Urgent: Venezuela
REPUDIATE THE BRUTAL MURDER DE THE WORKERS’ LEADERS RICHARD GALLARDO, LUIS HERNANDEZ AND CARLOS REQUENA!
By LTS of Venezuela
Friday, November 28, 2008
Repudiate the brutal murder of the workers’ leaders Richard Gallardo, Luís Hernández and Carlos Requena!
For a big national and international campaign to demand trial and exemplary punishment for the material and intellectual authors of this crime!
Yesterday, Thursday, November 27, comrades Richard Gallardo, national coordinator of the UNT and chairman of the Aragua section, Luís Hernández, union leader at Pepsi Cola, and Carlos Requena, work safety delegate from Alpina, militants of the Unidad Socialista de Izquierda (USI), were murdered in Cagua (Aragua state).
These comrades were leading the effort of solidarity with the Alpina workers, at a business owned by Colombian capital, that the workers seized in struggle against a breach of the contract and in the face of a threat to close the firm. Just that day, the workers had to resist a fierce police repression that included cops entering the plant and an eviction, with a toll of four workers wounded. As a result of the solidarity offered by workers and union leaders of the UNT, the workers recovered the plant again. That afternoon, the comrades had publicly demanded a statement by the recently elected PSUV governor, Rafael Isea; they also warned that if the factory was closed, the workers would opt for starting production under their own control, following the example of the comrades from Sanitarios Maracay. That night, comrades Gallardo, Hernández and Requena were shot in the La Encrucijada district, in Cagua.
Already on previous occasions, leading comrades of the UNT-Aragua, one of the most combative regional sections of the UNT, had received several threats. This brutal murder is not isolated from the situation of sharp labor conflicts in Aragua, not accidentally the state where the exemplary struggle by the Sanitarios Maracay workers for nationalization under workers’ control gained a lot of strength, including carrying out the first regional workers’ strike in almost a decade, in May last year.
Already last year, we could see how in the conflict at FUNDIMECA, the Valencia factory for making fans, the bosses used paid assassins to try to smash the hard struggle by the women workers for their rights, with the result that one female comrade got shot in the leg. All this happened with the complicity of the judges and state police.
From the Liga de Trabajadores por el Socialismo (LTS), together with our workers’ and student leaders, we declare our solidarity with the grief of the relatives and fellow militants of the comrades, a sorrow that is also ours, since we have shared a trench of joint struggle on more than one occasion. We join the call to the political organizations of the workers’ and socialist left, to political and intellectual personalities, to the union, student and human rights organizations, to declare themselves forcefully against this crime and carry out a large and active national and international campaign to demand exemplary punishment for the material and intellectual authors of this crime against the working-class vanguard of our country. We demand that the national and regional government immediately open an investigation in the hands of a commission made up of workers and human rights organizations, to discover the truth about this crime.
This is one more action that shows not only that there is no revolution nor socialism in the country, but that the institutions of this bourgeois state, as could not be otherwise, are completely on the side of the bosses’ interests against the struggles of workers and the impoverished people, when hundreds of murders of peasants and workers at the hands of paid assassins have gone unpunished. Between repression by the Guardia Nacional and the police on one hand, the “justice” system on the other, and murderers hired by the bosses, without the need to agree, they form a pair of pincers against the most hardened struggles the working class is beginning to wage. Our slogan must be to trust in our own class forces, without putting any confidence in projects of class conciliation!
Liga de Trabajadores por el Socialismo
Caracas, November 28, 2008
LTS
LIGA DE TRABAJADORES POR EL SOCIALISMO
www.lts.org. ve
lts@lts.org.ve
Member of the FRACCIÓN TROTSKISTA - CUARTA INTERNACIONAL
Sunday, November 30, 2008
Friday, November 28, 2008
IRAN--Free Farzad Kamangar now!
Free Farzad Kamangar now!
