INTRODUCTION

Welcome to the latest installment in my series of posts about Marxism 2015, the five-day political festival in central London, organised by the Socialist Workers Party. In this post, which I hope some of you will enjoy enough to share, I shall be covering the last two regular meetings before the final rally.

TWO SPLENDID MEETINGS

HOW BIG PHARMA STOPS US MAKING PROGRESS

This meeting, in Nunn Hall, where a lot of the meetings that appealed to me seemed to be taking place, was an excellent start to the final day of this great event.

I will limit myself to one story from that meeting – a tale of how 73 trials of which 37 gave the right result and 36 the wrong were spun by a combination of suppression and deceit into 48 successful trials and 3 failures – this is how the pharmaceutical industry chooses to conduct itself.

PEGIDA AND THE FIGHT AGAINST RACISM, FASCISM AND ISLAMAPHOBIA IN GERMANY

This was the last of the regular meetings I attended at the event, and it was superb. The main speaker, Christine Buchholz, a member of Die Linke talked about the rapid rise of Pegida and then the counter to them – appearing everywhere they did in bigger numbers. This of course is the way the Anti-Nazi League in this country dealt with the National Front and then in the 1990s with the first rise of the BNP, also how Unite Against Fascism dealt with the EDL and the second rise of the BNP – confront them, never let them have a moment’s peace and make it abundantly clear that there are more of us than there are of them. Check out this early blog post of mine on the matter.

Mention was also made of the brief and spectacularly ill-starred Pegida UK, which was really the absolute rump of the EDL and BNP, and never gathered any momentum. For examples of what happens of you do not take these people head on Holland and Austria where there are very major fascist organizations were cited (France with Front National being too well known to need much of a mention).

Here are some final photos…