slutwalk: because we’ve had enough

Bahar Mustafa reports on London SlutWalk

Picture it. A beautifully warm day in June, sunshine spilling over central London, luscious greenery surrounding the pavements en route, vibrant cheers and chants resonating from the front of the march of about 5,000 energetic, lively and colourful people; a mishmash of corsets, garters, nipples, bare bottoms, fishnets and lipstick. But more noticeable than anything was the vivacious confidence of the crowds of passionate people pissed-off at the victim-blaming culture of sexual violence and rape against women that has gone unchallenged for far too long.

SlutWalk saw its first ever march in Toronto in January 2011. Around 1,000 women and dozens of men took to the streets in protest at Constable Michael Sanguinetti’s despicable comments warning young female university students that they ought to “avoid dressing like sluts in order not to be victimised.” The movement quickly spread to Los Angeles, Chicago, Boston, Mexico City, Sydney and now London.

pcs votes to join ‘j30’

Steve Ryan reflects on the prelude to the upcoming day of co-ordinated strike action by public sector trade unions, due to take place on the 30th of June.

PCS members on strike in 2010.

So its official, the big strike on June 30th is on. Already the excitement is palpable with Scrota all over the news, twitter and face book full of delighted civil servants, all changing their profiles to reflect J30,

indignados in seville and barcelona: reports from the #spanishrevolution

We present here reports from anti-authoritarian communists in two different Spanish cities.  They appear here in English for the first time.  Elsewhere online there is another text, from Madrid, which is a worthwhile reflection on how revolutionaries can relate to the movement.

Indignados in Seville

I find it difficult to write about the movement of indignados in Seville and maybe that’s because I’ve been an activist for many years in this city. So I’m writing while aware that my opinions aren’t very representative of the movement as a whole.

italy reading group continues: workers’ struggles, 1962 – 1980

Time: 7pm, Monday 13 June
Location: Freedom Bookshop, Angel Alley, 84b Whitechapel High Street [Map] (near Aldgate East tube)

See below for reading

Class struggle broke out on a massive scale in Italy after more than a decade of migration, speedups and mechanisation. The Italian miracle of the fifties and sixties meant a big increase in the number- and the power- of factory workers, through mass migration to the north.  Theorists talked about a new subject: the “mass worker”, especially the unskilled and semi-skilled young workers. The class struggle waged by these workers is especially interesting not just for its militancy but also for the forms that struggle took and the ways it was organised: hiccup strikes, chequerboard strikes, sabotage, occupations, base committees, mass worker- student assemblies…

civil servants on strike: we can’t let the floodgates open

Ahead of civil servants’ walkouts this week and the June 30th strike day, Steve Ryan writes on the Con-Dem offensive against the whole working class

Members of the PCS civil servants’ union throughout a number of departments are taking industrial action over a range of issues, all of which have one theme, and that is government cuts. Department for Work and Pensions and Equality and Human Rights Commission workers are to walk out over office closures, and HMRC tax workers over attacks on sick leave.

con-dems want to crush the possibility of resistance

Also of course it is PCS that has been instrumental in pushing for co-ordinated action on June 30th.

Many on the left see this as something to be fully supported, and of course it is,. However the issues at stake are more complex and even more important than may at first appear.

councils of despair

Sheila Cohen writes on the situation after last month’s elections

The May elections have left a smirk on Cameron’s face – or perhaps we should say deepened the one that was already there. But for the left the result was, once again, a mixture of predictability and despair. While the Tories got trounced in the Northern cities – and the LibDems , of course, everywhere –  any illusion of a return to sanity was flattened by the Tories’ overall performance.

ed miliband is fishing for conservative working-class support

The staunch battalions of the North, it seems, have never forgotten Thatcher and the wounds she inflicted – but in the supposedly affluent South-East, the dynasties that once fell to New Labour have once again reverted to at least the appearance of support for what our rulers love to refer to as “aspirational” policies.    

to ‘the movement’: on work and unions in an age of austerity

This article was commissioned by Shift Magazine, a publication addressing the radical ecological direct action movement, to discuss the trade unions in the wake of the March 26th demonstration.  Because it addresses a readership who may not have much personal experience of union involvement, or a particular political orientation to labour militancy, aspects of it may seem obvious to regular readers of The Commune.  It was written in early April.

The ecological direct action movement has supported workers' struggles before: but is it time to do more than support from the outside?

In an age of austerity, at a time in which industrial struggle seems to be on the agenda in a way in which it hasn’t been for years, activists are asking questions about unions.  What can we expect from them?  How should we relate to them?  Why are they as they are?

in the crossfire: adventures of a vietnamese revolutionary – book launch

Wednesday 8 June, 7pm

Housmans Bookshop, 5 Caledonian Road, London, N1 9DX (2 mins walk from Kings Cross station)

Ngo Van joined the struggle against the French colonial regime in Vietnam as a teenager in the 1920s, suffering imprisonment and hardship. But when revolution swept Vietnam at the end of the second world war, the Stalinists of the Vietnamese Communist Party took control and tried physically to eliminate other socialists and anti-colonialists. Van escaped this massacre, in which many of his comrades were murdered. From 1948 he lived in exile in Paris, where he took a factory job and participated in workers’ movements before, during and after the 1968 general strike.  [See here for a short online biography.]

