Workers' Liberty

This is a useful analysis of the coup in Honduras, from the Solidarity (US) website - publishers of Against the Current.

http://www.solidarity-us.org/hondurascoup

This article is from the Venezuelanalysis website:
http://www.venezuelanalysis.com/news/4156

Two Workers Killed During Factory Occupation in Venezuela
by Tamara Pearson

The antinomies of eco-socialism

We should mark the passing for Brian Pearce, who died recently. The Guardian carried his obituary today.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2008/dec/11/brian-pearce-obituary-communist-history/print

This report is from Venezuelanalysis
http://www.venezuelanalysis.com/newsbrief/4015

Another trade union leader, Simon Caldera, was assassinated Tuesday in the state of Aragua, in Venezuela.

Unwilling to debate the AWL in public, the so-called CPGB continues its snipping at us from the safe distance of its paper.

Richard Gallardo, Luis Hernández and Carlos Requena, members of the Unidad Socialista de Izquierda (USI, United Socialist Left) and of the UNT trade union federation in Venezuela have been killed.

The pathetic intervention of the CPGB at the AWL-Machover on Sunday has been followed by an even more pathetic write up in its paper, the Weekly Worker (16 October).

It is an irony of history that Jack London should be remembered today mainly for dog stories - the children’s fictional stories Call of the Wild (1903) and White Fang (1905) remain his best-known wo

The prize for the most hysterical response to Sean’s article on Israel, Iran and nuclear weapons goes inevitably to the CPGB (Weekly Worker, 31 July).

A year ago Mansour Osanloo, President of the Vahed Syndicate – the Tehran Bus Workers’ Union was arrested.

If you missed the “Black Power Salute” film on BBC 4 last night you missed one of the best hours television for ages.

Two reasons to cheer in Venezuela recently, as socialists restarted the task of building an independent workers’ party, separate from Chavez’s ruling bourgeois PSUV.

I’m not a great one for polls, given the skewed questions and the dodgy sociological categories, but among the general gloom in recent polls on the environment, one finding stood out.

Chavistas try to split UNT

Pro-Chavez union leaders backed by the Labor Ministry have launched a new trade union centre in Venezuela – though it is not clear whether they will succeed.

The opinions of William Morris on what we now call ecology are important in any assessment of him as a political thinker in his own time.

Morris was a political activist, and although his personal life was informed by his socialist politics, he did not see lifestyle or consumer behaviour as a substitute for political action.

Morris was more coherent when commenting more concretely on housing under socialism. In The Housing of the Poor, an article published in Justice, (19 July 1884), he wrote:

Morris apparently disliked urban living before he became a socialist, and he appears to have carried over this attitude into his socialist activity. In an early article in Justice, entitled Why Not?

On transport, Morris was even more a prisoner of his time.

Morris had less to say of contemporary relevance on energy, which is hardly surprising since renewables were barely even dreamt of when he was politically active.

One of the great myths about Morris is that he was hostile to technology.

Another of Morris’ contributions to Marxism was his positive conception of work under socialism. Not for Morris - as for his contemporary Paul Lafargue – the right to be lazy.

Perhaps Morris’ most significant breakthrough was to identify working class action and the socialist movement more generally as the essential social agents in protecting the environment.

Morris held to a materialist appreciation of the connection between human productive activity and the ruination of the environment.

Morris had read Marx’s Capital in French by 1884 – an authorised English edition was still to be properly translated at this time.

Sometime in 1882, William Morris decided he was no longer a radical and began to associate himself explicitly with socialism.

Morris made his name as an artist and as a poet, and his commitment to conservation was expressed through his work.

William Morris was one of the outstanding Marxists in the period after Marx’s death.

Perhaps a better approach is to accept what Morris said about himself and look at what he wrote and did for the last thirteen years of his life.