In 1970, just like today, the Labour Party seemed dead from
the neck up. After six years of desperately disappointing government, Labour
had been unceremoniously bundled out of office. The Tories were back, aiming to
put the boot in to the working class.
Supporters of the Venezuelan revolution held a meeting at Cardiff University on Wednesday evening. This
meeting was held in order to explain the significance of events that have taken
place in Venezuela over the last 10 years and to spread the message that is
coming out of Latin America: that there is an alternative to capitalism in the
21st century – socialism.
We have now had more than a decade of Private Finance Initiative
involvement in the health service. Despite Labour pouring money into
hospitals and health care, more and more health trusts are reporting
deficits. PFI is sucking the NHS dry!
On Saturday the "Der
Funke" Marxist tendency organised a big event with Trotsky’s grandson, Esteban
Volkov, as special guest, to commemorate and celebrate the 90th anniversary of
the 1917 Russian Revolution. Around 200 people came to listen to the speeches in
defence of "Red October" and between 400-500 celebrated all night long at the
party that was organised after the meeting.
A Basque Marxist was
on a speaking tour of the North of Ireland at the end of October. He spoke to
audiences in Belfast, Strabane and Derry mainly composed of republican socialists, but not
only. There was keen interest in seeing how the experience of the Basque
situation could be applied to the North of Ireland, and vice versa. We make
available here a report, originally published in The Plough, the journal of the
Irish Republican Socialist Party.
"The October revolution laid the foundation of a new
culture, taking everybody into consideration, and for that very reason
immediately acquiring international significance. Even supposing for a
moment that owing to unfavourable circumstances and hostile blows the
Soviet regime should be temporarily overthrown, the inexpungable
imprint of the October revolution would nevertheless remain upon the
whole future development of mankind." Trotsky – The History of the Russian Revolution
The London Fire Brigade have been trying to impose a change in the
current shift system on its fire-fighters. This has been in the
pipeline for some time and would benefit the LFB management to the
detriment of its workforce.
MANCHESTER (fighting the victimisation of Karen Reissman)
BARNET, NORTH LONDON (battle against
vicious privateers, Fremantle)
NEWHAM, EAST LONDON (stop the victimisation of Michael
Gavan)
GLASGOW
(all-out strike by day centre workers)
As winter creeps, in students and staff at Edinburgh schools and nurseries have learned
of the chilling news that their places of learning and work places may be under
threat once again. The Edinburgh Evening News reported on the thirtieth of
October that Edinburgh Council intended to reopen a consultation process that
would look into the future of schools. It also listed seventeen schools and
nurseries that it expected to be earmarked for the process.
During the 1980s
and 1990s, advances in chaos and complexity theory began to demonstrate a fact
understood more than a century and a half earlier by the founders of scientific
socialism, Marx and Engels, that systems which show an apparently high degree
of complexity or “design” do not require the hand of a creator but emerge naturally
from the apparently mundane interacting and contradictory forces at play inside
the system. It may come as a surprise to many then to find that in the field of
cosmology there are respected scientists groping towards the revival of the
mystical idea of intelligent design.
When you watch a Michael Moore film, it doesn’t take long to realise just why the US bosses find him so irritating and why his films have never been shown on US mainstream TV.
Today, 7th of November a big meeting organised by the Danish
Marxist tendency, Socialistisk Standpunkt, will take place in Copenhagen to
celebrate the 90th anniversary of the Russian Revolution. However,
2007 marks another anniversary, and one with special importance for Denmark. It
is 75 years since Leon Trotsky held his last public speech in November 1932,
which was held at a huge meeting in Copenhagen, where Trotsky was invited by
the Social-Democratic Students Association.