The internationalists

After decades of submitting to layoffs, speed ups, real wage cuts and a general reduction of the standard of living so that two wages are needed where one almost did before, workers in many regions of the planet but particularly in Europe are saying enough is enough. British workers, after their epic defeats in the 1980s have been particularly slow to recover but they have one lesson for the rest...

Behind the Misery of War - Imperialist Rivalry · The area of direct confrontation between the imperialist powers in the Middle East/Central Asia/Northern East Africa is spreading like an inkblot on wet paper. From Darfur to Daghestan, from Aden to Almaty the conflict zone is widening and intensifying. · To those who believe everything they are told, there is no connection between these conflicts...

(This article is based on the introductory talk given at the CWO Public Meeting in London on November 10th 2007) · "If the Russian Revolution were overthrown by violence on the part of the bourgeois counterrevolution, it would rise again like a phoenix; if, however, it lost its socialist character and by this disappointed the working masses, this blow would have ten times more terrible...

The following letter was received by our comrades in Italy and printed in Battaglia Comunista 10. It deals with a small but significant episode of class struggle in which the workers for once broke out of the union cage, and were thus able to put the defence of their own interests first. Their anger had built up in the long period in which they had to put up with vicious attacks on their wages...

("Web special" article for RP44 – Originally published in Prometeo 12 (2005)) · This year is the centenary of the historic American union, the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW). We can do a re-run of their history through the biography of one of their founders: William “Big Bill” Haywood (1869-1928).