Solidarity 249, 13 June 2012

As Marxists, we know that if you survive by selling your labour power to a boss, you’re a worker. That’s not fundamentally altered by the amount of money you sell your labour power for. Therefore, the squads of footballers currently in Ukraine and Poland for the 2012 European Championships are technically made up of workers and it is to them that we make this appeal. To Bro. Rooney, who earns £26,000 every day (the same as the median annual wage in the UK), to Bro. Ronaldo, whose prospective bosses at Manchester City propose to pay him £400,000 per week in order to lure him away from his...

The latest “success” of the boycott-Israel campaign has resulted not in pressure on the Israeli government, but in the silencing of women’s voices from the Middle East. The Center for Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Texas Austin had been planning to publish a collection of women’s writing as a tribute to a late faculty member. But, according to US website Inside Higher Ed, Huzama Habayeb, a Palestinian contributor based in Abu Dhabi, objected to the inclusion of two pieces by Israeli writers and convinced 13 of the original 29 writers involved to withdraw from the project. The...

According to Syria expert Joshua Landis, “Syrians have abandoned the regime in spirit, even if they have yet to defect in body”. “Sunni Syrians continue to go to work and turn up in their offices in the morning, but they hate the Assad regime in their hearts. Assad’s army is being taken over by shabiha and security forces manned by Alawites. The massacres leave no doubt about that”. Even in the capital, Damascus, where Assad’s control is strongest, shopkeepers have staged a week-long strike to protest against the massacre, by the army and pro-Assad Alawite sectarian militias, of more than 100...

“Garbage”. “Poison”. “Cancer”. These are some of the words used by Israeli politicians to describe African migrants in the last month, which has seen racist riots, assaults and firebombings in working-class neighbourhoods of south Tel Aviv, encouraged and partly orchestrated by the “mainstream” right. The real cancer in Israeli society is racism, running riot as Israel entrenches its domination over the Palestinians, Israeli society is further militarised and brutalised, and Israeli politics shifts further and further to the right. To give a flavour of the kind of things being said about...

Today members of RMT and ASLEF took the first of two planned 24 hours of strike action in response to a decision by Deutsch Bahn Regio (who last year took over the contract) to enforce a real terms pay cut by refusing to meet the workers demand for pay rises in line with Retail Price Index. The picket line at South Gosforth metro station where most drivers start the day was upbeat, and the metro service didn't any services all day. In an interview with BBC Newcastle RMT regional organiser Micky Thompson said they were ready to discuss a living wage deal with the DB Regio. In a parallel dispute...