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Celia Sanchez and the Cuban Revolution

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Details: Created: Sunday, 30 June 2013 11:54

Review: One day in December: Celia Sanchez and the Cuban Revolution by Nancy Stout

Monthly Review Press, New York, 2013, 457 pages. ISBN: 978-1-58367-317-1

Nancy Stout has treated the reader to an exhilarating biography of Celia Sanchez, recording her vital contribution to the revolutionary struggle and the socialist state in Cuba. This is long overdue. While many supporters of the Cuban Revolution will have heard about Celia and her close relationship with Fidel Castro, few will have understood or appreciated the role she played. Celia’s great political and revolutionary strength lay in her organisational capacity, as well as her sacrifice and commitment. As novelist Alice Walker says in her foreword, the book offers: ‘A clear vision of what balanced female leadership can be; and, even more to the point, what a truly egalitarian revolutionary leadership of female and male partners might look like.’

The Queen vs Trenton Oldfield – A prison diary

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Details: Created: Tuesday, 25 June 2013 12:47; Written by Nicki Jameson

[Published by Myrdle Court Press, 2013]

On 7 April 2012, Trenton Oldfield disrupted the Oxford vs Cambridge University Boat Race in the River Thames in protest against elitism, inequality and government cuts and surveillance. He was arrested and initially charged under Section 5 of the Public Order Act, which does not carry a custodial sentence. Following a politically instigated CPS review, this was then changed to ‘causing a public nuisance’, for which he was sentenced on 19 October 2012 to six months’ imprisonment. He served a month and a half of this in Wormwood Scrubs prison in London, before being released on Home Detention Curfew electronic tagging. Trenton – an Australian who has lived in London for ten years – is now fighting an attempt by the British Home Office to make him leave the country on the basis that his presence here is ‘not conducive to the public good’.

Gangsterismo: The United States, Cuba and the Mafia: 1933 to 1966

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Details: Created: Wednesday, 19 June 2013 15:22; Written by Susan Davidson

By Jack Colhoun, OR Books, New York, 2013, 361 pages, £17.

Paperback ISBN 978-1-935928-89-8. Ebook ISBN 978-1-935928-90-4

www.orbooks.com/catalog/Gangsterismo

Jack Colhoun is a journalist and archive researcher with a distinguished record of investigating US foreign policy in Vietnam, Cambodia and the Middle East and publicising the impact of special interest lobbies on domestic politics like the Obama Healthcare legislation. He was the leader of the draft and military resistance registers exiled in Canada during the Vietnam War.

Ken Loach and The Spirit of ’45

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Details: Created: Monday, 10 June 2013 19:30; Written by FRFI

In this period when the living standards of the working class in Britain are being attacked, there is a rise in the call for new organisations and strategies to take a stand against the ruling class. FRFI is as committed as any in this country to the desperate need for a new movement to take a stand against the privatisation and destruction of the welfare state, the control of the corporations and the banks and the increasing poverty that have gained speed over the last 20 years under Labour and ConDem governments alike. It is not possible, however, to build resistance to the regime of austerity launched by the capitalist class without an honest political understanding of the forces at work against the people. This must include an honest record of the role of the British trade union movement and the Labour Party and their historic collusion with the state.

Review: Refugees, capitalism and the British state: implications for social workers, volunteers and activists

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Details: Created: Thursday, 29 November 2012 12:39; Written by Susan Davidson

Review: Refugees, capitalism and the British state: implications for social workers, volunteers and activists, Tom Vickers, Ashgate Publishing, Surrey, 2012, £55 (website price £49.50)*

www.ashgate.com

This is a book that delivers what is promised in the title and much, much more. Tom Vickers combines a detailed overview of current immigration policy at the legal and managerial levels, as it has emerged from successive British governments, with a Marxist understanding of the state. Refugees, capitalism and the British state is a work of direct significance to workers in the field of refugee experience and to all those who wish to understand the origins and significance of immigration in the context of the globalised power and financial structures of today.

