After 7 May, what should workers do? We don’t have the luxury of just preparing for the next election, as the Labour party is doing – though it looks like it is seeing how to lose the next election too.
As capitalism continues its drive to reduce workers to utter penury and, worse, compliance in that drive, the number of workers on zero hours contracts has soared from 200,000 in 2010 to 1.8 million in 2015.
By the time you read this, the election will probably have morphed into a grand negotiation about a coalition. This they call politics.
Every year workers throughout the world celebrate May Day. Forty years ago, it coincided with the liberation of South Vietnam. This year, May Day comes hot on the heels of the US’s massive climbdown over Cuba – brilliant news.
The run-up to an election is a strange time. There is much talk of democracy while in reality a range of tactics is deployed to remove citizens from the electoral roll.
Ukraine (desperate for a ceasefire) – Russia, Germany and France concluded a peace agreement in Minsk on 12 February. Notably, the main warmongers – the US, Britain and the EU – were absent.
11 January 2015
The French people have responded magnificently to the fascists who killed the workers at the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo in Paris on 7 January and in a Parisian grocery shop on 9 January.
Welcome to the first bimonthly Workers – 24 pages in full colour, replacing a 16-page monthly in black and white.
Estimates put the value of Britain’s housing stock at more than £5 trillion – that’s five thousand billion. Yet the shortage of housing remains a pressing requirement for millions of workers.
The EU is built on the “free movements” of capital, labour, goods and services, that is, on uncontrolled movements of all four. Capital needs these “freedoms” in order to maximise its profits, and for no other reason.
Parliament disgraced itself when it voted in October for another assault on stricken Iraq – “making the rubble bounce”, in the US Air Force’s unsavoury phrase.
Just about every aspect of the insanity of capitalism is exposed by the current outbreak of Ebola virus centred on west Africa.
This journal is changing. In fact, the whole way the CPBML produces news is changing, starting with a free electronic newsletter.
19 October 2014
The so-called “pro-democracy” demonstrators seeking to occupy central areas of Hong Kong are for the return of Hong Kong as an independent capitalist statelet, severed from mainland China.
We are told that we have to attack Syria in order to defeat the Islamic State (IS). The peoples of the Middle East will have to deal with their own backward feudal despots.
Now that the referendum is over, the focus of the media has leapfrogged the coming months and focused on the general election. Nothing else is held to be relevant.
The government is sponsoring a series of television adverts against slavery in Britain. The domestic servant, the farm hands, the sweat shop labourers, the sex worker etc. The great unsaid, but obvious from the presentations, is that these modern-day slaves are migrant workers.
This October’s TUC national demo will have a single concrete demand: Britain Needs a Pay Rise. It's a welcome change from vague calls such as the March for the Alternative.
Once again the war drums are beating over Iraq. This time we are told we have to go into battle abroad in order to prevent ISIS waging war on the streets of Britain, or to save the Yazidis.
Yet again Israel’s military terrorises Gaza. Why does political progress remain so far out of reach in this pivotal part of the Middle East?
NATO military exercises including British troops are due to take place in Ukraine in July. This is a dangerous move that will inevitably escalate an already tense situation.
Sometimes it seems as if opposition to capitalism remains just that – opposition. Are we so mired in the trenches that we cannot lift our sights and think not about opposing their plans but proposing our own?
Karl Marx famously wrote that history repeats itself – the first time as tragedy, then as farce. That sums up the contortions that the US is twisting itself into over Iraq, shabbily abetted by Cameron.
This year will see a host of elections. Can the working class could use them to advance our interests? Or is there a better way?
