Over Christmas the railways were in chaos – again. Why does
this sort of thing happen in Britain? It hasn’t always been like this. The
problem started with privatisation. The Tories under John Major plotted a
privatisation so stupid that even Thatcher had thought better of it.
Seventy-five years ago today, on January 30th 1933, Hitler was appointed Chancellor of Germany. Two months later the Reichstag voted him dictatorial powers. The workers’ parties were banned and their leaders thrown into concentration camps. The strongest labour movement in Europe was destroyed without even breaking a pane of glass, as Hitler boasted. The way was clear for genocide and world war.
“The new generation, in particular, must understand the part Stalinism played in German events prior to Hitler’s seizure of power, if they wish to understand its present role”, wrote Ted Grant in 1944. The Stalinists surrendered the German masses to Hitler and even proclaimed the coming to power of Hitler as a victory expressing the crisis of capitalism, boastfully proclaiming ‘our turn next’.
Today marks the 75th anniversary of the coming to power of Adolf Hitler and the Nazi party in Germany. Read here chapter 7 of Rob Sewell’s Germany: from Revolution to Counter-Revolution, which deals with the period just before Hitler comes to power and explains the reasons for such a catastrophe, in particular the failiure to create a united front between the socialist and labour organisations.
How do you lose £3.7 billion? Down the back of the sofa? Meet Jerome Kerviel. He lost £3.7 billion of
his employer’s money, Societe Generale, a French
bank. Is it actually a good argument for
capitalism that the whole world can be screwed up because of a solitary rogue
trader? Is the system really so precarious that one crook can send world
financial markets into freefall?
With a world recession looming, slides in the stock market
and capitalism generally entering a period of crisis you would expect the first
day of the World Economics Forum to be the site of a serious discussion and
plans for the future; not so.
For years Socialist Appeal
and the International Marxist Tendency have been arguing that the world is an
increasingly unstable place, where war threatens on many fronts
and revolution and counter-revolution hang in the air. The bourgeois and the Labour
right wing basically argue that it’s all down to evil people and that nice
President Bush and the generals keep us all safe by attacking terrr’sts and
keeping the world safe for freedom and ‘mockracy.
"The London police on strike. After that,
anything can happen", said Sylvia Pankhurst in 1918. The ground is certainly shifting in Britain. There has
been a continual build up of public anger at the government’s attempt to impose
a 2% limit on public sector pay. The Police are getting a paltry 1.9% rise, in effect a pay cut.
They were furious and making all kinds of threats against the Home Secretary
Jacqui Smith and Gordon Brown.
Even before panic hit the financial markets
the UK press was determinedly ignoring the big victory of German train drivers
last week. The train drivers won an
11% pay increase! Yet the emergence of what amounts to a five party system shows
Germany is entering a period of increased political instability.
So if things weren’t bad enough for Gordon Brown, it looks like the
Labour Party has been taking big donations from Tory voters. Apparently, a number of confused members of the public have discovered that their bank accounts have been used to
transfer funds to the Labour Party. This all
sounds a bit fishy. Can we expect a new episode of "Our friends in the North"?
Hain resigns: New Labour enmired in sleaze
New Labour’s indecent closeness to big business claimed another victim
as Hain resigned today. The police are now on his tail. The victim is
not Hain. His resignation will, after all, give him more time to count
his money. The victim is the working class who have voted for Hain and his mates in order for Labour to do a job for ordinary working people,
not grovel to big business.
Everything now clearly indicates that the
advanced capitalist world is headed for recession. The only question is when
and how deep that recession will be. In fact Merrill Lynch says the US economy
is already in recession. And that’s bad news for all of us. Here Mick Brooks at
what is really going on in the world economy.