Workers' Liberty

• Nausea #1

• Big Con
• Nausea #2
• Ask a stupid question
• Checkout all-out!

By Kate Ferguson

As Bush was being shown the very best of British hospitality by Blair, students from across the capital took to the streets on 20 November in a demonstration against Bush and the invasion of Iraq.

An ideal Xmas gift

Marx: with quote 'The emancipation of the working class must be the act of the workers themselves.'
In khaki, grey, aqua

Trotsky: with 'Third Camp' quote
In aqua and white

Sizes: medium, large and extra large

£11 including post and packing, from AWL, PO Box 823, London, SE15 4NA.

In the Northern Irish elections, Sinn Fein has emerged as the biggest party on the Catholic-Nationalist side and their political polar opposites, Ian Paisley's Democratic Unionist Party, as the biggest party on the Protestant-Unionist side.

The Good Friday Agreement stipulates majority consent in each of the two communities as a condition without which no Northern Irish government can be set up. The Democratic Unionist Party opposed the Good Friday Agreement and now demands that it be "renegotiated". What seems to follow is that restoration of Belfast government - which has been suspended for more than a year - is now an impossibility.

By Lucy Clement

The writer Somerset Maugham once described in rather disparaging terms how the Americans managed to converse without thinking. It was no doubt unfair at the time, and remains unfair to most Americans, at least those outside the current administration. But Maugham's description of a conversation consisting of "pithy and hackneyed phrases" which leave the mind "free to consider the more important matters of big business and fornication" gives a rather good summary of Tony Blair's all-new scaled-up focus group initiative: The Big Conversation.

By Pablo Velasco

• Israel: attacks on unions

• Korean unions defend migrant workers
• Salonika seven free, for now

Israel: attacks on unions

The Israeli government is preparing to dock the wages of workers taking industrial action, and introduce anti-union laws.

Between 17-21 November protests against the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA) negotiations took place in Miami, with thousands traveling to the city to join local activists in demonstrating against the agreement and the consequences of free trade.

Environmentalists, anarchists, animal liberationists, trade unionists and students were among those making up the many demonstrations and teach-ins that took place.

By Labour Behind the Label

"They lock the gates on us and sometimes put security guards out in front with rifles to prevent us from leaving," said Jacqueline, as she described the method her employer uses to force workers to work over 10 hours a day without compensation. "The supervisors would yell and curse at us to finish our quota. My daily quota is sewing 90 dozen zippers on pants for 80 gourds [$2 US]."

By Stan Crooke

Three weeks of popular protest in the Caucasian republic of Georgia culminated in the resignation of its president, Eduard Shevardnadze, on 23 November.

Shevardnadze was a Communist Party bureaucrat turned "democrat". He had joined the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) in 1948 and rose steadily through its ranks. By 1972 he had become head of the CPSU in Georgia.

Argentine police attacked the workers and their supporters on 25 November in scenes reminiscent of the military dictatorship. The assault took place in Neuquén, where members of the Unemployed Workers Movement (MTD) and the local neighbourhood assembly in San Lorenzo barrio were trying to meet.

I am a 23 year old Israeli Trotskyist. It is good to read your reports and analyses, including the ones on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. I must say it is refreshing to find out that there is a revolutionary left in Britain that does not seek to "destroy" the state of Israel and establish a "secular and democratic state of Palestine". As a revolutionary socialist, this is certainly not my political aim. Thus many socialists in Israel define themselves as "Zionists"; but there is genuine gap between their definition of Zionism and the practice of the Zionist movement headed by its official political parties.

By Cathy Nugent

On 10 December a "loya jirga", a 500-strong assembly of regional and other delegates, will meet in Afghanistan to discuss a new constitution for the country.

The draft constitution is a sketchy document which seems to propose a hybrid state, incorporating a model of an Islamic Republic - "there will be no laws contrary to Islam" - alongside a bourgeois democracy, with a bourgeois rule of law. There will be a bicameral legislature with enormous powers for the President. Nowhere in the document are explicit equal rights for women written down. Once (or perhaps, if) the constitution is agreed, elections to a National Assembly and for a new President will take place. These are scheduled for mid-2004.

I offer a different assessment of Daniel Bensaid's Marx for our times to the one given by Alan Johnson in Solidarity 3/40.

Bruce Robinson assesses the life and work of Al Richardson, historian of Trotskyism and editor of the journal Revolutionary History, who died unexpectedly in his sleep on 22 November, aged 61.

First the good news: the left is getting together in large numbers early next year. There will be a "Left Unity Convention", probably on 25 January, and a "Convention of the Trade Union Left", definitely on 7 February.

