The Writers Guild of America strike continues in the US, winning
an important victory with the cancellation of the Golden Globe awards show through union solidarity. The strike shows that it is not only industrial workers who are able to organise effectively. How this strike unfolds will have implications for unions throughout the US.
Socialist Appeal is British section of the International Marxist Tendency. We are seeking to organise class-conscious workers and youth around a Marxist programme to change society.
Supermarkets can sell cheaper than small independent shops
because they can buy cheaper. They use their bullying power over small farmers
and other producers. The Competition Commission has been deliberating for
eighteen months. They have decided that the four big supermarket chains
(Sainsbury’s, Tesco, ASDA and Morrisons) that sell three quarters of all food
in the country offer us all plenty of ‘choice’.
Tommy Sheridan
is facing yet another fight in his colourful career as Scotland’s best known
socialist. He has been arrested on suspicion of perjury arising from his widely
publicised defamation case against the News of the World for which he was
awarded £200,000 damages.
Despite an
international conspiracy of silence, as we have reported over the past year
Egypt has seen a major upturn in the class struggle. Workers have shown
fantastic bravery and made enormous sacrifices. The working
class, especially the massive Egyptian workers movement, is the key to the
future of the Middle East, not the so-called war on terror or the blind alley of
Islamism.
Towards the end of last year we witnessed the collapse of another
attempt to create a party to the left of Labour. The RESPECT party,
which was founded in 2004, was the latest effort to establish an
electoral alternative to Labour. It succeeded in winning an MP, George
Galloway, as well as a few dozen councillors up and down the country. However, the
whole project soon went pear-shaped.
Did Blair and his right wing policies make Labour
electable? The defeats of the 1980s led many activists to despair. The claim that dominance of the Party by the left was
responsible for the defeats needs careful scrutiny, as it is completely
at odds with the facts. Like all other aspects of history, the story of
the 1980s has been written by the so-called victors and what actually
happened needs to be investigated.
When socialists today revisit past struggles and movements, we do not
do so for nostalgic or romantic reasons. There is a need to study
historical events in order to be aware of the battles of our ancestors;
to take pride in those struggles, but, most of all, to arm ourselves
with insight and examine the lessons. The Peasants Revolt of 1381-82
was a fight for social justice and the very first time that a large
section of English people fought for the idea that ‘all men are equal’.
This demonstration of people power struck fear into the hearts of the
ruling class.
BBC News: A male lawyer can expect to live over seven years longer than the man who empties his wasterpaper bin, Office for National Statistics figures suggest. The rich are getting richer and can effectively ‘buy’ longer lives through more regular holidays and leisure activities. The very nature of people’s work, and not just the lifestyle it affords them, can have an impact on longevity. “Monotonous jobs where people have little control over what they can do can be much more stressful than more high-powered jobs, where people have much more freedom,” said Professor Dorling. “And that may ultimately take […]
Opposition politicians in the USA have found that the government is lying to the people about the cost of the Wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. They do it by burying some of the expenses in different government departmental budgets – such as disability payments to veterans and interest payments for past wars. The real cost to the nation is $1.5 trillion. That’s $20,000 a year for a household of four.
A Saudi girl of 19 was raped 14 times by a gang of seven. What did the Saudi state do for her? It jailed her for six months and sentenced her to 200 lashes for the crime of being alone with a man who was not a relative. What did Gordon Brown do for the cause of human rights, so dear to his heart? He set up a royal banquet at Buckingham Palace for King Abdullah, who, apart from his other crimes, is an accessory to gang rape.
In Britain and
internationally supermarket chains have come to dominate the food distribution
market. The tendency to monopolisation is evident. But with it go many
practices that literally endanger our health, and with it also working
conditions, wages, the environment and so on. The only answer is to take them
over, remove the profit motive and run them in the interests of all working
people.