Journalists usually refer to August as the silly season. It
is in that context that we have the latest madcap idea to come from the Con-Dem
coalition. According to plans leaked by the Guardian newspaper, council housing
tenancies will no longer be ‘for life.’
Today 6th August is the 20th anniversary of the death of Marxist MP and class fighter Pat Wall. In his memory we publish a tribute to him by Rob Sewell.
Campaign Press Release: Yunus Bakhsh, a highly respected trade unionist from
Newcastle, has won a four-year battle to clear his name after a landmark
Employment Tribunal victory. Bosses at Northumberland, Tyne and Wear NHS
Trust
sacked the mental health nurse in 2008, claiming he had bullied and
intimidated
other workers. But in a scathing judgement the tribunal last week found
that
the Trust had unfairly dismissed Yunus for his trade union activities.
In this second part of Jeppe
Druedahl’s contribution to the
discussion on China, he explains how initially the Chinese bureaucracy,
after the death of Mao, introduced market methods as a means of
stimulating production within a planned economy. However, over time the
capitalist methods began to dominate and the relation between the plan
and the market were overturned. Quantity was transformed into quality,
and capitalism has come to dominate.
Does the development of China on a
capitalist basis deny the theory of permanent revolution? Does it mean
that capitalism on a world scale has a new lease of life? What was China
under Mao? In this first part of a two part article, which we publish
as a contribution to the discussion, Jeppe Druedahl looks at these and
other questions and draws lessons from the development of the Soviet
Union after the revolution and under the Stalinist bureaucracy.
IRELAND: Recently we
reported on the vote of the public sector unions to back the Croke Park
Deal. We argued that despite the apparent victory of the ideas of
“Social Partnership” as espoused by Peter McLoone and David Begg; under
the present conditions it would be extremely difficult for any deal to
be brokered that was worth the paper it was written on.