Mark Sandell honours Benjamin Zephaniah

Christmas is coming so it is appropriate that Her Majesty the Queen will be dishing out feudal baubles in the honors list. Of course most of these gongs go to the ageing segment of the British ruling class for services to... the rich and powerful.

Barry Finger concludes his appreciation of the life and work of Julius Jacobson, who died last March. Julius was the founder and editor of the American socialist journal, New Politics.

One of the most agonising essays Julie was called upon to write was "The Two Deaths of Max Shachtman" in the Winter 1973 issue of New Politics. Shachtman had earned the admiration of a generation of radicals of previous decades by his political courage in engaging and opposing and - in Julie's estimation - besting Trotsky, whom he "loved, respected and feared", and for his intellectual and political contributions to the understanding of Stalinism.

By Joe Carter

The fortieth anniversary of the assassination of John F Kennedy, who was killed on 22 November 1963, has produced the usual flood of eulogies.

The reality was very different. Kennedy's actions in office were those of a pro-business government, with an imperial foreign policy which continued the work of the previous Republican administration.

FBU ranks must organise
By Nick Holden

Fire Brigades Union members have voted to accept the staging of the second phase of their pay rise, with a three to one majority.


The ballot had a 56% turn-out, low by the FBU's standards, and was a major reversal since twelve months ago, when there was a nine to one majority for strike action to win a £30,000 salary for all fire fighters.

By Alan Clarke, NUS Executive, personal capacity

With more than a third of Labour MPs now supporting an anti-top up fees motion in the House of Commons, the Government's plans for student funding are looking increasingly shaky. With public, labour movement and even Labour Party opinion overwhelmingly hostile to introducing a free market in higher education, there is every chance that the Blairites will finally be defeated on a major issue of government policy.

By Rosalind Robson

The government is in trouble. It is failing in every department. New Labour appears untrustworthy and ineffective. They need to do something to outflank a resurgent Tory Party. They want to answer their critics at the Daily Mail. What do they do? They plan to take the children of destitute and vulnerable people into care! Under new asylum legislation children of those asylum seekers, whose application for asylum has been turned down, could be taken into care if their parents refuse to "voluntarily" leave the country.

Patrick O'Brian's Aubrey-Maturin novels, said Christopher Hitchens, are set where two worlds meet. The first is the large and political world of "the long struggle between imperial and Georgian Britain and Jacobin and Bonapartist France". This "astonishing global tumult" stretched across the late 18th and early 19th centuries and might be thought of as the real First World War.

By Alison Brown

150 anti-sweatshop activists met in Sheffield on 29-30 November to debate, discuss and consider future campaigning priorities.

Students and trade unionists listened as Mick Duncan from No Sweat and Neil Kearney, a leader of the international garment workers' union, ITGFWU, opened the event. Mick stressed the need to build campaigning unity between the trade union movement and anti-capitalist youth and students. Mick advocated a sharp, clear focus on working class self-organisation and support for international workers' struggles.

Baghdad today: unchecked gangsterism and crime. Robberies, rapes, kidnapping, abductions. Death on the streets every day.
Sixty or 70% unemployment. The electricity now works, on and off, but the phones don't, except for calls within a few particular areas of Baghdad.

Alex Gordon, a member of the executive of the rail union RMT, spoke to Solidarity
(This is a longer version of the interview than printed in Solidarity 3/42)
I don't claim to be any kind of expert on Iraq. I don't speak Arabic or Kurdish. But five of us from various trade unions - the RMT, the Fire Brigades Union, the Transport Salaried Staffs Association, and National Union of Journalists - went to Baghad at the beginning of October for five days.

As the original AWL speaker supposed to have said that I am "a little bit Zionist" (the report is 'a little bit inaccurate'), I feel I have to respond to Bruce Robinson's letter (Solidarity, 9 October).

In the mid 14th century, about 30 or 40 million people died in Europe in the Black Death. That was when most people lived constantly on the edge of hunger; low technology and productivity made it impossible to escape that; and no-one understood how to prevent or cure such diseases.

By John O'Mahony

The October Revolution of 1917 seemed to many observers to be an attempt to stand Marxism on its head.

Those who said that included George Valentinovich Plekhanov and Pavel Borisovich Axelrod, the founders of the Russian Marxist movement, and Karl Kautsky, the most authoritative Marxist of the Second International (1889-1914).

A poll published on 23 November showed 56% of Palestinians and 53% of Israelis in favour of the "two-states" terms of the Geneva Accords.

London Underground workers are due to take industrial action on 9-10 December over safety on the Tube and privatisation of its infrastructure.

The biggest Tube union, the RMT, is demanding 24-hourly inspection of all Tube track; immediate introduction of speed restrictions wherever track defects are discovered; and all track, signalling and rolling-stock maintenance work to be carried out by qualified London Underground employees.