Workers' Liberty

In Tamar Yarom’s film six young Israeli women talk about their experiences during compulsory military service in the occupied territories.

Is there ever a point to examining the lives of the idle super-rich. Do we really need to know about the hyper-disfunctionality of their family life? Wait a minute — isn’t that the question they usually ask about us plebians?

The article "A watershed moment in union politics" in Solidarity 3/135 contained misleading comments about the events at the CWU Conference earlier in the month.

The following article is by Malik Miah, one of the editors of the US socialist magazine Against the Current. We print it in the interests of debate and to relate to an issue that extends beyond the American left. We invite our readers to write contributions to this discussion.

“It is the specific duty of the leaders to gain an ever clearer understanding of the theoretical problems, to free themselves more and more from the influence of traditional phrases inherited from the old conception of the world, and constantly to keep in mind that socialism, having become a science, demands the same treatment as every other science — it must be studied.” (Friedrich Engels, The Peasant War in Germany)

In "Global Emergency: the Battle Against Climate Change", Roy Wilkes, a supporter of the International Socialist Group and with it George Galloway's Respect Renewal project, argues that climate change

The fight to prevent dangerous and runaway climate change means that the energy regime in modern capitalism cannot be a matter of indifference to socialists. The pressure point now is the drive by power generation companies to build a new wave of coal-fired power stations.

The capture in Belgrade of Radovan Karadzic, who bears political responsibility for the murder of many thousands of Bosnian Muslim civilians in the mid-1990s, undoubtedly reflects the “turn to the west” of the current Serbian government. He had been living and working in Belgrade, protected by other Serb nationalists.

At the Labour Party National Policy Forum starting on 24 July [2008], the unions want to get a “Warwick 2”, a second version of the list of concessions obtained by them at a Policy Forum in summer 2004, in the run-up to the 2005 general election.

The USA has admitted defeat, for now, in its attempt to impose a “State of Forces Agreement” which would give the US military the powers of a parallel government in Iraq for many years to come.

The two day strike by hundreds of thousands of local government workers [on 16/17 July 2008] has demonstrated that there is a real mood to defeat the government’s imposed pay cut.

The National Union of Teachers Executive met on 17 July and unanimously agreed a timetable for a ballot on discontinuous strike action as the next steps in the pay campaign.

The 16th and 17th of July was the first time I have ever been on strike and I picketed outside the council building where I work with a couple of other workers.

• TEACHERS: NUT members in two Leeds schools voted for strike and non-strike action in June in opposition to increased workload.

New Labour’s welfare reforms will force single parents, the disabled and sick and drug addicts to find work — or lose their benefits. As the economic crisis bites, jobs will become harder to find. The government has a solution. Force people onto cheap-labour “workfare” schemes.

Those who do not know what the working class movement has done will not be able to imagine what it is capable of doing and will do in the future. Much of the real history of the movement is lost; it is one of the central functions of revolutionary socialists to act as the custodian of the memory of the working class and its movement.

HM Hyndman, writing towards the end of the nineteenth century thought that “supposing the time had been ripe in England, as many then believed, for a great social revolution, one important fact stood in the way of both the political and physical force revolutionists. In all serious upheavals, previous… London had taken a leading part… This was not the case in the days of Chartism”.

• Click here for the ensuing debate.

By Dan Katz

It was as if a conscience-stricken god said to himself one day in the mid-60s: “I suppose I have been a bit rough on the poor old Trots; setback after setback, massacre after massacre, blow after blow, for four decades now....

Editorial, Workers Fight No 7, June 1968

We can’t be sure; but the odds must be that George W Bush’s administration will not launch a bomb attack on Iran in its last few months in office.

Even if such an attack went neatly as planned, it couldn’t bring any triumph that would boost the standing of the administration or of its favoured candidate in the November presidential election, John McCain.

In 1961, the year of Barack Obama’s birth, it was still legal for the US government to discriminate against its citizens on grounds of race (the Civil Rights Act which formally banned such discrimin

Tom Unterrainer spoke with Mike Sambo from the International Socialist Organisation Zimbabwe

How was the ISO formed?

Michel Husson is a Marxist economist well-known on the French left, author of many books include Critique de la marchandisation (forthcoming) and until 2007 a member of the LCR. He responded to questions posed by Martin Thomas.