The continuing crisis in Pakistan

by Theo Russell

Based on a talk by Taimur Rahman at a New Worker public meeting on 3rd April 2008.

PAKISTAN is the seventh largest country in the world, has the fifth largest army, and five national and ethnic groups.
There are many national and class contradictions within the state as well as contradictions with imperialism.
Almost two thirds of adults (64 per cent of the total population and 77 per cent of female adults) are illiterate; 28 per cent of the population lives below the poverty line; 45 per cent have no access to health services; 50 per cent have no clean water and 40 per cent of children under five are malnourished.
The British conquered Bengal in 1757 and it took another 100 years before the Punjab was occupied in 1858. The War of Independence in 1857 was defeated largely by Punjabi troops, and the Punjab – especially the West Punjab, which is today part of Pakistan – became the main base for British military recruitment in India.
The base for this recruitment was a peasantry which had been indebted by British policies, but sections of which still regarded the British as better than their previous rulers, the Pathans, or the Sikhs with whom they had fought a series of wars.
The Indian National Congress, founded in 1885, contained strong pro-land reform elements and was seen as a threat by the Punjabi landowners, who moved towards the Muslim League. In this way divisions were created which were used by the British to bring about partition in 1947.
The Communist Party of India, founded in 1925, decided in 1948, a year after Pakistan’s creation, to divide the party into separate parties for India and Pakistan in view of the very different conditions in each country.
In 1951 elements in the Pakistan army opposed to US imperialism and the political dominance of the Muslim League approached the Communist Party for civilian help to overthrow the government. At that time the party was facing severe repression and its leaders were operating underground.
The army conspirators promised that the party would be allowed to function openly and take part in elections, in return for the support of the party and its trade union and peasant committees for a new military regime. But when the plan was betrayed the United States ordered its allies in the Pakistan army to crack down on the Communist Party.
In the 1954 Rawalpindi Conspiracy case, the party’s leaders and the army officers involved in the coup attempt were charged with treason. The party and all its organisations – women’s, students’, trade unions and writers’ – were banned.
Hassan Nasir, a renowned trade union leader and poet, created an underground organisation but he was arrested, brutally tortured and killed in 1960 in Lahore Fort. From then on the party continued to operate underground working closely with the secular socialist National Awami Party, which supports a non-aligned foreign policy.
There are four main political trends in Pakistan:
• Conservatives, supporting military dictatorship and the Muslim League. • Democratic forces including parties supporting bourgeois democracy such as the Pakistan People’s Party (PPP), and left parties such as the Awami National Party and communists. • Nationalist parties in Sindh, Baluchistan, and North West Frontier Province. • Fundamentalists, supporters of Sharia law and political and social reactionaries. The main groups are the Pakistan Muslim League (Q) and the Muttahida Majlis-e-Amal (MMA), a coalition of Islamic parties.
Pakistan has been dominated by undemocratic rule for most of its history. In 1951 the Prime Minister was assassinated, and in 1958 military rule began. There have been only six years in the 1970s and 11 in the 1980s and 90s of democratic rule.
Unlike some Middle Eastern or African states, military rule does not enjoy a popular base. The 1956 and 1973 constitutions were suspended in by the generals in 1958 and 1977 respectively,.
In 1988 democracy was restored under US pressure, and the 1973 constitution was reinstated in 1991. However once in government the democratic parties lost popular support due to corruption and in-fighting. Along with the collapse of the Soviet Union, this led to widespread de-politicisation and demoralisation in Pakistan.
In the past 10 years the US has favoured peace between India and Pakistan to avoid the threat of Pakistan’s nuclear weapons falling into the hands of Muslim fundamentalists or their allies.
The 1991 war with India in the Kargil area of Kashmir created a rift between the civilian and military sections of the ruling class which led eventually to the return of army rule. After 11th September 2001, Washington backed General Musharraf taking power as president, and pressed for showcase elections which took place in 2002.
The Communist Mazdoor Kisan Party (Communist Workers’ and Peasants’ Party) was created in 1995 when the Mazdoor Kisan Party, which broke away from the Communist Party of Pakistan in 1970, re-merged with the CPP.
The CMKP’s current strategy is unity with the broad democratic movement, the Muslim League (Nawaz) led by Nawaz Sharif, the PPP, the Awami National Party, and the nationalist parties, against military dictatorship. The other leftist parties in Pakistan have either become isolated from the masses or compromised with the military.
In Pakistan there is a political cycle that sees the people demanding change every seven to eight years. In 2007 the trigger was the dismissal of chief justice Iftikhar Chaudhry which sparked national outrage. Chaudhry, politically a conservative, was reinstated, but when Musharraf declared a state of emergency last November the entire Supreme Court was dismissed.
This turned out to be the last straw, and the military was overwhelmed by the popular reaction. The return of PPP leader Benazir Bhutto, even though it was arranged by Musharraf and the US, was objectively favourable to the development of the democratic movement.
Benazir was hated by the fundamentalists, and the second assassination attempt against her succeeded. Most people in Pakistan believe that the army was behind the fundamentalists in the operation.
There was a massive popular reaction to her murder. In Sindh alone arrest warrants for more than 600,000 were issued, and hundreds of thousands gathered at Benazir Bhutto’s burial place.
The mass pressure forced president Musharraf into elections in which any party close to the military and the fundamentalists was almost totally wiped out, including many political "giants".
The fundamentalists were reduced from 56 to five seats and the leader of the MMA, Maulana Fazlur Rahman, lost in his seat to a young People’s Party candidate. The only exception was in Baluchistan, where the local nationalist party made the error of boycotting the election.
The religious fundamentalist parties have never enjoyed popular support and are the creations of the Inter-Service Agency (ISI), a dominant force forces in Pakistan. The fundamentalists’ success in the 2002 elections were thanks to rigging by the army, recently admitted by the retired former number two of the ISI.
The masses are not interested in military rule or corrupt government. They want basic democratic rights and welfare measures. The CMKP has supported this line in its campaigns and its membership has grown rapidly, with a particularly strong base in the students’ movement. The party worked closely with the lawyers from the start of their campaign.
The CMKP did not stand candidates in the elections, but its materials, with the slogan "Don’t vote for military – Don’t vote for Musharraf", and displaying the CMKP’s logo, were distributed and displayed by all the other democratic parties. Taimur spoke at one People’s Party mass workers and peasants rally, where the CMKP’s demands and slogans were warmly welcomed.
The 2008 elections, the result of mass struggle against the dictatorship, have provided a boost for the democratic and progressive trends in Pakistan. Following the February election the opening of new parliament was disrupted by wild chanting of slogans from the public gallery, amid an atmosphere of change and progress.
Among the first decisions of the new PPP-Muslim League (Nawaz) government were to release the judges from house arrest, order a new investigation into the murder of Benazir Bhutto and to restore trade union and press freedoms.
All these actions were supported by the CMKP and have created far better conditions for its work. Democratic rule is also a major boost for national rights in Pakistan.
Another positive development is that India has recently said that relations with Pakistan are the best ever, with new a government in power that favours a peaceful approach. The broad political and mass consensus in Pakistan supports this position, which is a major change over past decade.
The CMKP’s campaign priorities are now for lower prices of basic goods, improved power supplies, against privatisation, and the full restoration of trade unions and student unions.
A new generation of young people with no experience of the Soviet Union or socialism is now emerging. They are receptive to socialist ideas and there is a rediscovery taking place. But the military is still extremely powerful, controls vast economic interests, and remains loyal to imperialism.
The right-wing trade union bloc now affiliated to the ITUC controls the Hydro union, probably the strongest in Pakistan with 100,000 members in one location. The railway unions have the same number of members but they are scattered.
A left trade union bloc was created by the Communist Party in the early 1950s but when the left and communist movements fragmented, the right-deviationist social democrats took the trade union movement with them. In rural the areas the unions have been very weak since the 1970s.
Since 2000 the CMKP has made a major effort to win the trade unions back from the social democratic revisionists. The unions are very demoralised but the All-Pakistan Trade Union Federation (which is mainly based in the
cities) is now linked to the CMKP.

The 900,000 strong Landless Tenants’ Movement, which is organised on army-run estates in the Punjab, staged an uprising in 2000-2002 in which the CMKP took a leading role. But after its leaders were arrested and tortured; divisions were created and the movement split. In 2005 it was revived and has organised huge convoys and mass rallies, some of which were addressed by the CMKP.
While there is no prospect of the PPP implementing land reform, there is an excellent chance of progress for bonded labourers, who are employed by rich peasants rather than by the big landowners. Their case is supported by the Supreme Court and even by the Islamic fundamentalists.
The bonded labourers are a separate caste and isolated from the rest of the movement. Unfortunately they are very dependent on lawyers and NGOs (non-governmental organisations), who have poured in funds for camps, buses and so on, while trying to exclude political parties and de-politicise the bonded labourers. As a result the movement has fractured.
The CMKP still controls the valley of Hashtanagar in North West Frontier Province, which was seized in an armed peasant campaign. This is the only major peasant movement to survive in Pakistan.
The prospects for reducing violence in Pakistan itself have also been boosted by the new government. No sooner had the new government been sworn in than US Deputy Secretary of State John Negroponte arrived in Islamabad to demand the continuation of military operations in the border areas, but the new government refused to accept this.
This week an anonymous US official warned "The bottom line for us is that we need to see more results. Any agreement must be enforced."
The leader of Tehrik-i-Taliban, an alliance of fundamentalist groups, has declared a ceasefire as part of secret peace talks with the new civilian-led government and the Awami National Party. There have been virtually no suicide bomb attacks since February. The fundamentalists are likely to accept changes in return for Sharia law in the areas they control.

Communist joint statement on the EU-LAC summit

Statement of Communist and Workers’ Parties from EU countries about the 5th EU-LAC summit


On 16–17 May 2008 the Fifth European Union-Latin America and Caribbean (EU-LAC) Summit will be held in Lima, Peru.

The objectives of the European Union have nothing to do with combating poverty and social inequalities, or with promoting the environment – benevolent policies as they claim. It seeks to open up the economies of these countries to exploitation, demanding the privatisation of state industries and natural resources, even water, for the benefit of the monopoly capital. It is an illusion to see it as a counterweight to the United States, in favour of the peoples: on the contrary, it has the same imperialist and neo-colonial goals.

