Eric Lee

This article appears in Solidarity.  Feel free to add your comments below.

It was a beautiful May morning, one of the first warm and sunny days we’ve had all year. In Clerkenwell Green, hundreds of people were assembling for the annual official London May Day march. Many of you will not have been there — in fact there were very few trade unionists at all on this year’s march.

So let me tell you who was there — the twentieth century’s greatest serial killer, Joseph Stalin. Stalin was on several banners, and not only his image side by side with Lenin and Mao, but huge banners just with his picture alone — and quotations from his writings.

As I marched along with some trade union leaders and a traditional brass band, I could not help feeling ashamed at what the march would have looked like to onlookers, of whom there were many along the route. Ashamed and disgusted.

It’s disgusting because holding aloft iconic images of Stalin at a trade union march shows a complete lack of moral judgement. Seventy years ago, it may have been understandable — the second world war was raging, the Soviet leadership had not yet acknowledged Stalin’s crimes. But after 1956, anyone who still believed that Stalin was a great revolutionary leader was delusional.

Many of the marchers holding hammer-and-sickle flags or Stalin images would have been from various far-Left Turkish organizations and maybe in Turkey, there is no strong anti-Stalinist left. (Not that that’s an excuse for their igorance.)

But there were also British far-Leftists, supporters of tiny fringe groups proud of their adulation for a man who is responsible for millions of deaths of innocent people, a man who contributed so much to destroying everything the Russian revolution had achieved, killing off the entire Bolshevik party in the process.

The British anti-Stalinist Left was represented by “Trotskyist” groups like the Socialist Workers Party and Socialist Party, who were there in strength, manning their book stalls, selling their newspapers. But there was no evidence that they challenged the Stalinists or even politely asked them to put their repulsive banners away. It seemed as if the Trotskyists and Stalinists were happy to march side by side, letting bygones be bygones. No enemies on the left and all that.

This in intolerable. If there are some, few individuals with personal “issues” who need to express themselves through things like the “Stalin Society”, that may be their right. But that doesn’t mean that they are welcome at our May Day celebrations. They are not welcome.

We must make an effort to ensure that this disgrace never repeats itself and that in 2014, there will be no banners with Stalin’s picture at the London May Day march and rally.

How do we do this? We begin by debating and confronting the Stalinist Left, demolishing their arguments and educating their members and periphery. We fight them on their turf and we fight them seriously. This is a fight over historical memory, over truth, and it is a fight we must win in order to cleanse and revitalise the Left.

At our own events such as a May Day march, we must take a firm stand of no platform for totalitarianism — no portraits of Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot or Kim Jon Il to be displayed. Enough is enough.

And finally, we must compell the leadership of the TUC and the unions to take May Day seriously. They must wrest it from the hands of the lunatics and the fringe. They must bring the hundreds of thousands of trade unionists who have marched under the TUC banner in recent years to come out on May Day too. The trade union leadership must help us to reclaim the holiday.

Stalin’s portrait must never again be paraded through the streets of London.

The collapse of the Rana Plaza in Bangladesh has horrified people all over the world. Everyone wants to see something done about us, to ensure that it never happens again.

But not everyone agrees on what needs to be done.

Last week, at the request of the IndustriALL global union federation which represents textile and garment workers around the world, LabourStart launched an online campaign. IndustriALL’s text, which came in part from their affiliate unions in Bangladesh, demanded that the Bangladeshi government “take urgent action to guarantee freedom of association and improve building and fire safety and the minimum wage for the more than 3 million garment workers in Bangladesh.”

The campaign pointed out that “Working for a minimum wage of US$38 per month, less than one percent of garment workers in Bangladesh are represented by a union. The Labour Law leaves workers unable to join a union and fight for safe workplaces, improved working conditions and better wages.”

It put the right to join a union at the centre of the campaign.

Tens of thousands of people learned about our campaign due to a promotion on Facebook and thousands of them signed up. But many of them posted comments which typically asked what we, as consumers, could do.

