Workers' Liberty

Sofie Buckland, Daniel Randall, David Broder, Sacha Ismail and Laura Schwartz were in Paris on 18 March for the demonstration against employment reform.

“I’m a pretty straight sort of a guy” — Tony Blair

“New Labour”? Old Tory sleaze! Plus an unctuous, creeping-Jesus hypocrisy which would be uniquely Blair’s if his other self Gordon Brown dropped dead.

But it’s more than Tory sleaze. More than its simple equivalent.

The French CPE-CNE law will extend the casualisation of labour in order to subvert all workers' rights to the needs of “flexibility” demanded by French bosses.

The Iraqi Freedom Congress, a group linked to the Worker-communist Party of Iraq, reports that some districts of Baghdad are organising neighbourhood self-defence against the sectarian militias.

By Colin Foster

On 22 March Gordon Brown delivered, as a City economist commented, a “steady-as-you-go Budget”.

by Martin Thomas

About 20,000 marched in London on 18 March against US/ UK troops in Iraq, and against war on Iran. Workers’ Liberty activists and others distributed leaflets for the Iraq Union Solidarity campaign, and did a bucket collection for the Iraqi unions which raised £289, about the same as on the bigger demonstration of March 2005 and much more than on the last “Stop The War” demonstration, September 2005.

By Joseph Grim Feinberg

Some time in late February, word began to spread around Chicago about a protest against HR 4437, a bill passed by the House of Representatives and currently being discussed in the Senate which would criminalise undocumented immigration, as well as aid given to undocumented immigrants (for more information see www.ilrc.org/HR4437.html). A humble-looking activist website had announced, in English and Spanish, “Unite! March against HR 4437. General Strike!”

by a unison member

Build unity; reach out to other sections of the working class; organise hard-hitting action — and local government workers can win the huge battle over pensions due to open on 28 March.

By Polly Maclean

It looks as if the construction workers at Cottam power station, near Lincoln, may have won a victory in their brave fight to win union-agreed wages and conditions for the Hungarian workers imported to work alongside them.

On the eve of taking strike action against the compulsory transfer of satellite broadcasting staff to a company owned by Barclays private equity, CWU members won agreement that any transfers would be voluntary.

A fringe meeting on the Trade Union Freedom Bill was held at Women’s TUC.

The concept of a such a Bill has won the support of over 100 Labour MPs since the Trade Union Congress 2005 called for a campaign to free our unions.

From a report by Pauline Bradley

About 320 delegates, from all the major unions and some of the smaller ones, attended the Women’s TUC Conference this year.

By an AMICUS member

While the TGWU has started a process of consultation on the creation of a new super union, developments in the other two unions (AMICUS and GMB) could well undermine the project.

Sam Azad is an Iranian born AWL member who was involved in events around the Iranian Revolution of 1979 and its aftermath. His story indicates the need to forge a movement in opposition to both war and Iran’s reactionary regime.

The people of Iran face two threats simultaneously: the prospect of imperialist American-led military action and sanction and the ongoing but accelerated repression and despotism of the Islamic regime in Iran.

By Dan La Botz

More than a quarter of a million miners and steelworkers walked off the job between 1-3 March in wildcat strikes at 70 companies in Mexico, virtually paralyzing the mining industry. While the strike has ended, there are reasons to believe that this could be the first act that could challenge Mexican employers, the corrupt “official” unions, and the conservative Mexican government.

David Broder outlines a critical view of Evo Morales’ rise to power in Bolivia and subsequent programme

When Morales was elected in December 2005 the mainstream media saw it as the victory of the — workers’ and peasants’ “social movements” whose demonstrations and strikes shook the establishment last summer. This was a crude mischaracterisation.

In the New Zealand city of Auckland, more than 1,000 secondary school students walked out of classes in protest at low pay for young workers, explicitly linking their protest to events in France.

At the end of the 18 March demonstration in Paris, riot police hospitalised French postal worker Cyril Ferez, who had been sitting peacefully in front of a police line. According to SUD, the militant trade union of whose postal and telecoms division he is a member, Ferez was “violently trampled by a load of the police force”, who then refused to administer first aid or call for medical help, despite the obviousness of his injuries.

Solidarity spoke to Nico Dessaux, an activist in Lille.

How did the anti-CPE movement begin?

The student unions attempted to launch a movement against it a few months ago, but with little success. The left parties in the National Assembly also launched a parliamentary guerrilla war, with thousands of amendments.

Five imprisoned bus drivers, all members of the executive board of Tehran's bus workers' union, and Sattar Amini, a metal worker, were released on bail on Saturday and Sunday 18 and 19 March. However, the head of the union, Mansoor Ossanlou, and Afshin Bahrami, an auto worker from Iran Khodro car plant, remain in prison.

On the Sydney (Australia) demonstration of 18 March, as well as London’s, there was a voice for the Iraqi labour movement. Members of Workers’ Liberty Australia and other supporters of “Aus-Iraq” distributed a leaflet headed: “No to occupation, no to ethnic and sectarian division, yes to the civilising, unifying power of Iraq’s trade unions”.

Charlie McDonald, an activist in the civil service union PCS, will be standing alongside local tenants' leader (and RMT union activist) Janine Booth for Socialist Unity in Hackney Central ward, east London, in the council elections on 4 May.

By Paul Hampton
Read this article in French here.

An article, “Marx and religion” by Anindya Bhattacharyya in Socialist Worker (4 March 2006) argued that Karl Marx and Frederick Engels were not very hard on religion and scorned “liberal” contemporaries (especially Bruno Bauer) who were.

The Ligue Communiste Révolutionnaire (LCR) has been debating the left’s response to the victory of the Islamist party, Hamas, in the Palestinian legislative elections on 25 January 2006.

An initial response by Nicolas Qualander appeared in the LCR’s paper, Rouge, of 23 February. We print here a translated extract of a reply to Qualander by Christian Picquet published in Rouge, 2 March 2006.

This 1860 article by Karl Marx is a concise account of the struggles of the people of Sicily for freedom through centuries. So is the politics of it, in his last paragraph. Marx loathes the French emperor Napoleon III and says that he will do what he will do in Italy for dynastic and imperialist reasons. Marx nonetheless thinks that “any change” — even a French intervention in Sicily — “must be for the better”. Better than the ongoing slaughter of Sicilians by their own savage Bourbon government.

In Solidarity 3/89 we published an open letter from Martin Thomas (of the Alliance for Workers’ Liberty), urging Maryam Namazie of the Worker-communist Party of Iran to withdraw her support for the “March For Free Expression” in London on 25 March. On the formal basis of supporting the right to lampoon Muhammad, the march organisers would put her on a platform with the rabidly right-wing and British-nationalist Freedom Association, a group which prides itself above all on its work in trying to break the Grunwick strike in 1977.

Mike wood reviews v for vendetta

This could’ve been great. It is after all based on an angry story about the overthrow of a British fascist regime, originally written as an attack on Thatcherism and British nationalism in the 1980s.

Pablo Velasco reivews Venezuela and Revolution in the 21st Century by Joseph Choonara, Socialist Worker pamphlet

Yves Coleman, a revolutionary socialist based in Paris gave Solidarity some thoughts on the anti-CPE revolt.

Is France facing a new May ’68 [when student protests eventually sparked a ten million strong general strike]?