the commune issue 15

The July issue of The Commune is now available. Click the image below to see PDF or use the list of individual articles as they are posted online.

To purchase a printed copy for £1 + 50p postage, use the ‘donate’ feature here. You can also subscribe (£12 a year UK/£16 EU/£20 international) or order 5 copies a month to sell (£4) online here. If you want to pay by cheque, contact uncaptiveminds@gmail.com.

Editorial

beyond ‘resistance’, beyond alienation

Reports on struggles

lessons of the middlesex occupation – by an occupying student

from greek crisis to european fightback? – interview with WSM member Constantinos Avramidis

holland: victory for nine week cleaners’ strike – by Willem Dekker

migrant cleaners and organising solidarity – by David Broder

sex workers in uganda organise – interview with Macklean Kyomya, Namakula Nakato Daisy and Benjamin

Gaza flotilla massacre

‘they were like hyenas in the dark’ – interview with Gaza flotilla activist Fintan Lane

atrocity stirs protest in tel aviv – by Solomon Anker

solidarity, not silence: the academic boycott debate – by Greg Brown

Labour leadership race

what use an abbott in a ‘broad church’? – by Taimour Lay

new labour in opposition – by Dave Spencer

Understanding our situation

for the right not to work! – by Steve Ryan

who benefits from cuts? – by Adam Ford

‘to act in union…’: the changing composition of the working class and the implications for class struggle – by Sheila Cohen

‘Global Commune’ debates

second global commune – by Allan Armstrong

no national solutions – by Clifford Biddulph

‘not another communist group! – by Oisín Mac Giollamóir

we lack resistance to the present – by Nic Beuret

report on the second ‘global commune’

by Allan Armstrong

The second Global Commune day school, jointly organised by the Republican Communist Network (RCN) and The Commune, was held in the Out of the Blue Centre in Edinburgh on May 22nd.  People attended from Aberdeen, Bristol, Dundee, Edinburgh, Glasgow, London and Midlothian.

a sign at the Middlesex University occupation points to the way forward

The first workshop session, ‘After the Election, What Next?‘ was introduced by Alberto Durango and Mark Ellingsen from The Commune. Alberto emphasised the necessity for communists to be open and honest about their communism.  Workers needed political confidence to attack the labour bureaucracy. Mark pointed out that current economic crisis was far from solved. We need to clearly argue for a revolutionary alternative to capitalism and not be afraid to call for the abolition of wage labour. The question is how do we relate this abstract demand to concrete practice.

what use an abbott in a ‘broad church’?

As Diane Abbott wins sufficient nominations to stand for Labour Party leader, Taimour Lay looks at her and her party’s credentials.

What use is a ”broad church” when the pews are empty, the foundations are subsiding and the high priests at altar turn their backs on any shout of dissent? The Labour leadership election, far from being ”saved” by the  inclusion of Diane Abbott, has merely continued to go to form – token ‘left’ candidate takes on four former cabinet ministers of varying degrees of conservatism, ”enlivens” the hustings with some maverick, contrarian and media-populist rhetoric before the vote concludes with a Miliband, Balls or Burnham promising to lead Labour back to ”electability”.

Abbott’s candidacy is theatre designed by the New Labour establishment to present a democratic, inclusive party. For misguided Bennites, it’s also part of their message: come home to Labour, disillusioned socialists, in opposition we will rebuild and steer the party left.

report of ‘communist organisation’ session at global commune

On 22nd May The Commune and the Republican Communist Network (Scotland) co-hosted a Global Commune day school in Edinburgh. The day had sessions on politics after the election, internationalism and communist organisation. Full reports on each to follow.

The session on communist organisation was led off by Chris Ford, who produced this paper on the subject. We then broke up into two groups for further discussion. Ellenor from Liberty and Solidarity was unable to give her presentation due to illness. Follow link for Chris’s paper, and see below for feedback at the end of the workshop.

building alliances against cuts and privatisation of public services

by Gregor Gall

There is an old anarchist saying: ‘No matter who you vote for, the government still gets in’. The result of the 2010 general election puts a new complexion on this old saying for no matter which of the mainstream parties was elected to government, the result would lead to the same outcome in regard of cuts in public services and further privatisation of these.

In the election, three parties only differed on when, where and how much on these two central issues. The elephant in the room of the 2010 election was neo-liberalism. It was never discussed, being the unspoken and unacknowledged baseline upon which all the three parties operated.

rank and file organising: it could happen here too

by Sheila Cohen

April 2010 saw the biggest conference ever for Labor Notes, the US-based rank and file trade union newsletter and network which celebrated its 30th birthday last year. Over 1200 activists gathered in the (unionised) hotel just outside Detroit where corporate blandness was set off by the T-shirted exuberance of American workers not shy of yelling a slogan or two – especially when workers on strike against a non-unionised branch of the same hotel chain came forward to tell a familiar story of rank injustice and betrayal.

