Workers' Liberty

a Socialist Worker pamphlet by Martin Smith

This pamphlet is a propaganda exercise. There is nothing wrong with that in itself. However, it also claims to provide an analysis of the Labour Party, the trade union bureaucracy, the Broad Lefts and members of the "awkward squad." It does not do any of that very well, relying on crass comments such as "bright flashes of a new mood" and "the gaps between the explosions are becoming shorter".

BBC2

"Thus were the working-men forced once more, in spite of their unexampled endurance, to succumb to the might of capital. But the fight had not been in vain"
- Frederick Engels, 'The Mining Proletariat', The Condition of the Working Class in England

by Andrew Murray, Verso

This book is in two parts. The first is an analysis of the trade union movement past and present, and the second a series of interviews with "awkward squad" members who are asked to explain their politics and their own understanding of their role. Both sections were interesting, but the comments of Jack Jones and Ken Gill in the first section seemed more pertinent to a broad understanding of the current situation in the trade union movement and its relationship to the Labour Party than those in the second section.

Channel 4

"Thus were the working-men forced once more, in spite of their unexampled endurance, to succumb to the might of capital. But the fight had not been in vain ..."
- Frederick Engels, 'The Mining Proletariat', The Condition of the Working Class in England

By Gerry Bates

The facts stare us in the face. And the Blair government tries to make us look away by conducting safe "inquiries" into incidentals.

Bush and Blair used lies to go to war. Probably they thought they would be able to find a few chemical or biological weapons in Iraq, enough to cover their stories. That had nothing to do with their real reasons.

By Lucy Clement

Union rallies in defence of the Corporation's independence have been called outside all BBC sites on Thursday 5 February, but it remains to be seen whether enough staff will still be feeling strongly enough to make the action a success.

In this, the collective memory of the media is barely longer than its soundbites.

One of the more bizarre consequences of the Hutton whitewash has been the transformation of Greg Dyke from Chief Dumber-Down to Chief Defender of Media Freedom.

Did the Emperor Caligula appoint his beloved horse a memher of the Senate of Rome? The very well-known story that he did sounds unlikely, apocryphal.

From David Merhav in Haifa

At least 11 Israelis were killed and 45 others were wounded in a suicide bombing on a bus in central Jerusalem on 29 January. The blast was very close to the official residence of Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, who was not in the building at the time.

By Vicki Morris

The third European Social Forum will probably be held in London, and probably in autumn this year. Preparations are underway. The timetable is very short for organising a successful ESF, but those who have put together the London "bid" - the SWP principally - have not let that bother them. Indeed, it is to their advantage, seeking to control the event, to railroad the process now, saying "we have to get on with organisation, no time for discussion". They are alienating many grassroots activists.

A round-up produced by the China Labour Bulletin.


Teachers' protest in Guangdong Province is violently dispersed

From 1 to 3 December more than 800 community teachers protested in front of the municipal government offices in Leizhou, Guangdong. The protestors were demanding that the government fulfil the promise it made in 2000 to transfer them into the higher paid classification of public teachers.

A report by Dita Sari

In the middle of the heat and poverty of the Indian city of Mumbai, the fourth World Social Forum (WSF) was held on 16-21 January. An estimated 100,000 activists from some 130 different countries - the majority from India - gathered together to discuss the urgent social and political issues facing humanity in the 21st century.

The main themes centred around issues of neo-liberal globalisation, war, peace (or the lack of it), women, racism, health, education and the environment. These issues were discussed in thousands of workshops, talks and forums.

By Mark Osborn

CAFOD (Catholic campaigning organisation) have produced a a useful, detailed, expose of the terrible working conditions, harassment and poverty pay faced by electronics workers, making computer parts, in Mexico, Thailand and China.

By Mick Duncan

International Women's Day is Monday 8 March and celebrates a strike among New York women garment workers nearly 100 years ago. No Sweat will be targeting Disney stores on Saturday 6 and Monday 8 March.

By Pablo Velasco

• Brazilian left calls for a new party

• Indonesian left starts election campaign
• Anti-union laws in Argentina

Brazilian left calls for a new party

By Peter Burton, Edinburgh No Sweat

In the last year Edinburgh City Council has let the sweatshop manufacturer Adidas use our schools to promote their brand name.

