As the Eurozone lurches from crisis to crisis, and governments of the member states seek to unload the burden onto the poorest in society, people have been fighting back. From the titanic struggles in Greece and Spain, to the election of Jeremy Corbyn in Britain, we have seen the rise of powerful movements across the continent. Now, this radicalisation is beginning to have an effect in Finland with a major public sector strike.

Thunderstorms and heavy downpour greeted a national walkout by Finnish workers on Friday 18th September. Nevertheless tens of thousands braved the rain to demonstrate outside Helsinki Railway Station against Government proposals to ban long-standing collective bargaining agreements. Some 300 000 workers throughout Finland stopped work in defence of hard won holidays, sick pay, unsociable hours payments and a proposed 5% pay cut.

SYRIZA won the elections yesterday, which Tsipras claims gives him a mandate to continue on the road he had already embarked on this summer, i.e. to apply the conditions dictated by the Troika. He, however, conveniently ignores the not unimportant detail that his government coalition (SYRIZA-ANEL) lost a total of 416,000 compared to the vote in January.

Statement of the Communist Tendency.

We interviewed another candidate of the Communist Tendency for the new Popular Unity Party, Angelos Irakleidis, who is standing in the Dodecanese, a group of islands in the south-east Aegean.

Greece goes to the elections on Sunday, the outcome of which will be determined by several factors, an important one being the sense of betrayal and disappointment among many of the SYRIZA voters, but there is also a process of radicalisation taking place on the left.

On Sunday, September 20, Greece goes to the elections after Tsipras resigned once he had signed up to the austerity programme demanded by the Troika. This provoked a split in his party, SYRIZA, with the left wing breaking away to from the new Popular Unity party led by Lafazanis

Originally published on 24 August 2015

In the days following Jeremy Corbyn's inspirational landslide victory in the Labour leadership election, the Tories, the right-wing press, and the Blairites within the Labour Party have stepped up their campaign of hysteria and attacks against the new Labour leader. We call on all our readers to get organised in defence of Corbyn. Hands Off Corbyn!

“The Labour Party is now a threat to our national security, our economic security and your family's security.” This was the way in which David Cameron greeted Jeremy Corbyn’s victory on twitter. None of the usual parliamentary niceties, straight onto scare-mongering. In case the message had been lost, Cameron’s tweet was followed by a video produced by Conservative Party HQ full of images of gun touting ISIS terrorists running around in tanks and jeeps waving black flags.

Mass protests are continuing in Moldova, one of the poorest countries in Europe. On 6th September, around 100,000 protesters [in a country 0f 3.5 million] took to the streets of the capital Chișinău [a town of less than 700,000 people]. Workers, civil servants, students, and pensioners have been protesting against the hike in prices and tariffs for utilities, and against corruption and poverty. The protesters, engaged in clashes with the police, are attempting to storm administrative buildings and have already set up a tent camp in the centre of the capital.

In March 2009, the Information Commissioner’s Office (a public body set up to investigate the misuse of individuals’ private information) exposed the existence of a ‘blacklist’ containing the names of 3,213 individuals, largely construction workers. The “Consulting Association”, as it was known, had operated from 1993, systematically compiling a database of workers’ personal details as well as substantive entries regarding their conduct, political affiliations and trade union activities.

Jeremy Corbyn’s stunning victory in the Labour leadership election has dealt a decisive blow to the right-wing of the party. It has exposed as false the empty Blairite rhetoric about the importance of the “middle ground” and is a denunciation of the abandonment of Labour’s socialist policies in the New Labour years.

This astonishing victory of Jeremy Corbyn becoming leader of the Labour Party represents a political earthquake of monumental proportions. It has turned the political map of Britain upside down. Hundreds of thousands of workers and youth, desperate for change, are celebrating this victory all over the country. Michael Meacher has correctly described the Corbyn campaign as “the biggest non-revolutionary upturning of the social order.”

100 days that shook Britain. That should be the name historians give to this summer’s Labour leadership campaign, if not for the fact that the next 100 days, in which Corbyn will most likely be leader of the party, will shake Britain much more still.