Workers' Liberty 29, March 1996

The Paris commune of 1871 was the first workers' government. Tom Willis looks at it's significance 125 years on. Download PDF

On the Australian system of student income support Download PDF

Why the Liverpool dockers have linked up internationally in their fight for trade union rights. Download PDF

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Jill Mountford, secretary of the welfare state network described her work as an organiser of WSN's conference. Download PDF

Editorial: There is no British solution, Mr Adams! The monthly survey: The way to peace is equal rights (Israel Palestine) Australia: Labor and the accord swept away Ford's workers stand by their man The new workers' movement in South Korea Download PDF

Possibly the most hyped British movie ever, Trainspotting is also one of the best British movies of recent years. From the team who made the unusual thriller Shallow Grave , and based on Irving Welsh’s cult novel, the film follows a group of Edinburgh skag-heads, and in particular Renton (Ewan McGregor), who wants to kick the habit. After a couple of false starts, he moves to London and is doing okay until two of his mates turn up, one of them on the run following an armed robbery. They drag him back down, until he gets involved in a big heroin sale which, if they get caught, would mean a long...

This could be a headline in the Daily Sport or, quite plausibly, a plot for The X-files, the hugely popular imported American sci-fi TV series on BBC1. Slickly made and entertaining, it plays on every paranoid conspiracy theory and on every wildest wet dream. It is total bilge! For those three people who haven’t seen the show, it depicts two FBI agents who investigate paranormal events and invariably discover that they are caused by aliens, government conspiracies, a cult, or all three. Or have some other bizarre cause. Recent plots, for instance, have included vampires, alien bounty hunters...

Four Rooms bombed with the critics, but Quentin Tarantino remains hot property. According to Paul Schrader, writer of such Martin Scorsese movies as Taxi Driver and The Last Temptation of Christ , and director of — among others — American Gigolo , and Mishima , Hollywood is desperately trying to remould its output on Tarantino-esque lines, but can’t work out what they are. Schrader sees Tarantino as a watershed in American film, ending the tradition of what he calls ‘the existential hero’. Travis Bickle in Taxi Driver is seeking to shape a place for himself in the world, however warped...

I joined International Socialists (IS) in April 1972 and was expelled in August 1975. I joined in Cardiff where at the start we had three members. For about a year the local organisation had a shaky, middle-class existence. In the months before the February ’74 election, we began to grow quickly, on a diet of anti-Toryism. The general mood in the movement at that time was virulently anti-Tory. IS swam with the tide. A lot of workers joined up. By mid-1974 IS had set up perhaps 40 or 50 factory groups. Nevertheless, IS had no idea how to relate to a Labour government. What we built soon fell to...