Of runes and men

In the first of a series of articles on the troubled relationship between the left and culture, Maciej Zurowski investigates reactionary musical counterculture and looks at the anti-fascist response

Warning! Attention, everybody! It looks like for the first time since the 80s, London’s ethnic communities must fear for their safety when certain rock bands come to town. As the Love Music, Hate Racism website warns us in bold letters, the Slimelight club in Islington, North London has booked a “set of acts with fascist ties” for October 2011. These include Peter Sotos, who “has written tributes to Joseph Mengele (also known as the Angel of Death in Auschwitz) and whose self-produced fanzine contains references to ‘Nazi triumphs’, with frequent and lurid references to the abuse of children and women.”[i] Scary stuff.

Weekly Worker issue 917 - June 07 2012

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Bolshevism and revolutionary social democracy

Lars T Lih completes his series of articles on Lenin's view of the party question by examining the context in 1920 of `Leftwing` communism

Lenin’s pamphlet ‘Leftwing’ communism - his last work of more-than-article size - was written in spring 1920 in order to be distributed to the delegates of the 2nd Congress of the Communist International, or Comintern. The message that Lenin intended to send cannot be understood apart from the particular circumstances of this event.

Letters

Stop sneering; State of denial; No go-to guy; Sectarianism; No free speech; Linke update;

The Fourth International and failed perspectives

Mike Macnair reviews Daniel Bensa

Last-chance saloon closing for business

Spain`s `total emergency` could bring down the entire euro zone, argues Eddie Ford

The New Iranian Cinema

Politics, representation and identity

READ THIS BOOK IN AMAZON

Ed: Richard Tapper. IB Taurus London, 2002

Iranian cinema is triumphant in the international film festival circuit. The Iranian cinema is in deep crisis. Both are true and interlinked realities about film and film-making in Iran today. This remarkable book goes some way to explain this apparent paradox.

In its early days the Islamists were intensely opposed to the cinema which they saw as spearheading the Shah and the West’s cultural assault on the country. Hamid Naficy expresses it as subscribing to a ‘hypodermic theory’ of ideology, the mere injection of which transforms an ‘ethical’ being into a corrupt ‘subject’. Perhaps the most vivid, and repulsive, illustration of this hatred is the torching of Cinema Rex in Abadan when over 600 of the trapped audience burned to death. In the course of the revolution 195 of the 525 cinemas were demolished - 32 in Teheran alone.

Yet within less than two decades Iranian cinema is being hailed as the new wave, earning laurels at one international film festival after another and labelled by the director of the New York Film Festival in 1992 as “one of the most exciting in the world today”. What caused this transformation form pariah to the pedestal?

Sex workers are doing it for themselves

“Because sex workers shouldn’t be dead to be on film”, argued the promo blurb for London’s first Sex Worker Film Festival. And who aside from Henry of Portrait of a Serial Killer could disagree? Organised by the Sex Worker Open University, a “grassroots collective” of sex workers, academics and activists, the declared goal was to challenge the stereotypical representations of strippers and hookers as  vulnerable “fallen angels” or “shallow, manipulative and without ethics”. Sandwiched between donation appeals and Q&A sessions with activists, the sold-out event presented 11 shorts and drew in a diverse, polysexual crowd to East London’s Rio Cinema.

A PEOPLE'S HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES by Howard Zinn

Chapter 1: COLUMBUS, THE INDIANS, AND HUMAN PROGRESS

Arawak men and women, naked, tawny, and full of wonder, emerged from their villages onto the island's beaches and swam out to get a closer look at the strange big boat. When Columbus and his sailors came ashore, carrying swords, speaking oddly, the Arawaks ran to greet them, brought them food, water, gifts. He later wrote of this in his log:

They ... brought us parrots and balls of cotton and spears and many other things, which they exchanged for the glass beads and hawks' bells. They willingly traded everything they owned... . They were well-built, with good bodies and handsome features.... They do not bear arms, and do not know them, for I showed them a sword, they took it by the edge and cut themselves out of ignorance. They have no iron. Their spears are made of cane... . They would make fine servants.... With fifty men we could subjugate them all and make .