Workers' Liberty

Revolt against the Islamic Republic

Every week sees a new strike in Iran. The lives of many workers have been devastated by the neo-liberal policies of the reactionary clerical government. Since 10 June Iranian students have been protesting against religious dictatorship as well as plans to privatise higher education in Iran. They have been attacked by the security services and many have been arrested. Yassamine Mather from Workers' Left Unity Iran analyses the political background.

By Lucy Clement

Italy’s “moderate” trade unions have scuppered an attempt to extend employment rights to workers in small businesses.

A massive campaign by Rifondazione Comunista and the left-wing trade union CGIL succeeded in forcing a referendum on the extension of Article 18 of Italy’s labour law — which protects workers from unfair dismissal.

Convened by Socialist Campaign Group of Labour MPs

Saturday 5 July 2003, 9.30am - 4.30pm

TUC Congress House, Great Russell St, London

By Harry Glass

The Indonesian military is making heavy work of its assault on Aceh, according to reports in the Australian socialist paper, Green Left Weekly.

After claiming significant progress in its operation to crush the Free Aceh Movement (GAM), the Indonesian military lost seven soldiers in an ambush in northern Aceh. It was the highest number of casualties the military has suffered since martial law was declared on 19 May.

By Jack Cleary

With an imminent split in the David Trimble-led Unionist Party, prospects of an early resurrecting of the suspended Northern Ireland power-sharing Executive faded further this week.

By Martin Thomas

Peter Hain touched a nerve. However hard the New Labour government is trying to shake off its "control-freak" image, it could not stop itself shrieking when minister Hain made the mild suggestion that the very best-off might pay 50p income tax on each additional pound stuffed into their bulging wallets, rather than 40p.

"Revolutionary ardour in the struggle for socialism is inseparable from intellectual ardour in the struggle for truth".
Leon Trotsky, "Trotskyism and the PSOP"

• French strikes over: we'll be back

• 50th anniversary of East German uprising
• Strike wave in South Korea tests the new president
• Zimbabwe extends strike bans
• Demonstration against Lula's government
• Cambodian police kill demonstrators
• No jobs for sacked Venezuelan oil workers
• Celebrate 100 years of the car industry?
• ICFTU figures for deaths of trade unionists

• Working in a whorehouse

• “Best practice”?
• “Sensitive area”
• New Labour: widening the poverty gap

By Mick Duncan

In a recent interview, Nike boss Phil Knight revealed the obscene degree to which this massive company is built around enormous payments for celebrity-sportstar endorsements.

By Nick Holden

This year's Tolpuddle Festival is on Friday 18-Sunday 20 July, at Tolpuddle, Dorset. It is a heady mixture of music, drama and politics, uniting people across the country in a celebration of the trade union movement, and the memory of the Tolpuddle Martyrs.

By Vicki Morris

On Sunday 21 June, in the early morning, Jose Bové was dragged from his bed by armed police and taken away to prison by helicopter.


The spokesperson of the French radical farmers’ union, the Farmers’ Confederation, is starting a 10-month jail sentence for destroying GM crops in 1998 and 1999. He had been hoping for a pardon for these offences—half a million people wrote to the French president requesting it—but Jacques Chirac—nicknamed “super-menteur” [“super-liar”], with all manner of corrupt deals in his past, but immune from prosecution while he is president—has not seen fit to pardon Bové.

On Wednesday 25 June six British soldiers and 80 Iraqis were killed in during two ambushes south of Amara in southern Iraq. The press could not say who — Ba’ath Party militia or its Shia opponents — was involved. The US-UK “liberation” of Iraq has required a lot of heavy policing. It is now coming under fierce attack...

An unemployed workers’ group has been set up in Iraq. Here is their statement:

Documenting the Spanish Civil War

Chris Hickey begins a two-part feature about the politics and work of George Orwell

Born 100 years ago and dying in 1950, it is difficult to think of an English writer in the last 100 years who has aroused stronger feelings and been the subject of more political dispute than George Orwell. Yet the fame and controversy that surround Orwell’s name essentially derive from just two books, Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four, produced in the last 6 or 7 years of his life.

• Two pleas for unity in action

• Protestant autonomy: imperialist prop?

A plea for unity in action

A bother, upset and disappointment I have is to see the continuing 'spat' between the many 'left'/Marxist groups. All seem to concentrate not on a main enemy, capitalism, but on each other.

By Duncan Morrison

More than 160 activists gathered for Workers’ Liberty’s annual Ideas for Freedom summer school, 21–22 June. The event gathers socialists to discuss both contemporary and historical issues.

Not all our supporters agreed with Solidarity’s emphasis and use of slogans during the recent war on Iraq. The following contribution is by Mark Sandell. It was written in May. We will print responses in the next issue. We welcome other short contributions on this topic.

