took a very different approach when he theorised fascism as it first emerged in the 1920s in Italy and then Germany in the 1930s. Trotsky noted that fascism was different from previous forms of authoritarian reaction because it made use of a mass movement based on the petit bourgeoisie - the lower middle class - shopkeepers, doctors, small businesspeople and the like. Its historic function is to smash the working class and all forms of democratic institutions and replace them with a dictatorship. When capitalism is in a relatively stable condition this class tends to look towards the major political parties such as the Tories or social democratic parties. But during economic crises, Trotsky argued, "everything is turned on its head." The 1929 Wall Street Crash heralded the deepest slump in history. Europe’s middle class found that their world was collapsing around them. It was at this point that demagogues like Hitler offered a simple, racist, solution - Jewish international financiers and Jewish communists were conspiring to destroy society. Anti-Semitism was also used by Hitler to give his members a sense of superiority and provide a scapegoat for society’s ills. Although fascism is based primarily around the middle class, as it grows it begins to recruit sections of the working class and the unemployed. It is a mass party that acts like a cancer and eats away at the democratic structures of society. Fascist parties create a street army designed to smash working class organisations. As Hitler’s Nazi propaganda chief, Joseph Goebbels, said, "Whoever controls the street also conquers the masses, and whoever conquers the masses thereby conquers the state." In the years following the First World War, the Italian fascist leader Mussolini cobbled together a street army from demobbed veterans - the Blackshirts. He used these gangs to spread terror on the left, beating up and murdering socialists and trade unionists. At the same time, he posed as a respectable "patriotic" politician and persuaded Italy’s rulers to hand power over to him. A decade later Hitler deployed the same tactics in Germany. His Brownshirts were used to physically attack the left while the Nazi Party contested elections on a platform of nationalism and race hatred against Jews. Again, the ruling class eventually handed power over to him. The result was the Holocaust - the murder of 6 million Jews. Fascist movements come to power under two conditions. Firstly fascists have to prove to the ruling class that they are powerful enough to terrorise and smash the working class. The second condition is that sections of the ruling class are so desperate that they are prepared to abandon traditional methods to defend their interests and instead look towards fascism as a solution. In the past the ruling class had turned to the police or the army to maintain its position at the top of society. But as revolution swept across Europe in the early 20th century these tactics started to fail. The police were unable to put down mass strikes involving millions of workers. If fascist parties are allowed to create a mass base, they are able to do what the police and army cannot. It is in situations like this that sections of the ruling class can look towards the unthinkable. Fascist parties may talk about a "Third Way" between capitalism and communism, but ultimately when they have taken power they have always run society in the interests of big business. Thuggery It is this dual approach of organising street thuggery on the ground while maintaining a level of political respectability and standing in elections that is the defining characteristic of fascist politics. Fascists exploit the space afforded to them by democracy in order to take it over and smash it. They are counter -revolutionaries who want to forcibly reverse even the limited democratic rights we have. Thankfully we have seen nothing on this scale in Europe so far. But the warning signs are there. The victory of fascist parties in the European elections has seen a massive increase in attacks and murders of Roma people by fascist gangs in Eastern Europe. We have also seen attacks on Romanian Roma in Northern Ireland and rampaging right wing thugs in Luton attacking Asian shops in May. But we also understand that fascists aim to control the streets and must therefore be physically confronted and defeated by a mass movement. Attempting to defeat the Nazis solely through peaceful and constitutional means is at best futile and at worst positively dangerous. Whenever the BNP gets its claws into a community, racist attacks and murders rise. They must not be allowed to become a fixture on our television screens and in our newspapers. Nor can we let them hold meetings, rallies and press conferences without protesting against them and disrupting their activities where possible. The history of Italy in the 1920s and Germany in the 1930s stand as terrible warnings of what fascists can do to democracy if politicians give them the benefit of the doubt and grant them democratic rights. But the tradition of militant anti-fascist mass movements has a track record of success, from the Battle of Cable Street in 1936 to the Anti Nazi League in the 1970s and early 1990s. We urgently need to reactivate that tradition today to deal with the increased threat of the BNP. We need to win the argument that democracy is best defended by shutting the fascists out - an argument that is all the more pertinent now that the Nazi BNP has got its jackboot wedged firmly in the door. The socialist approach to opposing fascism, in contrast, understands that pandering to right wing arguments over Muslims and immigrants only helps to encourage the poisonous atmosphere from which the BNP draws strength. We root ourselves in a tradition of working class anti-racism that fights for black and white unity and defends minorities from those who would scapegoat them. And we need to demonstrate in practice that socialists have the best understanding of who the fascists are and how to fight them effectively. Building that fight is a crucial part of a wider struggle against poverty and racism - and ultimately against the capitalist system that is responsible for generating those evils in the first place. ---- Column A to Z of Socialism: Y is for Young Hegelians Marxism was born of a synthesis of the most advanced aspects of bourgeois social theory: English political economy, French socialism and German classical philosophy. In retrospect the first two elements of this seem obvious enough. Among the political economists, Adam Smith had shown that labour was the essence of value, while David Ricardo, despite being on the opposite side of the barricades, had pointed to the rationality of working class struggle. Meanwhile, the socialist workers who Karl Marx met in Paris were living proof of an alternative to the egoistic individualism assumed to be natural by the economists. Their practice showed class struggle need not simply be a negative reaction against exploitation but could act as the embryo of a positive socialist alternative to capitalism. If the relevance of German classical philosophy to the socialist movement is less obvious, Engels claimed that the latter was the direct "heir" of the former. Writing in a context dominated by the French Revolution, the two giants of classical German philosophy, Immanuel Kant and GWF Hegel, shared with the revolutionaries the idea that freedom was the human essence. However, while they both embraced politics that aimed at realising human freedom, each favoured the idea of reform from above over revolution from below. Moreover, while Kant’s vision of individual autonomy could act as a spur to a radical critique of absolutism his liberal followers tended to become more conservative after the triumph of bourgeois individualism. Although Hegel was nominally the more conservative of the two thinkers his theory lent itself to a much more radical interpretation. Hegel argued that while freedom was the universal human essence, because it was realised in definite social and cultural contexts it always took a specific historical form. The revolutionary implications of this idea are not difficult to imagine: as history progressed the concrete possibility of freedom would change in ways that tended to undermine old orders. Nevertheless, Hegel suggested that history had ended in 19th century Prussia! The contradiction between these two aspects of his thought was reflected in his infamous claim that "all that is real is rational; and all that is rational is real". If this statement reads like an apology for the status quo, because Hegel distinguished between what is real and what actually exists, it could also be squared with a commitment to reform - institutions which had been rational in the past could become irrational over time. So long as Prussia was moving in a reformist direction this tension between what Engels called Hegel’s conservative system and his revolutionary method could be reconciled. However, once reaction moved to the fore the contradictions at the core of Hegelianism caused a split among his followers. This split was first signalled by David Strauss’s Life of Jesus (1835). Whereas Hegel had largely bypassed discussion of the Gospels in his attempt to reconcile his system to the Protestantism of the Prussian state - thus opening the door to Hegelianism becoming essentially a state-sanctioned philosophy in