Solidarity 299, 9 October 2013

The Republicans in the US Congress seem set to take the US budget deficit up to the wire on 17 October. And possibly beyond, to the point where the US government not only sends workers home unpaid, but fails to pay its bills. If president Obama and the Democrats campaigned boldly for the principle of universal health insurance — which is what the Republicans want to destroy — then the Republicans could not get away with it. Or even if the Democrats were bold about using unusual financial expedients. But the chief political lesson is on how politicians who are militant and determined can use...

Big investors, and a fair few middle-class people who can afford £750 to bid for shares, stand to make large windfall gains as Royal Mail shares are allocated and start trading, from 15 October. The government has deliberately set the share price low to get a successful sell-off, and the moneyed classes are confident that new private bosses will be able to get good profits by beating down postal workers’ pay and conditions. On 16 October the postal workers’ union CWU will announce the result of a ballot on strikes to win guarantees on terms and conditions. However, the union’s campaign so far...

Cloudy Sunday is the first novella by Mike Kyriazopoulos. Mike will be well-known to many members and sympathisers of the Alliance for Workers' Liberty, in which he was active until 2007 when he moved to New Zealand and joined the Workers' Party/Fightback, as well as to reps in the Communication Workers' and Public and Commercial Services Unions in which he was also active as a postal worker and civil servant. He began writing Cloudy Sunday earlier this year after being diagnosed with motor neurone disease. For a short book of seventy pages, Cloudy Sunday packs a lot of historical and other...

Between 12 and 26 November 2013, a young woman jailed by the government of Israel for refusing to serve in its army of occupation is speaking across the UK, on a tour organised by the socialist organisation Workers' Liberty to make solidarity with the Palestinians and the Israeli left. Click here for details of tour . Noam Gur is 19 years old, from Jerusalem. She is a queer and feminist as well as anti-militarist activist. In April 2012 she was jailed for refusing to serve in the Israeli Defence Force as part of compulsory national service. Noam says: "I refused to join an army that has, since...

From La Verite, 30 Sep 1944, the paper of the Trotskyist Internationalist Communist Party. This was part of an open letter to the President of the National Federation of the French Press in protest against delay in legalising publication of La Verite in liberated France. The Gaullist Minister responsible for the affair was Andre Malraux. Special issue of La Verite, 11 August 1944, at the time of the collapse of the Nazi occupation of Paris We are asked whether La Verite was an organ of "resistance" for four years. The first number of La Verite was secretly mimeographed as early as August 1940...