Socialist Review March 2011
Issue 356

London Street Photography

Museum of London

This refreshing exhibition of London street photography shows images taken between 1860 and 2010, most of which come from the museum's archives and have not been widely exhibited before. 

  It can be a weakness of large photography exhibitions that they invariably attempt to cover a sweeping history. But looking at images of London this way it is striking that there are common threads throughout the decades, though photography styles and technology have changed dramatically. We see people's changing looks and lifestyles, and whole areas changed and rebuilt. 
  
  But we also see consistency in observations of class differences and some of the multicultural character of London. An image taken in 2003 of posh England rugby fans is reminiscent of earlier images of the wealthy out and about. Images of City workers at the Bank of England from 1900 to today may show that fashion shifts from top hats to sharp suits, but the same kind of people populate the area throughout. This is contrasted with pictures revealing crushing poverty in the East End over the century.
  
  Moments of tension in the capital's history are highlighted with images of skinheads and hippies crossing paths in the late 1960s, confrontations between Nazis and anti-Nazis in Brick Lane in the 1970s and an image of mourning after the Nazi nail-bomb attack on the Admiral Duncan pub in Soho. The museum's selection of images reflects an interest in showing the social and multicultural mix of London from past to present. As viewers we can look at images from over 100 years ago and see a familiar city. 
  
  The exhibition provides an antidote to arguments that documentary street photography is dead. It shows that it is still relevant today. 
  
  Photography in public places can raise issues of voyeurism and the exploitation of those who are the subjects, which has been raised in other recent shows. But this exhibition shows how valuable street photography can be. It also recognises the rising levels of harassment that photographers face today and of the need to defend our right to photograph in public places. 
  
Angela Stapleford

Until 4 September 2011, 
admission free

8    The return of revolution

Events in Tunisia and Egypt have reverberated throughout the world. Mark L Thomas deals with some of the myths that disappear when dictators are deposed. Anne Alexander and Simon Assaf look at the Egyptian Revolution, while Mohamed Tonsi reports on the ongoing struggle in Tunisia. 

18 Tories sow false divisions

Last month David Cameron attacked multiculturalism in an attempt to demonise Muslims. Hassan Mahamdallie investigates the real roots of divisions in Britain, while Martin Smith reports on the continuing threat of the English Defence League.

20 Socialism and women's
	 liberation

A century after the first International Women's Day, sexism still persists. Sally Campbell argues that only socialism can bring genuine liberation. 

24 Eric Hobsbawm: half Marx

Historian Eric Hobsbawm champions Karl Marx as a critic of capitalism but suggests his alternative to it has failed. Patrick Ward disagrees.

Tories' trials

Only twice since the Second World War has any government succeeded in cutting public spending over two consecutive years. Yet George Osborne's plans involve wielding the axe to public sector spending for four years in a row, while dramatically accelerating the neoliberal transformation of the welfare state, local government, education and, perhaps most explosively, the NHS. 

  Ken Clarke, who served as a minister in both John Major's and Thatcher's Tory governments, seems at times alone in sensing that things are about to get much tougher. "Making the speeches is the easy bit," he told the Financial Times, "It is the actual ability to deliver it on the ground in the teeth of considerable controversy that determines the fate of a government."
  
  Opposition is spreading. One sign is the growing wave of marches and the protests outside town halls across the country. Even some Tory supporters, who might have accepted the need for cuts in the abstract, are up in arms when their local services are earmarked for closure.
  
  The government's nervousness is showing. The U-turn over the sell-off of public woodland was followed by Nick Clegg announcing that the plan to cut housing benefit by 10 percent for anyone on the dole for more than a year was being dropped. 
  
  Nor is the news good on the economic front. The apparent contraction of the British economy in the last quarter of 2010 points to a faltering recovery. The outburst by outgoing CBI head Richard Lambert that the government has no plan for economic growth points to an anxiety among some sections of big business that the cuts may also hurt profits.
  
  If the economy fails to return to growth - and any attempt to choke off rising inflation through increasing interest rates will amplify that risk - we can expect more rows inside the ruling class over the direction of economic policy.
  
  No doubt these problems fed into David Cameron's decision to attack Muslims last month (see Hassan Mahamdallie's article in this issue of Socialist Review) in a classic piece of racist scapegoating.
  
  But the government hopes its strongest card is a supine trade union movement. A glance at the timidity of the trade union leadership and the woeful level of strikes last year (with just 365,000 days "lost" through strikes in 2010 compared to an average 12.9 million strike days annually in the 1970s and 7.2 million in the 1980s) no doubt help affirm the coalition's belief that they can get away with an assault of this scale on our class. 
  
  Yet the cuts are provoking a rising mood of working class anger that shows the potential for serious resistance. What is urgently required is a major shift in the level of confidence of workers to fight. 
  
  This points to the importance of the demonstration called by the TUC in central London on 26 March. A massive turnout can make an event initiated by the trade union bureaucracy into something much more than just a show of TUC strength or rallying for a Labour vote for this May's elections. It can become a springboard for the kind of major strikes that can begin to punch holes in the government's austerity plans.
  
  That will depend in part on socialists being at the centre of building the demonstration and in doing so gaining a hearing for what should come next. If so, 26 March can be a day that becomes a real ace in our pack.
  
Mark L Thomas

The governor and Ken Dodd 

When the governor of the Bank of England starts quoting madcap 1970s comic Ken Dodd it must be a sign that things are not quite right, 
economically-speaking. 

  But that's precisely what Mervyn King did in a speech to business leaders in Newcastle on 25 January. The Dodd quote (about happiness, predictably enough) was rather less important, though, than the rest of what he had to say, which was centred on an examination of why the cost of living has risen and how this has affected people's incomes. 
  
  It's worth reproducing what he said in full: "The three factors I described - higher import and energy prices and taxes - have squeezed real take-home pay by around 12 percent. Average real 
take-home pay normally rises as productivity increases - money wages normally rise faster than prices. But the opposite was true last year [during the recession], so real wages fell sharply. And given the rise in VAT and other price rises this year, real wages are likely to fall again. 
  
  "As a result, in 2011 real wages are likely to be no higher than they were in 2005. One has to go back to the 1920s to find a time when real wages fell over a period of six years."
  
  This is quite unprecedented. Given the bank's longstanding obsession with keeping inflation in check, it's one thing for its governor to calculate how much worse off we are as a result of wages falling behind rising inflation, but quite another to include it in a public speech. 
  
  So what's it all about? In many ways, the governor is effectively gloating over the fact that workers have so far borne the brunt of the recession. He went on to say, "The squeeze in living standards is the inevitable price to pay for the financial crisis and subsequent rebalancing of the world and UK economies." 
  
  But is it inevitable? That inflation - already at 4 percent (or above 5 percent, depending on which measure you use) - is set to continue to rise will make for further downward pressure on living standards. 
  
  In this context, the question of the response from workers, especially organised workers, will become increasingly important. Wage rises in manufacturing, where there has been something of a recovery, have been higher recently at around 3 percent. And, in part at least, this seems to have been as a result of pressure from below. 
  
  To give one example, a solid strike at the Heinz baked beans manufacturing plant in Wigan before Christmas resulted in a significantly increased pay offer from the company. The Heinz workers were helped by the fact that the company is highly profitable, but it's a sign of the potential that's there. However, whether improved wage rises can be achieved elsewhere is very much a question of confidence. 
  
  And this is where the public sector cuts come in. The cuts in services and the measures aimed at the workforce - a 
two-year pay freeze, widespread redundancies and an attack on pensions - represent the biggest ruling class assault on workers' living standards in generations. In the short term, at least, the job cuts might make workers less likely to fight back over pay. 
  
  But if inflation goes on rising, as many predict it will, and planned increases in employees' pension contributions go ahead, reducing take home pay further, you begin to have some of the ingredients for a serious industrial response. 
  
  There's one more thing here. Ken Dodd is not just a comedian. He also happens to be a Tory, who introduced Thatcher to the faithful at the party's final election rally at the Wembley Arena in 1979. Maybe Mervyn thought that quoting the King of the 
Diddy-men would be a clever way of signalling his deficit-slashing credentials to other true believers.
  
  But the current government's attack on the public sector raises a potential dilemma for the bank, whether the governor recognises it or not. This is that the public sector pay freeze and spending cuts together could affect consumer demand and derail a potential economic recovery. 
  
  When you consider that government spending is normally an important factor in economic growth, the cuts - allied with weak business confidence and the continued crisis in much of the eurozone - present real risks for the government's strategy, politically as well as economically. 
  
  But the stakes are even higher for our side. It's about time we told Dodd (and King) what to do with those tickling sticks.
  
Kevin Devine

Hacking away at the truth

The dam has burst over revelations of phone hacking at Rupert Murdoch's News Group. Fresh revelations tumble daily from the High Court. 

  On just two days in 
mid-February we learned of a witness statement, previously withheld by police, that suggests an unknown number of News of the World (NoW) journalists used a private investigator to hack into celebrities' phones. We also learned that the Metropolitan Police held evidence of hacking that it repeatedly claimed did not exist and that Scotland Yard had uncovered new evidence (don't laugh) of illegal activity at the NoW.
  
  Lawyers for former private investigator Glenn Mulcaire told the High Court that an unspecified number of journalists at the NoW were party to hacking. Mulcaire said he provided the results to the news desk, though he could not remember to whom. This contradicted claims made by company executives since the scandal first came to light in 2006 that only Mulcaire and a single journalist, Clive Goodman, were responsible. Both were jailed in 2007.
  
  It was Mulcaire who, in January, identified a second journalist - NoW assistant editor Ian Edmondson - as having instructed him to intercept voicemails. 
  
  A day earlier, we heard the Met had handed over evidence it twice claimed did not exist in a High Court case brought by actress Sienna Miller's stepmother, Kelly Hoppen, who claims NoW journalist Dan Evans tried to hack into her voicemail in June 2009. Hoppen was a friend of footballer Sol Campbell and film director Guy Ritchie.
  
  The Hoppen case suggests a pattern of behaviour that continued after the initial exposure of phone hacking. Indeed, it undermines the testimony of News Group executives who assured a committee of MPs that the hacking was the work of a single "rogue reporter" at precisely the moment Evans was attempting to access Hoppen's messages.
  
  The Met's excuse for its delay in producing evidence was that the material was "chaotic" and "indecipherable" - which begs the question, why was it necessary to black out most of the notes? Evans's lawyers argued that the reporter had called Hoppen accidentally, that Evans remembered nothing, that his phone keys stuck and that he had made a single "rogue call".
  
  On the same day, Scotland Yard uncovered "new evidence" that former Sky football commentator Andy Gray's phone had been hacked by the NoW. Gray is suing News Group, providing an interesting backstory to his sacking by sister company Sky Sports over leaked disclosures of rampant sexism
  
  The cases stem from an earlier payout of £1 million by the Murdoch papers to gag victims of hacking, notably a £700,000 payment to professional footballers' association chief executive Gordon Taylor.
  
  In January, the accelerating rate of disclosures led David Cameron's director of communications Andy Coulson to resign. Coulson had been deputy editor and then editor at the NoW until the Guardian revelations prompted his departure. He continues to plead ignorance - a claim that astonishes anyone with the smallest knowledge of how a newsroom works. Coulson insisted as much in court when called as a witness by Scottish socialist Tommy Sheridan, himself the victim of a NoW vendetta. 
  
  The affair is clearly damaging to Murdoch. It also hurts Cameron - and not just because he employed Coulson - by skewing his relationship with Murdoch when the media baron wants government approval for a buy-out of satellite broadcaster BSkyB. This is already complicated by Cameron's relationship with the Lib Dems, especially since the prime minister relieved Lib Dem business secretary Vince Cable of responsibility for the BSkyB decision after the latter let slip he had "declared war" on Murdoch. 
  
  The scandal also threatens to shine a light on the relatively cosy way the police and some tabloid journalists work hand in hand. Scotland Yard stands accused of cutting short its investigation when evidence first came to light in 2006 and serially withholding information since. The New York Times quoted unnamed detectives last September who blamed the Yard's relations with the NoW for hampering inquiries.
  
  The phone hacking scandal thoroughly reflects the tawdry values of the tabloid press and those who own and run it in their class interests. 
  
  And it seems that neither the police nor the government are capable of holding Murdoch's arrogant media empire to account, or even to enforce the laws they tell the rest of us to obey.
  
Ian Taylor

Morally bankrupt

"I am not against - whether they are footballers or bankers - people who have particularly high skills or talents, being paid whatever you can get in the marketplace," said Lib Dem energy secretary Chris Huhne last month. Huhne should know, having used his (presumably) high skills and talents to make his estimated £3.5 million fortune in the City before joining the commoners in parliament. 

  Meanwhile, according to property website Rightmove, this year's banking bonuses (totalling around £7 billion), have skewed the housing market and led to an increase in London house prices of 4 percent from January to February this year. 
  
  But this isn't a problem for everyone. "I have investments in five homes for rent, which is basically my pension fund from my time in the City," Huhne boasted last year, "and we have two homes we actually use, which is one in Eastleigh and one in London."
  
  It was only last April that pre-election Nick Clegg argued, "Bankers must understand that after the billions pumped into the banking sector there can be no financial or moral justifications for the obscene bonuses which are still being paid out." Who needs morals when you're a Lib Dem minister? PW
  
City sleazers

It isn't just London's estate agents who are popping champagne corks this month. "People are feeling better about life... City folk are getting their bonuses again, we see a lot bankers in here these days". So said the head of the Spearmint Rhino chain of strip clubs in Britain, John Specht, last month. "We took just shy of £500,000 in January, traditionally a quiet month, around double what we generated at the same time in 2009." PW

Don't bash the unions

I think Jemimah McFarlane is wrong to associate our trade unions with "the bosses" and to say that they "are part of the system/problem" (Feedback, Socialist Review, February 2011).

  It is certainly true that some trade union leaders appear to side with the employers when faced with industrial disputes. However, things can and do change quite profoundly.
  
  Take the case of my own union, UCU. When I first attended the Natfhe (one of the parts of UCU before a merger with the AUT) annual national conference in the early 1980s there was a "day off" so that delegates could take their wives on a variety of excursions. There were also "black tie" dinners, as many of the delegates were college/polytechnic principals and vice-principals.
  
  By the end of the 1980s this had all changed and the bosses in our union were consigned to the dustbin of history as the Tories wooed them with "incorporation/privatisation" and the huge salaries they currently receive.
  
  Today UCU has changed out of all proportion and the UCU Left grouping of socialists and left wingers has a significant influence and representation on the national executive. 
  
  I do not believe that UCU is untypical of the union movement today. People have woken up and want their unions to join the fightback. 
  
  Our unions are more important now than ever and the rank and file can make significant progress in a shift to the left. Characterising them as poodles in awe of the bosses does no one (apart from the bosses) any favours. It is a flawed analysis.
  
Roger Smith

York

Economics of dictatorship

The end of Hosni Mubarak's regime in Egypt doesn't just herald the end of a brutal individual and his regime, it also marks the complete failure of neoliberal economics in the region.

  In 1991, shortly after the collapse of the Stalinist dictatorships in Russia and Eastern Europe, Mubarak signed up to the "Washington consensus". In return for a hefty loan from the IMF, Mubarak began to restructure the entire Egyptian economy along neoliberal lines.
  
  It meant subjecting his people to a wide-ranging privatisation programme in industry and agriculture, reducing food subsidies and dispensing with price controls on many basic necessities.
  
  Neoliberals held up Egypt as a poster-boy. A 2008 IMF report declared that the Egyptian economy "continues to impress" via a "dynamic private sector".
  
  The Egyptian economy was growing at a rate of 7.1 percent, attracting £13 billion in foreign investment in 2008. 
  
  Yet in 2009, 20 percent of Egypt's population were living in absolute poverty with 44 percent of the population surviving on less than two dollars a day. Food inflation had reached 17 percent as the price of bread and cooking oil spiralled up. 
  
  The official unemployment rate stood at 25 percent but was generally accepted to be far higher. 
  
Sasha Simic

Hackney

The myths that tumble with tyrants

The uprisings in Egypt and Tunisia have set the entire region ablaze with revolt. Mark L Thomas opens our coverage by considering the historic significance of these events

The revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt - the Arab world's most populous country - are of historic importance. They have set the whole region on fire as protests have spread from Yemen to Jordan to Iran. As we go to press the fate of the heroic uprising against Gaddafi's regime in Libya is unclear. Even the small Persian Gulf state of Bahrain is being shaken by mass revolts at time of writing. Further upheavals and revolutions across North Africa and the Middle East cannot be ruled out.

