Solidarity 322, 30 April 2014

These excerpts from autobiographical notes by Alice, who joined our movement in 1978 at the age of 23, tell something general about how people become committed to socialist activism, and also something about left politics in the 1970s. Alice came from an unprosperous and conflict-ridden working-class family, and had attended school only patchily since the age of 14. In March 1973, aged 18, she took advantage of an offer of a lift to leave her home country and to come to London, unfluent in English, with no job or home to go to, and in her pocket the equivalent of £160 in today’s money. She...

On 23 April, after officials at Gohardasht prison made a written commitment to transfer him to a wing reserved for political prisoners, jailed Iranian trade unionist Shahrokh Zamani ended his hunger strike after 47 days. During the hunger strike, Workers’ Liberty, our Iranian Revolutionary Marxists’ Tendency comrades, and others supporting the campaign stepped up the pressure for Shahrokh’s release. Hundreds of new people signed the petition, including many activists at the UK National Union of Teachers and National Union of Students conferences. Dozens of student union officers, including a...

London Underground workers in the RMT union are striking on 28-30 April and 5-8 May against job and service cuts. The dispute is better and stronger than other recent campaigns because it is against the principle of cuts. Even if London Underground can find a way to axe 900-odd front-line jobs and increase managerial posts by redeployment and voluntary redundancy, Tube workers oppose the cuts. They oppose them because the cuts mean that many workers will be pushed into lower-paid jobs, losing up to £12,000 a year pay. They oppose them because many workers will face disruptive changes in shift...

A “revolutionary unity” conference with the International Socialist Network, the Anti-Capitalist Initiative, Workers’ Power, Revolutionary Socialists in the 21st Century and Socialist Resistance was held on Saturday 26 April. Members of Workers’ Liberty were refused entry on the grounds that we had not been invited by any of the organising groups and were not members of ISN. Organiser Simon Hardy apologised, admitting that the wording on the website around whether the meeting was open or not was “confusing”. Liam MacUaid of Socialist Resistance was not so polite; he rudely exclaimed that the...

For a seventh consecutive year, the March For England descended upon Brighton for St George’s Day. While claiming to simply be a celebration of England, it is an extremist right-wing march organised by fascist groups such as the English Defence League and Casuals United. They choose Brighton for it being contrary to the England they want, as for the most part it is an incredibly tolerant city. On the years when there has not been a large counter-demonstration by anti-fascists, residents of Brighton have been racially abused, so a large counter-demonstration is necessary. Around 100 fascists...

The Marxists Internet Archive has said it will delete the entirety of the Marx and Engels Collected Works on its site by 1 May, which ironically is International Workers’ Day. The publishing company, Lawrence and Wishart, which was founded in 1936 through a merging of the Communist Party's press and a family-owned anti-fascist publisher, is claiming copyright infringement, stating that it cannot afford to have the collection still provided as a free resource. The very material that is being removed argues against private property in such matters. It is absurd to think that this company will...

According to the Times Higher Education, “A sector-wide panel of experts is to look at ideas for reforming England’s university funding system after an influential think tank said that trebling fees has saved the taxpayer less than £400 a year per student.” The panel is convened by Universities UK, the club of university vice-chancellors, which previously lobbied for higher tuition fees. “It will be chaired by UUK president Sir Christopher Snowden, vice-chancellor of the University of Surrey, who said he wanted to seek a ‘broad political consensus for a sustainable system of funding’. “Other...

The problem of corruption and misuse of union funds has plagued workers’ organisations almost from the heroic beginnings of trade unions. More than a hundred years ago my hero (we all have a few) Eugene Debs, in a famous speech about the emancipatory nature of organised labour, pleaded that the labour movement had been “betrayed by traitors, bled by leeches and sold out by leaders.” 100 years on it is time we of the left tackle this problem and use a powerful moral argument to start bringing this problem to heel. We need to put systems in place to stop corruption and end its bedfellow...

Unlike Hitler Mussolini had made compromises with the monarchy and the Church (in 1929 he gave the Vatican the status of an independent state and allowed the two million-strong Catholic Action to continue to function). Mussolini also had to manoeuvre between, balance, and play-off several competing cliques inside his own movement. Regional fascist organisations were organised through powerful local bosses often linked to organised crime. These structures and problems placed additional limits on his dictatorship which was authoritarian, but never totalitarian. Mussolini was a vicious thug –...

The Tories Immigration Bill will receive its third and final reading in the House of Lords on 6 May. The bill panders to many of the worst myths and prejudices about migrants — myths and prejudices whipped up by the Tories themselves, by successive Labour governments before them, and by the right-wing press. According to the Home Office website: “It is too easy for people to live and work in the UK illegally and take advantage of our public services. The appeals system is like a never-ending game of snakes and ladders. The winners are foreign criminals and immigration lawyers.” According to...