Hip hop rebellion is alive and kicking – October 2012

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Details: Created: Friday, 02 November 2012 14:42; Written by Louis Brehony

Review: The Coup, Jackson's Pit, Oldham, 26 October

Immortal Technique, Manchester Academy 2, 28 October

We are living in a time of unstoppable capitalist crisis. The crisis has sent shockwaves through the finance capitals of the world in Europe and the US, as imperialist politicians, bankers and corporations gamble and rob in order to save their sinking ship. Millions of people around the world are being forced into dire poverty as ruling classes bring in austerity measures to cut spending on welfare, and unleash savage warfare on the peoples of already impoverished and oppressed countries. In times like these, signs of resistance are emerging and in music, the voices of resistance are getting louder. FRFI attended two political hip hop gigs in Manchester, featuring US artists The Coup and Immortal Technique.

Black Bolshevik. Autobiography of an Afro-American Communist

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Details: Created: Tuesday, 15 May 2012 10:38; Written by Susan Davidson

Fight Racism! Fight Imperialism! No 4 May/June 1980

Harry Haywood. Liberator Press, Chicago, Illinois. 1978.

This is a big book by a big man. Born in 1898, the son of slaves, Harry Haywood was for 36 years a member of the Communist Party of the United States of America, the CPUSA. The history in this book, the history of a lifetime’s struggles, the history of the CPUSA is the history of 20th century America.

It was in the 1890's that American imperialism really took off. The Philippines, Cuba, Puerto Rica, much of South America and most Caribbean countries were conquered by American imperialism within a decade. When Harry Haywood speaks of imperialism he knows exactly what it means. The looting and stealing of the wealth of other countries, the political control by force of other countries, and the deliberate restriction and prevention of the economic development of national economies is the character of US (as well as British) imperialism.

US imperialism abroad was also carried on within the US. Just as imperialism oppresses external nations, so it keeps the black Americans, and other minority groups, in a position of special oppression. In the Southern States black people were excluded from basic democratic rights by the Jim Crow system, dating from the Hayes-Tilden Gentlemen's Agreement of 1877. This baldly stated that no black person has any rights that need be recognised by white persons. In the industrial North of America, black labour was excluded from the trade unions, from the more skilled jobs, from housing, and pushed into ghettos. Black people were used as a pool of reserve labour - to be hired last and fired first, and brought in to break strikes. This was US imperialism on the home front. Many of the laws which were used to specifically oppress and exclude black people have been thrown out. This gain was won by the heroic struggles of the black masses in the 1920s and 1930s and again in the 1960s. But the legal victories which cost so many lives and so many years of struggle are only a limited gain, like the independence of a country from Britain or the US which is independent in name only because it is still dominated by Western capitalism. American black people know that this legal equality is a pretence. The reality was shown by the ghetto rebellions, 24 in 1964, 38 in 1966 and in 1967 128 and in 1968 131.

Communist, internationalist and fighter for women’s rights: the legacy of Sylvia Pankhurst

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Details: Created: Friday, 20 April 2012 12:19; Written by Rachel Francis

Fight Racism! Fight Imperialism 226 April/May 2012

Sylvia Pankhurst: Everything is possible

Produced by WORLDWrite,

directed by Ceri Dingle and Viv Regan, 2011

www.worldwrite.org.uk/sylviapankhurst/ DVD: £20, plus p+p

‘To British manhood: comrades, how much longer will you be willing to fight, work and pay for the war which the British capitalists are making on the working people of other countries?’ (Sylvia Pankhurst, Workers’ Dreadnought, May 1920)

After another International Women’s Day was marked in Britain by corporate lunches and lectures, with little to no talk of the capitalist crisis affecting women worldwide, the documentary Sylvia Pankhurst: Everything is possible proves the necessary antidote. It details Sylvia’s committed anti-imperialist, anti-racist, feminist politics, and her dedication to building a mass movement with working class women and men. It touches on her unique, and overlooked, contribution to communism and the politics of class struggle. We can learn crucial and inspiring lessons from her opposition to inequality, war, patriarchy and racism, and their cause – the system itself.

Charles Dickens (1812-1870) a nationalist treasure

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Details: Created: Friday, 20 April 2012 12:19; Written by Susan Davidson

Fight Racism! Fight Imperialism 226 April/May 2012

charles dickens e1487098571626 500x263

Even in this bicentenary year when media corporations are investing a lot of money, talent and time into celebrations of the great writer with events, films and television shows, the name of Dickens summons up feelings of unease when growing austerity and class divisions mark these years. The term ‘Dickensian’ still implies dire poverty, slum conditions and child labour which, however modified, are all present in Britain today.