  But if the immediate political reverberations of the events of January and February are clearly visible on the streets, the ideological fallout is no less significant. The fall of the dictator Hosni Mubarak at the hands of a vast mobilisation by the Egyptian masses has struck a powerful blow to many of the 
dominant ideological assumptions of our age.
  
Democracy

The brutal US-led invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq were accompanied by loud talk of a "clash of civilisations". The Islamic world in general - and Arabs in particular - were held to be incapable of internally generating democracy. Democracy could only be brought in from the outside - by F16 fighter planes and the US marine corps. 

  But this was always a lie. It was not "Islamic culture" that stood in the way of democracy in the Middle East but the suppression of political freedom by dictatorial regimes fully backed by the US and the West over decades. It is the Arab masses themselves who are the force capable of bringing democracy to the Middle East and beyond - as is now being proved in practice.
  
  But as one myth is swept aside another is resurrected. The famous claim made by Francis Fukuyama in the wake of the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 that liberal democracy had triumphed historically is being dusted off to suggest that Tunisians, Egyptians and millions across the region are really yearning after "American" values.
  
  US support for Ben Ali and Mubarak, as well as the ongoing backing for dictators and sheikhs who (for the time being at least) remain in their palaces, is something of an embarrassment for this argument, though it hasn't stopped the likes of former leading neocon Paul Wolfowitz and the Financial Times newspaper from making it. They all agree that liberal democracy represents the outer limit of possible social change.
  
  In fact, of course, even the battle for democracy is by no means over in Tunisia or Egypt. The key to securing it will be the deepening of the wave of workers' struggles that have marked both revolutions. This development also challenges the widely accepted claim that the spread of neoliberal globalisation has destroyed the collective power of workers as footloose capital and insecure employment supposedly erode their bargaining strength. The opposite is the case. Globalisation has created powerful new concentrations of workers around the world. The Egyptian working class in 2011 is far bigger and makes up a far greater percentage of the population than the Russian working class that overthrew the tsar in 1917.
  
  But the role played by workers, especially in Egypt, opens up possibilities that were largely absent, or at least much weaker, in the revolutions in Eastern Europe in 1989, Indonesia in 1998, Serbia in 2000 and Argentina over the winter of 2000-1 (let alone the string of "colour revolutions" in former Soviet states, which were often little more than manoeuvres inside the ruling class encouraged by the competing imperial powers). 
  
  It is this return of the organised working class to the centre of political revolutions that can throw up struggles that have the potential to go beyond the framework of liberal democracy and to strike blows at exploitation and the hierarchy of class. "Where the chains of capitalism are forged, there they must be broken," wrote Rosa Luxemburg about the strikes that swept Germany after the overthrow of the monarchy in November 1918.
  
  The first phase of the Egyptian Revolution is over. The popular unity that seemed to stretch across classes - with even a section of the capitalist class in some sympathy for the demands for reform, or even for Mubarak to go - is likely to be replaced by growing class polarisation (Mohamed Tonsi, on page 13, shows this has already started to happen in Tunisia). 
  
  Long ago Karl Marx noted this feature of revolutions. Writing about the way the February 1848 Revolution in France, which enjoyed support across the classes, gave way to the bloody battles of July, when the bourgeoisie turned its guns on the workers, he noted: 
  
  "The February Revolution was the nice revolution, the revolution of universal sympathies, because the contradictions which erupted in it against the monarchy were still undeveloped and peacefully dormant, because the social struggle which formed their background had only achieved an ephemeral existence, an existence in phrases, in words. 
  
  "The June Revolution is the ugly revolution, the nasty revolution, because the phrases have given place to the real thing, because the republic has bared the head of the monster by knocking off the crown which shielded and concealed it."
  
Workers' power

The working class in Egypt today is vastly more powerful than in France in 1848. But key tasks ahead: deepening the strike wave, of electing workers' councils that link together workers across factories and industries, which can become the embryo of organs of workers' power and of a more decisive confrontation with the core of the Egyptian state machine. This will involve the attempt to break the army along class lines. 

  In this sense the revolution in Egypt has not yet reached the scale of February 1917 in Russia, where workers' councils were set up immediately (drawing on the memory of the first Russian Revolution in 1905) and the Petrograd garrison mutinied within days.
  
  But the potential for a democratic revolution to "grow over", as Leon Trotsky put it in his theory of permanent revolution, into a fight for a socialist revolution can already be glimpsed in Tunisia and Egypt.
  
The hope is that this process can continue and become stronger and in turn renew the belief that the real alternative to liberal democracy lies not in authoritarian versions of capitalism, from China to Iran, but the 
abolition of capitalist exploitation itself. MT

The gravedigger of dictatorship

There have been many conflicting interpretations of events in Egypt. Anne Alexander argues that the working class is the key force in Egyptian society with the power to drive the revolution forward

A few short weeks into the Egyptian Revolution the number of contradictory labels it wears is already growing with dizzying speed. In the Western media it is painted as a "flower" revolution - a heart-warming example of a leaderless "people power" movement. A considerable body of deluded neocon opinion in the US sees the overthrow of dictator Hosni Mubarak as a confirmation that George W Bush was right to try to impose "democracy" on the Middle East through the barrel of a gun. Military analysts at Stratfor and a good part of the BBC's senior journalists seem to think it is an old-fashioned military coup. Other voices clamour for the recognition of the Egyptian Revolution as an internet-driven revolt or a sinister 
Islamist conspiracy. 

  This article takes a different perspective. I argue that the Egyptian Revolution demonstrates, with a force not seen in the Arab world for more than half a century, that the power that can liberate society from below lies with the organised working class. 
  
  The strikes which spread like wildfire across Egypt in the last days before Mubarak's fall suddenly made workers' power visible. Yet it was deeper and longer-term processes of both global and local economic change which fractured the Egyptian state and created the conditions for the revolt. In particular, the toxic chemistry between the neoliberal reforms, promoted by Hosni Mubarak's son, Gamal, and his cronies, and the backwash from the global economic crisis played the central role in breaking workers materially and ideologically from the regime. 
  
  Yet the first phase of the revolution - the 18 days of mobilisation on a scale recalling scenes from the 1848 revolutions or Russia in February 1917 - was also the product of Egypt's "culture of protest", nurtured by a decade of struggles between the state and the people in the streets. Western journalists and Barack Obama's advisers may have been surprised by the sudden eruption of popular anger against a "stable" ally, but anyone who had watched the ebb and flow of protests since 2000 - over Palestine, against the war on Iraq, for democracy and constitutional reform, for better pay and trade union rights, and against police torture - should not have been. 
  
  However, analysis of the dynamics of the uprising itself shows that the 25 January revolution was more than an aggregator of disparate political and economic demands. Rather the scale of mobilisation from below and the pressure it exerted on the state transformed and deepened the relationship between the economic and political struggles. In Mubarak's final days it was the deployment of workers' social power against the state, and in particular the strike wave which erupted on 8 February, which finally cracked the regime. The fact that the people were still in the streets as Mubarak was forced out of power opens up possibilities for further extending the revolutionary process, already glimpsed in the explosion of strikes in the week following the dictator's fall.
  
Fracturing the state

The junior army officers who seized power and overthrew the monarchy in 1952 set Egypt on the path to state capitalist development. Under the leadership of Gamal Abdel Nasser they used the state's resources to found heavy industries, took control of the Suez Canal in order to finance the building of the Aswan High Dam, and built up manufacturing to supply Egyptian markets. 

  This economic strategy was connected to the creation of political institutions which sought to bind workers and peasants to the state. Workers were offered a social contract where in return for renouncing their political independence they could expect some gains, such as subsidised housing, education, other welfare benefits and relative job security. Nasserist rhetoric, particularly in its late phase, idealised workers for their contribution to national development. But the Nasserist state crushed independent workers' organisations and in their place built an official trade union federation which was subservient to the government. 
  
  The conditions which allowed Nasser and his colleagues to pursue this particular strategy for economic development had started to change by the late 1960s as ruling classes on a global scale began to search for alternatives to state-led development. After Nasser died in 1970, his successor, Anwar Sadat, broke with the USSR and by the end of the decade had sealed a new partnership with the US. Sadat pioneered a policy of "economic opening" ("infitah") in order to receive loans from international financial institutions. 
  
  During Mubarak's later years the process of infitah continued and deepened, with the imposition of a structural adjustment programme following the 1991 Gulf War. The percentage of workers employed in the state sector shrank from 40 percent in 1981-2 to 32 percent in 2004-5. However, these figures hide a more dramatic story of increased unemployment, rising job insecurity and the destruction of large parts of the welfare system. Between 1998 and 2006 the percentage of workers with an employment contract dropped from 61.7 percent to 42 percent while the percentage covered by social insurance fell from 54.1 percent to 42.3 percent during the same period.
  
  Nasser constructed a political system which, despite some tinkering by Sadat and Mubarak, survived decades after his death. Although his successors did allow fake "opposition" parties to exist - so long as they remained weak and subservient to the ruling party - they did not fundamentally change the basic political system. Until the 2011 revolution, Egypt had a two-class electoral franchise, with workers and peasants voting for one set of parliamentary representatives and middle class "professionals" voting for another set. So the state-controlled trade union federation was not merely an instrument of social control within the workplace, where it sought to manage workers' discontent in the interest of the state, but also a giant electoral machine delivering pro-regime voters to the polling stations and turning out crowds of workers to cheer Mubarak and his cronies.
  
  At an ideological level too, the legacy of Nasserism outlived its creator by several decades. Workers' identification with the goals of state-led national development could be seen even at the sharpest moments of class struggle. Workers' resistance did explode from time to time - for example in Mahalla al-Kubra in 1984, at the Helwan iron and steel plants in 1989 and in Kafr al-Dawwar in 1994. But rather than withdrawing their labour and stopping production, workers generally chose to stage "work-ins" - a gesture meant to signify that they, unlike their leaders, were still committed to a vision of common sacrifice for the sake of "the nation". 
  
  The reforms of the 1990s and beyond fractured the Nasserist system on several different levels. Privatisation removed hundreds of thousands of workers from state industries and transferred their bonuses and workplace-based welfare benefits to the bank accounts of private shareholders. Deprived of its role in channelling welfare to workers, the state-run trade union federation rotted from within. It continued to mobilise voters for ruling party election rallies and to harass and intimidate workers who attempted to organise resistance from below, but in large areas of the country its organisational structure was a hollow shell of "paper members" and a handful of self-serving bureaucrats. 
  
  In late 2006 a strike by around 25,000 textile workers at the Misr Spinning and Weaving Company in Mahalla al-Kubra opened the gates to a prolonged wave of workers' mobilisation. Strikes spread rapidly from sector to sector, and among some groups of workers, particularly the Mahalla textile workers and the property tax collectors, took on an explicitly political character, demanding the right to organise independent trade unions and calling for an increase in the national minimum wage. The widespread adoption of strikes as a weapon, rather than work-ins, was a testimony to the shift in workers' 
consciousness. 
  
  It is important to understand that these developments are not simply the result of local factors, but are intimately connected to global processes. The imposition of neoliberal economic reform programmes on variants of state capitalist regimes has been played out across the world. Short-term shocks have also played a central role, particularly the international rise in food prices which was driving workers' protests against the spiralling cost of living even before the onset of the global economic crisis. 
  
Holes in the wall of dictatorship

The strike wave of 2006 erupted into a context which had already been changed by popular protest. Although compared with the millions of demonstrators who took part in the 25 January revolution the numbers of protesters were often relatively small, the ferment in the streets since the second Palestinian Intifada in late 2000 marked a dramatic shift in the Egyptian political landscape. The first really significant breakthrough came in 2003, when tens of thousands of demonstrators took control of Cairo's Tahrir Square in protests against the US invasion of Iraq, punching "a hole in the wall of dictatorship", as one Egyptian socialist activist put it at the time. 

  Further holes appeared in the dictatorship over the following few years. In 2005 a loose alliance of radical Nasserists, liberals and socialists - supported by some elements in the Muslim Brotherhood - launched a campaign opposing Mubarak's renewed candidacy for presidency and his attempts to hand power over to his son, Gamal. Street protests crystallised around the slogan "Kifaya - Enough!" and began to draw in growing numbers of young people. Today it is hard to remember what an unusually daring step this was for the small forces of the radical opposition groups. They were publicly crossing the "red line" preventing criticism of the president. 
  
  The following year saw a revolt by judges incensed at the regime's blatant election-
rigging and persecution of those who spoke out against it. Hundreds of judges in full official regalia marched through Cairo in protest at the disciplining of two reform-minded members of the Court of Cassation. The sense of the state at war with itself was palpable, as riot police beat judges on the steps of their club building and tear-gassed lay supporters of the judges' campaign. 
  
  Rising levels of workers' struggles intersected with a revival of youth activism in 2008, which saw the regime face its biggest challenge before the 2011 revolution. A call for a strike by textile workers at Misr Spinning in Mahalla was taken up by networks of youth activists. A Facebook group supporting the Mahalla workers and calling for a general strike in solidarity gained around 70,000 members. On 6 April 2008 the actual strike in Mahalla was aborted by the police, but their attack on demonstrators touched off a near-insurrection in the town. Meanwhile, the "Facebook strike" found an echo in large demonstrations on most university campuses and shuttered shops across the capital. The final surge of protest before 25 January came in the summer of 2010, when the murder of a young internet activist, Khaled Said, by the police provoked demonstrations of thousands in his home city of Alexandria. 
  
  It would be easy with hindsight to plot a smooth upward curve of struggle from 2000 to 2011. In reality, these waves of protest were mostly discontinuous, with one set of demonstrations petering out, or being beaten off the streets, a few months before the eruption of the next. The gap between the economic demands raised by workers and the highly political claims of largely middle class professionals calling for constitutional reform was, some argued, a sign that attempts to unite opponents of Mubarak were doomed to failure. 
  
The spell of fear

Despite this, Mubarak's last decade played a crucial role in his downfall. It was on these disparate protests that a generation of activists from different political traditions - Islamist, Nasserist, liberal and socialist - learnt techniques of political organisation. In the space of these ten years the radical opposition groups acquired sustained experience of organising protests, maintaining activist networks and building tactical alliances across different political traditions. Above all, they collectively broke the spell of fear around street politics which the regime had enforced for more than a generation. 

  Of all the protests, it was the strike wave which established a dynamic of what Polish revolutionary Rosa Luxemburg called "reciprocal action" between the economic and political struggles against the regime. As Luxemburg observed during the 1905 Revolution in Russia, the interaction between economic and political struggles could not simply be understood as a linear progression from bread and butter economic demands to the political question of state power. The process of reciprocal action could be seen at work in a pendulum motion between political and economic struggles, she argued, where "after every foaming wave of political action a fructifying deposit remains behind from which a thousand stalks of economic struggle shoot forth". However, in the case of workers' struggles, their social power and collective organisation invested even their everyday battles in the workplace with a political dimension which opened up new horizons for further political action. 
  
  Egyptian workers took by storm the same rights which other "political" campaigns for democracy had been forced to abandon under pressure from the state: the right to assembly, the right to protest, the right to free speech. The strike wave carved out spaces for discussion and organisation in thousands of workplaces across the country, driving the struggle deep into the fabric of Egyptian society. 
  
  After 25 January 2011 processes which developed over a decade - wresting control of the streets from the police, protest demands directly challenging Mubarak, the increasing interaction between economic and political struggles - were suddenly compressed into the space of days. The opening moves came from opposition activists who seized the opportunity created by the overthrow of Ben Ali in Tunisia to call for nationwide protests. A Facebook group calling for the demonstrations, "We are all Khaled Said", named after the activist murdered by the police in Alexandria in summer 2010, gathered hundreds of thousands of members. 
  
  An alignment of the radical opposition groups took shape, bringing together revolutionary socialists, liberals, democracy activists, Nasserists, independent trade unionists and eventually the Muslim Brotherhood. Protest organisers agreed a new tactic to beat police blockades: a range of different assembly points, rather than one central march or rally. 
  
  Early on 25 January it was clear that the scale of the demonstrations was greater than anything Egypt had witnessed for years - possibly decades. First a dozen, then a hundred, then thousands of holes were punched in the wall of dictatorship. Tens of thousands of people poured through them: in Nasr City, Giza and Shubra; in Alexandria, in Mansoura, in Suez, in Assyut. 
  