With the Lisbon Treaty, new steps are being taken towards configuring the European Union as an economic, political and military bloc, a pillar of the world order of imperialism today, contrary to the interests of workers and the peoples. The sovereignty and independence of peoples and countries are being further undermined. Under the guidelines of the “Lisbon Strategy,” the attack on labour and trade union rights is being stepped up in the name of “modernisation,” “competitiveness,” and “security,” in order to ensure the profits of capital.

The European Union in its relations with Latin America and the Caribbean aims

• at further promoting the interests of European transnational monopolies at the expense of the peoples of the region;

• at promoting trade and investment protection agreements, under the guise of economic association and co-operation agreements;

• at gaining ground in its imperialist competition with the United States;

• at assisting the local oligarchies to tackle the people’s movements, to check and neutralise anti-imperialist struggles and processes that are developing.

The EU-LAC “strategic partnership” runs contrary to the interests of the peoples in both continents.

Along with mass popular resistance and opposition to the EU policies, working people throughout Europe express concern about the aggressiveness of the European Union towards the countries of Latin America and the Caribbean.

The solidarity with the peoples of Latin America and the Caribbean and the opposition to the policies of the European Union and its attempts to impose unjust free-trade agreements are integral parts of our struggle for a Europe of equal co-operation, of social and economic progress, of peace, in opposition to the process of European capitalist integration.

Our parties

• express our strong support and solidarity with the mobilisations of popular movements on the occasion of the EU-LAC summit, with the peoples’ and anti-imperialist forces that participate in the “Summit of the Peoples”;

• reiterate our strong support for socialist Cuba and demand the abolition of the EU “common position” on Cuba as well as all unjust restrictions imposed since 2003

• denounce the outrageous tour by Caleb McCarry in EU countries and demand that the so-called "Cuba Transition Coordinator” should not be received by our governments;

• welcome the victory of the popular forces in Paraguay and reiterate our strong solidarity with Bolivarian Venezuela, Bolivia’s and Ecuador’s governments and people and all peoples that struggle;

• sharply condemn the attempts to destabilise Bolivia and the support provided by the US government as well as the scandalous tolerance showed by other imperialist forces as well as the stance of the EU that seeks to intervene.

• demand that the sovereignty and independence of Latin American and Caribbean countries and peoples be respected;

• we condemn the EU position in solidarity and support for the Colombian government expressed recently by the Commissioner for External Relations and European Neighbourhood Policy

• We demand that FARC-EP and ELN be recognised as combatants and immediately removed from the EU list of “terrorist organisations”; this list itself should be abolished as an obstacle to the peaceful resolution of conflicts;

• reject the unjust association agreements promoted by the European union, such as the current negotiations on an “association agreement” with the Central American countries and the “economic partnership agreement” with the Caribbean region made in December 2007 but still to be ratified;

• oppose “Fortress Europe,” the immigration policy of the European Union that causes a significant “brain drain” from the countries of Latin America and the Caribbean while at the same time denying immigrant workers their essential social and democratic rights and intensifying their exploitation.

The Parties

Workers’ Party of Belgium
Communist Party of Britain
New Communist Party of Britain
Party of the Bulgarian Communists
Communist Party of Bohemia and Moravia
Communist Party in Denmark
Communist Party of Denmark
Communist Party of Finland
Hungarian Communist Workers’ Party
German Communist Party
Communist Party of Greece
Communist Party of Ireland
Workers’ Party of Ireland
Party of the Italian Communists
Socialist Party of Latvia
Socialist Party of Lithuania
Communist Party of Luxembourg
Communist Party of Malta
New Communist Party of the Netherlands
Communist Party of Poland
Portuguese Communist Party
Communist Party of the Peoples of Spain
The Communist Party of Norway, Palestinian Communist Party, Socialist Workers` Party of Croatia (not EU countries) have also extended their support to the statement.

Danish nurses' strike

by Callum Laggan

THE DANISH claim to be one of the world’s leading models of a welfare society is coming under severe strain as the Danish FOA (Care Workers Union) and Danish Nurses Union (Dansk Sygepleje Råd) (DSR) enters its second week of an official strike. They had an unofficial strike in June 2007 following which all leading politicians in the November 2007 general election promised nurses, care workers, and child care workers, equal pay but they have all gone back on their promises.
Social Democrat Helle Thorning Schmidt (married to Neil Kinnock’s son), Villy Søvndal of the Socialist People’s Party and Pia Kjærsgaard from the chauvinistic Danish Peoples Party (DFP) all promised that they would dramatically increase wages in these traditional women’s care areas, and even promised an “Equal Rights Commission”, which they have gone back on since the general election. .
The Danish Liberal / Conservative government, with the support of the DFP has since taken a particularly hard line, saying that the women’s place is to care for the sick and aged. Karen Jespersen, a former Social Democrat who joined the Liberals, and became straight away Social Minister in the present Danish government, says: “In future families and particularly women need to take greater responsibility in caring for sick members of their family, and the care and nursing of older family members.
Jespersen was questioned by the Danish Age Concern about the inability to care 24 hours per day seven days per week, as well as the fact women are now having to work outside the home for unequal pay with men, to keep the strained family budget on track, to cook, do housework and rear children. Jespersen replied that as Welfare and Social Minister, “I am not trying to save money; I am trying to make those with responsibility, namely the closest relatives, take away this burden from society and take responsibility for the society they live in.”
Danish Age Concern (Ældre Sagen) is reporting an increase in the number of elderly people living out their older years on a small pension in cramped unsanitary conditions. The April Edition 2008 of Danish Age Concern Magazine Nu (Now) reports on Solveig Pedersen living in wretchedly miserable small room, 9.5 square metres without a kitchen, bath or toilet in one of Denmark’s richest district council areas of Hamlet’s Ellsinore,
These are increasingly the sorts of conditions over the whole country that social welfare departments of Danish district councils expect elderly people to live in. In Solveig Pedersen’s case Danish Age Concern are trying to press the Danish Health and Safety Executive to take action, due to the unsanitary conditions which are a public health hazard. Sadly this is becoming commonplace in Denmark which claims to be one of the world’s most prosperous countries.
Every time a man in Denmark in the private sector, with the same education earns 100 Danish crowns, a woman in the caring professions earns only 81 crowns. Most Danish women in caring professions report they love their work, but that as no one wants to do the work it is becoming increasingly hard. Danish nursing union (DSR) leader Connie Kruckow says “We need equal pay for men and women in care work, this is a great problem for our members and is a problem for society and the government needs to take responsibility, as it becomes more and more difficult to recruit and retain care workers. We want The Danish Parliament and politicians to demand a ‘Women’s Equal Rights Commission’, which has just happened in Norway and other European countries like the UK to show the need for women to have equal pay with men.”
The nurses and care workers with their present official strike are in the strange position of having to work to provide emergency cover.
As Connie Kruckow says: “Because of the legal guarantee that all have the right to treatment, this conflict which looks as if it will be a long and costly affair for the government, as they are having to send patients to private hospitals, who see a major advantage for their shareholders in the strike being as long as possible as it will increase their balance sheet and bottom line profits.”
The Danish Care Workers’ Union (FOA) is the third largest trade union in Denmark, organising approximately 211,000 members, primarily in the public sector. But they also organise privatised employees in the public sector.
Their members are engaged in a variety of public sector services, from fire, public transport and childcare, to nursing and caring services for the elderly, including food preparation and cleaning work.
Kirsten Norman Andersen, chairperson of the Århus FOA branch, says: “The government is hoping for an economic crisis which will create large numbers of unemployed, forcing women to seek underpaid jobs in care work: for the elderly, children and chronically ill, who will then receive care on a low cost basis. But for our members in the public sector the fight is for equal pay, more hands, better care of the elderly, children and chronically ill, and a better welfare state. Unless we win in this area it is going to become increasingly more difficult to attract the necessary qualified caring personnel, mostly women, to this sector as we need a wage we can live on.
One of the optimistic aspects of this strike is the way women have mobilised to defend their rights. The Welfare Minister says that women’s place is to care for the sick and aged because they tend to lack self esteem and self confidence!
But women on strike supporting one another are suddenly starting to blossom and bloom in self esteem and confidence; lobbying politicians, writing press releases, talking to the media, being interviewed on local, national, and international TV, making banners, thinking of publicity ideas – which the women in Holstebro did, handing out a recipe for baking home made bread, with a lump of yeast and talked to members of the public face to face.
“We need a rise in our pay in the same way that yeast rises bread, to the level of men’s wages so we can afford to eat bread, and care for and look after your elderly, children and chronically ill family, relatives and friends,” one of them said. One thing is certain whatever the outcome of this national strike the Danish women care workers will have gained in self-confidence and optimism from the lessons they are learning from this strike.


If you wish to send them letters of support or emails here are the two addresses :
1) FOA (Care Workers) Frede Gydesen, International AdviserE-mail: fg001@foa.dk
Dennis Kristensen, FOA, Trade Union Chair Person, Staunings Plads 1 - 3, 1607 Copenhagen V Denmark Telephone 0045 46 97 26 26
2) Connie Kruckow Danish Nurses Union, Chair Person, (Dansk Sygeplejeråd) - Sankt Annæ Plads 30 - 1250 Copenhagen, Denmark.K- Postboks 1084 - 1008 København K – email: dsr@dsr.dkTel: 0045 3315 1555

Review: The ethics of socialism

by Ray Jones

Workers’ Politics — the ethics of socialism by William Ash. Pbk 340 pages.
Bread Books, PO Box 1806, Coventry CV6 1YJ. £8.00 plus £2.50 P&P.

THE FIRST THING that must be said is that this is a reprint of Ash’s Marxist Morality published in 1998. I’m not sure that the change of title was a good idea as it may cause confusion and I think the original was more to the point but if you haven’t already read Marxist Morality the age of the work should not put you off Workers’ Politics — essentially the work is not dated.

The second thing to say about this work is that to get the most out of it you should ideally have a grounding in bourgeois philosophy and a knowledge of Marxist political economy. This book, then, is not easy reading — particularly the first part.

Here Ash attempts in a concise way to show, largely successfully, the shortcomings of bourgeois ethics (although I have some problems with his treatment of utilitarianism). And he attempts to prove, less successfully I think, that a Marxist ethics can be derived from Marxist political economy and the theory of value.

