Solidarity 3/139, 25 September 2008
Solidarity 3/139
Submitted on 25 September, 2008 - 00:18Solidarity 3/139 is out. Download pdf (see "attachment", below).
TU News in brief
Submitted on 26 September, 2008 - 10:28
LOCAL GOVERNMENT: The decision by members of Unison’s Local Government National Joint Council to agree to binding arbitration effectively brings this year’s pay dispute to an end.
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Public sector pay: how to win
Submitted on 26 September, 2008 - 10:26
If anything sums up New Labour as a Government for the rich, a cuckoo in the labour movement nest, it has to be their year-on-year drive to keep public sector wages below the rate of inflation.
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Against fees, debts and marketisation
Submitted on 26 September, 2008 - 10:23
Student union officers and student activists involved in the Education Not for Sale group have launched the following statement calling for a national student demonstration next year — the year that could see university fees completely deregulated, but in which the National Union of Students is planning no demonstration or serious campaign.
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What kind of student movement?
Submitted on 26 September, 2008 - 10:19
Student Respect, or in other words Socialist Workers’ Party students, are organising a conference for a “democratic, campaigning student movement” at the School of Oriental and African Studies on Saturday 1 November.
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Trade unionists for choice
Submitted on 26 September, 2008 - 10:13
Next month we will have the first chance in 18 years to extend abortion rights when the House of Commons debates pro-choice amendments to the Human Embryology Bill.
Every day recently I have removed anti-choice leaflets from the entrance sign to the hospital where I work at and numerous friends have told me about receiving pro-life propaganda through their door, urging them to contact their MP and ask them to vote against all of the pro-choice amendments.
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Jobless figure is rising
Submitted on 26 September, 2008 - 09:53
As the economic crisis generalises — creeping out of the financial markets and into the productive economy — material effects on working-class lives begin to hit home. Along with rocketing costs of living and house repossessions, unemployment looks set to increase.
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Rebuilding the movement
Submitted on 26 September, 2008 - 09:37
A brief look at the current industrial news is enough to make any socialist’s eyes water. We have seen the GMB (with one eye to the sinking ship of New Labour) seek talks with the Tories, and Unison scuppering any possibility of a united public sector pay fight. Even in the unions, such as PCS and NUT, where the “left” control the leadership, there is little industrial strategy to win the pay fight, and scant effort is going into the most basic task of building a fighting, militant union movement.
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Convention of the Left Debates Equality
Submitted on 26 September, 2008 - 09:35
The main hall at the Left Convention was full for the meeting on how to fight for women’s equality, with speakers from Abortion Rights, Feminist Fightback, the Labour Party and the Women’s Charter.
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Matt Wrack: we need a workers’ party
Submitted on 26 September, 2008 - 09:31
Report from The Convention of the Left, meeting in Manchester in parallel to Labour’s conference (20-24 September).
Though the organisers had successfully argued against a debate on links between the unions and Labour, the question of political perspectives for the unions ran through many of the contributions to the trade union session.
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Celia Hart: a Trotskyist icon?
Submitted on 26 September, 2008 - 09:27
Celia Hart Santamaria, the well-known Cuban Communist Party activist who died in a traffic accident in Havana at the start of September, was feted on the international left as a representative of Trotskyism in Cuba.
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Stoke BNP rally sounds the alarm
Submitted on 26 September, 2008 - 09:25
On Saturday 20 September three or four hundred BNP activists leafleted and rallied in Stoke on Trent. Their activity was trying to capitalise on the killing of one of their most unpleasant members, Keith Brown, by an Asian neighbour whom he had provoked for many years.
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Fighting fascists after 1945
Submitted on 26 September, 2008 - 09:21
Physical confrontation with fascist organisations is a controversial matter for the main strands of anti-fascism. For groups like Unite Against Fascism, on the deliberate calculation of the dominant left force within it, the SWP, such tactics are likely to scare off their media, religious and mainstream political supporters. Searchlight has a similar problem.
