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Behind China’s belt and road diplomacy

3 November, 2023Admin

September 2023 marked a decade since Chinese Communist Party (CCP) president Xi Jinping unveiled plans for what became China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). This, along with other ‘soft power’ initiatives, has been a key feature of the growing geo-political rivalry between China and the US, writes PHILIP STOTT.

Few understood the significance of the announcement in 2013 in a speech by Xi in Kazakhstan in which he declared the ‘Silk Road economic belt’ would be the ‘project of the century’. As the Economist magazine commented in its feature to mark the tenth anniversary: “No one predicted that the project would become a defining feature of his foreign policy and dramatic symbol of China’s rise as a global power”. They went on: “The West was in for a shock”.

Fast forward ten years and the BRI has had a major international impact in vast parts of the world. Up to June 2023, “China had signed more than 200 belt and road cooperation agreements with 152 nations and 32 international institutions across five continents”, according to the National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC), China’s major economic planning agency.

Re-imagining work and the family

3 November, 2023Admin

CHRISTINE THOMAS reviews a fascinating book which traces the evolution of domestic labour in class society and offers a glimpse of what socialism could mean.

After Work: A History of the Home and the Fight for Free Time

By Helen Hester and Nick Srnicek

Published by Verso, 2023, £16-99

Helen Hester and Nick Srnicek want a world in which we all work less and have more free time. Not many working people would take issue with that. After Work, however, is concerned not with paid work – the ‘exchange’ of a workers’ labour power for wages – but unwaged ‘social reproductive’ work: housework, childcare, household management etc, work in the family that is still predominantly performed by women, even in the more advanced capitalist countries in the ‘west’ – which this book concentrates on. Could society be organised differently in order to reduce this work as much as possible? Could the remaining work be redistributed more equitably? These are questions posed in the introduction to this interesting and thought-provoking book.

Nationalisms and the war in Ukraine

3 November, 2023Admin

As the stalemate in Ukraine grinds on, DAVE REID reviews a book that shines a spotlight on the origins of Putin’s attack and the significance of the national question, historically and today.

The Russo-Ukrainian War

By Serhii Plokhy

Published by Allen Lane, 2023, £25

The modern crisis of global capitalism is nowhere starker than the human catastrophe in the Ukraine, where the bloody war with Russia has, by some estimates, claimed 300,000 casualties on both sides, 15,000 of them civilians. According to Serhii Plokhy’s book, The Russo-Ukrainian War, by March 2022, eight million Ukrainians were displaced, seven million had migrated.

This book intends to offer a historical background and description of the outbreak of the Ukraine war, and provides a comprehensive but brief account of modern Ukrainian history that a reader new to the politics of the country before the war would find useful. But like all histories it depends very much on the outlook of the historian. The reader is alerted to the outlook of Plokhy on the front cover of the book, where the Financial Times describes him as “the foremost historian of the Ukraine”.

Class, identity, and the struggle against racism

3 November, 2023Admin

Not So Black and White: A History of Race from White Supremacy to Identity Politics

By Kenan Malik

Published by C Hurst & Co, 2023, £20

Reviewed by Deji Olayinka

Kenan Malik’s book, Not So Black and White, discusses the ideas and battles in the history of race and racism since the 1600s. While the common sense view is that it is difference that leads to racial inequality, he makes clear that “race didn’t give birth to racism. Racism gave birth to race”.

Modern white-supremacist racism developed as a consequence of the transatlantic slave trade; it was not the other way round. In the initial decades, American plantations were mainly worked by European indentured servants.

To begin with the plantation owners preferred indentured servants over chattel slaves because renting a person was cheaper than buying one, and because if they failed to work well or ran away a court could extend their servitude term, whereas slaves couldn’t be threatened that way. There were also European slaves from the Balkans, and Circassian slaves, but their supply was being reduced by the Ottoman Empire. This, alongside other mostly business reasons, meant that African slaves were used more frequently.

Reparations or revolution?

2 October, 20232 October, 2023Admin

The Black Lives Matter movement has reignited an ongoing discussion about whether or how reparations should be made for the horrors of slavery. To coincide with Black History Month we are publishing the following article by PAULA MITCHELL as a contribution towards that debate.

Karl Marx famously said that capitalism came into being “dripping from head to toe, from every pore, with blood and dirt”.

By this he meant “the discovery of gold and silver in America, the extirpation, enslavement and entombment in mines of the indigenous population of that continent, the beginnings of the conquest and plunder of India, and the conversion of Africa into a preserve for the commercial hunting of black skins, are all things which characterise the dawn of the era of capitalist production. These idyllic proceedings are the chief moments of primitive accumulation…”.