Some of us don't appreciate our children being influenced in this way and we don't like sweatshop employers, guilty of routinely paying poverty wages (sometime to children), passing themselves off as people whose first concern is a person's welfare.

From the International Alliance in Support of Workers Rights in Iran

Iranian security forces and Kerman Province's special guards brutally attacked protesting workers at the Nazkhaton's Copper Smeltery in the City of Babak, Province of Kerman on 23 January killing at least four and injuring dozens more.

By Alan Clarke

So close…- for this Labour government, with its huge majority and addiction to control-freakery, to come within five votes of being defeated on a flagship policy was indeed humiliating. The rousing of the normally comatose Parliamentary Labour Party to destroy Blair's 160-plus majority is a reflection of massive hostility to top-up fees among students, in the general public and throughout the labour movement; but in politics organisation is everything, and Blair's victory is impossible to understand in isolation from the weakness, both organisational and political, of the anti-top up rebellion.

By Joan Trevor

Elections matter. Since they romped home in the parliamentary elections in 2002 on the coat-tails of Jacques Chirac's freak presidential win, France's UMP government with their massive majority have been punching holes in the French welfare state.

• Get out of town!

• (Not) getting a rise in politics
• Arise Sir Bill… oh, defender of free speech?
• New TV boss
• Old TV boss

by Jim Bywater

If the discussion at the Chicago Social Forum (30 January) about who the left should vote for in the US presidential elections is anything to go by, there is only one thing certain - it won't be Bush.

In 1938 Leon Trotsky wrote about the effect on labour movement activists of Stalinism's turns in the previous decade: the Third Period of denouncing social democratic workers' organisations as worse than fascism, the Popular Fronts of class collaboration, the great purges and show trials in the USSR. "Even among the workers who had at one time risen to the first ranks", he ruefully recognised, "there are not a few tired and disillusioned ones. They will remain, at least for the next period, as bystanders. When a programme or an organisation wears out, the generation which carried it on its shoulders wears out with it. The movement is revitalised by the youth, who are free of responsibility for the past…".

Why is the United States, with its British allies, occupying Iraq? Why did they go to war? What are the issues now? In this third of a series of articles, Colin Foster presents a view.

John O'Mahony continues his series of articles

On the eve of the abolition of Russian serfdom, in 1861, many of the jobs which in Western Europe were performed by wage laboureres - by legally free women, men and children who sold their labour power for specific periods of time to those who owned the means of production, the mills, mines, quarries, factories, etc. - were in Russia performed by unfree labour. One worker in three was a serf.

What became Bolshevism - that is, the organisation and ideas which led the Russian proletariat to the conquest of state power in 1917 - was the ultimate outcome of a whole series of previous Russian versions of Marxism, of successive self-definitions by groups of revolutionaries against what had existed before.

In recent issues, Solidarity has printed translations and articles from revolutionaries in France responding to the current ferment around the French government's plans for a law banning the Islamic headscarf from state schools in France by arguing "no to the veil, no to the law".

Here we print a translation of the views of Lutte Ouvrière, who place much more emphasis on opposition to the veil.

As a student supporter of Solidarity/Alliance for Workers' Liberty I was a little disappointed with the Solidarity headline, "Top-Up Fees: Resist the Market Principle" (3/43). That seemed to me to be inadequate on a number of levels, and was perhaps chosen for all the wrong reasons.

By a postalworker

Despite being hailed as a "watershed" agreement, the "Pay, Major Change and London Weighting" deal recommended by the CWU leadership was accepted in a ballot with a turnout of just 31%. Despite widespread disgust at the proposed 7,500 job cuts and miserly increase in London weighting, most members decided that simply voting in a ballot was an exercise in futility.

In the Hackney refuse dispute a mass meeting of refuse workers has voted to suspend the two days of strike action called for Friday 6 and Monday 9 February. But the dispute is still very much alive and very much in need of solidarity.

By a NATFHE member

NATFHE members at Leicester College, which has 42,000 students, were due to begin an all-out, indefinite strike on 2 February over management attempts to browbeat them into giving up four days of their annual holidays in return for a one-off payment of £1,800.

TELCO, the east London community-led alliance, has won an important victory for its Living Wage campaign, which could have far-reaching implications for pay negotiations involving contracted staff in the private sector.