This article originally appeared in "The Red Plough," an
independent Email journal of Republican Marxist opinion. It takes a
clear position against the arguments of the capitalist press around the
strikes on the 24th of November. In particular it deals with the
question of "the national interest". The bosses are always keen to try
and mask the class nature of society and here Gerry Ruddy points out
the contradictions in their arguments and offers a class alternative.
Thursday’s planned public sector strike has
been suspended after the government and the union leaders announced that a
breakthrough had been made. The "agreement" means that some of the
cost of wages would be offset by the workers taking "unpaid leave".
As we pointed out on more than one occasion recently, the political and
economic situation in the state is such that any agreement that has been
reached on the basis of "social partnership" will inevitably mean cuts
in worker’s wages and increased work load and pressure on already stretched
services. Effectively it means that the public sector is being put on short
time.
Socialist Appeal issue number 180 (December 2009) is now out and ready to order.
Click here to order your copy or click on the heading to read more.
The world of international finance has been shaken by the
default in Dubai.
Shares have taken a tumble all over the world. Commentators have suggested that
this could be the cause of the recession moving into a double dip, of a further
downturn in the world economy. Mick Brooks looks at the unfolding crisis in the, until last week, ‘money no object’ world of Dubai.
There has
been no levelling off of the global economy, as economists predicted. Although
industrialisation has expanded to lesser-developed countries, it has generally
been along lines determined by global corporations based in advanced capitalist
countries. From colonialism, we have moved into the age of multinational
corporate domination. Will Roche looks at the rise of monopoly capitalism.
From 7th to 18th December
2009, delegates from 192 countries will be gathering in Copenhagen, Denmark,
in order to create a new, “legally-binding”, global treaty on climate change.
The UN Climate Conference in Copenhagen (known
as COP15) marks the culmination of two-years of negotiation to try and generate
a replacement for the Kyoto
protocol, which is due to expire in 2012.
Stock
exchanges and commodity prices are on their way up. The world economy is
showing faltering signs of recovery. There’s no doubt that it’ll be a long
haul. Millions of people all over the world have had their lives devastated by
the economic tsunami. It will take years to clean up all the mess. But one
major national economy after another has announced that the recession is
officially over – France, Germany, Japan
and even the USA.
All except Britain.
Why is British capitalism still stubbornly stuck in the mire?
Well over
250,000 Irish workers in the public sector were on strike on the 24th
of this month. There would have been many more, but the unions
guaranteed emergency cover including flood relief in the west, the
midlands and the Shannon area and in Cork City. It’s a feature of every
major strike, not just here, but throughout the world, that the well
fed representatives of the bourgeois and particularly the mean
spirited and greedy petty bourgeois attempt to criticise and attack the
worker’s movement. These fine gentlemen and ladies are always the first
to reach for the box of tissues as they weep crocodile tears about the
poor and the vulnerable who they claim (wringing their hands in woe)
are being let down by the strikers. The fact that the government have
been slashing and burning public services for the last year and
attacking the vulnerable seems conveniently to have been forgotten.
At the opening session of the PSUV
congress Chavez made a very radical left-wing speech, calling for the
setting up of a new international, explaining that it was necessary to
destroy the bourgeois state and replace it with a revolutionary state,
but also referring to the bureaucracy within the Bolivarian movement
itself. It was clearly a speech that reflects the enormous pressure
from the masses below who are getting tired of talk about socialism,
while real progress towards genuine change appears to be frustratingly
slow. Alan Woods reports on the start of the PSUV congress in Venezuela.
At a recent meeting of a local Labour Party
Branch in Worcester,
a slick high tech presentation was given by a group called Transition Worcester,
who said they had the answer to the environmental crisis. It is to turn the
clock back 200 years to a mythical age where all trade was local and people
enjoyed the benefit of locally grown meat, fruit & veg. Within this presentation were ideas such as we
should no longer trade with developing countries and we should therefore export
our unemployment to the third world.
Striking refuse workers in Leeds have voted to return to work after nearly three
months on the picket line. The all-out industrial action, which ran from
September 7th to November 25th, was in response to savage
pay-cuts that would have slashed individual wages by thousands of pounds per
year. Workers attending a mass meeting at the suitably flamboyant Jongleurs Comedy Club voted by nearly
four to one to return to work, endorsing a deal which benefitted many workers
but raised concerns for some.