Workers' Liberty

Everyone deserves a chance at a decent life no matter where they live. That is why on International Justice for Janitors Day, June 15th, janitors united across the world in a show of solidarity.

Janitors united to send a message to the company behind the Westfield shopping malls in the USA, Australia, New Zealand, the UK and Canada. They are demanding that Westfield mall cleaners be treated with fairness, dignity and respect. For more information go to:

The Palestine Liberation Organisation has, since the beginning of the second intifada in September 2000, called for international intervention in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Usually they have talked of the deployment of United Nations peacekeeping troops. This has reflected their understanding that the Palestinians could not hope alone to prevail against the militarily superior Israelis.

By Lynn Smith

So cheating is standard practice with the big telcos?

Remember the Worldcom debacle of a few months back? It was the largest corporate crash in US history. Well… three new directors of the now resuscitated company hired William Lucas (ex director of enforcement for the US Securities and Exchange Commission) to conduct an internal investigation into why Worldcom got itself into trouble.

Five generals took the decision to assassinate Hamas leader Abd-al-Aziz al-Rantissi: the Prime Minister, the Minister of Defense, the Chief-of-Staff and the chiefs of the Mossad and the Security Service.

By Colin Foster

What were the real reasons behind the USA's drive for war in Iraq? Two polar-opposite explanations have been discussed on the left.

By Bryan Sketchley

Foreign Minister Alexander Downer has proclaimed that the Australian government fully supports the Indonesian military launching a war on the people of Aceh.

After a week of incursions into the province, reports started reaching Australia that unarmed villagers were being detained, tortured and shot, whole villages have been emptied and the general population is living in fear.

7 years prison for being a trade unionist

Seven years -- that's the prison sentence imposed upon Yao Fuxin last month by a Chinese court. His colleague Xiao Yunliang didn't fare much better; he got four years in jail.

The Workers' Party (PT) in Brazil has taken the first steps towards expelling socialists within the party who oppose government reforms.

By Janet Burstall

New South Wales Minister for Education and Training, Andrew Refshauge, announced a restructure of public education under the mendacious title of "Lifelong Learning". It is in the fine tradition of many job-cutting programs in the Australian public sector, pretending to be a restructure that will improve services - increase "frontline staff" and reduce the number of "bureaucrats".

By Riki Lane SA national co-convenor

The second National Conference of the Socialist Alliance in May voted to move towards a united multi-tendency socialist party. Most SA members expected a different situation and a different tempo for Socialist Alliance as a result. In fact, there has been more continuity than dramatic change in the two months since the Conference.

By John Bellamy Foster, 1999, New York, Monthly Review Press

The author, now one of the Editors of Monthly Review, is a regular writer on environmental problems. In 2000 he wrote a 310-page study of Marx's Ecology: materialism and nature. More recently, in the January 2003 issue of Monthly Review, he has analysed the failure of the Rio and Johannesburg Earth Summits. The Vulnerable Planet, while a short work (only 168 small pages) is a splendid introduction to the problems we face, as well as to the literature where we can go further.

by Amanda Lohrey in Quarterly Essay, No. 8 2002

Amanda Lohrey's essay on the history of the Greens proclaims "the political potency of ecology". "This movement and its ecological narrative have the power to subsume the traditional grand narratives of capital and labour and indeed to some degree they already have." "The Green constituency is based on…a new paradigm or grand narrative of what politics is about, i.e. the 'ecological'."

"The End of Organised Capitalism": introduction

The introduction to Scott Lash and John Urry's book summarises their whole argument and raises three questions:
a) The basic templates of "organised" and "disorganised" capitalism;
b) The role of the "service class";
c) Cultural changes.

"Ultra-imperialism": a debate from Workers' Liberty Australia no.31

As usual, a leading WL spokesperson has put their finger on something very significant, something much of the Left has missed. And again, as usual, WL takes it too far and onesidedly, leading to the article missing what's correct in the reaction of the rest of the Left. In the meantime, uncharacteristically, WL passes up the opportunity to get really stuck into the contradictions in the Cliffite position.