Workers' Liberty

Solidarity 3/78 is now online. Click here to read it.

South Africa is undergoing a strike wave, the second in a matter of months, with miners, municipal workers and civil servants about to take strike action. This follows stoppages in recent weeks by urban workers, grocery clerks and airline workers.

David Broder interviewed John Strawson about the restrictions on movement and other daily struggles for the Palestinians living in the occupied West Bank. John Strawson is a lecturer at the University of East London and also teaches at Birzeit University in the West Bank.

The shooting of innocent Brazilian electrician Jean Charles de Menezes by the Metropolitan police on 22 July poses issues not just about the arming of the police, but about the broader question of who should have access to guns. Whatever the qualifications introduced by the difficult issue of suicide bombers, I think socialists should continue to oppose the police in general being armed. We do not want a situation like that which exists in the US, where police officers routinely carry guns and wield armed force, often against working-class and in particular black working-class people, with relative impunity. But what do we say about gun control exercised not over the agents of the state but over its citizens?

Ricardo, Montevideo, Uraguay

I am 16, but not for much longer. My birthday is soon, although I have never received a birthday present in my life. I’ve been living on the street for the last six years.

Argentinian rail workers joined health workers, dockers and others in a 24-hour strike on Thursday 28 July, demanding higher pay.

Rail union reps said that after the failure of negotiations for over 100 days they decided to strike. They also warned that if there is no agreement in a week, they will escalate the action to 36 hours, with a 48 hour strike the following week.

On 26 July eight thousand miners from Silesia (south-west Poland) demonstrated in front of the parliament building in the Warsaw.

Members of all 13 miners’ trade unions demanded pensions rights for miners after 25 years work, regardless of their age. The miners do not want to accept a normal pension age (65) because it would mean working until their death. (The life expectancy of a Polish miner is 64.)

Four hundred people met in the Caracas Venezuela on 9 July to found a new socialist party by January 2006, when the World Social Forum will meet in the city.

The name currently proposed for the party is the PTRS, the Workers Party for the Socialist Revolution.

By Paul Hampton

Four people died and more than 100 were injured in the rail crash at Hatfield in 17 October 2000. This year Railtrack, the company responsible for the network and Balfour Beatty, responsible for track maintenance and their top executives - have been up in court for corporate manslaughter and other safety breaches. Last month they got off the manslaughter charges.

By Ben Davies

Just one month after the leaders of the G8 countries, the world’s richest, gifted the world’s poorest nations a few more crumbs from their table, we see a gut-wrenching example of the true scale of world poverty and inequality — the famine in Niger.

Some points on Maria Exall’s article in Solidarity 3/76.

What is secularism ?

On 23 July Coventry UNISON branch held a national rally in response to the council’s plans to implement pay cuts of up to £6000 per year in the name of “Single Status” — equal pay and conditions for women.

Tesco stores across Britain and Ireland were picketed on 4 August in solidarity with two Polish agency workers sacked after protesting about conditions at a distribution centre in Dublin.

TGWU and GMB members are also taking on exploitation by supermarket bosses at Morrisons in the UK. On 10 August over 8,000 of the chain’s distribution staff received ballot slips on whether to take strike action over Morrisons’ refusal to engage in meaningful negotiations.

By Daniel Randall

Following the 7/7 bombings in London, the tabloid press has been full of righteous denunciations of “extremists” of all stripes. Fair enough, you might think. The belief that blowing hundreds of public transport users up is a good way to get a political point across is pretty “extreme”.

Read on for details of London and South West London meetings, and No Sweat national conference

By Dave Ball

There are estimated to be 11 million street children in India. This includes those who are on the streets in the day but return to a family or other home in the evening, as well as those who sleep on the streets. Worldwide there could be as many as 170 million street children. The April 2005 issue of New Internationalist (NI) (published on the web at www.newint.org) focussed on the issue, giving most of the space to street children themselves to tell their experiences and put forward their hopes in their own words.

“The last exploit of the Fenians in Clerkenwell was a very stupid thing. The London masses, who have shown great sympathy for Ireland, will be made wild by it and driven into the arms of the government party. One cannot expect the London proletariat to allow themselves to be blown up in honour of the Fenian emissaries. There is always a kind of fatality about such a secret, melodramatic sort of conspiracy.” — Karl Marx, writing to Frederick Engels, December 1867.