  Over the following days the demonstrations gathered pace. Friday 28 January was the movement's first major test. The police locked down the city centres, and the regime shut down the mobile phone networks and the internet. Protesters used mosques as rallying points and marched to retake the streets. Estimates of the numbers on the streets ran into hundreds of thousands, as huge crowds of demonstrators battled with the police. Mubarak sacked his cabinet, withdrew the police from the burnt-out shells of their police stations and deployed the army. Local popular committees sprang up across the country to protect homes and neighbourhoods from attack by thugs, many believed to be policemen in plain clothes. Further demonstrations over the weekend culminated in a "march of millions" on Tuesday 1 February, which finally wrung grudging concessions from Mubarak. In a televised speech he said he would not stand again for election and promised to rewrite part of the constitution. 
  
  The regime struck back on Wednesday » 
2 February, mobilising its plainclothes thugs to attack demonstrators in Alexandria and Cairo. Demonstrators in Tahrir Square faced a surprise assault by columns of attackers armed with stones, knives and Molotov cocktails, riding the horses and camels which normally give tourist rides near the Pyramids. For two days the battle for the square raged back and forth, but eventually the demonstrators gained the advantage. Hundreds of thousands again marched the following Friday, this time labelled "Departure Day". Meanwhile the regime hunted desperately for potential partners in a "dialogue". Some of the opposition groups, including the Muslim Brotherhood, sent representatives to meet Omar Suleiman, Mubarak's newly appointed vice-president and former spymaster in chief. Sections of the ruling class, including figures such as businessmen Ahmed Bahgat and Naguib Sawiris, began to openly back some of the demonstrators' demands, while attempting to position themselves to play a political role in the expected "transitional period".
  
  Still tens of thousands held their ground in the streets and, despite the violent rhetoric coming from the regime's spokesmen and hired reporters, new people began to come. Families with young children mingled with the crowds in Tahrir Square and a young couple were 
married there on the Sunday afternoon. 
  
Strikes

It was on Tuesday 8 February that the balance of forces shifted again - this time decisively against Mubarak. A ripple of strikes spread from a few workplaces - the Suez Canal service workers, telecom workers in Cairo and the Helwan steel workers were among the first - gathering force as it washed across Egypt. By 9 February the Egyptian Centre for Social and Economic Rights estimated that up to 300,000 workers were on strike across 15 governorates. From hospital technicians and cement workers to postal workers and textile workers, they occupied and struck, raising a potent mixture of economic demands and support for the revolution. 

  Delegations of striking workers now joined the crowds in Tahrir Square, and outside the presidential palace and the radio and television building by the Nile. Amid swirling rumours that he would resign, Mubarak made a final televised statement on Thursday 10 February but still refused to step down. Small numbers of army officers could be seen addressing the crowds in Tahrir Square. One officer telephoned Al Jazeera to resign live on air and announced that he had joined the "people's revolution". While the army commanders met for hours behind closed doors, the crowds swelled again. Cairo seemed poised on the brink of a final insurrection. 
  
  The edifice of the state finally cracked on 11 February. The senior army commanders took power and removed Mubarak from office. 
  
  Three key things stand out from the story of the 25 January revolution. Firstly, the 18 days of confrontation were shaped by many of the same dynamics of protest as the previous decade, but operating at a deeper level and across a much shorter timescale. Protesters seized key areas of the major cities, particularly Tahrir Square, and turned them into strategic assets for the revolutionary movement. Tahrir Square, with its self-organised security committees, scavenged barricades, volunteer medics and street sweepers, sound systems, tents and banners, became - like the hundreds of occupied factories over the previous five years - liberated territory. It was a place to debate, but also an organising centre from which activists went out to win arguments for bringing factories, offices and neighbourhoods into the revolution. 
  
  Defence of this space rested not only on the sheer weight of numbers, but also on political organisation. The Muslim Brotherhood youth activists, for example, played a central role in protecting the square from attack by the government thugs and at the checkpoints around the perimeter. Yet the Brotherhood did not dominate the space inside but rather remained caught within its own contradictions - held in balance between its young members' identification with the broader revolutionary movement and the aspiration of its leadership to strike a deal with the state. That equilibrium not only helped to keep the streets open for protest but also created a space in which, despite their smaller numbers, voices from the revolutionary left have reached new audiences and won new recruits. 
  
  Secondly, however, if the revolution had only remained in the streets, even in the numbers which came out after 25 January, it is uncertain whether this would have been enough to cause the state to crack from above. Just as during the previous decade's struggles for democracy and reform, the alliance of different social and political groups mobilised for change did not make a breakthrough until the revolution crossed from the political to the social domain, going from the streets into the workplaces and rousing workers to take collective action, fusing their own demands with the wider goals of the movement. Moreover, the cracks in the regime's machinery of political and social control which allowed this process to take place did not simply appear on 25 January, but rather have their origin in the long-term impact of neoliberal reforms on the structure of the Nasserist state. 
  
  Finally, there is the question of the role of the military. In essence, what the mass movement from below achieved was to force one part of the state - the Armed Forces High 
Command - to cut out the cancer that Mubarak had become in order to save the state as a whole. This is clearly not the same as the mass movement seizing power on its own behalf. Nor have the armed forces disintegrated either vertically, with splits appearing between rival commanders, or horizontally, along class lines as the Russian army did in 1917. Yet it would be a mistake to see the removal of Mubarak as simply a coup d'état, or to underestimate the difficulties military rulers face if they try to demobilise the revolutionary movement by force. The situation is fundamentally different from that of 1952, when a small circle of junior army officers acted after the mass protest movement had temporarily exhausted itself. The streets were empty when Nasser led his forces to seize the palace, radio station and barracks. Here the turn towards the social struggle again becomes crucial. In February 2011 the revolution had already entered the workplaces before the military acted. In 1952 one strike by textile workers at Kafr al-Dawwar threatened the new military regime and it was crushed by the army. A week after Mubarak's fall hundreds of workplaces were on strike, including the giant Mahalla textile plant with its workforce of 24,000. 
  
If there is to be real change for the millions in Egypt, and not just the millionaires like Naguib Sawiris and Ahmed Bahgat, the revolution needs to deepen further. Organised workers are becoming a social force within the developing revolutionary movement, and they have consciously deployed their collective social power to achieve the movement's first political goal: the removal of Mubarak. In only 18 days Egyptian workers have travelled further down the road to human liberation than their parents and grandparents managed in a lifetime. But there is much still to do: kicking the ruling party's henchmen out of every workplace and neighbourhood, building independent unions and, above all, creating new institutions of workers' democracy which can start to act, at least in embryo, as alternative centres of state power. AA

The revolution has only just begun

With dictator Zine El-Abidine Ben Ali long gone, media attention on Tunisia has waned. But there is now an ongoing battle to cleanse the country of Ben Ali's cronies, reports Mohamed Tonsi 

The flight of dictator Zine El-Abidine Ben Ali was only the first chapter of the Tunisian Revolution. The mobilisation of the people, organised in neighbourhood militias, foiled the first attempt at counterrevolution by the remnants of the president's loyalists. The liberation caravan which came from regions where the revolution started and blockaded the prime minister's office for more than a week led to the reshuffle of a government - formed less than two weeks previously - which had kept ruling party figures in key positions.

  This success encouraged the masses to demand the full removal of the ruling party, the Constitutional Democratic Rally (RCD). Finally, the minister of the interior had to bow to popular pressure and froze the activities of the RCD, banning any meetings of its members pending its dissolution. In cities, towns and villages across the country, governors, mayors and municipal assemblies close to the old regime were forced out of office. When I phoned my cousin, who lives in the coastal village of Korba, to ask how the family is doing, he told me, "We are doing fine. Today the people gathered together and we managed to expel the mayor and the municipal assembly. They are a bunch of RCD cronies!"
  
  The new foreign minister, Ahmed Ounais, faced the same fate after a press conference in Luxembourg. Here he refused to describe the events in Tunisia as a revolution, and praised the French foreign minister Michèle Alliot-Marie, who had offered to help Ben Ali's police before his fall, calling her a visionary and a friend of the Tunisian nation. Finally, he refused to comment on the events unfolding in Egypt. Two hundred outraged employees of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs walked out and besieged the minister's office before issuing a communiqué in support of the Egyptian people. 
  
  There is a reverberation between the revolutions in the two countries. The main slogan used in Egypt - "The people want to bring down the regime" - originated in Tunisia, and the 50,000-strong demonstration in Sfax, the second biggest Tunisian city, was called as a "day of rage" just one day after the first day of Egyptian rage. The recent success of the Egyptian Revolution has inspired the Tunisian people to match the Egyptian achievements and call for the dissolution of parliament and the upper house, and for the formation of a constitutional assembly. 
  
  Following the fall of Hosni Mubarak in Egypt, inspired by the swift successes in the two countries, and intoxicated by the infinite realm of new possibilities, crowds started chanting an even more daring slogan: "The people want to liberate Palestine!"
  
  Although the momentum of the revolution has not faltered, the danger of counterrevolution is still present. Counterrevolutionary forces will always try to diminish, if not reverse, the achievements of revolutions. The latest attempt has been the formation of a government of ultra-liberal technocrats who, while having no links with the old regime, have been hand-picked by the bourgeoisie to defend their interests. 
  
  To add insult to injury, prime minister Mohamed Ghannouchi has hired as an adviser an ex-banker, and expert in "political marketing", who advised Ben Ali during his final days in office. This can only fuel the social discontent and the industrial action already taking place in many areas, not simply over pay but mainly to win permanent contracts for the large contingents of temporary workers.
  
  It is very interesting to notice the spontaneous and organised reactions of the bourgeoisie to these demands. Groups with tens of thousands of members have been formed on Facebook with slogans like, "This is a revolution of free men not of beggars" and a sarcastic, "The unemployed have started the revolution and the employed want a pay rise". 
  
  The class struggle is becoming increasingly obvious and is starting to polarise those who were united in calling for Ben Ali to "get the hell out". The revolution has achieved all the demands of the bourgeoisie by ousting the dictator and his party. According to them, the nation, meaning the workers, should go back to hard work. Leading these efforts to tame the revolution is the wealthy Mabrouk family - a member of which is Ben Ali's son in law - who are still free to continue their business as usual. They are trying to transform the revolution of the people into a "palace coup" and are happy to throw other families to popular vengeance. The adviser to the prime minister and at least three other new ministers have historical links to this family and their business empire.
  
  The revolution gathered momentum through the formation of local councils for protection of the revolution in several cities and towns. These pushed the opposition political parties, the UGTT union federation, the union of students and many other civil society associations to declare the formation of a nationwide council for the protection of the revolution. In total, 28 groups signed this declaration, including communists, social democrats, nationalists, Islamists and even the association of veterans of the anti-colonial struggle. This offers accountability over the actions of the transitional government and an overview of the task of changing legislation over electoral law, media and justice in order to pave the way for democratic elections. 
  
The UGTT presented this declaration to the transitional government who declined it on 16 February. As I write, calls are being made for countrywide demonstrations demanding the resignation of the transitional government. 

Mubarak: ally of imperialism

For 30 years Egypt has been the linchpin of US and Israeli domination across the 
Middle East. Simon Assaf charts the history of Western support for Mubarak and the consequences of his downfall

When the mass demonstrations that swept Egypt turned into an insurrection, US president Barack Obama demanded to know why Middle East experts in Washington failed to predict that a revolution was about to sweep away its most important ally in the Arab world.

  That the Middle East is a huge pressure cooker of anger and frustration was known to all. But some Israelis, neocons and many Arab leaders had convinced themselves that if the Arab masses had not risen in rebellion already, they never would. The Egyptian Revolution has dispelled those illusions and thrown into doubt decades of US military, political and economic thinking designed to break an alliance of Arab states that emerged out of the anti-colonial revolutions of the 1950s and 1960s. 
  
  The cornerstone of this strategy was to keep Egypt "neutral" and isolate any country that challenged imperialism and Israel. Egypt's peace treaties with Israel, signed by Anwar Sadat, Hosni Mubarak's predecessor, at Camp David in 1978-9, shifted the balance of power dramatically in the region. Stabilising Egypt meant stabilising Saudi Arabia, Lebanon, Yemen and a host of other countries. It was key to isolating Syria and Iran, nations that refused to bow to US diktats in the "new Middle East".
  
  Measured in hard cash, the Israeli-Egyptian peace dividend, known as the "cold peace", remained at a modest $500 million a year in trade. Israeli tourists could take Nile cruises or smoke hashish in Sharm el-Sheikh holiday resorts, and Israeli businessmen could set up free enterprise zones - mainly to guarantee the US market for Egyptian cotton. But the rewards for Israel were far greater. Before 1978 Israel dedicated some 23 percent of its GDP to military spending; after Camp David this dropped to 9 percent.
  
Cold peace

The treaty had more dramatic consequences. It allowed Israel, virtually unhindered, to turn its full might on the Palestinians, Lebanon and Syria. The 1978 Camp David Accords were signed as Israel staged its first invasion of Lebanon. Israeli troops completed the final handover of the Sinai in 1982, before launching the second, and more devastating, invasion of Lebanon. An Egypt friendly to the US guaranteed the safety of the Red Sea and key supply lines for the US occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq. Egypt was a great strategic asset. Camp David was hailed as a master stroke.

  The cold peace became the cornerstone of imperial strategy in the region, but Egypt also began to matter economically. Some 8 percent of global seaborne trade passes through the Suez Canal, which links the Red Sea to the Mediterranean. The strategically vital Sumed pipeline than runs along its banks is part of a network of global oil distribution. Egypt has recently discovered vast reserves of natural gas, oil and coal, and has big industry, with steel foundries, textile mills and car plants. 
  
  So Egypt is an economic as well as strategic prize, and China has been hovering for a while in its attempt to displace US and Western 
capital in the region. Egypt straddles Africa and the Middle East, and in Africa, China matters. Chinese investment in the continent has mushroomed over the past decade, and Egypt is part of this expansion. In 2002 Sino-Egyptian trade was worth $500 million; by 2006 it had reached $3 billion and in 2008 a staggering $6.24 billion. Chinese money is funding a huge expansion of the container terminal in Port Said that will serve as a key hub for its goods bound for European markets. It is modernising the car industry and building high-end electronics factories and other manufacturing plants along the "enterprise zones" near the canal. It has much at stake in Egypt.
  
  China was cautious of drawing too close to an Egypt allied to the US, but now it sees an opportunity and it brings little ideological baggage with it. The US might have a deep political connection with Israel, but China doesn't. Arab protesters do not burn the Chinese flag. So China can present itself as an honest broker in the same way the US did during the dying days of British and French colonial rule. The more aggressive and narrow US and Israeli strategy is, the more it stonewalls even the most moderate peace plan, the greater the risk that Egypt will slip further into the arms of China. 
  
  Israel has a second pressing problem - its disastrous relationship with Turkey, a key Middle East nation once considered, like Egypt, to be friendly. The Israelis have been slowly burning their bridges with Ankara, and relations soured further following Israel's bloody attack on the Mavi Marmara, the Turkish aid ship which attempted to break the siege of Gaza. Turkey, once a dependable ally, had already resisted US demands to use its territory as a launch-pad for its invasion of Iraq. Now the Turkish regime has started its "turn to the east", reheating its once frosty relations with its neighbours - it recently sealed its rapprochement with Syria and has warm relations with Iran.
  
  With the Egyptian state now under massive pressure from below, Israel may find it has few friends left. Even before the Egyptian Revolution, Israel was learning that its military power had limits. The failed occupation of southern Lebanon, which ended in a humiliating retreat in May 2000, was followed by a disastrous war in 2006, when it was outfought and outthought by Hezbollah and the Lebanese resistance. Even its grip on the Palestinians was not assured, with stubborn resistance in the West Bank and an untamed armed opposition in the Gaza Strip.
  
  A combination of the US's disastrous wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as Israel's clumsy attempts to suppress Lebanon's Hezbollah and the Palestinian Hamas movement, already set nerves jangling. In the weeks before the Egyptian Revolution the parliamentary alliance headed by Hezbollah forced out of office the US-backed prime minister of Lebanon. Israel already had a delicate situation on the "northern front"; now it has a disastrous one in the south.
  
  The region has seen some fundamental social changes in the era of the cold peace. Whereas in the 1960s and 1970s Israel confronted societies that were overwhelmingly rural and economically stagnant, by the turn of this century the Arab world had become urban, sophisticated and relatively advanced. Even countries such as Lebanon, vastly poorer that its oil-rich neighbours, have been transformed. In the 1960s three out of four Lebanese lived off the land; now some eight out of ten live in cities. This is true of most other Arab nations, with Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and the Gulf states becoming fully integrated into global capitalism. 
  