the 1820s - Strauss’s devastating (Hegelian) critique of the Gospels exposed the limits of this link. From then on right wing (old) Hegelians defended Hegel’s conservative system against left wing Young Hegelians who explored the revolutionary implications of his method. While Strauss criticised the historical accuracy of the gospels, and thus the biblical fundamentalism of Prussia’s Lutheran elite, he nevertheless defended the myths of Christianity as a reflection of the needs of both early and modern Christian communities. Bruno Bauer pressed the revolutionary side of the Hegelian method further to claim that though Christianity had reflected the needs of the early Christian communities, because it had long since ceased to do so the focus of radical politics should be a critique of religion. Young Hegelian radicalism also found a voice in Ludwig Feuerbach’s claim that the Christian idea of god was best understood as a distorted image of our collective humanity, a claim which Feuerbach’s followers extended to argue for an abstract, "true socialism", disconnected from any class agency. Alternatively, Max Stirner staked out an anarchist critique of all religious and political systems including socialism. These, he insisted, should be opposed because they led to the authoritarian suppression of the individual ego. Whatever the substantive differences among the Young Hegelians, they agreed that radical ideas were key to changing the world. This diverged from Hegel’s insistence that any social transformation must be rooted in underlying changes in the way people lived. From this perspective it was as absurd to try to extend freedom beyond the limits of bourgeois egoism by abstract moral injunctions as it was to hope that lions might lie down with lambs. Rather, the expansion of freedom was dependent upon the prior emergence of forms of practice pointing to different ways of life. Ironically, this Hegelian thesis informed Marx’s break with the Young Hegelians. Opening with a criticism of their abstract politics his argument culminated in the claim that the emergent workers’ movement, dismissed by them as irrelevant, pointed to a real deepening of the idea of freedom. He suggested that, for workers, socialism was not a good (Feuerbach) or bad (Stirner) moral doctrine, but was the ideological moment of an emerging way of life within which solidarity came to be desired because it had become a real need. From this standpoint neither biblical fundamentalism (Strauss) nor religion more generally (Bauer) were key social problems. Rather they were symptoms of deeper issues, and Marx insisted that the struggle for freedom should shift its focus to these causes. Thus, against the pseudo-revolutionary posturing of the Young Hegelians, he argued that in the modern world a really revolutionary ideology is one which reflects and speaks to the actual movement of workers for freedom. Paul Blackledge Further reading: Theses on Feuerbach by Karl Marx; The German Ideology and The Holy Family by Karl Marx and Frederick Engels; The Young Hegelians and Karl Marx by David McLellan ---- Books Main review Zombie Capitalismby Chris Harman Lenin once wrote of politics, "There are decades when nothing happens; and there are weeks when decades happen." For people around the world, rich and poor, young and old, this statement could rarely have rung more true than late in 2008 when the economic orthodoxy came down to earth with an almighty bump. From Margaret Thatcher’s insistence that "there is no alternative" to neoliberal capitalism to George Bush Senior’s talk of a "new world order" our rulers had insisted that the untrammelled free market represented the best, indeed the only, way of creating a prosperous society for a generation. These illusions were decisively shattered in 2008. Nationalisations, bailouts and enormous collapses heralded the biggest economic crisis in 80 years. Commentators from left and right were paralysed by confusion. Talk of the end of capitalism as we know it was rife. If this was the death of capitalism, however, its supporters were not prepared to let it go without a fight. In the wake of these massive upheavals, Chris Harman’s new book Zombie Capitalism is both timely and hugely valuable. Following Harman’s 1984 book, Explaining the Crisis, as well as the numerous articles he has written for the International Socialism journal, it is a book that succeeds in analysing the incredibly dynamic, shifting forms that capitalism and its relationship to the state takes. The first three chapters set out Karl Marx’s basic concepts. This is done in a way that not only provides grounding for the rest of the book but also deals directly with the criticisms of many of Marx’s positions, both from the standpoint of mainstream "neoclassical" economics and from within the Marxist tradition. These chapters forcefully restate both the dynamism of the capitalist mode of production and its inequality. We see how capital, itself the accumulation of labour performed in the past, becomes reified as a system of domination that, in Marx’s words, "vampire-like, only lives by sucking living labour, and lives the more, the more labour it sucks". In its blind rush to accumulate in order to compete with other capitals, capitalism sows the seeds of overproduction, unemployment and economic crisis. For Marx, this was a central part of the system. Crises were not the result of bad choices by managers but "momentary, violent solutions for the existing contradictions". These chapters are among the strongest in the book. Particularly useful is the way in which Harman is able to demystify the processes which are too often chalked up to the workings of "the market" or "the system" or some other term that seems beyond human comprehension. Rather, he goes to great lengths to show how these terms actually describe not metaphysical things but real relations between people that have taken on a life of their own. By emphasising that capitalism is constantly changing the world around it and, in the process, itself, he is able to overcome objections to Marxism that rest on static assumptions: the so-called "transformation problem" of translating value into prices, or the equalisation of profit rates across the system as a whole, for example. This understanding of capitalism as a dynamic system that ages through time informs the next two chapters, which explore the developments in Marxist theory in the years following Marx’s death. Marx had noted how the recurrence of crises within the system would have the effect of concentrating more and more capital into fewer and fewer hands, as failed companies were gobbled up by more successful ones in an effort to restore profit. These ideas were taken up by Rudolf Hilferding in the first decade of the 20th century in his book, Finance Capital. He showed concentration and centralisation of capitalism had led to the development of monopolies, arguing that "this naturally involves...a change in the relation of the capitalist class to state power". The connotation of this change was drawn out by Lenin and Nikolai Bukharin during the First World War. The rise of monopolies led to greater interdependence between business and states, or, in Bukharin’s term, the development of "state capitalist trusts". These state capitals are forced to compete on a world stage for resources and markets: "This anarchic structure of world capitalism is expressed in two facts: world industrial crises on the one hand, wars on the other." Recognising the link between the state and capitalism is crucial to understanding the system. To hold to the idea that states are a relic of a bygone age and not intrinsic to capitalism is to ignore its actual development as a part of a global system in which states have played a defining role, from the emergence of markets through to the massive nationalisations and bailouts of the current crisis. The binding together of the state and its domestic capitals compels the state bureaucracy to act as an agent of capital accumulation. This not only explains the actions of Western capitalist states during the Great Depression and afterwards. It is also an important underpinning of the theory, advanced by Tony Cliff, that the Soviet Union and its satellites were state capitalist - driven to accumulate in order to compete militarily on a global scale. In turn, this global military competition saw the state channel enormous amounts of capital into arms spending. Another member of the International Socialist tradition, Mike Kidron, rigorously analysed how this spending was able to slow the rate of accumulation and thus counteract the tendency towards crisis during the so-called "Golden Age of Capitalism" from the late 1940s through to the early 1970s. These concepts are important analytical tools if we are to make sense of the development of capitalism in the 20th century, which is the basis of the second section of the book. Though covering much of the same ground as Explaining the Crisis, Harman has jettisoned much of the more theoretical material of that work, which allows readers less well versed in economics to grasp the central dynamics of the period. The extension of the analysis to include the collapse of the Stalinist economies and beyond will be of great interest, particularly to people who would not have been following commentary on it in the International Socialism journal at the time. The remainder of the book