Workers' Liberty

Sean Matgamna replies to Moshe Machover's second polemic on Israel and Iran.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

“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

Weighing up the pros and cons of “consensus decision-making”.

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

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

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).

“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

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.

"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).

Following a series of victimisations, Tube bosses are upping the stakes by suspending a leading trade union activist on the network.

Aso Kamal of the Worker-communist Party of Kurdistan spoke to Martin Thomas from Solidarity.

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.

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".