  But these historic social changes are not reflected in the Arab regimes, whose leaders owe their position to events that took place in a world that has long gone. The dysfunctional relationship between the rulers and the "street" had long been seen as a problem by Western governments, but they were too timid to press for meaningful reforms. This problem was compounded by Israel itself.
  
  Israel was already finding the Lebanese and Palestinians difficult to tame. But it could reassure itself that neither resistance movement, even with the help of Syria and Iran, could field an army of millions and march on Tel Aviv. Egypt can, and it brings some hard facts to the table. Its 82 million population dwarfs all others. More people live in the city of Alexandria than in Lebanon, and the population of Greater Cairo is bigger than that of Syria. The Israelis can ill afford a repeat of the war of attrition that culminated in Egypt's devastating 1973 offensive. Israel survived that war, but it was very close.
  
  Having relied on Israel to break the alliance of Arab nationalist regimes, the US found itself unable to rein in its ally's territorial ambitions. The US fell into a strategic trap of its own making. It dangled the prospect of a two-state solution and normalisation to the friendly Arab states, but could not get Israel to make the necessary concessions. And, as was revealed in the recently leaked Palestine Papers - which exposed negotiations between the US, Israel and the Palestinian Authority - it never intended to. 
  
Oslo accords

Israeli governments engineered the collapse of the Oslo Accords that set out a two-state solution with the Palestinians, and rejected a key Saudi peace plan that offered "Arab normalisation" in return for all the lands seized after the 1967 war. By rejecting these plans, Israel slapped in the face Arab leaders who banked on an "honourable deal" they could sell back home. The Saudi plan and Oslo Accords were rotten for the Palestinians, but still insufficient to satisfy Israel's appetite.

  Arab leaders began to demand that the US put more pressure on Israel. Obama initiated desperate and unsuccessful attempts to reign in Israeli ambitions - even offering advanced warplanes in return for a temporary freeze on its settlements in the West Bank. Israeli stonewalling destroyed the Palestinian Authority's credibility and with it any real prospect for peace on its terms. Now Israel and imperialism face a nightmare scenario. Should Israeli troops rush to seize the Gaza Strip (as some Israeli generals are demanding) and risk dragging Egypt into war, or tread warily so as not to provoke a country in the grip of revolutionary fervour? The advice coming from the US is unequivocal. 
  
  Stratfor, the renowned US think-tank, used some blunt words to sum up Israel's "strategic distress": "The worst-case scenario for Israel would be a return to the pre-1978 relationship with Egypt without a settlement with the Palestinians. That would open the door for a potential two-front war with an intifada in the middle. To avoid that, the ideological pressure on Egypt must be eased, and that means a settlement with the Palestinians on less than optimal terms. 
  
  "The alternative is to stay the current course and let Israel take its chances. The question is where the greater safety lies. Israel has assumed that it lies with confrontation with the Palestinians. That's true only if Egypt stays neutral. If the pressure on the Palestinians destabilises Egypt, it is not the most prudent course."
  
  The US is banking on skilfully talking down the Egyptian Revolution and it is attempting to sell itself as a friend of the people. Yet there is an immediate and pressing question: what happens when Gaza asks for the siege to be lifted? What will be the response of an Egyptian government, whether military or civilian, that has set up shop in Mubarak's presidential palace?
  
  Either way the US is attempting, under Obama, to tread delicately. Israel could decide to gamble on a repeat of its 1967 victory, but the risks are suddenly very high. For imperialism the Egyptian effect is posing wider strategic concerns. The waves generated by the revolution are already lapping at the shores of other Middle East countries. The uprising has emboldened already existing movements for change, with almost daily protests and demonstrations in Bahrain (home to the US Fifth Fleet), Yemen (a key US ally in the "war on terror") and Jordan (the second Arab country to make peace with Israel), as well as Algeria and Morocco.
  
  Similarly it is worth repeating that Israel is a mighty power, and the more the US loses its footing in the region, the more dependent it is on maintaining this power. Crucially for the US, the Israeli regime has vastly greater internal stability than the Arab dictatorships, as it is based on a racially exclusive settler state that owes its survival to imperialism. The US understands that, whatever the outcome of the revolution, Israel still has the ability to mete out some harsh military punishment. The US is not about to abandon Israel; it just wants it to behave, for now.
  
  The biggest fear is not only that the Egyptian Revolution reproduces itself in the rest of the region - although this seems increasingly possible - but that in the process of revolution the Arab masses have rediscovered their power and proved what is possible. The question of the direction for the Egyptian Revolution remains open-ended. But it already casts a shadow over Israel, imperialism and its allies in the region. 
  
Over the past 30 years Israel and the US were forced to look over their shoulders at a resistance armed with stones and crude 
rockets. Now they have come face to face 
with a giant. SA

The state of the global economy

Jane Hardy

Bankers and bosses appeared cheerful at this year's World Economic Forum in Davos. But the state of the global economy remains precarious

Last month the global ruling class - the bankers, political leaders, the CEOs of top multinationals and their acolytes - met for the World Economic Forum at the luxurious Swiss ski resort in Davos. 

  At the same event last year, in the aftermath of the crisis, they were like rabbits caught in the headlights. But this year they found reasons to be cheerful - publicly at least. The global economy has not nose-dived into another recession - in fact some parts of it appear to be booming. The bankers have breathed a sigh of relief as they remain unscathed by regulations; large bonuses are back on the agenda and profits are up.
  
  Barclays have felt confident enough to stick two fingers up by giving Bob Diamond a £9 million bonus. As Guardian economics editor Larry Elliot put it, "From the boardroom life is sweet." However, according to Martin Wolf, a leading commentator at the Financial Times, in private the confidence of the global ruling classes was much more shaky. 
  
  As socialists our analysis does not differ very much from that of the global ruling class in terms of what the global economy looks like. The recovery is highly uneven. Broadly the global economy is recovering at three speeds; "emerging markets", Latin America and China are growing at between 6 and 10 percent a year, the US is racking up 3 percent of jobless growth and the eurozone (apart from Germany) is dragging its heels with 2 percent. 
  
  It is Germany's role as an export hub that has kept other European economies afloat - a relationship that is replicated between the US and China. The global economy is structurally imbalanced, with huge trade surpluses in China mirrored by massive trade deficits in the US. Inside the eurozone, Germany's export surplus is mirrored by deficits in the so-called peripheral economies of Spain, Portugal, Ireland and Greece. Overall the whole global economy looks fragile as every government tries to impose swingeing cuts. This has precipitated all kinds of tensions among the global ruling classes.
  
  In May 2010 the sovereign debt crisis in Greece triggered a crisis in the whole of the eurozone. Massive sums of money were pumped into the system by the European Central Bank and the IMF to prevent an implosion of the region. On the surface, things seem to be relatively calm. But Greece and Ireland have massive accumulated debts, while Portugal may need a bailout. 
  
  German chancellor Angela Merkel has suggested a "competitiveness pact", which means synchronising public debt limits, tax rates and pension ages and giving up linking wages to increases in inflation. As the Financial Times observed, "Berlin is treating the defence of the euro as a fundamental national interest - even at the cost of a bailout of some of the feckless partners." A broken eurozone would threaten Germany's economic interests - exports to its neighbours still dwarf exports to China. 
  
  There are also arguments among the US ruling class. The economy has grown at 
3 percent - but that is the only good news. The increase in jobs is a mere 1 percent above the level of employment in the depths of the recession. There is a rise in poverty and home repossessions. 
  
  The US government has had a two-pronged approach. It has printed money (quantitative easing) which has driven down the value of the dollar and heightened tensions with China. It has also indirectly fed into the protests and revolutions in North Africa as this money has fuelled speculation on food and driven up prices. The Obama administration is walking a tightrope. The Republican Party and some sections of the ruling class want to try to cut the gargantuan US debt. But Obama wants to lift the ceiling on debt by $14 trillion, saying that it is non-negotiable and fearing that any cuts would deal a catastrophic blow to the global economy.
  
  Despite double digit growth that other governments salivate at, China is not without its internal contradictions. The massive bailout of the economy in 2008 (four times larger than that of the US) has rebooted double digit growth but also produced a surge of inflation and property prices. The strikes of last summer show that China's rulers cannot rely on a passive and acquiescent working class.
  
  There are all sorts of contradictory tensions and pressures. Brazil's ability to export commodities to China has kept its economy afloat during the crisis. But China is also a source of cheap imports, because the Brazilian currency has risen by 40 percent against the dollar in the last two years. So in another twist the US is courting Brazil to gang up with it against "China's overvalued currency".  
  
  There is a general nervousness about the scale of austerity, and whether this could tip parts of the global economy back into recession. In Britain we are seeing the resurfacing of "stagflation" - with a contraction in demand (blamed on the bad weather) combined with rising prices. 
  
While our view of the world economy may be the same as that of the global ruling class our solutions could hardly be more different. They have consistently tried to shift the burden onto working class people in the form of an unprecedented assault on welfare. We look to Egypt for inspiration as their revolution demonstrated the power of workers. That sort of anger needs to be turned on ruling classes everywhere as we are asked to pay for their crisis. JH

Tories sow false Divisions

Last month David Cameron used a speech in Munich to attack multiculturalism, gaining fulsome praise from far-right and fascist organisations across Europe. Hassan Mahamdallie exposes Cameron's racist lies, while considering the legacy of multiculturalism in Britain 

D

avid Cameron travelled to 
Munich, of all places, at the start of last month to make a speech attacking our multicultural society and the more than one 
million Muslims living in it. 

  Why was this speech of such significance? It could be argued that Cameron was only travelling further down a road mapped out by Tony Blair. The deafening silence from New Labour, apart from frontbenchers distancing themselves from MP Sadiq Khan's condemnation of Cameron, was indeed wretched. 
  
  We know that the Tories like nothing more than a spoonful or two of bigotry with their politics, but Cameron's speech marked a step change in state racism. The occasion and place of Cameron's speech signalled the premeditated nature of his attack. He delivered the speech at an international security conference populated by spooks, military types, politicians and the official media. 
  
  His speech was certainly music to the ears of host Angela Merkel, who announced late last year that multiculturalism had "failed totally" in Germany and was to blame for Muslims' supposed failure to integrate into the German way of life. The speech was also applauded by French president Nicolas Sarkozy, who went on television to state, "If you come to France, you accept to melt into a single community, which is the national community, and if you do not want to accept that, you cannot be welcome in France."
  
  The speech also made Cameron new admirers from the cesspool that is Europe's far right. Marine Le Pen, the new leader of France's fascist Front National, was overjoyed: "It is exactly this type of statement that has barred us from public life [in France] for 30 years... I can only congratulate him."
  
  In the face of this, the recent speech by Tory chair Baroness Warsi that Islamophobia was the last "respectable" racism, applauded by British Muslim organisations, fades into irrelevance.
  
The new "enemy within"

Cameron has definitively lined Britain up with the European right wing consensus that Muslims are the agency of the West's decline - they are the "enemy within" to be viewed essentially as a security threat, and advocates of multiculturalism are to blame for it all. It was the section in Cameron's speech that broadened the scope of Muslim individuals and groups that are now to be opposed that marked the change. Cameron argued that from now on even Muslims who reject violence can be viewed as "extremist". 

  This was interpreted partly as an attack on the Muslim Council of Britain (MCB) - an entirely legitimate religious organisation whose views can be accurately described as mainstream. It follows that if the MCB are under suspicion then there are no Muslim organisations or leaders in Britain immune from the accusation that they are recruiting sergeants for terrorism, even as they oppose it. The only Muslim groups free from scrutiny will be those fostered by the state as client organisations - a handful of which were set up by the New Labour government as pretend spokespeople for "moderate Islam". 
  
  A recent event illuminates the climate of intimidation and fear Cameron now wants to foster. When Birmingham Respect councillor Salma Yaqoob remained seated instead of rising for a standing ovation as a decorated soldier entered the council chamber, a Lib Dem councillor rounded on her saying she would have got on her feet for a suicide bomber and accusing her of wanting to see Britain become an Islamic republic. The story was then splashed in the Daily Mail and the Sun. The thrust of the attack was to smear Yaqoob's reputation and deny her right as a Muslim to peaceful dissent and an anti-war stance.
  
  Cameron's message in Munich was bulked out by the usual lies that surround this worldview. He cited the example of "Islamic fundamentalists" taking over British prisons. There is no evidence whatsoever that this has happened in any British prison. He also resurrected the myth that Muslim communities have failed to confront forced marriages - despite the fact that you would be hardpressed to find an individual Muslim advocating these.
  
  Cameron's attack on "failed multiculturalism" also rested on a bed of falsehoods. The notion that multiculturalism was ever an official state policy is simply not true. Where local councils have funded a few facilities for minority ethnic groups, the overall thrust has been to give them "a leg up" and the confidence to engage with society on the basis of equality. 
  
  Study after study shows that Britain's Muslims are integrated - as much as they are allowed - into wider society. Opinion polls show that they agree with, or even feel more strongly about, so-called Western values. And Muslims are anti-war - with all the fundamentally decent values that implies - alongside the great majority of British society. 
  
  Given that most Muslims are working class, they are patently more integrated into society than the upper classes who take pride in their separation from "the unwashed masses". How many of us have a community-minded millionaire City banker living next door? Demographic studies have shown that it is overwhelmingly the fear of racist hostility that has acted to discourage black and Asian people from moving into majority white areas. The coalition's attack on the poor and the stamping on working class aspirations for a university education will do more to isolate communities than any other force in British life. Cameron claimed that multiculturalism had left young Muslims "feeling rootless". The truth is that if some young Muslims feel shut out of society it is the result of poverty, unemployment and racism compounded by hostility to Islam. 
  
  When communities have been divided, the root cause has rarely been people's religious beliefs. It was racist local council policies that led to segregated housing, for example. In the north of England it was employers, notoriously the mill owners, who deliberately segregated their workforce as a profitable ploy to divide and rule. And it has been the established political parties who have traditionally sought to treat minority ethnic voters as homogeneous electoral blocs and "community leaders" as the agency to deliver that backing, even if it meant playing one group off against another.  
  
  If you blow away the smokescreen, at the root of Cameron's attack is a profound hostility to our multicultural society and the desire to undermine the unity that is its strength. His "muscular liberalism" represents an urge to drive a wedge between us at the very point when we need to stand together against the coalition's attacks. 
  
Anti-racism

Progress towards a multicultural society has always advanced through anti-racist struggles large and small, everyday and historic: the defence of black and Asian immigrants against race riots; the battles of black youth against the "sus" laws and racist policing of the Notting Hill Carnival; the fight to turn the trade unions into bastions of anti-racism; the struggle of school teachers and students to enjoy anti-racist teaching; the multiracial riots that erupted in our inner cities under Margaret Thatcher; the growth of a multicultural youth culture; and stubborn defence of our communities from attack by Mosley's fascists, the National Front, the British National Party and the English Defence League. 

  The fight of Asian workers at the Grunwick factory in the late 1970s led by the recently deceased Jayaben Desai would have been less but for the support of the Yorkshire miners on the west London picket line, and the 1984-5 fight of the miners would have been less but for the solidarity delivered by miners' support groups, including from the black communities in areas such as Brixton.
  
  It is this tradition that Cameron and those urging him on wish to roll back and destroy. It's up to us all to defend it. HM
  
  Fighting racism on two fronts
  
When the racist English Defence League (EDL) announced it was going to hold a demonstration in Luton on 5 February everyone knew that it was going to be a big test for both the anti-fascist movement and the racists. 

  In the run-up to the demonstration the EDL boasted that it was going to put 8,000 people on the streets. But on the day it claimed 2,500 turned up. 
  
  However, anti-fascist protesters outnumbered the EDL two to one. Around 2,000 activists gathered at the official Unite Against Fascism (UAF) rally in the town centre and up to 3,000 people joined the joint UAF/community protest in Bury Park, the predominantly Asian part of the town.
  
  But that was only half the story. The spirit of the student protests and the Egyptian Revolution had buoyed our side. For over an hour 400 anti-fascist protesters blocked Luton railway station, forcing the London divisions of the EDL to get off at an earlier station.  
  
  On the day the police refused to allow the two anti-fascist protests to join together and there were a number of spirited attempts to link both protests. As usual, the police spent much of their million pound budget on persuading Muslims to stay indoors and away from the UAF counter-protest. The police didn't seem to be able to do anything about EDL thugs daubing Asian houses in Luton with racist graffiti in the aftermath of the protest. 
  
