Strikes are rapidly spreading beyond of the maquiladoras in Matamoros, Tamaulipas as workers are demanding better pay and working conditions. Workers at more than 27 non-maquiladora businesses walked off the job yesterday alone. As noted previously, this strike action represents the real threat to the bourgeoisie who fear it will spread not only to other border state maquiladoras but across the country.Over the last several weeks workers at 48 maquiladoras in Matamoros, many making as little $1 US and hour, had walked off the job demanding a 20% wage increase and a 30,000-peso bonus. A paltry demand for impoverished workers virtually enslaved in oppressive working conditions with the lowest wages in the Western World. With this new spread of strike action yesterday, workers are referring to their growing “movement” as Movimiento 20/30 to reflect the previous demands of the maquiladora workers.But behind the immediate demand for higher wages is a growing protest directed against the union taskmasters who work at the behest of the boss. mcclatchydc.com At Blanquita, a water purification company, 170 workers walked off the job as they denounced not only exploitation of their employer but the indifference of the union to their cause as well.
In evidence
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Dorking Public Meeting
NO WAR BUT THE CLASS WAR
PUBLIC MEETING/DISCUSSION
As capitalism’s economic crisis deepens our rulers are determined to make the working class pay for it by increasing exploitation and reducing wages and living conditions.
All across the world, the capitalists and their political puppets are also trying to prevent any united working class fightback by widening divisions in the working class, such as nationality, race, ethnicity, religion, gender and sexual preference. The xenophobia whipped up before and after the Brexit campaign, the Trump election campaign and the election campaigns of nationalist governments in Hungary and Poland are a few recent examples of what is happening and what is to come.
At the same time national states are trying to push the crisis onto capitalists of other states or blocs of states by trade wars. And history tells us that trade wars are the prelude to shooting wars. While imperialist proxy wars continue to rage in the Middle East, Africa and Eastern Europe, and while a new conflict with Iran is being stoked up, increasingly intense global conflicts are being prepared.
Nationalism is the main tool being used to recruit workers to support their rulers in these wars. No faction of the capitalist class is worth supporting and none is “a lesser evil”! The alternative is not to do nothing. There are already voices being raised under the banner of “No war but the class war!” to challenge the fate that the capitalists are preparing for us.
Join them in a public meeting to find out more and make your own contribution:
When: 26 January 2019 at 1300hrs
Where: The Lincoln Arms, Station Approach, Dorking RH4 1TF
Hosted by: Communist Workers' Organisation & Anarchist Communist Group
London CWO Meeting
Lessons of the German Revolution
Public Meeting/Discussion organised by the Communist Workers’ Organisation
On November 9 1918 the soldiers, sailors and workers of Kiel and Wilhelmshaven rose in revolt at the continuation of a war which had brought nothing but death, disease and food shortages. Within hours the Kaiser was overthrown and workers’ councils sprang up all over Germany in imitation of those that had taken power in Russia only a year earlier.
For communists at the time it offered the hope of a further step in the world proletarian revolution. That hope even survived the crushing of the Spartakist Revolt and the murder of Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg in January 1919. The revolutionary resistance of the working class carried on for some years but in the end the German state was not overthrown. The meeting will explore the failure of the German revolution, the consequences for the world working class then and the lessons for current revolutionaries.
A comrade of the Gruppe Internationaler SozialistInnen will be making a presentation alongside the CWO.
Time: 17 November, 2.30pm
Place: Calthorpe Arms, 252 Grays Inn Rd, London WC1X 8JR
Bordiga Beyond the Myth is now available as a PDF
Bordiga Beyond the Myth by Onorato Damen is now available in English translation (it already exists in Italian, French and Spanish). It contains 168 pages and includes 114 footnotes to guide English readers plus 4 appendices, one of which is the first full translation in English of Bordiga's famous letter to Karl Korsch. The price of £7.25 includes postage and packaging in the UK.
It is also now available as a pdf:
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Brief news
At least 70,000 workers from 45 factories—including tens of thousands of auto parts and assembly workers at companies that supply GM, Ford and Fiat-Chrysler—have launched a wildcat strike in the US-Mexico border town of Matamoros.
The strike is a rebellion against both the “maquiladora” manufacturing corporations and the pro-company trade unions. Over 1 million workers endure low wages and sweatshop conditions at the 3,000 “maquiladora” factories that line the Mexican side of the border and account for 65 percent of Mexican exports. It looks like it has the potential to escalate.
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- 1.19
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