Tomorrow, 10th July, will see up to two million public sector workers taking strike action defend their wages, pensions and working conditions. Members of NUT, Unite, Unison, GMB, FBU and PCS are all involved in campaigns. This co-ordinated action must be used as a platform for the labour movement to call a one-day general strike and fight for socialist policies.
The July 10th public sector strike will be a significant step forward for the labour movement in Britain, with possibly up to two million workers participating. It has been dubbed by the press as a “mini general strike”. The task for the labour movement now is to ensure that the continued fight back against the hated coalition government is united throughout Britain.
Teresa May, the Tory Home Secretary, has announced that there will be a government inquiry into the possible political cover-up of child abuse in the 1980s. But no amount of inquiries or investigations will be able to repair the public’s trust in the Establishment, which has reached rock-bottom levels after years of seemingly endless scandals amongst those at the top of society.
Guy Howie reviews Beyond Caring, a new play by Alexander Zeldin, which portrays the conditions of workers in modern day, zero-hour Britain – a new normality where millions live a precarious existence, cut off from stable or even regular employment, a living wage and a union that can fight for them.
In this article, first published in 2004, Rob Sewell deals with the important contribution Lenin made on the national question and how such a correct stand on this issue guaranteed the success of the Bolshevik Party in October 1917. The national question remains a key issue for Marxists in the current epoch of capitalist crisis.
Recently a young worker and member of the Leeds Marxist Society, Ben Curry, travelled to Cuba as an international delegate to the May Day celebrations. We publish here his thoughts and analysis on what is happening in Cuba now and where it is going in the future.
In the second part of our series on the First World War, Alan Woods looks at the causes behind the war and examines the role of the individual in history. In particular, Alan analyses the interests that led German imperialism to push for war.
In this video, recorded at the recent International Marxist School in London, Alan Woods – editor of www.marxist.com – speaks about the 100th anniversary of the beginning of World War One, discussing the causes behind the Great War, the interests of the different imperialist powers involved, and the role of imperialism in world geo-political relations today.
At the last Unite policy conference in 2012, Britain’s biggest union marked a shift to the left, with policies calling for the nationalisation of the banks and the fight for trade union policies in the Labour Party. This leftward shift continued at the 2014 policy conference, reflecting the general growing radicalisation in society. The task now is to turn the radical and militant policies passed into action.
We publish here a letter from Nico Baldion, a Socialist Appeal supporter in London, who writes about the proposals to demolition the Cremorne Estate, a one of the few remaining council estates available to working class families in the otherwise extremely wealthy Borough of Kensington and Chelsea.
Matthew Wood reviews Guns, Germs, and Steel, the 1997 Pulitzer prize winning book by geographer and anthropologist Jared Diamond, which provides a materialist analysis of the development of humanity from hunter-gatherers societies to agriculture.
We continue our series on Marx’s Capital with an analysis of Chapters 12-14. Having demonstrated how the capitalists squeeze greater profits from workers by extending the hours of the working day, Marx now turns his attention towards how the capitalists increase their profits by increasing the productivity of workers through the division of labour and co-operation within the workplace.