50,000 joined a TUC march in Manchester on 29 September, in support of the NHS and against Tory government policies.

The biggest contingent was from the public services union Unison. Other unions, trades councils, and campaigns had contingents; there were some local Labour Party banners, and a Green Party contingent; there was also a group of some hundred with banners and placards against the badger cull.

On the night of Friday 27 September, at least fifteen police officers turned up at Royal Holloway Students’ Union in Surrey, and set about the profiling and searching of students attending a freshers’ week SU night.

This included both uniformed cops with tasers and sniffer dogs and, even more bizarrely, undercover police disguised as students.

Workers of the world, awaken!
Break your chains. demand your rights.
All the wealth you make is taken
By exploiting parasites.

Shall you kneel in deep submission
From your cradles to your graves?
ls the height of your ambition
To be good and willing slaves?

CHORUS:
Arise, ye prisoners of starvation!
Fight for your own emancipation;
Arise, ye slaves of every nation.
In One Union grand.

From La Verite, 30 Sep 1944, the paper of the Trotskyist Internationalist Communist Party.

Contact: hlthompson87@googlemail.com 07527 064 326

WHEN? Every Monday night, 7pm

WHERE? University College London, Pearson room G17, enter via Quad on Gower Street

Leon Trotsky was a revolutionary socialist who played a central role in the 1905 and 1917 Russian Revolutions and later became one of the most prominent critics of the Stalinist degeneration of the USSR. He faced imprisonment and exile and was eventually murdered by a Stalinist assassin in 1940.

A strike bulletin written by AWL teachers.

Click here to download the PDF.

Introduction: In 1919 it looked to many - to Lenin and Trotsky, for instance - as if the capitalist system was breaking down and that a working class revolution was beginning, at least in Europe. There was tremendous working class militancy all across Europe. Short-lived Soviet Republics were set up in Hungary and Bavaria.

The program of the anti-Communist revolution in Eastern Europe can be summed up in one word: democracy. And its content can be summed up in one phrase: democratic socialism.

Today this can be asserted not as a hypothesis, a theory or a hope, but as a fact demonstrated and confirmed by every one of the great revolutionary movements which have challenged the rule of the Stalinist bureaucracy for the past decade and a half.

At midnight on Tuesday 17 September, anti-fascist musician Paul Fyssas was knifed to death in Piraeus, near Athens, by a fascist, Giorgos Roupakas.

Thirty thugs from the fascist Golden Dawn movement were waiting outside the cafe where Paul was watching a football match. They had been mobilised by mobile phone.

Thirty against one! And even then, they relied on their chosen thug, Roupakas, to do the killing.

Then Roupakas’s party disowned him. Pretended not to know him!

On 23 September Labour Party conference passed a motion against the public sector pay freeze, which the Labour leaders have promised to continue, and for the Living Wage to be made law.

Speaking for the motion, Dave Prentis, general secretary of the public services union Unison, called for “a clear unambiguous Labour promise to turn a statutory minimum wage into a living wage”. He continued: “The pay freeze must end. No ifs, no buts — a clear commitment to end the Tory pay freeze”.