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The latest news and analysis from The Communist, alongside reports of our activity. For Marxist theory and history, click here.

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Ethiopia: which way forward?

As food prices
soar world-wide it was reported recently on the BBC that ‘Ethiopia has launched an urgent
appeal to international donors for more than $300m (£154m) of emergency aid’.

According the news item, ‘a
total of 4.6 million people are now thought to need food aid, because of the
drought which struck most of the country in the early part of this year. In
some parts of the country, health centres and feeding clinics are already being
overwhelmed with large numbers of severely malnourished children. Existing
stocks of food aid will cover June, but the crunch will come in July.’

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Is Barack Obama an Alternative for U.S. Workers?

After years of Bush’s open-ended war on working people at home and
abroad, many on the “left” are desperate for an alternative. For many,
that alternative is Barack Obama, a Democratic Senator from Illinois. However,
far from being a “progressive” alternative, Obama is at his core a
typical representative of the bosses’ political parties.

Hammer and sickle the communist featured image

Jack London: What Life Means to Me

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Jack London
is best known as the writer of what he called his ‘dog books,’ such as ‘Call of
the Wild’ and White Fang’. As this biographical sketch shows, he was a
convinced socialist till his death in 1916. Reader will find that he learned
his socialism from a very convincing school – the school of hard knocks. Here
he sums up the lessons of his life.

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Glasgow East by-election: New Labour hits new low

Just
when you think it can’t get any worse for Gordon Brown, it does. New Labour has
succeeded in losing the Glasgow East by-election. Glasgow East is a solid
working class area with one of the finest labour movement traditions on the
country. It has been a Labour heartland for generations.

Mervyn King

Poor old Mervyn

Wasn’t it good of
Mervyn King, the Governor of the Bank of England, not to accept a pay rise of
£100,000? What a model/example of restraint to us all! Instead he would only
take 2.5% pay increase each year for the next five years, out of his annual
salary of £289,551. We must feel sorry for him. That means he will only get a
bit more than £7,000 pay increase this year. How did anyone work out that he
should get such a pay rise in the first place? The way the economy has been going
over the last year, it can’t be.

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SATs and privatisation

Readers of Socialist Appeal would have heard the
headlines this week about the delay in supplying the SATs results for schools
and the damage that this is causing. Apart from the late delivery, and the
whole issue that SATs as a form of assessment are not good education in the
first place, one of the critical issues about the current situation has largely
been missing from these headline reports.

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London Strike Rally

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Hundreds of striking Unison and Unite members filled the
large hall of Friends’ Meeting House in Euston on Wednesday afternoon following
a march through west central London. The turnout in and of itself was
impressive considering most of the strikers had been on picket duty since early
morning. The mood was buoyant and electric, with foot-stomping, flag-waving and
chanting while we waited for the meeting to start. I have not been to a strike
rally where the mood was so militant and combative since the miners’ strike.

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