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Scotland’s Worst Workplace Disaster: £405 would have saved lives

In May 2004, we reported Scotland’s worst ever industrial disaster when the
Stockline plastics factory in Glasgow exploded leaving 9 dead and 40 injured.
It was another searing indictment of breaches in Health & Safety
legislation, now a matter of course in Britain. Ex-employees told journalists
they had been sacked after raising concerns about safety. The 2 companies jointly responsible, ICL Tech and
ICL Plastics, faced only charges relating to Health & Safety, for which they have now been
fined a measly £400,000.

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Ted Grant: In Defence of Trotskyism

Just before the collapse of the Berlin Wall and later the Soviet Union,
Ted Grant delivered this speech on the crisis in the USSR. To deflect
any blame, Gorbachev and co. heaped blame on Stalin and Brezhnev, even
going so far as to rehabilitate some of the victims of the purge trials
– including those accused of "Trotskyism". But Trotsky was not
rehabilitated: he was still hated by the bureaucracy because they
feared the ideas he represented.

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The Tragedy of Michael Collins

Michael Collins was a great
Irish revolutionary and nationalist who more than any one person may be
considered to have created modern Ireland. On 22 August 1922, 85 years ago, he
was killed in an ambush during the Irish civil war – he was 31 years of age.

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Reflections from a Picket Line

The following is a short letter from a Postal Worker from Oxford, giving his impressions in his own humorous words of his experience on the picket line. For many of us, it is a grassroots view we can identify with.

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The Crime of Partition – part 3: The role of the Communist Party of India during Partition

Could the Communist party of India have made a decisive difference in the independence movement? Here Jamil shows they were above all the prisoners of the policies imposed by Stalin, which were normally reformist, indeed counter-revolutionary. But occasionally Stalin lurched into an ultra-left phase as in 1947-48, called the ‘Zhdanov offensive.’ In lurching from right to left, a drunk will at one point be found upright. That is the significance of the correct perception of what was happening in India by the Moscow commentators Dyakov and Zhukov.

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Caracas discusses Leon Trotsky on the anniversary of his assassination

Authorities in Venezuela have organised a public
meeting to commemorate the 67th anniversary of the assassination of Leon
Trotsky. For the first time since that date, Trotsky’s death is being
commemorated officially by a government institution. Estaban Volkov, Celia
Hart, and Ricardo Napurí are participating in events around the commemoration,
which also include television and radio appearances, where the ideas and life
of Trotsky are discussed.

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Leon Trotsky – revolutionary martyr

Leon Trotsky’s murder was no accident or spontaneous action by the dictator Stalin, but
a monstrous preconceived act that was the culmination of a murder campaign against
the whole of the old Bolshevik leadership of the revolution and those who stood
by the genuine ideas of Marxism. We republish this article published in Militant in 1985.

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How it Happened

Today is the 67th anniversary of the death of Leon Trotsky. Together
with Lenin, Trotsky was one of the great Marxist theoreticians of the
20th century, who dedicated his life to the emancipation of the working
class. Not only did he work for the overthrow of capitalism, but also
for the overthrow of Stalinism, a monstrous totalitarian regime which
held the Russian working class in submission. As a consequence, Stalin
sought during the Purge Trials to murder the entire leadership of the
Bolshevik party, and ordered the assassination of Leon Trotsky. After
the failed attempt in May 1940, Stalins assassin eventually succeeded
in murdering Trotsky on the 20th of August in Mexico city. Today we
publish Natalya Sedov Trotskys original account of the assasination.

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