A speech by Max Shachtman, candidate of the Workers Party for Mayor of New York City in 1944. It was reproduced as a mass circulation pamphlet.

WHAT DO THE SOCIALISTS WANT?

What is socialism? What do the socialists want? The simplest way to find the answer to these questions is to ask yourself: "What do I want? What do the tens of millions like me throughout the world want?"

The infancy and childhood of the movement was fortunate in having the intellectual leadership of one of the greatest minds of all time, Karl Marx. It was doubly fortunate in having in Marx’s collaborator, Friedrich Engels, a genius in his own right, whose true stature always remained obscured in the public mind as a result of his modest subordination to the towering height of Marx. The period of the formation of the Second International under the sound, experienced guidance of Engels, his last great service to the working class, coincided with the rise of the Marxist movement in Russia.

Outsourced workers at Uni of London have won sick pay and holiday terms of very-near equivalence with directly-employed staff after a long campaign and a two-day strike (27 and 28 November 2013).

Massive victory for 3 Cosas campaign, workers' self-organisation, and militant industrial action. Two demands down, one to go (plus union recognition)!

Tres Cosas campaign blog

Photos and reports from the strikes.

Outsourced workers at the University of London are striking for equal rights and union recognition. Their "3 Cosas" ("3 Things") campaign has fought for parity of sick pay, holiday entitlement, and pension rights between outsourced and directly employed staff. They are striking on 27 and 28 November for these demands, against potential job losses resulting from the closure of Garden Halls, and for recognition of their union, IWGB.

On 21 November, London Underground announced plans to close all its ticket offices and cut nearly 1,000 station staff posts.

Passengers and trade unionists responded with immediate opposition: within hours of the announcement, disabled campaigners held an impromptu protest at Westminster station, and the RMT trade union announced an industrial action ballot.

Trade union activists targeted blacklisting employers on a 20 November day of action.

The day, which was called by the TUC, saw demonstrations, rallies, and other direct actions targeting companies such as Sir Robert McAlpine, a construction firm.

An ongoing parliamentary enquiry has revealed that the firm spent £28,000 on union-busting and blacklisting activities.

Demonstrations were held in Birmingham, Cardiff, Glasgow, Hemel Hempstead, London, Leeds, Manchester, Newcastle, Wolverhampton, and elsewhere.

The steering committee of the Local Associations National Action Campaign (LANAC), a rank-and-file network in the National Union of Teachers (NUT) met on 23 November in Nottingham.

Higher education workers will strike over pay on 3 December.

Members of UCU, Unite and Unison in higher education who struck on 31 October will be striking again. This time they’ll be joined by Scottish education union EIS and UCU members in further education.

Many university teachers get less than the minimum wage, as little as £4 an hour, for the work they put in. Some are beginning to organise. Josie Foreman discusses the issues.

Academics love nothing more than having a moan about the terrible state of the neo-liberal university. We tend to be slightly less enthusiastic when it comes to getting up from our desks and doing something about it.

This has begun to change, as pockets of resistance have begun to emerge at several different British universities in the last few years.

Present-day schools teach failure more than they teach anything else. They are inefficient at teaching knowledge.

A recent survey found that MPs and business bosses, despite mostly having had many years of schooling, can’t work out the probability of getting a head and a tail when a coin is tossed twice; and we all know that many of them cannot write adequate English.

Yet, by the time they have finished school, most young people will have had one big idea drummed into them: that they are failures.