deals with capitalism in the 21st century and the return of the crisis. Harman explains how the delusions of unending growth during this period rested on a bubble of financial speculation and debt that would inevitably have to end. This section will be eagerly anticipated by readers of this magazine. Accounts of the crisis put forward so far, whether by neoliberals like Martin Wolf or Keynesians such as Graham Turner, have, for all their strengths, only grasped elements of the roots of the crisis. Harman integrates the analysis put forward by the International Socialist tradition of the collapse of profit rates after the long boom into explaining the crisis that grips global capitalism today. The failure of profit rates to recover to the levels enjoyed during the long boom in capitalism, itself the result of massive arms spending, meant that capital flowed into the financial sector, creating a virtuous circle: lending created demand; demand created more commodities, the proceeds of which went back into lending. However, those who try to blame "finance" and bankers for the crisis, as opposed to capitalism in general, are taken to task. Harman insists that "finance is a parasite on the back of a parasite, not a problem to be dealt with in isolation from capitalism as a whole". The notion that crises can be regulated out of existence is clearly ridiculous. However, as the collapse of Lehman Brothers showed, the sheer size of the units of capital in the modern system means that their failure can wreak havoc. This does not mean we should adopt a catastrophic view that capitalism is doomed to imminent collapse. States will throw everything they have at propping up the system. Like the wild-eyed Dr Frankenstein channelling electricity through his creation to give it life, our rulers have ploughed untold billions of dollars into the global economy to keep it afloat, leaving us with lumbering, unstable and dangerous "zombie capitalism", threatening not only crises and war but the environmental destruction of the planet. In a final chapter Harman makes it clear that, despite the repeated pronouncements of the death of the working class, or its inability to fight due to restructuring, workers still have the capability to resist and, in doing so, pose an alternative to the lunatic system we live under today. This book is an essential read for anyone struggling to make that new world a reality. It is accessible for readers new to economics and will be a good jumping off-point for anyone who wants to return to Explaining the Crisis or Marx’s Capital. It is also crucial for those better acquainted with Marxist theory, as it both extends the analyses put forward by our tradition in the past and sharpens our arguments for the future. Jonny Jones Zombie Capitalism, £16.99, is published by Bookmarks Publications and available from www.bookmarksbookshop.co.uk ---- The Ecological Revolution John Bellamy Foster Monthly Review £13.95 If there was ever a case not to judge a book by its cover, this is it. Despite the rather garish and vaguely confusing cover image, this is possibly the most coherent and fundamentally serious book on the issues facing the planet that I have had the pleasure to read. Structured in three parts, it outlines the environmental problem we face, the social causes of climate change, and finally the necessity of revolution. John Bellamy Foster’s collection of essays encompasses writings on global warming, peak oil, species extinction, world water shortages, global hunger, alternative energy sources, sustainable development and environmental justice. This is not a book about convincing people that we face a serious problem in terms of climate change - that’s an argument already won with all but the deliberately obtuse. You can no longer turn on the television without some multinational corporation attempting to sell you their green wares, and a desire to be seen as "green" is now central to mainstream politics. But the resultant "green capitalism" struggles with its inherent contradiction. Breaking the link between human beings and nature was a fundamental building block in the transition from feudalism to capitalism. Restoring that link would require a revolutionary movement, not simply amending the current system. The book highlights how, for example, the 2007 Stern report was seen by many as a major step forward with its admission that climate change could be regarded as "market failure of the greatest scale the world has ever seen". But this report - perfectly in line with mainstream economists - offers little. Despite the environmental promises - and the noise about reducing carbon emissions - the reductions discussed are widely acknowledged to result in a catastrophic rise in global temperatures of up to six degrees. Taking action to prevent this would threaten the economy - a price that will not be paid. Karl Marx wrote, "Even an entire society, a nation, or all simultaneously existing societies taken together are not the owners of the earth. They are simply the possessors, its beneficiaries, and have to bequeath it in an improved state to succeeding generations as boni patres familias (good heads of the household)." Marxists are often seen as lacking when it comes to environmentalism. This book clearly shows, through the writings of Marx, Engels and others, that ecology is central to our tradition. As Foster writes, "Ecological and socialist revolutions, if carried out to their logical conclusions, are necessary and sufficient conditions of each other… Socialism is ecological, ecologism is socialist, or neither can truly exist." Kelly Hilditch ---- Imperialism and Global Political Economy Alex Callinicos Polity £16.99 The notion of "imperialism" is firmly back on the global agenda. For many thousands of people who have become politically active over the past decade through involvement in the great movements against war and occupation in Iraq and Afghanistan, it helps inform the way in which they now make sense of the world. Yet as Alex Callinicos argues in this important and impressive study, it is not enough to have a generalised understanding of "empire" and "imperialism". Rather, as socialists we need to understand what is specific about the current variant of imperialism, and what distinguishes it from pre-capitalist versions, as well as from the imperialism of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. This is not a matter of abstract philosophical clarification. Without such an understanding of the dynamics and contradictions of the current world system, our ability to contribute to its overthrow is considerably impaired. For Callinicos, developing such an understanding means starting from the recognition that modern imperialism is "capitalist imperialism". As he himself notes, this is hardly news. An understanding that the geopolitical struggles of the early 20th century were bound up with developments in the structure of capitalism was central to the Marxist analysis of imperialism developed by Lenin, Nikolai Bukharin and others before and during the First World War. While elements of this classical legacy are still relevant today, these analyses cannot be applied dogmatically to current situations. Instead, like David Harvey, Callinicos argues that capitalist imperialism is constituted by the intersection of two forms of competition, namely economic and geopolitical. As he shows, this is a powerful explanatory formula. Its strengths are, firstly, that it is historically open, in allowing for the exploration of different types of imperialism. Secondly, it is non-reductionist, since it involves a concrete analysis of the relative influence of each of these dimensions in each specific situation. Thirdly, and very importantly, it places competition at the heart of our understanding of imperialism. Here the debt to the classical legacy is most obvious. In the same way that Lenin, almost a century ago, refuted Karl Kautsky’s arguments that "ultra-imperialism" made wars less likely, Callinicos here demolishes the arguments of those such as Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri who argue that competition between states is now obsolete, and that national antagonisms have been dissolved in a transnational network of capitalism (a difficult argument to sustain in the wake of the Iraq war). In addition, in contrast to "third worldist" approaches which conceptualise imperialism in terms of a North-South divide, for Callinicos, as for Lenin and Bukharin, the central dynamic of imperialism was, and continues to be, competition between advanced capitalist states. From this starting point Callinicos goes on to explore the relationship between Marx’s analysis of capitalist crisis and the development of imperialism. In another chapter he analyses the relationship between state and capital (including critiques of current International Relations theories and "Political Marxism" approaches). Callinicos states that he has spent two decades working on a theory of imperialism. As the product of that effort, this book, which builds not only on the insights of Lenin, Bukharin, Rosa Luxemburg and others but also on the work of comrades from the International Socialist tradition, is both a valuable contribution to our understanding of modern imperialism and a powerful weapon in the struggle to end it. Iain Ferguson ---- Lenin: A Study on the Unity of His Thought Georg Lukács Verso £6.99 This newly