This seems to me to be a valiant attempt at a significant task but one that in the end fails to convince and is perhaps doomed to failure. In essence Ash appears to be committing the error that he accuses others of — the “naturalistic fallacy”. He describes what is the case — the Marxist theory of value — and from that tells us what we ought to do, what ought to be the case — Marxist morality.

Perhaps I just didn’t grasp it but I don’t see how Ash achieves this vital shift from “is” to “ought”. I got the feeling that there was a logical blurring in between.

But then I tend to think that there is no Marxist morality as such — only class moralities — with no way of objectively assessing the morality of the ruling class against that of the working class and finding one superior to the other, by some higher moral rule. Or to put it another way, Marxist morality just is working class morality, tidied-up and clarified.

The two moralities just conflict and you choose one or the other (or they, or circumstances, choose you) or you dither in between.

The second part of Workers, Politics applies the now “proved” Marxist morality to politics and world events and makes very interesting, and rather easier reading, with many astute insights and sharp points.

Feed people not planes -- the fake climate change solution

by Renee Sams

ON 1st March an “open skies” policy took effect, sparking off an unprecedented boom in air travel as about 100 new air routes will be launched from Britain to Europe this summer. Happy holidaymakers will be looking forward to enjoying cheap flights to their favourite places.

And Heathrow’s new Terminal Five opened with the chaos of cancelled planes and stacks of luggage mounting up, which will take weeks to sort out. Transatlantic flights are expected to increase by a quarter, which will mean up to 524 extra flights a month.

On the 18th March the world’s biggest airliner touched down for the first time in commercial service. The A380 airbus owned by Singapore Airlines has been described as “the plane built for Heathrow”.

The timetable specialists OAG have calculated that during April nearly 200 new departures a day are expected from this country. And a year-on-year increase of 5,853 flights from here to Europe is likely as new destinations such as Bournemouth to Wroclaw and Liverpool to Santiago de Compostela begin to operate.

A few weeks ago Virgin Atlantic flew one of their fleet of 747s to New York using biofuel, signalling that with all this increase in air traffic an alternative fuel to petroleum and paraffin may be needed sooner rather than later.

On his website Sir Richard Branson claimed that they were using biofuel “that doesn’t compete with food or fresh water” and that this is “part of Virgin’s drive to reduce environmental impact” and that “this breakthrough would help to fly its planes using clean fuel sooner than expected”.

The press release added that the Virgin Group has pledged to do all it can “towards developing clean energy” And the Ministry of New and Renewable Energy has been given the task of setting up a Biofuel Development Board.

But there is already considerable doubt as to how clean that energy is and what kind of impact it will have on the environment.

Two papers published in Science early this year, concluded that “clearing land for biofuel would produce twice as much greenhouse gas than the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change had previously estimated.”

So, if Sir Richard intends to use biofuel or (agro fuel as it should be known) his pledge to “reduce the impact on the environment” is just a lot of greenwash.

Biofuel is not new; it was used in the early days of the car industry. Nikolaus August Otto, the inventor of the internal combustion engine conceived it to run on ethanol and the inventor of the diesel engine, Rudolf Diesel, designed it to run on peanut oil. The Model T Ford produced by Henry ford from 1903 to 1936 was designed to run on fuel derived from hemp.
But when enormous supplies of crude oil were discovered in Pennsylvania and Texas petroleum-based fuels became cheap and the car industry changed to the use of petrol and diesel.

But the political conflicts in the Middle East in 1973 and 1979 caused the Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries (Opec) to cut its exports and there was a sharp decrease in supplies of oil to the non-Opec countries causing an “energy crisis”.

That sparked off a new wave of interest in energy issues and since the year 2000 renewed interest in biofuel.

Biofuel is made from biomass derived from living organisms including plants, both food and non-food. Agricultural plants used to make biofuel include corn, switch grass, and soybeans primarily in the United States and rapeseed, wheat and sugar beet primarily in Europe. The crop in Brazil is sugar cane, and in South East Asia palm oil and miscanthus, sorghum and cassava in China and jatropha in India.

The problem is it needs vast areas of land to grow enough of either food or non-food crops to make enough fuel to supply the ever-expanding need for energy for vehicles and planes. Monoculture expansion for biofuel is the fastest growing cause of rainforest destruction. Shortages of food will be the result if increasing areas of land are used to feed cars and planes instead of people

Another often overlooked effect is that deforestation and land use change is responsible for about one quarter of total global CO2 emissions. Some rainforest ecosystems are now in danger of collapse.

The Amazon has been “drying out” in recent years and if this process continues vast fire could take hold and precipitate a change to a very different type of “dry forest” or savannah.

This would release enormous quantities of CO2 that could cause a change that might escalate completely out of control.

Deforestation is the biggest driver in this process combined with the already higher temperatures from global warming, itself already exacerbated by deforestation.

There is one kind of biofuel, however, that is really renewable and that is made from waste materials, household or industrial could produce a useful amount of power. A three megawatt landfill power plant could produce energy for 1,900 homes and would eliminate 6,000 tonnes per year of methane escaping into the environment.

But such biofuel however, could only deliver a fraction of the amount needed for the ever growing demand for power in a modern technological society.

It is now clear that the rich capitalist world is intending to replace fossil fuels which are now more expensive with biofuel or agrofuel made from growing crops. This would need massive areas of land that it would mean shortage of agricultural land for the poorer countries of the world.

Vegetable crops can be used for either fuel or food and can be made into biodiesel which has become the most common biofuel in Europe.

Bioethanol has roughly one-third lower energy content per unity of volume compared to gasoline(petrol) so larger fuel tanks are required to travel the same distance and per unit of distance travelled ethanol still costs more than the current high price of petrol.

First generation biofuels are made from sugar, starch, vegetable oil or animal fats using conventional technology. Now there are calls for increased support for a second generation biofuel made from non-food crops.

Second generation biofuel is made can be made from the stalks of wheat, corn, wood, and non-food crops such as the weed jatropha. Many of these second generation fuels are under development making bio-diesel, bio-hydrogen, mixed alcohols cellulosic ethanol and wood diesel.

General Motors has a project to produce cellulosic ethanol for a projected cost of $1 a gallon. This type of ethanol is five times more energy efficient than ethanol produced from corn. This type of biofuel would cause less damage but would still use enormous areas of land needed for food crops.

The third generation of biofuel, (now under development) is made from algae which is said to produce 30 more times energy per acre of land than other crops and with the high price of oil there is now an interest in algaculture (farming algae). This type of biofuel may have less of an impact on environment than some other types.

World leaders in use and development of bioenergy are Brazil, United States, France, Sweden and Germany.

In Brazil, where ethanol production and use are well advanced, the government aims to expand the production of diesel which must contain two per cent biodiesel by 2008 keep, increasing it up to five per cent by 2013.

In the United States President George Bush said in a State of the Union speech in 2006 that the US is “addicted to oil” and should replace 75 per cent of imported oil by 2025 by alternative sources including biofuels.

The US Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007 requires American “fuel producers to use at least 36 billion gallons of biofuel by 2022. This is a fivefold increase over current levels.”

“America’s ethanol programme is a product of government subsidies. There are more than 200 different kinds as well as a 54 cent-a-gallon tariff on imported ethanol. That keeps out greener Brazilian ethanol, which is made from sugar rather than maize. Federal subsidies alone cost $7 billion a year (equal to around 1.90 per cent a gallon).

The European Union, in a directive updated in 2006, is aiming for each member state to use at least 5.75 per cent biofuel across all traffic by 2010 and 10 per cent by 2020.

France is the second largest biofuel consumer in the EU; in 2006 consumption increased by 62.7 per cent, a large proportion of it being biodiesel. The French agro-industrial group Tereos is all set to increase its production of bioethanol.

Germany is a major contender in bioethanol production with the big sugar corporation Sudzucker and ADM Oelmuhle Hamburg AG I s the largest biodiesel company.

In this country from the 15th April, the Renewable Transport Fuel Order (RTFO) makes it obligatory for all road fuels to contain 2.5 per cent of biofuel, which will rise to five per cent by April 2010 and the biofuel additive can come from any source, such as the rainforest, but consumers have no say in this matter.

The damage to the environment is already becoming evident. Prices of crops such as soya, sugar cane and palm oil are increasing rapidly and the monoculture for biofuel is now the fastest growing cause of rainforest destruction
The biofuel lobby is endeavouring to get people to accept that the use of biofuel would actually reduce “greenhouse gas” emissions and increase energy security by providing an alternative to fossil fuels.

The theory is that because these fuels absorb as much CO2 when they grow as they emit when they are burnt, they are basically “carbon neutral”.

Recent research by Nobel prize-winning scientist Paul Crutzen, however, shows that the release of nitrous oxide from rapeseed oil and maize contribute more to global warming than the fossil fuels they replace.

Despite all this damning evidence, capitalists are determined to carry on using bioethanol and a new corporate alliance has evolved around the agrofuel boom. Big business, venture capitalists, car manufacturers and the oil companies are forming a powerful self-interested lobby influencing all the decisions that are made.

More and more people in countries all over the world are becoming alert to the dangers of climate change and making their opposition loud and clear

Tibet was,is,and always will be a part of China

Tibet: The Truth (oppression, monks, nuns... you're wrong)

Joint appeal in solidarity with the communists, progressive forces and the working class of Egypt

APPEAL OF SOLIDARITY
Since early morning today both downtown Cairo, and the main squares in the city, have been occupied by special security forces, anti-riot forces, and security personnel wearing civilian uniforms. In other cities, such as Alexandria and Algharbia, inhabitants have witnessed a heavy security force presence in the main squares and streets.

The city of Almahalla Alkobra was the location of today's largest demonstrations.

Nearly 200 activists have already been arrested at different times across different provinces. A number of workers are on strike in solidarity with the demands of striking workers of the Ghazl Almahalla spinning and weaving company. Their central demand is that wages must be linked to the rate of inflation - which affects not only Ghazl Almahalla workers, but all of the Egyptian working class.

Ghazl Almahalla workers' strike turned into a huge demonstration covering the whole city of Almahalla Alkobra. The poor people, peasants and workers all joined the demonstrations. Nearly 30,000 citizens chanted slogans against rising price, against monopolies, neo-liberalism and market forces.

The Egyptian central security forces attacked the demonstrators using huge tear-gas grenades, plastic bullets, electric-shock batons (tasers) and live bullets, resulting in hundreds of injuries amongst the demonstrators. The security forces arrested and detained both injured and not-injured demonstrators.