It’s impossible to take in everything at a Labor Notes conference (especially if you’re jet-lagged) but I followed my main interests in attending a chain of workshops addressed to union organising and membership participation (or lack of it). The first of these – “Innovative Organising Strategies” – was if anything the most inspiring, featuring the crucial dynamics of organising a union “before the union came along”, as some US activists have put it.

communists must organise as communists

by Chris Ford

The coalition government has been heralded as the start of a ‘new politics’ and a ‘new era of pluralism’. But for many the buzzwords offer little consolation, there is dread at the return of the Conservatives and resentment amongst those who voted Liberal-Democrat to stop them, some thinking they were ‘to the left of Labour’.

Far from marking a new beginning the election and the coalition has been a demonstration of deception, a deception that there is a ‘national interest’, a deception of political-pluralism and the reality of Parliamentary democracy.

greek revolt haunts the rulers of europe

by Mark Ellingsen

A class war has broken out in Greece, and there is a palpable fear amongst the international ruling class that workers will not submit to paying for the bailout of financial institutions. Stock markets tumbled during a week in which public and private sector workers in Greece went on strike and only recovered when the EU agreed an emergency fund to defend the euro. But even now doubts still linger amongst investors as to whether this will actually resolve the underlying problem of state debt.

The turmoil in Greece has seen protestors storm the Acropolis unfurling banners appealing to Europe to rise up; teachers interrupting an interview with the Education Minister on state television; and a general strike on 5th May with a demonstration of at least 100,000 in which some workers tried to storm the Greek parliament.

only solidarity can stop their attacks

editorial of The Commune

The General Election did not provide the ruling class with a mandate to slash public services. In the Prime Ministerial TV debates the party leaders shied away from outlining plans for cuts, knowing that doing so would risk electoral disaster. The result of the election was itself inconclusive.

Yet the new coalition government is confident in its offensive against the working class. As David  Cameron arrived in Number 10 on 11th May, he announced that Tory-Lib Dem Britain would be one where “we do not just ask ‘what are my entitlements?’, but ‘what are my responsibilities?'”. This masks an ideological war against our living standards.

the commune issue 14

The May issue of our monthly paper The Commune is now available. Click the image below to see the PDF or see individual articles as they are posted online in the list below.

To purchase a printed copy for £1 + 50p postage, use the ‘donate’ feature here. You can also subscribe (£12 a year UK/£16 EU/£20 international) or order 5 copies a month to sell (£4) online here. If you want to pay by cheque, contact uncaptiveminds@gmail.com.

and the struggle continues… women’s liberation 40 years on

Sharon Borthwick reports on the recent Feminist Fightback event in London

In 1970, 560 women came together at Ruskin College, Oxford for the first UK women’s liberation conference. The activist network Feminist Fightback met in London on 2nd May to look at how far we have come 40 years on, inviting all genders to “consider what feminism looks like today, how the struggle continues, and put the battles women fight today in the context of the history of the women’s movement.”

To aid comparisons of the women’s movement then and now the programme included two films: A Woman’s Place (Journeyman Pictures, 1970) and an episode of the BBC4 series on women, Activists (broadcast, March, 2010). Post introductions, the Feminist Fightback meeting continued with screening the 1970 film, which included footage of the Ruskin conference and The International Women’s Day March held in London in 1971.

despite ’empowerment’… people still have power

by Leo Singer

” The College principal says cuts will hit adult education”
“Services have been streamlined and centralised to curb duplication”
” increasing its council tax precept by 4.8 per cent”
“… plans to end funding for elite swimming, switch off street lights at night, cut two recycling centres and close crèches at leisure centres”
“… cutting around 70 jobs, with more to come in future years”

This is just a limited selection of headlines from the local papers all over Merseyside and Wallasey, collected this spring. Local governments are preparing us for a new era, a tightening of belts, expected after the national elections. Similar headlines are easy to find in papers all over the country. No wonder… as shit runs down.

‘we are fighting for now and for our future’

editorial of issue 13 of The Commune

As The Commune went to press the news media was dominated by coverage of the 6th May General Election. Both in mainstream politics and among the left there is much discussion of the policies of Labour, the Tories and Lib Dems.

Yet in reality there is little choice in the election. Parliament does influence our lives, and yet barely half of registered voters will vote. There is widespread disillusionment but no alternative in the election.

We believe that workers’ self-organisation is a far more important means of changing society. PCS, RMT and Unite members are all organising to stop the cuts planned by all three major parties.

gender, nation, class and the first intifada

by Aitemad Muhannah

Since Hamas was first established as an Islamic political movement within Palestinian society in December 1987 the leftist movement in Palestine has gradually come to be fragmented, and seems to be losing its popular constituency.

My own background as a women’s activist belonging to the PFLP from the 1980s until the mid-1990s leads me to argue that leftist parties and their popular grassroots organisations developed historically from incoherent ideological underpinnings, and that this has critically constrained their influence on Palestinians’ own systems of values and beliefs.