From the fifteenth to the nineteenth centuries, estimates vary but between ten and fifteen million Africans were kidnapped and crammed into merchant ships, to be enslaved in the Caribbean and southern states of America. The trade was begun by the Portuguese but by the seventeenth century Britain was at the heart of it. An estimated two million perished on the Middle Passage, dying in horrific conditions or thrown overboard. On arrival they were sold and sold again as commodities; families divided, and put to work on plantations; branded, raped, lynched and mutilated. The trade in slaves and in the commodities produced on the plantations was one of the key elements in the genesis of capitalism, and in particular enabled the growth of Britain as the world’s foremost capitalist economic power.

Cracks in the ‘Chinese miracle’

2 October, 2023Admin

The multiple problems facing China’s state capitalist economy have grown significantly during 2023. The western capitalist press is full of often self-serving analysis predicting the end of the ‘Chinese miracle’. In addition, ratcheting tensions between China and the US have led to severe trade embargoes – first under Donald Trump’s presidency, and more recently Biden’s so-called ‘Chip Wars’.

US imperialism is determined to stop its primary world rival from acquiring the advanced technologies in semiconductors to enable moves to an advanced economy. The Chinese Communist Party (CCP), in contrast, is trying to transition China from an ‘assembly plant’ into a higher value-added manufacturing economy. Especially in green energy, healthcare, artificial intelligence, supercomputing, life sciences and military technology.

Crunch time on campus

2 October, 2023Admin

In August, the Universities and Colleges Union (UCU) brought its long-running dispute over pay and conditions into the new academic year 2023/24, announcing five days of action – though later adding an opt-out clause for branches outside of Scotland.

This latest round of strikes also coincided with a nationwide re-ballot of UCU members, which started on 20 September and will decide whether this dispute – involving the so-called ‘Four Fights’ over pay, pay equality, workloads and casualisation – is extended into the spring of 2024.

While at the time of publication it is impossible to know exactly the outcome of the re-ballot, what is for certain is that the accumulated anger of university staff, which has found expression in the historic industrial action taken by UCU and joint unions over the past twelve months, has not gone away.

Spycops: When the public is the enemy

2 October, 2023Admin

PAUL HERON, Legal Director at the Public Interest Law Centre, and a member of the Socialist Party, was one of the lawyers representing three core participants in Tranche One of the recent Undercover Policing Inquiry. Below he outlines his views on its conclusions – both the realities it recognises and its stark omissions.

For more than four decades, the Metropolitan Police (MPS), the Security Services, the government, and the British state maintained a veil of silence regarding political policing. They concealed from public scrutiny the system of state-sponsored surveillance carried out by British police officers. The endorsement of political policing extended to the highest echelons of government.

The discovery of this level of political policing is owed to the courageous women – mainly grouped in the organisation Spies Out of Lives – who were deceived into engaging in intimate relationships with undercover officers (UCOs). Their unwavering determination and advocacy compelled Theresa May to announce a public inquiry in 2015, which has begun to lift the veil of secrecy. Shamefully, UCOs infiltrated campaigns advocating for family justice, a grievous violation of trust and privacy. To compound the scandal, UCOs were deployed to spy on the Stephen Lawrence Family Campaign, exacerbating the sense of betrayal and injustice.

Drawing lessons from the strike wave

2 October, 2023Admin

The current strike wave, which erupted more than a year ago with national strike action by railworkers in the RMT union, marks the beginning of a new era in the class struggle in Britain. ROB WILLIAMS gives an overview of the strike action so far and draws vital lessons for the workers’ movement for the battles to come, especially under, as looks likely, a future Starmer government.

At last year’s TUC Congress, Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer was unabashed in facing the leadership of the trade union movement. He would not apologise for his refusal to support strikes and made no promises: “There will be tough times during my Labour government”. The crises in the Tories, which reached a nadir as Congress ended, with the resignation of the disastrous then prime minister Lizz Truss, buoyed Starmer’s confidence.

As the general election nears, Starmer and his team will be hoping that 2024 will be a repeat of 1997, when Tony Blair’s New Labour won an historic landslide against another Tory government which was also clearly out of time. But it’s not merely the electoral arithmetic that he hopes will be similar, he also hopes he can inherit the same ‘industrial peace’.

Global Warning: Another fruitless talking shop

2 October, 2023Admin

Global scientific monitoring has recorded 2023 as being almost certainly “the hottest in human history”. As the year nears its end, representatives of the world’s governments will again be gathering at the latest Conference of the Parties to the UN climate convention (COP28) to discuss what can be done to avert climate crisis.

Even the least cynical onlooker must already be wondering what can be achieved when the COP28 presidency has been awarded to the chief executive of the state oil company of the host state – the United Arab Emirates (UAE). Bitter experience of previous COP summits suggests that, while few serious capitalist politicians can any longer deny the threats posed by climate change, nothing will be agreed that matches the urgency required to deal with them.