The news from Almahalla Alkobra onfirmis the death of at least 2 citizens - one is a nine years old female, and the other is a 20 years old male.
The “black forces” – a branch of the security forces – burned some shops, public buildings, trains and vehicles, in order to be able to fabricate charges against detained demonstrators and workers. Their aim is to tighten the grip of the police and the state on the working class and to contain the rising social awareness in Egypt, which has greatly increased in the last five years.

Our appeal to you is to support the just and fair demands of the Ghazl Almahalla workers and their right to choose the means to express their demands, whether demonstrations, strikes or any other method.

We, the communists and all the democratic and social forces, urgently alert you to the fact that the police, acting on instructions from the state, will start a huge campaign of repression against the working class in general and the Ghazl Almahalla workers in particular. These concerns arise from the thuggery of the security forces' reaction in Almahalla Alkobra city today. The warning also arises from the intentions of the security forces to deliberately fabricate charges against workers' leaders

Fraternally,
Communist Party of Egypt

==========
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The parties


1. Algerian Party for Democracy and Socialism
2. Communist Party of Bangladesh
3. Workers’ Party of Belgium
4. Communist Party of Brazil
5. Communist Party of Britain
6. New Communist Party of Britain
7. Party of Bulgarian Communists
8. Communist Party of Canada
9. Communist Party of Denmark
10. Communist Party in Denmark
11. Communist Party of Egypt
12. Communist Party of Finland
13. German Communist Party
14. Communist Party of Greece
15. Hungarian Communist Workers’ Party
16. Tudeh Party of Iran
17. Communist Party of Ireland
18. Workers’ Party of Ireland
19. Communist Party of Israel
20. Party of the Italian Communists
21. Jordanian Communist Party
22. Socialist Party of Latvia
23. Lebanese Communist Party
24. Socialist Party of Lithuania
25. Communist Party of Luxembourg
26. Communist Party of Malta
27. Party of the Communists, Mexico
28. Popular Socialist Party of Mexico
29. New Communist Party of the Netherlands
30. Peruvian Communist Party
31. Philippine Communist Party (PKP-1930)
32. Portuguese Communist Party
33. Communist Party of Romania
34. Communist Party of the Russian Federation
35. New Communist Party of Yugoslavia (NKPJ)
36. South African Communist Party
37. Communist Party of Peoples of Spain
38. Communist Party of Sweden
39. Syrian Communist Party
40. Communist Party of Turkey
41. Labour Party (EMEP), Turkey
42. Communist Party of Uruguay

Communist Appeal in Solidarity with the Palestinian People

Appeal by Communist And Workers' Parties In Solidarity With The Palestinian People of Gaza And The West Bank

The crimes that have been committed against the Palestinian people in Gaza and the West Bank are a disgrace to humanity.
During the last few days, from the beginning of this aggressive war against Gaza, tens of martyrs and hundreds of wounded have fallen, most of them children and women. Israel is using internationally forbidden weapons in this war. It is also still seizing Palestinian land, building new settlements, sweeping away trees and plants, erecting the segregating wall and challenging legitimate international decisions. All this Israeli tyranny is approved and financially, militarily and morally supported by the American administration, support which is revealed by the sending of American warships to the Eastern Mediterranean Coast, along the Syrian and Lebanese shores.
Of course the aim of this American step is not maintaining regional security as it has claimed, but to interfere directly with the internal affairs of the countries of the region and to prepare an aggressive war aiming to impose its conditions by force on the Arab region through the security council.
We denounce the brutal and aggressive war, devastating for both man and infrastructure in Gaza and the West Bank as well as the siege and blockade policy, and call the Palestinian groups to be united in the face of the aggression and to stop the river of blood. We also call the Arab governments to break their silence and give financial, moral and informational support to the Palestinian people.
We urge the popular movements, trade unions, solidarity and youth movements, political parties all over the world to denounce the daily massacres in Gaza and the West Bank, the starvation and death siege imposed on Gaza people who are prevented from obtaining medicines, food and fuel.
We demand the governments to urgently take supportive political and humane attitudes towards the Palestinian people, and to denounce the mobilization of the American warships, aiming to support Israel in its aggressive war against the Palestinian people and to threaten Syria and Lebanon.

March 2008



The Parties

1. Communist Party of Bohemia and Moravia
2. PADS, Algeria
3. Democratic Progressive Tribune, Bahrain
4. Communist Party of Bangladesh
5. Workers’ Party of Belgium
6. Communist Party of Brazil
7. New Communist Party of Britain
8. Communist Party of Canada
9. Communist Party of Chile
10. Socialist Worker’s Party of Croatia
11. Communist Party in Denmark
12. Communist Party of Egypt
13. Communist Party of Estonia
14. Communist Party of Finland
15. German Communist Party
16. Communist Party of Greece
17. Hungarian Communist Workers’ Party
18. Communist Party of India
19. Communist Party of Ireland
20. Communist Party of Israel
21. Socialist Party of Latvia
22. Lebanese Communist Party
23. Socialist Party of Lithuania
24. Communist Party of Luxembourg
25. Communist Party of Malta
26. Party of the Communists, Mexico
27. New Communist Party of the Netherlands
28. Communist Party of Norway
29. Peruvian Communist Party
30. Phillipine Communist Party – 1930
31. Portuguese Communist Party
32. Socialist Alliance Party, Romania.
33. Communist Party of the Russian Federation
34. New Communist Party of Yugoslavia
35. South African Communist Party
36. Communist Party of the Peoples of Spain
37. Communist Party of Sweden
38. Syrian Communist Party
39. Communist Party of Turkey

No Trident! No nuclear holocaust!

