Workers' Liberty

Articles from Solidarity 3/83 are now online. Read them here.

On Friday 28 October the Belgian trade unions staged a second 24-hour national strike opposing government plans to increase the retirement age from 58 to 60.

Unlike on 7 October, when only the ABVV/FGTB federation, with links to the Socialist Party, went on strike, all the trade union federations participated.

By Joan Trevor

The workers of the SNCM ferry company have voted a return to work after 24 days’ strike. They had been protesting against government plans to privatise the company.

Right now class politics are not being articulated by the labour movement.

There was nothing progressive about the riot that broke out in the Lozells area of Handsworth, Birmingham over the weekend of 21-23 October. The disturbances were fuelled by poverty, racism, mass hysteria, criminal drug gangs, religion and communalism.

This letter from campaigning anti-capitalist journalist Greg Palast is a comment on our Open Letter to Tony Benn (Solidarity 3/83), a piece which detailed now a number of Holocaust deniers and neo-Nazis had signed a petition calling for Tariq Aziz to be released from jail. The petition was launched in the UK by George Galloway.

By Sacha Ismail

George Galloway is facing a renewed scandal over his links with Iraq’s former Ba’thist regime, with both the US Senate committee which he savaged in May and a separate United Nations inquiry alleging he received money from Saddam Hussein’s oil-for-food programme.

After the Mexican revolution (1910-1920) ended with the exhaustion of the major combatants, a Bonapartist regime was established. It took the form of a ruling party (called the PRI for most of its history), which integrated trade unions, peasant organisations and business groups within its structures. Leaders of these organisations delivered votes and suppressed struggles.

“By Bonapartism we mean a regime in which the economically dominant class, having the qualities necessary for democratic methods of government, finds itself compelled to tolerate – in order to preserve its possessions – the uncontrolled command of a military and police apparatus over it, of a crowned ‘saviour’. This kind of situation is created in periods when the class contradictions have become particularly acute; the aim of Bonapartism is to prevent explosions.”

We have started a discussion in Solidarity on the issue of “left-wing anti-semitism”, with an editorial in the last issue of the paper and an eaxtended review of Preachers of Hatred by Pierre-André Taguieff, a major French-language study of the issue.

1. An abstract or formal conception of the question of equality in general and national equality in particular is characteristic of the bourgeois democracy by its very nature. Under the pretence of the equality of the human person in general, bourgeois democracy proclaims the formal legal equality of the proprietor and the proletarian, of the exploiter and the exploited, and thus deceives the oppressed classes in the highest degree.

The Theses on the National and Colonial Question of the Second Congress of the Communist International, which met in July-August 1920, are one of the most important documents of revolutionary socialism. We reprint this text over on page 16. They were drafted by Lenin and amended in important respects by the Congress.

By Cathy Nugent

On 26 October the Abortion Rights Campaign held a meeting in London to mark the 38th anniversary of the passing of the 1967 legislation granting British women some access to abortion. Limited though the legislation was, it did mean that women no longer had to risk death or damaged health from illegal “back street” abortions.

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“Full House?”, a report published this month by the housing charity Shelter has revealed that half a million British households are overcrowded, the same proportion as in 1997. The study, in which 550 families living in such conditions were surveyed, is the largest of its kind to date.

By Dan Katz

“There comes a time when people get tired of being trampled over.”

Martin Luther King

“My resistance to being mistreated on the busses and anywhere else was just a regular thing with me and not just on that day.”

Rosa Parks (1913-2005)

A lot of political tendencies and ways of thinking come under fire in the editorial “what is left anti-Semitism?” in Solidarity 3/82.

While the article “1945 – was it socialism” (Solidarity 3/83) did draw out many accurate criticisms of Attlee’s government, I feel that it failed to get a grip on the real outlook of the people involved.

By Heenal Rajani, Lambeth Council Unison

Unison members protested outside the head office of the Local Government Association in London on October 27, wearing skeleton costumes and masks, against plans to make local government workers “work till they drop” for their pensions.

Caretakers at Huddersfield Technical College started an indefinite strike on November 1 over poverty pay and the existence of a two-tier workforce.

300 First Bus drivers in Staffordshire struck against on October 29 and 31 as part of an ongoing battle over pay and conditions by First Bus workers around the country.

140 TGWU cleaners at the Houses of Parliament will strike on 9 November in support of their demands for a living wage, as well as sick pay, holidays and pensions.

By a postal worker

The Communication Workers’ Union held a national meeting on 27 October in Leeds to discuss its campaign against the threat of Post Office privatisation.

By Janine Booth, Finsbury Park RMT

The RMT has finally set a date for the conference on working-class political representation agreed by its AGM both this year and last year. It will take place on Saturday 21 January, 2006 at Friends House in Euston, London.

Industrial action against Sefton Council, which is accusing six of its workers of intimidation after they attended a protest against theprivatisation of council housing is continuing.

By a PCS Socialist Caucus member

There was solid support for the strike action of 21 October by members of the PCS (Public and Commercial Services trade union) employed by DEFRA (Department for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs).

By Colin Foster

British Airways finally signed a new catering contract with Gate Gourmet on 20 October, and over the days since then there has been some movement on the deal supposedly made by Gate Gourmet with the TGWU on 26 September to end the lock-out of GG workers at Heathrow. But no worker has yet been reinstated, and it is still not clear when, or whether, any workers will be reinstated.

The two members of the SWP on the Executive of the civil service union PCS, Martin John and Sue Bond, voted to approve the Government-TUC pensions deal.

Yet an article in Socialist Worker that same week, personally signed by SW editor Chris Bambery, and featured as the lead item on the SWP website, had already denounced the deal in the most strident terms as an “abject capitulation”.

By Chris Hickey, PCS

All the militant threats by public sector union leaders to launch the biggest single day’s strike action since the General Strike of 1926 have culminated in a “reserved rights” public sector pensions deal which fundamentally delivers the Blairite aim of a public sector retirement age of 65.

Yahya al Alfaifi worked as a communication engineering technician (command post technician) at the British Aerospace plant at Dharan in Saudi Arabia for four years. He was sacked in 2002 for organising a meeting of BAe workers, considered a “a trade union action” in Saudi Arabia.

By Pablo Velasco

china

A former textile worker who posted online reports about a protest demonstrations by steel workers in Chongqing has disappeared and is believed to be in police custody.