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Fra International Socialism Journal nr. 140

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Contents (ISJ 140, Autumn 2013)

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Contributors (ISJ 140, Autumn 2013)

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Alex Callinicos: Analysis: Spectres of counter-revolution

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Counter-revolution now haunts the Arab world. But it takes diverse and confusing shapes. In Syria, for example, it appears as the regime headed up by Bashar al-Assad and as the United States, which has been threatening military action against it. The Saudi royal family leads the Gulf states as they strive to maintain the status quo in the region—here by direct armed intervention (Bahrain), there by propping up the old regime (Egypt), elsewhere by backing sectarian Sunni jihadis (Syria).

Michael Roberts: From global slump to long depression

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It is now six years since the first rumblings of the earthquake that was the global financial crash and the Great Recession. On 9 August 2007 BNP Paribas announced that it was closing down two of its funds of US mortgage backed securities and taking heavy losses. It was not long before other banks across the US and Europe announced similar losses. The stock market began to plunge from October 2007 (it had been faltering from March).

Julie Sherry: Can Len McCluskey reclaim Labour?

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With over 1.4 million members, Unite is Britain’s biggest union, representing more than a fifth of all trade unionists in the UK. A mainly private sector union, it is also well represented in parts of the public sector—local government, the health service, the Ministry of Defence and other government departments.

Alex Callinicos + Charlie Kimber: The politics of the SWP crisis

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For almost a year the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) has been seized by deep division. It has not stopped us acting as a revolutionary organisation.

Ed Rooksby: “Left Reformism” and socialist strategy

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There has been a significant revival of interest among the radical left in “big picture” questions of socialist strategy that, as Mark L Thomas has pointed out, represents a return to “important debates of the left largely absent over the last three decades”.

Jane Hardy + Joseph Choonara: Neoliberalism and the British working class: A reply to Neil Davidson

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Neil Davidson has produced a lengthy piece on the neoliberal era in Britain, which raises important questions for us as revolutionary socialists. We agree with much of his narrative. However, the article is a piece of two halves and there are problems with both.

Nick Grant: Michael Gove: Doing the Right Thing?

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Is Michael Gove simply mad? Is he a vain loose cannon who was given the education ship’s wheel by captain David Cameron in June 2010? He is certainly derided as being professionally unqualified for his job by teachers and lecturers. They find his goals unworkable and harmful.

Simon Behrmann: Giorgio Agamben in perspective

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In recent years the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben has become one of the most vital and most discussed figures in academia. But as with other major figures such as Michel Foucault, Antonio Negri and Alain Badiou, Agamben’s name and influence have spread beyond the narrow confines of the academy.

Donny Gluckstein: Feedback: Socialism and the Second World War: A response to Leandros Bolaris

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Leandros Bolaris’s discussion of A People’s History is very welcome. A Marxist analysis of the Second World War remains relevant because, as he writes, “the bloodiest conflict in human history” remains part of current politics. The critique’s sections on Greece and France provide important supplementary information absent from the book due to lack of space.

John Smith: Feedback: Southern labour—“Peripheral” no longer: A reply to Jane Hardy

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In 1980 half the world’s industrial workers lived in Europe, North America and Japan, ie the imperialist nations. Since then, in just three decades, their numbers have declined in absolute terms by around a quarter, while the export-led expansion of the industrial workforce in low-wage countries has grown rapidly and now comprises 80 percent of the world’s industrial workers.

John Molyneux: Feedback: History without nature? A response to Nancy Lindisfarne, Jonathan Neale and Colin Wilson

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Unfortunately I lack the knowledge, particularly in anthropology, needed to offer a comprehensive response to either Nancy Lindisfarne and Jonathan Neale’s “What Gender Does” or Colin Wilson’s “Sexuality in Pre-class Society” in the previous issue of this journal. However, it does seem to me that each of their articles suffers from a serious and fundamental weakness and that, on inspection, this turns out to be basically the same weakness—a tendency to completely separate human history from what Karl Marx referred to as its “natural bases”.

Donny Gluckstein: Feedback: Comment on bourgeois revolutions

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In International Socialism 137 Alex Callinicos mixes deserved praise of Neil Davidson’s How Revolutionary Were the Bourgeois Revolutions? with some qualifications. While agreeing wholeheartedly with both Alex’s praise and reservations, there is perhaps something more which could be added.

Mona Dohle: Review: Might makes right

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Kate Bayliss, Ben Fine and Elisa van Waeyenberge (eds), The Political Economy of Development: The World Bank, Neoliberalism and Development Research (Pluto Press, 2011), £22
In 2006 the World Bank issued its Deaton Report, conducted by several established economists, assessing its own research. A number of well known critics of the World Bank, including Kate Bayliss, Ben Fine and Elisa Van Waeyenberge, subsequently published The Political Economy of Development in response. Contrary to its rather broad title, the book addresses the specific topic of the quality of the bank’s research.

