Europe

Andrew Glyn died from a brain tumour on 22 December 2007.  He was 64 years old.  A fellow of Corpus Christi College in Oxford since 1969, he was a leading socialist economist for all that time.

In 1970, just like today, the Labour Party seemed dead from the neck up. After six years of desperately disappointing government, Labour had been unceremoniously bundled out of office. The Tories were back, aiming to put the boot in to the working class.

The process of capitalist restoration in Serbia has been brutal. Hundreds of thousands of workers in the old industries have lost their jobs. The old social buffers provided by the planned economy have been dismantled. In this atmosphere a sombre mood dominates the working class. The only outlet the ruling class can offer is to keep whipping up nationalist sentiment.

Yesterday a powerful general strike shook Greece. There was a massive turnout and the whole of Greece was brought to a standstill. The New Democracy government is attempting to introduce severe cuts in the pension system. All they have achieved is a massive radicalisation of society.

The strike at the Ford plant in St. Petersburg is extremely symptomatic. After the collapse of the Russian economy in the 1990s now we have an upturn. With it comes also a renewed confidence of the working class. The victory of the Russian Ford workers would strengthen enormously the whole of the Russian working class. They need your help.

Over 150 years ago Ireland lost a staggering 13% of its population to death by disease and starvation. How could it be that Britain, which was still the richest and most powerful country in the world, could not prevent this horrific death toll? The answer is simple ‑ the British ruling-classes did not want to minimize the death toll, on the contrary, they welcomed it!

At the University of East Anglia recently Rob Sewell of the Socialist Appeal gave a talk on the Miners strike in Britain 1984-5. The strike was a culmination of the inevitable build up of tension between the ruling and working class. In the post-war period the decline of British imperialism had occured. The Tories of the 1980s were a rabid reaction to that phenomenon, determined to destroy the organised labour movement by taking on its most militant section, the National Union of Miners.

We are publishing here an interesting piece on the Irish trade unions by Peter Black, an active member of the TGWU (now fused with Amicus to form “Unite”) and the Irish Republican Socialist Party. Trade union membership is growing in Ireland, as is the militancy of the working class and Socialist Republicans, in the tradition of James Connolly, can play an important role in providing the militant leadership the Irish workers deserve.

On Saturday, November 17, a massive demonstration of 70,000 workers and youth took place in Ljubljana, the capital of Slovenia. The workers are fed up with low wages, high prices, cuts in services and privatisation. They have had a taste of capitalism and clearly don’t like it.

Last week an important dispute flared up at the Dublin Bus company over new work schedules. Although the strike was called off today, the present article, written last week, gives an idea of the militant mood that exists among Dublin's bus workers.

One year ago today comrade Phil Mitchinson died tragically of a heart attack. He was without doubt a very talented comrade who devoted his time to editing the Socialist Appeal and helping to build our tendency in Britain and internationally. Here Rob Sewell remembers Phil and the role he played.

On Saturday the "Der Funke" Marxist tendency organised a big event with Trotsky's grandson, Esteban Volkov, as special guest, to commemorate and celebrate the 90th anniversary of the 1917 Russian Revolution. Around 200 people came to listen to the speeches in defence of "Red October" and between 400-500 celebrated all night long at the party that was organised after the meeting.

Sarkozy is consciously provoking some of the big battalions of the French labour movement. His strategy is clear: take on the strong sections of the class and, counting on the weak trade union leaders, smash them in order to prepare the ground for an all-out attack on the rest of the class. The stakes are high. With a bold, militant leadership the workers could win.

A Basque Marxist was on a speaking tour of the North of Ireland at the end of October. He spoke to audiences in Belfast, Strabane and Derry mainly composed of republican socialists, but not only. There was keen interest in seeing how the experience of the Basque situation could be applied to the North of Ireland, and vice versa. We make available here a report, originally published in The Plough, the journal of the Irish Republican Socialist Party.

By all appearances the right-wing government couldn't have picked a worse time to call an election. However, if one looks at the situation more closely, one can see that things will only get worse in the future for them.