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Where is France heading?

3 May, 20233 May, 2023Admin

Millions of workers have been on strike and taken to the streets in France to oppose President Macron’s attempt to increase the pension age from 62 to 64. Even though the Constitutional Court has backed Macron’s imposition of the change using Article 49.3 to bypass parliament, strikes and protests are continuing.

Below we print an eye-witness account of one of the biggest demonstrations in Paris; an edited extract (on page 18) from the special bulletin distributed during the 23 March strike by Gauche Révolutionnaire (GR), French section of the Committee for a Workers’ International; and, on page 19, extracts from the perspectives document prepared for discussion at the recent GR congress.

Over a million workers and young people protested in cities and towns across France on 23 March. This enormous day of action was provoked by the latest stage in the government’s campaign against pension rights, and especially its use of undemocratic constitutional powers like Article 49.3 to force measures through against parliamentary and public opposition.

President Emmanuel Macron’s unprecedented TV appearance the day before poured more fuel on the flames. His prime minister, Elisabeth Borne, had just survived two no-confidence motions by the skin of her teeth, the first by just nine votes. Macron made no pretence of an attempt to conciliate. Rather, it was a flat insistence that the counter-reform will go through come hell or high water, no matter who opposes or how.

What lay behind Mao’s Cultural Revolution?

3 May, 2023Admin

The Cultural Revolution – a period that is generally considered to have spanned the ten years from 1966 to the death of Mao Zedong in 1976 – is one of the most confusing and misunderstood periods of recent Chinese history. Yet, as Guardian journalist Tania Branigan writes in Red Memory, its shadow still hangs over China today. CHRISTINE THOMAS delves below surface impressionism to draw out what really happened during those tumultuous events.

Red Memory: Living, Remembering and Forgetting China’s Cultural Revolution

By Tania Branigan

Published by Faber, 2023, £18.00

At the time that the Cultural Revolution was unfolding, some on the left internationally viewed it as a genuine revolutionary mass movement from below against bureaucratism. Mao was even hailed as an ‘unconscious Trotskyist’. Retrospective narratives like Branigan’s, which is mainly based on personal testimony, tend to concentrate on detailing and conveying the often seemingly random terror, brutality and destruction – in which up to two million people are thought to have died and 36 million persecuted – but with scant analysis of the factors underpinning and motivating what actually took place.

Fighting sexism in schools and everywhere

3 May, 2023Admin

Everyone’s Invited

By Soma Sara

Published by Simon and Schuster, 2022, £9.99

Reviewed by Helen Pattison

From the National Science Foundation, which recently commissioned a report into sexual harassment at their Antarctic research station; to the World Health Organisation’s three-year strategy aimed at driving “systematic change to tackle sexual misconduct” by its own personnel and partners; to #MeToo in Hollywood; to the London Fire Brigade. Clearly sexual harassment is everywhere, in all corners of society, affecting people in all walks of life, on a huge scale.

Drama in London’s East End

3 May, 202325 May, 2023Admin

This year has seen three stage productions based on important events in the East End of London and peopled with pioneers of the labour movement, suffragettes, Jews, and fascists. CLARE DOYLE reviews them.

Vodka with Stalin

The first was the heart-rending, if initially amusing, tale of a young Jewish woman drawn to the class struggle in the early days of the twentieth century. Rose Cohen grew up in East London’s Whitechapel in a family of Jewish refugees from Tsarist pogroms in Poland. She was active in Sylvia Pankhurst’s East London Federation of Suffragettes and was a founding member of the Communist Party of Great Britain. The play shows her courted by Communist Party leader, Harry Pollitt, and, with him, meeting various Labour pioneers, including Keir Hardie.

Editorial: New act in Tory Brexit drama, but not the last

3 April, 20233 April, 2023Admin

Amid the fanfare accompanying the announcement of the ‘Windsor Framework’ agreement between prime minister Rishi Sunak and the president of the European Commission Ursula von der Leyen, a remarkable interview on the BBC’s Newsnight programme with the Northern Ireland minister Steve Baker (27 February) revealed the high stakes at play for the UK ruling class – and their European counter-parts too – in trying to contain the ongoing combustible contradictions created by British capitalism’s exit three years ago from the European Union bosses’ club.

Baker was a central figure in the campaign to unseat Theresa May as Tory leader from 2018-19 for her not too dissimilar attempt then at a ‘soft Brexit’. Now, his voice shaking and on the verge of tears, the self-styled ‘hard man of Brexit’ appealed “for people to just be sensible and grown up”. Tory MPs, and the Northern Ireland Democratic Unionist Party (DUP), should accept the deal to modify the workings of the Northern Ireland Protocol aspect of the 2020 UK-EU Withdrawal Agreement or face, as he saw it, the only alternative of “chaos”.

“We have got to move beyond this awful populism we’ve suffered” – said the former chair of the European Research Group (ERG) of Tory MPs; founder of the climate change-sceptical Net Zero Scrutiny and conspiracy-feeding Covid Recovery Groups; member of the ‘small-state’ Conservative Way Forward faction; and opponent of the Same Sex Couples Marriage Act of 2013. And without even a hint of irony!

