Solidarity 3/83 is online
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Articles from Solidarity 3/83 are now online. Read them here.
Solidarity 3/83, 03 November 2005
Belgians battling for their pensions
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On Friday 28 October the Belgian trade unions staged a second 24-hour national strike opposing government plans to increase the retirement age from 58 to 60.
Unlike on 7 October, when only the ABVV/FGTB federation, with links to the Socialist Party, went on strike, all the trade union federations participated.
Unite the fragments
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By Joan Trevor
The workers of the SNCM ferry company have voted a return to work after 24 days’ strike. They had been protesting against government plans to privatise the company.
A programme for unity
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Right now class politics are not being articulated by the labour movement.
The bitter fruits of communalism
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There was nothing progressive about the riot that broke out in the Lozells area of Handsworth, Birmingham over the weekend of 21-23 October. The disturbances were fuelled by poverty, racism, mass hysteria, criminal drug gangs, religion and communalism.
“Once we knew a bit more about the man. . .”
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This letter from campaigning anti-capitalist journalist Greg Palast is a comment on our Open Letter to Tony Benn (Solidarity 3/83), a piece which detailed now a number of Holocaust deniers and neo-Nazis had signed a petition calling for Tariq Aziz to be released from jail. The petition was launched in the UK by George Galloway.
Galloway and oil-for-food: the facts
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By Sacha Ismail
George Galloway is facing a renewed scandal over his links with Iraq’s former Ba’thist regime, with both the US Senate committee which he savaged in May and a separate United Nations inquiry alleging he received money from Saddam Hussein’s oil-for-food programme.
Trotsky on Bonapartism in Mexico
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After the Mexican revolution (1910-1920) ended with the exhaustion of the major combatants, a Bonapartist regime was established. It took the form of a ruling party (called the PRI for most of its history), which integrated trade unions, peasant organisations and business groups within its structures. Leaders of these organisations delivered votes and suppressed struggles.
Bonapartism in Venezuela
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“By Bonapartism we mean a regime in which the economically dominant class, having the qualities necessary for democratic methods of government, finds itself compelled to tolerate – in order to preserve its possessions – the uncontrolled command of a military and police apparatus over it, of a crowned ‘saviour’. This kind of situation is created in periods when the class contradictions have become particularly acute; the aim of Bonapartism is to prevent explosions.”
Unravelling the issues
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We have started a discussion in Solidarity on the issue of “left-wing anti-semitism”, with an editorial in the last issue of the paper and an eaxtended review of Preachers of Hatred by Pierre-André Taguieff, a major French-language study of the issue.