Many people wanted an online campaign to put pressures on those huge Western clothing chains like Primark and Walmart. Others talked about boycotting those shops. Many argued that the problem was cheap clothing – only if we paid more for clothing could people in Bangladesh have a decent life. Some proposed that we only buy fair-traded clothing.

The focus of many of these comments seemed to be entirely on how through our shopping we could make the world a better place.

This strikes me as well-intentioned but also patronizing – and ultimately ineffective.

A decade ago I worked for an NGO in London that had been asked to do a campaign to promote mine safety around the world. They did a beautiful poster with a slogan that I’ve never forgotten:

“The stronger the union, the safer the mine.”

It’s a simple idea, but an enormously powerful one.

The workers in Bangladesh need better laws to protect their health and safety at work, they need labour inspectors to enforce those laws, and we in the West can of course help pressure their government and employers.

But above all, they need the only tool that workers have ever discovered that really does protect them at work: trade unions.

Strong trade unions will ensure that health and safety laws are passed and are enforced. Strong unions can compel an employer to reduce risks in the workplace.

I’m very skeptical about the idea that we can shop our way to a better world by “buying ethically”. It certainly feels better to buy a fair-traded product, but in the end, is that all we can do? Just make ourselves into nicer, more caring consumers?

The terrible tragedy at the Rana Plaza should remind us that we are far more than consumers – we are workers, members of a huge and powerful global movement that when united and focussed on a goal can change the world.

Solidarity – not ethical shopping – is what the garment workers of Bangladesh are demanding.

This article appeared in Solidarity.

I like to keep a record of the books I’ve read, and like millions of others, have found online communities to be a good way of doing this.

In recent years, I’ve used two of these – GoodReads and LibraryThing.

I recently began using GoodReads more because it, unlike LibraryThing, had an app for my phone and tablet.

But a couple of weeks ago, Amazon bought GoodReads — a good business move on their part.

Now they can sell even more books to people, and to people who we know enjoy reading.

I don’t boycott Amazon, despite all the terrible things they do, but if I have a choice, I take it.

I just closed down my GoodReads account and have moved everything over to LibraryThing.

This article appeared in Solidarity.  Please feel free to add your comments there.

Socialist Worker last week reported on the escalation of tensions on the Korean peninsula – but in topsy-turvy world of the fast-decaying SWP, it denounced “imperialist war-mongering against North Korea” which “threatened to bring the region to the brink of nuclear war.”

Allow me to make one or two small corrections.

First, it is not “the region” alone which faces the risk of nuclear war. North Korea’s Taepodong-2 ballistic missiles have a reported range of 6,000 km. That puts Alaska, the northern bits of Australia, the entire Pacific ocean, all of China, most of Russia and the Indian sub-continent all within range.

Second (and how shall I put this delicately?), comrades, the North Korean regime, peace-loving though I am certain you believe it to be, is not entirely innocent here. Perhaps in some tiny way, it might be responsible for at least some of the tensions.

Of course I don’t expect the SWP to take my word for this. So let’s call upon Fidel Castro to back me up.

According to the Morning Star, the former Cuban dictator urged “North Korea to restrain itself for the good of mankind.” Castro also reportedly said that a war could affect “more than 70 per cent” of the world’s population and said the current flare-up was the “one of the gravest risks of nuclear war,” since the 1962 Cuban missile crisis – a subject on which he is considered something of an authority. (He did allow the Soviet Union to place ballistic missiles with nuclear weapons on Cuban soil.)

The Stalinists at the Morning Star may be slightly more clued in than the ex-Trotskyists at Socialist Worker (there is something ironic in that) but they’re not entirely living on the same planet as the rest of us either.

In their one editorial so far on the subject, the only criticism they make of North Korea is that “the Kim dynasty in Pyongyang recently rewrote the Marxist maxim that the working class plays the leading role in the construction of socialism to ascribe this role to the armed forces”.

