Admin – Page 34 – Socialism Today

Socialism and national rights

11 June, 2021Admin

How can we open a road to begin to solve seemingly age-old intractable national conflicts? Reprinted below are extracts from an article in issue No.181 of Socialism Today (September 2014), written by PETER TAAFFE following the summer 2014 Israeli invasion of Gaza and the bloody conflict then unfolding in Ukraine.

Events in the last few months have graphically underlined that the different capitalist powers are totally unwilling and incapable of providing a democratic and just solution to the situation in Ukraine. The sheer hypocrisy of US imperialism and European capitalism on the one side and Russia’s oligarchic Putin regime on the other, in seeking the mantle of defenders of ‘oppressed nations and minorities’, will fool few thinking workers. It is a naked cash calculation allied to their strategic political and military vital interests that are at stake. ‘The right of self-determination’ is a hollow phrase, so much small change, to be quickly discarded if it stands in their way.

Exposing the bloodsuckers

11 June, 2021Admin

PETER TAAFFE reviews an impressive analysis of the role of commodity traders in ‘modern’ capitalism.

The World for Sale: Money, Power and the Traders Who Barter the Earth’s Resources
By Javier Blas and Jack Farchy
Published by Random House Business, 2021, £20

The World for Sale is an impressive, illuminating analysis of the corrosive rottenness and the corruption of ‘modern’ world capitalism. It couldn’t have come at a more appropriate time for Britain, where the Johnson Tory government is engulfed in allegations of gross influence-peddling, ‘chumocracy’ and outright bribery.

Written by two former journalists from the Financial Times, Javier Blas and Jack Farchy, with expert and inside knowledge of the workings of the system, it reveals the corruption of world capitalism – on an absolutely gargantuan scale! The book describes in nauseating detail how a handful of ‘commodity traders’ facilitated the theft of the world’s resources, further impoverishing the masses in the collapsing ex-Stalinist states and in the neo-colonial world. Their work allows us to understand how these gangsters gained through the colossal theft of previously nationalised industries and economies in the ex-Stalinist states. At the same time, there were opportunities resulting from a new imperialist scramble for Africa, Asia, Latin America and indeed the whole world. This was facilitated by these traders. This new stratum of the international capitalist class exploited the lucrative niches in finance capitalism, stacked up riches for themselves and, in the process, has in effect carried out a new re-colonisation of the world.

Will China’s bubble burst?

11 June, 2021Admin

As tensions between China and the US continue to rise, HANNAH SELL reviews a recent book by former Bloomberg economist Thomas Orlik, looking at the character of China and perspectives for its economy.

China: The Bubble That Never Pops
By Thomas Orlik
Published by Oxford University Press, 2020, £23

Unlike many other aspects of US foreign policy, Biden’s election has not led to a fundamental change in direction when it comes to China. However, instead of Trump’s quixotic and inconsistent unilateral ramping up of tensions, Biden is attempting to build a coalition of global powers behind US imperialism, with the aim of putting up a firewall against the further rise of China.

Is that possible? What are the limits to the continued rise of China? One of the most useful recent books on the Chinese economy is Thomas Orlik’s China: The Bubble That Never Pops. Previously based in China for eleven years as Chief Asia Economist for Bloomberg, his book – while not written from a socialist point of view but that of Western capitalism – still provides a useful picture of the contradictory character of China, and how it relates to China’s economic growth in the past and, to some extent, the future.

Global Warning: Just how radical are the Scottish Greens?

11 June, 2021Admin

The Scottish Greens are not the first European Green party to hold a pivotal position in their national parliament. But will they break the trend and offer a route to the fundamental system change needed to defeat climate change? In our Global Warning column this month OISIN DUNCAN of Socialist Party Scotland asks, just how radical are the Scottish Greens?

Many young people and workers voted for the Green Party in the Scottish Parliament election on May 6, concerned as they are about the environmental crisis being wrought on the planet by the capitalist system. The Scottish Greens put on 70,000 votes for the regional list seats compared to 2016, taking their share up to 8.1%. With eight Members of the Scottish Parliament (MSPs) they now hold a pivotal position at Holyrood.

But do the leadership of the Scottish Greens offer a fighting alternative to capitalism and cuts? After five years as the unofficial junior partners to the Scottish National Party (SNP) led Scottish government, what have the Greens actually delivered for workers and youth? And, looking to the future, do their policies go far enough to address the multi-faceted global crisis caused by capitalism?

