Socialism Today

At this year’s Labour Party conference Jeremy Corbyn launched a new policy document on the pharmaceutical industry. He gave the example of nine year-old Luis Walker, who has cystic fibrosis but has been “denied the medicine he needs because its American manufacturer refuses to sell the drug to the NHS for an affordable price”. He went on to say that many others were being “denied lifesaving medicines by a system that puts profits for shareholders before lives”. In the case of cystic fibrosis, the company that holds the patent, Vertex, is asking for £105,000 per patient a year and rejected the NHS’s offer of half-a-billion pounds over five years.

Labour’s document – Medicines for the Many: Public Health before Private Profit – is a devastating critique of the industry, as well as the current policies on research and development. The government ploughs billions into R&D, benefitting hugely profitable companies, yet pays out billions more to buy the medicines developed from that research.

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When the Berlin wall was dismantled in 1989 capitalism declared itself victorious. The collapse of Stalinism was used in a global ideological offensive against socialism, which was unjustly equated with that dictatorial, bureaucratic system, to drive through brutal, neo-liberal capitalist policies worldwide. In an abridged version of the introduction to the 2009 special anniversary edition of Socialism Today on the fall of the wall, PETER TAAFFE looks back at 1989 and its consequences.

On the anniversary of 1989 the ideologues, politicians and media of world capitalism wish to reinforce in popular consciousness that the events of that tumultuous year signified just one thing: the ‘final defeat’ of Marxism, ‘communism’ and socialism itself, buried forever under the rubble of the Berlin wall. This also meant the final victory of capitalism, which ‘ended history’ according to Francis Fukuyama, and established this system as the only possible model for organising production and running society.

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School equalities teaching including material on LGBTQ+ relationships has been a catalyst for parent protests in an impoverished working-class and predominantly Muslim area of Birmingham – seized on by the government, Christian and Islamic fundamentalists and others for opportunistic ends. It raises an important issue: how to involve marginalised, discriminated against communities in a programme that includes gender and sexuality equality alongside tackling widespread poverty and deprivation. MARTIN POWELL-DAVIES writes.

After over a decade of intensified attacks on workers’ living standards, and without the labour movement organising decisively to oppose them, it is almost inevitable that the growing anger and alienation within working-class communities can be misdirected towards chauvinism and division. It is the task of socialists, without ever conceding to discriminatory views, to find a way to overcome those divisions and help bring workers together in the united struggle needed to solve the problems we face.

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One of the largest strike waves in Middle East history swept across Egypt in the years before the mighty demonstrations that erupted in Tahrir Square in January 2011, part of the ‘Arab spring’. As a new mood of protest begins to develop, DAVID JOHNSON reviews two timely books outlining how the confidence to resist vicious security forces had grown from those earlier workers’ movements – and had weakened the regime.

Contesting Authoritarianism: labor challenges to the state of Egypt

By Dina Bishara

Published by Cambridge University Press, 2018, £21.99

Trade Unions and Arab Revolutions: challenging the regime in Egypt

By Heba F El-Shazli

Published by Routledge, 2019, £115

How did Egypt’s workers break the shackles of state, management and corrupt trade union leaders? How did independent unions emerge in some areas while other workers stayed in state-run organisations? These are vital questions for workers in many parts of the world with similar restrictions on the right to organise – not least in Egypt itself. Gains briefly won after the 2011 uprising were snatched back, particularly by the Muslim Brotherhood’s President Mohammed Morsi and current President Abdel Fatah al-Sisi’s dictatorial regime.

Both books, written by Egypt-born academics now based in American universities, examine these questions. They contain much valuable information, drawing on published material and interviewing participants in key strikes and in the formation of independent trade unions. The interviews were mostly conducted between 2011 and 2013, prior to al-Sisi stamping down on the movement.

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The Testaments

By Margaret Atwood

Published by Chatto & Windus, 2019, £20

Reviewed by Helen Pattison

The Testaments won’t disappoint Margaret Atwood fans, who were left with a cliff-hanger at the end of The Handmaid’s Tale. Loose ends are tied up and we get a deeper look at some character backgrounds, such as Aunt Lydia’s.

The Handmaid’s Tale was originally published in the 1980s and outlined a dystopian future, the growth of an authoritarian regime. Wide ranging attacks are imposed on women, essentially making them second-class citizens in the new society called Gilead, in present-day USA, leaving them unable to have bank accounts, or learn to read or write. A falling birth rate also sees the creation of handmaids, an extremely oppressed section of women forced through rape to help the infertile elite have children.

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I’ve just read Sarah Sachs-Eldridge’s excellent review of Helena Kennedy’s book, Eve Was Shamed (Socialism Today No.231, September 2019).

It begins with the denial of justice for women who experience violence. Then it considers the jail sentencing of women: “The most common offence by women is shop-lifting… 84% of inmates are there for non-violent offences. There has been a big increase in the jailing of women for non-payment of the TV licence. In 2015, 76% of women in jail had sentences of less than a year”.

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