Workers' Liberty

By Paul Hampton

Paul Hampton assesses Fidel Castro’s legacy — the nature of the 1959 revolution and the social and political changes Cuba is now experiencing.

The overthrow of Batista in the last days of 1958 was a popular revolution that socialists and radicals everywhere supported. Batista had made Cuba a vassal of the US and held down the Cuban working class with repression and a compliant union bureaucracy.

His porcine cheeks ruddy with the burst veins of the long-haul serious whisky drinker, looking like an overfed pork butcher on a spree, Nick Griffin, Führer of the fascist British National Party, emerged from the Crown Court in Leeds spluttering with triumph and vindication. He praised the jury. He denounced the politicians. He told people how wonderful the BNP is.

By Paddy Dollard

John D. Rockefeller was the richest man in the world at the beginning of the 20th century. He ran Standard Oil, which had cornered control of almost the entire American oil industry.

At one point he controlled over 90% of the industry!

Born in 1839, John D. was one of the great “robber barons” who raped and pillaged the whole North American continent during the last third of the l9th century. Oil— which then meant paraffin for lamps, and would later mean fuel for internal combustion engines— was first drilled out of the ground on the eve of the US Civil War. As the industry grew, there were at first large numbers of small oil producers, and numerous oil refineries. But not for long.

John D. was a righteous man, all his life an active Baptist Christian and all his life a philanthropist— on a giant scale towards the end.

He saw in the early oil industry exactly what socialists saw in it— chaos and waste and irrationality. He set out to rationalise and organise it—not as social but private property, his private property.

He ate up the small companies, and combined the production, refining, marketing and transportation of oil in one huge cost-saving’ planned operation.

He fought with the ruthlessness of a general in battle to ruin his prey, forcing them to choose between economic ruin and joining his snowballing “operation”: they could have stock m return for surrender. Amongst those who were ruined in one of his victorious economic wars was John D’s own brother.

He reached one goal common to socialists and robber baron alike —the organisation and integration of an industry. But under his ownership, not that of the workers, and only in one industry, not in the economy as a whole.
Others did the same thing in other industries in the same way. But the overall economy remained chaotic, and the American and other economic giants operated in a world of increasingly fierce competition and international rivalries that would soon lead to World War I. How did John D. Rockefeller, whose name was the popular byword for riches, appear to his fellow citizens? He seemed to his fellow Americans of that age to be a freak and a villain. He was the most hated man in America, the personification of greed, and of all the other plundering robber barons.

In those days, there was a strong plebeian populism in the USA. The super rich were a new phenomenon. They had not yet learned to sell themselves “like soap powder” to the masses they plundered, short-changed, exploited and murdered.

It was only towards the end of his life that John D. Rockefeller discovered the uses of “Public Relations” specialists. The PR boys had him photographed singing hymns and playing golf and convinced a lot of people in his old age that John D. was not such a bad old bastard after all.

Rockerfeller’s near-monopoly of oil was broken by the opening of new oil fields in places like Texas that he fai1ed to control—and by US government action. On the eve of World War 11, the Republican Teddy Roosevelt administration, responding to populist pressure, took action, and the Supreme Court compelled Standard Oil to break itself into pieces.

This is effective political action against monopoly capitalism, crowed the populists. Those anti-monopolists who rejected the socialist contention that you cannot roll the film of capitalist development backwards. to an earlier pre-monopoly capitalism and that, therefore, the answer to monopoly is pubic ownership. But it wasn’t effective political action!

Within a decade, the fragments into which Standard Oil was divided had each grown to be giant semi-monopolies in their own right! That’s where Esso (Standard Oil of New Jersey), Mobil and Socal among other economic giants of today, came from. You cannot beat monopoly in the monopoly-capitalist stage by breaking it up! John D., who had shares in all the segments, saw his wealth continue to grow by leaps and bounds.

He lived to be 97, until 1937, inordinately well favoured even in years.

