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Fra International Socialism Journal nr. 149

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Contents (ISJ 149, Winter 2016)

149

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jan 16

A house divided – Labour under Jeremy Corbyn

Contributors (ISJ 149, Winter 2016)

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jan 16

Alex Callinicos: Analysis: Resisting the long war

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3

jan 16

In May 1970 a group of prominent Harvard academics with considerable government experience, led by the game theorist Thomas Schelling, went to the White House to meet their ex-colleague, Henry Kissinger, then national security adviser to president Richard Nixon. They were there to protest against the recent invasion of Cambodia by the United States and its client regime in South Vietnam—supposedly to attack “safe havens” used by Viet Cong guerrillas.

Anne Alexander: Analysis: ISIS, imperialism and the war in Syria

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21

jan 16

For the fourth time in less than a decade and half the UK is at war, and once again the vast majority of the victims will be Muslims. Bolstered by the votes and voices of the Labour right, on 2 December David Cameron finally secured the parliamentary majority he needed to extend military operations to Syria. The star performance that night was not the prime minister’s however. The media’s plaudits were reserved for shadow foreign secretary Hilary Benn, who invoked the memory of the International Brigades and their fight against fascism to build a case for war.

Mark Thomas: A house divided: Jeremy Corbyn and the Labour Party

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39

jan 16

Something remarkable happened over the summer of 2015. Immediately after Ed Miliband resigned following Labour’s defeat in the general election, the grip exercised by Blairism over the Labour Party had seemed set to continue grimly on. The field competing for the Labour leadership was confined to various shades of uninspiring Blairites, with the supposedly “left” candidate, Andy Burnham, rushing to distance himself from the unions. Even after Jeremy Corbyn threw his hat in the ring, most (including Corbyn himself) assumed he would be soundly beaten.

Jane Hardy: Radical economics, Marxist economics and Marx’s economics

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71

jan 16

The major global crises of the mid-1970s and 2008-9 provoked debates among the ruling class about the best economic policies to manage capitalism. For socialists and activists the question was different, and debates about whether and to what extent capitalism could be reformed to avert crisis and instil a more humane and fair system became even sharper.

Paul McGarr: Striking debates

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101

jan 16

Significant discussion has taken place in recent issues of International Socialism, echoing wider debates in the movement, around the persistently low level of industrial struggle in Britain. This is part of a wider phenomenon internationally, but the debate in this journal, reflecting the arena of activity of most contributors, has naturally focused on Britain. Answering the question at the heart of these discussions is, as Alex Callinicos has noted: “the most important single task facing revolutionary Marxists today”.

Richard Morgan: Strikes, ballots and the class struggle: An addition to the strikes debate

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125

jan 16

Simon Joyce has helped galvanise a long overdue discussion in International Socialism on the state of workplace class struggle in the UK. Though I partially disagree both with his claim that shop stewards have lost control of the strike weapon and with his point that workers lose on “perishable” issues, that is, “issues that management would win by default if workers did not act immediately”, I agree with the tone and emphasis of Simon’s article which points to a refreshingly more positive assessment of workplace organisation than is commonplace on the left. In particular he makes four very important points.

Martin Empson: Jobs, justice, climate: The struggle continues

149

143

jan 16

A review of Paul Hampton, Workers and Trade Unions for Climate Solidarity: Tackling Climate Change in a Neoliberal World (Routledge Studies in Climate, Work and Society, 2015), £90
The complete and utter failure of the world’s governments to take meaningful action on climate change was once again apparent at the COP21 talks in Paris in December 2015. In Britain, the Conservative government was barely into its new term before it announced policies that undermined even the minimal commitments its predecessors had made.

Iain Ferguson: Between Marx and Freud: Erich Fromm revisited

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151

jan 16

More than three decades after his death, the ideas of Erich Fromm are enjoying something of an intellectual renaissance. Fromm (1900-1980) was a German-Jewish psychoanalyst, writer, public intellectual and activist whose life-long concern was with developing an understanding of the relationship between capitalism and mental health, based on his attempt to integrate the ideas of Karl Marx and Sigmund Freud.

John Rose: Book Review: Half socialist? Leon Trotsky and the Soviet Union

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175

jan 16

A review of Paul Le Blanc, Leon Trotsky (Reaktion Books, Critical Lives series, 2015), £11.99
Paul Le Blanc faced a daunting challenge when he agreed to write a book about Leon Trotsky and his life in exile for the Critical Lives series, which specialises in brief introductions to leading political and cultural personalities. How do you briefly introduce one of the greatest leaders of the world’s first socialist revolution that then apparently rejected him? How do you summarise all the unanswered political questions that were intensified by Trotsky’s expulsion from the Soviet Union in February 1929?

