Youth

To say it shortly ! 1)The attack by French Prime Minister De Villepin on the CPE (First Job Contract) is not only an attack on the youth, it is completed by the CNE (New Job Contract for all workers in the companies under 20 wage-workers ). When De Villepin issued the CNE last summer, the top officials of trade unions said nothing or nothing loud and didn’t nothing to mobilise. But it must be clear that the stake of the dispute is something like the issue of the miners’ strike in Britain in 1984-85. Either the right government and the bosses inflict a big and historical defeat to French...

The Edukators are Jan (Daniel Bruhl) and Peter (Stipe Erceg), anti-capitalists with their own ideas for how to build for socialist revolution. With the handy skill of being able to disarm an alarm, they break in to rich people’s houses, go in, and rearrange the furniture. They leave them with the unnerving message “Your days of plenty are numbered”. Directed by Hans Weingartner, his second feature since 2001’s The White Noise, he explains in an interview that, this generation no longer “know how to fight against the system”. His offering to this conundrum has received him nomination for the...

Peter Tatchell is a human rights activist who is a member of the Green Party and the gay rights group OutRage! He is particularly well-known for his criticism of homophobic reggae artists and the dictatorship of Robert Mugabe, who he has twice tried to Citizen's Arrest. ON GETTING INVOLVED: **What was it that first made you decide to become politically active? My first campaign involved opposition to the death penalty in my home city of Melbourne, Australia. It was in 1965, I was aged 13 and I read a newspaper report about a prisoner who had escaped from prison and allegedly shot a warder dead...

The Green Party has really increased its profile in recent years, particularly among Britain's youth. This has led to a progression in the number of Greens and environmentalists at all sorts of demos, and they've managed to make their anti-war sentiment well known. Beyond this, their stances on issues such as gay and lesbian rights, top-up fees and multinationals have meant that they've been able to attract a number of young people, disaffected by the mainstream parties, looking for a group which can voice their anger at the problems in our society. The fact that the traditional Left, most...

In the Queen’s Speech, the grey-haired racist billionaire announced, on behalf of Blair’s government, that the society constructed in Labour’s third term would be based on “respect.” No, not the dodgy communalist lash-up that managed to get some self-obsessed demagogue elected in East London (see elsewhere on this website), but that fluffy universal value that everyone from Ali G to Tony himself are advocates and exponents of. And what’s the way to get to a society based on “respect,” folks? Is it, perhaps, to attack capitalism – the socio-economic system that pits human against human in a...

Josh Robinson reviews “Bullet Boy” “Bullet Boy” traces the path of Ricky Gordon (rapper Ashley Walters of So Solid Crew) from the day of his release from a young offenders’ institution back into daily life in his Hackney council estate. The film follows his attempt to escape the pointless spiral of violence and retaliation, and the gradual but perhaps avoidable involvement in this cycle of his 12-year-old brother, Curtis (Luke Fraser). The film’s violence is shocking because it is so closely connected to the most inane details of everyday life. There is no gang-culture, no drug-dealing, no...