7: The Voyage of Vladimir Columbus
6: Who Says Cannibalising People Is Wrong?
5: The 1984-5 Miners'Strike and the Fate of the Pet Pig
4: Walking on the Moon:Wernher von Braun
3: And Shakespeare, Which Group Was He In?
1: Gangster Rap! Lenin and Joe Columbo

Indonesia

The People’s Democratic Party (PRD) in Indonesia is to form a new political party at the end of November, according to website of International Viewpoint. Then the National Liberation Party of Unity (PAPERNAS) will hold a founding congress.

The politics of denial

The editorial Maria Exall criticises in Solidarity 3/100 may have misunderstood and (inadvertently) misrepresented specific details about the Labour Party. But it is a matter of fact, surely, that there is now very little life in the Labour Party? Maria seems to me to be in a state of denial. She uses “nit-picking” facts, alleged facts and “factoids” to destructure and obfuscate the overall picture.

By David Broder

The demand for free education is often linked to the assertion that “education is a right, not a privilege”. The right of access to education for all represents a great social conquest for the working-class, a gain perhaps even akin to healthcare. That right must be defended. But it would be short-sighted to think that the education system represented everything we want, or was not in its own way alienating, a weapon in the armoury of bourgeois ideology designed to serve the needs of capital.

The fight in Parliament

While other so-called “Labour lefts” rally around the flag of the government at every opportunity, when the chips are down, John McDonnell has shown his refusal to tow the line at the expense of socialist principles.

By Paul Hampton

Daniel Ortega, the Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN) leader was re-elected president last week. But for all the flag waving, it’s clear that this is hardly a victory for the Nicaraguan working class.

By John O’Mahony

Tony Blair is again urging the Bush administration to make a new effort to settle the conflict in the Middle East. He has said publicly that resolving the Jewish-Palestinian conflict is an irreplaceable part of such a settlement.

By Jack Staunton

La lucha continua – the struggle continues! That’s the message from teachers, activists and other workers in Oaxaca, despite the wave of repression against them from Mexican police over the past two weeks.

By a socialist activist in Chicago

Few on the left could have failed to smile at the results of the US mid-term congressional elections on 7 November, which saw the Republicans lose control of both the House of Representatives and the Senate, and the Bush administration left isolated. Almost immediately, Donald Rumsfeld - Bush’s far right commissar in the Department of Defence and the man who Reagan sent to Iraq to sell guns to Saddam Hussein - announced his resignation, to shouts of joy from anti-war activists around the world.

By Jim Denham and Dan Nichols

Socialist Worker claimed that the Respect-organised Organising for Fighting Unions conference on 11 November would be “the biggest unofficial gathering of rank and file trade unionists since the mid-1980s”.

STOP PRESS: THE JJB STRIKERS HAVE SUSPENDED STRIKE ACTION PENDING NEGOTIATIONS ABOUT A NEW OFFER FROM THEIR BOSSES. MORE INFORMATION AS WE HAVE IT.

280 GMB members at the Wigan warehouse which supplies all 430 JJB Sports shops in the UK are striking against a millionaire boss who describes their demand for all workers to receive an equal wage of at least £6.50 an hour as “the communist way — cuckoo land!”

"We deplore the decision...to impose the death penalty on Saddam Hussein" - Amnesty International

By Sacha Ismail

Saddam Hussein, the former dictator of Iraq, has been sentenced to death for crimes against humanity. Of such crimes, there can be no doubt, he is guilty.

By Robin Sivapalan

Two thousand five hundred Metroline drivers finally slammed the brakes on their bosses’ profiteering on 14 November, venting years of frustration in a solid strike on 96 bus routes across north-west London,

By Martin Thomas

A conference of left-wing trade unionists on 11 November, initiated by the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) under the auspices of their “Respect” coalition with George Galloway MP, discussed a “workers’ charter”.

By John O'Mahony

Peter Fryer, who died on 31 October a few months short of his 80th birthday, is known now as the author of important books such as his history of black people in Britain, Staying Power. He once played an important part in the revolutionary socialist movement.