Ten years ago in Britain, at the time of the sudden death of
Diana, we witnessed an outburst of popular feeling without precedent in recent
British history. It was an entirely new phenomenon, reflecting an entirely new
situation in Britain. Here we republish Alan Woods’ article written in 1997 which
looked at the serious crisis the monarchy and the British establishment were
facing at the time.
With inflation running at
well over 4% for the last 6 months conditions couldn’t have been better for
public sector trade unions to challenge the Government’s 2% public sector pay
limit. Many staff are already angry
over cuts, NHS redundancies and job evaluation, so a real pay cut of 2 – 3% has
provoked a strong response.
Everyday our television screens are filled with
images of horrific bloodshed and carnage in Iraq and Afghanistan. Hundreds die,
men, women and children, in a single day. Some estimate that one million people
have perished since the invasion of 2003. This is the reality after more than
four years of foreign occupation.
From July 29 until August 3 the International
Marxist Tendency held its World School in Barcelona. Present were 300 comrades
from 26 countries, including Russia, Pakistan, Venezuela, Brazil,
El Salvador, Mexico, Argentina and most European countries. Over half of the 40-strong British delegation
was youth, most attending for the first time.
In May 2004, we reported Scotland’s worst ever industrial disaster when the
Stockline plastics factory in Glasgow exploded leaving 9 dead and 40 injured.
It was another searing indictment of breaches in Health & Safety
legislation, now a matter of course in Britain. Ex-employees told journalists
they had been sacked after raising concerns about safety. The 2 companies jointly responsible, ICL Tech and
ICL Plastics, faced only charges relating to Health & Safety, for which they have now been
fined a measly £400,000.
Just before the collapse of the Berlin Wall and later the Soviet Union,
Ted Grant delivered this speech on the crisis in the USSR. To deflect
any blame, Gorbachev and co. heaped blame on Stalin and Brezhnev, even
going so far as to rehabilitate some of the victims of the purge trials
– including those accused of "Trotskyism". But Trotsky was not
rehabilitated: he was still hated by the bureaucracy because they
feared the ideas he represented.
Hands Off Venezuela has produced a new podcast that will be available
monthly, containing news from Venezuela as well as the campaign’s
activities around the world. Our first
show contains news on socialist cities, an interview with one of the
film makers of No Volveran, a new documentary on the Venezuelan revolution, along with news from HoV Finland and Brussels, plus
Venezuelan music and lots more.
Michael Collins was a great
Irish revolutionary and nationalist who more than any one person may be
considered to have created modern Ireland. On 22 August 1922, 85 years ago, he
was killed in an ambush during the Irish civil war – he was 31 years of age.
The following is a short letter from a Postal Worker from Oxford, giving his impressions in his own humorous words of his experience on the picket line. For many of us, it is a grassroots view we can identify with.
The commemoration meeting in memory of Leon
Trotsky was an outstanding success. 300 people gathered in the Jose Felix Rivas
hall of the Teresa Carreño Theatre in Caracas to hear the first ever public
event organised by a government ministry on the life of Leon Trotsky.
Could the Communist party of India have made a decisive difference in the independence movement? Here Jamil shows they were above all the prisoners of the policies imposed by Stalin, which were normally reformist, indeed counter-revolutionary. But occasionally Stalin lurched into an ultra-left phase as in 1947-48, called the ‘Zhdanov offensive.’ In lurching from right to left, a drunk will at one point be found upright. That is the significance of the correct perception of what was happening in India by the Moscow commentators Dyakov and Zhukov.