republished short book is essential in understanding Lenin’s contribution to Marxism. When Georg Lukács wrote it in 1923 he had only recently become a Marxist, radicalised by the First World War and the Russian Revolution. He joined the Hungarian Communist Party in 1918 at the age of 33, and up to that point had written books on literary criticism. Lukács outlines how Lenin built upon Karl Marx’s insight that the working class is the historical agent which can bring about socialism. Lenin addressed the problem of unevenness in working class struggle and consciousness. This can be seen clearly today. The Visteon workers occupied their factory to force concessions from the bosses, while other workers have not challenged similar attacks. And workers on an individual level have uneven consciousness. An anti-imperialist might not see the need for strikes. A picket line militant might be opposed to abortion. For Lukács, the significance of Lenin is that he grasped the practical conclusions from this. The winning of the working class to socialist revolution, the linking of immediate class concerns to the broader necessity to overthrow capitalism, has to be fought for in every struggle and for many years before the revolution itself. Capitalist crisis and even mass strikes will not in themselves lead to socialism. Lukács writes, "The Leninist party concept represents…the most radical break with the mechanistic and fatalistic vulgarisation of Marxism." Lukács writes that Lenin’s concept of revolutionary strategy involves firstly the clear organisational distinctiveness of the revolutionary party, and secondly "total solidarity" of the party with all struggles against exploitation and oppression. If only the first happens the organisation will be an irrelevant sect, or attempt to be a "substitute" for real mass struggle. If only the second happens, revolutionaries will be submerged in the unevenness of working class consciousness. Lukács argues that the revolutionary party goes "beyond mere empiricism". It does not see the reality of a situation as static, which it must passively reflect. Rather the situation is always open to being changed if the party seizes on the key element which can transform it. So the Visteon workers’ struggle was important not just in itself, but because if generalised it would substantially alter the balance of class forces in Britain today. Lukács goes on to show how Lenin’s theories on the state and imperialism were part of the same world view which shaped his views on organisation. Unfortunately, in the afterword written in 1967, Lukács argues that the book should be seen as a product of its time written in a naive revolutionary fervour. But as the mass struggles which broke out a year later showed, capitalism continually produces both crises and resistance. This book needs to be discovered by a new generation. Jonathan Maunder ---- A Radical History of Britain Edward Vallance Little, Brown £25 I read this book as the corruption scandal about MPs’ expenses reached a climax. It fuelled my mounting frustration at commentators who repeatedly talked of the "very British" reaction to it all, in contrast to those dastardly continentals who’d be storming the palace of Westminster. What Edward Vallance provides are clear examples of all sorts of officials being dragged out by angry protesters and decapitated on the streets of London. In 1391, in the wake of the Black Death, as the aristocracy tried to reimpose feudal duties on a peasantry enjoying greater bargaining strength, and amid the rising tide of the enclosure of common land and the imposition of a poll tax, the English peasantry rose up. The Kent rebels, led by Wat Tyler, took London, seizing and beheading the chancellor of the exchequer and other government officials on Tower Hill. The Peasants’ Revolt had radical demands, as this book points out, though it did not challenge the existence of the monarchy. King Richard IImurdered Tyler during negotiations and persuaded his followers to quit London. Yet aristocratic fear of any repeat led wages and conditions to rise in subsequent years. In 1450 Kentish rebels, led by Jack Cade, once more marched on London, this time against the high taxes imposed to fund disastrous wars with France. They took the city. Once more the rebellion was quelled by a false royal promise of pardon. Cade was executed as "order" was again imposed. Twenty five English counties were involved in the "Kett’s rebellion" of 1549 over increasing enclosure. Kett’s forces took Norwich. The government was able to deal with each area of resistance in turn but on each of these three occasions the "mob" had effectively ruled in parallel with royal power. And of course parliamentary rule was itself won by the revolution of the 1640s. A Radical History of Britain details the ideas of Tom Paine and the Chartists, and explains the long fight for liberty and the vote. Vallance also charts the rise of the Labour Party and gives a good account of the suffragettes. He catalogues the fight against fascism and ends with praise for the Stop the War movement. I thoroughly enjoyed it. Now, where’s my pitchfork? Chris Bambery ---- The Rise and Fall of Communism Archie Brown The Bodley Head £25 Beginning with the Russian Revolution and ending with the downfall of the one-party regimes in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, the period between 1917 and 1989-91 saw billions of people across the world living in states which were claiming to strive for the construction of a fundamentally different system to capitalism: "communism". The ambitious aim of Archie Brown’s work is to provide a reliable account of how and why these states came about, their longevity, and what caused their downfall. Although he belongs to the liberal mainstream, Brown appears well suited for the task: he has written extensively for more than 40 years on Soviet and Russian politics. Brown differentiates between the idea of "communism" (with a lower case "c") based on an egalitarian and stateless society, and "Communist" systems (with a capital "C"). He attempts to define Communism as a system in which power is monopolised by a centralised party, a centrally-planned non-capitalist economy, and an ideological commitment to the international spread of communism. But as he seeks to apply this definition, Brown’s liberal preconceptions become problematic. He depicts the Russian Revolution as more of a coup d’état by the Bolsheviks than the result of a prolonged collective struggle from below. Brown argues that the initial deficiencies of Communism led to its final downfall. Lacking democratic rights and economically inferior to the West, the final nail in the coffin was provided with the declining power of the USSR. As Brown puts it, "If it ceased to be Communist, it was clear that the survival hopes for Communism in all other Warsaw Pact countries were minimal." He says remarkably little about the role of collective resistance against the bureaucratic regimes of Eastern Europe and the USSR. Instead the credit for why this ended up as a remarkably peaceful process is given to the reform-minded leadership of the USSR, and in particular to Brown’s favourite Communist, Mikhail Gorbachev. Brown’s admiration for Gorbachev reflects his emphasis on the role of ideas and great leaders, to the detriment of material forces and collective struggles as driving forces of social development. Having said that, Brown’s book is a stimulating read, which provides valuable insights to socialists interested in developing a deeper understanding of "Communist" systems. And for those comrades who find Brown’s arguments superficial, there are excellent writings within the Socialist Workers Party tradition from Alex Callinicos, Chris Harman and Mike Haynes. Adam Fabry ---- A Child in Palestine Naji al-Ali Verso £9.99 The cartoons of the legendary Palestinian character, Hanthala, are composed into this beautiful collection. One drawing sees a man holding his dead child in his arms, the child’s hands amputated and bloody, behind him a cinema screen reads "The End" - the horror in Palestine continues after the news finishes. Another depicts Mikhail Gorbachev and Ronald Reagan in bed under a duvet of the map of the world, with Reagan taking too much of the cover; an incredibly simple, yet powerful, image. Within all these pictures is little Hanthala, most of the time silently watching events, sometimes crying, sometimes punching the air in anger; but always witnessing the atrocities and injustices. My only criticism of this book is the captions, which tend to dictate interpretations, not giving the cartoons credit as pieces of art. At times they don’t translate the Arabic words into English, which I found very frustrating. However, this is more than made up for by the art itself. This wonderful collection reflects al-Ali’s views on a world that has turned its back on his people. Hanthala has become a proud mascot of the Palestinians and symbolises their continued struggle for justice and resilience in pursuing that goal. The power of al-Ali’s work can be seen in his untimely death in 1987 - assassinated on the streets of London by Israeli secret agents. James Haywood ---- Strike by Name Norman Strike Bookmarks £8 Former miner Norman Strike decided to mark the 25th anniversary of the 1984-5 miners’ strike by blogging his diary from the strike on the internet. This proved so popular that it