Workers' Liberty

By Gerry Bates

Vast numbers of Americans and millions of American workers feel the same way about Bush as we do.

They did not vote for him - his opponent in the Presidential election, the Democrat Al Gore, got more votes than Bush did. It was dirty-dealing and chicanery by his brother Jeb, Governor of Florida, that put George Bush in the White House, not a majority of those who voted in the 2000 election.

The majority who voted, voted against Bush. Millions did not vote at all!

• Wrong number?
• Black's dead, long live...?
• Making the links

The government won the vote on foundation hospitals in the House of Commons on 19 November by 302 votes to 285, a majority of only 17 votes. There were 62 Labour rebels.

"Choice" is one of the watchwords of the Blair government. In politics, "choice" is one of the key defining words between left and right. Ministers endlessly harping on about "choice", in the NHS and elsewhere, define the Blair government as a government of the right, not the left.

By Lucy Clement

Could the Sun win it again for the Tories? That's the tantalising prospect held out to new party leader Michael Howard by News International boss Rupert Murdoch this week.

It was a clever piece of news management on Murdoch's part. All week rival papers had been printing critical stories about the appointment of his son James as Chief Executive. What better way to deflect them than with a juicy alternative story to run?

By Jim Bywater

On Monday 17 November the Dean of Students at UC Berkeley, Karen Kenney turned the clock back decades by approving sanctions against three Berkeley students for their part in a peaceful campus sit-in on 20 March. (For more details about the event and the "trial" go to www.antiwarnetwork.org)

On Sunday 15 November two synagogues in Istanbul were car-bombed, killing 23 people and injuring about 300. The same day, buildings of a Jewish boys' school in Gagny, near Paris, were burned down.

The day before, Germany's main conservative party, the Christian Democratic Union, finally voted to expel one of its MPs for an anti-semitic speech he had made on 3 October. A German army general had already been sacked from his post for backing the MP.

Mickey Conn, University of Sheffield student

Nearly two hundred students, including Alliance for Workers' Liberty members, occupied the University of Sheffield's cash office on 4 November in a protest over new and increased hall fees.

By Mick Duncan

In between marching, trying out the cheapest wine on sale and getting lost, No Sweat participated in two sessions at the European Social Forum (12-15 November).

The first was organised by the Clean Clothes Campaign on codes of conduct and corporate responsibility. The seminar was in three parts, with academics, campaigners and trade unionists on the panel. No Sweat tried to appeal to the newly enlightened audience to get active in taking on sweatshop exploitation and to support the Tarrant workers, still sacked and blacklisted in Mexico.

Saturday 29-Sunday 30 November

University of Sheffield Students' Union

Read on for the full programme...

Saturday

12-12.45 Registration
Plus film showing - Harvard Living Wage Sit-in

Controversial plans for Turkish forces to occupy Iraq as peacekeepers have been abandoned.

The plans, which were voted through by Turkey's National Assembly in October, received widespread opposition from Iraq's US-installed interim Governing Council, Kurdish and Islamic leaders, and much of the Turkish public and media.

By Mark Osborn

A key question of the 21st century is how the unity of activists and trade unionists across national frontiers can be forged. Capital is well organised and protected. How can we be better organised?

And how can the left help the new labour movements in countries like China build?

The No Sweat conference in Sheffield, over the weekend of 29-30 November, will be a good place for activists to take stock of our achievements, swap ideas, debate and plan future activities. It is an arena where trade unionists and anti-capitalist young people can meet up with environmentalists and anti-sweatshop camapigners. You must be there.

By Harry Glass

Tens of thousands of Korean workers staged a one-day general strike on 12 November against the government's anti-working class policies.

The Korean Confederation of Trade Unions (KCTU) said more than 150,000 of its members joined the one-day walkout - including more than 25,000 workers from the Hyundai Motor Company. Demonstrations took place in 20 cities across the country, despite the police banning street rallies.

By Clive Bradley

The suicide attack on a police station in Nasiriyah, which left 19 Italian soldiers and 8 Iraqis dead, confirmed the pattern of recent weeks. The violent resistance to the US-led occupation, which seems to consist mainly of those loyal to the dictatorship of Saddam Hussein, has increased the scale of its attacks. A week earlier, another bomb laid waste to the Red Cross in Baghdad - one of four that day; the day before, a missile hit a hotel where Donald Rumsfeld was staying.

Matt Wrack, London Region FBU, told Solidarity about the importance of the National Officer elections

The National Officer election ballot is extremely important. It is an opportunity for ordinary members to influence the direction the union is going to take in the coming period.