by Ann Rogers

IN MARCH 2007 the Government put a resolution before the House of Commons calling for “the necessary steps to maintain the United Kingdom’s strategic nuclear deterrent beyond the life of the existing system”. In short the Government was calling for a new generation of Trident nuclear weapons.
The resolution was passes after pressure on both Tory and Labour MPs. But it was still opposed by 161 MPs – including 89 Labour MPs – the biggest revolt by Labour backbenchers on a domestic issue since Tony Blair came to office.
The rebel MPs were in step with the public as a whole. A majority (59 per cent), polled by ICM in July 2006, opposed replacing Trident.
In January 2008, as reported in the New Worker, armed forces chiefs from the United States, Britain, Germany, France and the Netherlands gave a statement insisting that a “first strike” nuclear option remains an “indispensable option” since there is “simply no realistic prospect of a nuclear-free world”. It is thought this manifesto will be discussed at the Nato summit in April.
Of course armed forces chiefs are not necessarily speaking for their respective governments. But since governments have not spoken against these views we must conclude that this does reflect the thinking of the imperialist leaders.
It means that objecting to these policies needs to happen now – ahead of the Nato summit.
The armed forces chiefs’ statement also needs to be seen alongside arguments put by Tony Blair when he was striving to get the new Trident resolution through the Commons. According to Blair it would be “unwise and dangerous” for Britain to give up its nuclear weapons. He alleged that the consequences of misjudgement about the country’s security would be “potentially catastrophic”.
He alleged that new threats were posed by states like the Democratic Peoples Republic of Korea. This outrageous slur against the DPRK, a country that has issued no threats to anyone at all and which vigorously supports peace and working class solidarity internationally, shows the utter emptiness and weakness of the Government’s case. It also shows that the Cold War is not ended outside Europe – at least in the minds of the imperialist powers.
But Blair’s words will come as no surprise after backing Bush’s war on Iraq on the basis of a lie about weapons of mass destruction, which Iraq did not have.
The whole issue of Trident is presented by the biggest lie of all – that these weapons protect our country and that they are a means of “defence”.
We do not need to second guess the thinking of the ruling class here and in the United States – we only need to see the specification for Trident to know that it is, and always was, an offensive weapon of mass destruction. Much more exposure needs to be given to this since there is now a generation of young adults who were born after the Cold War in Europe and after the intense campaigning against Trident in the 1980s.
Briefly: The current trident fleet consists of four Ballistic submarines – HMS Vengeance, HMS Victorious, HMS Vigilant and HMS Vanguard. At any time three of these can be at sea. Each 150-metre submarine has 16 missile tubes capable of firing Trident D5 missiles and four tubes for Spearfish torpedoes. D5 is a MERV-type missile, which can fire 12 nuclear-armed warheads.
Each submarine’s range is over 4,000 nautical miles and, according to Royal navy information, claims an accuracy of a few metres. This is laughable, since a single warhead would totally devastate an area of many square miles – being accurate to a few yards is utterly irrelevant.
Just one trident warhead has eight times the explosive power of the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima in 1945. A warhead aimed at a city would kill, sooner or later, over a million people, destroy the entire infrastructure and contaminate the whole area for decades to come.
The range of Trident means it could do this to any country in the world.
This is military nonsense – a fact acknowledged by many military pundits. If Trident were ever used it would amount to a crime of genocidal proportions – and it is obviously not inconceivable that it could be used, given the first-strike talk of the Nato war chiefs.
Does Trident defend our country? Of course not. It only increases the danger of nuclear catastrophe.
Only the US has a comparable system to Trident. Britain does not face a threat from others – we are the threat. In fact in July 1998 a Ministry of Defence review stated: “There is today no military threat to the United Kingdom or Western Europe. Nor do we foresee the re-emergence of such a threat.”
That statement did not deter former Defence Secretary Geoff Hoon from indicating in 2002 that Trident might be used in a first strike capacity as a pre-emptive attack against a proportionate threat and that this could be against a non-nuclear weapon state.
A CND briefing of May 2007 said: “The UK is enhancing the Trident system and making it more flexible and therefore more usable. For example in 2003 new computers were installed on Trident submarines so that the missiles can now be rapidly retargeted and £28.4 million has been spent on acquiring a new fire-control system (to be deployed in 2010) which will improve their targeting. An upgrade to the nuclear warheads has also been scheduled. The Government describe this as a “relatively minor upgrading and refurbishment during the first half of the next decade. This will enable Trident warheads to remain in service until at least the 2020s.”
The Ministry of Defence and Foreign Office have produced a fact sheet giving a potted history of Britain’s nuclear weapons programme (incidentally, though this goes back to 1941 and the 1943 Manhattan Project, agreed between Churchill and Roosevelt, it never bothers to mention the US bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945).
However it does mention the signing in 1958 of the Mutual Defence Agreement (MDA) as the basis for Agreement and Co-operation on Uses of Atomic Energy for Mutual Defence Purposes. This, it says, “became, and remains, the cornerstone of UK-US co-operation on nuclear defence issues. It was renewed in 2004 for a further period of 10 years.”
It underlines the fact that the US Trident missile system that Britain deploys always has to be seen as a component of the wider US war strategy.
In the 1980s Trident was to have been an integrated part of the US Star Wars programme and today it remains an arm of US strategy. Trident is not an independent UK weapons system and it is inconceivable that Britain would ever use its Trident weapons if the US did not sanction it.
While British ministers always speak of trident as “our nuclear deterrent” – it is actually more closely tied to Washington than other weapons systems that Britain has. This is because the US will not let Trident be subjected to any collective decision-making by its allies.
It is not just the constraints of the MDA that make Trident not an independent weapons system. A report prepared for Scottish CND revealed that Trident is technically dependent on the US in many important ways. It says: “The [Trident] warhead is a Dutch copy of the US W76…. Several key components are produced in America…. The MC2989 Neutron Generators, initially deployed on British warheads were overhauled in the US in 1999. This implies that they were built there. A replacement Neutron Generator, the MC4380, was manufactured in America and supplied to Britain in 2002 …. The gas reservoirs on British warheads are filled with tritium in the US. These are difficult components to build. This suggests that the reservoirs are manufactured in America.
“The arming, fusing and firing system triggers the warhead. The model used on British warheads was designed by Sandia Laboratory and almost certainly procured off-the-shelf from America…. And there is a substantial American presence at the Northwood headquarters from where British submarine operations are controlled.
“Successive governments have withheld information to conceal dependence …. This is consistent with the policy of uncertainty that lies at the heart of British nuclear policy.”
Blair’s statement to the House of Commons that “it would be unwise and dangerous for Britain to give up its nuclear weapons” is utterly bogus. The vast majority of countries in the world do not have nuclear weapons at all. And since the end of the Cold war in Europe Ukraine, Kazakhstan and Belarus have got rid of their nuclear weapons.
For Britain to opt for Trident replacement is not going to deter countries from trying to acquire nuclear weapons – it will have the opposite effect of making non-nuclear states feel threatened and therefore in need of seeking a nuclear option.Furthermore it is contrary to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) that Britain has signed.
The NPT was signed by the US, Britain, the Soviet Union and 59 other countries on 1st July 1968. Since then China and France have also signed. By 2000, 187 states were party to the NPT.
Though Blair denied that Trident replacement is in breach of the NPT, the words of Article VI of the treaty show that he is wrong. It says: “Each of the parties to the treaty undertakes to pursue negotiations in good faith on effective measures relating to cessation of the nuclear arms race at an early date and to pursue nuclear disarmament, and on a treaty on general and complete disarmament under strict and effective international control.”
Britain and the US have never paid more than lip service to this and by upgrading their nuclear weapons they are clearly in breach. But that sort of thing has never worried either state. The imperialist powers never thought of the NPT as a call for nuclear weapons’ reduction by themselves – but only as a means of constraining all other states to create as near to a nuclear weapons monopoly as possible.
Since the counter-revolution in the Soviet Union this pressure has built up so that now states the US regards as unfriendly are bullied to abandon nuclear power generation altogether.
If the Government’s stated reasons for wanting to keep Trident are spurious, what are the true reasons?
One of these can be summed up by the words of Aneurin Bevan when he addressed the Labour Party Conference in 1957 and insisted that Britain retain nuclear weapons “lest she go naked into the conference chamber”.
Maintaining nuclear status has and is a ruling class objective for British capitalism’s international prestige and to keep its permanent seat on the Security Council of the United Nations.
It is also part of the wider strategy of Anglo-US relations. Britain is no longer a big colonial power but a section of the British ruling class hopes to bask in the reflection of the new sun in the sky –the US.
It is timely that this Easter CND plans to mark its 50th anniversary with a demonstration at the Atomic weapons Establishment (AWE) at Aldermaston. This is where a new laser facility is being built to test and develop a new generation of nuclear weapons.
This site produced and maintains nuclear warheads and has always been the business end of Trident in Britain.
The decision to replace Trident has led to an increase in the workforce at Aldermaston and capital costs have risen by £278 million in the last five years. According to a House of Commons written statement £1 billion extra funding has been earmarked for Aldermaston from 2005 to 2008.
This brings us to the cost of Trident. According to CND replacement for Trident could cost at least £25 billion. Running costs will be £1.5 billion-a-year and over a 30-year lifespan this would bring the cost to £76 billion. The Stop the War Coalition believes the cost will be £50 billion and a Defence white paper says the running costs of Trident are five to six per cent of the annual defence budget.
Of course the figures all depend on what is counted in. for example there would be extra costs for decommissioning the old system and the huge costs of running AWE Aldermaston.
Whatever measure we use it is colossally expensive and represents money that could be better spent on health, education, housing, pensions, public transport, local authorities and so on.
Clearly British taxpayers – the majority of whom are working class people on pay-as-you-earn tax (PAYE) – are helping to pay for US nuclear war plans and “defence” strategy. None of this is in the interests of the working class.
Quote: “Trident is unacceptably expensive, economically wasteful and militarily unsound.” – Gordon Brown (1984).

No to the Lisbon Treaty!

EUROPEAN communist parties called for a mass campaign for a strong No vote against the “Lisbon Treaty” in Ireland and throughout the European Union at a conference in Athens last weekend. Twenty-three communist and workers’ parties, including the New Communist Party of Britain, took part in the conference called to develop joint and co-ordinated initiatives to mobilise the working class against the bourgeois drive to build the capitalist super-state in Europe.
There was broad unanimity amongst the communist representatives from 20 EU member-states and accession countries on the true nature of the European Union. They stressed that the development of the Common Market and the EU that followed was the choice of European imperialism and western European monopoly capital.
It promotes neo-liberal measures favouring the monopolies and the concentration and accumulation of capital. It cannot represent a genuine counterweight to the United States in favour of the people. With the Lisbon Treaty, new steps are being taken towards the configuration of the EU as an imperialist, economic, political and military bloc contrary to the interests of the workers and the people.
The sovereignty and independence of peoples and countries are being further undermined. The attack on labour and trade union rights throughout the EU is escalating in the name of “modernisation”; “competitiveness” and “flexicurity”, and in order to ensure the profits of capital. The participants vehemently denounced the adoption of the Treaty without consulting the people.
The unilateral secession of Kosovo from Serbia was condemned and concern was expressed about its consequences.
Leading members of the revisionist and left social-democratic “European Party of the Left” bloc, like the French Communist Party and the Italian Communist Refoundation Party, did not take part in the conference though others including the Communist Party of Spain (PCE) fully participated in support of the communist initiative.
The guest of honour was the Cuban ambassador to Greece and two anti-European Marxist-Leninist movements, the Pole of Communist Renaissaince in France (PRCF) and the L’Ernesto magazine from Italy attended as observers.
NCP leader Andy Brooks and Theo Russell from the Central Committee represented the Party in Athens. In his speech Andy Brooks called for mass support for a No vote in Ireland, the only country that is putting the Lisbon Treaty to referendum. He said: “Communists must also use the opportunity of the public debate that will no doubt take place prior to the vote to make the principled stand against the European Union and the Treaty of Rome altogether…the European Union cannot be reformed except by tearing up the Treaty of Rome, which established the Common Market in the first place”.

photo: KKE General Secretary Aleka Papariga opening conference

The Soviet National Anthem

International Womens Day -- dedicated to the women of Palestine

World Federation of Trade Unions
Athens March 4, 2008

On March 8, 1857 the women workers in textile indurstries of New York were on strike demanding ten hours of work instead of sixteen. Their strike ended by bloodshed.

Today, in all capitalist countries, the working woman is the object of harsh exploitation. She works mainly in part-time, uninsured, and temporary jobs. She is being paid less than what men are paid. She has a smaller pension. She is the first to become unemployed. In many countries violence against women is on the rise, prostitution is spreading, economic migration is separating many mothers from their children and deprives them of the right to education, to cultural activity, to free time. All these are consequences of the so-called globalization, that is, of the renewed and expanded aggression of the monopolies and transnationals against the peoples.
According to the European Union statistical data (Eurostat), today 1.2 billion of the world's 2.9 billion workers are women (40%). Women are 60 % of the world's working poor people. More women than ever before are unemployed and they are mostly stuck in low productivity jobs such as agriculture, the field of services and the informal sector. The two-thirds of the 800 million illiterate people globally today are women. Among the children that do not attend school, 3 out of 5 are girls. The data also reveal that around one million people annually fall victim to sex trafficking, 900 thousand of whom are women and girls.
The conditions for women are extremely bad in all continents. In Africa, AIDS is spreading among the female population, in India around two thousand pregnancies are being prematurely terminated daily, because families wish to have only male offspring. Around ninety percent of the victims of the armed confrontations and wars are non-combatants, among them the large majority women and children.

The data and the numbers speak for themselves. They reveal the true picture of the so-called “female issue” which is a social phenomenon linked to the historical progression of human society and includes a multitude of economic, political and cultural discriminations against women in all spheres of social, family and personal life. These discriminations have mental, cultural and moral repercussions, since women are prevented from developing their abilities in full and from attaining full equality. These negative repercussions concern the women of the working class, of the poor peasantry and of the self-employed strata.

For the W.F.T.U. the solution and the way-out is found in the common struggles of women and men against the social system which gives birth to the exploitation of men by men. We have the duty to fight in political and trade union level for the small and bigger problems until the deliberation of the working class.

The attention and the interest of the W.F.T.U. for the issues of working women is interpreted in concrete actions such as the constitution of a permanent Working Committee composed of members representing different regions, development of trade union skills and training programs on gender equality at the workplaces, strengthening the capacity of class-oriented trade unions so as to include gender issues in their collective bargaining, to inform working women about their legitimate rights and help them assure those rights, including legal assistance when presenting claims on violations of the working women's rights and in the supervision of ILO Conventions, to promote the ratification and implementation of labor standards relevant to gender equality, particularly the No. 100 on equal remuneration, No.111 on non discrimination in employment and occupation, No.156 on workers with family responsibilities, No.183 on maternity protection, to promote the occupational, health and safety measures for the women workers, to struggle for increase of women's participation in trade unions, and also their elections as trade union leaders, to fight again sexual harassment or violence against women and other.
On the International Women’s Day 2008, the W.F.T.U. calls upon all women militants of the world to act jointly with men inside trade unions, to resist the capitalist globalisation, the imperialist wars and the destruction of the environment and to demand trade union and democratic freedoms.
The W.F.T.U. dedicates this year’s Women’s Day to the women of Palestine, to the mothers of Gaza, to the girls in Ramalha who are facing today new barbarian attacks from the Israeli army.

