Last August Northern Rock was the subject of the first run on a bank in
this country for a hundred and forty years. People queued up all night
to try to get their money back. But, of course, their money wasn’t
there. Where had it gone?
This week, a CIA memo has been discovered that confirms the existence of a coup plan, which is code-named Operation Pliers.
On Sunday, we will be rallying against the CIA coup attempt outside
Bolivar Hall, where the Venezuelan community in London will be voting,
from 5pm once the poll has closed.
Production at the
American dream factory has slowed down as workers organised in the Writers
Guild of America just completed their third week on strike. 4,000 marched in
support of the strike down the famous Hollywood Boulevard.
We are publishing
here an interesting piece on the Irish trade unions by Peter Black, an active
member of the TGWU (now fused with Amicus to form "Unite") and the Irish
Republican Socialist Party. Trade union membership is growing in Ireland, as is
the militancy of the working class and Socialist Republicans, in the tradition
of James Connolly, can play an important role in providing the militant
leadership the Irish workers deserve.
Everywhere the cry is: credit crunch! You can smell the sweat on the brows of
bankers as their necks are squeezed by the tightening credit noose. In all the offices of the great investment
banks of Wall Street, the City of London and gnomes of Zurich, you can hear the
hissing sound of the global financial bubble bursting and deflating.
On Saturday 24th November over 2,000
trade unionists marched through Manchester demanding the reinstatement of
UNISON health service activist Karen Reissmann. Banners were present
from UNISON branches across the country, but also from UNITE branches, civil service
branches, teachers, lecturers, journalists, railway workers, fire-fighters,
postal workers and specialist hospital workers, like Midwives.
On Saturday November 24th,
around two hundred people attended the third national Hands Off Venezuela
conference in Britain.
The whole day was a great
success and left everyone inspired to carry on the struggle to defend the
Venezuelan people and their Bolivarian revolution.
Most current debate on multiculturalism revolves
around fundamental conflicts within liberalism. The liberal hegemony has meant
that the intense and detailed debates that accompanied the evolution of Marxist
social democracy have been relegated to the historical margins. The Marxist debate starts from a very
different perspective. Its focus is not the individual, but society as a whole.
This article is a re-examination of these debates and of
their historical interpretations in order to throw a new light on issues today.
LABOUR MP John McDonnell demanded that the Brown government make "a
choice between democracy or oligarchy" at the weekend. At Saturday’s
Hands Off Venezuela national conference in London, he condemned new
Labour’s ongoing hostility towards Venezuela and pledged to make
solidarity with the Bolivarian revolution an issue that "no MP would be
allowed to dodge."
Although Dieterich does his best to cloud the issue, the facts speak
for themselves – Baduel has broken with the revolution, and now stands
on the side of the counterrevolution. To propose the unity of the two
forces – revolution and counterrevolution – is like hoping to unite
fire and water.
In the autumn of 1916 the Industrial Workers of the World, better known
as the Wobblies, were trying to organise lumber workers near Everett,
Washington in the USA. A series of attempts to organise by the workers
had lead to a murderous response from the employers. Charles Ashleigh was appointed to run the Wobblies defence campaign – this article is in memory of him, a soldier of the proletariat.