has been put together for this book. From chapters with headlines such as "Whoopee", "Police and thieves" and "1980 Fuckin’ 5", we get a real taste of what is was like as a rank and file miner during the strike. As Norman becomes "committed" his life becomes hectic and filled with meetings, picket lines, and befriending rock groups like the Redskins whose lead singer interviews him for the NME. He also finds time to read and review Emile Zola’s novel Germinal for Socialist Worker, a paper he sold to other pickets during the strike. His story is sometimes funny and often brutal but is always honest. Norman gives us many clues to why the strike went down to defeat but also how it could have been won. Alongside accounts of police brutality and media bias are many wonderful tales of comradeship and solidarity displayed by other strikers and their families and supporters. I loved rattling through this, as it brought back many memories for me as a former miner and will do for others. But this is more than a trip down memory lane; it gives a voice to those of us who, despite being defeated, will always believe that by making a stand we did the right thing - something sorely missing in the present debates about the 1984-5 miners’ strike. Ian Mitchell ----- New in paperback and Children books Belching Out the Devil by Mark Thomas (Ebury Press £7.99) Mark Thomas takes on Coca-Cola as he explores the darker side of the famous drink. He highlights among other things the infringements of workers’ rights and the impact the company has on communities. ---- The Turnaround by George Pelecanos (Orion £7.99) Written by one of the writers of The Wire, The Turnaround shows how 15 minutes of someone’s life can dominate the next 35 years. It is crime fiction at its best. ---- Two Good Thieves by Daniel Finn (Macmillan Children’s Books £9.99) In an unnamed South American city, child thief Demi and his lookout, Baz, make a dangerous enemy when stealing a priceless jewel. (For young adults.) ---- Stuff that Scares your Pants Off! by Glenn Murphy (Macmillan Children’s Books £4.99) It’s OK to be scared. Glenn Murphy looks at the most common fears, including natural disasters, dentists, ghosts and monsters. This book is a fun, carefully pitched popular science title for children. ---- Culture Column Mike Gonzalez A time for tragedy "For a writer to experience life tragically…there must be in his society a poignant, underlying sense of the times being morally and practically out of joint" (Victor Kiernan). If that is so, then it is a perfect moment for the National Theatre to present the tragedy of Phaedra (Phèdre), with Helen Mirren in the title role. This version is Ted Hughes’s version of Phèdre by 17th century French dramatist Jean Racine. His classical theatre held rigidly to the rules of Greek theatre, and its formal conventions of language and staging. But, despite these constraints, it is a work riven with tension and internal conflict. At the heart of Greek theatre was the idea of hubris, the excessive pride that leads to the inescapable destruction human beings face when, out of greed or excessive ambition or simple egotism, they forget their own limitations - or their own humanity - and try to usurp the power of the gods. The effect was, as the Greeks put it, "cathartic" - it allowed the audience to experience fear and terror at the consequences of such insolence, and then provided a kind of resolution, or a warning. Phaedra is driven by an uncontainable sexual passion for her stepson, Hippolytus. She confesses it to her nurse who in turn tells him. His rejection enrages Phaedra, who then takes revenge by denouncing him to his father, Theseus, for attempting to cajole her into bed. Her husband banishes his son and then arranges for the gods to kill him. Phaedra then kills herself out of regret and remorse. Phaedra is a tragic heroine, just like her contemporary, Medea (she poisons herself with the same potion that Medea has used to kill herself and her children). Their tragedy, however, is not simply that they come to a bad end or experience disappointment. Like every tragic hero, both these women suffer from an inner conflict, a battle within and against themselves, and at the same time are engaged in a struggle with their world, their society. Irrepressible passion, a sense of destiny, hatred or love, can drive individuals to go beyond their own limits, whether or not they understand fully what is happening to them or what the consequences are. The other factor in their tragedy, however, is that the social constraints that hold them back have, for one reason or another, been loosened. Hamlet, for example, asks himself whether or not he should "suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune". It is his own, individual decision; he acknowledges the forces acting on him (the slings and arrows) but he doesn’t simply yield to them, even though they batter and claw at him. The England to which Hamlet spoke his words was going through a time of profound change. Racine, too, was writing at a time when the absolute and unchallenged authority of the church, which he personally accepted, was being challenged by new ideas. The original play on which Phaedra was based was Euripides’s Hippolytus. Unlike the great dramas of Sophocles in earlier epochs, the Greece of Euripides was a decadent place, riddled with corruption exposed in the course of the brutal Peloponnesian War. The noble times seemed long past, the gods and the nobility seemed to have become petty and vengeful, and figures like Phaedra and Medea pursued their unrestrained passions to revenge and destruction. Yet like all tragic figures, Phaedra, Medea and the others die in the end. Their dilemmas and inner conflicts express a deeper discontent or dysfunction - they are "out of sorts with their time". They feel the end of an age and look for the shape of new times, yet cannot see it. They are standing on a collapsing bridge over a chasm, their feelings the sign of an era in meltdown. It might seem that the only conclusion to be drawn is a conservative one - that anyone who steps outside the framework of the given order is bound to suffer and die. If that were true, they would not be tragic figures, simply foolish or misguided. It takes something else for them to be tragic. There is nobility in the tragic hero or heroine, a determination to break out of whatever circle constrains or holds them down. The reasons for their resolution need not be noble in themselves, or particularly visionary. In Phaedra’s case it is love or passion that leads her to hurl herself against the walls that hem her in; in Medea’s it is the pain of betrayal. Their failure is inevitable because, while their own world may be falling apart, the world of the future which will operate according to different values does not yet exist. At the end of Racine’s play, Phaedra (like Cleopatra), announces her own death. But as Theseus says, in his final speech, the world cannot just be put back in place. When such passions are unleashed, the world changes for ever. That is the revolutionary promise of tragedy: it points ahead to a future as yet undefined that will replace this conflict-ridden present. MG Phèdre is at the National Theatre, London, until 27 August ---- Reviews Film 35 Shots of Rum Director Claire Denis Release date: 10 July Claire Denis’s latest film is a warm and beautifully observed portrayal of life in a working class suburb of Paris. Centring on the deeply affectionate relationship between Lionel, a widowed train driver, and Josephine (Jo), his daughter, the plot unfolds effortlessly, yet offers rich insight into the various characters who make up their world. Gabrielle, a neighbour and former girlfriend of Lionel’s, waits on her apartment balcony hoping to catch a glimpse of him returning home. Noé, a slightly odd and somewhat detached young guy who lives upstairs, returns home each evening to find only his cat waiting for him. The comfortable and easy-going friendship that all four share serves only to highlight the underlying loneliness of Gabrielle and Noé, in contrast to Lionel and Jo’s strong bond. But Lionel is aware that his daughter is becoming too old to maintain such a close link with him and encourages her to be more independent and "to feel free", accepting the subsequent relationship that develops between her and Noé. While Denis’s film is primarily a study of individual human relationships, it comments on several wider debates in French society. The relentless, exhausting nature of work is captured in the weary expressions of commuters who ride the subway system. René, one of the train drivers, looks forward to retirement to escape this grind but is desolate once it arrives, missing the camaraderie of work and unable to find his place in life. Jo stumbles across a student blockade of her university, in protest at the closure of an anthropology department. She leads a classroom debate on the adverse effects of debt on African countries, during which one student suggests it’s a systemic problem, encouraging his classmates to read Fanon on the effects of colonisation. But it is the depiction of everyday life in Paris’s suburbs that stands out most. Denis shows an almost exclusively black cast of ordinary people from France’s former colonies who work, live, love, debate and socialise together. This is in sharp contrast to the facile and often racist portrayal by the mainstream