Following an appeal from LabourStart and Education International yesterday (26 November), many trade unionists throughout the world sent protest emails to the leaders of the Islamic Republic of Iran protesting against Farzad Kamangar's imminent execution. Those writing to Ayatollah Khamenei included Brendan Barber, the General Secretary of the Trades Union Congress (in Britain).
According to Education International, the international teachers' federation, he was taken from his cell in Tehran's Evin prison on 26 November in preparation for execution. The guards told him he was about to be executed and made fun of him, calling him a martyr.
Fortunately Farzad Kamangar has not been executed. His lawyer has spoken to him and he is, considering the circumstances, quite well. The rumours and preparations for his execution are despicable stunts that highlight the real danger that this Kurdish teacher still faces. However, even though his arrest, the five minutes' trial and long imprisonment have been based on "absolutely zero evidence" there is nothing to stop the death sentence being carried out at a whim.
His arrest on trumped up charges, subsequent trial and death sentence have not only mobilised exiled labour activists but have also provoked protests in Iranian Kurdistan itself - including a picket by around 300 teachers.
We urge all trade unionists and labour activists to support the LabourStart campaign by filling in the online protest form.
Iranian Workers' Solidarity Network
27 November 2008
For more information on Farzad Kamangar see the special section at
http://www.iwsn.org/campaigns/teachers.htm
Following an appeal from LabourStart and Education International yesterday (26 November), many trade unionists throughout the world sent protest emails to the leaders of the Islamic Republic of Iran protesting against Farzad Kamangar's imminent execution. Those writing to Ayatollah Khamenei included Brendan Barber, the General Secretary of the Trades Union Congress (in Britain).
According to Education International, the international teachers' federation, he was taken from his cell in Tehran's Evin prison on 26 November in preparation for execution. The guards told him he was about to be executed and made fun of him, calling him a martyr.
Fortunately Farzad Kamangar has not been executed. His lawyer has spoken to him and he is, considering the circumstances, quite well. The rumours and preparations for his execution are despicable stunts that highlight the real danger that this Kurdish teacher still faces. However, even though his arrest, the five minutes' trial and long imprisonment have been based on "absolutely zero evidence" there is nothing to stop the death sentence being carried out at a whim.
His arrest on trumped up charges, subsequent trial and death sentence have not only mobilised exiled labour activists but have also provoked protests in Iranian Kurdistan itself - including a picket by around 300 teachers.
We urge all trade unionists and labour activists to support the LabourStart campaign by filling in the online protest form.
Iranian Workers' Solidarity Network
27 November 2008
For more information on Farzad Kamangar see the special section at
http://www.iwsn.org/campaigns/teachers.htm
Saturday, November 22, 2008
SPAIN--Student movement on the rise
From www.ft-ci.org
Spanish state: A student movement on the rise
By Carlos Munis and Susana Penna
Wednesday, November 19, 2008
The academic year in Europe had a hot beginning. Although the plans by the bourgeoisie for privatizing public education had already been in preparation since the 1998 Bologna Declaration, now the crisis of capitalism at an international level is forcing the acceleration and hardening of these measures.
The November 13 strike: One more step against the Bologna Plan and the capitalist crisis
In the Spanish state, the government of Rodríguez Zapatero, in keeping with the rest of the European bourgeoisies, is making a considerable gift of 150 billion euros to the banking interests, with the resulting emptying of the government coffers, that is precipitating, among other things, the reduction of the budget for the universities. University financing is decentralized and belongs to the autonomous communities. [1] Thus, for example, the Madrid community made a 30% cut, or the Valencia community, that cut [the university budget] by 25%, and in both, it will be impossible to guarantee payment of the wages of workers and university teachers, if things do not change. This budget cut is similar to the indebtedness of the autonomous communities to the central government.
