Solidarity 282, 17 April 2013

Janine Booth is a member of the Rail, Maritime and Transport (RMT) union Executive and Workers’ Liberty. She has written and performed poetry for many years. She wrote this piece in response to the death of Margaret Thatcher. Respect for the dead Today I mourn the passing of those who deserve our tears The many many victims of Margaret Thatcher’s years The teenage generation, hopes destroyed without a care Like jobless Sean and Raffy*, who ended lives filled with despair Derelict inner cities where hopelessness was rife Miners who lost their jobs, their communities and some their life The...

Robert Ford is a visual artist based in London. He is currently working producing an illustrated edition of Karl Marx’s Capital. He spoke to Daniel Randall from Solidarity about the project. Around eighteen months ago, I was attending some Capital reading groups, including one run by Workers’ Liberty. I was also watching David Harvey’s lectures. It seemed to me that many people, including many people around the Marxist left, didn’t have any engagement with Capital or grasp of its key concepts. So I wanted to undertake an original project that would make people more interested in the book and...

Bruce Robinson reviews Campaigning Online and Winning: How Labour Start’s ActNOW campaigns are making unions stronger by Eric Lee and Edd Mustill. Working-class solidarity follows capitalist globalisation to respond to attacks on workers’ rights wherever and whenever they occur. “The international nature of the global economy is often seen as being bad for workers and of course it often is. But it is also potentially a source of great strength for us. When we enter into a struggle we have allies all over the world”, Lee and Mustill comment. As electronic communication has become accessible...

Thanks to the donations of comrades and supporters, the AWL office will be taking delivery of a new top-of-the-range digital duplicator in the next two weeks. That means we’ll be able to increase production of our workplace bulletins and other leaflets, making sure our members have printed literature as well as online material to read with contacts. There are other ongoing projects and initiatives for which we need financial support. In the last year, we’ve widened our network of international contacts – we need funds to pay for travel to bring them to the UK and to send AWL comrades to visit...

What we hold against Margaret Thatcher is not that she was “divisive”. We, revolutionary socialists, are “divisive” too — only we want to rally the worse-off to defeat the rich, while Thatcher rallied the rich to defeat the worse-off. In a recent opinion poll, a clear majority (60%) thought that the taxpayer should not cover the cost of Thatcher’s funeral, and an equally clear majority, 59% to 18%, thought “Thatcher was the most divisive Prime Minister this country has had that I can remember”. The thing Thatcher is most remembered for, according to the poll, is “curbing the power of trade...

In an online article the Socialist Party’s Hannah Sell tries to convince activists not to sign the statement initiated by Unison activists Marsha-Jane Thompson and Cath Elliot ( “Our movement must be a safe place for women” ). “Safe Place for Women” is an unarguable appeal to the left and labour movement to stand in solidarity with women who are victims of male violence, especially when an incident takes place within our own movement. Sell cannot directly contradict that sentiment so she takes the line “context is everything”. She says the statement will be used by the right-wing in the labour...

Egyptian railway workers have forced the state to back down from a plan to conscript 97 striking railway workers into the army. The plan was the Egyptian government’s latest attempt to break a drivers’ strike that began on Sunday 7 April. It is the country’s first nationwide railways strike since 1986. Workers are demanding pay increases and more time off. Train driver Ashraf Momtaz said: “The Morsi administration’s targeting of strikers has proven to be much worse and more oppressive than the actions of the Mubarak regime”. 97 strikers were summoned to a Cairo barracks on Monday 8 April and...

Four hundred fast food workers in New York struck and demonstrated on 4 April to demand a $15/hour minimum wage. The strike involved workers at McDonalds, KFC, Burger King, Domino’s Pizza, and other multinational fast food chains. Naquasia Legrand, a KFC worker, said low pay in the fast food industry forced workers to make impossible choices: “You have to decide whether to feed your family or get a Metrocard so you can go to work. Or you have to choose between paying your rent or feeding your child”. The strike was part of the Fast Food Forward (FFW) campaign, an initiative of the Service...

The narrow victory of Nicolás Maduro in the Venezuelan presidential election on 14 April should trigger serious reflection on the left about the limits of chavismo without Chávez. Maduro won by 1.6% of the vote against right-wing neoliberal opposition candidate Henrique Capriles, with 50.7% compared to his opponent’s 49.1%. Pro-chavista apologists such as the Venezuela Solidarity Campaign were saying only days before the election that Maduro had a double digit lead over Capriles. Turnout was still high at 78%. There can be few excuses. Hugo Chávez defeated Capriles 55%-44% last October and his...

Prominent English Defence League spokesperson Stephen Lennon (also known as Tommy Robinson) has publicly backed Ukip, calling on other “nationalist” parties not to stand against them. Lennon/Robinson cited the party’s platform on Europe and “Islam” as points of agreement with the EDL’s own approach. The EDL’s last attempt to intervene in official politics was an alliance with the far-right British Freedom Party, which was deregistered in December 2012 after failing to submit its accounts to the Electoral Commission. Ukip has distanced itself from the EDL, affirming that party members found to...