Paul Woolstenholmes, Brigade Secretary of the Suffolk Fire Brigades Union (FBU), spoke to Nick Holden about the ballot which the union has called to accept or reject the employers' plan to pay the current 7% instalment of their wages deal in two stages, 3.5% now and the other 3.5%, backdated, only after 'verification' of changed work conditions.

Between 17 July and 10 August 1903, in the course of 37 sesssions, the Russian Social-Democratic Labour Party held its Second Congress in Brussels and London. In reality this was the first, the constituent, congress of the RSDLP. The 'First Congress' held in March 1898 in Minsk had lasted one day and all nine delegates were arrested! The 'party' it proclaimed existed only as scattered, uncoordinated local groups and circles.

By Vicki Morris

That 50,000 people registered for the European Social Forum in Paris is moving.

The following letter (slightly abridged here) has been sent to the Stop the War Coalition. It raises important issues which need to be widely discussed.


As Jewish anti-war activists, who support the work of the Stop the War Coalition and value its achievements in mobilising so many people, we write to express our grave disappointment and concern about how the coalition's officers handled the clash between the STWC demonstration and Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, on 27th September… we are raising this issue in the hope that errors which have undermined the STWC can be acknowledged and steps taken to ensure that they are not repeated in the future. We believe that the issues raised by recent events are of concern not only to Jewish anti-war activists but to the STWC and the anti-war movement as a whole.

Victor Navasky, in his classic study Naming Names, reported a story about Elia Kazan. In 1955, after Arthur Miller had completed A View From The Bridge. Miller sent a copy to Elia Kazan. The play is about a Sicilian waterfront worker who in a jealous rage informs on his nephew's 'illegal' immigration status. Kazan had directed Miller's Broadway hits - All My Sons and Death of A Salesman - but had broken with him over the issue of naming 'communists' to the McCarthyite House of Unamerican Activities Committee. Kazan had named names - and destroyed lives.

Julius Jacobson - Julie to his many friends and comrades - was the founder and editor of the American socialist journal, New Politics. He died in March of this year. Barry Finger continues his appreciation of his life and work.

During the 1950s Julie became editor of The New International - a journal of the Independent Socialist League/Workers' Party, the Trotskyist organisation founded by Max Schachtman. But by the middle 50s, Shachtman was shifting rapidly to the right purportedly in pursuit of new opportunities for movement-building.

By Cathy Nugent

Government social policy has focussed heavily on issues to do with 'the family'. Some of this is warm and friendly - policy geared towards balancing work and family life, for instance. Some of it is more aggressive - measures to tackle problem, 'anti-social' families: parents who don't get their children to school or teenagers who roam the streets after 9pm.

By Nick Holden

The simmering firefighters' dispute is reaching a decisive phase, with a consultative ballot over what both the employers and the FBU's negotiators claim is the 'final' offer.

Thousands of police will cram the streets as George W Bush visits Britain.

And so will many tens of thousands of people very angry about Bush's bombing of Afghanistan and Iraq, his military build-up, and his blocking of the Kyoto agreement on the environment.

by David Rees, Serpents Tail

Acerbic - like hydrochloric acid is acerbic. That is the only way to describe these cartoons. Rees started producing his cartoon strips shortly after 9/11 and puts them out via his website. Rees documents the anxieties of American society and savages the politics of the Bush administration. His strips are all set inside the office of a nameless corporation and feature stiffs in suits making personal phone-calls to each other. This is not satire for the squeamish, and the politics sometimes jarred with me. Still Rees's work is very much a reflection of the insecure and unequal world we live in.

The Coen Brothers do romantic comedy? The same Coen brothers who did Fargo, Brother Where Art Thou and other strange, unpredictable, wry takes on life in contemporary America? Not likely, surely?

Don't worry, this is a terrific film - a modern Hollywood screwball comedy. The original screwball comedies were made during Great Depression of the 1930s and were both a comment on the world where there is rich and poor and also medication for the poor - wealth and true love could be obtained by anyone. Sexual role-playing and class reversals were the hallmark ingredients.

by Tariq Ali (Verso)

Tariq Ali, who achieved fame as figurehead of the Vietnam Solidarity Campaign in the 1960s, recently wrote in the Guardian: "It [the Anglo-US presence] is an ugly occupation, and this determines the response... The key fact of the resistance is that it is decentralised - the classic first stage of guerrilla warfare against an occupying army. Yesterday's downing of a US Chinook helicopter follows that same pattern. Whether these groups will move to the second stage and establish an Iraqi National Liberation Front remains to be seen."