The times of the post-War boom were fat years for most
working class people. Living standards went up year after year and there was
virtually full employment. As a result the labour movement had built up
enormous strength.
The following episode is taken from Rob Sewell’s book ‘In
the cause of labour ‘, on the 35th anniversary of the historic events of that year.
Brown has replaced Blair as leader of the Labour Party and Prime
Minister, but has anything fundamental changed? Absolutely not! And yet behind
this seemingly uneventful change lies the manoeuvre to stop John McDonnell to
stand for the leadership. All the indications were that John would have made a
good showing. Something is stirring in the British labour movement.
Jorge Martin talks at a Socialist Appeal meeting at the end of June on the recent Nationalisations that have been taking place in Venezuela since the begining of the year. Also talked about is the general acceleration of the revolutionary process since the elections in December of last year, which saw Hugo Chavez returned to government with 63% of the vote. As Chavez said the vote was not for Chavez or the government, but for Socialism.
The Socialist Youth Network (SYN) launched its COFUP! campaign (Coalition Fighting Unfair Pay) in the House of Commons last night. The campaign seeks to make it a Labour party policy that pay discrimination based on age is abolished, and that the minimum wage is adjusted to 2/3 of median male earnings.
In
the House of Commons last night around 40 people met for the ‘Launch of
International Support for Mexico’s Public Trial of Crimes Against Humanity’.
The meeting was organized by The Global Woman’s Strike and hosted by John
McDonnell and Jeremy Corbyn.
This is an important book, written by Andrew Kliman, and published by
Lexington Books. In a nutshell, what Andrew Kliman shows is that Marx’s laws of
motion of capitalism (how capitalism works and does not work) are logically
consistent and theoretically valid.
In the course of human history new discoveries,
particularly in the fields of science and medicine, have challenged established
thought. This is now happening again with stem cell research. What could lead
to curing many diseases that up to now have been fatal is coming under a
barrage of criticism because of religious and reactionary prejudices.
On Thursday 18th July comrades of the British section of the International Marxist Tendency, Socialist Appeal, showed their solidarity with the Peoples Youth Block (BJP) by protesting outside the embassy of El Savador against the repressive measures employed by the government. A letter of protest was received, signed by leading trade unionists from the NUJ, PCS, CWU, ASLEF, UNISON and the TGWU.
This recording was made at the Socialist Appeal day school
in June, where comrades gathered to discuss the Marxist theory of the
State and the Revolutionary Tactics of the Bolshevik Party in 1917. In
this session Rob Lyon explains the origins of the state as a means of expropriating the surplus wealth produced by a particular class, and the development of the different forms of the state and class society throughout history.
The first showing of the new film No Volveran attracted a large number
of people. Read the report on the Hands Off Venezuela website .
In the middle of the war the ILP was floundering. Not having
a fully worked out Marxist programme, it combined opportunism and sectarianism
at the same time. They could not understand the method as outlined by Ted Grant
at the time, which was not to issue mere denunciations of the Labour Party
leaders. It could "only be done by demonstrating to the masses, by their own
experience, that their leaders are incapable of representing their interests."
One year ago today the Marxist theoretician Ted Grant died after more than seventy years of political activity. His death marked the end of an era, but not the end of the struggle for the ideas he always defended.