The first step in the Spanish state was the October 22 strike against privatization of education. The mobilizations had been growing, and the last one, on November 13, was one of the most massive. 20,000 people came out in Madrid, a somewhat larger number in Barcelona, in a demonstration joined by teachers in secondary education, fighting against a privatizing law pushed by the Govern Catalá, 5,000 in Salamanca, 2,000 in Valencia, and 1,000 in Zaragoza. The mobilizations were not the only demonstrations of the spirit of struggle among the students; departments, like Madrid, Barcelona and Valencia, were also seized, with the possible extension to other cities. These processes could mean the first steps this school year in organizing a vanguard group.
We need a combative, massive, democratic and grass-roots student movement
The struggle has only just begun: it is necessary to turn the assemblies into mass bodies. The student movement must be grass-roots and democratic, with delegates subject to recall. It must take as an example struggles like the one in France against the CPE. [2] We must recover these experiences to strengthen the offensive against the current crisis and all its privatizing plans for public education, which has already been much degraded.
For a worker-student pact, to fight against the capitalist crisis
Capitalists and their governments want to make not just us, but all the workers, and especially immigrants, legal or undocumented, pay for this crisis. Worker-student unity is more needed than ever.
Coordinating and unifying our demands, next to those of the workers, will allow us to be stronger, by taking up again the lessons of May 1968, or that of the Spanish state in 1986-1988, where the workers and students were the leaders. We should support the current struggles of the workers, like that of the Nissan workers in Barcelona, and back them actively, as we are able.
Down with the Bologna Plan!
Not a single Euro for the bankers!
The capitalists must be made to pay for the crisis!
Oppose layoffs and precarious employment!
For a decent job once studies are finished!
For an education that serves the working class!
* * *
[1] "Spain is divided into 17 autonomous communities," Wikipedia.
[2] Contract of first employment.
Spanish state: A student movement on the rise
By Carlos Munis and Susana Penna
Wednesday, November 19, 2008
The academic year in Europe had a hot beginning. Although the plans by the bourgeoisie for privatizing public education had already been in preparation since the 1998 Bologna Declaration, now the crisis of capitalism at an international level is forcing the acceleration and hardening of these measures.
The November 13 strike: One more step against the Bologna Plan and the capitalist crisis
In the Spanish state, the government of Rodríguez Zapatero, in keeping with the rest of the European bourgeoisies, is making a considerable gift of 150 billion euros to the banking interests, with the resulting emptying of the government coffers, that is precipitating, among other things, the reduction of the budget for the universities. University financing is decentralized and belongs to the autonomous communities. [1] Thus, for example, the Madrid community made a 30% cut, or the Valencia community, that cut [the university budget] by 25%, and in both, it will be impossible to guarantee payment of the wages of workers and university teachers, if things do not change. This budget cut is similar to the indebtedness of the autonomous communities to the central government.
The first step in the Spanish state was the October 22 strike against privatization of education. The mobilizations had been growing, and the last one, on November 13, was one of the most massive. 20,000 people came out in Madrid, a somewhat larger number in Barcelona, in a demonstration joined by teachers in secondary education, fighting against a privatizing law pushed by the Govern Catalá, 5,000 in Salamanca, 2,000 in Valencia, and 1,000 in Zaragoza. The mobilizations were not the only demonstrations of the spirit of struggle among the students; departments, like Madrid, Barcelona and Valencia, were also seized, with the possible extension to other cities. These processes could mean the first steps this school year in organizing a vanguard group.
We need a combative, massive, democratic and grass-roots student movement
The struggle has only just begun: it is necessary to turn the assemblies into mass bodies. The student movement must be grass-roots and democratic, with delegates subject to recall. It must take as an example struggles like the one in France against the CPE. [2] We must recover these experiences to strengthen the offensive against the current crisis and all its privatizing plans for public education, which has already been much degraded.
For a worker-student pact, to fight against the capitalist crisis
Capitalists and their governments want to make not just us, but all the workers, and especially immigrants, legal or undocumented, pay for this crisis. Worker-student unity is more needed than ever.
