comment and analysis

The recession is here. We're told to tighten our belts and brace ourselves for redundancies, wage and service cuts. Politicians and business leaders are united in saying we should pay for a crisis not of our making [see box for a brief history of the crisis]. A recession is simply when the economy shrinks for 6 months in a row.

Political debate often tends to quickly polarise into simple binaries. This is perhaps even more so online. Mainstream politics has its liberals/conservatives and left/right; radical politics has its anarchist/Marxist and reform/revolution.

If the government were to announce that it was cutting the wages of all workers - public and private sector - there would presumably be uproar. And yet this is exactly what they have done by calling for ‘pay restraint’ and insisting all wage rises are capped at 2%. Make no mistake, a sub-inflation pay ‘rise’ is a pay cut. No amount of statistical trickery changes this simple fact.

Eight people, including a child, were killed by police and around 100 were injured including 33 police. An apparently unrelated border fire-fight on 4/3/08 in the territory of Nagorno-Karabakh, disputed with neighbouring state of Azerbaijan with whom Armenia is still technically at war, broke a ceasefire agreed in 1994, killing 12 Armenian conscripts.

Following a heady 18 months of diverse and popular struggles up down the country, the Mexican state is using familiar tactics to reassert itself as the country’s main authority.

Some 20,000 prison officers in England and Wales took illegal unofficial action on Wednesday 29 August against Gordon Brown’s public sector wage cuts and the disastrous overcrowding in prisons.

Workers Control at Venezuela’s Sanitarios Maracay under Attack
By Megan Hise

The Doctor’s Strike and the Nurses’ Occupation

The rapidly expanding economies of some parts of Asia have not been accompanied by a uniformly greater integration into Western structures of political administration. South Asia is experiencing a crisis of its democratic institutions; leftists, islamicists and nationalists compete with ruling powers for conquest of the state and domination of workers and peasants.

Attached as a print-friendly pdf file below.

The goal of stripping power from the monarchy has been achieved - as much by last year's widespread pro-democracy street protests as by their guerilla activity (see previous coverage here). The King is no longer head of state, has no political power and has been relieved of much royal property and other assets.

A retrospective written by friends of Echanges et Mouvement. The text criticises the movement on a rather general level, e.g. of not being able to go beyond the boundaries of its student character and provides some overview of past student mobilisations in France.

Previous libcom.org coverage here.

The news that fresh forced redundancies at Norwich Union by Aviva can only have come with shocked resignation to many people in Norwich this morning, as they gained the knowledge via the media that the present culture of ‘offshoring’ jobs to India continues to wreak havoc on Norwich’s work force and call centre staff across the country.

In Nepal the showdown between a fat power-crazed king and a huge pro-democracy movement has shut down the entire country since April 6th. The strike is absolute - no driving vehicles, no work, often no shops at all. Hospitals, commercial airlines and banks are on strike.

He received a nine year sentence for each of the four counts of manslaughter, to run concurrently. However the jailing of Connell, though welcome, is perhaps not quite the victory it first seems. As the construction giant Carillion plc, who subcontracted Connell to carry out the work, and as such should take some of the blame, was never prosecuted.

When analysing the state of the working class, it is up to those looking at it to observe and evaluate the tendencies working within it. By this we don’t mean, “how many people have joined the Marxist-Leninist Workers’ League?” or “how many people self-identify as anarchists?” but something a little more subtle than that.

French group Alternative Libertaire stated:

The recent movement in France against the CPE have been a massive inspiration to militant workers the world over.

So Chirac's withdrawn the CPE?