media and politicians of dangerous "no-go areas" inhabited largely by ethnic minorities who sporadically riot. For this and the understated yet thoughtful way in which it discusses the complexities of their lives, the film is to be welcomed. Jacqui Freeman ---- Shirin Director Abbas Kiarostami Release date: out now It might be truer to the spirit of Kiarostami’s latest experimental work to begin, dear reader, not with a description of his film but on the condition of review-writing. There is something unromantic about the critic’s view of the blank computer screen when compared to the audience member’s relationship with the cinema screen, on which images in flickering light bring love, violence, death - in a word, emotion. With a central place in the international arthouse circuit, the career of Abbas Kiarostami has developed from documentary-style narratives about human behaviour that were part of the 1970s Iranian New Wave, to recent explorations of the nature of cinema itself. Which takes us to Shirin. Aside from the opening credits, rolling on evocative scenes woven into tapestry, the film’s 90 minutes remain on the faces of an audience of women in an auditorium where a film plays, heard but not seen. As the blood and thunder melodrama plays out in front of them, their reactions range from yawns to gasps, and from inattentiveness to tears - lots of them - that bind the uncommunicating audience into a collective. Shirin is thus about storytelling, and about the experiences storytelling enables in the audience it creates. The horses, dungeons, heroes and romance of the film they watch bring us back to the classical bases of fiction, the disembodied voices on the unseen screen suggesting the earliest oral tales from which narrative itself originates. But Kiarostami’s film hardly offers an experience similar to that of the women seen silently watching; Shirin offers instead a collision of disembodied voices from an unseen film with an onscreen audience of voiceless bodies. In this way, Shirin is an avant-garde separation of meaning from image, and of narrative from reception. As the film continues, one cannot help but consider that the camera alights only on women. Women are forever subjects of stories but not their active participants, condemned to wait, whether in distress or in love, for men to act. The rights of women are so frequently the prism through which Iran is viewed, our own pro-war commentators claiming with as much fervour as any cleric the right to speak on behalf of the women who form the majority of the population. And yet as Shirin gradually attunes our attention to the slightest facial detail, the smallest outward explanation of the inner hopes and feelings that animate the women, their silence assumes a quiet strength that seems to edge towards defiance, intensifying the ultimately unknowable emotional depths. Perhaps not entertainment. But then that’s not the point for this challenge to the basis of the cinema experience. Louis Bayman ---- Frozen River Director Courtney Hunt Release date: 17 July Frozen River, directed by Courtney Hunt, is a gritty and captivating contemporary drama, based on fact, that depicts the escalating and desperate situation of single mother Ray Eddy, played by Melissa Leo. We are first introduced to Ray in the quiet of the morning, before her two sons have woken, upon the discovery that her husband has left her, taking with him the down payment for a new mobile home the family were saving up for. In her confusion and grief we are shown a woman embittered by a set of difficult circumstances, but refusing to consider the possibility of giving up. The acting in this first scene as Ray contemplates her new situation is subtle, but it gives the film a powerful opening. Set along the US-Canadian border of upstate New York, this film shows how Ray, in order to provide for her children, slowly becomes embroiled in the very shady world of smuggling illegal immigrants into the US from Canada, with accomplice Lila (Misty Upham), a Mohawk woman who lives in the local reservation that runs along the border. Frozen River shows how the two parents risk everything to provide for their families, or merely to hold them together. Both characters are shown to be hardened by their experiences of life: profoundly human and at the same time, in different ways, very strong. Through the contrast of their differences, Hunt creates an interesting dynamic between the two women. One, Lila, has suffered all her life from racist discrimination from both the white community near the Mohawk reservation and the local state troopers; the other, Ray, has been struggling to make ends meet while at the same time dealing with her husband’s addictive nature. Both characters are shown to have no choice but to dip into a very dark world in order to survive. The midwinter, snow-ridden setting of the film does nothing but back up the harrowing sense of struggle. However, this gripping atmosphere doesn’t make Hunt a sensationalist. Throughout the film a sense of pragmatic domesticity, especially on the part of Ray and her responsibilities as a parent, is never forgotten. This duality of mundane everyday life mixed with the sometimes terrifying illegality of the smuggling world continues throughout the film. But it maintains a balance of optimism and realism to its very end: optimism about the strong human compassion of those brought down by struggle, and realism about what people come up against while living on the breadline. Although Hunt manages to successfully show the reasons why people take up smuggling in order to survive, the argument behind illegal immigation is never explored. However, I think that the main focus was always supposed to be on those committing what some people consider a crime, rather than the moral or political implications of the crime itself. I definitely recommend Frozen River, though perhaps not after a particularly long or difficult day. It is sometimes a dark film, but deeply engrossing and thought-provoking. It explores at length the extent to which people under pressure will go to risk everything and to survive. Millie Fry ---- Exhibition Banksy versus Bristol Museum City Museum & Art GalleryBristol, until 31 August Banksy has come home to Bristol. The anonymous street artist launched his biggest ever exhibition at the city’s museum at the end of June, provoking Banksy mania in the local and national press. Banksy versus Bristol Museum brings together more than 100 pieces of work, many of which are brand new. The exhibition was conceived, planned and set up by Banksy’s crew and the head of the museum without the knowledge of Bristol City Council, which owns the place, once again demonstrating Banksy’s chutzpah. Some of the works are placed around the Edwardian building among the dusty old exhibits in a "remix" of the museum. The show is a mixture of Banksy’s graffiti and stencil art pieces and his newer style of installation work. The animatronics pieces from his New York Pet Shop show are there, including fish fingers swimming in a goldfish bowl and chicken nuggets in a cage feeding on a tub of barbecue sauce: a comment on the treatment of animals. Much of Banksy’s work has a rebellious political message: he laughs at cops, consumerism, religion and politicians, and protests against war. Banksy is a master of juxtaposition and some of the best pieces are where he has altered the existing museum exhibits. The old traditional gypsy caravan has been wheel-clamped and had an eviction notice stuck on the door. In the old biplane hanging from the ceiling sits a Guantanamo detainee in orange jumpsuit and handcuffs. Among the old masters in the gallery there are Banksy’s remixed paintings. Jean-François Millet’s The Gleaners has one of the field workers stepping out of the frame for a fag break, the piece renamed Agency Job (The Gleaners). Despite suggestions that Banksy has "sold out" or become establishment, his work continues to prick the pomposity of the art world. His decision to take his show to the heart of the local establishment is as mischievous as the art itself. He’ll no doubt be laughing at the fawning praise he is now receiving from the local press and politicians who have for so long condemned him as a vandal and a criminal: those who only discovered Banksy’s talent after he became world famous, celebrity endorsed and worth lots of money. Banksy’s work is funny and provocative and to see so much of it in this setting, and for free, is great. People should definitely go to this show before it closes. Neil Roberts ---- Five things to get or see this month Mad Men DVD, season 2 It’s Valentine’s Day 1962, two years after season one ended, Kennedy is now president and the Cuban missile crisis looms. This hugely atmospheric and gripping television series continues with marital breakdowns and looming political upheavals. ---- Newspaper archive http://newspapers.bl.uk/blcs/ Read the first issue of The Chartist from 2 February 1839, or accounts of the Matchgirls’ Strike, on this massively expanded archive of newspapers both local and national from the 19th century. ---- Antichrist Directed by Lars von TrierOut on 24 July Lars von Trier’s new film is about a couple leaving modern life for a woodland hut after relationship problems and the death of their child. Their escape soon turns sour and gruesome. The critics seem divided on it, but many are calling it one of the best