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Fra International Socialism Journal nr. 141

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Contents (ISJ 141, Winter 2014)

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Contributors (ISJ 141, Winter 2014)

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Alex Callinicos: The left after Grangemouth

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The last few weeks of 2013 saw three important events in the life of the radical left in Britain-the defeat suffered by workers at the Grangemouth oil refining and chemicals complex in Scotland, the founding conference of Left Unity, and the third conference held that year of the Socialist Workers Party (SWP). Plainly these events are of a different order of significance.

Iain Ferguson: Can the Tories abolish the welfare state?

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There is a scene in The Spirit of ‘45, director Ken Loach’s documentary about the achievements of the 1945-51 Labour government in Britain, where a general practitioner tells of visiting a poor family where a child was very ill with a hacking cough.

Laura Miles: Transgender oppression and resistance

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In July 2013 Bradley Manning, the American soldier who passed thousands of classified documents to Wikileaks in protest at US military operations in the Middle East, was sentenced to 35 years in Fort Leavenworth military prison. The day after sentencing Manning caused a media sensation by announcing that she had had gender identity issues since childhood and from now on was to be known as Chelsea Manning and that she intended to pursue gender transition.

Christian Høgsbjerg: A “Trot of the milder persuasion”: Raymond Challinor’s Marxism

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In 1957 E P Thompson in a private letter to his friend, the fellow dissident Communist historian John Saville, described Raymond Challinor (1929-2011) warmly as a “Trot of the milder persuasion”.

Camilla Royle: Dialectics, nature and the dialectics of nature

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In 1873 Karl Marx’s collaborator Frederick Engels started work on an ambitious volume entitled Dialectics of Nature. He described in a letter to Marx how, while lying in bed one morning, he had concluded that the natural sciences were really all about “matter in motion”.

Martin Upchurch: The internet, social media and the workplace

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There have been heated debates on the left over the last few years on the role of the internet and social media through web based communication (WBC). In an article in International Socialism two years ago Jonny Jones reviewed these debates and correctly highlighted the dangers of overestimating the impact of social media on social movements.

Roland Boer: “All things are in common”: theology and politics in Luther Blissett’s Q

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The long and wildly popular novel Q is a stunning reclamation of the revolutionary Christian tradition for a whole generation of anti-capitalist activists. Written by the radical Italian collective, Luther Blissett (now Wu Ming, “nobody”), it was first published online in Italian in 1999.

Tim Evans (Wales): Clear red water or Fabianism with a valleys accent? Wales and the politics of devolution

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Seven years ago Britain’s main nationalist parties were making tangible gains. In 2007 the Scottish National Party (SNP), Sinn Fein and Plaid Cymru all took some degree of control in their respective devolved institutions. Sinn Fein entered into a new power-sharing agreement at Stormont, the SNP won control of the Scottish Parliament for the first time and Plaid Cymru went into a ruling coalition with Labour in the Welsh Senedd—the national assembly. Yet if you fast forward to 2014, only two of those parties have consolidated their gains. Plaid Cymru has failed to do so.

Paul Blackledge: Feedback: Once more on left reformism: A reply to Ed Rooksby

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Ed Rooksby’s response to the Socialist Workers Party’s criticisms of left reformism is exemplary both in its aim and its tone.1 I hope that my reply matches the standards he set. In essence, Ed suggests that the SWP’s conception of left reformism is akin to the claim that all cats are grey in the dark; it says more about our perspective than it does about the variety of political formations we criticise.

Andrew Stone: Review: A history of struggle

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Neil Faulkner, A Marxist History of the World: From Neanderthals to Neoliberals (Pluto Press, 2013), £18
This is the kind of book that the now thankfully lesser-spotted postmodernists warned you about—an unashamed grand narrative of humanity’s global history; an attempt to analyse rather than describe, and to synthesise rather than compartmentalise. But it is also an account which holds no truck with the nationalist and elitist narrative advocated by Secretary of State for Education Michael Gove in his recent abortive attempt to disembowel the school history curriculum. Neil Faulkner’s history is one which, in the classical Marxist tradition, is both profoundly internationalist, and which celebrates the self-activity of the exploited and oppressed and their potential to shape the future.

Leo Zeilig: Review: Fighters against apartheid

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Alan Wieder, Ruth First and Joe Slovo in the War Against Apartheid (Jacana Media, 2013), £20
Joe Slovo and Ruth First were South Africans who spent their lives (and in Ruth’s case gave her life) in the struggle against apartheid. They were also members of the South African Communist Party (SACP) for most of their adult lives. They married in the late 1940s and despite a stormy relationship remained together until Ruth First was murdered in Mozambique’s capital Maputo in 1982. Their lives are worthy of celebration (and study) and Alan Wieder has written the first thorough account of their lives.

Giles Ji Ungpakorn: Review: Thailand’s red shirts

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Claudio Sopranzetti, Red Journeys (Silkworm Books, 2012), £11.99
In September 2006 the Thai military staged a coup d’etat and overthrew the democratically elected and popular government of Taksin Shinawat. By winning successive elections on the basis of modernising and pro-poor policies, rich businessman Taksin was unwittingly challenging the old order which had held power based on entrenched privileges and the power of the army.

Ken Olende: Review: Intersectionality and black communist women

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Erik S McDuffie, Sojourning for Freedom: Black Women, American Communism and the Making of Black Left Feminism (Duke University Press, 2011), £15.99
The radical and significant work of early Communist Party members is written out of mainstream history. Erik S McDuffie looks to an especially marginalised group, black women in the United States who joined the Communist Party.

Tad Tietze: Review: Neoliberal psychiatry and its discontents

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Ethan Watters, Crazy Like Us: The Globalization of the American Psyche (Free Press, 2010), £9.99, and Gary Greenberg, Manufacturing Depression: The Secret History of a Modern Disease (Bloomsbury, 2010), £9.99
In May last year the American Psychiatric Association (APA) launched the fifth edition of its diagnostic “bible”, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. The public controversy surrounding DSM-5 epitomises a major crisis of authority for US psychiatry, with psychiatric and other critics lining up to attack it. It also signals the exhaustion of the project codified in DSM-III in 1980, which laid the groundwork for a distinctly neoliberal psychiatry where pharmaceutical companies, medical elites and governments colluded in the massive expansion of an increasingly commercialised mental health industry.

Simon Gilbert: Review: Can China’s trade unions be reformed?

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Tim Pringle, Trade Unions in China: The Challenge of Labour Unrest (Routledge, 2013), £26.99
When workers at the Nanhai Honda car plant in China’s Pearl River Delta went on strike in 2010, they first had to fight off a gang of thugs sent by their own trade union. By the time they returned to work they had won not only pay rises of up to 33 percent, but also the right to elect their own union representatives. The local union office was forced to make a rather grudging apology too.

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

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New Left Review

Phil Webster: A Note on Sex and Early Societies

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Terry Sullivan has written an excellent online article (“Pre-Class Sexuality: Free, Warm and Wild”), in which he shows what is in effect the dialectical interaction between the biological and the social aspects of sexual behaviour.

Day School: Work, Class & Resistance

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Video recordings of the day school held by International Socialism on 8th February 2014.