In this comment, an Algerian socialist, Chedid Khairy, takes issue with the attitude to Islamic fundamentalism in the anti-war movement of the British SWP and its international co-thinkers.

The comment is translated from no.3 of Solidal, the newsletter of the French movement Solidarités Alternatives Algérie, in which a leading part is played by members resident in France of the Algerian PST [Socialist Workers' Party, no relation to the British SWP, but connected with the Ligue Communiste Révolutionnaire in France].

Alan Johnson concludes his appreciation of the Marxist historian who wrote about the 17th century and the English Revolution


We have to be careful in appropriating Hill's history-writing. He is contradictory and uncertain on some crucial questions. In parts of his oeuvre Hill is not alive to the qualitative difference between a bourgeois and a working class revolution. The former is necessarily minoritarian and self-deluding. The latter is necessarily majoritarian and self-conscious. Hill (rather like Isaac Deutscher) tended to conflate the two and read the dynamics of the former onto the latter. But in other places Hill is clear that on the left wing of the bourgeois revolution emerged something entirely new in human history, the presentiment of self-emancipation.

By Robert Coster

You noble Diggers all, stand up now, stand up now,
You noble Diggers all, stand up now,
The waste land to maintain, seeing Cavaliers by name
Your digging does disdain, and persons all defame
Stand up now, Stand up now.

Your houses they pulldown, stand up now, stand up now,
Your houses they pull down, stand up now.
Your houses they pull down to fight poor men in town,

Sean Matgamna continues his article on 'The last time we were heresy-hunted', dealing with the campaign against us in 1983 by the Workers’ Revolutionary Party — then a high-profile group with a daily paper, Newsline — for pointing to circumstantial evidence that they were being funded by the Libyan and Iraqi dictatorships. They were — the truth came out soon after, in 1985, when the WRP imploded — but that did not stop them campaigning, or a section of the “broad left” supporting their campaign.

The FBU pay dispute ended on 12 June.

Worn down by government and media propaganda, and government threats to impose a settlement, and demoralised by their executive's refusal to fight, firefighters and control operators around the country had reluctantly accepted the employers' latest offer.

At a conference in Glasgow on 12 June their reps, most with great bitterness, respected their mandates and voted 3:1 for the executive's 'accept' motion.

Here we print the motion and those put up in opposition to it, and assessments by firefighters of the dispute and the future.

By Pete Keenlyside

In an era when trade union leaders were household names, Tom Jackson, who died this month aged 78, stood out from the rest. This was partly due to his appearance - the trademark handlebar moustache - partly due to the fact that he appeared regularly on TV panel programmes but mainly because he was general secretary of the postal workers union (then UPW, now CWU) during the 7-week strike in 1971.

By a GPMU member

The Graphical Paper and Media Union held its biennial delegate conference last week in Bournemouth. It was totally dominated by a debate on the future of the union in the face of membership loss and impending financial crisis.

By a PCS member

The Executive election in the civil service union PCS is now entering its final stages. The votes have to be in by noon on the 3 July. Given that the return envelope is second class, the effective last day to vote is 1 July.

By Ed Whitby, delegate, Newcastle City Unison

Unison conference (17-20 June) was more about promises than policies. General Secretary Dave Prentis spent the run up to conference talking about “reclaiming the Labour Party” and working with others in the “awkward squad” of union leaders.

The ghost of our former Deputy General Secretary (Postal) John Keggie is still with us. The deal that his successor, Dave Ward, has done on the Tailored Delivery System has all the hallmarks of a classic John Keggie deal - 12,000 job cuts and a "two bob" bonus scheme. Well there's no doubt as to who's being stitched up here. Ward managed to force the deal through CWU Conference (the vote on the job cuts element was carried by just 7,444 votes to 7,394) but getting postalworkers in delivery offices to accept the huge increases in workloads which will come is another matter.

By a CWU member

The productivity bonus scheme for BT Customer Service engineers, "Self Motivated Teams", has been rejected by members of the Communication Workers Union three times this year - at a Special Conference of activists in January, in a consultative ballot of engineers affected in February, and in the mandate given to the Executive in the ballot to take industrial action against SMT in April. When strike action was derailed by management's use of the the anti-union laws, the union has lost ground on the issue among the members.

Stop the testing torture!

By Patrick Yarker

Conference against SATs
11.30-3.30, Saturday 28 June
South Camden Community School, Charrington Road, London.
Nearest Tube: King’s Cross/Euston

By Sam Ruby

The Government has rejected the recommendations of two Parliamentary Committees that parents should be banned from smacking their children. So it is an outrage for a husband to hit his wife and cruelty when someone kicks a pet dog…- yet it is okay for adults to physically hurt children?

On this issue reason and logic have never played a part in the decisions of policy makers.