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New opportunities in Peru

4 May, 2021Admin

The second round of the presidential elections in Peru, which takes place on Sunday 6 June, will see left candidate, Pedro Castillo, line up in a run-off with the right-wing candidate, Keiko Fujimori, daughter of the former dictator Alberto Fujimori.

The first round of the presidential contest was held on April 11, along with elections for the National Congress and the Andean Parliament. The big winner of the day was the left-wing party, Peru Libre, whose presidential candidate, Pedro Castillo, came first, with 2.687 million votes, a 19.1% vote share, in an election with eighteen presidential candidates. His party also came first in the Peruvian Congress poll and in the election of members of the Andean Parliament, with a similar percentage of the vote. Peru Libre will have 28 Congress representatives.

Veronica Mendoza, who as the left-facing Broad Front candidate in the last presidential elections in 2016 received 18.7% of the votes in the first round, now only obtained a poll share of 7.8%, losing 1.76 million votes on her 2016 score. This is the result of her effort not to appear as a ‘radical left’, making declarations to distance herself from Venezuela for example, while making overtures to the business sector. Appearing as too much like the decayed political caste abhorred by her own electorate, Mendoza was abandoned by her supporters. The party she now leads won even less support for its congressional candidates, at just 6.8%.

One hundred years of divide and rule

4 May, 2021Admin

This year marks the hundredth anniversary of the partition of Ireland. With sectarian tensions rising once again, the real history of that period – of revolution and counter-revolution – needs to be reclaimed. NIALL MULHOLLAND writes.

On 22 June 1921, a parliament for the new state of Northern Ireland, compromising the six counties in the north east of the island, was opened by King George V, in its temporary accommodation in Belfast City Hall. Over the next months, the twenty-six county Irish Free State also came into being.

The Irish workers’ leader James Connolly’s dire prediction in 1914 that the division of Ireland (partition) would lead to “a carnival of reaction” was fully borne out. Civil war, military rule, sectarian upheaval and bloody pogroms accompanied the creation of the two impoverished and church-ridden capitalist states. From the start, the Catholic minority in Northern Ireland’s ‘Orange State’ were brutally treated and discriminated against. Arising from British imperialism’s long held ‘divide and rule’ tactics, partition was a monstrous crime against the interests of the working class of Ireland, cutting across national and social revolutionary movements and entrenching sectarian divisions.

The real history of that period of revolution and counter-revolution in Ireland, from around 1913 to 1923, is obfuscated and distorted in most of the history books. And the main political parties in the North inevitably view this pivotal period of Irish history from their sectarian perspectives.

The condition of the working class

4 May, 2021Admin

The Covid pandemic has brought into relief the persisting inequities of capitalism and the terrible conditions of life it inflicts on millions of workers, including in the so-called ‘advanced’ capitalist countries. Sozialistische Organisation Solidaritaet, the German section of the CWI, has reprinted the first systematic expose of capitalism written by Friedrich Engels, The Condition of the Working Class in England, at a time, in 1840s Britain, when it was still a relatively new and dynamic system. Below is the introduction to the new volume, written by LENNY SHAIL.

In 1863 while working away at what was to become Das Kapital, Karl Marx took time out to refresh himself again with his comrade and closest friend’s early masterpiece The Condition of the Working Class in England.

In his almost daily letter exchange to Engels, Marx commented, “What power, what incisiveness and what passion drove you to work in those days. That was a time when you were never worried by academic scholarly reservations! Those were the days when you made the reader feel that your theories would become hard facts if not tomorrow then at any rate on the day after”.

The book was the first to be published by either of the two great collaborators, and it is timely that Sozialistische Organisation Solidaritaet is reprinting it for current and future generations given the conditions and struggles facing the working class across the world today that are in many cases identical to that of the horrifying conditions illuminated by the 24 years-old Friedrich Engels.

An heroic episode

4 May, 2021Admin

We Fight Fascists
By Daniel Sonabend
Published by Verso, 2019, £20
Reviewed by Nick Hart

Britain in 1946: despite the second world war being over, many of the hardships of wartime persisted. Rationing was still in place, cities were pockmarked with bomb sites, unemployment was rising and many workers remained housed in slum conditions.

It was in this austere environment that a number of those who had previously been active in the British Union of Fascists (BUF) during that organisation’s 1930s heyday began to regroup and restart their campaign of anti-Semitic provocation. What they had not reckoned with was the resolute opposition which they would encounter.

We Fight Fascists by London-based historian Daniel Sonabend tells the story of The 43 Group, an organisation set up by working class Jews, mainly though not exclusively based in London, to prevent a fascist revival by any means necessary. In a fast paced and meticulously researched account, Sonabend relates how a group of Jewish ex-servicemen, angered both by the anti-Semitic slander being openly spread on the streets of Britain and the passivity of more established Jewish organisations in confronting it, set out to disrupt the activities of the fascists wherever they encountered them.

Editorial: Is the Liverpool road still possible?

6 April, 20211 June, 2021Admin

Keir Starmer launched the Labour Party’s campaign for the May local and mayoral elections in England on March 11 by majoring on Boris Johnson’s plan for a 1% rise-but-real-terms-pay-cut for nurses and other NHS workers.

This line of attack on the Tories was chosen even though, as the BBC report archly put it, “NHS pay for England is decided nationally, rather than by councils”.

