Solidarity 566, 7 October 2020

Food couriers organise nationwide

In York and Sheffield, food delivery couriers are continuing an ongoing campaign of boycotts, strikes and demonstrations. Their aim is to civilise a wild-west industry that relies on Victorian-style super-exploitation, painted up as the modern “gig economy”. Deliveroo, UberEats and other operators have used the coronavirus crisis as cover to slash pay and over-recruit – all the while noisily lauding their exploited workforce as “heroes”. In Sheffield, much attention has been drawn to the plight of workers who fall foul of Deliveroo’s seemingly-arbitrary sacking policy. One union member has...

Millionaire misanthrope hospitalised

Old man Trump knows just how much racial hatred he stirred up in the blood spot of human hearts The old man Trump folk singer Woody Guthrie attacked in 1954 was Donald Trump’s father Fred. Woody was protesting against the racist housing practices of landlord Fred Trump in Brooklyn. Fred Trump also had form for associating with the Ku Klux Klan. In 1927 the KKK held an anti-Catholic march in Queens, New York and Fred Trump was one of seven “berobed marchers” to get arrested. Racism, like avarice, is a part of Donald Trump’s character inherited from his father. In 1989 he took out full page...

Back student rent strikes!

With numbers of university students testing positive for Covid rising dramatically — 400 at Nottingham University, nearly 500 at Sheffield University, over 700 at Northumbria — student action is beginning to get off the ground. The rising Covid infection has destroyed university bosses’ claims that face-to-face teaching was sustainable and campuses were “open for business”. Thousands of students are now in lockdown in crowded halls. Given a choice, many students would now prefer to go back to their home town to study online or defer their degrees. At Glasgow University, students have been...

The "idiot of Vienna"

The expression “antisemitism is the socialism of fools” is widely attributed to the late-nineteenth-century German socialist August Bebel. In fact, Bebel did not ‘invent’ the expression. Nor did he even agree with it. The original version of the saying is to be found in a speech by Ferdinand Kronawetter, an Austrian liberal sympathetic to the labour movement, at a general meeting of the Margarethen District Electoral Association held in Vienna in April of 1889: “We democrats are called traitors, Jews and lackeys of Jews. We are none of these, but neither are we the boot-polishers of...

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