Van, who died in 2005, wrote extensively about Vietnamese worker and peasant resistance, both to French colonialism and to Ho Chi Minh’s brand of Stalinism, helping to hand that history on to later generations.

In The Crossfire, published by AK Press, is the English edition of Ngo Van’s autobiography.

Hilary Horrocks, one of the book’s translators, will talk about this unique eye-witness account of a little-known aspect of the anti-colonial struggle, and read from Van’s vivid story of secret meetings, arrests, torture, battles and insurrection. Simon Pirani, who researched the history of Vietnamese Trotskyism and edited some of Van’s earlier English-language publications, will also speak. There will be plenty of time for questions and discussion from all.

Entry: £3, redeemable against any purchase

Enquiries 07947 031268. Housmans 020 7837 4473, shop@housmans.com

We are publicising this talk, but it is not organised by The Commune.

italy reading group: class struggle during the second world war

The next of the London Commune’s reading group meetings on the class struggle in Italy takes place on Monday 30th May. This week we will be looking at the wave of class struggle unleashed by the events of World War II; the collapse of Benito Mussolini’s fascist regime; and the struggle over the post-Liberation social order.

The recommended reading is just two articles, even though each is fairly long. We have prepared a reading pack, including a timeline of events. Click here to download.

gaddafi in space

Jack Staunton reviews Suicide of the Astronaut by Muammar al-Gaddafi

Colonel Gaddafi is, without a doubt, one of the greatest science fiction icons of all time. Who could forget the 1985 Infocom game A Mind Forever Voyaging, where the Libyan dictator dies in a nuclear test predicted for 2011? Add to this the opening scenes of Back to the Future, released that same year, when Libyan gunmen shoot Doc Brown, angry that he has stolen Gaddafi’s plutonium to fuel his time-travelling DeLorean.

No less of a contribution to the genre is Gaddafi’s own sci-fi volume, celebrated 1998 collection Escape to Hell. The lion of Tripoli set pen to paper to lay bare the moral emptiness of our fast-paced, instant-thrills modern society.

‘why us?’ possilpark youth speak out against dispersal zone

Dawn Hunter introduces an interview she conducted with youth in the Possilpark area of Glasgow, subject to a trial ‘dispersal zone’ order

‘I’m wondering, though, if there’s four police cutting about, can we tell them to disperse?’

Flattened tenements, graffiti-daubed shop shutters and the yellow moon of the local Lidl illuminating littered gutters and rusting gates: Possilpark appears the stereotype of a depressed Glasgow, still scarred by the heroin trade and decades of government neglect.

A map of the dispersal zone, as issued to police

But for those of us brought up here, for all the problems, we know it as something more, a community which deserves better than crude policing and quick-fixes.

A trial ‘Dispersal Zone’ in one of Glasgow’s poorest areas has led to the targeting of young children. This is a transcript of a group discussion held in March with seven children, aged between 10 and 13, in Possilpark.

the workers’ inquiry: what’s the point?

Joe Thorne looks at the history of the “workers’ inquiry” idea: from Marx, to Italy in the 1960s, to the present day.  This fairly long article touches on debates amongst those influenced by operaismo about how we should relate to the modern workplace.

What can we learn from focussed investigations of contemporary working class reality?

The point of these notes is: to understand what the term ‘workers’ inquiry means; to argue that it has come to mean at least two different things; to characterise the political objective of these different projects; and to evaluate both the importance of those objectives and how well they are met by the methods in question.  The point is to articulate what place I believe the inquiry ought to have in the ideas and practice of revolutionaries.  It will also say something about research into class composition more generally.

organising for june 30th – open assembly – 7pm monday may 23rd

Please forward far and wide, join the Facebook event group and publicise!

Organising for June 30th // Open Assembly // 7pm Monday May 23rd // Marchmont Community Centre WC1

30th June 2011 may well turn out to be the most important step forward in a mass fight against public sector cuts. Hundreds of thousands of workers could be involved in strike action, from as many as four or five different unions including NUT, PCS, UCU and ATL.

Let's join community mobilisations to strikes: direct action against austerity

Often strike action can be ignored by those in power but also the vast majority of workers not in unions or directly effected by the issues. Therefore we, rank & file union members, students, precarious workers & unemployed are calling for a mass show of solidarity for those taking strike action and to generalise the strike on June 30th.

“our time is coming again”

Sheila Cohen reviews New Trade Union Activism: Class Consciousness or Social Identity? Sian Moore, Palgrave Macmillan, 2011.

Yet another pricey, “academic” book – but one with an interesting message. In New Trade Union Activism Sian Moore, who teaches trade unionists at London Metropolitan University’s Working Lives Research Institute, examines the increasing – and, to some of us, questionable – phenomenon of new forms of worker representation. By contrast to the staunch shop steward of the past, who simply took on whatever problems the daily toll of workplace exploitation threw up, the last ten years or so have seen the growth of specific “reps” for apparently every conceivable contingency – learning reps, equality reps, environmental reps, etc., etc.