That’s an odd sentence in so many ways, not least of which is the assumption that the totalitarian rulers of North Korea know or care about who plays “the leading role” in the construction of socialism, a project which they are not remotely interested in. Whatever it is that they are building with the help of hundreds of thousands of slave labourers, it is most certainly not socialism.

It’s not surprising that the Morning Star has mixed feelings about North Korea – after all, it inherits the Stalinist legacy of full support for any country, no matter how dictatorial and ruthless, so long as it confronts “imperialism”.

Why Britain’s largest trade union, Unite, continues to bankroll this awful newspaper is beyond belief. But it may perhaps have something to do with the fact that the union’s chief of staff has been a leading figure in the British CP for some time and a decade ago publicly expressed his full support for the North Korean regime, saying “Our Party has already made its basic position of solidarity with Peoples Korea clear.”

Socialist Worker and the Morning Star are struggling with the Korean crisis, but for socialists it is actually not very complicated.

It could be summed up in just six words – “no to war, no to dictatorship”.

No to war – meaning that North Korea must cease its threats and return to negotiations based on UN resolutions.

And no to dictatorship – meaning, down with the Kim regime, and for a united, democratic and socialist Korea.

I have been trying to do something fairly simple: I wanted to write a web page that could render well on a small screen (like a mobile phone) and which would display content from the IUF website.  How hard could this be?

Well, it shouldn’t have been hard.

The content on the IUF site, which is handled by a content management system called Drupal, is stored in a MySQL database.  The characters are encoded as Unicode (UTF-8) — because that’s what you need to do when you have multilingual content on your site, and the IUF site works in Arabic, Chinese, Russian and many other non-Latin languages.

So it should have been fairly simple to write a few lines of code in the widely-used PHP programming language to read news headlines from the IUF’s database and show them on screen.

Except that it was showing gibberish every time there was an accented character.

I posted a message calling for help on the Drupal forums.  (Not a big response there.)  I wrote to three very smart friends who understand these things and they all had good ideas, and pointed me in different directions, but to no avail.  Nothing was working.  One suggested that I give up.  I nearly did give up.

And then I decided to search again, and found this page where a programmer named “HoboTraveler” (I’m guessing that’s not his real name) encountered a similar problem on January 21st, 2008, more than five years ago.  He writes asking for help, gets loads of tips, tries a million things, nearly gives up, and then, dozens of comments later, he solves the problem.

He writes:

I think I got it to work with multiple databases!

I’ve inserted the line:

mysql_query(‘SET NAMES utf8′);

just after the mysql_connect() and it seems to work.

So I thought, what the hell, I’ll try that.  I tried everything else.  And “HoboTraveler”, whoever you are, you made my day.

Lesson of the story: sometimes life is hard.  And thank God for Google.

This article appears in the current issue of Solidarity.  Please post any comments there.

Four years ago, the stars of the successful BBC comedy series “Gavin and Stacey” made the mistake of starring in an abysmal comedy known as “Lesbian Vampire Killers”.

The movie was quickly forgotten, but I was reminded of it recently when I saw the latest – and last – film by acclaimed American director Steven Soderbergh, “Side Effects”.

Soderbergh’s film could easily have been given a similar title, even though it was not in any sense a comedy.

But the theme of homicidal lesbians is central to the plot, and the film absolutely reeks of homophobia.

Not everyone will have seen it that way, of course.

When I first heard about the film, a reviewer talked about it revolving around a conspiracy in which the pharmaceutical industry played a key role.

The film’s tagline was “one pill can change your life”.

The story seems at first to be about the side effects of a new anti-depressant which may – or may not – have contributed to a young woman (played by Rooney Mara) murdering her husband (Channing Tatum), who has just returned home after a few years in jail.

Jude Law plays the psychiatrist who prescribes the medication, and later becomes a kind of amateur detective, determined to figure out what really happened.

