Solidarity 088, 23 February 2006

The Zanon factory in Neuquén province in Argentina has operated under workers’ control for four years. It is a great example of the creativity of working class people. Julian Pununuri from Zanon spoke to Paul Hampton during his recent UK tour, organised by No Sweat and the Argentina Solidarity Campaign. PH: Zanon is an inspiration to socialists and activists across the globe. What’s going on there now? JP: The struggle continues, supported by the local community, the unemployed organisations (MTD), the left and of course the workers in the factory. The factory’s former owners decided to shut...

By Laura Schwartz, convenor students against sweatshops Between 8 and 14 February I happily accepted an invitation from United Students Against Sweatshops to attend their winter conference in San Francisco as a representative of Students Against Sweatshops and No Sweat. 415 delegates attended the four day conference, representing groups from the 200 US colleges affiliated to USAS. Workshops and seminars focused on USAS’ four main campaign areas – sweat-free college merchandise; a living wage for campus workers; “Killer Coke”; and international solidarity. The conference also discussed how...

By Sacha ismail Between February 11 and 18, activists across the country organised meetings, protests, film-showings, petitioning and benefit gigs as part of the first student Anti-Sweatshop Week of Action. The week of action, which we hope to make an annual event, was called by No Sweat and Students Against Sweatshops, with (in the event, largely passive) support from the National Union of Students. A variety of left-wing activists on campus, from People & Planet groups to left-wing campaigning societies and even one Labour Club, organised events. The backbone of the week was an international...

By colin foster According to detailed research by the International Crisis Group, the Iraqi “resistance” is becoming much more organised and confident. The USA’s reported repeated attempts to get into negotiations with a “nationalist” wing of the “resistance” and split it off from a “jihadi” wing have little grip. The ICG report is based on analysis of the websites, DVDs, and videos produced by the “resistance”, now quite numerous and professionally-done, plus a few interviews. At the start in 2003, the ICG says, the “resistance” was very fragmented. It got a big boost in early 2004 with the...

by Amina Saddiq In a solid display of working-class solidarity, an international day of trade union action was organised on 15 February in support of the Iranian bus workers. Road transport unions in Morocco, Egypt and Tunisia, the Tunisian rail workers’ and maritime unions and the petrochemical union in Jordan all held actions. In Iraq, members of the General Federation of Iraqi Workers (formerly the IFTU) delivered a letter of protest and demonstrated in front of the Iranian embassy in Baghdad. Actions were organised by unions in Austria, Australia, Canada, India, Japan, Korea, New Zealand...

If Terry Liddle wants to maintain that FA Ridley was personally a good sort (see Solidarity 3/87), I’ll take his word for it. I never met him. I know him only for his writings, including his pamphlet on Spartacus, which, decades ago, I read and thought very good. What Ridley might have been as a person is beside the point. He did, in black and white, in the Socialist Leader, back the Stalinists in their savage repression of Hungary in October-November 1956 — and on the bizarre grounds that the choice was between the “Red” (Stalinist!) International and the “Black” international, that is the...

Mark Sandell’s letter (Solidarity 3/87) attacking my article on secularism in France did make a sustained effort at picking holes in my argument, but did little to justify his own position. While I raised doubts over the possibility of engaging religious workers if we wholeheartedly support the bourgeois state’s effort to impose irreligion on them, Mark simply accuses me of “joining the motley crew of cultural relativists, numbskull ‘anti-imperialists’ and assorted religious bigots in opposing the ban on the veil”. He nowhere answers my charge that a crude ban on religious symbols will make...

By Alan Thomas At the present time, Muslim populations across Europe are under-privileged and oppressed. Within the UK as well, Muslim populations suffer all the usual social indicators of racism, as well as being at the sharp end of the recent “antiterror” laws, as well as a wider post-9/11 backlash. The image of Muslim as savage, terrorist “other” is thus at the fore in a way that it has not been in many years. It is within this context that the Jyllands-Posten cartoons exist. I simply cannot see how (on any basic understanding of racism as a social, political and economic phenomenon) that a...