In September last year the
Conservative party came to power in Sweden. Now Swedish workers have a tough
fight ahead of them to defend the remnants of the Swedish welfare
state. Should the next general election return a Conservative
government, British workers would do well to study the Swedish
experience.
A recording of the meeting in April, reported on www.marxist.com, where 40 people packed the NUJ Headquarters in London to find out about the theory of the Permanent Revolution.
Alan Woods was invited to speak at the Hands Off Venezuela meeting to explain the theory and its
relevance today. Here is the audio file of Alan speaking.
On April 26th 1937 General Franco commissioned from the German High
Command, against Republican Spain, the aerial bombardment of the small
and defenceless Basque town of Guernica,
visiting a hell on earth in the form of bombs weighing up to 1000lbs
across the town of 10, 000 people. Two months later, seventy years
ago, Pablo Picasso unveiled Guernica. Despite his enormous prestige the
establishment rarely tell us that Picasso was a man of the left.
The Hands Off Venezuela campaign has sought
to take the message of the Venezuelan Revolution to as many trade
unionists as possible. As a result of our work, resolutions supporting
the revolution have been passed at a large number of trade union
national conferences, the bulk of which have affiliated to
the national campaign. All in all, this means that trade unions numbering nearly six million members have shown support in one form or other for HOV.
As the Middle East descends deeper into a vicious cycle of
death and destruction, the Reverend Blair has stepped once again
onto the world stage as international envoy for the Middle East,
representing the "Quartet" of the European Union, Russia, United
Nations and United States. In this new role, Blair has the strong
backing of the US President George W. Bush, who is the key player. In
other words, Blair will bend the knee as always to US imperialism and
its interests.
Rob Walsh reviews Iran on the Brink, a book by Andreas Malm and Shora Esmailian, that tells the story of the struggles that have shaped Iran since 1906. It
shows how workers’ independent organisations have formed an important
component of every struggle for democracy, including the revolution that overthrew the
dictatorship of the Shah in 1979.
The world’s stock markets having been hitting all-time
highs in their prices, especially the markets of India and China,
where there seems no end to the upward spiral of the burgeoning capitalists
economies and their accompanying stock markets. Only the US economy is slowing as its
housing market collapses.
Gordon Brown and senior Labour Party officials
have greeted the defection to Labour’s parliamentary ranks of Tory MP Quentin
Davies with joy. But what sort of person are they actually getting?
The ruling class is clearly
finding the state of it’s forces in Iraq in a dire situation. The army relies on young working class
people signing up; unsurprisingly they have not been coming forth in large
numbers after seeing so many others killed. In light of this desperation, efforts at military
recruitment have hit new heights.
In his article (The significance of Lenin’s April Theses
1917 ) Darrall Cozens explained how Lenin rearmed the Bolshevik Party
in 1917. Continuing our series on the Russian Revolution, he tells how the
revolutionaries developed from being a small group when the
February Revolution broke
out, to become the main alternative to the new
establishment by June of that year.
Yesterday the smoking ban came into effect in England. But as socialists, should we be applauding such
state interference in our lives? Smoking kills thousands of people each year, but by supporting a smoking ban are we no better than the New Labour leadership who constantly patronise and blame working class people for the ills of capitalist society?