Let’s express all together our Internationalist solidarity to the women of Palestine and to their heroic struggles.
The Secretariat






40, Zan Moreas street, Athens 11745 GREECE
Tel. +302109214417, +302109236700, Fax +30210 9214517
http://www.wftucentral.org/ E-mails: info@wftucentral.org, international@wftucentral.org

Women's Equality: Forward not back!

by Daphne Liddle

PROGRESS is never smooth and even; we live in a dialectical world. But recently it seems the struggle for women’s equality has been going backwards and the evidence is all around us.
There were certain points of principle we fought to have enshrined in law to prevent discrimination against women at work, battles we thought were done and settled so we could move on to new issues.
The logical next battles were to get these laws actually implemented throughout the country. The general view was that big “respectable” employers – the public sector, major companies and so on, would all be aware of the laws and the battles would be with small-time rogue employers who were not up to scratch on employment laws.
This was always an illusion of course. But TV tycoon Alan Sugar shattered it a few weeks ago with his admission that he and many other bosses have binned job applications from women because anti-discrimination laws forbid employers asking women about whether they have or plan to have children.
The star of BBC2’s The Apprentice said pregnant women are “entitled to have too much” and called for a change in the law to allow employers to ask recruits if they are planning a child. He said: “These laws are counter-productive for women. You’re not allowed to ask so it’s easy – just don’t employ them.”
We had the Archbishop of Canterbury, in the course of remarks about Sharia law, implying that family law was a relatively trivial matter.
Then a “human resources” manager publicly claimed that women earn less than men because they prefer it that way; they’re just not so competitive.
Last week the Guardian reported that one third of mothers lose significant ground in their career paths simply as a result of being mothers. It’s not easy being competitive when you are carrying an extra burden of domestic and parental responsibility.
There are of course some men, in gradually increasing numbers, who do get more involved in domestic responsibilities but it is still the exception rather than the rule.
The result is that thousands of women still never get to fulfil their potential and have to make do with staying in the back seat of life while others decide what direction they will go in.
Of course working class men also have very little control over the course and direction of their working lives; working class women have the least control of all – either at work or in the home where they still do the lion’s share of the work.
According to the Office of National Statistics the gender pay gap fell to its lowest ever rate of 12.8 per cent between 2006 and 2007 comparing the median hourly rate paid to women with that for men.
This slight progress arises from some titanic equal pay battles won by public sector unions. But unfortunately some of these have resulted in major pay restructuring in NHS and local government pay that have seen the pay of some men reduced rather than women’s raised.
The median hourly rate for men went up 2.8 per cent to £11.96, while the rate for women increased by 3.1 per cent to £10.46.
But when we look at weekly earnings, according to the ONS, on the internationally comparable measure based on mean earnings, women’s average hourly pay (excluding overtime) was 17.2 per cent less than men’s pay, showing a decrease on the comparable figure of 17.5 per cent for 2006.
In 2007, median weekly earnings of full-time employees for women of £394 were 21 per cent less than those for men (£498), unchanged from 2006.
The major reason for the discrepancy is that women – because of their domestic responsibilities – are less able to work long or unsociable hours. Many with young children opt for part-time working and part time rates are always lower than full-time.
So women continue to pay a swingeing levy throughout their lives for deciding to become a parent while men do not.
But setting women and men against each other is playing the bosses’ game of divide and rule. The truth is that bosses like Alan Sugar want the world and everybody’s lives organised to make it as easy as possible for them to make as much profit as possible.
We are living in a bourgeois capitalist society that has a one-dimensional view of the human race, which is seen as existing only for the purpose of making money. All other human activity: family life, leisure, rest and relaxation are regarded as subordinate and dispensable in favour of that one purpose.
The bosses are so blinkered they do not see – or care – how one-dimensional and unbalanced our society is becoming. And though women workers suffer most from this discrimination, men workers also suffer.
Bosses take it absolutely for granted that male workers will invariable put their bosses’ needs before their family or any other interests. To modern capitalism families are a trivial hobby that workers must set aside when the boss requires it.
Yet the bourgeois media hypocritically blame parents and the failure of the “family” for all the ills of society.
Capitalism – in Britain, the United States, Australia, Canada and increasingly in Western Europe – does not need its indigenous working class to reproduce itself. In all these places industry is declining. What industry remains in the capitalist/imperialist heartlands is capital intensive – machines do most of the work. The biggest employers in these places are the finance, public and service sectors.
Imperialism deliberately blocks industrialisation in the poorest countries of Africa and Latin America – it wants to keep these places dependent on the imperialists for technology. Imperialism also dumps cheap subsidised food in these places, destroying local agricultural economies.
All this serves to put pressure on young African and Latin American workers to want to get out and emigrate to the imperialist heartlands in search of economic advancement.
Once again the capitalist media wail and moan about waves of economic migrants but they welcome the cheap and eager labour – already raised to adulthood and educated. The former socialist states of Eastern Europe are also now a rich source of high quality working class migrants. The bosses have no need for indigenous workers to take time and effort having children, raising them and educating them.
So we now have an anti-child culture, where women are warned in advance that having children will ruin their lives, exhaust them and cost hundreds of thousands of pounds to rear. Few women’s pages in the newspapers or magazines now mention any joys associated with parenthood. Maternity services are seriously reduced; childbirth becomes lonely, frightening and dangerous with not enough midwives, hospital beds or support. Childcare provision is patchy and expensive yet mothers are expected back at work as quickly as possible.
Those in a proper job with a trade union may get their full entitlement to maternity leave and be allowed to ask the boss for more flexible hours. But in the minimum wage service sector – women working in shops, restaurants, hotels and so on no such concessions are made. London buses carrying workers home are crammed from before dawn until midnight and beyond with exhausted men and women, mothers and fathers and there are always a few with pushchairs and fretful babies who’ve been picked up from official or unofficial baby-minders at God-knows-what hour. It’s a long way from the civilised seven o’clock bedtimes with mum or dad reading a story to soothe the little one to sleep of the middle class household.
Once the children are grown a little, the media portrays them all as potential monsters. Once schools were able to offer after-hours activities but pay and teacher cuts in the 1980s did away with most of that. The National Curriculum and constant testing and examinations keep children’s noses to the grindstone, leaving no time for hobbies or cultural pursuits and the social development that goes with that and brings adult confidence.
Our children grow up deprived of their cultural heritage because capitalism doesn’t want them wasting time on that sort of thing when they should be learning how to improve the bosses’ profits.
Children are regarded as a menace if they gather in groups to chat among themselves or play out of doors. Shopping malls now install devices that emit a high pitched whine – inaudible to adults – simply to drive children a way. This amounts to punishing children by the deliberate infliction of discomfort simply for the crime of being young.
They see little of their overworked parents and have little ordinary social interaction with adults. The adult world of profit-making has no time for them; they are a nuisance and should go away. No wonder so many children are seriously depressed. And when they are old enough, no wonder they are reluctant to become parents.
The root cause of this worsening situation is the increasing rate of exploitation of the whole working class. New gadgets and gizmos around the house, designer furniture, laminate flooring, computers, giant HD televisions, MP3 players and so may give the illusion that workers’ standards of living are improving. It is not so.
A century ago a worker – usually a man – could earn enough to keep himself, his wife and a large family of children housed, fed and clothed. Working hours were long but not as long as today. Now two partners working all the hours they can cannot earn enough to keep up with massive housing debts, not to mention credit card and other debts. Their homes may look like palaces but they have no time to enjoy them and many are convinced they cannot afford to have children.
Half a century ago people worked nine-to-five and thought that was onerous. They had tea breaks and lunch breaks that lasted at least an hour. When the clock struck five people were out of the door and did not give their work another thought until nine o’clock the next day. They had time for their families, to go out and about. Weekends were for gardening, pottering about, lazing or even trips to the seaside.
Ironically workers who are more rested and relaxed are far more productive and make fewer mistakes than those who are tired and always under pressure.
Nominally wages are higher but we’ve lost time to rest and relax. Debts keep our noses to the grindstone; holidays and outings are postponed until they are forgotten. Our working lives rush by and suddenly we find ourselves too old and tired to enjoy those leisure occasions we have deferred so often and so long. We have to surrender our most modest daydreams of easier days to come as pension cuts mean continued working into old age, followed by declining health and the prospect of totally inadequate support services. Mobile phones and emails mean the boss can be on our backs at any time of night or day. No wonder so many workers, men and women, are seriously depressed.
At least most of the readers of this paper have involvement in the fight back to sustain our morale but many workers now, especially the young, are totally alienated from political – or any other involvement because their work demands all their time, thought and energy.
Yet most of the products of all this frantic work are of little use to most people. Modern technology would allow us to produce enough of the basic necessities and quite a few luxuries to meet the requirements of every child, woman and man on this planet with much less work – and much less using up of the world’s resources. It is only capitalism’s frantic need for ever increasing profits that drives the madness machine.
The fight for equal pay for women and changes to employment patterns to suit the needs of people rather than profit will leave all workers and their children better off and more rested and relaxed. No political or economic system can guarantee individual happiness but we can remove some of the biggest sources of human misery.
We must demand that the state recognises that rearing a child is the job of more than one exhausted woman – it requires the involvement of fathers, grandparents, siblings, aunts, uncles, cousins, teachers, health visitors, doctors, child minders, crèches, play leaders, youth clubs, park keepers, school crossings supervisors, neighbours, friends and many more.
Employment laws should allow all parents more time off to be with their children; no parents should be required to work unsocial hours in the evenings or at weekends and their pay should still be enough to keep them out of debt.
We must step back from the 24/7 society. Not many jobs really need to be done all the time – emergency services, caring for the sick and vulnerable, maintaining water and electricity supplies – apart from those most jobs could revert to reasonable closing times.
We must re-examine what is meant by flexible hours and recognise that this “benefit” has robbed us of proper tea and dinner breaks and the chance to chat that goes with that. “Flexi” must be to our benefit and not the bosses’.
Bosses must be told that whether they employ men or women they are just as likely to face demands for time off to attend to the needs of children and that women are not cheap labour.
Family law must be changed so that workers who are parents can decide to engage in or end partnerships according to their needs without economic penalties for themselves of their children. There must be no one trapped in a bad marriage because they fear impoverishment or homelessness.
And of course there must be vastly improved safe, high quality childcare facilities that really are affordable and allow both parents equal chances to pursue their careers.
These targets may seem a long way off under capitalism. But in striving for them we will be helping to make an impelling case for getting rid of capitalism and replacing it with socialism. And all socialist countries – even the ones that failed – have from the very beginning achieved huge advances towards these aims.

