The SNP victory
in the Glasgow East by-election certainly marks a new low in the recent history
of the Scottish Labour Party but the question is now posed: does it mark the
seismic shift in Scottish politics that Alex Salmond has declared?
In 2007 Socialist Appeal hosted a meeting in London with Alan Woods speaking on the history of Bolshevism. Here we provide the audio files.
In September 1931,
the sailors of the Atlantic Fleet of the British Royal Navy organised an
insurrection against the government in response to pay cuts and conditions of
employment. Known as the Invergordon Mutiny, it is one of the historical
examples of the power of class-based action in response to attacks on living
standards.
Last week 500 bus workers protested in central London demanding better pay and conditions.
A reply to ‘Comrade Clifford’ is an under-rated pamphlet by Ted Grant, partly because it has been fairly inaccessible for much of the time since it was written in 1966. Another reason it may be under-appreciated is because Brendan Clifford and his little sect have long since disappeared from the political scene. But, as usual with Ted, the arguments of this Stalinist and Maoist are just the basis for a wide-ranging Marxist survey of the entire history of Stalinism and the resistance to it nationally and internationally from 1917 to the Second World War and beyond.
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.
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.
Today Trades Councils in Britain have been
consciously relegated to the sidelines by the trade union bureaucracy, but in
this article, written at the time of the struggle against the Heath
government’s ill-fated Industrial Relations Act [1971] Dudley Edwards outlined
the history of the trades councils in Britain and pointed to their potentially
vital role.
We republish one of Ted Grant’s most important
writings. In the years after the Second World War the Trotskyist movement had to
reorient itself to a very different situation to that envisaged by Trotsky when
he had founded the Fourth International in 1938. Rather than falling into
crisis, capitalism in Western Europe and North America was experiencing a boom
which was later described as a ‘golden age’. After the post-War revolutionary
wave was seen off in the advanced capitalist countries, this made conditions
for revolutionaries very difficult. Illusions that capitalism had solved all
its problems began to develop quite widely. Ted analysed the causes of the boom
and why it would come to an end in ‘Will there be a slump?’ in 1960.’
By Stewart Player and Colin Leys, Merlin Press,
2008.
This book is written in the classic muck-raking style. But
then, there’s a great deal of muck to be raked. It deals with the introduction
of Independent Sector Treatment Centres into the NHS. ISTCs are capitalist
firms operating for profit. It was a New Labour brainwave for them to be given
NHS surgical procedures to perform. The argument was that harnessing the
private sector would help do away with the horribly long hospital waiting lists
left after 18 years of Tory penny pinching.
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.
The
strike was as good as any I have previously been involved in, with better media
coverage. The photos on the UNISON
website (www.unison.org.uk)
show some of the pickets and demonstrations around the country. Support in the South West stood out to me –
given we are always told it is just the North and London where things are
effective – a demo of 1,000 in Exeter, and on the beach in Torquay.