Solidarity 059 ESF Extra, 7 October 2004

By Mick Duncan No Sweat , the British anti-sweatshop campaign, began life as a national network a little under three years ago. During those three years the organisation has extended the breadth and scale of its work, which has included drives against sweatshop bosses abroad and in the UK. Five national trade unions and the National Union of Students are now affiliated and No Sweat continues to grow, week by week. No Sweat’s structures are open and flexible — capable of allowing Trotskyists, anarchists, Labour Party leftists, trade union militants and activists from various other backgrounds...

A is for ATTAC The biggest “movement for another globalisation” in France, which has a large international network. It has a considerable overlap with official politics, for example in the French Socialist Party. But some revolutionaries are active within it. ATTAC France was launched in June 1998, following a call for an “Association for the Tobin Tax for Aid to Citizens” in the December 1997 issue of the magazine Le Monde Diplomatique. It now has more than 30,000 members, and other national ATTAC groups tens of thousands. For Tobin Tax, see T, below. There is an ATTAC-Britain, but, according...

By Mark Osborn How can exhausted, downtrodden workers, bombarded with prejudices, come to see their place in the world as part of a revolutionary class? Or will better-off workers always see their interest in getting what they can out of the system, and will worse-off workers always be helpless objects for charity and welfare? These questions were answered in practice in France in May 1968. In April 1968 many people were still saying that the working class had been irrevocably tamed. By June they were eating their words. The spark of student action lit a huge fire of discontent as French...

In 1991, after the collapse of the USSR, we went on the streets with the headline: “Stand up for socialism”, and the strapline: “Stalinism was the opposite of socialism”. A common response, gleeful or sad, was: “Socialism is dead, darling!” But for years and decades before 1991, we had championed the underground workers’ movements and the oppressed nationalities in the Stalinist states. We had waged war on the idea — which used to be held by many in the labour movement — that states like the USSR, China, or Cuba were socialist in any sense or in any degree. Stalinism was as distant from...

Can we change the world without taking power? Without organising ongoing, structured, political movements (parties)? John Holloway, in a much-read book (Change the World Without Taking Power, Pluto 2002) says we can. He is wrong. If we don’t take power — if, to be more exact, activists do not agitate, educate, and organise to push the working class towards sufficient organisation, confidence and assertiveness for the working class to take power — then the Blairs and Bushes, the Schröders and Putins, will keep power. If, at points of crisis and turmoil, we counsel the working class to step back...

By Colin Foster Socialism means democratic control by the producers — the workers — over what is produced and distributed. That’s how it will end poverty, class inequality, exploitation, boom-slump cycles and the trashing of the environment. That is how it will ensure good social provision for all, in place of the chaos and inhumanity of the free market. To make planning democratic, the process will have to be quite complicated. People in particular industries and localities will have to discuss and draw up proposals for planning targets. A balance will have to be found between local, national...