On December 18th a campaign was launched to free the “Shministim” – Israeli high school students who have been imprisoned for refusing to serve in the army occupying the Palestinian Territories. The website december18th.org features videos of the jailed conscientious objectors, and you can also send a letter of protest to the Israeli Defense Minister.
Tag: the commune
Below is a video of the Iranian student activist Behrouz Karimizadeh – a leading member of Freedom and Equality who spent several months in prison in winter 2007-spring 2008 – speaking at the Hands Off the People of Iran conference on December 13th. Behrouz discusses (via an interpreter) the challenges the student movement faces in building its forces and building its links with the workers’ movement in the face of repression and imperialist threats, as well as outlining the history of the movement. Videos of other talks are available on the HOPI website.
There will be a demonstration outside the Greek Embassy in London on Thursday 18th December showing solidarity with workers and students in Greece, after the murder of teenager Alexis Grigoropoulos by the police and a series of strikes and protests against the government.
The solidarity protest will take place 4-6pm on the 18th. The Embassy is located at 1A Holland Park, London W11 3TP. The nearest Tube stop is Holland Park: see map below.
by Ernie Haberkern
“The “New Question” posed by the experience of the Labor government is not, then, whether socialism can be established by parliamentary means or only by extra-parliamentary means. It is this: Can the working class reach socialism only by its own efforts, by its direct class rule over the economic and political life of the country, or can socialism be attained without workers’ control and simply by an expropriation of the bourgeoisie carried out, one way or another, under the control and direction of a more or less benevolent workers’ bureaucracy? The spread of Stalinism has raised the same question in one way; the Labourite government in another way. If it is not the most vital question of our time, it is certainly one of the most vital. Not a few Marxists have abandoned the basic convictions of the founders and teachers of scientific socialism by replying, in effect, in the affirmative: Yes, the road to socialism lies or may lie through the domination of society by a workers’ bureaucracy or a bureaucracy that arose out of the labor movement. They have concluded that the Stalinist revolution is the socialist revolution, that Stalinist society is progressive, that the Titoist state is socialist, and the like. As for ourselves, we remain unreconstructed in our belief that the emancipation of the working class, that is, socialism, is the task of the working class itself and no one else. The experience of the Labor government, especially when considered, as it must be, in the light of the social and historical significance of the rise of Stalinism, has not modified our belief in the slightest degree and we see no grounds in the realities of British society to warrant such a modification.”
Max Shachtman, The New International, January/February 1951
This article, in which the author repudiated his long-held position that nationalization by itself was a progressive step towards socialism, argues that nationalization of private capital by the state bureaucracy, even when carried out by a party based on the working class is not a step forward. The article even goes so far as to argue that the Attlee government, if it continued on this path, was heading towards a social system that would differ little, if at all, from Stalinism.
Shachtman was rediscovering Marx and Engels’ views on the subject of statification. Continue reading “marx and engels on the state and society”
Below are a few photos taken at the Hands Off the People of Iran conference on Saturday 13th December. Much of the event was filmed: a video of John McDonnell speaking about sanctions is featured here, while Yassamine Mather on the Iranian trade unions is here.
Our group now has a Flickr page with photos from meetings, demonstrations and so on, which can be found here.
Three videos on the subject of the week-long occupation of the Republic Windows & Doors factory in Chicago. This won a huge pay-off worth $1.75 million for the workers concerned, who lost their jobs due to the recession.
Workers at Republic Windows and Doors in Chicago won a large pay-off this week after an occupation of the factory where they worked. Gregor Gall argues that in the current economic climate, occupations should play a major role in the fight against mass redundancies.
A recession is well and truly here if you look at the newspapers and see the daily tally of redundancies and closures. Indeed, ITN has begun doing its daily count on its late evening bulletin – just as it did in the grim 1980s.
Most economic analysts believe the recession will be long and deep, not short and slight. So there is agreement that the number of unemployed will be between 2m-3m by sometime next year unless there is a fight to stop redundancies.
It is not just the redundancies and closures that cause untold misery but the way in which they are carried out in terms of notification and compensation result in further heartache.
Faced with mass redundancies and plant closures, how should workers and unions best respond?
by Terry Brotherstone, from The Guardian
Brian Pearce, who has died aged 93, was one of the most acute scholars of Russian history and British communism never to have held an academic post. Of the historians who broke with the Communist party of Great Britain (CPGB) after the Khrushchev “secret speech” and the suppression of the Hungarian revolution in 1956, he was the most insistent on the need for historical analysis of the party’s record.
A prodigious translator from both Russian and French, Pearce won the Scott-Moncrieff prize three times – in 1976 for Marcel Liebman’s Leninism Under Lenin, in 1980 for Roland Mousnier’s The Institutions of French Monarchy Under Absolutism, and in 1991 for Paul Veyne’s Bread and Circuses. Literary translation was his main source of income after he stopped working for the CPGB, for which he did various journalistic, cultural relations and translation jobs after leaving the civil service in 1950.
Expelled from the party in 1957, he had continued to work as a teacher of English at the Soviet Embassy, but the next year Harry Pollitt, the CPGB’s former general secretary, saw him there. “Soon my pupils … very embarrassed, made excuses for terminating their lessons,” Pearce recalled. Continue reading “obituary of brian pearce”
Last night (Monday 8th December) we held the last of our first series of “uncaptive minds” forums. The subject of the series was the 1970s class struggle, and we held meetings on struggles such as the Grunwick strike, the Upper Clyde Shipbuilders‘ occupation and the Leeds women clothing workers’ strike as well as discussing the organising methods of the time and focussing on debates in the movement such as the issue of workers’ control.
