After a 2 month strike by Glasgow City Council
Day Care workers, the City’s grave diggers are the latest group of workers who
have been forced to strike following the Council’s refusal to have meaningful
talks with the GMB union who represent the workers.
The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggle. That is all written history. For the majority of human history man did not live in a class society. The development of technique allowed for the production of a surplus of wealth over and above the means of subsistence. This produced a flourish of art, science and philosophy as part of the population was freed for the first time from the toil of everyday labour. Mick Brooks talks on the application of Marxist philosophy to the development of society.
The Electoral Commission
has launched an investigation into an illegal donation to Wendy Alexander MSP’s
campaign to take over from Jack McConnell as Labour leader in the Scottish
Parliament. The crisis
unfolded when the Sunday Herald learned that every donation to the Wendy
campaign was under £1,000. Many were for £950. Under the Elections Act 2000,
all donations of £1,000 or more must be declared to the Electoral
Commission.
This article analyses the relationship between the Soviet state and the Russian Orthodox Church. There was a clear dividing line between Lenin’s approach to this question and the zig-zag policy later adopted by Stalin. First published in Workers International News, October 1945.
The findings of a report conducted by the Sutton Trust into the educational achievements of working-class and poor children compared with their better-off peers were recently published. The Trust tested three-year-olds to determine their intellectual capabilities, their intelligence and ‘brightness’ in other words. It may come as no surprise to learn that those children who came out top but were from working-class families had, by the age of seven, fallen far behind children from middle-class and well-off families who had been in the bottom segment at the age of three.
Labour Research has looked at the 2006-7 pay round. We’re getting poorer! “the median (midpoint) increase in pay was 3.6%, well below the 4.1% average Retail Price Increase growth reported over those 12 months.” So over the past year wages have fallen behind the rise in prices.
Metronet bosses have been paid out £1.2 million to get rid of them. Metronet went belly up in the summer leaving us with a farewell present of £2 billion debt. Metronet got the contract to maintain two thirds of the tube network, despite the opposition of Mayor Livingstone and pretty well everyone who lives in London. Metronet is not actually a firm. It’s a consortium of companies such as Balfour Beatty and Thames Water. They contracted the work out to firms who actually did the repairs, firms such as Balfour Beatty and Thames Water. Presumably they cut cards to share […]
The papers have been reporting that people all over the country have been pulling out their own teeth with pliers and filling their cavities with Polyfilla. It seems they can’t find a NHS dentist anywhere near where they live.What happened to a health service free at the point of use?
In the present financial volatility, American bank Merrill Lynch has lost between $8 and $12 billion. The man who made it all happen by betting on the sub-prime mortgage market was chief executive Stan O’Neal. He’s got to go. The bank is paying him $159 million to go. The reward for failure?
From the Guardian October 25th: “Last week India’s biggest real estate dealer made a paper fortune of £500m in a day. Government figures show that the average expenditure of countryside household India to be just 500 rupees a month or about 20p a day.”
How well prepared was US imperialism for the invasion of Iraq? Was their planning based on high precision satellite spy technology? According to Barbara Bodine, formerly of the State Department in the TV programme No plan, no Peace, their main instrument for information about the country was a 1990s version of the Lonely Planet Guide to Iraq.
In the build up to Christmas, Socialist Appeal is contributing to the festive spirit by issuing some articles by Marxists on the origins and significance of Christianity, which in its early period was a revolutionary movement of the oppressed. This article deals with the person of Christ and the historical evidence for his existence, which is taken from the first chapter of the ‘Foundations of Christianity’ by Karl Kautsky.