Europe

He is the hero of the hour, the man who, if we are to believe the media, single-handedly has saved the world financial system from meltdown. When all around were panicking and in despair, here was a man who kept his head and threw billions of pounds at the banks, a veritable 21st century miracle! That man is Gordon Brown, a man who dances to the tune of the bankers and capitalists, not the workers who voted Labour into power.

Workers and youth are being radicalised in Switzerland and are seeking answers to the crisis of capitalism, but their leaders are not providing those answers. That explains the successful intervention of the Swiss Marxists in recent rallies organised by the trade unions, Young Socialists and Social Democratic Party.

Yesterday the Spanish Student Union, Sindicato de Estudiantes, called a student general strike involving school and university students. The turnout as massive, with hundreds of thousands coming out to protest against cuts in education and privatisation.

After Italy, Greece, Spain and other countries in Europe, now Germany is being hit by a wave of student protest. The same policies everywhere, cuts in spending and privatisation of the education system, are provoking the same reaction. The youth is mobilising massively, indicating that an even bigger movement of the working class is being prepared.

On 31st October–1st November the left student union (VSF) in Sweden held its 7th congress in Rågsved, south of Stockholm. The VSF has a close relationship with the Left Party and its youth organisation, the Young Left. Among other issues discussed was the idea of declaring the VSF a revolutionary socialist organisation.

Sooner or later the financial tsunami will run into the sand, but in its wake the real economy will be left in recession. The immediate crisis will have abated, but the sludge, mud, sewage and devastation lasts much longer. They're still mopping up the mud from the 2007 floods… how long will the recession last and how deep will it go?

An examination of the results of the recent vote in the different federations of the French Communist Party indicates a sharp shift to the left in the thinking of the membership since the previous congress. And the vote for the Marxists confirms this process.

PCF members have voted on which of the three alternative documents should be the base of discussion at the coming party congress in December. The document written by the comrades of La Riposte, "Renforcer le PCF, renouer avec le marxisme", obtained a resounding success which went beyond any expectations: 5419 or 15.04% of the total valid votes.

At the beginning of October the Swiss comrades of Der Funke took an important step forward in their work of spreading Marxist ideas in Switzerland by beginning the publication of their journal for the first time not only in German (Der Funke), but also in French (l`Étincelle) and in Italian (la Scintilla). These are the three main languages spoken in the overwhelming majority of the different regions of Switzerland, and this is therefore a very important step for the Swiss Marxists.

We have seen companies go under, banks on the verge of collapse, but in Iceland what we have seen is a whole country going bankrupt. Up until very recently Iceland was presented as the ideal place to live as a model for others to follow, but it was all based on mountains of growing debt.

Thousands of students took to the streets in Spain on Wednesday 22nd to protest against plans to privatise university education and also opposing any plans to make workers pay for the capitalist crisis through cuts in education, health and other public services.

Now a policy of wage restraint during a serious financial crisis is, sooner or later a finished recipe for an intensification of the class struggle in Britain. Already the strike figures for this year - before the recent financial meltdown - have outstripped last year's figures