30 people attended the last of our seven fortnightly meetings, which was on the subject matter ‘Where did it all go?’. A few photos are featured below.
Liam comments: “earlier this evening I went along to a meeting organised by The Commune at which John McDonnell and Jeremy Corbyn very vividly brought to life politics and class struggle in the 1970s. John mentioned an example of a factory in his area in which the management removed the phone from the union office. The shop steward walked to the phone box at the end of the street and brought 250 workers with him. He got his phone back. Jeremy described his time as an organiser for NUPE when he would walk into school kitchens and recruit all the non members into the union. Contrast this to the contemporary situation. The young workers in my local branch of Woolworths yesterday were energetically recreating the 1974 Bulgarian retail experience. It hadn’t crossed their mind to strike, occupy the shop, hold a public meeting. Stoic acceptance that they were losing their jobs and the hope that something else would turn up seemed to be their attitude.”
A new series will begin in the New Year, looking at wider aspects of capitalism and the working class today. More information to follow shortly. Continue reading “photos of the last of our forums on 1970s class struggle”
A lecture by Tamas Krausz, a communist based in Budapest, about the 1956 Hungarian revolution, its workers’ councils and forms of workers’ self-management
1. Prehistory[1]
The history of the workers’ councils of 1956 cannot be understood without the history of the Hungarian working class. The intellectual-political and socio-cultural development of the Hungarian working class has been shaped by diverse and complex historical processes in the interwar period. The counter-revolutionary system of Horthy destroyed and criminalized the 1918-1919 revolutionary tradition of the workers’ councils of the Hungarian working class, it banned the communist party and it declared in the name of the sanctity of private property that communal property – which was defined as the essence of socialism from Marx and Lenin till Zsigmond Kunfi, Justus and Lukács – was a sinful idea. Continue reading “the workers’ councils of 1956 – by tamas krausz”
by S. Parsa
Up to 2000 left wing student activists demonstrated this weekend in various parts of Iran, on the annual “Student day” (16 azar/6 December). The Freedom & Equality Seekers, the main left student group in Iran, protested in universities of Tehran, Urumia, Mazandaran, Shiraz, Isfahan and also in the Kurdish regions.
Behrouz Karimizadeh, an active member of the group Freedom and Equality Seeking Students, who now resides in London, has told us that their group was under much pressure this year: “Last year over 70 of our members were arrested. This year we were under a lot of threats and pressure and decided instead not to call for demonstrations ourselves”. Many of the official demonstrations were only called by the Tahkim Vahdat organisation (Office for Strengthening Unity), and their post-graduate group Advar. Both of the groups are semi-governmental and the only officially recognised and legal student bodies in Iran.
the freedom and equality group’s slogans at mazandaran university read “freedom of women means freedom of society”; “student movement: in solidarity with workers’ and women’s movements” and “free thinking is our right” Continue reading “socialist iranian students demonstrate”
In our recent pamphlet Strategy for Industrial Struggle Chris Kane argued for the revival of the occupation tactic to resist lay-offs and redundancies in the current recession. It is excellent to see that workers in Chicago are putting such long-lost tactics into action – from socialistworker.org
WORKERS OCCUPYING the Republic Windows & Doors factory slated for closure are vowing to remain in the Chicago plant until they win the $1.5 million in severance and vacation pay owed them by management.
In a tactic rarely used in the U.S. since the labor struggles of the 1930s, the workers, members of United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America (UE) Local 1110, refused to leave the plant on December 5, its last scheduled day of operation. Continue reading “factory occupation in chicago”
PCS activist Christine Hulme has been added to the platform for Monday‘s ‘uncaptive minds’ forum on the 1970s class struggle. She will be leading off the discussion alongside John McDonnell MP, Jeremy Corbyn MP and RMT activist Steve Hedley.
Unfortunately, Joe Marino will now be unable to attend, for health reasons.
The meeting begins at 6:30pm on Monday 8th December. The venue is in central London – email uncaptiveminds@gmail.com or phone 07595 245494 to find out more details.
by Chris Kane
If co-operative production is not to remain a sham and a snare; if it is to supersede the capitalist system; if united co-operative societies are to regulate national production upon a common plan, thus taking it under their own control, and putting an end to the constant anarchy and periodical convulsions which are the fatality of capitalist production – what else, gentlemen, would it be but communism, “possible” communism?
Karl Marx, The Civil War in France
The communist revolution is fundamentally different from the process imagined by those who see the capturing of Parliament or a coup d’état by an elitist party as an end in itself. Marx, as is now well known, emphasised the self-emancipation of the working class: in 1871, amongst the conclusions he drew from the experience of the Paris Commune, he said that: 1. we cannot lay hold of the existing state machinery, 2. the commune was the political form at last discovered under which to work out the economical emancipation of the working class. Alongside the Paris Commune we now have extensive historical experience of similar forms of workers’ self organisation by which to address its relationship to the communist society latent already in the class struggles within capitalism, whose potential has almost been realised in past efforts to reach the first phase of communism. Continue reading “the communist revolution and the necessity of workers’ self-management”
