Join us for a picket of the US embassy and public meeting on Wednesday,
September 17, in London to defend the Bolivian and Venezuelan
revolutions! Download and print off this A4 leaflet and distribute it as widely as possible.
Thirty
five years ago on 11th September 1973 a coup eliminated the
democratic Popular Unity government in Chile and killed the elected President
Salvador Allende in the presidential palace. In the days, weeks and months that
followed tens of thousands of activists were murdered and dumped in unmarked
graves by the military. Tens of thousands more were imprisoned and tortured –
many in Santiago football stadium. This was a catastrophe for the Chilean and
international working class.
The £145
million profit declared by the Go-Ahead Group is a direct drain on fare-payers’
and taxpayers’ cash that should be invested in the bus and rail industries. The group’s profit was funded by nearly £200
million in subsidy for its three rail franchises over 2007/08,
inflation-busting fares hikes and untold amounts of public money finding their
way into the group’s bus operations from local authorities.
The American education company Kaplan has announced plans to open a
profit seeking university in the UK. Although only a small beginning,
this opens the way to a profit-driven higher education system. The
first move was the government’s, who recently relaxed laws on who can
award degrees. They are in effect trying to open up the concept of a
degree to market speculation and commodification.
The nearly £2 billion gap between Tube Lines’ £7.2 billion
costs estimate and the maximum £5.5 billion the PPP arbiter says it should get
raises fears for planned Tube upgrades.
The Tube Lines
estimate is a massive £3.1 billion higher – £2.5 billion taking inflation into
account – than that of London Underground, which called for the arbiter’s early
guidance.
The Labour
Movement must learn from the lessons provided by its own history. The trade
unions were created out of class struggle. To establish themselves they had to
fight the hostility of Parliament, the courts, the employers and the media. Here we trace how the TUC arose from the need
to secure a legal basis for the developing union movement in the 1860s.
Urgent
action to stem a ‘tidal wave’ of violence was today demanded by transport union
RMT as it launched a campaign to establish an industry-wide code of protection
for workers in the rail, bus and ferry sectors.
Cross-company
zero-tolerance campaigns, an end to unnecessary lone-working, more uniformed
staff and better legal protection for transport workers are at the heart of the
campaign launched by the union today.
After
surveying its own front-line members, RMT says that official assault figures
represent only the tip of the iceberg, that police fail to attend as many as 40
per cent of reported incidents, and that more than a third of incidents go
unreported.
The Financial Times has hailed the
effective takeover of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac by the US government as “what
could become the world’s biggest ever financial bail-out.” Treasury secretary
Henry Paulson has promised he will pump in ‘unlimited liquidity.’ Don’t you
wish the government would grant you unlimited liquidity? When it comes to the
food and fuel bills of the poor and the working class, the British and American
governments find that the cupboard is bare. But now it’s not bare. Predictably
markets all over the world have breathed a sigh of relief. Fannie and Freddie
have effectively been nationalised – and big business thoroughly approves!
TUC Congress will get underway with a bang this year – with
one of the early motions calling for “a series of one-day general strikes until
such time as the Government removes the restrictive anti-trade union
legislation from the statute”. Yes, really.
This week we publish in 3 parts a history of British Trotskyism by Martin
Upham. This was a PhD thesis on the subject, and while we would not
agree with all the points raised in it, we believe it deserves a wider
audience, particularly for those interested in the history of our
movement. For a more in-depth study of the subject readers are urged to
consult Ted Grant’s book on the the History of British Trotskyism.
Together with the same author’s
‘Materialist conception of history’ this is a brilliant introduction to
historical materialism. Clearly there are limits to the ‘what if’ way of
looking at historical processes, but the reader will no doubt find Plekhanov’s
conclusion that even such over-arching figures as Napoleon or Robespierre did
not fundamentally change the broad course of historical development compelling.
After all Plekhanov is defending the basic materialist conception of history,
i.e. that progress is determined by material forces that manifest themselves in
the activities of millions of people. He explains it well. In doing so he is
illuminating the interplay of accident and necessity in history.
Today marks 350 years since the death of Oliver Cromwell, the
outstanding leader of the English bourgeois revolution of the 1640s.
Without him, with his steadfast courage and determination, the
Revolution would have been betrayed by the big bourgeoisie who
continually sought an accommodation with the Crown. It is no accident
that Cromwell has been described as the Lenin of the English bourgeois
revolution.