Editorial

If you were sceptical of the existence of climate change and its effects, the events of this summer might help you change your mind. The floods in Britain, first in Yorkshire, then a month later in Gloucestershire, the worst in a hundred years, were the ones to make the headlines in Britain. But much worse were those in South Asia, especially India and Bangladesh.

 

Economy

David Coen looks at the growth of the British economy, Brown’s claim that we have experienced the longest period of sustained growth in history and asks how this is related to the rather shaky foundation of a house price boom.

 

Palestine

The rise of Hamas over the past two decades is rooted in disillusion with the corruption and compromise of the Fatah leadership of the Palestinian movement. This has grown since the Olso ‘peace process’ of the 1990s, with the beefing up of settlements, the separation wall, military incursions and mass detentions. Piers Mostyn looks at recent events in Palestine.

 

Palestine

Following a motion passed at the annual conference of the 120,000 strong University and College Union (UCU), the June 8 Times Higher Education Supplement reported that leading US lawyer Alan Dershowitz has ‘pledged to lead a campaign to visit financial and legal ruin on any UK academic backing a boycott of Israeli academe’.

 

China

Women Migrant Workers in China

The overwhelming majority of the labour force in China’s Export Processing Zones (EPZs) is women. Here Au Loong-yu shows how, since the 1990s, the one-party bureaucratic state has implemented radical capitalist reforms with profound affects on female rural migrant workers. He also reveals how these women workers have responded to these changes.

 

Climate Change

Population control and climate change

Population control is once again being touted by sections of the green movement as a possible answer to climate change and other environmental problems. Phil Ward examines the historical roots of these views and argues for a strong socialist response that addresses their reactionary and racist character.

 

Education

Dave Hill, Professor of Education Policy at the University of Northampton asks what does education do in capitalist Britain, in the capitalist world? What can Marxist educators do about it? Recognising the limitations - but also the opportunities of efforts by socialist and critical educators, by socialist teachers, who try to work as critical organic public transformative intellectuals, where should we put our efforts?

 

Review

By Mark Lynas, Fourth Estate, 2007, £12.99

A difference of six degrees Celsius between one temperature and another does not sound a lot. Six degrees above freezing is still very cold, six degrees below boiling is still very hot. However the last time the world was around six degrees colder was during the ice age when most of Britain was under an ice sheet over a mile thick. A world where the average temperature is six degrees higher will be as radically different to today’s world as today is to the world of the ice age.

 

Review

Historical Materialism volume 15 issue 1 Spring 2007

Since his death in 1995 Ernest Mandel’s theoretical work has been surprisingly little discussed on the Marxist left, with the exception of one conference volume edited by Gilbert Achcar. This is a major loss, since as well as acting as a leading activist for half a century in the Fourth International, Mandel made significant contributions to Marxist analysis in a large number of areas. Indeed, he saw his theoretical and practical activities as inseparable.

 

Review

By Joanna Blythman, Fourth Estate 2006, 318 pages, paperback £7.99

In a gruesome passage in chapter 10 of the first volume of Capital, Karl Marx wrote of the ‘incredible adulteration of bread’ in Victorian London, and used a report of a Royal Commission of Inquiry to reveal that the London worker, ‘had to eat daily in his bread a certain quantity of human perspiration mixed with the discharge of abscesses, cobwebs, dead cockroaches, and putrid German yeast, without counting alum, sand, and other agreeable mineral ingredients’.

 

Review

Paul Mason, Harvill Secker, London, 2007, £12.99

I came away from Paul Mason’s book with a mixture of emotions. The crisp language and the power of the storytelling enthralled me. I was invigorated by the stories themselves – some of them very familiar, some with hidden corners illuminated for the first time, some completely unknown to me. The pages bubble with the creativity of collective ideas and collective action.

 

Letters

I was very interested to read Roy Wilkes’ article on the dialectics of climate change in SO12. The account of climate change itself and the feedback mechanisms involved were excellent. However, I’m not completely persuaded by the more theoretical part on dialectics.