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The man who wrote “The Iron Heel”
Submitted on 26 September, 2008 - 09:18
Jack London is remembered today mainly for children’s fictional stories — Call of the Wild (1903) and White Fang (1905) remain his best-known works. It is often forgotten that London was a socialist.
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Iraq’s (not quite) lost generation
Submitted on 26 September, 2008 - 09:15
Review of Heavy Metal in Baghdad
Acrassicaduda (Latin for black scorpion) is a heavy metal band in the world’s most “heavy metal city” — Baghdad. After writing about them in US counter culture magazine Vice in 2003, two metal head journos make the ultimate groupie pilgrimage to the world’s most dangerous city to track down the young Iraqis who make up the band.
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From rebel to zealot
Submitted on 26 September, 2008 - 09:12
“In lawlessness, in the committing of crimes, the point must be remembered at which a man becomes a cannibal!” Statement of A. I. Solzhenitsyn in defence of Zhores Medvedev, June 1970
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Only half an answer
Submitted on 26 September, 2008 - 09:08
Weighing up the pros and cons of “consensus decision-making”.
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Zimbabwe:“We urge working people to reject this elitist deal”
Submitted on 26 September, 2008 - 09:06
The following assessment of the recent power-sharing deal between Robert Mugabe’s Zanu PF and Morgan Tsvangirai’s Movement for Democratic Change is from the International Socialist Organisation of Zimbabwe
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The myth of “Luxemburgism”
Submitted on 26 September, 2008 - 09:02
Rosa Luxemburg, a Polish revolutionary (1871-1919) who spent much of her active life in Germany, is one of the great figures of the revolutionary Marxist tradition. This article written in June 1935, sets the record straight about Luxemburg’s real contribution
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A right-winger who may go for peace?
Submitted on 25 September, 2008 - 01:00
Uri Avnery, an Israeli peace activist, gives his assessment of the election of Tzipi Livni to the leadership of the Kadima party, the largest party in the Israeli Knesset (parliament).
The Capitalist Mystique Shatters!
Submitted on 25 September, 2008 - 00:23
“For us the bourgeoisie is not a stone dropping into an abyss, but a living historical force which struggles, manoeuvres, advances now on its right flank, now on its left. And only provided we learn to grasp politically all the means and methods of bourgeois society so as to each time react to them without hesitation or delay, shall we succeed in bringing closer that moment when we can, with a single confident stroke, actually hurl the bourgeoisie into the abyss" - Leon Trotsky, 1922
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Help Iraqi workers win a labour law!
Submitted on 24 September, 2008 - 22:17
According to US Labor Against the War and the Iraqi Freedom Congress, a flurry of strikes and demonstrations has scored one of the most important victories for Iraqi workers since 2003, and put the question of a proper labour law on the agenda.
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Labour conference: the unions and the crisis
Submitted on 24 September, 2008 - 22:15
"If they [the power companies] still don't get the message, this government should consider taking these essential industries - gas, electricity, water - back under public ownership", declared Unite joint general secretary Tony Woodley at the Labour Party conference (22 September).
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Test case on the Tube
Submitted on 24 September, 2008 - 22:12
Following a series of victimisations, Tube bosses are upping the stakes by suspending a leading trade union activist on the network.
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Iraq: "we need a third front"
Submitted on 24 September, 2008 - 12:01
Aso Kamal of the Worker-communist Party of Kurdistan spoke to Martin Thomas from Solidarity.
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US announces "bankers' socialism"
Submitted on 24 September, 2008 - 11:53
For decades now we've been told that the only way to a dynamic and efficient economy is privatisation and fiercer free-market competition. Now the same capitalist governments say that the only escape from economic disaster is to nationalise and regulate.
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Weekly Worker Chickens Out of Israel Debate
Submitted on 20 September, 2008 - 20:14
Song of the Weekly Worker
I'm so small! But I'm poisonous too;
What I say is at best but half-true:
I spread gossip thin,
So they'll think I'm well in;
But I'm useful, torn up in the loo!
Readers may remember that on 3 August I challenged the people who publish the Weekly Worker to "debate with me publicly on the Israel-Palestine question, at a meeting presided over by a commonly agreed chair".