The reputation of Dickens the man has undergone a reassessment recently following the publication of several new biographies and studies of the writer and his circle, including fellow novelist Wilkie Collins (The Woman in White), his wife Catherine and his mistress, the actress Ellen Ternan. New research shows that he was a man with many of the peculiarities and flaws that he gives his great cast of characters, over 400 in all, who feature in his novels. His relationships with women were particularly intense and his treatment of his wife, who was banished from the family home and her ten children, and Dickens’s public statement on this in The Times newspaper in 1857, have all the sensational elements of one of the author’s own plots.

Building solidarity with Palestine

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Details: Created: Tuesday, 06 March 2012 12:42; Written by Toby Harbertson

Fight Racism! Fight Imperialism! 225 February/March 2012

• Gaza: Symbol of Resistance, ed Joyce Chediac, World View Forum 2011, $15.55. The full text is also available at gazaresistancebook.com

• Targeting Israeli Apartheid: A Boycott Divestment and Sanction Handbook can be downloaded as a pdf or bought for £10 at www.corporatewatch.org/?lid=4103

On 29 December 2011, Benny Gantz, Chief of Staff of the Israeli Defence Force (IDF), marked the third anniversary of Operation Cast Lead, describing the massacre as ‘an excellent operation’ during which the IDF operated in ‘a determined, decisive and offensive manner against terrorists in the Gaza Strip’. He warned that ‘sooner or later, there will be no escape from conducting [another] significant operation’.

Occupy Wall St: from the horse’s mouth – book review

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Details: Created: Friday, 10 February 2012 11:21; Written by Steve Palmer

Occupying Wall Street by Writers for the 99%

OR Books, February 2012, paperback £10/$15 ISBN 978-1-935928-68-3/ e-book £7/$10 ISBN 978-1-935928-64-5

This is a book about Occupy Wall Street (OWS) by participants, not outside reporters. It therefore gives an inside view of the protest, by some of its supporters. It recounts all the major milestones on the timeline of the New York protest and describes the major incidents of police harassment. It describes in detail the procedures for conducting a General Assembly and identifies the various working groups and components (library, medic tent etc) which are core to the occupation. It is a useful handbook for anyone who wants to set up another Occupy protest, with all the templates included.

The murky world of tax havens

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Details: Created: Thursday, 16 June 2011 13:20; Written by David Yaffe

tresure_island Fight Racism! Fight Imperialism! 221 June/July 2011

Treasure Islands: Tax Havens and the Men Who Stole the World

by Nicholas Shaxson, Bodley Head, London 2011, 329pp, £14.99

Capitalism in its imperialist phase is a decaying and parasitic system. It is a global system of national oppression and of financial strangulation of the overwhelming majority of the world by a small number of imperialist countries. The needs of millions of human beings are brushed aside as multinational corporations, banks and rich investors seek whatever means are available to augment their profits and wealth. The book Treasure Islands dramatically exposes some of the secretive, devious and corrupt mechanisms now employed to achieve these ends.

Ricin! The Inside Story of the Terror Plot That Never Was

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Details: Created: Tuesday, 01 February 2011 11:24; Written by Anthony Rupert

ricin This book provides a definitive guide to the much hyped ‘terrorist threat’ known as the ‘ricin plot’, which was used by the British government and media to scaremonger the public into backing the brutal occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan.

In January 2003 police raided a flat in Wood Green and arrested six men on suspicion of manufacturing the poison ricin for use in a terrorist attack. Other arrests followed in London and Manchester. A month later US Chief of Staff Colin Powell cited the ‘UK poison cell’ in his appeal to the UN to back the invasion of Iraq. In 2004 and 2005 the criminal trials of the ‘ricin plotters’ fell apart as it was clear there was no case against them.

Lawrence Archer was a jury foreman at one of the trials. The experience changed his life and led him to co-author this book, which explains how not only was there no ricin poison manufactured in the so-called ‘factory of death’, but how the prosecution were unable to provide any evidence that the defendants were an organised terrorist cell or had any connection to Al Qaeda.

To get hold of such information to tie the five together, the British police relied on details of Algerians in London, extracted from main suspect Mohammed Meguerba, while he was being tortured in 2002 in Algeria.

SUS: British police – racist police!

