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6,000 London bus workers from 3 different companies have been taking
co-ordinated strike action in pursuit of a basic wage of £30,000. Since
privatisation, drivers from different companies have different wages
and conditions. The companies argue that they need to be competitive,
i.e. offer lower wages than competitors to get work. There is no
justification for bus drivers being on different rates of pay if they
do the same job. This strike has been building up for years and is long
overdue.

Socialist Appeal is the Marxist voice of Labour and youth. The ideas of Marxism have a long and rich heritage within the British labour movement. We defend these traditions today.

Hundreds of workers downed tools on Tuesday 21st October two hours
before their shift was due to end. This was the first round in a
battle to save the Southampton plant. A workforce of 1,100 make
Transits there. They are already on a four day week as the recession
starts to bite.

Nottingham Trent University has declared war on the University and
College Union (UCU). On 4 July 2008 the university wrote to UCU and
said it was aware that it should give nine months’ notice, but had
decided to terminate the agreement to recognise the union on 4 October
2008.

Alan Woods speaks to a meeting in 2008  of Socialist Appeal supporters, on the financial crisis that is spreading across the globe like an epidemic. He points out that while there is a swing to the right at the top, there is a swing to the left at the bottom of society. Governments have rallied round to defend the banks while they continue to cut living standards. All this is having a profound effect on consciousness.

Socialist Appeal 167 is out now!

Martin Wolf in the Financial Times
today: “…this would be a recipe… for xenophobia, nationalism and revolution…
Everything must be done to prevent the inescapable recession from turning into
something worse… Deflation is a real danger… At stake could be the legitimacy
of the open market economy itself… the danger remains huge and time is short.”

It really is a pity capitalism can’t devote
as much ingenuity on a cure for cancer as it does on trying to make money or as
much resources on getting rid of world poverty as it does on gambling. But it’s
a laugh when they get it horribly wrong.

Hedge
funds are a bunch of locusts who add nothing to the sum total of human
happiness. One of the ways they make money is by short selling. Now they’ve been caught in “The biggest short squeeze in history.”

Workers at the National Gallery – who include; conservators,
curators, information assistants, librarians, information systems staff,
photographers and designers – are angry that the Treasury was almost 12 months
late in agreeing their 2007 pay remit. They have just staged their second
24-hour strike by Prospect members this year. This follows a campaign of action
short of a strike that reflects growing anger at management’s refusal to reopen
pay negotiations.

More than 1,000
railway workers are being balloted for industrial action in a row over pay. Staff at Arriva
Trains Wales, belonging to the Rail, Maritime and Transport Union and the
Transport Salaried Staffs Association, are being urged to back a campaign of
action after rejecting a two-year wage offer. The proposed deal of 4.75% this
year and the rate of inflation plus 0.75% in 2009 to non-driving grades is
worse than a pay rise given to other employees at the company

Marxist philosophy provides one with all the basic tools needed to
analyse and understand living reality, understood, not as a series of
dry, senseless unconnected "facts", but as a dynamic process, impelled
by its intenal contradictions, ever changing and with an infinitely
rich content. It is both materialist and dialectical.

Still flummoxed by the financial crisis? In this
classic comedy sketch, John Fortune and John Bird explain why we are in
such a mess.