Workers' Liberty

by John O’Mahony

That’ll teach me to make silly jokes! A few issues back, in a fit of self-indulgent whimsy, I mocked some ex-comrades of ours who had abandoned socialist politics to enlist in George W Bush’s neo-conservative crusade to bring bourgeois democracy and American-style capitalism to Iraq. In a little skit, I had one of them confuse the Communist Manifesto with “the Bourgeois-Democratic Manifesto”.

The crisis between Iran and the US entered a new stage with the election of Mahmoud Ahmedinejad to the presidency of the Islamic Republic last June. Amina Saddiq looks at the background

The government is in a panic. Its criminal justice policy is in chaos. At the same time a Chief Constable publicly denounces them for pandering in their decisions to the demagogue tabloid press. And he’s right.

By Joan Trevor

French Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy, whose vicious immigration reforms have now passed both houses of the French parliament, has softened his stance not one iota, in spite of what it says on the BBC news website about him having relented: “Mr Sarkozy plans to spare about 1,200 children who faced expulsion and deportation with their families.”

Three hundred thousand marched into Oaxaca, Mexico on 16 June, to support striking teachers whose encampment was brutally attacked by police two days earlier. Led by Section 22 of the SNTE teachers union, the march was supported by university students, local health and university workers and numerous other union, popular and left wing organisations.

By Mickey Conn

Over the last month, Chile has entered the stage of the social struggles sweeping Latin America, with hundreds of thousands of secondary students striking and occupying their schools.

One recent poll (Ipsos/ MORI, 30 May) gives only 26% satisfied with Tony Blair as prime minister, and 67% dissatisfied. His negative ratings are much worse than even at the height of the big demonstrations against him taking Britain into the US-organised invasion of Iraq in 2003.

By Gerry Bates

Members of the GMB union working in Asda Wal-Mart depots have voted by three to one to take strike action to win collective bargaining rights at all 20 distribution depots, to ensure the payment of the 2005 bonus and to have safe working practices.

By Mike Fenwick, Unison

Announcements of cuts in the NHS have become routine— each day the newspapers find a new story to highlight increasing debt, job losses and closures. Yet the unions seem to be standing on the sidelines, with no concerted national campaign in place to respond to the crisis.

By a conference delegate

Unison conference, meeting in Bournemouth between 17 and 23 June, posed both problems and possibilities for serious class-struggle activists in the union.

Workers on the Docklands Light Railway in East London have voted for strike action for the first time in the 19 years since the DLR was established.

By a rail worker

The RMT’s Annual General Meeting, meeting in Dublin on 2-7 July, will discuss what the union has described as the “pensions crisis” facing rail workers.

The GMB’s congress has voted overwhelmingly against merger with the TGWU and Amicus to form a new “super union”.

By a PCS Socialist Caucus member

The big industrial issues at the PCS civil service union conference were national pay bargaining, pensions and job cuts. Sadly delegates backed an NEC line that has achieved nothing on pay; has seen the introduction of a compulsory pension age of 65 for all new civil servants (leaving current workers open to a future divide-and-rule attack), and has allowed the continuation of a jobs cull.

By Sacha Ismail

“For almost forty years we have stressed the class struggle as the immediate driving force of history, and in particular the class struggle between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat as the great lever of the modern social upheaval; it is therefore impossible for us to ally with people who wish to expunge this class struggle from the movement...We cannot ally with people who say that the workers are too uneducated to emancipate themselves and must first be freed from above by philanthropic bourgeois and petty bourgeois.”

Marx and Engels to August Bebel, Wilhelm Liebknicht and others, September 1879

Stan Crooke gives an alternative view on the ssp crisis

The crisis in the Scottish Socialist Party (SSP) dates back to a meeting of the SSP Executive Committee held on 9 November 2004, which voted unanimously to ask Tommy Sheridan to stand down as SSP convenor.

A contested election for the Labour leadership would be “virtually meaningless” as “there's such an overwhelming consensus that Gordon will succeed”.

Nadia Mahmood, a member of the Worker-communist Party of Iraq, was in Iraq in April, in Baghdad, Kirkuk, and Sulaimaniya. She spoke to Martin Thomas.

According to Naftana, the UK support committee for the Iraqi Federation of Oil Unions (GUOE), the Iraqi regime has frozen all the bank accounts of the Iraqi oil workers’ union, both abroad and within Iraq.

Thomas Carolan is far too generous to Freud (Solidarity 3/93). Freud was insightful, and drew attention to the field of psychology; he had ideas that led others after him to develop theories and methods that have helped people since.

Thomas Carolan reckons the reason that so many people like The Da Vinci Code (Solidarity 3/94) is because they believe (or want to believe) that it is true, and that this is a “mix of alienation from authority ... and bottomless ignorant incredulity”.

The recent council election results should have sent a strong message to the Marxist movement of this country. While we have spent years in petty squabbling over who are the purest Marxists, splitting our movements into tiny factions, the BNP have organised and gained support culminating in the return of eleven councillors in Barking and a marked increase in other areas.

Sofie Buckland looks at the events which led to the French Popular Front government in France 1936

Roma and travellers across Europe mark 2 August as a day to recall the persecution of gypsies in Europe under the Nazis. On the night of August 2 and 3, l944, several thousand were massacred in the gypsy camp at Auschwitz.

The Sukula family

On Saturday 17 June a rally was held in Bolton to protest againt the threatened deportation of the Sukula family. The three sisters, two brothers and mother fled Kinshasa, the capital of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) in 2001. The family were involved in an opposition group.

To perenial fete-goers, the annual fete outside Paris organised by the French Trotskyist group Lutte Ouvrière (LO) on 3-5 June appeared to be larger, younger and more ethnically mixed than previous years.

Laura Schwartz reviews Offside, directed by Jafar Panahi

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmedinejad recently ruled that women would finally be allowed into the stadiums of football-mad Iran.

Joan Trevor reviews “Iran Awakening” by Shirin Ebadi (Rider, 2006)

Shirin Ebadi is a human rights lawyer in Iran and won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2003. She takes up cases like that of the well-known political journalist Akbar Ganji, and of completely anonymous Iranians, like the dirt-poor family of Leila Fathi.

Dion D’Silva reviews “How to plan a revolution”, BBC2

Azerbaijan is situated alongside the Caspian Sea, and sandwiched between Russia and Iran. It is ruled by a brutal crypto-Stalinist regime.

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