films of the year. If you can stomach the gore and make sense of the plot - or perhaps lack of one - this could be for you too. ---- Edinburgh festivals Various venues throughout August Edinburgh is a city of festivals throughout the summer. The fringe runs from 7 to 31 August with hundreds of comedy shows and theatre. And the International Book Festival runs from 15 to 31 August. This year features a huge array of authors from AL Kennedy, Irvine Welsh and Ben Okri (pictured above) who have new volumes of short stories, to writers of Socialist Review’s favourite television series The Wire, David Simon and Richard Price. ---- Revolutionary Road DVD A 1950s young couple dream that their lives will be different - they are going to travel and live in Paris and never fall into suburban conformity. Kate Winslet is brilliant as a woman bristling against her ever more claustrophobic life as child rearing and housework stifle her aspirations and threaten her marriage. ---- Obituary John Saville 1916-2009 John Saville, who has died aged 93, was a towering figure in the fields of Marxist and labour history, and in the British labour movement and the left, for more than seven decades. His enduring legacy may well be the volumes of the Dictionary of Labour Biography that he edited, detailing the lives of many of the women and men who were active in the labour movement from the late 18th century. Only someone with an extensive knowledge of the movement as a participant could possibly have embarked on such a project. Saville joined the Communist Party (CP) in 1934 while studying at the LSE and was among anti-fascist students at the Battle of Cable Street. On graduation he worked for the CP as London student organiser and on two occasions took letters for the CP into Nazi Germany. He briefly took a job as an economist with British Home Stores but from 1940 he served in the Second World War. As a Communist, but against the advice of the CP, he repeatedly refused to be a commissioned officer but still rose to the rank of sergeant major. He saw service in India from 1943 to 1946 where he acted as a go-between with Indian Communists and the British CP. While in Bombay he led an intervention of CP soldiers in the Soldiers Parliament, causing an anti-imperialist motion to be passed and the closure of the parliament by senior officers. A certain military bearing and booming voice never left him, although it may be that his intellectual confidence owed rather more to his LSE years. A member of the CP Historians Group after the war, Saville’s first major work, an edition of some of the writings of Chartist leader Ernest Jones, appeared as early as 1952. In 1954 it was Saville who edited a volume in honour of the effective founder of the group, Donna Torr, called Democracy and the Labour Movement. In 1956 Saville, with EP Thompson, was one of the leaders of the opposition in the CP following the Hungarian Revolution. The pair edited a journal, The Reasoner, later the New Reasoner, which was frowned upon and then banned by the CP. They left and became part of the founding group of the British New Left in the late 1950s. Saville, however, did not participate significantly in the foundation of New Left Review in 1960. Rather he edited an annual publication, The Socialist Register, from 1964 with the Marxist theoretician Ralph Miliband. The Register, which is still published annually, became a forum for left wing discussion and debate. Saville did not join another party after he left the CP, being sharply critical of both his former party and the Labour Party. Neither was he particularly attracted to the Trotskyist movement, although in later life he worked well with historians and activists associated with the Socialist Workers Party, particularly in the northern Marxist Historians Group. He taught at Hull University for many years, from 1947 when he was 31, and lived in the city. His friendly relationship with the university’s librarian, the poet Philip Larkin, led to Hull becoming an excellent resource for labour history. Saville endeavoured to tutor activists who were participants in the labour movement, for example John Prescott. His academic output was not restricted to the ten volumes of the Dictionary of Labour Biography he was associated with from 1972 to 2000. He wrote economic history, mostly focusing on 19th century Britain, and in 1958 he was one of the founders of the still continuing Society of Labour History, for which he was a vice-president at the time of his death. With Asa Briggs he edited three volumes of Essays in British Labour History (from 1960) and went on to publish books on the crisis of the British state (1987), and on the impact of imperialism on the foreign policy of the 1945 Labour government (1993), among numerous other writings. He was a consistent anti-imperialist and opponent of British military adventures. For example, he demonstrated that while the 1960s Labour government of Harold Wilson did not join in the Vietnam War it made British bases in the far east available to US troops, thereby providing help in kind. He was a great encourager of socialist historians, but a firm believer in friendly but robust and critical advice. I persuaded him on several occasions to speak at the Institute of Historical Research in London, on the subject, so I hoped, of the Communist Party Historians Group. Saville rightly, however, was always far more interested in what could be done to promote the practice of socialist history in the here and now, and that was indeed what he spoke about. Saville sometimes referred to Karl Marx’s favourite adage, "De omnibus dubitandum" - "Doubt everything" - but also favoured the words from early editions of The Reasoner, "To leave error unrefuted is to encourage intellectual immorality." Saville published his own memoir in 2003. It stands as a fascinating record of achievement in both Marxist scholarship and political activism. Keith Flett ----- Ground Control Anna Minton £9.99 Penguin Over the past 20 years cities and urban spaces in Britain have been remodelled in the interests of profit. "Regeneration" has brought private, corporately managed and policed spaces, from which working class communities have been excluded. Policy-makers and property developers say that there is too much affordable housing in Peckham or Tottenham or wherever they wish to put new private developments. Instead of housing people in need, they claim to improve communities by bringing in upwardly mobile apartment-dwellers as role models for existing tenants and residents. Anna Minton’s book burns with righteous anger at such socially divisive policies. She points to the hidden but ever-present objective of driving up property values, in a world where profit always comes before people. She shows that when lifeless spaces are created, fit only for shopping, more "security and safety" only has the perverse effect of increasing the fear of crime. She examines ASBOs and the "respect" agenda, which stigmatise people who have real issues rather than providing the support and local services that they need. Minton is describing neoliberalism, although she does not use the term. She sees the new urban policies as imports from the US, and looks instead to the supposedly more balanced policies of the "Europe" of Switzerland, Germany, Scandinavia and the Netherlands. However, her book does not take into account the ways that people can and do resist. The private ownership of public spaces such as shopping centres is not new, and "public-private" spaces have always been contested. Think of any club, bar, café or bus station. Also, public authorities are not always marvellous. They can pass restrictive laws or by-laws, or deploy the police to control ordinary people. Class divisions and class struggle cut across any simplistic categories of "public" and "private". Minton does not write about transport, with its problems of prices, access, pollution and safety, but also with "Critical Mass" bike rides and its bus and rail strikes. In urban policy, the outstanding case of ordinary people standing up to politicians and privatisers is Defend Council Housing, which has prevented or delayed housing privatisation for more than a decade. But Minton has not interviewed a single tenant activist. Dazzled by the jargon of planners, consultants and developers, Minton even suggests that ordinary people cannot understand the term "compulsory purchase", and, bizarrely, this comes after she has interviewed homeowners who fought against the "Pathfinder" mass demolition schemes across Northern England. To make a better future, we need more mass struggles from below. This book is a useful account of the neoliberal onslaught on urban areas, but it is much weaker on solutions. -- The Cinema of John Sayles Mark Bould Wallflower Press £16.99 In a scene in Matewan, John Sayles’s brilliant film about the struggle for unionisation in a West Virginia mining town in the 1920s, an argument erupts that is still relevant today. The miners, on strike, meet to discuss their tactics and the possibility of beating up black and Italian workers whose labour the company has brought in to undermine the strike. A man who is not a miner, but a communist just arrived to help the strike, makes an intervention and argues that the union should accept the black and Italian workers, and calls for unity, not division. He states that there are two kinds of people: "Them that