How to combat the worldwide offensive of capitalism against the rights and conditions of the working class? This is a big issue facing the trade unions today. So also is the absence of a distinct political voice for working-class people as former ?workers? parties have abandoned a working-class and socialist perspective. PETER TAAFFE (General Secretary of the Socialist Party, England and Wales) shows in this reveiw that in the writings of Marx and Engels are to be found many answers to begin overcoming these problems confronting trade unions today.

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THE SICKENING video images showing British soldiers kicking and beating unarmed Iraqi teenagers in 2004 and new images of abused Iraqi prisoners at the US-run Abu Ghraib prison in 2003, will come as little surprise to those in the anti-Iraq war movement.

By Dave Carr, Socialist Party (more…)

Joanne Delaney, a Mandate shop Steward in the Ashleaf shopping centre was dismissed by Dunnes Stores for wearing a union badge. Pat Waine from The Socialist Party in Ireland spoke to Joanne recently. (more…)

ONE of Melbourne’s oldest shopping strips, Smith Street in Collingwood, will alter dramatically after State Government approval for a large retail and residential development is granted today.

By Rachel Kleinman, taken from the Age Newspaper February 15, 2006. Includes quotes from SP Councillor Stephen Jolly. (more…)

In 2006 John Howard is will unleash some of the biggest attacks on workers and youth this country has seen for many years.
Further attacks on the rights of workers, students, women, Aborigines and welfare will all be on the cards. (more…)

The UNITE campaign in Australia supports the SuperSizeMyPay.Com campaign in NZ. Below we publish a report of a successful mass meeting in Auckland. Over 1000 fast food workers and their supporters filled the Auckland Town Hall yesterday to give added impetus to the SuperSizeMyPay.Com campaign and to other low paid workers campaigns. (more…)

HAS US president George Bush, the die-hard neo-conservative former Texan oil man, gone green? His state of the union speech attacked his country’s “addiction” to imported oil. Instead, he proposed all manner of alternative clean fuels and technologies that his administration was funding research into. (more…)

JUST A week or so ago, the four-year long ceasefire in Sri Lanka’s civil war was on the verge of collapse. In seven weeks more than 100 people had been killed, most of them members of Sri Lanka’s armed forces. But on 23 January, two key figures involved in efforts to renew peace talks arrived in the capital, Colombo.

By Clare Doyle, Committee for a Workers’ International (CWI) (more…)

Hong Kong?s market-driven education ?reforms? and insensitive comments by a top government official have enraged the city?s hard-pressed teachers.

By Laurence Coates (more…)

100th anniversary of the Theory of Permanent Revolution

ONE HUNDRED years ago, while in a St Petersburg jail awaiting trial for his leading role in the defeated 1905 Russian Revolution, Leon Trotsky formulated the ?Theory of Permanent Revolution?.
By Niall Mulholland, CWI (more…)