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Fra International Socialism Journal nr. 125

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Contents (ISJ 125, Winter 2010)

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jan 10

Contributors (ISJ 125, Winter 2010)

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Shifting sands of the crisis

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jan 10

Despite the euphoria that gripped the financial markets in the second half of 2009, the world economy continues to be hit by severe shocks. Another hit it in late November.

Kieran Allen: Ireland: From shock therapy to resistance

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jan 10

Ireland is undergoing a form of shock therapy and major political changes are in the offing. The government has embarked on pay cuts and reductions in the public sector as its principal strategy for getting out of a recession that will see its economy fall by 8 percent this year.

Denis Godard: France: From economic to political struggles

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jan 10

After last year’s huge days of action, demonstrations and the radical conflicts against redundancies in the car industry, has French rebelliousness disappeared over the past few months? Are we witnessing a downturn in struggle as a result of the social movement’s inability to remove the obstacles put in its way by trade union leaders?

Stefan Bornost: Opposition and opportunity in Germany

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jan 10

Just one month after Angela Merkel’s new conservative-liberal government took office in Germany it faces its first difficulties. Franz Josef Jung of Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union (CDU) resigned from the government amid allegations of a cover-up relating to the Kunduz massacre in Afghanistan in which up to 142 people lost their lives, including numerous civilians. Also dismissed the previous day for the same reason were general inspector Wolfgang Schneiderhan, the most senior military figure, and state secretary Peter Wichert.

Panos Garganas: Greece: The eye of the storm?

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jan 10

“The social climate in Greece is charged with the electricity that you find in the air before a tropical storm.” That was the description by a leading columnist on Greece’s most popular daily newspaper. He is not alone in this view. Costas Karamanlis, the outgoing leader of the conservative New Democracy party, gave his reasons for calling an early parliamentary election in similar terms.

Michael Eaude: Sketches of Spain

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jan 10

“We are coming out of the tunnel,” affirmed finance minister Elena Salgado creatively, when the third quarter unemployment figures came out in late October. 4,137,500 people were jobless, 17.93 percent of the population available for work. The Spanish state’s official unemployment rate is higher than in any other European country except Latvia (19.7 percent).

Megan Trudell: From a bang to a whimper: Obama’s first year

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jan 10

The Obama presidency is in a quagmire. The tremendous promise encapsulated in the campaign slogan “Change we can believe in” and the enormous expectations of reform after the Bush years have not been realised. Energy has given way to hesitancy and the Obama government’s first year has seen it become increasingly entangled in the contradictions of profound crisis in the US. The conjuncture of recession and the deepening morass of war in Afghanistan have intensified divisions in the US political establishment. Government responses to the crisis have produced the twin, mutually reinforcing, effects of failure to deliver change for its most enthusiastic supporters and stoking political opposition to its right.

Mike Gonzalez: Honduras is not just another banana republic

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43

jan 10

The tone of media reports of the events in Honduras has been generally tongue in cheek, as if this were simply another episode in the ongoing tale of banana republics and their regular coups.

Ian Birchall: Chris Harman: a life in the struggle

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jan 10

I first met Chris Harman in the spring of 1963, in Peter Sedgwick’s attic. We had gone to Liverpool for a meeting of the Young Socialist paper Young Guard.

Chris Harman: Book Review: The emperor has no clothes

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A review of Gregory Elliott, Althusser: The Detour of Theory (Haymarket Books, 2009), £19.99
The economic crisis of the last two years has provided an extra impetus to the revival of interest in Marxism. A new generation is beginning to reach out to ideas that we were told were finished once and for all in the aftermath of 1989.

Joseph Choonara: Another side of Chris Harman

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jan 10

For those of us who joined the Socialist Workers Party from the mid-1990s—too late to have worked closely with Tony Cliff, Duncan Hallas, Paul Foot or Mike Kidron—Chris Harman played a special role. For one thing, he seemed more than anyone else to embody what had drawn us towards the International Socialist tradition, not just the theories of state capitalism, deflected permanent revolution and the permanent arms economy, but also the possibility of workers’ self-emancipation that these theories helped to maintain.

Chris Harman: Not all Marxism is dogmatism: a reply to Michel Husson

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95

jan 10

Michel Husson has criticised a number of Marxist economists, including myself, in the most stringent manner.1 He writes that:
The crisis has given rise in recent months to a series of contributions characterised by a counterproductive and discouraging dogmatism…What these contributions have in common are references to the orthodox interpretation of the law of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall.

Guglielmo Carchedi: Zombie Capitalism and the origin of crises

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113

jan 10

This is the second in a series of responses to Chris Harman’s last book, Zombie Capitalism: Global Crisis and the Relevance of Marx. It was written shortly before Chris’s death.