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Details: Created: Thursday, 21 October 2010 11:53; Written by Anthony Rupert

sus_dvd A review of SUS (2010) by Barrie Keefe, directed by Robert Heath, available on DVD

Director Robert Heath revives writer Barrie Keefe's stage play in a new film depicting a harrowing case of police racism and brutality, set during the election night of 1979. Clint Dyer plays Delroy, a black man who is held in custody on suspicion of murdering his wife, during which time he is humiliated and beaten by police officers Karn and Wilby in order to extract a confession by any means.

South of the Border, Oliver Stone, 2010

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Details: Created: Thursday, 21 October 2010 09:37; Written by FRFI

oliver Sometimes a film is of such extraordinary quality that you can be captivated by it before seeing it. So it was for me in the case of Oliver Stone’s latest documentary, South of the Border, about the latest wave of anti-imperialist struggles in Latin America. Stone was planning to introduce the film in person but his views were deemed so threatening to the ruling class on both sides of the Atlantic that the British government wouldn’t let him in. Meanwhile, reviewers castigated Stone for being biased in favour of the Bolivarian Revolution in Venezuela; needless to say, few if any of these reviewers saw anything wrong with being biased in favour of imperialism. For a film to antagonise so many reactionaries so quickly…what was there not to like?

Malcolm X: revolutionary voice for our epoch

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Details: Created: Thursday, 07 October 2010 12:53; Written by Mike Webber

FRFI 217 October/November 2010

• Malcolm X, Black liberation and the road to workers’ power Jack Barnes, Pathfinder Press 2009, £15

This book, by the leader of the US Socialist Workers Party, is a timely analysis of the contribution by Malcolm X to the black liberation struggle in the United States.

Barnes takes us from Malcolm’s early years, including attacks on the family home and eventually the murder of his father by white racists, through his attempts to make a living in Boston from petty crime, to his conversion in prison to the Nation of Islam. From mid-1953 he was a full-time organiser for the Nation and became its most prominent public face, even more so than its leader Elijah Muhammad, who maintained absolute power within the organisation.

Revolutionary Cuba: saving lives across the globe

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Details: Created: Thursday, 07 October 2010 12:53; Written by Hannah Caller and Cat Wiener

FRFI 217 October/November 2010

• Cuban medical internationalism, origins, evolution and goals

John M Kirk and H Michael Erisman, Palgrave Macmillan 2009, £57

‘The life of a single human being is worth a million times more than all the property of the richest man on earth . . . Far more important than good remuneration is the pride of serving one’s neighbour.’

(Che Guevara, 1960, On Revolutionary Medicine)

The phenomenal achievements of Cuba’s health system are recognised throughout the world, even by critics of the socialist island. What is perhaps less discussed is the impact of Cuba’s health interventions throughout the underdeveloped world. With a population of just 11.3 million, Cuba punches above its weight in the international health arena: it has 40,000 medical staff engaged abroad and the largest international medical school in the world; since 2004, 1.5 million people in Latin America and the Caribbean have had their eyesight restored for free by Cuba. As Wayne Smith, director of the Cuba Program at the Center for International Policy in Washington put it: ‘Cuba is credited with saving more lives in the developing countries than all the G8 countries together. How has it done this?’ It is both the ‘how’ and the ‘why’ that Erisman and Kirk have set out to explore here, bringing together four years of research to begin to provide the answers.

The limits to opportunism

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Details: Created: Friday, 06 August 2010 14:27; Written by Peter Howell

FRFI 216 August/September 2010

The limits to opportunism

Kautskyism past and present, Alec Abbott

www.rosclar.webspace.virginmedia.com

Kautskyism past and present is a three-volume study of the nature, origins, growth and spread of Kautskyism. Volume 2 will be posted on the internet towards the end of summer 2010, and Volume 3 in 2011. The following review focuses on Volume 1, ‘Modern-day Kautskyism’.[1]

Abbott begins with a brief account of Kautsky’s 1914 standpoint, his prediction that the world’s finance capitalists will resolve their differences by uniting in a gigantic, all-embracing trust. Abbott then turns his attention to current debates by examining the standpoints of Antonio Negri, a prominent anarchist in the anti-capitalist movement, and Alex Callinicos, the SWP’s leading theoretician. Whereas Negri and his followers maintain that capitalism has evolved along the lines indicated by Kautsky, the SWP insists that a single world trust is a fallacy. Capital, as Callinicos never tires of telling us, can only exist as many capitals.

