Workers' Liberty

At least 15,000 students demonstrated in London on 26 October as part of the National Union of Students' campaign against top-up fees.

The right wing of Labour Students and its allies have run NUS for more than 20 years, resulting in defeat after defeat for the student movement. Since 1998, however, they have faced increasing opposition, with a united left slate challenging the Labour/"independent" leadership in the elections at every NUS conference.

By Rhodri Evans

In an opinion poll taken during the first two days of the congress of the LCR, fully 31% of French voters said they might vote for a revolutionary socialist candidate in next year's regional elections.

By Dale Street

David Blunkett is a worried man. He is worried that "community relations" might be "adversely affected by what may be seen in many quarters as continuing evasion and exploitation of immigration and asylum controls at significant cost to the taxpayer".

By Dave Osler

The things George says:
'A mass unifying movement of grassroots radicals to hobble the state, bring it under popular control and complete an unfinished radical democratic revolution. This level will unite Muslims, Christians, Jews, socialists, liberals and conservatives, men, women and the disadvantaged of all types in one movement of democratic liberation'.
From The Guardian

Revolutionary socialism in England signed its own suicide note last week, and it came in the unlikely shape of a billet-doux to George Galloway. The overwhelming majority of the far left south of the border has lined up behind a project that seeks not so much to put the working class in the saddle, as Orwell expressed it, but to put a £150,000-a-year Saudi-bankrolled crypto-tankie into Strasbourg. Bang goes the Trotskyist neighbourhood.

• Dodgy Dame caught out
• Trust me, I'm Alan Leighton
• Debtors of the world unite

By Lucy Clement

In Paul Burrell's position, let's face it, most people would do the same thing. Cash in. And why not? There's not much respect left for the British Royal Family to destroy, now the Queen Mum's dead and with her all that Blitz-heroine mythology.

It's a shame that Burrell's sticking to the tired old line of 'doing it for Diana', but after all those years as a flunkey it's probably too much to expect him suddenly to come out and declare yes, the Royals are a bunch of parasites and here's the inside story.

By Joan Trevor

French teachers, who waged an inspiring battle during the spring and summer against government attacks, have hit the headlines in the "rentrée scolaire" (back to school) not for their continued industrial militancy - things have gone fairly quiet on that front - but, in one school anyway, for excluding two young Muslim women from high-school for wearing a Muslim headscarf.

By a London postal worker

Postal workers have succeeded in giving Royal Mail bosses Leighton, Crozier and the rest of their mob a bloody nose in the fight over imposed conditions.

On every issue that provoked the unofficial strikes over more than two weeks up to 4 November, management has backed down: no victimisations, restoration of the Industrial Relations framework and national agreements. Clear-up of backlog on the basis of "fair and manageable workload", normal allocation of overtime and a commitment to achieving a national agreement on single delivery ("Major Change") by 10 December 2003 - instead of managers trying to impose savings locally without agreement.

Alice Nutter, from the rock band Chumbawamba was part of a No Sweat delegation that visited Puebla, Mexico, in September. No Sweat met independent trade union activists who are attempting to unionise the sweatshop factories in the region. This is part of Alice's report.

by Pablo Velasco

• Oscar Olivera wins case
• Urgent appeal for Chinese workers' leaders
• P Diddy uses sweatshops
• Brazilian car workers walk out
• Korean workers' demonstrations
• Colombian Coca Cola worker visit

A world of rich and poor

"Capital," wrote Marx, comes into the world "dripping from head to foot, from every pore, with blood and dirt." Global capital is bloody still-but on a grander scale than ever before.

By Clive Bradley

Muayad is a soft-spoken Iraqi who meets me in a busy railway station and insists that he pay for the coffee. When he recalls protests outside the offices of the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) in Baghdad, it's hard to imagine. "American soldiers were holding their guns on their chests and pointing them at our heads. If things had got out of control, we could have been killed."

Alan Johnson reviews Marx For Our Times: Adventures and Misadventures of a Critique by Daniel Bensaid
Read this review here.

