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.

On the morning of June 13, two oil tankers were attacked in the Gulf of Oman. One was the Front Altair, owned by the Norwegian company Frontline, but flying the flag of the Marshall Islands. It was carrying a cargo of ethanol from Qatar to Taiwan. The second was the Kokuka Courageous of the Japanese company, Kokuka Sangyo, flying the Panamanian flag which was carrying methanol from Saudi Arabia to Singapore.

For those who think that the political and economic incompetence of our rulers is confined to the Anglo-Saxon states the following article from our Italian comrades, written just before the European elections, only underlines the same sorry story for Italian capitalism.

A review of Mitchell Abidor's translated abridgment of the Anarchist Encyclopedia, an immense, collaborative work produced largely by the French 'grand old man' Sébastien Faure. Abidor's contribution is valuable, but leaves us wanting more.

A review of Jim Jarmusch's anti-zombie film. This review contains many spoilers so you may want to see the movie before reading this.

Freedom Press published a selection of essays by 1910s anarchist activist George Barrett, Our Masters Are Helpless, at the start of this month. Below is an edited and slightly expanded text of the launch event talk.

the first in a series critically analyzing "socialist leaders", dealing with Che Guevara

On 8 May 2019 around 300 protesters, mostly Uber and Lyft drivers, blocked Market Street in San Francisco in front of Uber's international headquarters as part of a global strike by drivers timed to coincide with Uber's IPO. This brief analysis attempts to situate these struggles against working class decomposition, with its roots in neoliberal deregulation, and the rise of so-called "gig economy" work.

On Thursday 30 May construction workers at the Tees Renewable Energy Plant, owned by MGT Power, walked out in a wildcat action over safety conditions at the site. When workers act on their own class terrain they begin to challenge the capitalist structure as a whole.

We want to present a pamphlet written by comrades of ours about class struggle and the social democratic government under Allende in Chile in 1973. Chile is one of many examples in history that shows us that the relation between working class movements and left governments is more complicated than the mechanistic picture of force (movement) and container/stabiliser (government) often painted by current democratic socialists.

A rebuttal to the argument "communism killed x amount of people"

Looking at one of the less orthodox ways of marking the 200th anniversary of the death of Karl Marx.

Whether this situation of neither war nor negotiation, or ‘a bit of war, a bit of truce’ is going to last for a long time or will be temporary, one thing is certain. Neither Trump nor Khamenei, despite their desires and intentions, will ever be able to bypass the impasse that the present crisis is creating.

The crisis in the capitalist party political system has become even more acute during May. Two sets of election results have shown that the Labour v Conservative Punch and Judy show has, at least for the time being, lost its ability to call all the shots.

The struggle against fascism begins with the struggle against toxic masculinity

The victory of the ANC in the South African election has yet again shown it is the capitalists’ chosen party for running South African capitalism. Its primary role is organising and enforcing the exploitation of the working class even when this means downing strikes in bloodshed as we saw at Marikana in 2012 (see leftcom.org).

As a follow up to our recent article about Solidarność (see: leftcom.org) we are republishing three of the leaflets that the CWO and Battaglia Comunista distributed in 1980-1 among workers in Britain, Italy, France, and the USA on the events unfolding in Poland.

Political and economic crises led to the dissolution of the Eastern Bloc. The downturn in the post-war accumulation cycle, the Cold War, the USSR’s disastrous intervention in Afghanistan, as well as the popular revolts in Central and Eastern Europe all played a role. But it is the class struggles of 1980s Poland to which we turn our eye here.

2019 marks the 20th anniversary of the National Minimum Wage.