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The great anti-Semitism smear campaign

9 December, 20219 December, 2021Admin

JUDY BEISHON reviews a detailed account of how claims of anti-Semitism were used as cover by Labour’s pro-capitalist right-wing to destabilise Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership, which spotlights the campaign against the left-wing former MP Chris Williamson.

Labour, the anti-Semitism crisis, and the destroying of an MP
By Lee Garratt
Published by Thinkwell Books, 2021, £11-99

The removal of Chris Williamson and Jeremy Corbyn from the Parliamentary Labour Party (PLP), and Rebecca Long-Bailey from the front bench, was in each case based on accusations of anti-Semitism, or on comments on accusations of anti-Semitism. There was no actual evidence of anti-Semitism in their cases and they all made clear that it should have no place in the labour movement. However, that issue had become a battering ram of the Labour Party right wing against the Corbyn-led left and its prime method for removing certain individuals from positions of influence.

Lee Garratt’s book documents well the deliberate smearing of those prominent Labour lefts and many others – such as former MP and London mayor Ken Livingstone – who were targeted on similar grounds.

The rise and decline of Podemos

9 December, 2021Admin

Pablo Iglesias, one of the founders of Podemos and its most prominent representative, announced his resignation from politics earlier this year – the tenth anniversary of the movement of the indignados which gave birth to the new party. ROSS SAUNDERS looks back at the formation of Podemos, its development, and the mistakes of its leaders which have put its future in jeopardy.

Ten years ago the revolt of the indignados (the ‘outraged’) erupted in Spain as a protest against brutal austerity. The government of José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero and the misnamed Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party (PSOE), loyal to the interests of the capitalists who backed him, demanded that ordinary working class people pay the bill for the economic crisis which convulsed the Spanish state and the rest of the world in 2007-08.

While Spanish banks received huge no-strings-attached bailouts, Zapatero held wages down and savagely cut back public services, pensions and welfare. Jobs were slaughtered and new attacks were launched on trade union rights in order to obstruct the efforts of workers to fight back.

The end of the USSR

9 December, 20219 December, 2021Admin

The USSR was officially dissolved thirty years ago in 1991. CLARE DOYLE, who was working in Russia at the time on behalf of the Committee for a Workers’ International (CWI), looks back at an historic moment.

On 25 December1991 a sombre Mikhail Gorbachev appeared on television screens across eleven time zones announcing that the vast federation known as the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics was dissolved. Long before this date, it had been unravelling and the fate of Gorbachev, its president and the secretary of the ruling ‘Communist’ Party, had been sealed.

This Christmas speech marked the end of the ‘Soviet Union’; it was by no means ‘the end of history’, as one infamous political scientist – Francis Fukuyama – argued, maintaining there was now no alternative to capitalism. And yet today the idea of socialism is becoming more and more popular amongst young people and ever more urgent in the fight against the destruction of the world’s people and resources.

What happened to the Socialist Alliance?

9 December, 20219 December, 2021Admin

This month marks twenty years since the Socialist Alliance conference, on 1 December 2001, which brought the organisation under the complete domination and control of the Socialist Workers Party (SWP). This effectively ended an initiative that had previously had the potential to play an important role in bringing together different socialist organisations, trade unionists, community campaigners, and activists from the then emergent anti-capitalist movement, as a ‘staging post’ towards a mass alternative to Tony Blair’s New Labour government, a new workers’ party.

With the issue of how to organise an inclusive pre-formation on the road to a new mass party once again to the fore, following the defeat of Corbynism within the framework of Sir Keir Starmer’s revived Blairite Labour, we are reprinting two articles on the experience of the Socialist Alliance.

The first article, written by HANNAH SELL and published in The Socialist No.231, 23 November 2001, is a preview of the issues at stake at the December 2001 conference, which had been called to agree a new constitution for the Socialist Alliance. The second, on page 27, by CLIVE HEEMSKERK, is abridged from a feature in Socialism Today No.79, November 2003, written as the SWP were winding down the Socialist Alliance after its failure to develop against the backdrop of the mass anti-war movement and the tremors rocking the Blair government.

Twenty years on, the contrast is stark between the ‘majority-takes-all’ approach which the SWP imposed on the Socialist Alliance and which sealed its demise, and the democratic federal structure of the Trade Unionist and Socialist Coalition (TUSC), within which the Socialist Party has played a key role but which has been providing an inclusive framework for an electoral collaboration of different forces for over ten years now.