“The stupid affair in Clerkenwell was obviously the work of a few specialised fanatics; it is the misfortune of all conspiracies that they lead to such stupidities, because 'after all, something must happen, after all something must be done'. In particular, there has been a lot of bluster in America about this blowing up and arson business, and then a few asses come and instigate such nonsense. Moreover, these cannibals are generally the greatest cowards… and then the idea of liberating Ireland by setting a London tailor's shop on fire!” — Engels’ reply

By Doug Russell

On 3 August 95 test engineers at Rolls-Royce’s Filton plant in Bristol received ballot papers on whether to strike over the dispute resulting from the sacking of their Amicus convenor Jerry Hicks.

The Communication Workers’ Union is holding a national mass meeting against privatisation, in the face of postal regulator Postcomm’s decision to open up all parts of the service to competition in January 2006,

By Clive Bradley

The deadline for agreement on Iraq’s new constitution is 15 August, after which it should go to a national referendum. But as we go to press, it looks unlikely the various factions involved in the negotiations will have agreement by then.

By a PCS member

Following a motion passed at my central civil service union branch’s Annual General Meeting (AGM), about raising funds for the TUC Iraq Appeal, a sub-committee of our Executive Committee (BEC) was set up. It discussed a number of fund raising ideas including karaoke, showing a film about the trade union movement in Iraq and a quiz night but finally we settled on the idea of a second hand book stall including a weigh the cake competition and a cake making competition.

Alan Porter reviews The Last Mitterrand

Francois Mitterand simultaneously thought of himself as the saviour of the French left and the “last great president in the line of De Gaulle”. While Robert Guédiguian’s film is very good on this enormous egotism, as well as the 1981-95 president’s role in the Vichy regime’s mass deportation of Jews, its criticism of Mitterand’s failure to deliver the “break with capitalism” promised at the 1971 Socialist Party Congress is somewhat less sharp.

Ansa Logistics, a firm which delivers Ford cars to showrooms, has been hit by a strike by 350 staff over pay and reduncancies.

Almost every day in Venezuela, Hugo Chavez interrupts programming on the nation’s TV networks to deliver speeches and to propagandise for his government — the stations have no choice but to transmit his broadcasts, which last up to three hours.

In 1894 Ernest Belfort Bax, one of the pioneer British Marxists, wrote a long series of articles on the Commune in Justice, the paper of the first British Marxist group, the Social Democratic Federation. We have abridged and adapted Bax’s narrative account of the Commune and also incorporated a few pages from a mid-1880s Socialist League pamphlet, written by Bax and William Morris.

Laura Schwartz reviews "Victoria’s Big Fat Documentary", 21 July, BBC 1

New Labour, Heat magazine and Weightwatchers are all united in their enthusiastic support for losing weight. As a result, the quest for thinness has acquired an almost moral quality. Conversely, being over-weight is equated with greed, laziness and stupidity — with being a bad person. Victoria Wood’s Big Fat Documentary showed how this obsession with food, eating and dress-size has permeated our national and individual psyches.

By Pauline Bradley, Iraq Union Solidarity convenor

The Tolpuddle martyrs festival is one of my favourite events in the union calendar. Held in the pretty Dorset village where in 1834, six poor, starving farm labourers held meetings and swore an oath to form a “friendly society” under a sycamore tree — it was one of the first trade unions formed.

By Robin Sivapalan

Two gay teenagers have been publicly executed in Iran adding two more to an estimated death toll of 4,000 lesbian, gay and bisexual people condemned to death by the regime since the Ayatollahs seized power in 1979. The two boys, Mahmoud Asgari (16) and Ayaz Marhoni (18), were imprisoned for 14 months and subjected to 228 lashes before being executed in Edalat (“Justice”) Square in north east Iran on July 19.

By John O’Mahony

The IRA’s Army Council has formally declared the organisation’s military campaign at an end, as from 4pm on 28 July 2005:

“The leadership of Oglaigh Na hEireann (the soldiers, or army, of Ireland) has formally ordered an end to the armed campaign… All IRA units have been ordered to dump arms.