Workers' Liberty

We asked socialists and activists to comment on the way to campaign against world poverty after the G8 summit.

Two million South African workers showed how to fight poverty at the end of June with the biggest strike since the days of apartheid.

At the end of August the Israel government plans to withdraw from Gaza, dismantling 21 Israeli-Jewish settlements.

Go London!

As we go to press we find that London has won the bid to stage the 2012 Olympics.

After their own fashion, Tony Blair and Gordon Brown do have a “third way”. Their friend Peter Mandelson, now European Union trade commissioner, explained it in the Independent on 4 July.

By Stan Crooke

Workers in the UK work the longest hours in Europe. Nearly four million workers in the UK regularly work over 48 hours a week — 700,000 more than a decade ago.

When Meg Munn, the deputy minister for women and equality, addressed the TUC’s Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender conference on 30 June/ 1 July, she was asked repeatedly why the government did not act to ensure that equalities legislation comprehensively protected all minority groups.

The Annual General Meeting of the rail union RMT, at the end of June, voted to endorse the union’s decision to expel ultra-fascist Patrick Harrington.

A national ballot in the civil service by the union PCS, over job cuts in the Department of Work and Pensions, is still on hold as the union has yet to have proper talks with the Government.

The congress of the general union GMB in Newcastle on 5-9 June voted to affiliate to No Sweat and to support the new labour movement in Iraq.

Campaign forces reprieve for Zimbabwean asylum seekers

By Dale Street
As we go to press on 6 July around a hundred Zimbabwean asylum-seekers held in British detention centres are about to begin the third week of their hunger strike in protest at the government’s plans to remove them to Zimbabwe.

Banana workers in Ecuador are continuing with strike action to defend their right to organise, in the teeth of repression.

Korean trade unions are heading for a clash with the government over its anti-union harassment.

This year has seen a sharp increase in urban and rural protests across China, some involving workers taking strike action, according to press reports and academics.

Leaders from the three main trade union organisations in Iraq — the Iraqi Federation of Trade Unions (IFTU), the Federation of Workers’ Councils and Unions of Iraq (FWCUI), and the General Union of Oil Employees (GUOE) — toured the USA in June.

By Yasmine Mather

Elections held in Iran in late June came at a time of unprecedented developments in the region. As far as the Middle East is concerned, Iran is in a very strong position, mainly thanks to the military interventions of its long term “foes”, the United States and Britain.

Recently there have been many discussions in Solidarity and on the left in general on political matters with a religious theme. Issues such as the ban on the veil in French schools, the extension of faith based education and social care in the UK, the protection from discrimination in goods and services on the basis of belief or non belief in the Equalities Bill, the proposed religious hate laws — all these call for an understanding about the relationship between religion and politics.

“The role played by the young Ukrainian socialist movement is most significant. This movement has connected the national liberation question to all the problems of the liberation of the working class: it has raised this question to the level of those political problems which can be solved by no other means but democratic struggle, by the development of class conflict in Ukrainian society. Thus has progressed Ukrainian socialism always following the same route, confirmed by the undoubted truth that in all present day liberation movements, political or national, both being the result of the same evolution which has transformed feudal states into modern capitalist states, the working class appears as the sole revolutionary and democratic power. “
Lev Yurkevych, Ukraine and The War 1916

Anna Rzymska, from the Revolutionary Left Current in Poland, reported on the situation of the labour movement and the left in Poland at the international meeting organised by the AWL in Paris on 18 June.

Jack Cleary continues his analysis of and selection from Lenin’s 1902 book What is to be Done?

The BNP lost its only council seat in London on 23 June when a 51% vote for the fascists turned in to a 51% vote for Labour. The BNP always were in for a hiding to nothing in Goresbrook after their councillor simply gave up after a few months of doing very little at Barking and Dagenham council. However what really put the final nail into their coffin was the strong community campaign which has developed to oppose them in Goresbrook.

Residents of Aspland estate and Marcon Court have been successful in their campaign (as reported on in Solidarity) to force Hackney Council to back down from its plan to privatise their estates.

Up until recently I didn't have that much time for Bob Geldof. The lyrics to Do They Know It’s Christmas? were ill-conceived and the recent Band Aid 20’s repeat performance was even more ridiculous — given that the main cause of the crisis in Sudan that it was meant to help was war and not famine. However, watching Geldof in Africa made me to reconsider the man.

Stephen Spielberg’s film of H G Wells’ novel The War of the World’s was something to look forward to. With Schindler’s List and Amistad, Spielberg made important, thought-provoking films. Since Wells’ book says important things, Spielberg’s War of the World might have been more than an action adventure.

On one level Batman Begins is a simple story about a man who dresses up as a big rubber bat and fights crime. It’s just good old-fashioned summer movie kind of fun.

However there is another way to roughly summarise the film.

The liberal left, from the Guardian op-ed writers to the Socialist Workers Party, has tended to see modern political Islam as an automatic response of the oppressed and dispossessed of “the Muslim world” to “imperialism”, “the West”, and global inequality. It’s a simplistic view which is not much endorsed by any of the detailed studies of Islamism which have been published in the past few years. Clive Bradley surveys the literature.

There is sharp disagreement about the nature and meaning of imperialism on the left, with two broad schools of thought emerging. Two recent books sum up the differences very clearly. Paul Hampton reviews John Bellamy Foster and Robert W McChesney eds. Pox Americana, Exposing the American Empire (Pluto) and Leo Panitch and Colin Leys eds. The Empire Reloaded: Socialist Register 2005 (Merlin)

Having read your report on UNISON conference (Solidarity 3-75) I saw it failed to mention an outcome of an issue covered by your paper on 28 April 2005. “The Race-hate election: Why don’t unions answer Tory Racists”. Your article correctly criticised the article in UNISON Labour Link News entitled, “Ten things the Tories did to you. That article included a fact that the asylum applications had increased by 45% under the Tories; this of course is not something we should consider bad i.e. something the Tories did to us, there being plenty of examples of the Tories’ attacks on us such as privatisation, not even mentioned in the article.