Blogs

Examples from Adelie in Southall, Royal Mail in Greenford, Sofology in Park Royal and XPO/House of Fraser in Milton Keynes

School students in the US are organising a national high school walk out against gun violence on 20th April, the 19th anniversary of the Columbine shooting.

In the early afternoon of Tuesday, January 30, the police charged and drove a group of workers away from the gates of GDN Logistics of San Cipriano Po (Pavia). They were demonstrating in front of the company's gates to ask for an end to dismissals and suspensions (therefore for reinstatement) carried out by the company against some of their colleagues for the simple fact they were "registered with Sicobas". The strike began in the early morning, and the police charge took place after more than 10 hours of blockade in which protesting workers prevented the entry of trucks to the warehouse units.

During the preparation for the 2016 referendum on the UK’s membership of the European Union (EU) we made it entirely clear (in Revolutionary Perspectives 08) that the debate was one that class-conscious workers should not have been drawn into – on either side. Participating in the exercise could only line workers up behind one or other faction of the ruling class. The stories peddled by both sides – that somehow workers would benefit from the British state either maintaining or ditching their relationship with EU institutions – were full of lies and imagined, but non-existent, benefits.

If you've ever thought that Jonathan Pie's contrived rants sounded like they could've been written by someone from a left-liberal rag obsessed with getting speaking gigs for fascists, you were right.

Despite years of unqualified failure, nation's liberal intelligentsia announces full support as US redoubles its efforts in its catastrophic "war on terror"

A critique of Sally McManus, the Australian Council of Trade Unions, and the 'Change the Rules' campaign from a communist perspective.

With our Amazon workers’ reports we hope to not provide yet another sad victim story of how Amazon turns humans into semi-robots. We leave this to the mainstream media.

The collapse of Carillion is another symptom of capitalism’s general crisis of profitability. We are told the PFI and debacle of Carillion are not the way capitalism is supposed to work. Unfortunately this is the way capitalism is supposed to work, and the way it worked under state control also. The system is supposed to transfer wealth created by the working class to those who own capital and this is precisely what has been happening with Carillion, with PFI in general and with privatisation.

Comments about a minor controversy other Karl Marx in a video game.

As 2018 opens economic optimism is breaking out amongst the capitalist class. Leaving aside the vainglorious boasts of the current President of the United States that unemployment in the US has reached lows only last seen in the post-war boom, or that the New York stock market is now at all time record highs, more serious economic commentators are arguing that after a decade of misery (at least for 99% of the planet) the signs of recovery from the 2007-8 banking collapse are now behind us. If this sounds familiar it is because we have heard the same tale so many times.

An enormous number of currencies already exist across the world (dollars, roubles, euros, yen, yuan, etc.) – most of them tightly held in the wallets of bourgeois minorities dazzled by the illusion of its self-valorisation – wherever the crisis of the production and sale of commodities rages.

On Thursday, 28th December 2017, in Mashhad the second most populous city in Iran, thousands of protesters gathered outside the city hall and chanted “Death to Rouhani”, the country’s President. Some reports have suggested that it may have been initiated by the conservative cleric Ebrahim Raisi, Rouhani's defeated rival in the May 2017 Presidential election. Later on, some others, including the senior officer of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, implicitly accused ex-President Ahmadinejad's circle being behind the recent protests. However it may have started, it quickly broke out of its intended framework and control and, in less than a week, spread to over 40 cities.

Some information on often overshadowed victims of Nazi aggression, and what their suffering tells us about the nature of totalitarianism.

Hand-wringing over the trashing of a few H&M branches in South Africa ignores the often highly militant struggles of the workers in H&M's supply chain (and others like it), themselves often women of colour and one of the most combative sections of the international working class.

We look at the recent history of migration to the UK and the current discussion about migration and wage decline, in particular within the nation state policies of Labour. We criticise the effort of trying to reconcile a largely liberal 'pro-migrant' position with Labour's national perspective and share our experiences of working and organising amongst migrant workers in west London.

This is the second in our series of translations from the review Kommunist via the French version published by the Collectif d’édition smolny (www.collectif-smolny.org) as La Revue Kommunist: Les communist de gauche contre le capitalisme d’état (The review Kommunist: Left Communists against state capitalism). Our first translation was of Radek’s article on the situation of the October Revolution in Russian in March 1918 entitled Five Months On. (See leftcom.org). This second one is also by Radek from Kommunist No. 1.

2017 will no doubt see a flood of publications to commemorate the centenary of the Russian Revolution. There will be those who insist that the October Revolution provides a model for today and still others who will argue the opposite. Neither opinion is likely to go much beyond the defence of entrenched ideological positions. The fact that the great hopes raised by the October Revolution not only failed to materialise, but ended in a monstrous Stalinist regime which turned private exploitation into state exploitation, has been one of the greatest propaganda weapons for today’s capitalist system whose own crisis grows deeper with every year that passes.

In Revolutionary Perspectives 11 (due out January 2018) we shall be printing Bukharin’s short review of Lenin’s The State and Revolution. In the meantime we are publishing here another translation from the same journal Kommunist which appeared in March 1918. Kommunist was the journal of the “proletarian communists” or left communists who opposed the signing of the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk as well as the change in direction which the revolution began to take at that time. We have already published several articles from it with our commentaries.

A look at browsing statistics and habits on libcom.org over 2017, as traffic increased and mobile browsing became significantly more important.