Yet even then, on his chosen field, Starmer avoided media questions about whether he would join nurses on a picket line or what he felt would be an appropriate pay rise, other than saying that the 2.1% previously agreed in 2019 would be ‘a good starting point’.

But what about the council elections? A National Audit Office (NAO) report had been released the previous day showing that 94% of English local authorities expect to cut spending in the year ahead after the hit to their finances from the Covid pandemic. Yet nothing was said on what Labour-led councils would do under Starmer to resist the coming turbo-charged austerity against local public services.

Scottish Blairism is back

6 April, 2021Admin

As expected the Blairite, right-wing candidate Anas Sarwar was elected leader of the Scottish Labour Party when the results were announced on February 27. The outcome, allied to Starmer’s increasing grip on the UK Labour Party, marks the end of the Corbyn left’s challenge to the dominant capitalist wing of the Labour Party. Indeed Jeremy Corbyn himself is still excluded from the Parliamentary Labour Party (PLP) and is no longer a Labour MP. The millionaire tendency are definitively back in the driving seat.

That the Corbyn ‘revolution’ has ended with the same Blairites back in charge was only possible because of the political and organisational compromises made to the right by the Labour left during the four and a half years of Corbyn’s leadership. Rather than use the mass enthusiasm for Corbyn, reflected in the hundreds of thousands who joined Labour, to create a genuine workers’ party and drive out the pro-capitalist elements this opportunity was squandered.

Catalonia ferment undimmed

6 April, 2021Admin

Weeks of protests against the jailing of rapper Pablo Hasél have rocked Catalonia and other parts of the Spanish state, becoming a lightning rod for the anger of a generation whose lives have hit a dead end. These social explosions are just a taste of the revolutionary confrontations that lie ahead.

The Mossos (Catalan police) finally arrested Hasél on February 16, after he had barricaded himself in the University of Lleida with supporters, refusing to comply with attempts by state forces to jail him after he was convicted under the hated Citizen Safety Law.

Global Warning: The dark side of clean energy

6 April, 2021Admin

The Rare Metals War: the dark side of clean energy and digital technologies
By Gullaume Pitron (translated by Bianca Jacobsohn)
Published by Scribe, 2020, £16.99

Are ‘green’ and digital technologies environmentally friendly? The transition to green and digital technologies is portrayed as the way to move to zero carbon emissions and a clean environment by reducing our dependency on nuclear power and fossil fuels. Renewable energy sources are promoted as clean, environmentally friendly and sustainable. Renewable energy sources are an increasing proportion of the energy we use. Digital technologies maximise the efficiency of renewable power production and consumption. The full story is, however, more complex.

Guillame Pitron’s book fills in some of the gaps in this green and digital technology story. Pitron is a French investigative journalist and documentary film maker. The book is the result of six years of research in a dozen countries. It was written in 2018 and translated into English and published in 2020.

A new Diana moment?

6 April, 2021Admin

Following Prince Harry and Meghan Markle’s incendiary interview with Oprah Winfrey, comparisons have been made with previous royal crises. PAULA MITCHELL looks at the events surrounding the death of Princess Diana in 1997 which rocked the capitalist establishment and asks, what is the significance of this new royal drama?

On 7 March, Prince Harry and Meghan Markle gave an interview to Oprah Winfrey in which they accused the royal family of racism, of lying about Meghan in their briefings, and ignoring her pleas for help with her mental health. Over twelve million people in the UK watched the interview and many more have watched and discussed it since. #AbolishTheMonarchy trended on social media. Tabloids described the impact as “utter devastation”. The Palace was reported to be in “meltdown”. Harry “used the atomic bomb”; it was a “declaration of war”.

The front page of the Mirror newspaper described the consequences of the interview as the worst crisis for the monarchy in 85 years, referring to the abdication of Edward VIII in 1936. Lots of people have pointed out that this comment overlooks the Prince Andrew sex scandal, a potential powder keg. But importantly it also overlooks the enormous events that engulfed the monarchy following the death of Princess Diana in 1997.

Liverpool’s real legacy of struggle

6 April, 2021Admin

Liverpool is in the news with the desperate situation facing the city’s public services behind the meltdown of the council’s Blairite Labour leadership. Once again the example of the 1983-87 city council’s refusal to implement austerity is posed. Edited extracts from an article by PETER TAAFFE first published in the spring 1986 edition of Militant International Review, No.31, the predecessor magazine of Socialism Today, give a real time defence of the city that showed how to fight.

The British ruling class have been shaken to their foundations by the magnificent struggle of the Liverpool city council and working class. In the miners’ strike and in Liverpool are to be found the germs of the mass conflicts which will convulse Britain on a national scale in the future. There can be no other explanation for the vile and unprecedented campaign of slander and of personal vilification of the leaders of the city council and District Labour Party. A new Tower of Babel, of lies, misinformation and half-truths has been constructed by the hirelings of capital in Fleet Street and the media.

Both nationally and locally the ruling class and their organs are determined to smash Liverpool as a symbol for workers everywhere moving into struggle. Like with the miners, Margaret Thatcher wanted to ensure that ‘militancy does not pay’. She described the miners as ‘the enemy within’. She reserved the same venomous class hatred for the working class of Liverpool: “They do not have enough respect for my office… these people must be put down”. (Quoted in Liverpool On The Brink, by Michael Parkinson)