Uncategorised articles from The Communist archives.
The 17th to the 21st September was a hectic week for many
students as they continue preparing for university. The week-long
freshers fair at Leeds University was a hive of activity and not
wishing to miss a great opportunity the Leeds comrades of Socialist
Appeal and Hands off Venezuela set up some stalls.
Postal workers are to take industrial action this month over
a bitter row over pay and conditions. Walk-outs will take place on 5/6 October
and 8/9 October followed by a rolling programme of strikes until the dispute is
resolved.
On the 18 and 19 September comrades from the Socialist Appeal attended
the Oxford Brookes University freshers fair, with the aim of attracting
people to the ideas of socialism.
With total student debts in the U.K reaching a staggering
£18 billion, the threat to our education by privatisation has never been greater. The result has been that the responsibility for higher
education has been handed down, like a cursed heirloom, from government to
university, to family, the buck finally stopping at the student. This means
that students going to university today will pay three times as much as they
would have done a decade ago.
The bourgeois economists are incapable of understanding
crises, which are an inescapable result of capitalism. They look for subjective
factors such as "confidence", even "human nature". In reality what we are
witnessing are the real workings of the capitalist system in a period of
decline.
The recent chaos on world stock markets is a
manifestation of the general turbulence that is the most prominent feature of
the present epoch. The crisis that affected the Northern Rock bank in Britain
is but an indication of dramatic
events that are being prepared globally.
We are making available to our readers an appeal by the Labour
Representation Committee on the issue of internal party democracy. On Sunday
Labour Party conference kicks off. If Brown’s proposals are accepted it appears
that from next year CLPs and affiliates will no longer have the right to take
resolutions to Party conference.
The all-new revamped website of the Wellred Online
Bookshop is now fully operational at
www.wellred.marxist.com – nearly all of the books and
pamphlets we had on the old site have been transported to
the new one and they have been joined by a number of
new additions.
Over the past 15 years production has risen at
about 3% a year in the OECD countries, while money supply, mortgage and company
debt, personal borrowing and the massive so-called derivatives market based on
this credit has increased at over 25% a year! Result? A huge bubble which is
now bursting, starting with Northern Rock.
Pat Macdonald gives a report on Hands off Venezuela at this years T.U.C in Brighton. To a filled room of trade union
activists, Rob Sewell gave a speech on the importance of events in Venezuela,
followed by John McDonnell MP, who praised the work of Hands off Venezuela and
its founders. NUJ General Secretary Jeremy Dear and FBU vice president Alan
McLean also spoke at the meeting.
Floods, Foot and Mouth and hundreds of thousands of public
sector workers balloting for industrial action over pay, not perhaps the sort
of run up to the party conference that Gordon Brown had hoped for. But can we be
confident that Labour can beat the Tories in a "snap" election, and just
as importantly is there any evidence that Brown will be more convincing to
working class voters who have stayed at home in droves in the past period?