Workers' Liberty

This instalment is the tenth in a series on the Northern Ireland crisis of 1968-9 and the left. The series is focused on the IS. There are good reasons for that.

New Zealand union organiser Mike Treen and French union activist Axel Persson spoke on organising, unionising and fighting for the rights of — mostly young — workers in the fast food industry.

On Sunday 17 February Kosova declared itself an independent state.

No better, more democratic, or more effective rules for organising relations between peoples and fragments of peoples exist than those of Lenin, Trotsky and their comrades. Nothing else is more conducive to working class unity across the divides and despite them. They are the principles of all who are Marxists and stand in that great tradition.

The consequences of the opposite approach — or of an approach of unprincipled eclecticism and zig-zags — are well illustrated by the politics of Socialist Worker and the SWP on Kosova.

One of the four SWP-Respect councillors in Tower Hamlets has defected... to the Tories.

SWP-Respect issued a statement on 14 February: “We are sorry to hear that Cllr Ahmed Hussain has joined the Tories. We had discussions with him yesterday where he agreed that he was going to stay with Respect. We issued a statement saying that, in good faith, but clearly his assurances meant nothing.

Around 300 trade unionists and environmental activists attended the Campaign against Climate Change (CCC) trade union conference on 9 February.

On Thursday 21 February, we will find out if some 450 members of the TGWU/Unite have voted in favour of national strike action, an event which would be a first in Shelter's 41-year history.

AWL tubeworkers have been arguing for some time that the unions should get on with action against casualisation and destaffing. So we are pleased that RMT and TSSA have said they will ballot.

Before Christmas, Ken Livingstone promised to pay the “‘London Living Wage” of £7.20 an hour to Underground cleaners when he took over Metronet. Unsurprisingly, he has not delivered.

In a shocking example of its free-market savagery, the Government is closing 28 of the 83 Remploy factories, which employ disabled workers to make work-wear products in a unionised workplace with unio

Hundreds of Rolls-Royce workers and their supporters marched through Liverpool on 8 February to protest against the company’s plans to close its plant in Bootle and transfer the work to the US, with

The last two years have seen an upsurge of the Iranian student movement — and a sharp turn to the left, as more and more student radicals become influenced by Marxism.

On 8-9 February 2008, over 3,000 delegates from fifty civic groups, social movements, trade unions and the revolutionary left gathered in Harare.

In India the liberal feminist Bangladeshi author Taslima Nasrin is being threatened with expulsion from India in the aftermath of Islamist protests against her criticisms of religious fundamentalism.

Kevin Rudd, the Blair-model new Labor prime minister of Australia, has made the long-awaited official apology from Australia’s government to the country’s Aboriginal peoples for mistreatment over the centuries.

The campaign to defend sacked Venezuelan trade union leader Orlando Chirino is gathering momentum within the country as well as internationally.

The Chinese road?

Samuel Farber, Cuban “Third Camp” Marxist and author of The Origins of the Cuban Revolution Reconsidered, was interviewed about the book in US socialist journal Against the Current (November 2006). Here we reprint an extract with his predictions for Cuba without Castro.

The tumultuous political scene in Pakistan, took an unexpected turn on 18 February, when President Musharaf’s political party Pakistan Muslim League ‘Q’ took a battering in the general election.

As we go to press, unofficial results show the Pakistan People’s Party, the party of assassinated ex-prime minster Benazir Bhutto, has won 86 seats out of 256 National Assembly seats. The PPP won a clear majority in the southern province of Sindh and have enough seats to rule the federal government there.

Seven people were killed on 27 January as the Lebanese army clashed with rioters in southern Beirut in the wake of a Shia demonstration. The incident has drawn the army into Lebanon’s political crisis, which has seen three months of impasse as parties close to PM Fouad Siniora squabble with Syrian-backed parties such as Amal and Hezbollah over the election of a new president.

The mayor of London receives the salary of a Cabinet Minister - that is, £137,579 per annum plus expenses. The latter are bound to be high.

Last week a group of cleaners at Stansted airport were told not to come to work the next day as they were no longer required. Most are from Eastern Europe and Africa. All are agency workers.

Temporary and agency workers are in a particularly precarious position. They can be hired and fired almost at will. They have no guaranteed hours or permanent contract of employment. They often work for lower wages and receive less favourable sick pay and other ‘perks’ than the directly-employed colleagues they work alongside. Added to this, scams and abuse such as categorising these workers as “self-employed” contractors in order to avoid holiday pay and other rights, are widespread.

A footnote to Pat Longman’s review of The Shock Doctrine (Solidarity 3-126). Capitalism has always been full of “hard-faced men who did well out of the war” — or out of whatever recent disaster may have thrown society off balance.

Pierre Lambert was in his time one of those “orthodox Trotskyists” who kept a banner of anti-Stalinist revolutionary Marxism flying in the worst years of Cold War and declining class struggle.

Continuing a history of the Blues

Beginning around the First World War, millions of black US Southerners moved north to cities like Chicago, Detroit, and New York. Known as the Great Migration, this population movement changed the course of American history. People left the South to escape the oppressive racist system, but also, and more importantly, because of the job opportunities and promise of economic security in Northern cities.

Already hailed as a masterpiece, this film is one of the bookies’ favourite for the Oscars, particularly for Daniel Day-Lewis’s portrayal of oil man Daniel Plainview. His performance certainly dominates the film — he is central to all but two scenes in the film — and it is as subtle and understated as it is masterful.

You carry the pearls of war within you, bombs

Give them to your children. Give them to your love.

From: Dreams From The Malaria Pills (Barefoot)

From binge drinking and the problems associated with it, to privatisation, the dumbing down of education and low paid, “flexible for the bosses” work, life under New Labour has a bit of everything bad for working class youth. At work, millions of working people are paid a pittance, and the younger you are the worse it is.

“All comparisons with the 1970s are absurd”, squeaked one of Gordon Brown’s media people, embarrassed about the Government’s decision on 17 February to nationalise Northern Rock.

Around 200,000 teachers in the National Union of Teachers (NUT) will receive ballot papers from 28 February asking them to vote for strike action on pay.