Barricade

The World Cup and class struggle

Even for those of us who love sport, the saccharine liberal puff that accompanies any major sporting event can be a little nauseating. Once you realise that it’s not an insufficient quantity of football in the world that causes poverty, racism etc, and that these things cannot be magicked away by the unifying power of the beautiful game, you begin to begin to find things like FIFA’s “Win With Africa” campaign very tiresome: “The goal is to reach beyond football… FIFA hopes… to ensure the entire African continent will benefit from the long-term effects of the 2010 FIFA World Cup South Africa TM...

Nothing to lose but our chains

It's pretty common to be told that class “doesn't exist any more”, that “we're all middle-class now” or that the class struggle is “over.” When workers are on the back foot and our organisations are weak, it's sometimes easy to believe that stuff is true. But when you can't open a newspaper without reading some screaming denunciation of “mindless militants” causing “chaos” for daring to strike, and when bosses go to the courts to get pretty much any big strike declared illegal (and somehow the court always sides with the boss), you realise that class definitely still exists. Recently, high...

Sylvia Pankurst

In History at school, we are often given very distinctive impressions of the women’s suffrage movement – that there were two main groups, with two very different methods of gaining the women’s vote: Millicent Fawcett founded the NUWSS (National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies), a non-violent organisation which called itself ‘suffragist’. And then, of course, the Pankhursts formed the Women’s Social and Political Union. It was these “suffragettes” who were renowned for extreme behaviour – arson attacks, hunger strikes, window-smashing, and the most famous incident in which a young woman...

What is socialist-feminism?

Feminism, in the popular understanding, is for very angry women with hairy legs, who feel hard done by because they are female, and don’t feel that even now, in the twenty-first century, society treats them as equals. Broadly speaking, they are lesbians who hate men, and think the world would be better if it were ruled by women. Since the 1990s, another idea of feminism has emerged: the feminism of micro-skirts and high heels, pneumatic busts, and cringe-worthy slogans like “girl power”. According to this new ‘feminism’, the path to women’s liberation is through using manipulative, feminine...

Lads' mags

To write this article, I decided to go and buy some lads’ mags; they’ve become a byword for sexism and I wanted to see for myself quite how bad they are. I wasn’t disappointed — both the notoriously crude cheaper weeklies like Nuts and Zoo, and the glossier monthly “lifestyle” magazines like FHM and Loaded are plastered from with representations of women that could have walked out of a Carry On film. We’re all either the butt of sexist jokes or reduced to a perfect tanned and toned figure. And it’s not just the pictures; Zoo magazine has caught media attention with competitions to win your...

Greek workers fight recession - bosses around Europe shit themselves.

Over recent months, millions of workers in Greece have come out on strike again and again against attacks on their jobs, public services and pensions. Greek trade unions, under pressure from their members and from organised networks of rank-and-file workplace activists, have called three general strikes, and it is likely that more will follow. The general strikes have brought Greece's economy to a halt and have been accompanied by massive unrest in the streets, as angry workers and youth battle police. Where has all this come from? The Greek government is out of money. In the years before the...

Fight the Tory cuts!

Our public services are under attack. The Tory-Lib Dem coalition government wants to radically slash public spending. That means cutting hundreds of thousands of jobs - sacking nurses, teachers, street cleaners, train drivers, civil servants - anyone who works for a public service is in the firing line. All sorts of services, from nurseries to care for the elderly, are under threat of closure. Millions of working-class people will be hurt by these cuts. Young people will be amongst the worst hit. Our schools may become 'academies', meaning more corporate/business involvement in the classroom...

First Issue of Barricade, September 2010

Download the first issue of barricade here. Print off a few to distribute at your school, college or work, and think about writing for barricade ... and ask your friends to do the same! Welcome to barricade , a new socialist zine for young people produced by members, supporters and friends of Workers' Liberty, a revolutionary socialist organisation active in working-class struggle in the UK. barricade is a space where young people can learn about socialist ideas and the history of working-class struggle, but this isn't a political theory textbook or a history book. It's a place where young...

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