Workers' Liberty

Kathy Black spoke for US Labor Against War (USLAW) at a meeting at Melbourne Trade on 12 March. Riki Lane summarises her speech.

Mehdi Kazemi is a 19 year old gay man being threatened with deportation to Iran.

Driving examiners strike
 

A large teachers’ strike has been called for Tuesday 18 March in France, with teachers in many schools voting to strike indefinitely. As the preparations for this are underway, the JCR (the LCR’s youth wing) has been mobilising to get word out to lycée (roughly equivalent to post-16/FE college) students, at a time when the organisation has identified expansion into that age group as a priority.

The Olympic spectacular in August this year is likely to be another step on China’s march towards great power status. For sure the media will marvel at the incredible stadia, the clean streets of the capital and the immensity of the country.

So spare a thought for the workers on Beijing’s Olympic construction sites,

The inconclusive outcome of the Democratic Party primaries to date suggests an increasing certainty that the nomination process may only resolve itself during the August convention. The so-called “super delegates,” the skeletal deposits of the party — its elected officials and functionaries — may have the decisive say.

The national conflict in Sri Lanka, so little reported in the mainstream UK media, is visibly deepening. In 2006, the recently elected president Mahinda Rajapakse in effect ended a ceasefire agreement brokered by the Norwegians in 2002.

The International Longshore and Warehouse Union conference in San Francisco has passed a motion “calling on unions and working people in the US and internationally to mobilize for a “No Peace No Work Holiday” on May 1, 2008 for 8 hours to demand an immediate end to the war and occupation in Iraq and Afghanistan and the withdrawal of US troops from the Middle East”.

It has been some time since there was any meaningful link between the real struggles faced by the working class majority of students and the debates that took place at the annual conference of what is, officially, their union – the NUS. This year that disconnection will be as acute as ever, and (more significantly) we may see the end of the potential to ever reconcile it.

The success of ENS Women at this year’s NUS Women’s Conference (13-15 March) in passing radical left-wing policy and mobilising a significant number of conference delegates around socialist feminist politics, is testimony to the hard work of our activists both within NUS and outside it with Feminist Fightback over the last two and a half years. So is the result of the election held at the conference for NUS National Women’s Officer.

There have been interesting election results in a number of university student unions over the last couple of months.

The SWP/Student Respect have lost control of their two strongholds, Manchester University and SOAS in London.

On 5 March, a 300-plus strong general meeting of UCL Union passed a motion proposed by socialist activist Sham Rajyaguru, president of UCL’s Stop the War Society, to ban the Officer Training Corps, University Royal Navy Units, University of London Air Squadron and all other military organisations from freshers’ events and other union-sponsored events, union premises, and student-run media. Now the right of the union has responded by suspending left-wing General Secretary Sam Godwin.

March 17 1968. 20,000 gather in Trafalgar Square for a rally and march to the US Embassy in protest against the US war in Vietnam. The Square is full of the flags of the National Liberation Front (the “Vietcong”), who, only weeks previously had launched the Tet Offensive that had taken a largely rural guerilla war into the cities of Vietnam, getting as far as the gates of the US Embassy in the capital Saigon.

Gordon Brown and Ed Balls will continue to accelerate the academies programme. The fake concern Balls expressed about some schools flouting admissions procedures acts as sand in our eyes as he and Brown increase selection through academies, trust and foundation status.

Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire W. B. Yeats

This [NUT 2008 Easter] conference comes at a crucial time for trade unionists both in education and across the Public Sector. Both the NUT and UCU are balloting members over the government’s 3 year pay cut, which will hopefully lead to the first national strike over pay for a very long time.

If you ask teachers what the worst aspect of their job is, a very big majority will point to excessive workload. We know this because they have been asked by trade unions and by academic researchers on a regular basis.

“Teachers are proletarians. Indeed, it has been some time now since a significant number of teachers owned their own means of production; in order to survive they sell their labour power…”

Beverly J. Silver, Forces of Labour: Workers’ Movements and Globaliation since 1870

I am a local officer of Leeds NUT. One of our biggest sources of casework is workplace bullying. It is also one of the most depressing and frustrating aspects of our work because it is very difficult to protect individual members from systematic intimidation by school managers, and the problem grows like a malignant tumour.

The Cambridge Primary Review - arguably the most important review since Plowden in 1967 - calls for an end to national testing and a complete re-think of current primary practice.

Middle class producers at the BBC have conveniently rediscovered the working class in order to make a series that attempts to drive a wedge between workers. The vile advert designed to build some hype around the “White” series depicted a bulldog man’s face being progressively blacked out by foreign words.

The American sheet music publishing industry produced a lot of ragtime music. By 1912, the sheet music industry had published three popular blues-like compositions, precipitating the Tin Pan Alley adoption of blues elements: Baby Seals’ Blues by “Baby” F. Seals (arranged by Artie Matthews), Dallas Blues by Hart Wand, and Memphis Blues by W. C. Handy.

The editorial on the crisis in Gaza in Solidarity 3-128 seemed to have some faith in the Israeli government’s ability to bring about a two state settlement to the Israel-Palestinian conflict. It appealed to the Israeli government to use a proportionate response to attacks and to live up to its democratic ideals. It also talks of a limited level of military response to Hamas’s rocket attacks as being unobjectionable self defence.

I have read with interest — and some amusement — Sean Matgamna’s history of the “Irish debate” in IS and elsewhere on the left in the period from the late 1950s to (presumably) the early 197

The popular image of Victorian consists of scenes of upper class decadence, lower class destitution and a stifling morality. Working people are passive, society is stable, and the best they can hope for is a rich philanthropist to save Oliver Twist from hardship. That is a fabrication, the creation of historical spin doctors.

Gaza is “the world’ s largest concentration camp”, something to be compared to “the Warsaw Ghetto under the Nazis.” The position of the Palestinians in the Occupied Territories “resembles that of Jews who once lived in the ghettoes of Eastern Europe before the Holocaust.”

Respect Renewal MP George Galloway has been far from sympathetic to the case of Mehdi Kazemi, instead choosing to spew homophobic bile and defend the Iranian regime. Showing his complete contempt for human rights and democracy, he has levelled the ridiculous accusation that people campaigning against the deportation of Mehdi Kazemi are “the pink contingent of imperialism” — even though the protests are against our own government.

Particularly since it expelled the bulk of its founders and trade union activists in 2006, the Workers’ Power group has been notable for combining rhetorical ultra-leftism with opportunism and wild political zig zags. Now the r-r-revolutionaries have surprised even the most jaded sectarian-watchers by supporting a first preference vote for Ken Livingstone,

Delegates will meet at the National Union of Teachers Conference in Manchester this month (21-24 March) in the middle of the union’s first national strike ballot for 22 years. Most activists are expecting a strong yes vote to endorse the union’s opposition to a 2008-10 pay deal which offers three further years of pay cuts.