Strangeways protest dramatised

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Details: Created: Wednesday, 09 June 2010 21:42; Written by Rebecca Rensten

FRFI 215 June/July 2010

Crying in the Chapel by Stafford, Clarke and Coghill, produced by Fink On Theatre company at the Contact Theatre, Manchester 26 April-9 May 2010

On 1 April 1990, when over one thousand men in Strangeways Prison in Manchester decided that they had suffered enough mental and physical brutality at the hands of the prison system, it is unlikely that any of the prisoners involved would have predicted that their actions would still be of such great interest, intrigue and inspiration 20 years later. Although probably unexpected, it is not at all surprising that Crying in the Chapel received standing ovations from audiences and was sold out by its second week. This story of an uprising that started within an institution designed to represent complete control over the working classes shows concretely what can be achieved.

Sons of Cuba

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Details: Created: Wednesday, 09 June 2010 21:42; Written by Saija Lukkaroinen

FRFI 215 June/July 2010

Sons of Cuba - Fighters for socialism

Sons of Cuba, film directed by Andrew Lang, released March 2010. For details of screenings go to: www.sonsofcuba.com

Cuba has won 62 Olympic Medals in boxing in the last 40 years. British director Andrew Lang was inspired to make this film about young Cuban boxers after reading double Olympic winner Mario Kindelan’s explanation of their success: ‘Cubans are fighters in all walks of life. Ours is a small country, but we live to fight’.

POA: a history of repression

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Details: Created: Wednesday, 14 April 2010 12:46; Written by Nicki Jameson

FRFI 214 April / May 2010

The Everlasting Staircase: A history of the Prison Officers’ Association 1939-2009, David Evans with Sheila Cohen, Pluto Press in association with the Prison Officers Association, 2009, £20

‘The fact that the police was originally recruited in large numbers from among Social Democratic workers is absolutely meaningless. Consciousness is determined by environment even in this instance. The worker who becomes a policeman in the service of the capitalist state is a bourgeois cop, not a worker.’ Leon Trotsky What Next? Vital Questions for the German Proletariat, 1932

In August 2007 the Prison Officers’ Association (POA) staged a one-day national strike in defiance of laws outlawing industrial action by prison officers. This and subsequent wildcat actions were eagerly seized on by the selection of British left groups which had long been courting the POA and generally applauding the ‘struggles’ of ‘workers in uniform’, including the police. Foremost among the cheerleaders is the Socialist Party (SP) and in September 2009 POA General Secretary Brian Caton announced his defection to the SP from the Labour Party. Caton is now a prominent speaker for SP-backed electoral grouping the Trade Unionist and Socialist Coalition.

Unpicking the Zionist myth

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Details: Created: Wednesday, 14 April 2010 12:29; Written by Claudia Miller

Sand

FRFI 214 April / May 2010

The invention of the Jewish people, Shlomo Sand, translated from the Hebrew by Yael Lotan, Verso 2009, 332pp, £18.99. ISBN 978-1-84467-422-0

‘I could not have gone on living in Israel without writing this book. I don’t think books can change the world – but when the world begins to change, it searches for different books’

Shlomo Sand, 2008

The world is indeed changing. Since the recognition of an Israeli state by the United Nations in 1947 and the extension of its borders in 1967 by war and occupation, Zionism* has demanded and received unconditional support from the US and Europe and silence on its record of oppression of the Palestinian people. Today this collusion is breaking down and the Zionist state of Israel can no longer claim that the exceptional tragedy of the European Holocaust puts it beyond reason and responsibility for its actions. Israel is being ever more exposed as a racist, apartheid state with a record of war crimes and crimes against humanity.

Yesterday’s opportunism

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Details: Created: Wednesday, 17 February 2010 13:02; Written by Robert Clough

FRFI 146 December / January 1998 / 1999

Review: Marxism Today, Nov/Dec 1998 Special Issue, £3.50

As the world capitalist system stands on the precipice, ideologues of every description counsel its political leaders as to how they should act to prevent a global disaster, anti the social unrest it will bring. Amongst these are some members of the former Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB), who after eight years have just republished its theoretical journal Marxism Today. Not that it has anything to do with Marxism: all it offers is a rehash of aged social democratic dogma, replete with appeals for governments to regulate the global financial markets, and to reduce the inequalities that have been a product of the last 20 years of neo-liberalism. Tired stuff indeed.

