Europe

Today Trades Councils in Britain have been consciously relegated to the sidelines by the trade union bureaucracy, but in this article, written at the time of the struggle against the Heath government's ill-fated Industrial Relations Act [1971] Dudley Edwards outlined the history of the trades councils in Britain and pointed to their potentially vital role.

For ten years Gordon Brown has been mouthing the phrase "no return to boom and bust". Now we see it is meaningless, as the British economy slides into recession, possibly the worst for decades.

On July 10, to coincide with the start of the trial of the neo-nazi Óscar Colino Damián, the Gasteiz Antifascist Platform organised a demonstration at 11am in front of the court. The demonstration which attracted more than 40 workers and young people was organised by the Gasteiz Antifascist Platform with the participation of various trade unions, associations, left parties, student unions and left and progressive collectives.

The grand coalition in Austria has fallen apart, the two main parties of Austria, the Social Democrats and the Conservatives came under the opposing pressures of the bosses and the working class. In the ranks of the labour movement a militant mood is developing. The long established relative social peace is at an end as the Austrian workers prepare to join their brothers and sisters across Europe in a fightback against the bosses onslaught.

Since the beginning of this year Belgium has witnessed a wave of wildcat strikes reminiscent of the 1970s. The movement has spread spontaneously from one sector to another. Significantly it has rekindled class unity across the language divide at the same time as the bourgeois attempt to divide the working class along national lines.

The British National Health Service was set up sixty years ago, officially on July 5th 1948. It was the result of years of struggle on the part of the working class for a free universal health service. At its height it was as close as you could get to a communist principle under capitalism. Over the years the capitalists have been working hard to drag us back to the dark days when the poor could not afford decent healthcare.

Pressures have been building up in British society. High house prices, fuel and food price increases and pay restraint and cuts particularly in the public sector are all having a huge effect on workers. It's obvious that there's going to be a change and the longer it is delayed the worse the storm is when it eventually breaks.

This article was originally published in 1971 in the Militant International Reviewunder the title Marxism and the Pilkington Strike – A lesson from history. The Pilkington glassworks had entered into dispute and had come up against the problem of the stifling control of the bureaucracy over their union, the GMWU. The Socialist Worker advised the workers to leave and set up a new union. The Marxist tendency, gathered around the Militant, advised against this and events later confirmed the correctness of this position.

British capitalism is in big trouble. The official annual inflation rate has hit 3.3%, its highest level for 16 years. The governor of the Bank of England, Mervyn King, has been forced to send a letter to the Chancellor of Exchequer, Alastair Darling, to explain why the Bank has been unable to keep inflation from rising at more than 2%, which is the target set by the government for the Bank.

Since the collapse of Stalinism in Eastern Europe the whole region has become a field of investment for western capital. Austria has invested big time in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE). Now however all the contradictions are mounting up and from a source of stability the region could become a source of instability. Here we provide a brief comment on the economic situation of the CEE region.

In spite of all the main parties, big business, the media and even most of the trade union leaders campaigning for a "yes" vote in yesterday's referendum on the Lisbon Treaty, the "No" won the day. This was a slap in the face for the Irish government and the European Union bosses.

Ireland, after a long period of economic boom, is now feeling the effects of the worldwide slowdown. Some have made big money, but at the other end of the social spectrum there are many who have lost out. Now is the time to raise the banner of genuine socialism within the Republican movement and the working class as a whole.

The political landscape in Britain is changing before our very eyes. This morning’s prominent TV news is of the tanker drivers’ strike, showing scenes of pickets with Red Flags turning away lorries at Shell refineries. The next item is the deepening government crisis, followed by a warning from Gazprom that oil prices could reach $250 a barrel. It was like a typical news bulletin of the 1970s.

In any historical period, the dominant ideas are those of the ruling class. In 1989 the world was treated to the words of Francis Fukuyama, who published an essay with the title 'The end of history?' His argument was not that historical events had literally stopped happening but that the collapse of so-called 'communism' in the Soviet union meant that western liberal democracy had successfully established itself as the ultimate and ideal form of government. Marxism lay totally discredited he declared, gloatingly.

This is a two-part article looking at the decline in the quality of life for working people in Britain today. The first article focuses on the workplace, where there has been relative decline in wages and deterioration in the conditions of employment. The second part looks at the attack on the 'social wage'. Real wages, i.e. purchasing power has been declining and the overall infrastructure of what once was an advanced welfare state, has been crumbling.