Greece is key to the fate of Europe. Despite being a small nation state and accounting for a mere 2% of the region’s GDP, its dire economic crisis and turbulent political situation threaten to destroy the foundations of the European Union (EU). After four years of declining output the IMF predicts further recession in Greece and no growth at best next year. This year Ireland and Spain will join Greece in recession. Indeed, the whole of the Eurozone barely grew in the first quarter of

Every trade unionist in London should really get down to the Tower Hamlets college picket lines. The atmosphere is great, the strikers are in good spirits and the strike very strong. The strike itself is an example of the kind of action we need to resist job losses and attacks on services – something that will be happening a lot in the near future. The highlight of my visit to the picket line was when a postie drove up to deliver mail to the college.

The brutal invasion of Gaza by Israel’s armed forces and the rise of the far right in the Israeli elections that followed has appalled people all over the world. It has also hammered a further nail in the coffin of the idea that a Palestinian state can live in peace alongside the Zionist state. Keith Harvey strips away the last shreds of credibility from the “two-state solution”… Israel is a state based on ethnic cleansing. The foundation of the state in 1948 was prepared by

An attempt to hold Cuba’s first Gay Pride March at the end of June was quickly ended when police arrested the organisers and banned the march writes Stuart King. The march was organised by the Foundation LGTB Reinaldo Arenas in Memoriam and supported by the Unity Coalition a Latino/Hispanic gay rights group in Florida. Cuba’s LGBT (Lesbian, Gay, Bi-sexual and Transsexual) community had been encouraged to think that things were changing in Cuba, a country where homophobia and police repression of the LGBT community is

Mark Hoskisson reviews Workers and Revolution in Iran, by Assef Bayat (Zed Books, London 1987, 227pp, £7.95) The Iranian revolution of 1978/79 has been the subject of numerous studies over the past few years. Nearly all of them have concentrated on the role of the Islamic fundamentalists led by the Ayatollah Khomeini. This is hardly surprising. Khomeini was, after all, the victor in the revolution and in the power struggles that that followed it. Shi’ite Islam seemed to be the only force worth considering as

In the first thirty years after World War II, the United States economy performed remarkably well. The rate of growth averaged 4-5% a year, the rate of unemployment was seldom above 5%, inflation was almost non-existent (1-2% a year), and the living standards of workers improved substantially (the average real wage, or the purchasing power of wages, roughly doubled over this period). This was the “golden age” of US capitalism. However, this “golden age” ended in the 1970s. Since then, the rate of growth has

IN THE MANY probes, investigations, and background pieces printed in the bourgeois and social democratic press preparatory to the witch hunt endless references have been made to entrism (or entryism). The claim that it was developed by Trotsky with regard to the French Socialist Party in the 1930s is repeated with the unchallenged assumption that all the grou­pings inside today’s labour Party that claim some adherence to ‘Trotskyism’ are thereby carrying out Trotsky’s tactic. There is, in fact, nothing specifically or distinctly Trotskyist about the