FRFI dealt with this trend many years ago (see ‘New Times, old opportunism’, FRFI 94), showing that their politics ‘codified the standpoint of a privileged stratum of the new petit bourgeoisie’ which sought not to destroy imperialism, but to pacify it. What has changed over the last eight years? Only that the contributors to Marxism Today Mark II are a wealthier, and more openly part of the ruling class, running chat shows on TV (David Aaronovich) or editing national newspapers (Will Hutton, The Observer, Martin Jacques, Independent deputy editor), or writing reglar newspaper columns (Suzanne Moore, Anatole Kaletsky), or even global strategies for insurance companies. Plus a few professors to lend a semblance of academic gravitas. Their role however is to act as a safety valve, transforming condemnation of the capitalist system into harmless criticism over its lesser aspects. While appearing to be radical opponents of New Labour, in reality they support it on anything that really matters.

Review: Memoirs of a radical lawyer

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Details: Created: Thursday, 17 December 2009 12:13; Written by Carol Brickley

FRFI 212 December 2009 / January 2010

Michael Mansfield

ISBN 978 0 7478 7864 9. Bloomsbury, London 2009. 496pp, £20

The English legal system, like all legal systems, is an instrument of class rule. Its system of precedents, cases, statutes, its rituals and its personnel reflect this. While the English constitution – unwritten – celebrates the ‘rule of law’, maintaining that all British subjects are governed by the same law equally and impartially, this is only a fiction that the ruling class maintains so that it can bask in the glow of its own righteousness while disciplining the inferior classes. A short visit to any magistrates’ or crown court will show you the realities. Most judges and barristers are toffs. A high proportion of politicians are lawyers. The criminal law is designed to control the working class, the civil law to defend property rights and corporate interests. Working class burglars are imprisoned; banks that specialise in daylight robbery are rewarded. Ordinary folk who deliberately, or even accidentally, cheat the benefit system of a few pounds are vilified; MPs who fiddle their expenses to the tune of thousands get a pension. It is remarkable, then, that among this morass of privilege and double-dealing there are a few decent lawyers. Michael Mansfield QC is one of them.

Review of Capitalism: A Love Story, a film by Michael Moore

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Details: Created: Wednesday, 09 December 2009 16:25; Written by Steve Palmer

michael_moore_capitalism_a_love_story What an opportunity! Cinemas full of people who want to see a film about Capitalism! Think of the possibilities: exposing imperialism – how a comparative handful live at the expense of the rest of the world; demonstrating that for two centuries capitalism has shown itself to be inherently crisis-ridden, and at the root of war and social misery; exposing its apologists and petit-bourgeois opponents.

Instead, we get an expose of capitalism’s ‘excesses’ while its essentials remain unquestioned. We have the greedy bankers and estate agents, the cruelty of ‘dead peasant’ insurance (company insurance against the death of its employees), poverty struck airline pilots, ‘excessive greed’ and so on. Of course, Moore gives examples of the misery created by capitalism – lousy wages, foreclosures, firings etc. – and we even get an all too brief glimpse of workers’ cooperatives. And, as always, Moore cannot resist engaging in stunts in front of his own camera, including a rather feeble attempt to stage a ‘citizen’s arrest’ of greedy bankers.

Unravelling nonsense / 02 December 2009

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Details: Created: Wednesday, 02 December 2009 15:45; Written by FRFI

Joseph Choonara: Unravelling capitalism, Bookmarks Publications 2009, pp159, price £7.99

This apparent purpose of this booklet is to provide a popular summary of Marx’s critique of political economy and then present an outline of the development of modern capitalism up to the present crisis. What we find is something disjointed and incoherent where the later historical exegesis bears no relation to the earlier part which seeks to follow Chapter 1 of Marx’s Capital. Even worse: Marx’s categories are distorted to justify a reactionary position which rejects the relevance of Lenin’s theory of imperialism for today, and with it, the struggle against opportunism.

How the SWP forgot British imperialism

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Details: Created: Thursday, 01 October 2009 11:38; Written by Jimmy German

FRFI 164 December 2001 / January 2002

No to Bush’s war – The military face of globalisation. A Socialist Worker’s Party pamphlet £1 (29pp)

This pamphlet contributes as much towards an understanding of the present war in Afghanistan as the Flat Earth Society does to the art of navigation. For instance pages 11-13 list 16 countries under the title, ‘Bush’s bloody allies’. The one country not listed is the Socialist Workers Party (SWP)’s own – Britain. The country which is more bloody than any of them.