Free the Unions! Workers unity still the key

by Alex Kempshall

EVER SINCE society divided into classes the all-important question of remuneration for work done has loomed larger than any other in the political economy of human society. When capitalism became the prevailing mode of production its integral component, wage labour, made this aspect an even greater issue in the arena of inherent conflict between labour and capital.
The ruling class and all those who serve it have evolved more sophisticated methods to contain and reduce wages as a share of the proceeds ofproduction. In 1949 workers got 57 per cent of gross domestic product (GDP).By 1975, through the strength of the trade unions, this had increased to 65 per cent of GDP dropping back to 52 per cent by the end of the Tory government in 1997. By 2006 the gross operating surpluses of corporations(profit) totalled £301 billion and compensation of employees was some £721billion or 55 per cent of GDP; so some of the profit has been clawed back from the ruling class but there is still a long way to go to reach the 65 per cent of GDP that was achieved in 1975.
The British labour movement, during the 30 years from 1945, succeeded in building a fairly comprehensive system of social services and monetary benefits. This represented a social wage and was a means of recovering for the working class part of the profits that employers of labour had extracted from workers at the point of production.
This only came about because of the collective strength of the working class, organised through the trade unions pushing successive Labour Governments to legislate is favour of the working class, by establishing a comprehensive tax systems to pay for the social wage. In this way part of profits made from exploiting workers was recovered from the ruling class. Even so it should be remembered that the substantial proportion of the social wage was funded by taxing the working class. The social wage, as with wages, is an ongoing bone of contention between the classes.
The capitalist class seeks to ensure that more and more of these profits are retained after taxation, either by Government strategy to pass the burden of taxation increasingly onto the working class, or simply by tax avoidance.
According to the Government’s National Audit Office analysis of tax raised it was found that almost a third of the Britain’s 700 biggest businesses paid no corporation tax at all in the 2005-06 financial year. Some even received tax credits – J Sainsbury, the supermarket group, instead of paying corporation tax received a credit of £3 million in 2005-06 and in the following year it received another £9 million tax credit. For those financial years it made profits of £352 million and £429 million and distributed to shareholders dividends of £136 million and £165 million.
When the Government takes steps to increase the taxation of private equity firms from its current 10 per cent, the ruling class complain bitterly about the abolishment of taper relief on capital gains tax (CGT) in favour of a single 18 per cent rate. When Labour came to power in 1997 this tax was a single 40 per cent rate; the following year Gordon Brown reduced it to an effective rate of 10 per cent. Only £2 billion is paid in CGT, so even after doubling it the amount of tax paid will still be less than half of the bonuses paid to city bankers in any one year. The Government should revert to the 1997 position of treating CGT as income tax at the present higher rate of 40 per cent.
Corporate profits and capital gains are not the only form of income that accrues to the ruling class and their side-kicks. An examination of the division of wealth and incomes shows that the top fifth of the populationowns by far the biggest ratio of wealth in Britain. Historically income has always been grossly unequally divided, now it is even more so.
Income Data Services, a research organisation, recently revealed that chief executives of FTSE 100 companies saw their average total remuneration (pay,bonus and long term incentives) increase to the end of June 2007 by 16 percent to £3.17 million, doubling over the last five years. Meanwhile those in the FTSE 350 rose by 20 per cent during the same 12 months. Also in a poll of pay experts “drawn from human resources managers and compensation and benefits specialists conducted in September 2007, Income data Services found that more than half thought that executive directors of listed companies were “overpaid”.
Brendan Barber, TUC general secretary, commenting on this report said:“Britain’s top directors clearly have no shame. Year in, year out they have been paying themselves far bigger rises than they are prepared to pay their staff, while lecturing the rest of us on the need for low taxes. It beggars belief that they are somehow working twice as hard as five years ago. Confirming the unpopularity of fat cat salaries an opinion poll conducted during the summer of 2007 for the Financial Times found that almost 60 per cent of British citizens thought that the Government should cap the earnings of senior executives.The description “fat cats” also extends to bankers and traders in the City who took home £8.8 billion in bonuses in 2006 and a further £7.4 billion in 2007. This is anticipated to drop, on the basis of the current monetary crisis, to a paltry £6.2 billion in 2008. These bonuses pushed up the average earning index from 3.3 per cent to 5.4 per cent during the month of February 2007.So there’s plenty of money for those with their noses in the trough!

What about the workers?

A report published in October 2007, by uSwitch – the online gas and electricity price comparison organisation, based on figures produced by the Office for National Statistics figures, showed that disposable income in Britain is at its lowest level for a decade with net household income as a proportion of gross household income down five per cent compared with 1997,mainly due to utility bill and tax increases.
Despite this, consumer spending rose 3.0 per cent in the first three monthsof 2007 compared with the same quarter the previous year. It is therefore not surprising that consumer debt has reached a record level of £1,345 billion, almost double the gross annual wage of all employees in Britain.
In April 2007 median gross weekly earnings for full-time employee jobs on adult rates was £457, an increase of 2.9 per cent on the previous year, with25 per cent earning less than £326. In the private sector the median was £439, in the public sector the comparable figure was £498.
The median gross weekly earnings rate for all employee jobs was £362 per week.
However, if we look at average earnings, as the Labour Research Department(LRD) does, average earnings in April 2007 were £554, up about 3.5 per cent on the previous year. This disparity illustrates the difficulty in assessing what wage rates are and demonstrates the old adage that there are lies, damn lies and statistics. Average wages can easily be distorted by high paid workers. Incidentally the Government is introducing a new “experimental”method of calculating average wages that attempts to show that wages are actually rising at 4.5 per cent, which the Financial Times claims is “closer to the levels likely to trigger inflationary concerns”.
So according to National Statistics Online, wages are rising at either 2.9 per cent, 3.5 per cent or 4.5 per cent, which just goes to prove that an across the board flat-rate monetary increase of substance is the only way forward to unite the class in fighting for higher wages at the expense of the ruling class.
The following example illustrates the difference between the mean and median when analysing statistical information. Most people use mean and average interchangeably.
Suppose in a factory eight workers get paid £1 per week, one gets paid £2 and a further eight get paid £5. The total wage bill for the 17 workers in the factory is £50. If the total wage bill was divided equally among the workers the average wage would be £2.94. The median of the wages paid can be found by arranging all the wages paid from the lowest wage to highest and picking the middle one. In this factory it is the worker with the eighth highest wage which is £2 because, of the 17 workers, there are eight workers paid less than £2 and eight paid more than £2. By contrast, the average wageof £2.94 is not at all typical, since nobody in the factory is paid a wage approximating £2.94.
Looking at real wages the LRD, in its survey of wage agreements, reported that a worker on the Nissan assembly line could earn a maximum weekly wageof £489. At Airbus UK a skilled worker earns £400 per week. At ArrivaNorthWest an experienced bus driver earns £307 per week and at BAe SystemsSurface Fleet Solutions a skilled worker could earn £350 per week. To earn more than the average wage at Nissan a worker would have to be in a supervisory engineer role, in the other agreements none of the workers earn a wage approaching the average.
In a survey produced by the Higher Education Statistics Agency, reported bythe Financial Times on 5th November 2007, showed that more than one in five male and more than a quarter of female graduates in full-time work are still on less than £336 a week 3½ years after graduating – well below the full-time National Statistics Online average wage of £554. Interestingly this Financial Times article reported that the average wage was £423!
So whether it’s the Financial Times’ average wage of £423, ASHE’s median wage £447 or the £537 average wage publicised by the Government some, trade unions have negotiated seemingly significant percentage wage increases that have included a 7.9 per cent rise for 600 workers at Drax power station inYorkshire, a 5.35 per cent pay rise for 10,000 Network Rail workers, a 4.7 per cent increase for 60,000 BT staff, and a 4.5 per cent rise from April at BAE Systems Submarines – proving that the higher pay rises go to the best organised. But the 7.9 per cent awarded to workers at Drax power station based on the Financial Times’ average wage would still leave workers £80 per week short of the average wage, as publicised by the Government.
For wage settlements negotiated in July 2007, as reported by LRD, 25 per cent secured a wage increase of 4.58 per cent or more, 25 per cent secured awage increase of three per cent or less with a median of four per cent.
It should be emphasised that these figures are for organised workers. Those workers in areas where there is no strong union would expect pay rises substantially less than these negotiated rates. Even so the median of four per cent is barely above the increase in the cost of living and 25 per cent have suffered what is effectively a pay cut. Overall average earnings roseby 3.7 per cent driven mainly by bonuses in financial services, namely bankers.
Postal workers will have decided, by 27th November 2007, whether to accept a headline pay increase of 6.9 per cent over the next two years. Effectively what is actually on offer is a 3.8 per cent offer for the year ending March 2008. A further 1.5 per cent increase plus £400 for 2008/09 is on the table,to be made locally, when new flexibility arrangements have been implemented.
The agreement between the CWU and the Post Office states the flexibility arrangements as: “To cover for one another and develop sensible options toabsorb absences and increased workload, where time exists within normalhours”. The reward for this is to be implemented on a local level; again quoting from the document: “Local offices will be entitled to the 1.5 per cent pay increase from 7th April 2008, subject to deployment of these new arrangements. Any offices where deployment is deferred will receive the additional 1.5 per cent from the date of deployment”. In addition the pension scheme will be closed to new members and existing members will have their retirement age raised from 60 to 65.
As a reward and no doubt and in anticipation of the postal workers acceptinga pay cut, Royal Mail directors’ pay increased from £4.3 million to £7.3 million in the year to the end of March 2007, with chief executive Adam Crozier receiving a pay rise of £69,000, plus £140,000 in lieu of pension and £1.1 million paid into his incentive plan. A delivery postal worker is paid as at the end of March 2007 a maximum of £311 per week or £16,172 peryear.
With inflation increasing at 4.2 per cent per year, according to National Statistics in October 2007, even the median trade union negotiated pay settlement of four per cent is effectively a pay cut. Inflation is expected to increase for the foreseeable future, primarily though food and fuel inflation. World food prices have risen in the past year by 11 per cent and non-food inflation runs at a rate of about seven per cent, according to International Monetary Fund estimates.
Back in 1996 the International Labour Organisation criticised the rise in wage inequality particularly in the US, Britain and New Zealand, which it argued is partly due to the decline in trade union density and decentralisation of pay bargaining.
The mean total weekly paid hours of full-timers was 39.4 hours in April 2007 and the percentage of full-time employees working paid overtime in was 22.5 per cent. At our 2006 Congress we noted that some 4.76 million workersworked an average of 7.4 hours unpaid overtime every week, saving employers £23 billion a year. This is only part of the picture as an increasingly significant amount of time is spent travelling to work.
The TUC produced a report in October 2007 which revealed that the number of people travelling for more than an hour to get to work had risen by more than 22 per cent since 1996, with an average of 54 minutes to get to and from work each day. More than 1.3 million people working in London travel for more than two hours each day and half a million do so in the north-west.All this adds significantly to the stresses and strains of the working day.Is it little surprise that 1.09 million people are on incapacity benefitsuffering from “mental and behavioural” problems?