Matter, reality… and Lenin

11 June, 20219 January, 2022Admin

Helgoland
By Carlo Rovelli
Published by Allen Lane, 2021, £20
Reviewed by Pete Mason

Helgoland, by best-selling physicist Carlo Rovelli, is named after the barren “windswept island in the North Sea” where, in the summer of 1925, Werner Heisenberg, escaping from an incapacitating bout of hay fever, gasping for breath, unable to sleep, created quantum mechanics.

Written with much poetic gusto, it nevertheless fails both as a book of philosophy and a book of science. It falls between two stools. There is too little science to convince the reader of the truth of Rovelli’s main argument, and too much philosophy, too much poetical prose and verse, which gives the ultimately false impression that Rovelli’s ideas derive from philosophical speculation as opposed to experimentation. In philosophical terms, this would be called ‘idealism’ (not to be mistaken with the non-philosophical, common meaning of the term, a pursuit of perfection). This impression is enhanced by his embrace of Buddhism.

Editorial: Could Brexit have ended differently?

4 May, 20211 June, 2021Admin

Boris Johnson’s withdrawal agreement with the European Union, which would “effectively leave Northern Ireland within the EU’s economic jurisdiction” following the UK’s exit, “will dangerously escalate sectarian tensions; spilling over into Britain too as in the past”, we warned before the December 2019 general election. (Socialism Today No.233, November 2019)

“For this reason alone”, we went on, after 19 mainly Blairite Labour MPs had voted with Johnson against the parliamentary whip issued by the then leader Jeremy Corbyn, “the workers’ movement in Britain can give no support to Johnson’s deal”.

The Socialist Party, the publishers of Socialism Today, opposes the EU, which at bottom is a bosses’ club attempting to co-ordinate the policies of different capitalist nation states on a continental scale in the interests of big business.

We backed a leave vote in the binary choice referendum on the UK’s EU membership in 2016 from the standpoint of working class socialist internationalism.

But that did not signify a commitment to offer even one ounce of support to the subsequent outcome of negotiations between the UK government and the 27 other EU member states on what the new relationships would be, including the so-called ‘Northern Ireland Protocol’.

Sectarian unity against abortion rights

4 May, 2021Admin

It took a vote in Westminster in 2019, initiated by right-wing backbench Labour MP Stella Creasy and backed by virtually all the right-wing parties in that chamber, to vindicate the rights of women in Northern Ireland to have an abortion.

At the time, the vote was welcomed by activists, women, trade unionists and socialists who had been campaigning for the right to abortion over decades, both north and south. In that period, the campaign in the north has been largely led by women’s organisations often working closely with the leadership of the trade union movement.

The vote in Westminster was seen as the only way to overcome the blockade on women’s reproductive rights resulting from the veto of the main parties at Stormont buildings, the seat of the power-sharing Assembly. In the twenty years since the devolved government was established with the 1998 Good Friday Agreement, no moves were made to address the absence of reproductive rights in the north.

Behind the split in the SNP

4 May, 2021Admin

The launch of a new pro-independence political party, Alba, by the former Scottish National Party (SNP) leader Alex Salmond dominated the news agenda for the first days of the official start of the Scottish parliament election campaign. It came in the immediate aftermath of the conflict between Salmond and his successor as SNP leader, Nicola Sturgeon, which arose from allegations of sexual harassment and assault against Salmond. Above all, the formation of the new party reflects deep-seated divisions within the independence movement in Scotland.

As Socialist Party Scotland commented at the beginning of March, a month before Alba’s launch, “these splits and divisions are also indicative of a conflict over how to confront British capitalism’s opposition to Scottish independence. Sturgeon is widely seen outside of the SNP as too timid. Her insistence that only a ‘legal’ referendum, ie one agreed by Boris Johnson, can offer a route to independence is increasingly seen as a utopia. Her fear of mobilising the working class in a mass movement for democratic rights is a morbid one”.

“Salmond and other pro-Salmond elements take a more combative position, at least in rhetoric. This could crystallise into a split from the SNP after the election in May with the creation of a new political formation. It’s not ruled out that Salmond could even stand in the election, perhaps on one of the pro-independence lists”.

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.