Preparing for the tests to come

3 April, 2023Admin

Following the Socialist Party’s successful national congress, HANNAH SELL draws out some of the key issues that were discussed, particularly on the character of the developing waves of strike action, and also on the Socialist Party’s call for a new mass workers’ party.

The Socialist Party’s 2023 national congress took place from 25-27 February in London. Around 300 delegates and visitors attended. Longstanding Socialist Party campaigners were joined by many more recent recruits, some representing new branches of the party. There was a confident and combative mood, and agreement on the central political perspectives and organisational tasks facing the party. The main political statement presented by the executive committee (see Socialism Today issue No.264) was agreed with only one small amendment.

The high level of general agreement does not mean, however, that the congress resembled a ‘rubber stamp’. The discussions were very rich and helped to deepen the whole party’s understanding of perspectives for the next period and, above all, the role our party can play. In addition to the discussion on political perspectives for Britain, and a shorter discussion on the world situation, there were also important discussions on tasks for Marxists in the trade unions, the demand for a new mass workers’ party and preparing for the general election, fighting for socialist ideas among students, the role of party publications, plus sessions on finance and developing ‘party-builders’ in every branch.

Where now to consolidate Unite as a fighting union?

3 April, 2023Admin

As members of Unite prepare to elect a new executive council ROB WILLIAMS assesses how far the union has come under Sharon Graham’s leadership, and what steps need to be taken now to build on that progress.

The first Unite executive council (EC) elections are taking place since the election of Sharon Graham as union general secretary in August 2021. Socialist Party members are standing on the slate of candidates supporting Sharon’s leadership, looking to consolidate her victory and continue the transformation of Unite into a more fighting and democratic union.

This is vital because of the industrial and political conjuncture. The election takes place during the most extensive strike wave for a whole period, in the midst of the cost-of-living squeeze and the threat of new Tory anti-union laws. Action on the scale of a 24-hour general strike is being posed. Unite has been to the fore in the strike movement in all the sectors of the economy in which it has members. It has invariably found itself clashing with Starmer’s New Labour leadership, which is intent on proving its ‘fitness to govern’ to big business and the capitalist establishment.

An historic crisis shakes Israeli society

3 April, 2023Admin

Weekly mass protests in Tel Aviv, settler violence in the West Bank, increasing Israeli state repression of Palestinians, AMNON COHEN analyses an unprecedented crisis for the Israeli ruling class.

On Sunday 26 February, hundreds of ultra-right Israeli settlers rampaged through the West Bank town of Hawarwa, torching homes and cars and killing one Palestinian – in what the Israeli press correctly described as a pogrom.

Tens of thousands of Israelis are demonstrating every week against the new ultra-right Israeli government and its ‘judicial reforms’. Prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu has denounced the pro-democracy demonstrators as ‘anarchists’. The police have used mounted police, water cannon and percussion grenades and arrests in an attempt to intimidate the demonstrators into staying at home. But the number of demonstrators has only increased further, with 200,000 coming out on 11 March – one of the biggest protests in Israeli history. And while Netanyahu has a narrow majority in the Knesset, polls show only 35% of the public support his ‘reforms’.

Northern Ireland: 25 years since the Good Friday Agreement

3 April, 2023Admin

NIALL MULHOLLAND explains the background to the signing of the Good Friday Agreement and how the 25 years since its signing have not overcome the fundamental problems underpinning sectarian division in Northern Ireland.

Ahead of the 25th anniversary of the Good Friday Agreement, British prime minister Rishi Sunak and European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen unveiled the ‘Windsor Framework’. The deal amends the ‘Northern Ireland protocol’, which caused significant trade problems for Northern Ireland and the collapse, last year, of the power-sharing Stormont Assembly after the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) walked out of the Executive.

No doubt with an eye on the powerful Irish-American lobby in the Democratic party, US president Joe Biden was quick to welcome the Windsor Framework. Biden stated he was “proud of the role the United States has played for decades to help achieve, preserve and strengthen” the Good Friday Agreement. Chris Coons, a Democratic senator and close ally of Biden, introduced legislation that if approved by both chambers of Congress and signed into law by Biden would give the president the authority to negotiate a free trade agreement with the UK.

What future for multi-crisis capitalism?

3 April, 2023Admin

Not all capitalist economists have confidence in their system. TONY SAUNOIS reviews Megathreats by the US economist Nouriel Roubini.

Megathreats: The Ten Trends that Imperil Our Future, and How to Survive Them

By Nouriel Roubini, Hachette UK, 2022, £15

Many bourgeois economists have tended to put a gloss on the deep systemic crisis facing world capitalism. They have often seized upon this or that marginal piece of ‘good’ news to empirically conclude that this or that problem has been fixed – until the next one arises. Now faced with the convergence of a series of multiple crises, economic and political, many have finally been compelled to catch up with what the Committee for a Workers’ International (CWI) has argued – that a devastating situation confronts global capitalism.