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Fra International Socialism Journal nr. 147

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Contents (ISJ 147, Summer 2015)

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Movements from below

Contributors (ISJ 147, Summer 2015)

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Alex Callinicos: Analysis: And now the British question

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The British general election of 7 May 2015 represented a curious mixture of stasis and dramatic change. But its outcome—the election of the first majority Tory government for 20 years—underlines that what we are confronted with is a crisis of the British state.

Gareth Jenkins + Despina Karayianni: Manoeuvres from above, movements from below: Greece under Tsipras

147

19

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Syriza’s electoral victory on 25 January 2015 was historic. It was the first time a party with its roots in the Communist tradition had succeeded in coming to office. It was a victory for the working class movement, which had fought with great determination and courage against the austerity programme that the Pasok government had signed up to in 2010 and that the technocratic Papademos and New Democracy governments had continued to implement.

Michael Roberts: The global crawl continues

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In my last article for International Socialism 18 months ago I argued that the Great Recession of 2008-9 that devastated the world capitalist economy had not been followed by a recovery in investment and output in the “normal” way, as it did after the simultaneous international recession of 1974-5 or after the deep slump of 1980-2. Instead it has morphed into a Long Depression, similar to the Long Depression of 1873-97 experienced by the major economies of the United States and Europe or the Great Depression of the 1930s.

Ghayath Naisse: The “Islamic State” and the counter-revolution

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75

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According to the world’s media outlets and major heads of state, a new threat has been looming over “world peace” since June 2014—the threat of ISIS. ISIS was presented as an imminent danger and, far from being constrained to the Arab world, it threatened the “national security” of Western and Eastern imperialist states.

Ian Rappel: Capitalism and species extinction

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Life on earth is arguably the most extraordinary phenomenon in the perceivable universe. And, among living things, 21st century humans are uniquely possessed with the means to appreciate this remarkable occurrence.

John Rose: Luxemburg, Müller and the Berlin workers’ and soldiers’ councils

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113

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Two very important new books about the German Revolution were published last year: Working-Class Politics in the German Revolution: Richard Müller, the Revolutionary Shop Stewards and the Origins of the Council Movement by Ralf Hoffrogge and The German Left and the Weimar Republic: A Selection of Documents, translated and introduced by Ben Fowkes.

Kevin Corr: In from the cold – Tamás Krausz’s Lenin

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A review of Tamás Krausz, Reconstructing Lenin: An Intellectual Biography (Monthly Review Press, 2015), £25
Reconstructing Lenin is a thoughtful and compelling study of Lenin. Tamás Krausz reveals Lenin as an activist revolutionary whose thoughts were shaped by immediate political events but who also at the same time never strayed far from a coherent theoretical framework. As a work of scholarship it deserves to be up there with Lars Lih’s Lenin Rediscovered.

Mark O’Brien: Revolutionaries in the unions: The reality of the strike

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The debate around orientations for revolutionaries in the unions today is the result of an uncomfortable but inescapable fact: the level of trade union struggle has remained historically low for 20 years.

Mark Brown: Socialism, satire and Charlie Hebdo

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The murderous attack on the Paris offices of the “satirical” magazine Charlie Hebdo on 7 January 2015—in which 12 people (nine journalists, two police officers and a caretaker) were killed—has, obviously and correctly, been condemned by every decent person on the left. Socialists defer to no one in our revulsion at the murders.

Graham Mustin: Religion and revolution in the Middle Ages

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In International Socialism 141 Roland Boer gives a fascinating account of how Luther Blissett’s novel Q is “a stunning reclamation of the revolutionary Christian tradition for a whole generation of anti-capitalist activists”.

