Solidarity 108, 15 March 2007

Linking the union to the everyday

By Sofie Buckland, NUS National Executive (personal capacity) To most of its 5,200,000 paper members, the National Union of Students’ annual conference, which takes place on 27-29 March means nothing. Most will not even know that it is taking place. It means even less to ordinary NUS members than, say, Unison’s conference does to its rank-and-file members. Decades of political mis-leadership and anti-democratic structural reform have led to a huge crisis of disengagement between NUS’s structures and the political activity — let alone the actual day-to-day struggles — of its membership. For...

SWP students say anti-semitism targets... Muslims!

By Sacha Ismail At the 11 March compositing meeting for this year’s NUS conference, the session to decide motions for the Students Rights and Welfare debate featured a very strange discussion about anti-semitism. Part of this discussion focused on whether NUS should support the European Union Monitoring Centre’s definition of anti-semitism. But in addition, the SWP were pushing motions claiming that anti-semitism doesn’t just affect Jews, but Muslims too. Yes, you read that right. The student unions of Manchester University and SOAS, both of them run by Respect Students, with SWP presidents...

Living Wage victory

By Heather Shaw The Director of the London School of Economics, Howard Davies, has announced a “significant increase in wages” amongst poorly paid staff at the college. This shift in policy comes after pressure from Living Wage campaigners. The daily maintenance of the LSE is carried out by 150 contracted-out ancillary workers who scrape by on poverty pay. Although the exact details of their wage increases are unclear, and will be phased in over time, the deal is a partial victory for the LSE Living Wage campaigners — students and academics — who have doggedly insisted that the scandal of...

Oaxaca movement revives

By Nancy Davies Students involved in the SAS week of action in February, which highlighted the struggles of Mexican workers in Oaxaca, will be interested to hear that the movement has begun to revive. On 21 February, Section 22 of the National Education Workers Union (SNTE) took over the government offices in the city of Oaxaca, along with thirty-two other offices statewide. The Popular Assembly of the Peoples of Oaxaca (APPO) movement has regrouped. The former secretary of Section 22 of SNTE, Enrique Rueda Pacheco, who is regarded as a sell-out, has been removed and no longer has a major...

Fascism, futurism and flight

Steve Cohen begins an occasional series of appreciations of forgotten political novels, beginning with The Aerodrome by Rex Warner, published in 1942. The unholy trinity of fascism, futurism and flight was a central cultural and technological motif of the first half of the twentieth century – the years that spanned from the Wright Brothers to the Spitfire. The glorification of speed, flight and destruction was a pivotal theme of futurist art — as typified by Tullio Cravi’s 1939 Nose Dive On The City. The political and human consequences of this unholy trinity is most famously seen in Pablo...

Levelling-up is possible

All class-divided societies have inequality in education. Britain is not unique in that. What is unusual in Britain is the frenzy of the “postcode lottery” for favoured schools, now supplemented in Brighton by a literal lottery. What makes the “postcode lottery”, or literal lottery, so frenzied in Britain is not just the inevitable inequalities of class society, but specific things, including the school league tables (which tend to be self-reinforcing, pushing “up” schools high in the tables and “down” schools low in them); the virtual absence of publicly-funded nursery education; and the...

Case for a no vote

The question on Jim Denham’s voting paper, and on mine, in the recent TGWU-Amicus ballot, was “do you approve the Instrument of Amalgamation?”, not “are you, in general, in favour of a merger of TGWU and Amicus?” I favoured voting no because I do not approve the Instrument of Amalgamation. Jim does not approve the Instrument, either. He believes that “the creation of a rank-and-file controlled accountable industrial structure must be our central task”. The scheme outlined by the Instrument of Amalgamation is anything but. So, if anyone is taking a paradoxical, contrary-to-common-sense view...

Tony, Why Don't You Back John McDonnell? An open letter to Tony Woodley

To Tony Woodley, Joint General Secretary of TGWU-AMICUS Dear Bro Woodley, "Should [Labour] party policy be put into practice by [Labour] government, and if not, why not?", you asked in your article in the Guardian on 5 March . "For example, it is Labour’s policy to return the railways to public ownership... The party conference has repeatedly voted for limits on the use of the private finance initiative... "Labour delegates voted for a radical reform of employment law... Labour has voted for equal funding treatment for council housing". As you well know, the Blair-Brown government does just...

How militancy was sapped from below

Tom Unterrainer reviews “Ramparts of Resistance: Why workers lost their power and how to get it back” by Sheila Cohen “…But when it is a question of making a precise study of strikes, combinations and other forms in which the proletarians carry out before our eyes their organisation as a class, some are seized with real fear and others display a transcendental disdain.” Karl Marx, The Poverty of Philosophy Sheila Cohen begins her study of the rise and fall of “working class power” by invoking Marx’s insistence that socialists should not fear or be disdainful of a full and honest assessment of...

Alone with our day

The great Spanish revolution of 1936-7, tragically betrayed and defeated, has gone down in history as “the Spanish Civil War” (1936-9). Civil war it surely was, but that designation, civil war, embodies the politics and the slant on history of those who crushed the workers’ revolution in Catalonia and elsewhere. It was buried in life by Stalin’s political police and its collaborators in Spain; it is “buried” in history under a grave stone mislabeled “the Spanish Civil War”. This was one of the most important working class revolutions since October 1917 in Russia. (See Workers’ Liberty pamphlet...

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