  The UAF counter-protest was an important step forward in another way - it had a broad base of support, and this had a lot to do with the excellent work the local group has done over the years. The local MP and MEP both spoke at the UAF counter-protest, a large number of councillors were present and every union in the town backed it.
  
  Judging by the comments on the EDL online chat rooms, many went home dispirited, with many complaining that they were outnumbered by anti-fascists. Their leader, "Tommy Robinson" (Stephen Yaxley-Lennon), was punched by one disgruntled EDL supporter. 
  
  But the EDL were saved by two connected events. The first of these was David Cameron's speech attacking multiculturalism, which hit the front pages of almost every national newspaper the same day as the EDL demonstration in Luton. This was not lost on the EDL. When Robinson spoke in Luton, he said of Cameron's speech, "He's now saying what we are saying. He knows his base." Robinson is a vile racist, but he is right on this point - Cameron's speech helped legitimise their racism.
  
  The other event was the Daily Star newspaper running the front page headline, "EDL Chief: Vote Us Into Parliament". It's a rare thing for the Daily Star to run anything on politics - its front pages are normally reserved for half-naked women and football stars. The day before this it carried a phone poll that found that 98 percent of its respondents said that "they agreed with the EDL's policies". This is depressing and has echoes of the way the Daily Mail supported Oswald Mosley's British Union of Fascists in the 1930s.
  
  The EDL may have failed to make the breakthrough it threatened in Luton, but it has gained credibility from both Cameron and sections of the media. Our movement faces two key challenges: one is to halt Cameron's attacks on multiculturalism and the other is to build a broad movement against the rise of the EDL.
  
Martin Smith

Socialism and women's liberation

It is 100 years since the first International Women's Day was held in March 1911, yet despite many victories gender inequality still exists today. Sally Campbell argues that only socialism can bring genuine liberation

W

e live in a time of contradiction. There are more women in positions of power than ever before, yet attitudes to women seem to be going backwards. Angela Merkel is the chancellor of Germany, a country debating imposing a quota for women in the boardrooms. Yet the head of Deutsche Bank, when asked if he supported the proposal, said yes, of course - women would make boardrooms "more colourful and prettier". 

  Italy, on the other hand, is run by Silvio Berlusconi - a man whose behaviour is so atrocious that tens of thousands of women demonstrated recently holding placards with slogans such as "Italy is not a brothel". As I write, Hillary Clinton, US secretary of state, is being discussed on the radio - not for her political role, but for her opinion on handbags. 
  
  Here in Britain, Scottish Tory MSP Bill Aitken revealed once again a traditional view of rape - that it is not so bad if it happens to a woman working as a prostitute, or even just walking alone in an area known for prostitution. Unfortunately surveys show that this view is held much more widely than the Tory right.
  
Women workers

Half the workforce in Britain today is female, with more than half of women with children under the age of five being in work, rising to 80 percent of those whose youngest child is aged 11 to 15. Women are having fewer children and studies suggest that many young women, perhaps 20 percent, won't have children at all. Girls do well at school and go on to further and higher education in unprecedented numbers. In many ways women's and men's lives are getting more and more similar. So how can this reality coincide with such backward attitudes? 

  It's not just men's attitudes that are the problem. Many women have bought the notion that being "sexy" is the height of female empowerment, that pole-dancing and "dancing in stilettos" classes are the fun way to keep fit, and that self-confidence is something to be bought in the form of the right pair of shoes or, worse, the right pair of implants. 
  
  The contradiction of a time in which women have legal equality but face such rampant sexism confounds many commentators. It is not sufficient to simply blame the media and easy-access internet pornography for creating sexism and women's oppression. Women see these images and obviously feel pressure to conform to these plucked, plastic forms. But, as Bidisha observed in the Guardian recently, male porn actors are also completely shaved and waxed, but young men don't come away feeling they have to emulate this particular form of self-mutilation. There are deeper structures at work, of which the current "raunch culture" is a symptom, which shape men's and women's behaviour and expectations and their attitudes towards one another.
  
Mars and Venus

In the last few years there has been a resurgence of the "common sense" view that this behaviour is natural - men are from Mars and women are from Venus, and there's nothing we can do to change the fact. Sometimes this is dressed up in pseudo-science about how our brains work: the evolutionary imperatives for girls liking pink, and so on. These arguments have been debunked very effectively by Deborah Cameron in The Myth of Mars and Venus and Cordelia Fine in Delusions of Gender. But these ideas retain a hold because they seem to explain the real inequality that still exists. 

  Despite women's deep and permanent implantation in the workforce, and 40 years on from the Equal Pay Act, we still earn on average 18 percent less than men for full-time work. For part-time workers (of whom many are women) the gap rises to around 30 percent. Over her lifetime a woman will earn on average half of what a man will earn, primarily because of the role women still play as primary carers for children - not to mention all the other family members women will often find themselves responsible for. So if we toss out Mars and Venus, what is at work to constantly reinforce women's oppression?
  
  Some would identify this structure as "patriarchy" - rule by men. This is certainly a good description of the world today, where the Angela Merkels and Hillary Clintons are still the exceptions that prove the rule. But where does patriarchy take us in terms of explanation? Why do men rule? 
  
  Some feminists would say it is in men's nature to be aggressive and dominant - if women ruled the world there wouldn't be all this war and economic crisis! For me, this is no different from the dominant conservative view - it's Mars and Venus with the polarity reversed. Others see patriarchy as an ideology, going back to the Bible and beyond, which justifies men's rule and which is carried through the institutions of the state and the family to keep women out of public life. This still doesn't explain why patriarchy emerged. In either case, the crucial conclusion drawn is that all men are agents of patriarchy and that all women suffer from it. 
  
  Patriarchy theory emerged from the women's liberation movement of the 1960s and 1970s. The movement had grown not just because of sexism in society, but as a response to sexism in the liberation movements themselves, particularly in the US. Women felt that male activists, who often looked to versions of Marxism, did not take the issue of women's oppression seriously and therefore Marxism failed the test of liberation. 
  
  There was certainly a case to answer in terms of sexism in the movement, but was their critique of Marxism valid? Some feminists argued that Marxists say it is the ruling class that oppresses us and that a workers' revolution will liberate us, when actually it is all men who oppress (and benefit from the oppression of) all women, so we can't "wait for the revolution" before we fight for women's liberation. 
  
  A genuine Marxist approach would never argue that we have to wait to fight oppression. However, we would start from a class analysis of oppression - both in how it originated and how it is maintained from day to day. Frederick Engels, Marx's lifelong collaborator, wrote the groundbreaking text on this question, The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, in 1884. With breathtaking theoretical strength - remember this was just 25 years after the publication of Darwin's On the Origin of Species - he argued that, for the vast majority of human existence, we lived in small, nomadic, hunter-gatherer communities without hierarchies, exploitation or oppression. Concepts such as "wealth", "ownership" and "property" did not exist, either in our relationship with our environment or with each other. It was settling and developing productive techniques which began to change this. 
  
  With the development of agriculture around 6,000 years ago, women who were pregnant or with young children were not able to participate equally and found their importance in society degraded. Farming required more labourers and therefore more children, and this became women's primary role. 
  
  The production for the first time of a surplus of goods beyond what was immediately needed meant the rise of classes of priests or "big men" to control the surplus, and an idea of inheritance to pass wealth on from one generation of big men to the next. It became important at this point to know that the mother of your children was monogamous so you could ensure heirs. As Engels wrote, "The overthrow of the mother right was the world historic defeat of the female sex. The man took command in the home also; the woman was degraded and reduced to servitude."
  
Class and oppression

It was the rise of class which led to the development of the family and the subjugation of women to men. Class and oppression arose at a specific historical juncture and they are inextricably linked. Of course the ways we produce have changed over centuries, but the vital role of the family as a function of class society and the root of women's oppression remains. This analysis points towards the end of oppression - in the end of class society. 

  The fight against oppression is a class fight - not because rich women's oppression doesn't matter, but because only a class struggle against the ruling class that benefits from this society can ultimately end oppression. 
  
  Women today are in a stronger position than ever to wage this struggle. The "historic defeat" of women was being cut out of the role of producer, but the structural changes in capitalism, particularly since the Second World War, have meant millions of women being sucked into workplaces throughout the world, as an indispensable and permanent part of the working class alongside men. This gives women immense power, as producers, to hit the system where it hurts. As Oscar Wilde might have said, there's only one thing worse than being exploited under capitalism  - and that's not being exploited.
  
The problem with patriarchy theory is that it leads to the conclusion that all women are allies and all men are enemies - it ignores the class divide among women and among men. Of course oppression affects all women, whether a single mother on the minimum wage or Hillary Clinton, but it does not follow that they have the same interests. Women who are members of the ruling class have an interest in legal equality
 - so they can sue their bank for paying them a smaller six- or seven-figure salary than their male colleagues; they want the right to divorce and to retain their wealth; they have always been able to obtain birth control or abortions, though of course this is easier for them if it is legal. 

Double burden

But the central expression of women's oppression today, which affects women whether they have children themselves or not, is the "double burden" - the fact that women are expected both to work as productive members of society and to be the primary carers for children, the sick and the elderly. The role that women play as carers is crucial to capitalism for replenishing the labour power it needs to make its profits. 

  It might be nice for a man to come home to his dinner on the table (though this is less likely to happen nowadays as women don't have time, hence the proliferation of microwaves and fast food), but the real beneficiaries of women's unpaid labour are the ruling class. This is why it is so important for them to reinvent the idea of womanhood - that we must be successful, confident women in the workplace as well as being Nigella in the kitchen and Belle de Jour in the bedroom.
  
  The attacks on the welfare state will magnify this "double burden". Thousands of women will not only lose their own public sector jobs, but will lose the services they rely on - from public libraries and swimming pools to maternity services and care homes. Wealthy women do not face this burden, as they are able to hire other women to care for their children, pay for private education and healthcare, and install a swimming pool and their own personal library. Ruling class women have more of an interest in maintaining the status quo - even if it is a sexist one - than in changing it in the interests of the majority and thus expropriating themselves.
  
The majority of our rulers - businessmen, politicians, generals - are men, but the majority of men are not rulers. And while sexism certainly exists among 
working class men, it is in our common struggles that these backward ideas can and must be challenged. The key battles over abortion and equal pay were not won by women fighting alone, but by mass struggles of working class people and their unions. These were struggles about ordinary people gaining more control over their lives. 

  Every struggle shines a light on the ways in which we relate to each other, and how distorted we all are by living in a society based on exploitation and oppression. In a revolution that light is even starker. 
  
Sexual harassment

In Egypt in 2008 some 83 percent of women said they had been subject to some form of sexual harassment; in 2006 women made up just 22 percent of the workforce; and until 2000 a woman could not leave the country without her husband's permission. Yet in the revolution - in the course of just 18 days - things changed fundamentally. Women were central to the protests in Tahrir Square. As one activist said, "I've never felt safer in Egypt than when I was in the crowds. People are not just asking the regime to change. People are changing themselves." 

  This does not mean that sexism has now disappeared in Egypt, but it does show how unity against the regime was powerful enough to override divisions which hold the movement back. 
  
Process of change

Activist and writer Nawal el Saadawi has reported how young men from the Muslim Brotherhood came up to her in the square to offer their respect to her as a principled fighter. A revolution is not one day or two weeks - it is a process of immense change through which the details of everyday life are raised to the level of public, collective debate, and can begin to be dealt with. The questions of women's oppression - whether abusive partners, sexist comments or lack of childcare - are not just for women but for the whole movement to resolve.

  We live in a class society that is shaped by the struggles of the past. Because people fought for civil rights we have Barack Obama today; because people fought for women's rights we have Angela Merkel and Hillary Clinton; because those struggles hit the barrier of class society and didn't smash through it we still have racism and we still have sexism. 
  
Let's ensure that today's struggles have a clear aim - at those who exploit us and who care so little for humanity that they will deliberately set us upon each other in order to keep their grip on power. SC

The origins of International Women's Day

International Women's Day is now celebrated by working class women and those of the ruling class alike. Yet it was first called by the revolutionary socialist women of the International Women's Socialist Organisation (IWSO), a body led by German revolutionary Clara Zetkin, in the wake of intense discussions over how socialists should fight for emancipation.

  "Socialist parties of all countries have a duty to struggle energetically for the introduction of universal suffrage for women," proclaimed a resolution at the first IWSO conference in 1907. "Socialist women must not ally themselves with the bourgeois feminists, but lead the battle side by side with socialist males."
  
  At the following meeting of the IWSO in 1910 in Copenhagen, Zetkin successfully proposed an International Women's Day. It was to be held on 
8 March, as it is today, to commemorate the day of demonstrations by working class women in New York for universal suffrage in 1908. 
  
International Women's Day demonstrations were held across Europe every year afterwards until the outbreak of the First World War. The only wartime demonstration carried out was in Russia, 1917 - the spark that began the first Russian Revolution.

Groundbreaking historian of Chartism

Dorothy Thompson (1923-2011)

Dorothy Thompson was a socialist and feminist historian who transformed the study of the Chartist movement. 
Keith Flett considers her life and achievements 

Dorothy Thompson, who has died aged 87, was one of the post-1945 era's leading socialist and feminist historians and a political activist of considerable note and impact.

  She was married for many years to the socialist historian E P Thompson, who died in 1993, and her work and activity were in some ways complementary to, and at least equal to, his own. Edward studied Britain in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, for example, while Dorothy focused on the period immediately afterwards - that of Chartism, the first great working class movement. 
  
  Both left the Communist Party in 1956, both were part of the New Left in the 1960s and both later went on to become peace campaigners around CND in the 1980s. Yet both Dorothy and Edward made distinctive and independent contributions to historical knowledge and socialist politics.
  
Early years

Thompson, born Dorothy Towers, a third generation south Londoner, recorded much about her early years in her 1993 book, Outsiders: Class, Gender and Nation, and in an interview she gave to Sheila Rowbotham in New Left Review in the same year (Rowbotham provided a fine obituary for Thompson in the Guardian). 

  She came from a relatively privileged background but one with a liberal intellectual outlook.
  
  She had been politically active from age 14 but from 1942 at Girton College, Cambridge University, she engaged both with the politics of the Communist Party and with the kindred intellectual spirit of Edward Thompson. 
  
  Both Dorothy and Edward eschewed involvement in the academic establishment for work in adult education in Halifax during the 1950s and much of the 1960s.
  
  In Dorothy's case, with three children to bring up, the work was part-time and there were time limits to her political engagement in the era before women's liberation made an impact. She became a leading proponent of socialist feminist politics both in the academy and as an activist.
  
  Change in universities was central to the upheaval of the 1960s and Thompson moved to take up an academic post in the history department at Birmingham University from the late 1960s. She was responsible for tutoring and encouraging a generation of socialist historians who went on to produce a distinctive body of work, often around the subject of Chartism. From the late 1960s her published works began to flourish. These were often groundbreaking.
  
  She was, for example, one of the first to touch on the exclusion of women from labour movement histories in her essay "Women and Nineteenth Century Radical Politics: A Lost Dimension", published in 1976.
  
  Early Chartists (1971) began a series of works, including The Chartists (1984), which were for many years the landmark histories of Chartism, reflecting her enormous breadth of knowledge in this area. Her research opened up new topics of study, from a focus on female Chartists to the role of ethnicity in Chartist politics.
  
  Political activism was not forgotten. In her obituary, Rowbotham records how Thompson helped to organise events around the Beyond the Fragments initiative in the early 1980s, which sought to unite grassroots activists in the struggle for socialism. At the same time she was active in European Nuclear Disarmament, a campaign that specifically encouraged links with peace activists in Eastern Europe, reflecting the heritage of her decision to quit the Communist Party in 1956. In 1983 she published the book Over Our Dead Bodies: Women Against the Bomb.
  
  As a Chartist historian myself I had the privilege of being in a sense a second generation Thompson student. The editor of and adviser for my book on post-1848 Chartism was Owen Ashton, who was also an editor of the book of essays in honour of Thompson, A Duty of Discontent.
  
  From Ashton I was able to witness the Thompsonian method in the study of Chartism - an intellectual rigour combined with a keen interest in exploring and developing new areas and avenues of research.
  
Complexities

Another student, Neville Kirk, noted that she was an "inspirational teacher, both democratic and rigorous in her practice". He argues that she put a research agenda focusing on ambiguities, nuances, complexities and contradictions before adherence to a specific historiographical framework, such as Fabianism or Marxism, two dominant themes in Chartist studies.

