Solidarity 483, 24 October 2018

Decriminalise abortion!

On Tuesday 23 October, Labour MP Diana Johnson introduced a ten-minute rule bill in the House of Commons to decriminalise abortion in the UK. 208 MPs voted in favour, and 123 against. The Offences Against the Persons Act 1861 makes abortion illegal in the UK, and this Act was only partly superseded by the Abortion Act 1967. This means that the ″compromises″ built into the ′67 Act, such as the two-doctor rule and giving a reason for termination, must be followed for an abortion not to be a criminal offence. In theory anyone breaching the law could face life in prison. It also means that...

Protest against new fracking site

Over 1,000 protesters marched on Saturday 20 October against a new fracking site in Lancashire. The site was given the green light to start a few days earlier that week, the first frack since 2011 and the week after the IPCC issued dire warnings about climate change. IPCC’s report stated that “rapid and … unprecedented [transitions] … in all sectors” are necessary to limit global warming, which, will displace many millions and cause health problems. The slower the transition, the worse this will be. Central to this is the fastest possible reduction in fossil fuel extraction, transitioning...

Left must reshape the Remain movement

The headlines following from Saturday’s People’s Vote demo have, understandably, focused on its size. Organisers say 670,000 people took part. If true, that is bigger than the Trump demo this summer. It’s plausible that it was bigger that the anti-austerity March for the Alternative in 2011, at the height of the public-sector strikes. It’s possibly the largest since the anti-war demonstrations in 2003-4. Whatever the truth, it certainly dwarfed the overwhelming majority of protests that have taken place in recent years. Workers’ Liberty took part in the “left bloc” organised by Another Europe...

17-18 November: students move to change NUS and Labour Students

Things are moving forward with the founding of the Socialist Feminist Campus Collective and talks about launching a Student Left Network. These came out of the Student Activist Weekender and Student Feminist Campaign Day, co-hosted by a range of local and national student activist groups in early September. Attendees from over twenty campuses agreed to launch a socialist feminist organisation active in NUS Women’s Campaign, and to go for a national student left organisation to facilitate joint activism across campuses and form the left bloc of NUS and Labour Students. Two meetings on 17-18...

Khashoggi murder shows Saudi state under pressure

Saudi Arabia’s regime is a stain on the modern world. And the Saudi state’s decades-old campaign to export an extreme, fundamentalist version of political Islam, funded by vast amounts of oil money, is a world-wide political pollutant. All political and workers’ rights are severely restricted in Saudi Arabia. All public gatherings, including peaceful demonstrations, are prohibited under a 2011 order made by the Ministry of the Interior. The country’s significant Shiite minority, based in the oil-rich East, is seriously repressed. Women’s rights are restricted by segregation and a male-guardian...

Teamsters fightback over UPS deal

In the US, Teamsters working for the package delivery giant UPS are once again fighting on two fronts: against their bosses and against the union bureaucracy. UPS and the International Brotherhood of Teamsters have negotiated a contract that covers 243,000 workers which will introduce a new class of driver with lower pay. On 5 October 2018, 54% of Teamsters in UPS who voted on the deal chose to reject it. Activists achieved this result through serious campaigning efforts in the rank-and-file, including rallies in car parks and online videos that reached up to 50,000 viewers. Shockingly, the...

How Marx transcended "the rule of law"

With the passing of Robert Fine on 9 June 2018, the British left lost a truly exceptional figure. A respected sociologist at the University of Warwick, Fine was a long-time sympathiser of Workers’ Liberty. Though he was less involved in frontline activism towards the end of his life, he never lost his commitment to working-class struggle. In short, Fine never became a stereotypical “Marxist academic”. To highlight his impressive body of literature I am going to review five of his major books, starting with Democracy and the Rule of Law: Marx’s Critique of the Legal Form (Blackburn Press 2002...

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