Blogs

There is an ever-growing stream of media commentary on the Grenfell fire, increasing daily as the public enquiry unfolds. There are some elements in the media with the goal of obscuring or excusing the plain facts as part of a pre-emptive defence manoeuvre to protect those most implicated in what caused the fire and the 72 deaths. That they feel the need to use such distortions to defend the Grenfell landlords and those who ordered and oversaw the Grenfell refurbishment that fitted the lethal cladding only increases the suggestion of a general doubt on all sides about their innocence.

The struggle can hardly prosper if it becomes isolated in Iran. The Iranian workers’ need for a useful political organization, to develop consciousness and guide struggles, is what we all need. Not in the future but now.

The leaflet below was given out by the Italian affiliate of the ICT, Il Partito Comunista Internazionalista, in the anti-racist demonstration in Rome on 10 November.

Whilst all bourgeois eyes are fixed on the G20 summit in Buenos Aires or the Ukraine-Russia conflict in the Sea of Azov the class war goes on around the planet. We have already published on the strikes currently convulsing Iran more than once and now we have received the following report and comment on a revival of strikes in Russia from a sympathiser there.

A friend of ours works in a small warehouse in west-London that organises shipments between the UK and the British Virgin Islands. Recently conveyor parts deliveries were delayed by road blockades in France, organised by people who protest against the diesel tax increase. But not only that, they were also delayed by the cumbersome sub-contractor system within the logistics chain. The chains are weak, let’s lose them! Here is his story...

Today the slogan of Bread, Jobs, Freedom, Soviet Organisation is to everyone's surprise, if not disbelief, resonating everywhere. The support of other workers, teachers, office workers has ignited hope in the hearts of millions of workers and toilers. Against the regime’s drumbeat for imperialist war, our slogan is “no war but class war”. As the class struggle intensifies, the balance of power in Iran is being questioned for the first time since 1979.

A local working class newspaper: spreading work-place and struggle reports and propagating revolution. Get involved in local distribution or set up your own papers. Comments welcome - stick it to the man!

The figures set out in the latest UN report on UK pauperisation, shocking enough in their own right, form the latest link in a chain of extremes which is the reality of global inequality, a tendency which has rocketed since the 2008 financial crash.

Showing how the famines in Ukraine and elsewhere in the USSR in the early 1930s were the result of capitalism, rather than "communism".

Reflections on the CWO/ICT Public Meeting in London (November 17 2018).

A criticism of Angela Nagle's recent essay, 'The Left Case against Open Borders'. Touches on globalism, ethics and electoralism.

This time, it is the workers of the Haft Tapeh that after several years of strikes, struggle and enduring all the hardships, arrests and beatings of their representatives, have stepped up their struggle and reorganised themselves.

We wrote this text last year, as a reading suggestion for our debate on current class struggle in the US. We thought it might still be of interest. It focusses on the 'internal dynamics' rather than US foreign (military) policy...

We wrote this report about experiences of women inside trade unions for our fellow workers of the IWW New Syndicalist:
https://newsyndicalist.org/2018/11/19/tmm3-women-the-factory-and-the-union/

9 November is an auspicious date in the German historical calendar. 80 years ago this was the anniversary of Kristallnacht (the Night of Broken Glass) when synagogues were burned and 10,000 Jewish males were marched to concentration camps. It was the first step on the road to the genocide of millions. 28 years ago it was the day that the GDR authorities announced the dismantling of the Berlin Wall. However, a century ago it was also the date when the Kaiser announced his abdication in the face of a workers’ revolution which had begun with mutinies in Kiel before spreading across Germany.

The Polish nationalism of today is a direct continuation and consequence of the nationalism which crushed the workers’ movement in years 1918-23.

Why your vote is completely irrelevant.

The 100th anniversary of the Armistice, which we are told put a stop to the first world war, happens to coincide with remembrance Sunday, or Poppy Day. So we’re in for a treat. On top of poppy-wearing – now almost de rigueur – and two minute silences in the most improbable places, there are some smashing events in store. While local volunteers polish up war memorials, craft red poppy memorabilia, there are all sorts of state-sponsored celebrations, to mark the 11th hour of the eleventh day, in November 1918 when “the guns fell silent”.

In the media workers are usually portrayed as people who don’t care about ‘the environment’ – we see mining workers defending mining jobs or car workers demonstrating to keep car plants open. We forget that working class people tend to have much less of a choice to ‘act environmentally friendly’ – we lack the financial means to buy electric cars, organic food or hemp-based underwear - and there often is not much of a choice when it comes to jobs and working class communities that have formed around them.

How the failure of the leftist Pink Tide movement lead to the right's victory in Brazil.