Why did the Socialist Alliance break-down?

9 December, 2021Admin

From Socialism Today No.79, November 2003

“Those on the left who have pinned their hopes on founding a new socialist party”, wrote the veteran Labour left-winger Tony Benn on the eve of Labour’s Bournemouth conference, “should note that the Socialist Alliance candidate only received 366 votes in Brent East and Arthur Scargill’s Socialist Labour Party (SLP) was only able to get 111 votes, which does not promise well for that strategy”. (Morning Star, 26 September 2003)

Editorial: How to save the planet

1 November, 2021Admin

“When the leaders speak of peace”, wrote the German socialist artist Bertolt Brecht while living in exile in 1937, “the people know that war is coming”. Brecht’s pithy epigram, from his German War Primer poem, should be kept firmly in mind as the representatives of the countries that agreed the 1992 Rio Earth Summit United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change gather this November in Glasgow for the twenty-sixth Conference of the Parties to the convention (COP26).

Almost half of the atmosphere’s extra, human-made carbon dioxide has been put there under the watch of these representatives in the period since, almost thirty years ago now, they solemnly signed the Rio convention to “prevent dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate”.

The battle for UNISON

1 November, 2021Admin

Emerging from the Covid pandemic and following a decade of austerity, the capitalist class is once again determined to force the working class to pay the price for economic instability and crisis. But their success is not a foregone conclusion – that depends on whether there is a struggle.

In an attempt to stave that off, and particularly to prevent struggle finding a political expression, when Jeremy Corbyn won the leadership of the Labour Party in 2015 the Blairite right-wing embarked on a ferocious campaign. These representatives of capitalist interests in the Labour Party had spent years transforming it into a party safe for big business, and were not about to allow the door to open to the possibility of it becoming a vehicle through which workers could challenge the profit system.

Now with Corbynism defeated within the Labour Party framework the new battleground is in the biggest public sector trade union, with 1.3 million members, UNISON.

ID divisions dangers are still there

1 November, 2021Admin

The consultation on the 2004 Gender Recognition Act (GRA) launched by the Tory government in 2016 was not the starting gun for the ‘culture wars’ – but it did create a battlefield. The Tories faced a Labour opposition led by Jeremy Corbyn. They hoped making it easier for trans and non-binary people to self-identify would be a cheap way to cut across some of the hatred felt, especially among young people, for their nasty austerity party. Five years on, as we warned, the Tories admit they have no intention of improving the GRA. The battlefield, however, is still active.

Those pushing themselves to the front of the so-called debate arising from the GRA reform consultation falsely present women’s rights and the rights of trans and non-binary people as conflicting rights. They are not. All women and trans and non-binary people suffer in different and related ways because of the way capitalist society is organised and structured.

Climate talks: the hot air years

1 November, 2021Admin

For nearly 30 years, capitalist politicians have talked about tackling global warming – since discussions held in the run-up to the Earth summit of 1992. But, as BEN ROBINSON shows in an article first published just before the 2015 Paris climate summit in Socialism Today No.194, they have done little to deal with this threat, bound as they are to the profit-driven system they represent.

The United Nations climate change conference in Paris is the latest in a series of talks that has gone on for 23 years. They have thoroughly demonstrated how bankrupt capitalism is, in the face of the coming climate catastrophe it has created. The rate at which pollutants are spilled out has continued to grow, virtually unabated by the discussions held by diplomats around the world.

In the red forward line

1 November, 2021Admin

Reading Len McCluskey’s autobiography will provide today’s activists with an invaluable insight into developments in the British labour movement during his term of office as the Unite union general secretary, argues PETER TAAFFE, and be an important preparation for future battles.

Always Red
By Len McCluskey
Published by OR Books, 2021, £16-99

Always Red by Len McCluskey, the recently retired general secretary of Unite, is a powerful and interesting autobiographical account of his life. It demonstrates the huge effect he has had on members of both Unite, the biggest trade union in Britain and Ireland, and the broader labour movement generally. It is vital for understanding the events in the British labour movement during his term of office. They encompass developments both in the trade unions and on the political terrain. His book is particularly relevant for helping to understand the tumultuous events in the Labour Party with the rise of Jeremy Corbyn to leader.