Sacha Ismail reviews Diego Garcia In Times of Globalisation
Read this review here.

Cathy Nugent reviews Reclaim the State, Experiments in Popular Democracy by Hilary Wainwright
Read this review here.

Paul Hampton reviews Change the World Without Taking Power - The Meaning of Revolution Today by John Holloway
Read this review here.

By Vicki Morris

Here we are, tens of thousands of us, in Paris. We had a more or less long journey to get here, and from some regions we had a dangerous journey. Some of us had trouble getting permission to enter Fortress Europe; life will be harder for some of us when we get back home because we came here.

We paid good money to get in-those who paid three euros will count the cost the most. To get the most from the event, we will study the agendas and run around Paris and probably we will miss sleep. We will hear people we agree with and some that will make us very angry and some we simply don't understand. Then we will go away, more or less tired.

Jane Ryan looks at the political times of the American film director Elia Kazan, who died in September.

Elia Kazan was a great film director. His films were usually on the side of progress and humanity, and, in that sense, he was a man of the left. But his reputation with people on the left, even with liberals, has been blemished by one overwhelming fact: at the height of the 'McCarthyite' anti-communist witch-hunt in the USA, he appeared before the investigating committee as a 'friendly witness' - that is, one who 'named names' of others who had been in or around the US Communist Party at the same time as himself.

Martin Thomas attended the congress of the French Trotskyist group LCR (Revolutionary Communist League) in Paris on 31 October-2 November. This is his report.

A working-class "emergency plan" against unemployment, insecurity and poverty will be at the centre of French revolutionary socialists' campaign for the Euro-elections in June 2004 and France's regional elections in March 2004.

In 1986-7 Socialist Organiser, Solidarity's predecessor, carried a debate on "what is Zionism?", an issue recently discussed in this paper. In the last issue of Solidarity we reprinted some extracts from the 1986-7 debate. We print the rest here.

Julius Jacobson - Julie to his many friends and comrades - founder and editor for more than 40 years of the American socialist journal New Politics, died on 8 March 2003. In the first of three articles Barry Finger appraises his life. The articles first appeared in the Summer 2003 edition of New Politics.

It has been said that 25 years in the life of a small magazine is the equivalent of an individual attaining the age of one hundred. By that standard New Politics, for which Julie travailed to his last breath, has truly earned its place as one of the venerable mainstays of American radicalism.

• Heathrow hit by a 48-hour strike
• Vote yes! Strike for safety on the Tube!
• Remote sourcing - No to job losses! Yes to international trade union links

Vote yes! Strike for safety on the Tube!

It was "the largest left-wing demonstration the country has seen for years", according to the Israeli daily Haaretz.

Firefighters, postalworkers, Tube: Make it a Winter of Discontent!

By Gerry Bates

As Solidarity goes to press, more and more firefighters across the country are joining unofficial industrial action.

This battle comes just after the postalworkers' victory, through unofficial strikes, against Royal Mail bosses' attempt to impose unilateral changes in work conditions.

The Guardian's coverage of the expulsion of George Galloway from the Labour Party on 22 October was not only pro-Galloway, but notably uncritical. It took Galloway as he chose to present himself - as a left-wing martyr to the anti-war cause.

By Martin Thomas
The debate about "Zionism" currently running in Solidarity was taken to a meeting called by the Weekly Worker group in London on 26 October. Sean Matgamna spoke, and he, Sacha Ismail and I from the AWL responded to the polemics against us from the Weekly Worker people.

Solidarity works. Solidarity can win. That is the big lesson from the two and a half weeks of unofficial strikes by postal workers which ended on 4 November.
Royal Mail bosses are under pressure from the New Labour government, as it drives towards opening the postal service up to capitalist competition and ultimately privatising it.

The Passions, an exhibition by Bill Viola, National Gallery, London

The Passions is not all about the crucifixion of Jesus Christ, but it does take some of its inspiration from the iconography of early Christian religious art. Its subject is the nature of human emotion. Viola started the work in 2000 when his father was dying of cancer and this, according to the artist, accounts for the grief and sorrow in the work.