  This meant that Thompson could sometimes come up with points or issues that were awkward for Marxist historians or active socialists. As her interview in New Left Review reflects, she was doubtful about the political implications of the concept of progress in history, for example, and in later years concerned about whether people did want to be politically active. However, her commitment to the left both in historical research and politics could never be doubted, whatever the disagreement on specific issues.
  
  In 1956 and after, she stood clearly with socialists who did not see the Stalinist states of Eastern Europe as in any way associated with socialism.
  
In person Dorothy Thompson could be a sharp critic, but that was combined with a friendly encouragement to historians to actually get on and do historical research and to expand historical knowledge with their findings. In the age of Wikipedia an emphasis on visiting the archives cannot be overestimated.

eric
hobsbawm: half marx

Eminent historian Eric Hobsbawm's latest book champions Karl Marx as capitalism's great critic, but he argues that Marx's alternative to the system has failed. Patrick Ward looks at why it is wrong to abandon Marxism as a project for transforming the world 

The financial and economic crisis that erupted in 2008 has a fed a renewed interest in the ideas of Karl Marx. The latest book from respected Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm, How to Change the World, is a welcome addition to this resurgence. 

  Hobsbawm is a key historian of the left. He has produced some of the most insightful studies of empire, capitalism and class struggle, and is perhaps best known for his series of classic texts, The Age of Revolution, The Age of Capital, The Age of Empire and then The Age of Extremes. 
  
  How to Change the World, a collection of his articles on Marxism's history, offers a fascinating account of the influence of Marxist ideas. It looks as far back as the young Marx who, with his co-thinker Frederick Engels, attempted to develop an explanation of a world undergoing a revolutionary transformation as the new system of production, capitalism, took root. 
  
  Hobsbawm makes a strong claim that Marx has a central relevance for anyone wanting to understand the world of the 21st century, especially his insistence that capitalism was doomed to recurrent crises, and his work should therefore be welcomed.
  
  But understanding the world is only half of the problem. As Marx himself famously put it in his 1845 Theses on Feuerbach, "The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it." Understanding capitalism is one thing, but understanding how it might be overcome is the vital task of socialists today, just as it was in 1848 when Marx wrote the Communist Manifesto. 
  
  Since Marx wrote his body of work we have not seen the demise of capitalism. Indeed, what was generally perceived as the main challenge to capitalism in the 20th century, the "official" Communism of the Soviet Union and elsewhere, also failed. 
  
  It is perhaps little wonder, then, that many people who once looked to Marx might see his project for changing the world as having failed. Unfortunately, Hobsbawm himself is not immune to such pessimism. As he writes in How to Change the World, "Unlike in the 1930s, [socialists] can point to no examples of communist or social democratic regimes immune to the crisis, nor have they realistic proposals for socialist change."
  
Illusions

Hobsbawm's disillusion with the prospects for socialism today is rooted in the illusions he held in the past. He was a key intellectual figure in the British Communist Party - a party wedded to the Soviet Union (despite his own opposition to some of its worst policies from within the party). Hobsbawm, like many others in his generation, sickened by the inequalities, wars and instability inherent in capitalism, looked to the apparent "actually existing communism" of the Eastern Bloc as the only realistic counterbalance to the free market. 

Each defeat suffered by the working class in the 1930s - such as the Nazis' victory in Germany in 1933, the collapse of the Popular Front government in France, and Franco's victory over the Spanish republic - eroded a belief in the power of workers' own activity to change the world. It correspondingly fed a faith in salvation from above in the form of Stalin's regime. This was despite the fact that it was the politics and influence of the 
Communist parties which time and again led to defeat in the first place.

  The Stalinist states were the very opposite of what Marx stood for. Central to Marx was the idea that "the emancipation of the working class must be the act of the working class itself". 
  
  Capitalism creates huge concentrations of workers with no means of making a livelihood except to sell their labour power to those who own and control the means of production, the capitalists. As the collective source of profits workers have an enormous potential power - not just to challenge capitalism, but to create a new form of society without exploitation. All this was true in the time of Marx and it is still true today. So why does capitalism still survive?
  
  Of course, capitalism exercises immense power over our lives and ideas, through its domination of the media, through forcing us into a struggle to make ends meet in often tiring and demanding jobs, through its police and armies if we do revolt and a myriad of other means of domination.
  
  But workers have repeatedly revolted at key moments and the possibility of socialist revolution has been a reality. A red thread ran through the last century: from 1905 and again in 1917 in Russia, in 1918-23 in Germany, in 1919 in Hungary, 1920 in Italy, 1925-7 in China, 1936 in Spain and France, 1956 in Hungary, 1968 again in France, 1972-3 in Chile, 1974-5 in Portugal, 1978-9 in Iran to 1980-1 in Poland. In each of these moments workers' power drove revolutionary processes forward.
  
  The key to explaining why only one of these revolutions broke through and turned the possibility of socialist revolution into an actuality is to see that Marx was far from the determinist that the Stalinist tradition (and most academic interpretations of Marx) hold him to be.
  
  Marx never saw the triumph of communism as inevitable. Rather it is dependent on the actions of human beings and, crucially, on whether the working class can develop traditions, ideas and organisation that can mobilise its full power at key moments. As Marx wrote in the Communist Manifesto, historical crises may result in either "a revolutionary reconstitution of society" or "the common ruin of the contending classes". Hobsbawm too often seems to overlook the crucial role played by the subjective factor in history.
  
October

Only this approach can come to terms with the decisive event of the last century - the 1917 Russian Revolution. The successful overthrow of capitalism by Russian workers in October 1917 rested ultimately on the strength of its revolutionary traditions and ideas that crystallised around Lenin's Bolshevik Party. 

  The revolution did not survive. But the counterrevolution in Russia should not be seen as happening in 1989 when the Stalinist states collapsed - it occurred tragically earlier, as the revolution spread but failed to break through in other industrialised states in Europe, crucially Germany. The invasion of the workers' state in Russia by numerous foreign capitalist armies, and the civil war that ensued, led to the decimation of Russian industry and the working class which had led the revolution. 
  
  This opened the door for Stalin to seize control of the husk of the Communist Party, and then the state, before he purged from it those most associated with the revolution. From this wreckage capitalism was restored (though this process took over a decade to complete) with workers exploited not for private capitalists but for a state seeking to compete - economically and militarily - with other capitalist states. Stalinism represented the defeat of the revolution, not its continuation in however a distorted a form, as Hobsbawm tended to see it.
  
  But the isolation and defeat of the Russian Revolution was far from inevitable. The fate of the struggle between revolution and counterrevolution in Germany between 1918 and 1923 was decided by the contending strengths of the reformist tradition embodied in the old Social Democratic Party and the inexperienced forces of the revolutionary left. The failure of German revolutionaries to build at least the embryo of a party like the Bolsheviks before the outbreak of the revolution proved a terrible mistake.
  
  The defeat of the German Revolution paved the way for the rise of Stalinism in Russia, whose influence on many of the best fighters inside the international working class movement in turn created the conditions for further, unnecessary defeats in the revolutions that followed.
  
  It was the traditions of reformist social democracy and Stalinism which dominated the working class movement in the last century and repeatedly choked off the potential for socialist revolution.
  
  It is precisely Hobsbawm's entanglement in these two traditions which lies behind his inability to see the continued potential for socialist revolution. It leads him to sever Marx in two, accepting the ideas of Marx the economist and Marx the historian, but rejecting the ideas of Marx the revolutionary activist.
  
  So he concludes his book with the lament that, "Since the 1980s it has been evident that the socialists, Marxist or otherwise, were left without their traditional alternative to capitalism, at least unless or until they rethought what they meant by 'socialism' and abandoned the presumption that the (manual) working class would necessarily be the chief agent of social transformation."
  
  Both social democracy and Stalinism claimed to represent and speak for the whole of the working class. Both have been in crisis, most obviously the Communist parties after the fall of the Soviet Union, but also social democracy thanks to its failure to offer real reforms any longer.
  
  Hobsbawm equated a crisis for these traditions with a crisis for the working class itself and argued that this rendered obsolete Marx's claim that the working class was capitalism's gravedigger.
  
Billions strong

But the working class around the world, far from shrinking in power, has continued to grow in size. One estimate suggests the core of the global working class is around 2 billion, with perhaps another 2 billion subject to similar pressures to sell their labour power. This is vastly bigger than the total working class of Marx's era.

  We are currently witnessing another wave of revolutions, in Egypt, in Tunisia and potentially across the Arab world (with not just manufacturing workers playing a leading role but groups of workers like tax collectors, bank workers and tourism workers at the forefront in Egypt).
  
  It is in such waves of struggle that new traditions can be built that can ensure that the next opportunity to do away with capitalism is seized not just in one country but across the globe.
  
Eric Hobsbawm's How to Change the World: Tales of Marx and Marxism is published by Little Brown, £25.

The Science and Humanism of Stephen Jay Gould

Richard York and Brett Clark

Stephen Jay Gould was one of the most important evolutionary theorists since Charles Darwin. His enormous final work, The Structure of Evolutionary Theory, was published shortly before his death in 2002 and will long remain a key text for understanding the natural world and its development. The prominent left wing biologist Steven Rose argues that Gould's book represents "perhaps the most important advance in evolutionary theory since Darwin wrote The Origin of Species".

  Gould was also one of the greatest modern popularisers of science. From 1974 to 2001 he wrote a monthly column in the US magazine Natural History. These articles were the basis of a series of books which are among the very best of science writing.
  
  In these essays he covers issues in evolution, natural history and often way beyond.  Sometimes he countered opponents, like creationists; sometimes he explained important scientific ideas and debates. The essays were always beautifully written and accessible but never oversimplified.
  
  Gould drew heavily on history, art, architecture and much else including baseball, for which he had a passion, all of which he wove into his arguments to brilliant effect. 
  
  Gould was also a politically engaged scientist and made little secret of his leftist views. On occasion he was attacked for being a Marxist - though that was not a label he usually applied to himself. Gould certainly waged war against the right - throughout his working life he battled against the powerful forces in the US who push creationist views.
  
  Another front in Gould's wars was with the IQ industry - the idea that there is a single measurable thing called intelligence, with the usual corollary that this "intelligence" shows genetic differences across races and classes. In 1981 Gould wrote the classic book The Mismeasure of Man which utterly destroyed these arguments.
  
  But Gould was, first and foremost, a working scientist, a palaeontologist studying the fossil record of life on earth. This science was the foundation for all of his contributions to the nature of evolution. At the heart of Gould's arguments - and the core of his final book - is a fight over an understanding of evolutionary theory. In the last decades of the 20th century this battle was often dubbed "The Darwin Wars". These were fought between people like Gould and his allies, such as US Marxist biologist Richard Lewontin, and a group whose best-known figures include British biologist Richard Dawkins, famous for books such as The Selfish Gene, and non-biologists such as US philosopher Daniel Dennett.
  
  Dawkins and others draw on the dominant theme in evolutionary theory since the 1930s known as the modern synthesis. Crudely put, it argues that the only evolutionary mechanism needed to explain the natural world and the whole of evolutionary history is natural selection (differential survival) operating at the level of the gene. All the rich patterns of life's history can be reduced to this single causal level and explanation, or so the argument goes.
  
  Gould powerfully challenges this view, known as reductionism. He argues that while this mechanism is a vital part of evolution, it is only one aspect, a partial picture.
  
  He argues that the natural world has emergent properties at different levels of complexity, and that you cannot reduce causal explanation down to a single level, but instead need to understand each level, and the relations between them. Gould argued that at each level of biological organisation - the gene, the individual organism, the deme (locally breeding population), the species and so on - selection could and did operate, and that understanding evolution meant understanding all these levels and the often complex relations between them.
  
  This approach was grounded in a wider scientific and philosophical challenge to crude and mechanical reductionism. The argument is that you cannot reduce biology to chemistry, or chemistry to physics. Nor can you reduce psychology to biology, or human history to biology. To use a physical picture to illustrate, you cannot explain the behaviour of liquid water in all its features simply at the level of the physics of hydrogen atoms and oxygen atoms. Water has emergent properties which have to be understood at their level: such as liquid flow - with all its complexity.
  
  Gould's view draws on a philosophical and scientific tradition which goes back to Karl Marx' s lifelong collaborator, and important writer on scientific ideas and understanding, Frederick Engels, which argued for this richer historical materialist approach to understanding the natural world,  against crude reductionism.
  
  Richard York and Brett Clark have done a great service by writing a concise and readable account of the key aspects of Gould's work - both his scientific ideas and some of his wider philosophical views. I heartily recommend their book to anyone wanting to understand Gould's ideas - and even more strongly recommend reading Gould's own work.
  
Paul McGarr

The Science and Humanism of Stephen Jay Gould is published by Monthly Review Press, £14.95

Beauty and the Inferno

Roberto Saviano

Quercus Publishing

£18.99

Roberto Saviano's book Gomorrah, and the subsequent film adaptation, put the global spotlight on the grip that organised crime, the Camorra, holds over Naples and the surrounding region.

  The price he paid for that was a death sentence and being forced to live under the protection of the Italian state police in barracks and safe houses.
  
  This book is a collection of his essays. Some are clearly written as an escape from his isolation, while others record meetings with remarkable people, including Barcelona footballer Lionel Messi and Mafia infiltrating FBI agent Joe Pistone (whose story was told in the film Donnie Brasco), and events such as receiving the Nobel Prize. 
  
  He lets rip at the death and devastation the Camorra inflicts and the compliance of big business in this. His love of those who escape the Camorra's net, including the teenagers who star in the film, and, understandably, Naples, shines through. It contrasts with his anger over the discrimination visited on the Italian south.
  
  Saviano points out that members of the Camorra and Mafia include surgeons and financiers as well as the foot soldiers who sell the drugs and pull the triggers. Yet I feel he fails to explore how they have cashed in on a free market economy and privatisation. He also pulls his punches when dealing with Silvio Berlusconi's governing coalition.
  
  Today Saviano is a constant presence in the Italian media. He's also kept himself largely in isolation from other anti-Mafia campaigners. This has led to criticism from some on the left. 
  
  Yet some of his recent statements colour these essays. Over a year ago he praised Italy's hard-line, anti-immigrant home secretary - a member of the racist Northern League which attacks southerners - as the best interior minister Italy's ever had. 
  
  Last autumn he joined via video link a pro-Israel rally in Rome, stating, "Israel represents the best example of a state which supports legality and security."
  
  Saviano has also praised "the anti-Mafia values of Giorgio Almirante" - a man who served as a minister in Mussolini's final regime, under Nazi occupation, and was the re-founder of the fascist party post-1945.
  
  Last December he issued an open letter attacking the violence of the mass student movement sweeping Italy - calling for the "bad" protesters to be isolated. The student movement responded by saying his stand would encourage state repression, and he had nothing to say about the beatings the police administered. 
  
  Beauty and the Inferno is well written - not without flaws but worth a read.
  
Chris Bambery

Stride Toward Freedom

Martin Luther King, Jr

Souvenir Press

£12

Published for the first time in Britain, Martin Luther King's Stride Toward Freedom details the first mortal blow to segregation in the South: the 11-month Montgomery bus boycott of 1955-6.

  King first shows you pre-boycott Alabama - how as the "cradle of the confederacy" it fought tenaciously in the Civil War for the freedom to enslave anyone with black skin. Even as late as 1954 only 2,000 out of 30,000 eligible African Americans could vote.
  
  The denial of elementary rights for African Americans extended to all areas of social life. Black passengers paid at the front of the bus but had to board at the back. Any attempt to sit in "whites only" seats led to arrest or worse.
  
  Upon arriving in Alabama as a minister, King describes the main barriers to opposition to segregation as "factionalism among leaders, indifference in the educated group, and passivity in the uneducated". 
  
  Rosa Parks's arrest gave the initial cut to this oppressive knot. King says Parks refused to move for a white passenger because she was "anchored to her seat by accumulated indignities of days gone by and...boundless aspirations of the yet unborn".
  
  From here this book begins to shine. A packed meeting follows Parks's arrest where the idea of boycotts against segregated transport firmly seizes those present and beyond. King describes the determination to be "saved from the patience that makes us patient with anything less than freedom".
  
  The boycott saw 50,000 African Americans, many uneducated, make the history that still shapes our present. They organised car pools to ferry people to and from work. These were often as complicated as the bus routes, replete with pick-up points, timetables, mass ring-rounds and the simple defiance of long distance walks to work.
  
