Workers' Liberty

Review of Alfredo Saad-Filho and Deborah Johnston, eds Neoliberalism: A Critical Reader, Pluto, 271 pages, paperback, £15.99

By Paul Hampton

Neoliberalism is the dominant ideology of the epoch and this book is the most comprehensive analysis of the subject by Marxist and radical political economists published to date.

Click here to read it.

African partnerships

Paul Wolfowitz, the new head of the World Bank and prominent neo-con has given support to Blair and Brown’s idea of massive and increased aid to Africa. He pledged to persuade Bush of the necessity and justice of this plan. He also said that “there were real partners [in Africa] with whom the west could work.”

By Pat Yarker

Before the General Election Channel 5 screened Classroom Chaos, a video-diary-cum-documentary produced by Roger Graef.

Sacha Ismail spoke to Briggs Bomba, an activist in the Zimbabwean democracy movement and international coordinator of the Zimbabwe International Socialist Organisation (ISO).

By Patrick Murphy (secretary, Leeds NUT)

Four school staff trade unions struck in Leeds on Tuesday 21 June against compulsory redundancies. There were large and noisy pickets on all three sites of the Specialist Inclusive Learning Centre, with passing motorists constantly honking horns to show their support. Parents turned up to the pickets, some with their children. The roads outside all three sites were festooned with home-made placards supporting our demands for proper funding and no job cuts.

By Cathy Nugent

In November 1995 Ken Saro-Wiwa, the best known leader of the Movement for the Survival of the Ogoni People, was executed by the Nigerian government. The Ogoni are an ethnic minority of 500,000 who live in about 350 square miles in the impoverished Niger river delta region of Nigeria.

By Dale Street

The government’s professed concern for human rights and poverty in Africa stands in marked contrast to its treatment of refugees from Africa.

By Liam Conway

In 1976 James Callaghan made a famous speech attacking schools for their failure to deliver a workforce suited to the needs of the economy. Callaghan was talking nonsense of course — schools had nothing to do with the failure of British capitalism to meet the crisis generated by the massive oil price hike of the early 70s. Still teachers and schools proved a useful scapegoat, along with lazy workers and militant trade unions.

By Gerry Bates

“Psst! Can’t get a ticket, mate? I can help you out there, but it’ll cost ya!” Ticket-touts, in front of theatres, concerts, Wimbledon, football stadiums… Can’t get in via the box-office? No. But you can get in. If you can pay for it.

Maybe for the first time ever, a trade union has tried to block its members’ access to a website, in a move similar to the Chinese government’s restrictions on Internet access.

Kate Ferguson

Despite Sue Blackwell’s media notoriety, Hilary Rose is probably the most prominent spokesperson of the movement for an academic boycott of Israel. Her visit to a meeting organised by the Oxford branch of the Palestine Solidarity Campaign in May therefore provided left activists in the city with a valuable opportunity to debate the issues surrounding the boycott intelligently. Unfortunately, it was a missed opportunity.

By John O’Mahony

The 1950s movie The Wild One is about a motorcycle “rebel” gang, led by Marlon Brando, invading a small American town and frightening the natives.

Lenin’s 1902 book, What Is To Be Done, is one of the most important of all the great texts of revolutionary Marxism. Its importance is especially great in the period we are now going through, when as a result of Stalinism and the defeats of the labour movement which it inflicted or precipitated, everywhere Marxism has come to be separated from the working class and its movement. The great task we face is once more to combine Marxism with the working class movements.

Officials from the civil service union PCS are meeting new Work and Pensions minister David Blunkett on Thursday 23 June to ask for guarantees of no compulsory redundancies and no compulsory transfers in the DWP as the Government proceeds with its plans for over 100,000 job cuts in the civil service and 30,000 in the DWP.

By a civil servant

The largest civil service union, PCS, meeting in conference in Brighton on 8-10 June, voted to endorse the union Executive’s decision to call off its planned one day strike over jobs, pay and pensions on 23 March.

The Jubilee Debt Campaign (JDC) estimates that the total external debt of low-income countries is $523 billion (£260 billion). Debt is a huge problem.

Lorry driver trade unionists from across Europe, who held a conference in Eastbourne on 6 May, had a steering group meeting in Malmö, Sweden, in early June.

Some schools in Coventry have been closed and many parts of the education service have been affected by three days of strike action held by local UNISON and T&G members. They are striking against the imposition by the council of a “single status” pay deal from 1 June.

By a delegate

Delegates at the national conference of the public services union Unison, meeting in Glasgow from 21 June, have defeated the platform in two votes which show growing distrust of the Blair-Brown government.

By Sacha Ismail and Houzan Mahmoud

On the evening of Tuesday 21 June, the Government’s proposals to outlaw “incitement to religious hatred” passed the House of Commons with a majority of 57. The measure was abandoned before the last election due to obstruction in the House of Lords, and there were widespread predictions that this time enough Labour MPs would rebel to overturn the Government’s newly narrowed majority. In the event the backbench Labour rebellion was almost non-existent — John McDonnell and Jeremy Corbyn were the honourable exceptions.

How can hunger, poverty, and suffering through preventable or curable disease be ended?

Possible privatisation of Royal Mail, and the union’s link to the Labour Party, were the big issues at the General Conference of the Communication Workers’ Union (CWU) in Blackpool from Sunday 12 June.

By George Russell

How low can the “left” sink? It appears that these days belief in a “World Jewish Conspiracy” is not enough to get one “No-Platformed”. Instead, if you make the right noises on Palestine, you might even get invited to speak.

By Amina Saddiq

For three weeks in May and June Pakistan saw an upsurge in class struggle, with the military regime forced to seize physical control of the country’s state-owned telecom corporation and arrest over a thousand telecom workers in order to force through its privatisation plans. The Employees’ Union has now signed a deal with the government allowing privatisation to go ahead, but a rank and file organisation of telecom workers is still opposing the privatiation.

By Paul Hampton

The voices of African workers have been missing from the recent media frenzy about Africa. Even on the left the general picture of Africans is of passive victims of disease and malnutrition in need of charity.

By Colin Foster

On the evidence of the EU summit of 15-18 June, France’s “no” is leading not to the “social Europe” which many “no” voters wanted, but to a hobbled Europe.

Only a radical programme can now stop climate change from impacting dramatically, disastrously, on our world. No such programme will be on the table at the G8 Summit, from any of the governments, even from those like the Blair government who claim to take a lead on cutting “greenhouse gas emissions”.

As you rightly note (“What’s wrong with ASBOs?”, Solidarity 3, 74), the Anti-social Behaviour Act has had some vile consequences. While working in a night shelter I was appalled by the way that the act is being used to persecute the homeless.

Dan Katz read Q by Luther Blissett alongside Frederick Engels’ The Peasant Wars in Germany