Once again
New Labour are aping the Tories. Jack Straw has rushed through rules making strike action
by the Prison Officers illegal, reintroducing rules brought in by the Conservative government in 1994. We need to defend the
rights of the POA and the principles of free trade unionism.
The government has now pumped about £60
billion of our money into Northern Rock. That’s a lot of money – it’s more than
half what the health service costs. Now the NHS is looking after millions of
people at any one time and hospital services are available round the clock for
you in case anything goes wrong. It employs over a million people and its
benefits are there for all to see.
As we explained in the last issue, the vultures
are hovering round Northern Rock. There are the shareholders on the one hand,
people who think the rest of us owe them a living and, if they bet on a horse
that loses, then we should just give them their money back.
Last year’s conference of the
National Union of Teacher’s voted to ballot members of the union to vote in
favour of setting up a political fund. This successful vote was a significant
advance for the largest and traditionally more militant of the teacher trade
unions.
Thousands of Revenue and Customs workers are to start voting on
whether to stage a one-day strike and a ban on overtime in protest at job cuts
and office closures.
The walkout will be held on January 31, the deadline for self assessment tax
returns, if there is a yes vote by members of the Public and Commercial
Services union.
This article was originally written on the occasion of the seventieth
anniversary of the 1929 Wall
Street Crash. It was not intended purely as a
commemorative or historical piece. It was written because, to Marxists, all the
signs were then apparent that another stock price ‘correction’ was in
preparation.
Republication of the article is timely. In 2007 the sub-prime mortgage bubble
finally burst. The financial crisis has already had a knock-on effect on the
banks through the credit crunch. The capitalist world stands on the threshold
of recession.
The Scottish parliament elections last May saw
the Scottish National Party (SNP) win a national election for the first time in
its history. The flip side of this is that the majority of Scots have
always consistently opposed independence. But on Sunday, Dec 16th, the
Sunday Herald newspaper claimed in their own poll that demand for independence
was just short of 50%. Their poll was based on a random 1,000 people
across the country. Why the rise in nationalist sentiment? Events of recent
times have caused a large section of the electorate in Scotland to
lose faith in Labour.
In April and May of 1797 the British ruling
class was horrified when two naval mutinies broke out; the first was at
Spithead, close to Portsmouth; the second at the Nore which marks the seaward
approach to the Thames Estuary.
The State
can ultimately be reduced to bodies of armed men. These bodies of armed men are
used by the ruling class either to maintain its power against what it sees as
internal enemies, to defend itself against foreign aggression, or in support of
its own aggressive action against foreign nations. Since its power lies in its
ability to threaten or actually to use force, the ruling class regards anything
that jeopardises the effectiveness of the State apparatus with the utmost
seriousness. This explains why mutinies in the armed forces are of such concern
to them.
In Bangladesh politics revolves round
the prices of staple foods. The price of rice in Bangladesh has a correlation with
poverty, economic and political stability. In 2000, a wage labourer could buy
6-7 kg of rice with his daily income (Taka 60 per day, about 43 p). Now, less
than half of that can be bought, even though the income has risen over time. Rising food prices stand out as a problem that, if left
unresolved, could derail all political predictions and spell disaster for the
country in 2008.
Our differences with the SWP are not limited to theoretical questions. They are fundamentally to do with method and approach. They adopt an empirical petit-bourgeois approach to politics, which is the hallmark of the sectarian, which always ends up in a contradictory mess.
As the New Year begins Alan Woods comments on the state of world
affairs, highlighting the impasse facing humanity, a direct consequence of
capitalism in its phase of senile decay. At the root of the present world
turmoil is private property of the means of production, a system based on greed
for profit. In the next period the workers of the world are faced with the task
of removing the system.
The press have carried a number of stories over recent weeks about the
discovery of planets outside of our solar system. But what is the
reality behind these "new earths"? Are we about to "boldly go where no
one has gone before" or is it a bit more complicated than that?
We publish a response from the GMB to an article in the Guardian that implied multinational banana companies in Latin America supported the principle of free collective bargaining. It exposes the collaboration between union tops and companies such as Del Monte, who have carried out a campaign of intimidation against organised workers. The dominance of British supermarkets in the area is identified as a key element in this campaign.