Coordinating and unifying our demands, next to those of the workers, will allow us to be stronger, by taking up again the lessons of May 1968, or that of the Spanish state in 1986-1988, where the workers and students were the leaders. We should support the current struggles of the workers, like that of the Nissan workers in Barcelona, and back them actively, as we are able.
Down with the Bologna Plan!
Not a single Euro for the bankers!
The capitalists must be made to pay for the crisis!
Oppose layoffs and precarious employment!
For a decent job once studies are finished!
For an education that serves the working class!
* * *
[1] "Spain is divided into 17 autonomous communities," Wikipedia.
[2] Contract of first employment.
ITALY: General strike, December 12!
From http://www.ft-ci.org/, November 20, 2008
General strike, December 12!
By Ciro Tappeste, from Rome
This weekend, the center of the nightly scene of Roman youth moved to the University City of La Sapienza. Until a late hour of the early morning, groups of students from all over Italy could be seen on the steps of the occupied departments, in lively discussions of the prospects of the student movement; others, hungry, in search of some improvised dining room where some helping of pasta is left, and the tired ones, after almost twelve hours of an assembly, preparing their sleeping bags for rest in one of the lecture halls. The 2,000 student activists who met in Rome this weekend made clear what their program was: In opposition to the plans of Minister Gelmini, they are raising the prospect of reforming the university from below, "auto-reform," and against the policy of the government and Confindustria, the Italian bosses, they are determined to continue mobilizing and still support the December 12 general strike. The "tsunami," as the student movement calls itself, "onda anomala" in Italian, is, in reality, to continue the metaphor of climatic and natural phenomena, only the tip of a deeper iceberg that is called "class struggle."
The student "tsunami," staggered strikes, wildcat strikes: an X ray of the social mobilization in Italy
In fact, the last 15 days were particularly turbulent. Although a large part of the Gelmini counter-reform has been definitively adopted, the high school and university students did not let down their guard, quite the contrary. Without any doubt, the biggest mobilization was the national demonstration of 200,000 people on Friday, November 14, which coincided with the general strike in university research proclaimed by the CGIL and the UIL, joined by students mobilized from all over Italy, after which the first national student coordinating committee met.
On the most directly social front, the CGIL had to reconsider their positions in the last few weeks. Meanwhile, the national leaderships of the CISL and the UIL, more disposed to dialogue, were trying to maintain a certain balance between the sense of "responsibility," that is, negotiating with the government and the bosses over the attacks that have been swooping down on the subordinate classes, and the noticeable anger among the unions' rank and file. The CGIL leadership and its different federations are being pressured by the existing dissatisfaction among the workers because of the economic situation and the avalanche of announcing layoffs, because of right-wing provocations by the government and, in the final instance, because of the student mobilization that is serving as a social and political sounding board symbolized by the famous "we will not pay for your crisis," sung at all the university marches.
The CGIL leadership among government employees, had to keep the staggered strike during the first half of November, while the CISL and UIL drew back and preferred to negotiate with Berlusconi. In the commercial sector, one of the most precarious in Italy, the CGIL called the November 15 mobilization. On Tuesday, November 11, the main Italian cities had been paralyzed by a force general transportation strike, the third this year. On that same day, the workers of Alitalia, threatened with 2000 layoffs, stopped working at the Rome airport ... in a "wildcat" strike, that is, without legal authorization and against even the most combative unions that until now had opposed the plan to dismantle the company agreed to by the bosses, the government and the union confederation bureaucracies.
Meanwhile, at a local level, above all in the north of the country, calls to strike against factory closings, as in Turin on November 20 and in Brescia on November 21, were circulating, and the National Assembly of the FIOM metalworkers' delegates, decided to call the December 12 strike. This date ended up becoming a general strike called by the CGIL, as Roman students in struggle had requested at the end of October, a strike that rank and file unions now joined.
