Solidarity 103, 8 December 2006

Chavez wins election, but what about the workers?

By Paul Hampton Hugo Chávez was re-elected president of Venezuela on 3 December, but the prospects for socialism in Venezuela depend on a conscious break with the so-called Bolivarian revolution. Chávez got around 61% of the vote, compared with the right-wing opposition candidate Manuel Rosales, who got 38% - a convincing victory but not the 10 million votes he and his supporters were aiming for. The opposition did better than expected, and although he conceded defeat, the opposition has revived as an organised political force. What are the prospects for Venezuela and the Venezuelan working...

Cleaners take on city banks and win

• City bankers "earn" £9 billion in Christmas bonuses • Top executives get £1 million each - 90 years work for cleaners on minimum wage By Sofie Buckland As City bankers prepare to rake in record bonuses this Christmas, the armies of cleaners who keep the City running are being paid the bare minimum to maximise profits. The average Christmas bonus was £23,000 last year, set to rise 20% this year as a total of £9 billion is paid out to financial executives. Three thousand will receive over Ł1million each. Cleaners, contracted out via one of the many sweatshop cleaning companies, would have to...

Songs of liberty and rebellion

Yevgeny Yevtushenko who wrote this denunciation of Russian anti-semitism, was the USSR's licensed-rebel poet in...the late 50s and early 60s. "Over Babiy Yar/ there are no memorials....I am frightened...Dreyfus. I am he...I am also a boy in Belostok...the public-bar heroes are rioting...the corn-chandler is beating up my mother..." Yevgeny Yevtushenko, who wrote this denunciation of Russian anti-semitism, was the USSR's licensed-rebel poet in the period of the liberalising "thaw" during the late 50s and early 60s, under Nikita Khruschev. In his autobiography Yevtushenko says that he had been a...

How New Labour is creating slave labour

By Steve Cohen Whatever the merits of Tony Blair's recent retrospective apology for Britain's leading role in the slave trade it would be less hypocritical if his government was not developing a modern system of slavery and the reintroduction of sweated labour through the reshaping of immigration controls. The mechanisms of immigration control are changing. They are locating themselves in the workplace and on the factory floor. The agents and enforcers of controls are becoming employers. They are the managers of New Labours "managed migration". In fact this role began with the 1996 Asylum and...

The Olmert-Abbas Meeting: New Moves in the Middle East?

Editorial in current "Solidarity" In 2003 George Bush talked of a worldwide drive by the USA to erect bourgeois democracy and American-style capitalism across the globe, wherever "dictatorial" and heavily state-regulated economies existed. He saw no limits to US power, no insuperable obstacles to an American-engineered transformation of the globe into more or less developed replicas of itself. When the US invaded Iraq Bush abandoned all the considerations which a dozen years before had held the US back from occupying Iraq and dismantling the Iraqi state machine: the fear that Iraq, which...

And Shakespeare, which group was he in?

"In fact, every sect is religious." — Karl Marx Many years ago I read with riveted fascination a big book on the history of a controversy that has more than a little interest for citizens of a socialist movement that has reduced itself to a sprawling archipelago of self-sealing, self-intoxicating, self-blinding sects - the dispute about "Who wrote Shakespeare?". It was called Shakespeare's Lives, and written by S. Schoenbaum. The dispute has raged for well over a hundred years now and rages still. Shakespeare wrote "Shakespeare", you say? But very little is known about William Shakespeare of...

No to Trident replacement!

by Amy Fisher In his foreword to the Government's white paper on the replacement of the Trident nuclear missile system, Tony Blair writes of the need to "deter" countries who might "seek to sponsor nuclear terrorism". In fact, the system exists for no other reason than to reinforce British imperialism's power to terrorise. Whilst we oppose apologists for the weapons programmes of countries such as Iran and North Korea, socialists must recognise the hypocrisy of the biggest nuclear powers, Britain and the United States, when they talk of disarmament. The white paper states Labour's "commitment"...

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