Solidarity 189, 19 January 2011

Tories swing axe at the NHS

On 15 January, the NHS Confederation, representing top doctors and medical managers, put out a formal warning in advance of the Government's Health and Social Care Bill, to be published on 19 January. Click here for a longer version of this article . The Government's plans, said the Confederation, are "extraordinarily risky", and could lead to hospitals being closed, treatment being rationed more, and patients suffering. The central plank of the Tory plans is to abolish the Primary Care Trusts (PCTs, the "purchasers" under the NHS's current "purchaser/ provider" structure) and replace them...

Tunisia: for democracy, freedom and workers’ rights!

On 17 December a young Tunisian man set himself on fire in protest at poverty, lack of jobs and police harassment. The act of this desperate man struck a chord. Mass protests followed. By the end of December the popular mobilisations had spread to the capital, Tunis. The nasty, brutal dictatorship of Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali – in power for the previous 23 years – struck back, killing dozens and arresting and torturing many more. The state shut universities and schools in an attempt to stop students organising. At the same time Ben Ali attempted to offer economic and political concessions aiming...

Manchester City Council to cut 2,000 jobs

Manchester's Labour-run city council plans to axe 2,000 workers as part of £110 million worth of cuts. The council has been hit hard by Coalition cuts to local government funding, which disproportionately effect working-class areas. The council claims to want to avoid compulsory redundancies, but all staff are being asked to consider taking voluntary redundancy, with all staff over 55 being asked to consider early retirement. The cut represents a reduction in the workforce of nearly 20%, which the council claims it "has" to make. Its leader, Labour's Sir Richard Leese, said "the accelerated...

The Bolsheviks as they really were

This extract is from The Bolshevik Party , by Pierre Broué (1963). It shows what Bolshevism meant, and how different it was from the "Leninism" constructed after Lenin's death in 1924. Click here to download as pdf . The printed version of this article, in the paper, is slightly abridged. The heart of the Bolsheviks' organization, the 'column of steel' of professional revolutionaries, was recruited entirely from young people, workers and students, in a period in a society which in fact scarcely gave time for childhood to drag itself out, especially in working class families. It was those under...

The Lenin who believed the working-class would work "miracles"

Lars Lih, author of a 600-page study on Lenin Rediscovered: What Is To Be Done In Context , has written a new book, Lenin , a short biography (Reaktion Books, spring 2011). . In his earlier book, Lih comprehensively turned upside down the conventional wisdom, Stalinist and bourgeois alike, about What Is To Be Done? . According to that conventional wisdom, the main idea in What Is To Be Done? is that the workers were reluctant to support socialism, or anything more than trade unionism, and needed a forceful, authoritarian party to pull them along. In fact Lenin's main idea was that the workers...

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