Tony Phillips: Was the German Revolution defeated by January 1919?

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185

jan 16

John Rose argued in his talk at Marxism 2014 that the German Revolution had effectively suffered terminal defeat by January 1919. The National Congress of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Councils voted in December 1918 to hand power to the National Assembly after elections to be held in January 1919.

Peter Green: Feedback: Paul Mason’s PostCapitalism: A response to Joseph Choonara

149

197

jan 16

It came as no surprise that International Socialism could publish, in the last issue, such a dismissive review of Paul Mason’s fascinating and thought-provoking new book. Certainly Mason has moved a considerable distance from the Leninism of his youth and now advocates a politics which uneasily combines elements of left reformism with an autonomist focus on the emergence of alternative forms of cooperative endeavour within contemporary capitalism.

Dave Merrick: Feedback: Letter to the editor: The European Union

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205

jan 16

The autumn 2015 issue of International Socialism contained two extremely important and erudite articles concerning the issue of the European Union and which way socialists should vote in any potential referendum. In order of appearance they are: “The EU Referendum: The Case for a Socialist Yes vote” (John Palmer), and “The Internationalist Case against the European Union” (Alex Callinicos). Both of these contain a great deal of empirical and historical detail and repay careful consideration.
Having said that, I found myself wondering whether in responding in simple “yes or no” terms we are missing the opportunity to resist what is at best a silly question and at worst a poisonous question. I will do my best to elaborate below.

Nikos Lountos: Book Review: Face to face with the minotaur

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207

jan 16

Kevin Ovenden, Syriza: Inside the Labyrinth (Pluto Press/Left Book Club, 2015), £11.50
I’m writing this review on the eve of a general strike (3 December) in Greece, the second against the Syriza government since it was re-elected in September. Alexis Tsipras is eager to find allies among the leaders of the pro-austerity opposition, feeling already that the majority he enjoys in the parliament, along with his nationalist allies, the “Independent Greeks”, will not be enough to push through measures such as a massive cut in pensions. Interestingly, Tsipras’s hopes are being complicated because of the deep internal crisis the biggest opposition party, the right wing New Democracy, has got itself into.

Shaun Doherty: Book Review: Learning the lessons of the past

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210

jan 16

John Newsinger, Them and Us: Fighting the Class War 1910-1939 (Bookmarks, 2015), £7.99
John Newsinger opens this timely account of working class struggle in the first half of the 20th century with what at first seems an incongruous statement: “We live in a period of unprecedented class warfare”. But he argues that the only reason this sounds strange is that the war has been so brutally one-sided in recent years.

Brian Richardson: Book Review: Understanding Islamophobia

149

212

jan 16

Arun Kundnani, The Muslims are Coming! Islamophobia, Extremism, and the Domestic War on Terror (Verso, 2015), £9.99
Arun Kundnani’s book about Islamophobia deliberately references the 1966 Hollywood movie, The Russians are Coming! The Russians are Coming! With its repetitive title and exclamation marks, it was indicative of the anti-Communist hysteria lying at the centre of that film’s plot.

Robert Jackson: Book Review: Everything moves

149

215

jan 16

Antonio Gramsci (edited and translated by Derek Boothman), A Great and Terrible World: The Pre-Prison Letters, 1908-1926 (Lawrence and Wishart, 2014), £25
The Italian revolutionary Antonio Gramsci is widely acknowledged, even beyond the left, as one of the most important thinkers of the 20th century. This collection gathers together around 200 of his letters ranging from his school days in Sardinia, through joining the socialist movement at university, as an international communist leader in the early 1920s, right up until the moment of his arrest and imprisonment by Benito Mussolini’s fascist regime in 1926.

Terry Sullivan: Book Review: Genomes: Just how important are they?

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217

jan 16

John Parrington, The Deeper Genome: Why There is More to the Human Genome than Meets the Eye (Oxford University Press, 2015), £18.99
John Parrington has written a lively and engaging popular science book about the history of genetics or what is increasingly referred to as “genomics”.

Allister Mactaggart: Book Review: The Aldermaston generation

149

219

jan 16

Cal Winslow (ed), E P Thompson and the Making of the New Left: Essays & Polemics (Lawrence & Wishart, 2014) £15.99
This collection of E P Thompson’s writings covers the period from 1956 to 1963, a tumultuous but also highly creative and active period for Thompson as a key organiser in the New Left following the Soviet invasion of Hungary, and the resultant ­resignation of over 10,000 members from the British Communist Party.

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

149

223

jan 16

Irish Marxist Review – Critical Muslim – The Socialist History Society on historian Eric Hobsbawm – New Left Review