So far, so good. What follows contains spoilers, so if you really want to see the film and don’t want to know how it turns out, stop reading.

It turns out that the pharmaceutical company isn’t a protagonist in the story, it’s done nothing particularly wrong, and it doesn’t even seem that the young woman took the pills.

It’s not the “one pill” that changed her life, or ended the life of her unfortunate husband.

It was the fact that she had a lesbian relationship with her psychiatrist, who treated her for depression when her husband was taken away by the FBI.

The psychiatrist, played by Catherine Zeta-Jones, would not have been out of place in “Lesbian Vampire Killers”.

It is only at the end of the film that Mara’s character confesses to Jude Law her motivation for killing the unfortunate Tatum.

She first became depressed when her bourgeois lifestyle ended suddenly as the FBI descended on a garden party to arrest Tatum on charges of insider trading.

Zeta-Jones seduced her vulnerable, and much younger, patient, and the two conspired – as lesbians do, apparently – to murder Tatum when he got home from prison.

Their relationship was kept a secret from everyone.

And their motivation wasn’t just love (or lust). There was some scheme to make a fortune by linking a pharmaceutical company to the crime, thereby driving its share price down and reaping millions on the stock market.

Near the very end of the film, Mara and Zeta-Jones meet up and embrace, discussing where the money has been stashed – though at this point Mara has betrayed her lover, and is wearing a wire.

Some viewers and critics didn’t see any of this as homophobic, but others certainly did.

If there were loads of films made by Hollywood A-listers in which the lead characters were lesbians, “Side Effects” would just be one forgettable movie in which the women were not very nice.

But how many Hollywood films with budgets of over $30 million feature a lesbian couple at the centre of the story? Very few, I imagine.

And the linking of forbidden love to murder is quite explicit in “Side Effects”.

It may not be obvious to British audiences, or even to the British leads in the film, but America is a deeply homophobic country which lags behind much of the world on issues like gay marriage or gays serving in the military.

Homophobia is explicitly used by the right in America, including even mainstream politicians like Mitt Romney. Where right-wing policies such as austerity or tax breaks for the very rich became unpopular, homophobia – like racism – becomes quite useful for the right.

It differs from most forms of bigotry in that it’s still quite acceptable, it seems, to incorporate homophobic elements in a mainstream film. It would be hard (though not impossible) to do the same with more traditional prejudices, such as hatred of Blacks or Jews.

There was an uproar in America when Kathryn Bigelow’s “Zero Dark Thirty” implied that torture was an important part of the hunt for Osama Bin Laden. Right-wing politicians like John McCain led the charge on that one, and it’s one of the reasons Bigelow’s film couldn’t be named “Best Picture” at the Oscars.

No one expects McCain, Romney and politicians like them to speak out against the homophobia in “Side Effects” – but one wonders why the left, in America and elsewhere, hasn’t been more outspoken in taking on this vile, bigoted film.

This article appeared today in Solidarity.

When George W. Bush proclaimed his “War on Terror” more than a decade ago, there was some concern in the USA and its allies that the war might not be confined to fighting actual terrorists overseas and could also be directed against ordinary dissenters at home. For that reason, civil liberties groups were particularly concerned about any “anti-terror” legislation that could be seen as curtailing human rights.

The good news is that the democratic rights we had pre-2001 are largely intact in countries like the USA and the UK. The intelligence services no doubt have larger budgets and electronic spying on all of us has probably increased, but the fears of an all-powerful “national security state” emerging have thankfully not been realized.

It’s not as if armed riot police would storm Unison’s headquarters on the Euston Road, arresting hundreds of activists, accusing Dave Prentiss of “terrorism” because he’d spoken out against some government policy.

But that’s precisely what’s happening today in Turkey, one of the junior partners in the US-led “war on terror”.

Two weeks ago, police stormed the Ankara headquarters of KESK, the public sector union, arresting over 100 activists. Over 160 arrest warrants were issued. Fifty were arrested in Istanbul. The teachers union Egitim Sen was also subjected to a wave of arrests.

