Solidarity 048, 18 March 2004

In December LG Electronics, an $18 billion Korean company, transferred 350 components workers at their Reynosa TV plant to an abandoned warehouse. The workers first had to suffer rats and snakes while production was set up. They are exposed to the fumes from soldering and numerous chemicals with little or no protective equipment. They earn $43-$58 US per week. The workers went to their company-dominated CTM union and were told there was nothing to be done. On Saturday, February 21st they met and decided to file charges at the labour board. They found the State Governor touring nearby and asked...

By Harry Glass The general elections on 5 April will not provide a solution to the problems faced by the Indonesian people because the majority of political parties are rotten, says the People's Democratic Party (PRD) in Indonesia. The PRD, led by Dita Sari, wanted to stand in the elections as part of the People's United Opposition Party (POPOR), but in October they failed the verification process to be legally registered as a political party. According to Max Lane, writing recently in the Australian socialist paper Green Left Weekly, there seems to be very little popular interest in the...

It gets curiouser and curiouser, the Galloway affair. The champion of Saddam Hussein's fascistic Iraq, the loyal personal friend of the Iraqi Hitler's loyal deputy Tariq Aziz, the man who leads the list of the SWP's Respect coalition for the Euro-elections in June, has defended himself against AWL and Solidarity - in a letter to the Weekly Worker. It was, the reader will remember, in deference to this morally and politically compromised rich spouter of stale rhetoric that the SWP dropped the idea that an MP should get only a worker's wage (and the extra expenses of the job, naturally). Someone...

The battles about hijab-wearing in French state schools have almost exclusively concerned girls of 13 or older. I would not argue that 13 is old enough to abandon entirely the supervision and discipline which we take as obviously necessary for smaller children, but which would be unjust imposition on, say, 18 year olds. I am in favour of public laws (against child labour, for a sexual age of consent), sometimes as a counter to parents' supervision. Yet 13 year olds should have a wider limits within which to experiment and to make their own mistakes for themselves than younger children. France...

No Sweat are organising solidarity with the re-emerging labour movement in Iraq. Who will fight for democratic rights and decent living conditions in Iraq? The best hope is the re-emerging labour movement. For 35 years the Ba'thist dictatorship crushed all independent politics and trade-union organisation. Now independent trade unions have been formed, distinct from Saddam's old state-controlled General Federation of Trade Unions. The Union of the Unemployed in Iraq campaigns for jobs or unemployment benefit of $100 a month for Iraq's huge numbers of jobless. Organisation and activism can make...

By Peter Burton The Scottish Socialist Party's conference at Edinburgh University on 27-28 March has three times more motions before it than last year. A warning has been put out that speaking time will be short and there is no time for international speakers to address conference. The Executive's motion following on from the "historic decision" of the RMT to affiliate branches to the SSP wants all unions to disaffiliate from the Labour party and affiliate to the SSP. There is a qualification about the timing of raising rule book changes in different unions, but little is said about working...

Ewa Jasiewicz spent eight months in Iraq, mainly in Baghdad and Basra, working for Occupation Watch. She worked with the trade union movement in Basra, especially the Southern Oil Company Union. From Basra she used to post regular reports at the anarchist website infoshop (www.infoshop.org), and via other web resources (for example, Voices in the Wilderness), about workers' struggles in Iraq. Clive Bradley talked to her. Ewa went to Iraq from Palestine, because while many activists from around the world were working to help the Palestinians, few were supporting Iraqis. It's an impressive...

Martin Thomas moved the motion opposing Respect at the SA conference Respect is not democratic, not inclusive, and not socialist. Its political platform is similar to the Greens. The Greens already exist. There is no point creating a second-rate replica. The ideas of common ownership, workers' control, workers' representatives on a worker' wage, or workers' representation of any sort, are missing from the platform. Respect does not have a constitution. Decision-making power is with an Executive which includes no minority representation and publishes no minutes. Respect includes a much narrower...

Click here for the series on The Roots of Bolshevism of which this article is part John O'Mahony continues his series of articles on the roots of Bolshevism "The Russian proletarian is no novice in the revolutionary movement. You know that it was a worker who blew up the imperial palace in February 1880. The very idea for this action was conceived in a workers' group." G V Plekhanov and Vera Zasulich, Letter to the International Socialist Congress, 1891 "And our proletariat? Did it pass through the school of the medieval apprentice brotherhood? Has it the ancient tradition of the guilds...

By Martin Thomas In the last issue of Solidarity I argued that Marxists must both fight to "reclaim the Labour Party" (to the limited extent that such a thing is possible) and "build a new party". These are not two alternative lines of action, but two necessary and complementary aspects of a coherent strategy. But doesn't the experience of the Scottish Socialist Party (SSP) prove me wrong? For a decade now the SSP and its predecessors have dismissed all efforts to mobilise the Labour-affiliated unions within the Labour structures, and focused exclusively on "building a new party". In the 2003...