Since World War II, British imperialism has aided and abetted every US invasion, adventure and operation, no matter who is in power, Tory or Labour. That is what the special relationship is all about and the SWP is either ignorant of it or covering up for it. As for British imperialism’s own crimes, the map of the British empire stretched from South America to Hong Kong and was drenched in blood. Page 24 argues ‘…the capitalist system that has now brought us a new imperialism – bigger corporations, more obscene weapons, more wars and greater inequality across the globe’. [our emphasis].

Dude, where’s my country?

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Details: Created: Friday, 25 September 2009 14:56; Written by Susan Davidson

FRFI 176 December 2003 / January 2004

Diego Garcia: still fighting for justice

Dude, where’s my country? Michael Moore, hardback £17.99, published by Allan Lane, 2003

This rapidly-written book by Michael Moore and his support team was published in the month following the invasion of Iraq by the coalition forces. The speed of its publication reflects the urgency Moore feels about the leadership and, indeed, ownership of the USA today. The title means that the interests of the people of North America have been hijacked by a handful of neoconservatives around the Bush family. Their greed, militarism and reactionary social values do not reflect those of the majority of the population who, Moore illustrates with a series of independent opinion poll results, are essentially tolerant and liberal on questions of race, gender and wealth distribution.

Michael Moore’s Stupid white men became an international best-seller with over four million copies sold in 2002-3 and, when his documentary film on gun law Bowling for Columbine won an Oscar, he spoke out against the war on Iraq to a worldwide television audience. As an author, performer, film-maker and television producer Moore has broken through the isolation of progressive forces to win popular acclaim. His work lifts the curtain on the realities of working life for the majority of the people in the USA, the manipulation and control of the media by a handful of owners and the impact of the corporations on domestic and foreign policy. And all this with humour and minutely researched detail.

‘Pure’ class struggle ignores imperialist reality

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Details: Created: Tuesday, 15 September 2009 14:02; Written by Susan Davidson

FRFI 208 April / May 2009

The trouble with diversity – how we learned to love identity and ignore inequality, Walter Benn Michaels, Holt Paperbacks, New York 2006, £10.58

When a heartfelt, lively and argumentative book challenges the left for fighting racism, Fight Racism! Fight Imperialism! is obliged to make our case.

Michaels argues that ‘identity’ politics has replaced ‘class’ politics. He says that religion, sexual orientation, gender, disability, age, race, indigenous rights and cultural heritage have displaced economic inequality as the causes of the left. Any complaint arising from identity rights has come to be regarded as progressive. Solidarity is automatically on offer to those who feel themselves to be humiliated, disregarded or discriminated against. Objectivity, he says, has been supplanted by subjectivity and a thing is asserted as true because it is felt to be true. Michaels concludes that the left has been subverted from targeting the real discrepancies of wealth and class and has joined the right wing as the champion of identity rights.

A master class in socialist economics

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Details: Created: Thursday, 27 August 2009 13:36; Written by Diana Raby

FRFI 209 June / July 2009

Che Guevara: the economics of revolution,
Helen Yaffe, London, Palgrave Macmillan 2009, £17.99

by Diana Raby

Helen Yaffe has produced a very important book which can only be described as essential reading for all socialists. Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara has been justly admired, indeed romanticised and even idolised, for his heroic role as revolutionary guerrilla fighter, his personal integrity and self-sacrifice culminating in martyrdom. But a vital period of his short life has been inexplicably neglected in previous accounts: the six years in which he served the Cuban revolutionary government, playing a crucial role in the transition to socialism.

The State We're In: The political economy of the new middle class

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Details: Created: Friday, 22 May 2009 17:20; Written by David Yaffe

FRFI 124 April / May 1995

'The starting point of the English revolution...the nearest we will get to a Keynes for our time', said Labour MP Denis Macshane in the New Statesman and Society, 'Heady, dangerous stuff...provides powerful ammunition for Labour spokesmen with no new ideas of their own' warned the Daily Telegraph, a 'ferocious polemic...too bleak to please or persuade' cautioned the London Evening Standard. All are speaking of The State We're In* by the Guardian's economic editor Will Hutton.

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