The leaders of KESK and Egitim Sen were accused of involvement with terrorism.

The arrests were, it was claimed, part of an investigation into a suicide bomber’s attack on the US embassy in Ankara at the end of January in which one guard (and the bomber) were killed.

We have to admit that Turkey does in fact suffer from a lot of political violence – on all sides. Kurdish fighters of the PKK, far-leftists angry at the USA and Israel, and others have from time to time engaged in horrific violence. So has the Turkish state.

It’s not like the Turkish government is making up the idea of “terrorism”.

The problem is that it appears to be using a genuine security situation to justify attacks on organisations that it doesn’t like for other reasons, such as unions of teachers and other public sector workers.

This is, of course, reminiscent of the McCarthy era in the USA when the genuine threat of Stalinist domination of Europe was used to justify a crackdown on any form of dissent.

In Turkey, the organization the government is blaming for the US embassy bombing is known as the Revolutionary People’s Liberation Party-Front, or DHKP/C. The DHKP/C is listed by the US State Department as a Foreign Terrorist Organization (FTO).

But KESK is not. And Egitim Sen is not. And it’s an important distinction.

Amnesty International says it “has long campaigned against the abuse of Turkey’s overly broad and vague anti-terrorism laws to prosecute legitimate peaceful activities.”

Note that Amnesty isn’t saying Turkey shouldn’t combat terrorism. It’s saying that the laws are overly broad and vague. And they’re being abused by the state to persecute legitimate dissenters, like the unions.

Unions around the world have rallied to the defence of KESK and Egitim Sen.

The Brussels-based International Trade Union Confederation, representing 175 million organised workers, was the first to issue a strong statement. They were followed by the global union federations for public sector and education workers, Public Services International and the Education International. All three groups have teamed up to launch an appeal on LabourStart which has been signed – so far – by over 8,000 trade unionists.

The LabourStart campaign is here:

http://bit.ly/13QoD18

Please sign up and spread the word.

This article appears in Stronger Unions, , a news and comment blog about the UK trade union movement, managed by the TUC.

Unions that want to communicate with their members using the new technologies face a problem. And the problem is that we don’t actually know very much about how our members use the Internet.

Of course there are general surveys and studies which show that masses of people use Facebook and Twitter, that smartphones and tablets have come to replace desktop PCs as a way to access the Net – but is that the case for union members?

After all, union members in the UK and elsewhere are not typical – we tend to be older than the average, for example.

The only way to know how our members use the Net is to ask them, and this year for the third year running, LabourStart is doing exactly that.

In last year’s survey, we learned that a very large of number of trade unionists had started to use Google+ and LinkedIn, in addition to Facebook. And yet unions were not really responding to this, and had done little or nothing on those social networks.

Nearly 42% of the nearly 3,000 respondents last year told us that they accessed the Net with a smartphone and a third that number were already using tablets (like the iPad). But less than 6% thought their unions had apps for these devices.

We learned that nearly two-thirds of the respondents rated their national union websites as ‘good’ or ‘excellent’, but that number dropped dramatically when we asked about local or branch websites.

These numbers and many more like them can be very useful for unions in Britain and around the world. We should, for example, invest more in training local and branch unions to do better and more useful websites. We should learn which social networks our members use (such as LinkedIn) and exploit the possibilities there, rather than solely relying on Facebook. We should be designing apps for smartphones and tablets which are increasingly becoming the primary way our members access the Net.

This year’s survey will run through 18^th March – and the more members of trade unions participate, the more useful it will be for all of us. We don’t just want those who love new technology to respond – it’s also important to know how ordinary members of our unions use the Net.

Please spread the word in your union – you can take the survey online here.

This article appears today in Solidarity.

Recently, I co-authored a book on online campaigning for trade unions and self-published it using a print-on-demand service called CreateSpace.