  The growing movement drew the support of some whites who helped with ferrying duties and sent financial support from as far away as Tokyo. Its greatest success was not just the fact that it smashed segregated transport but that, in the words of a black janitor, afterwards the oppressed "got our heads up" and would "never bow again". The Civil Rights Movement was born.
  
  There are three things that will strike you about this book. First is its immediacy and poetic prose. Written by King just after the success of the boycott it shows a leader and a movement finding their feet in order to fly. Second is King's deep familiarity with Marxism. He writes, "Both Negro and white workers are equally oppressed."
  
  There is much that is debatable in this book - such as the role of violence in history. However, this book bears reading repeatedly by anyone interested in serious change and who agrees with King's proposition that faced with oppression "it is better to fight".
  
Gaverne Bennett

The Net Delusion

Evgeny Morozov

Allen Lane

£14.99

Evgeny Morozov's book explores the role of the internet and social media in aiding dissent.  The US-based Belarusian has quickly joined the ranks of liberal commentators making a living as a new media "expert". 

  On one level this is a welcome antidote to the analysts quick to claim that emerging movements owe their success to Facebook and Twitter. This view was recently espoused by BBC foreign affairs correspondent - and liberation expert - John Simpson, who stated, "In the end Egypt's 'internet generation' just would not put up with a dictator" - as if young Egyptians had found out about food prices, low wages, unemployment and state oppression through social networks. Morozov dubs this concept "cyber-utopia" - the notion that access to participatory media and censor-free information will unlock an inevitable path to democracy. 
  
  Morozov busts many of the myths surrounding Iran's so-called Twitter revolution - in fact only 0.027 percent of Iranians had a Twitter account in 2009. He ridicules the Washington obsession with bringing down the "cyber Berlin Wall" and argues that pro-Western bloggers alone will not spread freedom to anti-US regimes. He compares this to Western media's overstated role in ending the Cold War. 
  
  Unfortunately he has an unhelpful analysis of the pacifying role of popular culture - claiming that people in East Germany were too busy watching Dallas to get active sooner. He is uncritical of Western governments and is too trusting of liberal democracy. He makes little distinction between criticism of Saudi Arabia, China, Iran, Venezuela and Bolivia.
  
  His is a one-dimensional criticism of cyber dissidents that claims the internet gives non-Western authoritarian regimes more of an advantage than it does the movements that oppose them. Activists, he says, are too quick to give over their personal details and expose their political views and contacts. 
  
  But political movements gain momentum on the streets and in workplaces. The threat of cyber infiltration to movements is offset against the power and strength of mass mobilisations on the ground. Political activists should aim to publicise their demands widely using all media - including that run by corporate capital or the state. 
  
  In the case of recent events in the Middle East the idea that Facebook and Twitter were the catalysts for the movement is massively overstated - a point that Morozov recognises but fails to explore in relation to the Mahalla textile workers' strike - his only concrete reference to strike action. The movement and its plans to overthrow Hosni Mubarak were clearly formed and shaped on the street in open view of the world's media.
  
Tom Woodcock

The Letters of Rosa Luxemburg

Edited by Georg Adler, Peter Hudis and Annelies Laschitza

Verso

£25

Karl Marx's biographer Franz Mehring described the Polish-German revolutionary Rosa Luxemburg as possessing the best brain after Marx. He wasn't exaggerating. Her works, Reform or Revolution and The Mass Strike in particular, remain essential reading for revolutionaries. But her whole work and life (to which the best introduction remains the biography by her comrade Paul Frölich) richly repay study today.

  The letters in this collection begin in 1891 when as a young woman she fought to build an internationalist revolutionary current within Polish socialism. The final letter published here is to her German comrade in arms Clara Zetkin, four days before Luxemburg was murdered by right wing paramilitaries in January 1919. 
  
  In between are letters that document her brilliant entry into the then mighty German socialist party, the SPD, at the end of the 1890s. We see her fighting alongside Karl Kautsky against the growing "revisionism" inside the party by those who would openly abandon Marxism and revolution in order to embrace reformism. As the class struggle in Germany sharpens, in around 1910, we read Luxemburg's growing frustration with Kautsky as his verbal radicalism is unmatched by deeds when it comes to turning from theory to practice.
  
  We witness Luxemburg's attempts to draw supporters of a genuinely revolutionary stand around her. But we also see how weak this current proved with the test of the First World War in 1914, when the anti-war left in Germany (in contrast to the Bolsheviks in Russia) proved very weak, with Luxemburg initially quite isolated.
  
  Along with this are letters that shine a light on her significant intervention in the work of revolutionaries in Poland and Russia, and her participation in the wider international socialist movement.
  
  Much of the material combines the political with the highly personal - with numerous letters to her lovers and friends. At times this feels like quite an invasion of her privacy (she wanted her letters burned), but it does give a sense of this extraordinary woman. She lived quite a "modern" life for an unmarried woman at the time, with a number of lovers and earning an independent living as a public intellectual through journalism and later teaching. 
  
  This is not the first collection of Luxemburg's letters to appear, but it is the most comprehensive in English to date, with over two thirds of the material translated into English for the first time. But the letters are not the best introduction to Luxemburg and the editors' introduction assumes a ready familiarity with her life and work. 
  
  This collection is a welcome contribution to a renewed interest in this key figure of the Marxist tradition. But this volume of letters is really an hors d'oeuvre to the main dish (or rather dishes) - the first complete collection of her works that publishers Verso plan to bring out over the next few years. Now that really will be a meal to savour.
  
Mark L Thomas

Chocolate Nations

Orla Ryan

Zed

£12.99

Agriculture and Food in Crisis

Fred Magdoff and Brian Tokar

Monthly Review Press

£14.95

The last four years of financial crisis have sent food prices rocketing and availability plummeting as speculators' money has chased a fast buck out of subprime mortgages and into tangible commodities such as corn, rice and flour. These two books are very different but both are a response to this misery. From the "tortilla riots" of Mexico in 2007 to the developing revolutions across the Middle East now, the mass of the world's population is tired of being hungry and oppressed by neoliberalism and the people who get rich off it. 

  Chocolate Nations describes one end of the problem. The West African cocoa industry involves hundreds of thousands of impoverished small farmers. The structural adjustments programmes of the International Monetary Fund and World Bank have removed government training schemes and investment. Even replacement seedlings are too expensive for many, so ageing trees produce less every year and the major chocolate manufacturers don't want to operate in Africa. They want to buy the beans and ship them to factories close to their markets. There has been war and corruption. This is all true, and however badly written and repetitive the book is, author Orla Ryan does cover a lot of the facts. There is also a relatively detailed critical examination of fair trade.
  
  Agriculture and Food in Crisis is made up of essays covering almost every aspect of what is wrong with 21st century capitalist food production and land use. The authors, a range of academics and activists firmly of the left, including Walden Bello, are concerned with sustainability and climate change as well as feeding the world. There is some repetition and the authors don't always agree with each other. For instance, a couple of times development of a new middle class in India and China, which is able to afford meat, is mentioned as a source of creating scarcity. However, Utsa Patnaik's piece convincingly demonstrates that meat for the middle class in the context of neoliberalism means hunger for the millions. This is not because meat production has used up the grain or driven prices up beyond their means, but because neoliberalism impoverishes the majority of people.  
  
  There are interesting pieces on South American land reform, both state-led and from below, and how the process of reclaiming land and learning to live communally when self-organised can profoundly change people. There are also the fun and important details of how people in the right environment can produce enormous amounts of food without a genetically modified crop, or even much pesticide, in sight.
  
  The relatively new development in "land grabs", where one state aims to ensure its own food security by buying huge tracts of fertile land in another, is covered, as is the great crime against humanity that is biofuels - burning food to replace fossil fuels.
  
  This is a very useful book. Even if we don't all come to the same conclusions we can agree with Karl Marx that those who speculate in famine will live in infamy long after we've got rid of them.
  
Sarah Ensor

Essays

Wallace Shawn

Haymarket

£9.99

The role played by theatre and film artists within Western society is a paradox. On the one hand they are a source of entertainment and education for the masses, and on the other a key contributor to and beneficiary of one of the biggest, most influential industries within capitalism. It is from this lonely tower - "the mansion of arts and letters" - that Wallace Shawn writes his series of essays.

  Shawn is both a successful film actor and an established playwright. He credits his liberal US upbringing for his concern with the world and the arts. He is caught between a stark awareness of the injustice of a system based upon profit and the temptation to drift into the land of art and luxury. This book is likewise split into two parts, "Reality" and "Dreams". 
  
  In "Reality" Shawn explores issues of patriotism, imperialism, war and class with a sense of irony and imagination. In one essay he writes a fearful and paranoid letter from the US to the "Foreign Policy Therapist" in the wake of 9/11. In another he creates a fake US magazine, Final Edition, which exposes the blood-hungry war in Iraq. He strips the imperialist US down to its brutal bones. "Why I Call Myself a Socialist" is almost childlike, as it seems to cry, "We are all the same at the end of the day, aren't we?" It is here that Shawn fails to set aside his seemingly guilty conscience in exchange for an argument for socialism. He is intellectually won to the idea of socialism but has no way of moving his feet.
  
  It is in "Dreams" that readers might find themselves drifting into REM-sleep. Shawn plays splendidly with words and throws an array of thoughts up into the sky, but he goes no further. "Dreams" touches on subjects of interest to a milieu of people who may desire to know what Shawn thinks about poetry, theatre, sex and aesthetics. However, individuals unbeknown to Shawn or his writing are in danger of being distracted - most likely by the real world.
  
  Shawn's essays are, at their best, witty and refreshingly honest. At their worst they are a bit dull but harmless. You are better off getting a copy of one of Shawn's plays, which combine the best of both his worlds: reality and dreams.
  
Emma Davis

Radical Religion in Cromwell's England

Andrew Bradstock

I B Tauris 

£15.99

The mid-17th century was a time of religious and political upheaval - a world of Ranters, Diggers, Quakers, Levellers, Muggletonians and Fifth Monarchists. Andrew Bradstock ably navigates this terrain of ideological ferment, to provide a concise and readable introduction to these varied strands of religious radicalism. 

  The book is not without flaws. Bradstock begins by claiming that "it was religious issues that primarily drove the conflict". But though the words of radicals like Leveller John Lilburne were wreathed in religious fire and brimstone, their tracts were anchored in the broader social transformation heralded by the process of the English Revolution. The "middling sorts" - who provided the religious "sectaries" with many of their members - were challenging the power of the old feudal order. As they did so new ideas of equality emerged as age-old social relations were tested to breaking point. 
  
  But the emphasis here is not on detailed analysis. Instead Bradstock delights in describing the struggles and insights - as well as the lunacy - of the period, more often than not allowing the radicals' own words to speak for themselves. As such there is plenty to enjoy here. Those looking for a more substantial analysis should get hold of a copy of Christopher Hill's The World Turned Upside Down, or Chris Harman's A People's History of the World.
  
Jack Farmer

Imperialism: A Study

J A Hobson

Spokesman books

£19.95

This classic study of imperialism by the radical-liberal economist J A Hobson was originally published in 1902. Hobson's influential work was drawn on by Lenin when he wrote his book Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism in 1917.

  Hobson seeks to explain the rise of the "new imperialism" in the 1870s and 1880s when Britain, together with the other Great European powers, engaged in a scramble for colonies. This move towards formal control over colonies was a break from the previous British pattern, where it exercised its global dominance through free trade and "informal" mechanisms of political control.
  
  Hobson argues that advanced industrial capitalism produced an excess of capital that was unable to find any profitable outlet in the domestic economy. This led to the search for new markets abroad. It was this process that drove the pressure to annexe territories, both to safeguard existing investments and to secure areas for new investments.
  
  But Hobson locates this drive to export capital as the result of the search for profits by "rentier" financial interests around the City of London, allied to certain sections of industry like arms manufactures and the shipping industry. He thus mistakenly argues that the costs of empire were not in the interests of British capitalism as a whole.
  
  Despite this weakness, Hobson's work was pioneering and its republication is to be welcomed.
  
Llewellyn James

Striking a Light

By Louise Raw
(Continuum £16.99)
Newly republished and with a foreword by Sheila Rowbotham, Striking a Light is a groundbreaking study of the 1888 matchwomen's strike in London's East End which sparked a new era in working class resistance.

Field Grey

By Philip Kerr
(Quercus £7.99)
It is 1954 and private detective Bernie Gunther is captured by the US and taken to Guantanamo Bay where he relates his past from the interrogation chair.

This is the seventh Gunther novel from Philip Kerr.

Delusions of Gender

By Cordelia Fine
(Icon £8.99)
Fine takes on the myths of gender in this detailed yet sharp attack on sexism dressed as popular science. 





How Did That Get in My Lunchbox?

By Christine Butterworth
(Walker £8.99)
Where does the food we eat come from? This picture book tells children where our bread, cheese and tomatoes come from and the production processes which take place.

Boardwalk Empire

At the stroke of midnight on 16 January 1920 the US went dry. For the next 13 years Prohibition made it illegal to buy or sell alcohol. Yet rather than discouraging drinking, it had quite the opposite effect. Thousands of illegal drinking dens opened. The "Roaring Twenties" had begun. The capital of all this hedonism was Atlantic City in New Jersey - a Las Vegas before Vegas was even invented. 

  Prohibition had another spin-off: it provided a bonanza for Italian, Irish and Jewish street gangs who came to control the supply and distribution of alcohol. It became a multimillion-dollar business and gave birth to the modern Mafia. 
  
  The Mafia ran their business like any venture capitalist would. There were takeovers, buyouts and liquidation sales. The difference was that lead was the currency of exchange.
  
  But some things never change - those at the top stay at the top. Welcome to the world of Boardwalk Empire, HBO's latest TV drama on Sky Atlantic. Don't be deterred by the fact that it is on a Murdoch-owned channel - very soon the DVD will be on sale. 
  
  Based on the book by Nelson Johnson and with the pilot directed by Martin Scorsese, Boardwalk Empire is a lovingly detailed re-creation of the US's "Jazz Age" - the era of Al Capone, F Scott Fitzgerald's novels and Duke Ellington's scores. 
  
  No cost has been spared to bring this story to your TV screen - it is rumoured that $33 million was spent on the pilot alone. The filmmakers have built a replica Atlantic City seafront in Brooklyn! No detail is missed and while the script is sometimes pedestrian and the story more mainstream than, say, The Wire, it still paints a panoramic view of US society in the 1920s. 
  
  Boardwalk Empire's characters are vivid, dark and menacing. The star of the show is Steve Buscemi, who plays Enoch "Nucky" Thompson, Atlantic City's corrupt Republican city treasurer. 
  
  He inhabits many worlds. One is full of politicians, state officials and the moneyed Irish establishment who run the city - villains of unbelievable brutality and cunning. Nucky is also the man pulling the strings behind every mobster and crooked deal in town. Then there is the caring, philanthropic Mr Thompson, a man who cares for the poor and needy - and if you believe that you'd believe anything. 
  
  Then there are the gangsters - Jimmy Darmody of Atlantic City, Lucky Luciano and Arnold Rothstein of New York. Even a young Al Capone begins to step onto the stage of history. Many of these men are scarred by their time in the trenches during the First World War and come back more violent and ruthless than the older generation of gangsters.
  
  In one memorable scene Nucky finds out that his protégé, Jimmy, has just massacred a rival group of mobsters in a wood. Nucky threatens the young hood, who coolly turns round and says, "You can't be half a gangster." The world is moving on and only the most ruthless will survive.
  
  And then there is federal agent Nelson Van Alden (Michael Shannon), a sanctimonious, pious, temperate, bible-bashing cop who claims his work is "of a godly pursuit". And if you believe that - well you know the rest.
  
  Finally, someone who should be mentioned in dispatches is the character Chalky White, a black bootlegger and vote fixer for the Republican Party. He is played by Michael Kenneth Williams, best known as Omar in The Wire. You will shudder in your seat when he brings out his father's old tool kit and at the same time just wish that it was true. 
  
  I have been writing this column for over four years now and I have been lucky enough to write about The Wire, Mad Men, Treme, The Sopranos and Generation Kill. I believe we are witnessing a golden age of US TV making. HBO is not alone, but it is at the centre of this renaissance. 
  
  Boardwalk Empire is not as good as The Wire, The Sopranos or Mad Men - but that is asking a lot. Nonetheless, it is TV of the highest order. 
  
