New book on China’s environmental crisis reviewed by Socialist Party Councillor Stephen Jolly

Socialists organised in the parties of the CWI have highlighted potential barriers to exponential Chinese economic growth. One of these is the topic of this book, the environmental crisis that is current and growing. When a Billion Chinese Jump by the Guardian’s Asia environment correspondent, Jonathan Watts, takes the form of a dark, political travelogue. Watts travels through China’s provinces talking to Communist Party bureaucrats, capitalists, and ordinary farmers and workers about the impacts on their lives of the environmental changes wrought by the economic ‘miracle’.

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By Jacinta Chavulak & Mel Gregson, Socialist Party

The film ‘Made in Dagenham’ tells the story of the 1968 Ford factory strike that paved the way for a national campaign demanding women’s’ right to equal pay and inspired women’s’ liberation movements across the globe.

In 1968 the Ford factory in Dagenham, England employed around 55,000 workers, of which 187 were women. When these female machinists were unfairly classified by Ford management as ‘unskilled’ workers, they decided to fight back.

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Niall Mulholland reviews ’James P Cannon and the origins of the American revolutionary left, 1890-1928’ by Bryan D Palmer

This recent publication is an important addition to the historical literature of a crucial period in the US workers’ movement. It deals with Cannon’s early days as a ‘Wobbly’ agitator, his emergence as a young leader of the new American Communist Party, and up to the point of his expulsion from the increasingly Stalinist party due to his adherence to the ideas of Leon Trotsky and the International Left Opposition.

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By Jacinta Chavulak, Socialist Party

In her book Living Dolls, Natasha Walter paints a horrifying picture of Britain’s sex culture. The book explores the modern reality of sex in our everyday lives and explains that sexism is worse now than ever before.

Walter begins her book by examining children’s toys. She looks at the difference between girls and boys toys and explains how toys sexualise people from a young age. Bratz, Barbie dolls and make up sets are all examined in detail.

In the first chapter ‘Dolls’, Walter briefly explores the 1970’s feminist movement and the aims behind it. She looks at the difference between the women’s free love movement of then and the hypersexual culture which exists today. Women’s liberation was a key issue in the 1970s, now the focus is on how women appear to men.

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Post-hardcore band Enter Shikari’s latest album is fuelled with discontent about the current political situation in Britain and around the world. “Common Dreads” demands that all ordinary people unite against the system, and correctly states that we will never win divided.

“Common Dreads” is only the band’s second album but it contains not only musical maturity but switched on political analysis.

By Jacinta Chavulak

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Blackwater: The rise of the world’s most powerful mercenary army

The new year began with a US court throwing out a case against five Blackwater guards accused of killing between 14 and 17 Iraqis in the infamous 14 September 2007 Nisour Square massacre in Baghdad. Witnesses allege that they fired indiscriminately when the convoy they were guarding approached a crowded intersection. Thrown out on a procedural technicality, the case highlights the use of private contractors in warzones, and the way in which they can act with impunity as they go about their business of doing the dirty work of US imperialism, and other major powers. A number of claimants had reached out-of-court settlements with Blackwater.

Reviewed by Iain Dalton, Socialist Party

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“Capitalism is an evil, and you cannot regulate evil”

Karl Marx likened capitalism to a vampire which lives and expands by sucking “living labour” from the worker by extracting “surplus value”, “unpaid labour”.

But that is while the worker lives. Now we learn through Michael Moore, the US radical film-maker, that the biggest vampire, Wal-Mart - “a company with revenue larger than any other in the world” - actually bets on its “workers dying.

Peter Taaffe, reviews Michael Moore’s ‘Capitalism: A Love Story’

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Review of Jeyakumar Devaraj’s “Malaysia at the Crossroads, a Socialist Perspective” by Peter Taaffe

Jeyakumar Devaraj, member of the Central Committee of Parti Sosialis Malaysia (PSM) and Member of Parliament for Sungai Siput, published a book on perspectives for Malaysia in August 2009. Peter Taaffe, General Secretary of the Socialist Party (CWI in England and Wales) and member of the International Secretariat of the Committee for a Workers’ International, reviewed it in a letter to Jeyakumar.

We are carrying a slightly edited (shortened) version of the review which deals with important questions of method, analysis and perspectives for Marxists in the struggle - to overthrow capitalism in Malaysia, Asia and worldwide.

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Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara; revolutionary, Marxist and doctor. Together with Fidel Castro, he waged war against Cuban capitalism, and overthrew it, during the Cuban revolution of 1959. Che: Part One explores this inspiring tale of struggle.

By Jacinta Chavulak, Socialist Party

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A ‘dis-Service’ to Leon Trotsky
This book is very thick – running to 600 pages – but is very thin when it comes to an honest political examination and analysis of the ideas of Leon Trotsky, the subject of Service’s tome. His justification? That this book is, allegedly, the first “full-length biography of Trotsky written by someone outside Russia who is not a Trotskyist”.

By Peter Taaffe, Socialist Party

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