CreateSpace is a subsidiary of Amazon, the giant online retailer, and any book you publish there is automatically available for sale on the Amazon websites. It was a great option as it cost nothing and allowed us to reach a very large global audience.

When I announced this to LabourStart’s mailing lists, we got hundreds of people to buy copies of the book. But a small number, mainly from the UK, wrote in to say that they wouldn’t buy from Amazon.

Most of them had heard that Amazon doesn’t pay its fair share of taxes in the UK. Some will have heard of the online petition at Change.org that got over 90,000 supporters.

That petition — which has proven to be far more popular than any of the campaigns we’ve done in defence of workers’ rights — was posted by Frances and Keith Smith, independent booksellers from Coventry. The first line reads like an advertisement for their shops.

Their shops, they say, “have been a proud part of our local high streets for many years. We are proud of the personal service we provide to all those who visit our store.”

That sounds like self-promotion to me, but for tens of thousands of people, it sounds like a just cause — supporting small, family-run businesses against the encroaching faceless and all-powerful American-owned corporation.

This is, as Marxists will be aware, a thoroughly reactionary attitude toward capitalism, a longing for an earlier era of friendly Mom-and-Pop shops where smiling shop owners greeted every customer by name, and freely extended credit to those who were a bit skint.

It goes without saying that Amazon should pay its taxes. We also demand that government ramp up corporate taxes and enforce payment. And that’s our minimum demand — in the longer run, we support expropriating the expropriators.

Unions have also started to take on Amazon here in the UK.

In mid-February, the GMB held protests at nine Amazon facilities. They presented the company with “corporate ASBOs” in an attempt to focus public attention on the company’s record of tax avoidance — but also on their record of low pay and union-busting. These are issues which concern socialists and deserve our support.

As the union put it, “Amazon pay its staff as little as £6.20 per hour — just above the national minimum wage of £6.19 per hour. Staff complain to GMB about a culture of bullying and harassment endemic in the dataveillance that comes from staff being required to wear digital arm mounted terminals (AMTs) with no agreed protocols re breaks, speeds etc. Union activity has to be kept underground for fear of reprisals.”

But GMB have so far refrained from calling for a boycott of the company.

And they’re absolutely right — because this is not how you will compel Amazon to pay a living wage and recognize trade unions.

The boycott, like the strike, is one of the most powerful weapons in a trade union’s arsenal. It needs to be used with care — which is why unions very rarely use it.

For a boycott to be called, one should expect it to produce some kind of result. Calling a boycott that has no effect on a company’s profit may make boycotters feel worthy, but it distracts from the real issues.

Coca-Cola is a company that is often targetted by campaigners for boycotts — but the unions representing Coke workers have never called for such a boycott, and in some cases have outspokenly opposed one.

For a boycott of Amazon to be effective, it would need to make a dent in the company’s sales — something that seems rather unlikely considering just how vast the company has become in recent years.

A decade ago, when the Communication Workers of America were attempting to organize Amazon workers in the Pacific Northwest, a boycott might have had a chance. Not today.

Amazon made the news yet again this week, as reports came out of its maltreatment of temporary workers in Germany, where neo-Nazi thugs were hired by the company to “keep order” among the workers.

This, just like union-busting, low wages, contract labour and tax avoidance, are all good reasons to shop elsewhere if you can — but they are not grounds for a general boycott of the company.

So if we’re not boycotting Amazon, what can we do?

We can support the GMB and any other union that tries to organise workers there. We can publicise their appalling record on the living wage and union busting through the media. We can demand that Parliament fix a system which allows companies to legally avoid paying taxes despite earning billions of pounds in this country.

We can even help build alternatives by supporting left-wing bookshops, of which there are still several in the UK.

But signing up on Change.org to show your solidarity with some small bookshop owners in Coventry, or taking the personal decision to not shop at Amazon and then telling all your mates about how worthy that makes you, is little more than posturing.