What of jobs?

At the end of August 2007:

The employment rate for people of working age was 74.4 per cent or 29.10 million – a rise of 82,000 over the year; in the previous 10 years employment was growing at 300,000 a year. So in the last year employment prospects have reduced significantly.
Of the economically active 400,000 were in temporary employment solely because they could not find permanent work and more were self-employed due to the loss of a salaried job.
There were 7.97 million people of working age who were economically inactive, 1.65 million were classified as unemployed, 835,000 were claiming unemployment benefit and a further two million who, although not actively seeking work, would do so if jobs were available.
There are also 200,000 16 and 17 year-olds looking for work. The Treasuryhas estimated that the number claiming unemployment benefit will rise to 930,000 over the next 12 months. Thus there are probably four million people looking for work, most are unlikely to find a job as there currently only 668,800 job vacancies.
These numbers of economically inactive are the highest since comparable records began in 1971.
In the later part of 2007 xenophobia has been lifted to be the number one tool to attack the unity of the working class.
This should come as no surprise when one considers that the British capitalism has failed to maintain economic growth compared with itscompetitors. To this end they have elevated statistics to “prove” that foreign-born workers are cutting “British” workers out of the jobs market. It has been claimed that the 1.5 million foreign workers, who arrived since1997 and have filled more than half of the new jobs created since 1997.
So what? If one is trying to persuade people that immigration is good or bad, one has to analyse its impact on the gross domestic product and its distribution, after subtracting the incomes earned by these foreign workers.The closest we get is a report, highlighted in a recent edition of the New Worker, produced by the Treasury, Home Office and Department of Work andPensions, which showed that on this basis they contributed £6 billion a year to the British economy. What isn’t discussed in the bourgeois media is:

• why has job creation collapsed by 220,000 jobs this year?
• why has inequality increased?
• why are workers working longer hours?
• why do workers have to commute ever greater distances to find a job?
• why are record profits being made at the expense of wages?
• why are the ruling class taking more and more from the economy to furnish their lavish lifestyles?
• why are workers having to spend future earnings (go into debt) justto maintain their standard of living?

The reason why the media isn’t posing these questions? It’s because the truth is too unpalatable – namely that capitalism isn’t working. When capitalism is in difficulties the capitalists have to find scapegoats and at the moment what better scapegoat than a foreign worker. Therefore we should support the TUC resolution adopted at the 2007 TUC Congress which stated:

“Congress recognises the benefits to the economy, public services and local communities of the presence of migrant workers but believes that more must be done to tackle exploitation and abuse by unscrupulous employers, to encourage recruitment of migrant workers to the trade union movement and to improve and enhance support services provided to migrant workers and theirfamilies.”

Manufacturing is the most important sector of the British economy as this is the main wealth-creating sector. Manufacturing currently generates around£147 billion of export revenue a year. The success of manufacturing within Britain is essential for future prosperity. Although it accounts for only a fifth of the economy it generates 60 per cent of all exports and 80 per cent of spending on research and development.
However, among the ruling class and their representatives in Government, the predominant school of thought is that it is the financial sector that is the key to Britain’s future. One would have thought that the events during the summer of 2007 should have dispelled any belief in that theory. To quote Ken Lewis, Bank of America’s chief executive officer: “I’ve had all the fun Ican stand in the investment banking business at the moment. You can’t have a business where you make money for five years, then give it all back in one year”. Well the financial sector doesn’t magic up money from thin air, all it does is move around the value added by workers to raw materials, in other words those workers who work in the extractive, agricultural, engineering and manufacturing industries.
So what is happening in manufacturing? In the last two years the haemorrhaging of jobs from the sector has continued at an alarming rate. In 1997 there were six million employed in manufacturing; by May 2004 employment had dropped to 3.3 million. Two years later in May 2006 that figure has dropped to three million.
But seen in context, the gross value added in manufacturing in 2005 was £148billion, almost 20 per cent higher than in 1979. So with a considerably reduced workforce and increased use of new technology it was still able to add significantly to the British economy. In relative terms it has grown more slowly than that of other developed economies – being out performed during the last 25 years by the US, Japan and Western Europe.
Britain’s manufacturing decline has been exaggerated, by as much as 20 per cent, by the outsourcing of functions such as accounting and delivery services. When these activities were an integral part of manufacturing they were defined as manufacturing activities and not costs. Once outsourced to service companies they are recorded as part of the service sector and are recorded in the profits of that sector and this has been used as a tool to divide the industrial working class.
It is no coincidence that the Tory attacks on trade unionism went hand-in-hand with the dismantling of the coal industry, manufacturing and agriculture. The only way to redress the balance and defend manufacturing is for a stronger trade union movement. No amount of legislation, hand-wringing or any Alternative Economic and Political Strategies is going to force the ruling class to reverse their direction.
The TUC, at its 2007 Congress, resolved to call upon the Government to:

“Establish a fair trading environment for British manufacturing byaddressing, in particular, the excessive costs of energy; inappropriatetrade and public procurement policies; and the failure to utilise available European Union resources to promote British manufacturing advance.”

No mention here of reversing the Tory anti-trade union laws, no mention of increasing wages – so that workers can buy back the goods that they produce.
Then in November 2007 in response to the Government’s proposals for apprenticeships the TUC issued a press statement : “The TUC welcomes measures to improve the number of apprenticeships on offer to young people starting out in the world of work and to older workers looking for a change of direction.
“If apprenticeships are to offer meaningful career opportunities, they must be of good quality, where apprentices are treated well and earn a decent wage. Legislative powers to regulate and promote apprenticeships give the opportunity to do just that, and it is important we get it right. The Government should ask the Low Pay Commission to review the current minimum wage exemptions that apply to apprentices.”
Contrary to this legalistic approach by the TUC, the key to the defence of manufacturing and apprenticeships is more trade union rights and higher wages. The struggle to raise wages would go some way towards strengthening trade unions and giving greater confidence to their members and encouraging young workers to join. It would place the unions in a more favourable vantage point to secure the restoration of free collective bargaining and tow in back other working conditions that have been lost over the last 30years.
A resurgent labour movement would have renewed power to offset the effects of imperialism and to bring pressure to bear on the ruling class to reverse the decline in manufacturing and wages.
The lifting of the morale and class consciousness through struggle would play a positive role in improving the stance of the Labour Party, making it more responsive to the needs of the working class.
It may be objected that such a strategy would be doomed to failure. The answer is that it is the struggle itself that is crucial and the activity it engenders. Through the struggle some immediate material benefit may accrue to the working class, and it might hinder the ruling class’s offensive against long-established conditions. More important, the objectives of the struggle will serve as a focus, a direction, for the class helping the cohesiveness of its activity. In this the question of fundamental change is bound to surface.
After all it was Lenin who said:

“However, strikes, which arise out of thevery nature of capitalist society, signify the beginning of the working class struggle against that system of society.
“But when the workers state their demands jointly and refuse to submit to the money-bags, they cease to be slaves, they become human beings; they begin to demand that their labour should not only serve to enrich a handful of idlers, but should also enable those who work to live like human beings.
“When the workers refuse to work, the entire machine threatens to stop.Every strike reminds the capitalists that it is the workers and not they who are the real masters – the workers who are more and more loudly proclaimingtheir rights. Every strike reminds the workers that their position is not hopeless, that they are not alone.”

As part of the struggle to defend the class we should give full support toand demand that the TUC lives up to its decisions to:

• give full support to unions taking action to defend jobs andservices and to win fair pay;• ensure that no Remploy factory is closed;
• oppose the two per cent pay target for public sector workers byco-ordinating opposition at national and local levels, including co-ordinated joint industrial action;
• organise a national demonstration against any furtherprivatisations;
• defend the welfare state;
• fast-track action on equal pay.

If the TUC can be pushed to take up these demands in a forceful way, the confidence to take on bigger tasks will be immeasurably strengthened. In doing so we must demand that the TUC does not take the “honest broker”approach as it has done in other recent struggles. TUC general secretary Brendan Barber chaired the recent talks between the CWU and Royal Mail; instead he should have been on the picket line.
Trade unionists, Labour Party activists and Communists must act to reverse the direction taken by Brown and Blair in their desperation to run capitalism.
Trade Unions and the TUC exist to defend workers. They are not revolutionary organisations to bring about the overthrow of capitalism. But neither do they exist to hand workers over to capitalism on a plate.
Trade unions should coordinate bargaining by launching simultaneous and substantial increases in pay. Other demands should include the 35-hour week, full employment, health and safety, training, the protection of core skills and safeguards for labour mobility, flexibility and productivity.
Prior to 1997 most trade union conferences agreed not to support “wage restraint or an incomes policy under the next Labour government” and to“oppose any attempt to undermine free collective bargaining.” A united struggle, in which the TUC coordinates the movement to win wide support for each struggle and on a number of these fronts will inevitably lead to confrontation with the law. On this basis the law can be challenged by a movement united around these common set of goals – pay, hours and jobs.