Solidarity 141, 30 October 2008

Fund drive for £18,000: Help support the fight for Workers' Liberty!

The financial crisis which is rocking the capitalist system and destroying the ideas that have sustained the capitalists during the latest phase of globalisation is opening up new possibilities to explain unfalsified Marxism to a wider audience. The Alliance for Workers’ Liberty, through our paper Solidarity, has a unique voice on the British left. On key domestic and international political questions we advocate a clear working-class perspective. We produce a paper to provide a working-class antidote to the lies, poison, tittle-tattle and trivia which is the daily diet provided by the...

As New Labour cuts grants and student numbers, Irish students show how to fight back. Fight for a national student demo!

On Wednesday 29 October, the Government confirmed to the Guardian that it plans to slash eligibility for student grants, and cut student numbers by up to 10,000. For the details, see the Guardian article here . Higher education minister Jim Denham denies that this has anything to do with the economic crisis, but it is a clear indication of how New Labour plans to cut back as things get tight. Its shows how we need to take social wealth out of the hands of the bankers and capitalists so it can be used for social need. That goal is a long way off; but we begin now by fiercely resisting every cut...

Obama elected: now "everything depends on workers getting organised to fight back from below"

Kim Moody, an American socialist activist living in London who was formerly the director of the US rank-and-file labour movement publication Labor Notes ( www.labornotes.org ), spoke to Sacha Ismail What do you think will happen in the election? It's hard to tell. Obama has spent astronomical amounts of money, not just from the small donors he likes to talk about, but from the traditional corporate sources too. However, a factor that could well be decisive is racism. The economy is crucial, as any news outlet will tell you, but it's also very visible that unfortunately many white working-class...

Five notes on the economic crisis

Inflation likely to rise again Almost all the press says that price inflation will slow down. Prices for basic raw materials - oil, metals, wheat - have already fallen, and in the coming months that will work through to finished-goods prices. This online version is longer than the version in the printed paper But meanwhile the governments and central banks are doing exactly what they have long said is certain to increase inflation - pumping masses of cash and credit into the economy. It is not always true that more money-production by central banks means more inflation. But there is a...

Who is to blame for the crisis? Just financiers, or capitalism more generally?

In a poll published by the Financial Times on 19 October, 80% of people across the European Union blamed the banks for the current economic crisis. This is a longer version of this article than appears in the printed paper In the UK, over 50% of people responding to the poll said that the crisis was due to "abuses of capitalism", and a bit over 10% that it was due to a failure of capitalism itself. There is some plausibility in such views. After all, this crisis originated within the financial system at a time when non-financial trade and production was doing well in capitalist terms. Profit...

Left debates the credit crisis

Conway Hall, in London, was pretty full - over 200 people - for a meeting on 21 October on "Marx and the Credit Crunch". The content was, however, disappointing. The meeting was organised by Andrew Burgin's "Public Reading Rooms" group, with a platform of three: the writer Istvan Meszaros, the SWP's Chris Harman, and Richard Brenner of Workers' Power. Brenner's speech was particularly formulaic, composed almost entirely of generalities equally applicable (or inapplicable) to any economic disturbance at any time in the history of capitalism. The crisis arose, said Brenner, from the Tendency of...

From the French revolution to Gate Gourmet: black radicals in British history

Written and published for Black History Month William Davidson and the Cato Street conspiracy Terrified by the radical phase of the French revolution in 1792-5, the British ruling class intensified its repression against radicals and working-class organisations above all. The Combination Acts of 1799 banned trade unions, making it much more difficult for workers to organise against the dire social conditions produced by Britain's industrial revolution. This anti-working class terror persisted for decades. In 1819, the British state killed eleven and injured hundreds of unarmed protestors for...

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