Andy Durgan: A whiff of tear gas

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127

jan 10

Upon joining the Dagenham and Ilford International Socialists in late 1972 I was offered a special bargain price package of reading material. I eagerly devoured what was a fairly mixed selection of work but one pamphlet stood out: Chris Harman’s How the Revolution was Lost. Having flirted with Stalinism, here were all the arguments I had been looking for.

Paul Blackledge: Marxism and anarchism

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jan 10

There is a striking paradox at the heart of contemporary anti-capitalism. Many within the movement deny what is undoubtedly one of its defining characteristics: the very fact that it is political at all. The practical problems with this approach have been dissected in previous issues of this journal. In this essay I provide some context for these debates by examining the roots of the anti-political perspective in earlier arguments between anarchists and Marxists.

Jane Pritchard: The sex work debate

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jan 10

The debate on “sex work” has divided the trade union movement. While the GMB has tried to organise women who work in lap dancing clubs, in 2009 the Trade Union Congress (TUC) Women’s Congress voted against a motion which supported the decriminalisation of the sex industry and the unionisation of sex workers. Instead a motion was passed in favour of the criminalisation of the purchase of sex.

John Rose: Book Review: Jewish intellectuals and Palestinian liberation

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jan 10

Shlomo Sand, The Invention of the Jewish People (Verso, 2009), £18.99 and Avi Shlaim, Israel and Palestine (Verso, 2009), £16.99
I’ll risk a prediction. Shlomo Sand’s book, already a best seller in Israel and France, will accelerate the disintegration of the Zionist enterprise.

Jeffery R Webber: Book Review: Struggle, continuity and contradiction in Bolivia

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jan 10

A review of John Crabtree and Laurence Whitehead (eds), Unresolved Tensions: Bolivia Past and Present (University of Pittsburgh, 2008), £24.50
Bolivia has long been marginalised from mainstream international political discussion and affairs. Even the rest of South America has often forgotten the existence of its landlocked indigenous core. However, the poorest country in South America entered the spotlight in December 2005 when Evo Morales won an electoral majority and became the country’s first indigenous president.

Mike Wayne: Book Review: The public enemy

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jan 10

Dennis Broe, Film Noir, American Workers and Postwar Hollywood (University Press of Florida, 2009), £62.95

Andrew Stone: Book Review: Matches made in hell

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jan 10

Louise Raw, Striking a Light: The Bryant and May Matchwomen and their Place in Labour History (Continuum, 2009), £70

Andy Durgan: Book Review: Barcelona at the barricades

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jan 10

Lois Orr, Gerd-Rainer Horn (ed), Letters from Barcelona: An American Woman in Revolution and Civil War (Palgrave, Basingstoke, 2009), £45

Barry Pavier: Book Review: Reclaiming radicalism

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211

jan 10

Talat Ahmed, Literature and politics in the Age of Nationalism, The Progressive Episode in South Asia, 1932-56 (Routledge, 2009), £50
Talat Ahmed has written a fine account of the All-India Progressive Writers Association which flourished between 1936 and 1956. In doing so she has rescued it from its frequent fate of being labelled as little more than a front organisation of the Communist Party of India.

Martin Empson: Book Review: Healing the rift

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jan 10

John Bellamy Foster, The Ecological Revolution (Monthly Review Press, 2009), £13.95
The conclusion of John Bellamy Foster’s latest book is one that may not strike a chord with many traditional environmentalists—”today, the transition to socialism and the transition to an ecological society are one.”

John Maunder: Book Review: The relevance of revolution

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jan 10

John Foran, David Lane, and Andreja Zivkovic (eds), Revolution in the Making of the Modern World (Routledge, 2008), £21.99

Colin Wilson: Book Review: A hidden history

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jan 10

Charles Upchurch, Before Wilde: Sex Between Men in Britain’s Age of Reform (University of California Press, 2009), £30.95
This fascinating and important book focuses on the history of sex between men in the first half of the 19th century.

Mark Bergfeld: Book Review: Time is lifting the fog

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217

jan 10

Istvan Meszaros, The Challenge and Burden of Historical Time—Socialism in the Twenty First Century (Monthly Review Press, 2008), £16.95

Charlie Hore: Book Review: Class struggle in China

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jan 10

William Hurst, The Chinese Worker After Socialism (Cambridge University Press, 2009), £55

Jonny Jones + Joseph Choonara: Pick of the quarter: This quarter's selection

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jan 10

A regular survey of articles which readers will find useful. Some, although by no means all, are available on the web.