The latest news, analysis, and Marxist theory from The Communist, alongside reports of RCP activity.
The State Pension was
established 100 years ago on 1st January 1909. This followed a ten
year campaign by social reformers and the Trade Union Movement.Pensions should be a right for those who have worked all
their lives. Instead the government is looking to whittle away the fragile
gains of a century of struggle.
As the capitalist crisis deepens so it
creates waves of political and social upheaval. In this new period of recession that is unfolding it is clear that
the solution for the ruling class is to force ordinary people to accept a
reduction of their living standards. They want us to pay for their crisis. This
is a recipe for class struggle. It is the duty of the Marxists to carry the
ideas of socialism into the labour movement. Learn the lessons of the past, in
order to prepare for the future. On the 14th of February
Socialist Appeal held a day school in London on Cuba, Iran and the Communist
International, all of which have important anniversaries in 2009.
The welfare ‘reform’ measures currently wending their way through Parliament are so right wing you might have thought they were drafted by the Tories. Funny you should mention it…David Freud, who drafted the White Paper on which the bill is based, has just defected to the Conservatives. This shows two things:
He’s a rat leaving what he sees as a sinking ship
New Labour sucking up to the Tories with anti-working class policies just paves the way for the real thing to take over and put the boot in further.
Poor old Alex Salmond. Things
haven’t been going too well for him lately. Maybe it was one too many whiskeys
with their Burns Suppers, but the Scottish National Party Government seems to
be stumbling from one embarrassment to another. First they couldn’t get their
“recession beating” budget passed on the first go. Then they were forced to
back down on their flagship policy to scrap council tax, apparently due to a
lack of “parliamentary consensus”. And then, just to add insult to injury Iain
Gray, the Scottish Labour Party leader, slammed the SNPs plans for an
independence referendum.
Coupled to the Bologna Process, though not explicitly included in
it, has been the privatisation of education and all that this entails. So now
not only are students faced with the fact that they will have to work harder
and longer hours for a shorter period of time, that the costs of their
education will also increase (so working on top of the hours required for
studying becomes more of a strain) but also that their courses may end up being
influenced by some company who’s only real interest in to create profit out of
the process…
Today, almost 25 years since the miners’ strike
began, the industry has been decimated, with only a few thousand jobs left. The
proud traditions remain as the Durham Miner’s Gala demonstrates each year, and
many miners have taken their fighting traditions into the wider labour
movement. But many of the pit villages are crumbling and the social effects may
never be completely overcome, on the basis of capitalism.
But this destruction wasn’t an ‘act of god’ or some huge work of nature
like the tsunami. This was a deliberately worked out plan. It was an attempt to
take on and smash the most militant determined and class conscious section of
the organised labour movement. And this was seen as a critically important task
by the ruling class ad their chosen instrument, the Tory Party. It even had a
name, the Ridley Report.
Over the course of a cold February week two
Glasgow campuses emerged at the forefront of the wave of occupations that is
currently engulfing universities across Britain and, in the process, transforming
their political atmospheres. Strathclyde and Glasgow University were both
occupied, with the occupiers protesting about the Israeli onslaught on Gaza and
their universities’ links with arms companies that were complicit in the
offensive.
The Private
Finance Initiative was always bonkers. The idea was that, instead of the
government borrowing to build infrastructural projects, they would hand the job
over to a private consortium to raise the money.This was
always daft. The government was always the safest borrower in town. When did
you last hear of a government going bust? Because its loans are completely
safe, the government can borrow at a cheaper rate than anyone else.
February 12th
2009 saw the 200th anniversary Charles Darwin’s birth.. The
beautifully simple idea embodied in his most famous book, Origin of the Species – evolution
by natural selection – was a revolutionary departure with profound scientific
and philosophical implications. Following the
footsteps of Copernicus and Galileo three hundred years earlier, Darwin battered an
enormous, irreparable breech in the walls of Fortress Theology and for that
reason the book has been the source of intense debate right up to the present
day. Darwin
sought and found an explanation – a mechanism – for the evolutionary changes in
species, which other scientists were beginning to suspect, using a purely materialist method, without any recourse
to God or metaphysics.
Rail unions held a protest on Wednesday
February 11th outside London Underground head offices against the
first wave of threatened cuts of 1,000 jobs. Workers turned out to demand that
those responsible for running up the massive TfL/LUL deficit of over £2.5
billion be sacked, and not the workers who are being threatened with the sack because
of senior management incompetence.
Yesterday it was David Blunkett and his
privately funded trip to South Africa, which he forgot to own up to. Today it
is Home Secretary Jacqui Smith and her £116,000 expenses claim. According to
the BBC: ‘Ms Smith reportedly claimed £116,000 in expenses for her home in
Redditch, Worcestershire, after telling the Commons that her sister’s home –
where she stays while in London – was her main residence.’ The tax-free
Additional Cost Allowance is worth up to £24,006 a year at present.
Boris Johnson,
Mayor of London, was the man who didn’t let the buses go out during the snow in
London on Monday 2nd February because he thought it was dangerous.
So how did he
expect people to get in to work? Now he’s docking transport staff a day’s pay for
not making it in. The managers who are making the threat are claiming that they
were ‘working from home.’ So they get their money.