Solidarity 057, 2 September 2004

Adventures in Stasiland

Dan Katz reviews Stasiland by Anna Funder (Granta, £7.99) There’s a photo above our fire taken on New Year’s Eve, 1989. Me (compulsory donkey jacket) and girlfriend (long-hair, long-gone) and four pints of Guinness. We were drinking enthusiastically for the smashing of Stalinist rule across Eastern Europe. The Berlin wall had been pulled down in November 1989, Russian miners had set up workers’ councils, and then, over Xmas, the Romanian dictators, the Ceausescus, had been put up against a wall and shot. As one Romanian commentator declared: “When I saw the Ceausescus dead, I, like everybody...

Working till we drop

Pat Longman reviews Willing Slaves: How the Overwork Culture is Ruling Our Lives by Madeleine Bunting (Harper Collins, £12.99) “For about one in three of all British workers, exhaustion, stress or both have become an inescapable part of their working lives.” Madeleine Bunting argues that the weakening of the trade union movement, neo-liberalism and New-Ageist ideology have all contributed to a work environment that is increasingly unbearable. She provides facts, figures, case studies, and draws on anecdotal evidence to document how we are all working a lot, lot harder than we used to. Bunting...

North West England: Keeping the fascists at bay

By Joan Trevor It’s difficult to say whether support for the BNP, or the far right generally, has peaked. It’s certain that anti-fascists cannot be complacent. Look at these facts and figures: - 808,200 people, 4.9% of those who voted, voted for the BNP in last June’s European election. The BNP failed to have anyone elected. However, the nationalist and, in their election material and the pronouncements of Robert Kilroy-Silk, racist UK Independence Party won 16.1% of the vote and got 12 MEPs elected. The racist vote seems to have been split between the above two parties. The website of the...

Travellers and us

The following article by Jim Gibney is taken from Sinn Fein’s An Phoblacht/Republican News from 26 August. We don’t agree with very much of Sinn Fein’s politics, but on this issue — the rights of travellers — they have a good record. It comes as a shock when you think you know something about something and you suddenly realise you know very little. That’s how I felt a few weeks ago sitting in a lecture theatre in St Mary’s University on Belfast’s Falls Road. The occasion was the Royal Victoria Hospital’s annual lecture in West Belfast’s Féile an Phobal. The lecture theme was Health and...

The TUC Congress

The TUC congress opened on 3 September in 1984. There was still time to rally the working class to the miners. But months before the TUC had been manoeuvring to get themselves in as mediators between the miners and the government, so that a deal could be fixed that would end the strike. But the congress would want something better. So the leaders were forced to trim and fake. The NUM had put down an amendment calling “for industrial action involving all trade unions.” The furniture union FTAT called for a 24-hour general strike. But under pressure, these were withdrawn in favour of a...

Writing on the Wall

Robbing the rich? No way! Conrad Black’s behaviour towards the shareholders of Hollinger International has outraged his capitalist peers. The man who investigated Black’s looting of the Telegraph owners — to the tune of $400 million — is the former head of the New York Securities and Exchange Commission, Richard Breedon. For Breedon, turning a profit at the expense of the workers was fair enough. But robbing your shareholders to the extent that Black did was mind-boggling and a moral outrage. Hence Breedon’s report is laden with invective against Black and his wife Barbara Amiel’s ability to...

For freedom of the press - in Israel!

Journalist and activist Ewa Jasiewicz has been held in a detention centre in Israel since 11 August, threatened with deportation. As Solidarity goes to press (1 September), her appeal is due to be heard in Israel’s Supreme Court. Ewa was jailed immediately on arrival in Israel. According to the Israeli Embassy in Britain, the reason is “suspicion with regards to the aims of her visit… Ms Jasiewicz is an activist of the International Solidarity Movement, an organisation which has been involved in disruption to public order in the name of peace activism.” In fact, the ISM sends volunteers to...

Can socialists cheer al-Sadr?

By Clive Bradley In the end, the crisis in Najaf ended peacefully — although many died along the way — and as a huge political victory for Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani. Sistani returned to Iraq from London via Basra, and marched north — joined by perhaps a million Iraqis — to end the siege of the shrine city, demanding the withdrawal of US troops from the city and of Muqtada al-Sadr’s Mahdi Army from the Mosque of Imam Ali. It was as if Sistani — who at the beginning of the year called huge demonstrations demanding direct elections, forcing the change in US policy which resulted in the transfer...

A 'tour of duty' with the ISM

"Harry Sands" joined the International Solidarity Movement in protests in the West Bank this summer. This is part of a diary of his experience Early July My fellow ISMers on training come from an incredible selection of countries, sexes, class, ages, religions and backgrounds. One minute I was discussing the upcoming election with a 22-year-old girl from New Orleans (she says fuck Bush, but fuck Kerry too), the next minute I am talking punk rock with a 40-year-old Glaswegian Geordie who used to roadie for the Angelic Upstarts. There are no dogmatic or overly political people at all. Halfway...

No Sweat: What's On

• S W London No Sweat meets on Monday 6 September, 7.30pm at BWTUC Centre, 898 Garratt Lane, Tooting, SW17 (Tooting Broadway tube). Discussion on organising low paid and sweatshop workers in London, with speakers from T&G and GMB. • Gilberth Bermúdez Umaña, General Secretary of the Costa Rican banana workers’ trade union, SITRAP, is visiting Britain in September to engage trade union members and leadership in influencing British government and industry on labour standards in the Costa Rican banana industry. More information from Banana Link. Email: info@bananalink.org.uk. • No Sweat Steering...

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