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Fra International Socialism Journal nr. 134

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Contents (ISJ 134, Spring 2012)

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Contributors (ISJ 134, Spring 2012)

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Alex Callinicos: Rumours of crisis, revolution and war

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The urgent sense of imminent catastrophe that gripped much of Western capitalism during the second half of 2011, eased off a little in the past few months. This is not so much because anything fundamental has changed.

Interview: Greece: the struggle radicalises

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Panos Garganas, editor of the Greek newspaper Workers Solidarity, spoke to International Socialism about the latest developments in the country.

France: anti-capitalist politics in crisis

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Undeniably the global economic and political crisis has accelerated a broad process of political radicalisation visible, for example, in the impact of the Occupy movement during the winter of 2011-12. But these developments have not stilled the question of how the radical left has, as an organised force, responded to the crisis.

Neil Davidson: The politics of the Scottish independence referendum

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David Cameron chose to open 2012 with one of those tactical misjudgements increasingly typical of the overconfident, untested politicians of the coalition. On this occasion the subject was the timing and content of a future referendum on Scottish independence.

Jonny Jones: The shock of the new: anti-capitalism and the crisis

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In February of this year the Tory employment minister, Chris Grayling, launched an astonishing attack on the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) while live on national radio. Responding to a campaign against a government “workfare” scheme which puts unemployed people to work for no pay, Grayling claimed that the SWP were “part of a broader anti-capitalist trend on our society. Campaign groups are waging war very deliberately against big business”.

John Newsinger: “Most humble day”: the Murdoch empire on the defensive

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Rupert Murdoch’s enforced appearance before the House of Commons Select Committee on Culture, Media and Sport on 19 July 2011 was an unprecedented humiliation. It signified the eclipse, at least temporarily, of his political influence in Britain.

Gareth Dale: The growth paradigm: a critique

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In respect of climate change, the hurricane that tore into New York was the game changer. The floods it unleashed forced the authorities to organise a mass airlift evacuation of much of the city’s population, and to begin planning the relocation of the city’s stock exchange to a less vulnerable site.

Dave Renton: Housing: as it is, and as it might be

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This article explores the history of housing in Britain over the past 150 years, and the ways in which access to housing has been shaped by collective struggle. It traces the rise and the decline of council housing, and the present hegemony of a system in which it is assumed that the majority of people will buy, or attempt to buy, their own house, and in which private tenants in particular have fewer rights than their counterparts of just 30 years ago.

Leo Zeilig: Pitfalls and radical mutations: Frantz Fanon’s revolutionary life

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Since his death Frantz Fanon has been appropriated for almost every cause. Five years after his death in 1961 he emerged as the preferred theorist of the emergent Black Power movement in the US, influencing Bobby Seale and Huey P Newton in the Black Panther Party.

Richard Seymour: The late Christopher Hitchens

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A review of Christopher Hitchens, Hitch-22: A Memoir (Atlantic, 2010), £9.99

Dave McNally: Feedback: Explaining the crisis or heresy hunting? A response to Joseph Choonara

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In opposition to ostensibly “pragmatic” politics, revolutionary Marxists have long insisted that the practice of changing the world is inextricably tied to the ways in which we understand and theorise it. Yet, while maintaining a resolute commitment to the indispensable role of theory, the best Marxist work has also resisted dogmatic ossification, insisting that, since the world we seek to understand is undergoing incessant transformation, so must the theoretical mappings in which we engage.

Federico Fuentes: Feedback: The Morales government: neoliberalism in disguise?

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For more than a decade Bolivia has been rocked by mass upsurges and mobilisations that have posed the necessity and possibility of fundamental political and social transformation. In 2005 the social movements that led the country’s water and gas wars managed to elect a government that since then has presided over a process of change that has brought major advances.

Gilbert Achcar: Feedback: Letter to the editor: Libya

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Simon Assaf’s article “Libya at the Crossroads” in International Socialism 133 included a misinterpretation of my position on Libya as one that “argued that the left had no choice but to support intervention”.

Nicola Ginsburgh: Review: Race and class in the US

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David Roediger, How Race Survived US History: From Settlement and Slavery to the Obama Phenomenon (Verso, 2008), £12.99
To state that race is socially constructed may be construed as a tired and even irrelevant point to make in a contemporary global society that has, in response to the Holocaust, seemingly banished biological concepts of race to history textbooks.

Gabriele Piazza: Review: After the fall

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Andrew Kliman, The Failure of Capitalist Production (Pluto Press, 2011), £16
The debate on the underlying causes of the Great Recession has divided Marxist and radical economists. Conventional left accounts of the crisis are rooted in the idea of a new phase of capitalism: neoliberalism.

Amy Gilligan: Review: Materialism vs creationism

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John Bellamy Foster, Brett W Clark and Richard York, Critique of Intelligent Design (Monthly Review Press, 2008), £10.95
Intelligent design—the notion that the complexity we see in the universe could only have arisen due to the intervention of a “designer” or creator—has seen somewhat of a resurgence in the 21st century. Particularly in the US, right wing fundamentalist Christians have attempted to force schools to teach intelligent design alongside evolutionary theory in an attempt to provide credibility for their ideas as “science”.

Dave Sewell: Review: Thought for food

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Fred Magdoff and Brian Tokar (eds), Agriculture and Food in Crisis: Conflict, Resistance and Renewal (Monthly Review, 2010), £14.95
When prices for many basic foods spiked in 2007 and 2008, thousands rioted in more than 30 countries from Bangladesh to Burkina Faso. In Haiti the riots drove President Réné Préval from office; in Egypt they were a key act in the prologue to the current revolution.

Francesca Byron: Review: Another social work is possible

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Michael Lavalette (ed), Radical Social Work: Social Work at the Crossroads (Policy, 2011), £21.99
Right now there is a crisis in social work. The global economic crisis has meant devastating cuts to welfare provision while neoliberal policies have seen an increased emphasis on the privatised provision of services within local authorities.

Tim Evans (Wales): Review: How green was my valley?

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Dai Smith, In The Frame: Memory in Society, 1910 to 2010 (Parthian 2010), £20
Dai Smith’s 446-page book In the Frame—”an alternative history of the past century in Wales” as he calls it—is an occasionally unwieldy collection of essays on Welsh working class history and culture which, at first sight, seems disjointed in terms of a unifying theme or connecting narrative.

Joseph Choonara: Review: Nude, shrewd but sometimes crude

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Steve Keen, Debunking Economics: The Naked Emperor Dethroned, 2nd edition (Zed, 2011), £18.99
When I first became interested in Marxist political economy, I longed for a critique of mainstream economics written by someone who was thoroughly familiar with the discipline. Heterodox economist Steve Keen has produced just such a work.

Christian Hogsbjerg: Review: Remembering E P Thompson

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Scott Hamilton, The Crisis of Theory: EP Thompson, the New Left and Postwar British Politics (Manchester University Press, 2011), £60
At a time when the “thinkers” of Blue Labour are attempting to rewrite the history of the English working class movement for their own reactionary nationalist project, the appearance of Scott Hamilton’s new study of the great Marxist writer and thinker Edward Palmer Thompson (1924-1993), author of the classic The Making of the English Working Class (1963), is most welcome.

Jonny Jones + Alex Callinicos: Pick of the quarter: This quarter’s selection

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New Left Review – Capital & Class – Links – Rethinking Marxism – Historical Materialism – Irish Marxist Review

Videos of ISJ ‘Crisis, Class and Resistance’ conference

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Video recordings of the conference held by International Socialism on Saturday 12 May 2012.