MANCHESTER (fighting the victimisation of Karen Reissman)
BARNET, NORTH LONDON (battle against
vicious privateers, Fremantle)
NEWHAM, EAST LONDON (stop the victimisation of Michael
Gavan)
GLASGOW
(all-out strike by day centre workers)
As winter creeps, in students and staff at Edinburgh schools and nurseries have learned
of the chilling news that their places of learning and work places may be under
threat once again. The Edinburgh Evening News reported on the thirtieth of
October that Edinburgh Council intended to reopen a consultation process that
would look into the future of schools. It also listed seventeen schools and
nurseries that it expected to be earmarked for the process.
During the 1980s
and 1990s, advances in chaos and complexity theory began to demonstrate a fact
understood more than a century and a half earlier by the founders of scientific
socialism, Marx and Engels, that systems which show an apparently high degree
of complexity or “design” do not require the hand of a creator but emerge naturally
from the apparently mundane interacting and contradictory forces at play inside
the system. It may come as a surprise to many then to find that in the field of
cosmology there are respected scientists groping towards the revival of the
mystical idea of intelligent design.
When you watch a Michael Moore film, it doesn’t take long to realise just why the US bosses find him so irritating and why his films have never been shown on US mainstream TV.
Today, 7th of November a big meeting organised by the Danish
Marxist tendency, Socialistisk Standpunkt, will take place in Copenhagen to
celebrate the 90th anniversary of the Russian Revolution. However,
2007 marks another anniversary, and one with special importance for Denmark. It
is 75 years since Leon Trotsky held his last public speech in November 1932,
which was held at a huge meeting in Copenhagen, where Trotsky was invited by
the Social-Democratic Students Association.
Marxists have always maintained that
at some stage the intensity of the class struggle affects even the "armed
bodies of men" of the bourgeois state. Such an example was the police strike in
Britain at the end of the First World War. In the late summer of 1918 the sight
of 12,000 furious Metropolitan constables marching on Whitehall sparked panic
among ruling circles in Britain. Under the leadership of the National Union of
Police and Prison Officers, militantly class-conscious policemen conspired to
overturn their role as the subservient body of the State.
Has humanity enlarged its power and freedom, improved its conditions and increased its chances of happiness? In simple terms, is social progress a fact?
On Saturday November 3 President Pervez
Musharraf declared virtual martial law, imposing a state of emergency
throughout Pakistan,
suspending the Constitution and replacing superior courts. This amounts to his
second coup d’etat after he seized power in October 12, 1999. It is a desperate
move that underlines the extremely unstable nature of the regime, which is
losing support by the day.
BBC staff are set to ballot for strike over plans to axe up to 2500
jobs. The mood is angry and a big ‘yes’ vote is likely among the 23,000
workers. The three unions involved are Bectu, Unite and the National
Union of Journalists.
In the Guardian on September 4th George Monbiot gave a classic
example of PFI madness. In Coventry officials wanted to refurbish its
two hospitals.This would have cost £30m. They didn’t have £30m, so they had to go for PFI.
After weeks of media speculation the Brown bounce election became the general
election that never happened. Marx explained that the state and politics are like a superstructure that sits on top of society and maintains the appearance of having a certain independence. But in the final analysis, politics, the state and even bouncing Prime Ministers are organically connected to the real world. The prospect of a general election was just too risky.