So you know the score - more late nights in front of the TV and as the clock strikes midnight the question will be asked, is there time for just one more episode? MS

Film

Route Irish

Director Ken Loach

Release date: 18 March 

In 2010 Kathryn Bigelow's appalling The Hurt Locker won the Oscar for both best film and best director (by some grim irony she was the first woman to win the award). Not only did it win the Oscar but, in a dramatic display of the way that Hollywood film culture has colonised Britain, it also took the Bafta for best film and best director. While the film was widely congratulated for showing the Iraq War "as it really is", it was, in fact, just another celebration of US militarism. And now, as if from another world altogether, comes the new Ken Loach-Paul Laverty film, Route Irish.

  Loach is, without any serious doubt, the most important film director working in Britain today and has been in this position for many years now. He has a career going back to the 1960s that includes such powerful films as Cathy Come Home (1966), Kes (1969), Days of Hope (1975), Land and Freedom (1995), The Navigators (2001), Looking for Eric (2009) and the tremendous The Wind That Shakes The Barley (2006). Now we have Route Irish, written by Laverty, who has scripted Loach's most recent films and is apparently working on a number of future projects. 
  
  The film is very much a tragedy. It tells the story of a deeply flawed ex-SAS soldier, Fergus (Mark Womack). He is earning big money working in the private security business. But after the death of his closest friend, Frankie (John Bishop), in Iraq he begins asking questions: about Frankie's death, the private security business and the Iraq War itself. The film takes its title from the route from the Green Zone to Baghdad airport, the ambush zone where Frankie dies.
  
  The emergence of the private security business (best described with the old-fashioned word "mercenaries" - although this is not a word the industry likes) is one of the most important developments of the last decade. The creation of private companies that maintain their own armies will be seen as something of tremendous historic significance, involving immense danger for civil liberties and freedom, not just in those countries unfortunate enough to be occupied by the West, but in the West itself. Of course, this development was wholeheartedly embraced by New Labour.
  
  Loach provides a powerfully tragic view of this development from the inside as Fergus sets about discovering what really happened to his friend and in the process discovers what has really been done to Iraq. The result is a tremendous film that successfully combines a radical political stance with the exploration of one man's tragedy. Personally, I shall be very surprised if I see another film this year that approaches Route Irish. Don't miss it.
  
John Newsinger

The Company Men

Director John Wells

Release date: 11 March

In the aftermath of the financial crisis, US transnational GTX is facing some tough decisions. It has long since expanded from its shipbuilding heritage and into more lucrative markets. As its CEO argues, "Heavy manufacturing is dead... We work for the stockholders now." Rather than damage the company share price - or jeopardise the construction of its new skyscraping edifice - the decision is taken to axe thousands of jobs.

  The story of The Company Men follows the lives of three men caught in this jobs cull and their long and arduous job hunt - so you'd be forgiven for thinking that Hollywood might be waking up to the serious impact of the recession. Instead, with misty-eyed slumber, the ex-company men we follow are all high-salaried executives - and we are asked to sympathise with their challenges ahead. 
  
  The main storyline follows Bobby (Ben Affleck), who is the most financially vulnerable of the trio. It gradually dawns on him that he may have to accept a slight pay cut from the $120,000 salary he's been receiving for the last 12 years. But it gets much worse for poor Bobby. After much sulking and arguing with his wife, he reluctantly agrees to trade in his Porsche for a hatchback and to reduce his $600 a month dry cleaning bill. The despair and indignity of having to cancel his golf club membership is topped only by the family having to downsize their palatial house. Fortunately, there's respite from this bleakness when, in an act of heart-melting solidarity, little Jonny shows his undiminished love for his dad by spontaneously selling his X-Box. Phil (Chris Cooper), by far the most interesting character, is glossed over, and tears sadly prevent me from saying any more about Gene (Tommy Lee Jones), who can no longer travel by private jet. 
  
  The Company Men is not without its serious and genuinely touching moments. At one point Phil resorts to throwing stones at the glass walls of the corporation, yelling the most poignant line of the film: "My life ended but nobody noticed!" This is a cry from the US middle class - they expect to be noticed. 
  
  There's a slightly clumsy attempt at allegory when Bobby is forced to labour for his brother-in-law's (Kevin Costner) construction company. A return to US manufacturing greatness is presented as the antidote to unbridled financialisation. It's easy to be nostalgic as characters walk past the rusty cranes and the empty shells of buildings that once housed thousands of jobs and a sense of collective purpose. It's a shame this wasn't writer John Wells's focus. Instead I wanted to shout, as Thomas Paine once wrote, "He pities the plumage, but forgets the dying bird."
  
Kevin Best

DVD

Zvenigora

Arsenal

Director Alexander Dovzhenko

Out now

£12.99

Two key works of Soviet cinema are newly available with the DVD release of Zvenigora and Arsenal. They are fruit of silent cinema's final maturity before an imminent eclipse ushered in by the talkies and (with graver finality) Stalinism. 

  Zvenigora and Arsenal are the first two of Alexander Dovzhenko's trilogy about his native Ukraine. Ukraine was hard won by the Bolsheviks, having been subjugated by the Russian Empire. It was a bitter stage to the civil war and subject to grain requisitioning to feed the distant revolutionary centres of Moscow and St Petersburg. 
  
  In the mountain of Zvenigora treasure is hidden deep below ground. An unusual way to exhort workers to the barricades, the legend of the treasure inserts a sense of eternal peasant tradition and raises the question of who enjoys the earth's wealth. A self-styled "cinematic poem", the film's images are emblems of suffering and defiance that recall religious iconography to create a fantastical experience in tune with popular peasant culture.
  
  But decisive in historical change are electrification and industrial production. The climactic moments of the film lie in the disorienting rush of a dizzying and overwhelming modernity. Iron girders are rarely thought the stuff of cinema (and odes to tractors were to become the parody of Communist propaganda) but the new powers, social relations and experiences of life brought about by technological advance were central concerns of European modernism. 
  
  Superimpositions of steel structures and rapid cuts edit together an array of perspectives at breakneck speed. This tumbling clash of images is known as montage editing, which for Soviet filmmakers captured the dynamics of social change. Meaning comes from the collision of opposing forces, and not from objects in isolation.
  
  This is intellectually Marxist, and yet montage is an incredibly exciting form of filmmaking. Now used by advertisers and Hollywood blockbusters, in the hands of Soviet filmmakers it was a revolutionary cinematic experience.
  
  The artist's eye of Dovzhenko combines multiple styles - folkloric and iconic emblems, striking imagery and montage's re-creation of capitalism's rush towards its own overthrow. These reach perfect unity in Arsenal, in which the smoke and fury of war's explosions occur amid the clamour of counterrevolutionary pretenders to power in civil war Ukraine. This is not the action cinema of Rambo or Terminator that modern audiences are used to. Here the muscularity is that of a class of workers made powerful by their very conditions of exploitation - conditions which the mass movement will in turn smash.
  
  Together the films show revolution as a process that flows from the immense disorder that capitalism unleashes. Whether in representing magical fantasy or the rapidly advancing structures of mass industry, the films illustrate power and the fact that workers' endurance holds the balance between catastrophic defeat and the victorious progression of humanity. 
  
  They are at odds with the perverted appropriation of the word "revolution" by 2004's US-organised coup in Ukraine, but not its rescue in the streets of Egypt. In Arsenal power is a question decided within the army, as the very bullets that fly from a firing squad's rifles towards a Bolshevik soldier refuse to hit their mark. The speed of historical change means that when you read this anything I write now about North Africa will be outdated; but what remains is that there, as in the work of Dovzhenko, the forces of class and revolution are those that move history.
  
Louis Bayman

Marxism Today

BFI Gallery, London

Until 10 April

Two short films by video artist Phil Collins explore sympathetically the contradictions of Marxism that existed in East Germany before the fall of the Berlin Wall. The first, Marxism Today, uses interviews, music and archive footage to ask the questions: what was education like in the GDR, and what happened to teachers of Marxism-Leninism after reunification?

  The teachers' stories are rich and varied. One teacher married a black South African and planned to move there to fight apartheid. A teacher's gymnast daughter tells of her struggle to adjust as the state that had controlled most aspects of her life, in pursuit of sporting glory, suddenly disappears. A third teacher recalls how the state paid her to gain a PhD in neoliberal economics! Between the interviews archive footage shows us the other side of GDR-style education, such as when a dusty bureaucrat drones on about education until music begins to fade in and out, freeing us from his stupefying banality.
  
  Another state-made clip has a teacher watching while his students debate the question of West German exploitation with considerably more agility than he could muster. In response, he points once again to his scientific diagram that must remain beyond reproach.  
  
  The second 20-minute film is called Use! Value! Exchange! It is essentially contemporary footage of a succinct lecture on the opening chapters of Marx's Capital. I know this sounds quite dry, but it is actually surprisingly therapeutic when set to soft music. Overlaid are clips of statues of Marx and Engels being winched out of a park in Berlin - the cult has gone, but the ideas are very much alive. The pupils grapple with distinctions such as commodities and products and their teacher reminds them that as workers create surplus value, they have every right to be outraged and to revolt in order to expropriate what is rightfully theirs.
  
Barry Green

Theatre

The Heretic

Royal Court Theatre

Until 19 March

The Heretic by Richard Bean centres on Dr Diane Cassell, a specialist in sea levels, whose observations lead her to question anthropogenic climate change. As its title suggests, the play argues that belief in climate change is a religion, whereas scientists "don't believe in anything".

  In The Heretic environmental activists aren't seen in a good light. At best environmentalists are portrayed as people making a fashionable lifestyle choice - they ride bikes, stop eating meat and turn lights off when they leave the room. At worst they are seen as totalitarians who want to "price the poor out of the skies and off the roads". They even send death threats to Cassell to try to silence her. 
  
  Cassell is also put under increasing pressure at work. The fictional Yorkshire University where she works is facing cuts from central government and increasingly tries to secure funding from private sources. That's why having a scientist with unorthodox views in the earth sciences department is a problem. Bean has recognised a genuine issue facing academics - Tory universities minister David Willetts has called for the greater involvement of the private sector in higher education and supported the creation of private universities. 
  
  In these circumstances it is easy to see how a few charismatic individuals could get media attention by questioning the science of climate change - although it seems unlikely that climate change deniers are acting out of a concern for academic freedom. 
  
  The play draws on comparisons with the "Climategate" scandal in 2009, where emails between researchers at the University of East Anglia were leaked after a hacking operation. The emails supposedly showed that they had manipulated data in order to exaggerate the effects of climate change. The emails were quickly taken up by sections of the media as evidence of corruption among scientists. In reality the quotes used in the "Climategate" emails are widely considered to have been taken out of context. Similarly, debates about the timespan for the melting of the Himalayan glaciers in one chapter of the IPCC report - also mentioned in the play - was seized upon by climate change deniers. 
  
  It is unclear whether Bean is sceptical about climate change himself. I would guess that his position is more nuanced than that of his characters, especially as The Heretic was produced with the cooperation of the earth sciences department of UCL. 
  
  However, the play may well appeal to real-life sceptics - it is described as a "must see" on climate denial website climaterealists.com. 
  
  The Heretic is very topical but doesn't always get the science right. It's funny in parts but hockey stick graphs and debates about sample sizes don't always make for the best comedy. Bean also tries to make jokes about anorexia and self-harm - obviously not an easy task and one that he doesn't seem to get quite right, making it uncomfortable viewing. 
  
Camilla Royle

Hidden

Museum of London, 
until April

There is still time to see Red Saunders's artworks which grace the walls of the Museum of London foyer. The three historical tableaux show black Chartist William Cuffay, the 18th century revolutionary Thomas Paine and Wat Tyler during the 1381 Peasants' Revolt. 

  Saunders says about his work, "History has been dominated by kings, queens, war and 'great men'. Hidden engages with a different historical narrative involving dissenters, revolutionaries and radicals." 
  
Walking the Wall

Comedy tour

Comedian Mark Thomas's new stand-up tour relates his epic 750km walk along the route of the wall built by Israel to cut off huge chunks of the West Bank of Palestine. While the subject doesn't necessarily lend itself to a comedy routine, he manages to bring across the stories of those whose lives have been devastated by Israel's apartheid regime as well as his own experiences of attempting to document the horrors of occupation.

The Biting Point

Theatre 503, London, 
until 12 March

Set in the late 1970s and early 1980s, Sharon Clark's drama follows the lives of people intimately caught up in the race riots of the time. The story is based on Clark's own political development, and seeks to draw parallels to the situation we face today. The play has been described as a call to action, which in the context of the Con-Dem cuts at home and the struggles in the Middle East seems timely.

Made In Dagenham

DVD, out 28 March

The story of the historic strike by women machinists at the Ford Dagenham plant comes to DVD. This entertaining and inspiring film charts the battle of the Ford workers who brought the car manufacturer to a standstill.

  Despite a bit of artistic license, Made in Dagenham is a powerful film for all those seeking ideas on how to beat the bosses today.
  
Fair Game

Film, out 4 March

Based on the memoir by Valerie Plame, Fair Game tells the story of Plame's outing as a CIA agent by the US state following her husband's criticism of the Bush administration's rationale for the Iraq War. 

This Hollywood thriller received rave reviews after its US release, so it could well be worth a look. 

Do we need bosses?

Ruth Lorimer argues that we could run society without the need for bosses

Many workers believe that bosses are necessary, but if you ask if their own boss is necessary, they say they could run things better themselves. 

  The boss is often the person who knows least about the running of a workplace. Factory workers, teachers, nurses and so on know far more about the day to day problems in their workplace, as they experience them first hand. It's true that in any big workplace there are highly skilled jobs that need to be done and someone has to coordinate the different areas of work. But the boss doesn't do this - technical specialists are hired to do such jobs.
  
  The only function of the bosses is to own and control our workplaces, and to maximise their profits they must employ a whole hierarchy of managers and supervisors who cajole or bully people into working longer and harder. It is the managers who are one rung up the ladder from us that we usually blame for the daily humiliation and stress of our work. They are usually well bribed to keep us in line. But the real winner is the boss at the top, who doesn't do any work but simply invests his money and creams off the profits. 
  
  Many people would agree that these fat cat executives play no useful role in society. But they would still argue that we need managers to motivate people to work.
  
  This is based on the experience of work under capitalism. As we have no control over our work we become alienated from it. Most of us carry out menial, boring, repetitive tasks for long hours and low pay. Very few people have a job that they find fulfilling, so we live for the weekends (if you still have them, that is). At work our energy is sapped, our creativity is stifled and our aspirations shrink. Given this, it's no surprise that managers are needed to crack the whip.
  
  But even in these conditions people find time and energy to devote to activities outside work. Think of the enthusiasm people have for cooking, gardening or music. What the most diverse hobbies and interests have in common is that people have control over them, so they put the effort in.
  
  The experiences of workers throughout history who have taken over from the bosses show us that if we ran society democratically we could transform work into something that is no longer alienating but fulfilling, and in doing so transform ourselves. 
  
  In the Russian Revolution of 1917 workers elected soviets (councils) to organise the revolution against the tsar, and factory committees took over from the bosses in workplaces. They kicked out the bosses - sometimes into nearby canals - and began to oversee the day to day running of the factories. They reduced the working day to eight hours, and in some factories they organised child care and food distribution. The soviets began to decide what to produce based on what society needed.
  
  Because the workers had a democratic say in how they worked, what they produced and how it was distributed, work became meaningful. By putting workers in charge, pointless tasks could be eliminated and problems solved collectively. As people were accountable to their colleagues there was an incentive to work hard and do a good job, rather than get away with the minimum. Above all, the purpose of work was to benefit all, not just to generate profits for the bosses.
  
  This process was reversed in the 1920s, but in the last century workers' control has appeared many more times. So, for example, after the overthrow of the dictatorships in Portugal in 1974 and Iran in 1979 workers took over their factories. In Iran there were committees for sales, pricing, wages, health and safety, financial affairs and the specific demands of women workers. 
  
  More recently in Egypt during the protests in Tahrir Square, ordinary people organised themselves to provide food, water, street cleaning and security, as "normal" life ground to a halt. In doing so, people got a glimpse of their own ability to run society and found the confidence to kick out Hosni Mubarak's dictatorship and demand real democracy. 
  
It is clear that the current bosses are incapable of running the world without causing financial and environmental disaster, war and poverty. Every time ordinary people challenge the bosses - for a pay rise or against the decline of working conditions - we raise our own self-confidence to challenge the whole system and run society for ourselves.