Andy Durgan: Trotsky and the POUM

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A review of Alan Sennett, Revolutionary Marxism in Spain, 1930-1937 (Brill, 2014/Haymarket, 2015), £98/£18
Historical debate about the outcome of the Spanish Revolution (1936-37) has often centred on the dissident communist Partido Obrero de Unificación Marxista (POUM). For the Trotskyist movement the POUM was responsible for the revolution’s defeat. So given there is little in English on the POUM, the publication of Alan Sennett’s book, a revised version of his 1992 doctoral thesis, is to be welcomed.

Lee Humber: Book review: Exposing the migration myths

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Katy Long, The Huddled Masses: Immigration and Inequality (Thistle Publishing, 2015), £4.32
There is a lot of confusion regarding the extent and nature of migration into the UK. For example, a recent Press Association survey showed the public perception of numbers does not match the reality with more than half of people asked wrongly believing the total percentage of foreign-born residents in the UK to be 20 percent or higher. Around 11 percent thought it was 40 percent or higher. The actual figure is around 12 percent.

Ken Olende: Book Review: Critical links

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210

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Abigail B Bakan and Enakshi Dua (eds), Theorizing Anti-Racism: Linkages in Marxism and Critical Race Theories (University of Toronto Press, 2014), £22.99
Significant sections of the left have argued that Marxism is an inadequate tool to discuss how racism works—often because it is seen as Eurocentric or reducing all social relationships to class.
This new collection of essays aims to show that it can be useful, partly by arguing that differences between elements of Marxist theory and other theories of oppression such as post-colonial theory are not as insurmountable as theorists defending each sometimes claim.

Antony Hamilton: Book review: Race and the British working class

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Satnam Virdee, Racism, Class and the Racialized Outsider (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), £26.99
Racism, Class and the Racialized Outsider provides a strong historical and theoretical basis for understanding the making of the British working class. This “study of working class efforts to secure economic and social justice” is a fascinating read and provides an insight into a class shaped by racism and resistance.

Simon Shaw: Book review: Hungry for justice

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215

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Elaine Graham-Leigh, A Diet of Austerity: Class, Food and Climate Change (Zero Books, 2015), £12.99
In December last year the All-Party Parliamentary Inquiry into Hunger in the UK, “Feeding Britain” (funded from the Archbishop of Canterbury’s Charitable Trust), reported that in the sixth richest nation on the planet 4 million people were going to bed hungry. In the same year The Trussell Trust, a Christian charity that currently runs 420 food banks in the UK, recorded a 38 percent increase in referrals.

Camilla Royle: X-ray vision

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David Harvey, Seventeen Contradictions and the End of Capitalism (Profile Books, 2014), £9.99
David Harvey’s latest book Seventeen Contradictions is an attempt, in the wake of the financial crisis, to follow Karl Marx’s method to understand the inner workings of capital today. To this end he borrows Terry Eagleton’s analogy of taking an x-ray of the present situation in order to see the potential within it for future change.

Andy Zebrowski: Book review: Poland’s unfinished revolution

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Jack M Bloom, Seeing Through the Eyes of the Polish Revolution: Solidarity and the Struggle Against Communism in Poland (Haymarket, 2014), £20
On 31 August 1980 the Polish government was forced to sign an agreement in an occupied shipyard with the leaders of the workers’ movement that was to become known as the 10 million strong union Solidarity (Solidarno??).

Alex Callinicos + Camilla Royle: Pick of the quarter: This quarter’s selection

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223

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New Left Review – Against the Current – Intersections

Alex Callinicos + Stathis Kouvélakis: Syriza and Socialist Strategy – Debate video and transcript

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The following is a video and transcript of a debate between Stathis Kouvelakis, Syriza central committee member, and Alex Callinicos, editor of International Socialism, Central London, 25 February 2015.

Alex Callinicos: The Middle East

147

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Interview for Marx 21—the anti-capitalist network within the left party Die Linke in Germany.

Alex Callinicos: Fighting the Last War

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A Note on Andreas Bieler and Adam David Morton, “Axis of Evil or Access to Diesel? Spaces of New Imperialism and the Iraq War” (Historical Materialism, 23.2 [2015])