Solidarity 139, 25 September 2008

A right-winger who may go for peace?

Uri Avnery, an Israeli peace activist, gives his assessment of the election of Tzipi Livni to the leadership of the Kadima party, the largest party in the Israeli Knesset (parliament). This is the victory of a person without a military background over someone with almost nothing apart from a military background. On the advice of his right-wing American political strategist, Stanley Greenberg, Mofaz emphasized the word "security" on every occasion, almost in every sentence. A popular talk-show turned this into a parody: Security, security, security, security. Well, it did not work. The general...

The Capitalist Mystique Shatters!

“For us the bourgeoisie is not a stone dropping into an abyss, but a living historical force which struggles, manoeuvres, advances now on its right flank, now on its left. And only provided we learn to grasp politically all the means and methods of bourgeois society so as to each time react to them without hesitation or delay, shall we succeed in bringing closer that moment when we can, with a single confident stroke, actually hurl the bourgeoisie into the abyss" - Leon Trotsky, 1922 1968 went down in history as the year of tremendous shifts in world politics that led to an enormous upsurge of...

Help Iraqi workers win a labour law!

According to US Labor Against the War and the Iraqi Freedom Congress, a flurry of strikes and demonstrations has scored one of the most important victories for Iraqi workers since 2003, and put the question of a proper labour law on the agenda. USLAW reports (14 September): "Following days of demonstrations and strikes by thousands of workers, the Iraqi government reversed its order to cut wages by up to 30% and eliminate many industrial labor benefits". As I understand it, the wage cuts were imposed as a result of IMF pressure to reverse a wage rise granted by the Iraqi government to public...

Labour conference: the unions and the crisis

"If they [the power companies] still don't get the message, this government should consider taking these essential industries - gas, electricity, water - back under public ownership", declared Unite joint general secretary Tony Woodley at the Labour Party conference (22 September). "If it's good enough for the banks, it's good enough for our utilities". A sign that the union leaders are being jolted by the economic crisis into a more assertive stand? We can hope so, but so far the evidence compels scepticism. At the conference the union leaders have also rallied to Gordon Brown, shelving the...

Test case on the Tube

Following a series of victimisations, Tube bosses are upping the stakes by suspending a leading trade union activist on the network. Andy Littlechild, a well-known local rep at Lillie Bridge and activist on the "company council" - the top relevant union body - was suspended by the infrastructure company Metronet on Tuesday 16 September, on trumped-up charges. The London Underground Engineering and Fleet branches, and the RMT union executive, have voted to ballot Metronet workers for strike action. If Metronet is allowed to get away with this, every union rep across the network will be in...

Iraq: "we need a third front"

Aso Kamal of the Worker-communist Party of Kurdistan spoke to Martin Thomas from Solidarity. Passages in italics are explanatory additions supplied by Aso Kamal after the printed version of this interview had gone to press . Q. You've recently set up the Worker-communist Party of Kurdistan as well as the Worker-communist Party of Iraq. Why? A. We are the same party in Iraq and in Kurdistan. We believe in the same principles: socialism, workers' state. But in the last 17 years Kurdistan has been practically separated from Iraq. There is a different economic, political, and social situation...

US announces "bankers' socialism"

For decades now we've been told that the only way to a dynamic and efficient economy is privatisation and fiercer free-market competition. Now the same capitalist governments say that the only escape from economic disaster is to nationalise and regulate. That is how capital is. When things are going well for capital, it wants a free hand to grab what it can. But that free-fire zone for capital necessarily, sooner or later, leads to economic bubbles bursting, and the state stepping in to shore up capital. The bigger banks and insurance companies get bailed out. The working class that produced...

Weekly Worker Chickens Out of Israel Debate

Song of the Weekly Worker I'm so small! But I'm poisonous too; What I say is at best but half-true: I spread gossip thin, So they'll think I'm well in; But I'm useful, torn up in the loo! Readers may remember that on 3 August I challenged the people who publish the Weekly Worker to "debate with me publicly on the Israel-Palestine question, at a meeting presided over by a commonly agreed chair". That was in response to a ridiculous campaign they were - and are - running around the assertion that I, in Solidarity 3/136 . "excused an Israeli nuclear attack on Iran". It is a straightforward lie...

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