Solidarity 195, 2 March 2011

Wave of protests in Iraq

Despite a government-ordered “lockdown” designed to prevent them, demonstrators took to the streets in Iraq on 25 February in at least 17 cities, protesting against government corruption and neglect of basic services. The Washington Post reports that Iraqi security forces detained about 300 people, including prominent journalists, artists, and lawyers in the aftermath of the Friday protests.The demonstrations are part of the biggest wave of social upheaval since Saddam Hussein’s regime fell. The growing movement has included significant workers’ militancy, particularly amongst workers in the...

Union challenge in Queensland

Bob Carnegie, a member of Workers’ Liberty Australia, is running for election as secretary of the Queensland branch of the Maritime Union of Australia — Australia’s union for dockworkers and seafarers. Nominations open on 7 March, and the ballot runs from 28 April to 14 June. Bob was a prominent member of the MUA — and, before it merged into the MUA, the Seamen’s Union of Australia — in the 1980s and 1990s. In 1998 he resigned from his full-time position as MUA Branch Organiser because he could not back the deal made by the union leadership to settle the lock-out by Patrick’s, one of Australia...

Death threat to Zimbabwean socialists

52 Zimbabwean socialists have been tried with treason and “subverting a constitutionally elected government”, and could now face the death penalty, following arrests after a meeting organised in solidarity with the Egyptian revolution. The activists are members of the International Socialist Organisation, a group linked to the British SWP but which cooperates with other tendencies. Mike Sambo, a leading ISO member, spoke at Workers’ Liberty’s Ideas for Freedom event in 2008. The despotic regime of Robert Mugabe is undertaking a general clampdown on dissent in advance of possible elections...

Student occupations restart

Many thousands of students have participated in occupations, demonstrations and direct action in recent weeks. On 29 January, around 10,000 students demonstrated in London and 6,000 in Manchester. In Manchester hundreds of students chased NUS President Aaron Porter off the demo, a crucial step in the chain of events which ended with him announcing he would not stand for a second year of office, the first president since 1969 to do that. February saw student occupations at the University of the West of England, Manchester, Aberystwyth, Glasgow and Hull. Students at the London School of...

Vive la Commune! 140 years since the workers' revolution in Paris

In 1871, the workers and poor people of Paris organised to take power and create the world's first workers' government - the Paris Commune. The result was an explosion of democracy, freedom and human creativity unparalleled in history up to that point. Although the Commune lasted less than three months and was drowned in blood by the French ruling class, its example has inspired workers in revolutionary struggle across the world ever since. Between March 18, the day the Commune began, and 28 May, the day it fell, Workers' Liberty will be organising a series of events to celebrate and try to...

Student occupiers launch 'Anticuts Space' in central London

Royal Holloway is a university based in Egham, in Surrey, outside West London. Traditionally its political culture has been quite conservative, but the building of a strong anti-cuts group and a big occupation last November changed that, with socialist Daniel Lemberger Cooper winning the student union presidency (see here ). On Thursday 24 February, immediately after a packed Israel/Palestine report-back addressed by AWL solidarity delegation members Jade Baker and Sacha Ismail, Royal Holloway activists put into action their plans for occupying the Arts building on their Egham campus. The next...

American workers fight back

The Great Recession and its aftermath have generated a wholesale and unprecedented assault on the living conditions and future prospects for the American working class. This is the backdrop for the dramatic conflict now unfolding in Wisconsin. The organized working class in the United States is a shell of its former self, pummeled by protracted neo-liberal policies of aggressive union busting, globalization, and the relative decline of the manufacturing sector. While, at the same time, the Chamber of Commerce rebooted itself from a network of small town grandees into a confrontational and...

Uncovering the truth about human society

“[The capitalist mode of production] is based on the dominion of man [sic] over nature. Where nature is too lavish, she “keeps him in hand, like a child in leading-strings.” She does not impose upon him any necessity to develop himself. It is not the tropics with their luxuriant vegetation, but the temperate zone, that is the mother country of capital. It is not the mere fertility of the soil, but the differentiation of the soil, the variety of its natural products, the changes of the seasons, which form the physical basis for the social division of labour, and which, by changes in the natural...

Review of The Ecological Rift by John Bellamy Foster et al

The Ecological Rift, the latest book by John Bellamy Foster and his co-thinkers Brett Clark and Richard York, epitomises the strengths and weaknesses of the Monthly Review school: “half lamentation, half lampoon; half echo of the past, half menace of the future”, as Marx put it in the Communist...

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