Trade is a vital part of the neoliberal economic, political and ideological regime that now dominates the world economy and most national states.
At various summits in recent years the world’s most powerful governments have promised to introduce a better deal on trade, aid and debt for the world’s poorest countries, especially in Africa.
<a href="/system/files/170801neoliberalism_0.pdf">Click here to download as pdf</a>
The global credit crash of 2008 and the ensuing travails have produced delayed political effects. A shift to more right-wing, nationalist, and "identity" politics may move neoliberalism sharply to the right, or even explode it from within. The economic turmoil has also produced new life on the left, as yet on a low wattage.
Law professor Sol Picciotto has proposed a new approach to stop tax avoidance by transnational corporations. He spoke to Ed Maltby from Solidarity.
Taxing transnational corporations already involves international agreement, based on tax treaties. The issue is, what kind of agreement? Until now, there has only been loose coordination. That's because governments like to hang onto what they call "sovereignty".
Workers at the UK′s train operating companies are facing a huge attack on their pensions due to government legislation that ends the contracting-out of the Second State Pension. The legislation means higher National Insurance contributions for both employees (1.4%) and employers (3.4%).
The government has also passed legislation to help employers out with this — by allowing them to carry out annual raids on occupational pensions schemes, without even having to consult with scheme trustees.
Dan Mills of the McLibel support campaign spoke to Joan Trevor
The Association of International Workers' Solidarity (UID-DER) in Turkey organised a commemoration this year of the 15-16 June 1970 workers' protests against anti-union laws, known as "The Great Workers' Resistance".
LabourStart’s “Global Solidarity Conference” in Berlin on 23-25 May 2014 was its fourth major gathering and, with more than 300 participants, its biggest.
The conference was hosted by the German trade union ver.di, and comprised nearly three days of plenaries and workshops covered a range of themes.
A substantial chunk of the conference examined “Digital communications” — how unions can use electronic media to build themselves and their campaigns: LabourStart’s raison d’être!
Marcus Halaby’s polemic against Workers’ Liberty’s politics on religion, Islamism, and anti-imperialism (“The AWL’s anti-anti-imperialist Islamophobia”) is worth reading because it illustrates some differences between the political method of Workers Power and ourselves in Workers’ Liberty.
At the Second Congress of the Communist International, in the debate on the national and colonial question, just after his book Imperialism had been translated into German and French, Lenin warned delegates they should “establish concrete facts and to proceed from concrete realities, not abstract postulates”.
“It is the same with the policy of Social Democracy as with any other: if you do not move forwards, you go backwards. Whoever closes his eyes out of a (not necessarily conscious) fear of the consequences of stating what is, has not only failed to fulfil his Social-Democratic duty to say what is but will also be forced to say what in reality does not exist, to spread illusions. Any misunderstanding of reality leads to confusion.”
Karl Radek, Ways and Means in the Struggle against Imperialism (14 September 1912). D&G 2012: 615
*****