work, and them that don’t." Mark Bould is very quick to show us the Marxist roots in such a line when he claims it is a "vulgarised version of Marx’s observation that capitalist production ‘produces and reproduces the capitalist relation; on the one side the capitalist, on the other the wage labourer’". In attempting to show Sayles’s films in a broad political framework, and with a socialist analysis, Bould does well to rescue film criticism from the academic fantasy world of postmodernism. But he is keen to reject what he calls "one-sided" Marxism - a mechanical approach to art that criticises anything that does not explicitly depict class struggle. Instead he calls for a dynamic approach and heaps praise on Sayles’s films for showing the changing nature of the working class and the different areas in which people face struggle. The book offers an insight into the work of one of greatest independent filmmakers of the last century. It follows Sayles’s career from screenwriter to auteur, showing the development of his work and his role as a people’s filmmaker in charting the lives of ordinary Americans with great skill and passion. However, Bould often uses needlessly academic language that makes for difficult reading and sometimes leads him to a fairly abstract analysis. He fails in locating both Sayles’s drive to make such films and people’s appetite for them. This can lead you to believe that Sayles simply read Marx and then set about his work. It could have done far more if it looked outwards into society and placed Sayles’s work as not only coming from our cultural history but also playing a vital role in shaping it. Seb Cooke --- Matthew Cobb, The Resistance: The French Fight Against the Nazis. The heroic view of the French resistance has faded. Histories of France in these years focus on the complexity of French public opinion, the collaborationist Vichy regime of Philippe Petain or challenge the resistance myths of Charles de Gaulle and the French Communist Party. Cobb’s book tries to buck this trend with a demythologised but sympathetic account of the French resistance, attempting to demonstrate its "power to inspire". The two dominant post-war voices about the resistance were de Gaulle and the Communist Party. De Gaulle presented himself as the embodiment of the true France and of the resistance. The French Communist Party forgot the period before the German invasion of the Soviet Union when they did not engage in serious resistance activity. What both had in common was that they presented the resistance as an expression of the entire French nation. Matthew Cobb does an excellent job of stripping away these myths. Rather than being a nation of resistors called to action by de Gaulle’s first BBC broadcast, initially resistance emerged slowly, in a fragmented and confused fashion. Although at the time of the liberation of France it was a mass movement, with 500,000 fighters and 100,000 having lost their lives, it was always a minority. De Gaulle’s war was conducted from London or Algiers and his experience was very different from those who built resistance networks in France itself. On his return to France, he treated those in the irregulars of the internal resistance with contempt. He disarmed the resistance as quickly as he could; he imposed prefects across France ending the role of the liberation committees; he tried to limit the workers’ seizures of the factories. In short, he was determined to make sure that the liberation would not turn into revolution. In this regard, he was assisted by the French Communist Party, whose leader, Maurice Thorez, had sat the war out in Moscow and supported de Gaulle in his efforts to reconstitute the state and stabilise French capitalism. Matthew Cobb’s enjoyable book is well written and accessible for those unfamiliar with this story. It is a welcome contribution at a time when the historical debate about the resistance focuses in a distorted manner upon the head shavings of women at the liberation, or bloodthirsty score-settling of the purge. Although Cobb makes the point that the resistance resonates to the present, I found it frustrating that he does not draw out these connections explicitly, either in terms campaigns against the French fascist Le Pen or in recovering the promise that the liberation fleetingly seemed to offer to transcend a world of inequality, slump and war. Matt Perry -- When China rules the world Martin Jacques Allen Lane £25.00 One of the most striking features of China's rise has been its sheer speed. Thirty years ago the Chinese economy was essentially stagnant, and accounted for less than 1 percent of world trade. Since then it has grown by around 10 percent a year almost without interruption, and has become the third largest trading economy (behind the US and Germany). So it's hardly surprising that most commentators assume that this will carry on indefinitely. The standard argument in almost anything written about China nowadays is that it will shortly become the world's biggest economy, and supplant the US as the world superpower. Right-wingers lament this; left-wingers welcome it: but both see it as inevitable. As the title suggests, this book echoes that consensus, though the author takes it further than most, suggesting at one point that China's rise is more important that of the US. He also takes a wider angle than many other writers, arguing that China's dominance will mark an end not just to US hegemony, but to a Western model of development which has dominated the world since the 18th century. The problem is that the consensus is simply wrong. China's economic boom relies on cheap exports - now mostly electrical goods - to the West, crucially the US. And the factories that produce those exports rely on a constant supply of cheap labour from the countryside. Even before the economic crisis hit, it was impossible that both of these could carry on growing indefinitely. As far back as 2006 there were clear signs that the numbers of migrant workers were decreasing. In 2007, an academic report found that in about two-thirds of villages there were no more "surplus" peasants ready to become migrant workers. But over the past year the traffic has been all the other way. Rather, more than 20 million migrant workers have lost their jobs in export-producing factories as exports have collapsed. And the current economic statistics coming out of China are contradictory, suggesting that at best China may fare less badly than most other economies. Jacques does at certain points acknowledge the impact of the crisis, but doesn't really grasp that the sheer uncertainty of the crisis makes long-term predictions quite irrelevant. He also acknowledges some of the problems facing China's current development model, but again doesn't integrate these into his predictions about China as the future superpower. If the parts of the book dealing with China's economy aren't very useful, those about the nature of Chinese culture and nationalism are considerably worse. Jacques comes close to arguing an essentialist view that all Chinese people necessarily have a distinct worldview, based on the fact that elements of Chinese culture go back more than 2,000 years. This is part of the wider argument about the Western-defined world order being overturned as developing world economies (Brazil, Russia, India and China) come to be the dominant powers in the world. Now there's no question that the weakening of US power is in part driven by the growth of other countries, and that we are moving towards a multipolar world, rather than one in which the US is the sole superpower. But the idea that China will automatically side with other developing economies against the US is simplistic. It’s equally likely that China, faced with the rise of India and Russia as fellow Asian powers, will look to an alliance with the US as a counterweight. That’s what Mao did in the 1970s, after all. More importantly, the argument misses the fact that the "Western model of development" is a world capitalist economy dominated by imperialism. China has risen precisely by accommodating to, and participating in, that world economy. And the continued prosperity of the Chinese economy depends both on the health of that world economy, and within it the disproportionate power of Western imperialism. A stronger China may well shift the balance of power and influence within that framework, but it is beyond the power of any one national ruling class to break the framework itself. There are some better parts to the book, in particular the account of China's relations with southeast Asia, and many of his speculations are thought-provoking even when they're based on very little evidence. China is becoming more important as US power wanes, and although there are good reasons to doubt many of Jacques’ answers he does point to some important questions. But there’s an underlying power-worship that runs through this book, which made me increasingly uncomfortable. Older readers may remember Jacques as one of the leading lights of Marxism Today, a magazine that provided much of the intellectual justification for the Labour Party's lurch to the right in the 1990s. He said in an interview that, "Thatcher was a kind of hero of mine… she was on the opposite side of the fence but you could learn a lot from her. She had a vision and a strategy to achieve that vision." For Thatcher, read China's rulers. Charlie Hore --