John Newsinger: Review: Diaries of a nobody

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Chris Mullin, A Walk-On Part, 1994-1999 (Profile Books, 2012), A View From The Foothills 1999-2005 (Profile Books, 2010) and Decline and Fall, 2005-2010 (Profile Books, 2011), all £9.99
“Chris is so right wing now, and so loyal and so Blairite,” wrote Tony Benn in a 2003 diary entry.
Chris Mullin used to be somebody. In the late 1970s and early 1980s he was one of Benn’s lieutenants, a staunch uncompromising Bennite, editing two volumes of Benn’s speeches (Arguments for Socialism published in 1979 and Arguments for Democracy published in 1981), and in 1982 he became the Bennite editor of the Tribune newspaper.

Martin Empson: Review: Pre-class societies

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Kent Flannery and Joyce Marcus, The Creation of Inequality: How Our Prehistoric Ancestors Set the Stage for Monarchy, Slavery and Empire (Harvard University Press, 2012), £29.95
This important new book is a thorough examination of the earliest human societies and how they transformed themselves into the unequal societies that have characterised recent human history.

Alex Callinicos: Pick of the quarter: This quarter’s selection

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Historical Materialism – New Left Review – Critical and Radical Social Work

Yusuf Timms: The KPD and the Crisis of World Revolution

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This year marks the ninetieth anniversary of the “German October”, the aborted socialist revolution that came to mark the end of the post-war revolutionary wave that had washed away monarchical government from most of Central and Eastern Europe. For a time, in the autumn of 1923, there seemed a real possibility that a new front was about to be opened up in the communist revolution that had begun in Russia six years earlier.

Sean Vernell: The working class, trade unions and the left: the contours of resistance

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Since the onset of the economic crisis that followed the collapse of Lehman Brothers in 2008, governments across the world have attempted to implement policies that try to stabilise capitalism. In Britain these attacks have focused on the welfare state, cutting the cost of the social wage, scrapping and cutting benefits, wage freezes, slashing pensions, privatising the NHS and raising student fees.

Mike Gonzalez + Jennifer Wilkinson + Alexis Wearmouth + Megan Trudell + Dan Swain + Andrew Stone + Jim Wolfreys + Mike Haynes + Colin Barker + Amy Gilligan + Jacqui Freeman + Hannah Dee + Neil Davidson + Estelle Cooch + Anindya Bhattacharyya + Simon Behrmann + Louis Bayman + Jonny Jones: “The politics of the SWP crisis”-a response

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As members of the editorial board of International Socialism we wish to disassociate ourselves from the recently published article, “The Politics of the SWP Crisis”, written by the journal’s editor and the national secretary of the Socialist Workers Party (SWP).

Charlie Kimber + Alex Callinicos: Can we move forward? a reply to Wolfreys and others

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This journal is committed to acting as a forum for the debates that have developed within the Socialist Workers Party over the past year. The reply that Jim Wolfreys and other members of the International Socialism editorial board have written to our article on the politics of this crisis is a contribution to that debate. These comrades are all members of the faction that has existed-in defiance of the constitution and traditions of the SWP-since February this year.

Colin Wilson: A Response to John Molyneux on Sexuality

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John Molyneux has intervened in a debate concerning the history of sexuality. Sexuality has been a subject of serious study only in the last 40 years, the field emerging from the women’s and gay movements of the 1970s. Lesbian and gay authors began its development by unearthing a history that included the movement headed by Magnus Hirschfeld in Germany before and after the First World War, the development of struggles in 1950s America, and the inspiring example of the Russian Revolution.

John Molyneux: Sexuality and social constructionism: A reply to Colin Wilson

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The mere mention of “nature”—in this case principally biology—in relation to human history and the development of women’s oppression—in my International Socialism article has produced a frenzy of accusations from certain quarters: John Molyneux’s argument is gender essentialist, transphobic, homophobic, not to speak of intellectually dishonest, ignorant, disgusting and so on.

Terry Sullivan: Pre-Class Sexuality: Free, Warm and Wild

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Recently in this journal Sheila McGregor has written about sexuality in pre-class societies and its evolution. Colin Wilson replied arguing that McGregor’s analysis is incorrect. In turn, John Molyneux has countered Wilson. Most recently, Wilson has responded, and Molyneux countered again. In this article I wish to show that, while there are shortcomings with McGregor’s account, it is Wilson who is fundamentally mistaken. In so doing I elaborate on two points that Molyneux makes and defend him from two erroneous criticisms made by Wilson.