Towards the December 12 general strike, to be organized from below and coordinated, the better to prepare the confrontation with the "Cavalier" and the bosses
As some militant students and workers explained in the discussions this weekend in the University City, after several weeks of mobilizations, one can begin to draw some conclusions.
All these struggles show how the union bureaucracy, especially the CGIL, that "turned to the left" in the last few weeks, is in a state of tension, between continuing to negotiate and the bosses, and, at the same time, being part of the struggles and even leading them, so as not to lose control. That explains the apparently paradoxical character of the current policy of Epifani (leader of the CGIL). Alhtough in Alitalia the CGIL signed the agreement privatizing the company, scabbing on the workers' struggles, and although in the transportation sector the three main unions called for a strike, the better to resume negotiations with the government, Epifani found himself forced, at a global level, to change the call for a December 12 metalworkers' strike into a call for the general strike for the first time since 2004.
Acting as a social and political sounding board, the student vanguard in struggle, in a certain sense, has made a qualitative leap in the last few weeks, as shown by the main points of the appeal by the universities in Rome, adopted on October 31, after the massive strike by teachers and students. In that appeal, reference is made to the need to coordinate all the struggles underway, and that December 12 should bethe occasion for all the union leaderships to call a strike jointly, beyond their differences. The appeal also mentions the need to set up, for the first time in years, a national student coordinating committee, that ended up by meeting on November 14 and 15 in Rome. Although student pressure managed to impose the united front between the CGIL and rank and file unions and organize a national coordinating committee that would give the mobilization a political profile of greater scope, the road we have before us continues to be very complex, to guarantee that we workers and students really do not pay for the crisis.
As shown by the ambiguous orientation of the union bureaucracy, that buries the struggles on the one hand, and calls for mobilization on the other, the question of building the strike from below among workers and students, immigrants, workers in precarious situations, and the jobless, is more urgent than ever so that the general strike will be the most incisive possible. On the other hand, the national student coordinating committee showed that students organized from below achieved more weight than if the conflicts are fragmented. A struggle to set up a national worker and student coordinating committee of the vanguards in struggle would be the best way to build a tendency capable of opposing the vacillating line of the bureaucracy in an organized fashion and at the same time the best guarantee that the current wave of mobilization goes on, by creating the most favorable possible conditions for continuing to confront a shamelessly right-wing and reactionary government and bosses that have announced a million layoffs for the coming months.
Rome, November 19
General strike, December 12!
By Ciro Tappeste, from Rome
This weekend, the center of the nightly scene of Roman youth moved to the University City of La Sapienza. Until a late hour of the early morning, groups of students from all over Italy could be seen on the steps of the occupied departments, in lively discussions of the prospects of the student movement; others, hungry, in search of some improvised dining room where some helping of pasta is left, and the tired ones, after almost twelve hours of an assembly, preparing their sleeping bags for rest in one of the lecture halls. The 2,000 student activists who met in Rome this weekend made clear what their program was: In opposition to the plans of Minister Gelmini, they are raising the prospect of reforming the university from below, "auto-reform," and against the policy of the government and Confindustria, the Italian bosses, they are determined to continue mobilizing and still support the December 12 general strike. The "tsunami," as the student movement calls itself, "onda anomala" in Italian, is, in reality, to continue the metaphor of climatic and natural phenomena, only the tip of a deeper iceberg that is called "class struggle."
The student "tsunami," staggered strikes, wildcat strikes: an X ray of the social mobilization in Italy
In fact, the last 15 days were particularly turbulent. Although a large part of the Gelmini counter-reform has been definitively adopted, the high school and university students did not let down their guard, quite the contrary. Without any doubt, the biggest mobilization was the national demonstration of 200,000 people on Friday, November 14, which coincided with the general strike in university research proclaimed by the CGIL and the UIL, joined by students mobilized from all over Italy, after which the first national student coordinating committee met.
On the most directly social front, the CGIL had to reconsider their positions in the last few weeks. Meanwhile, the national leaderships of the CISL and the UIL, more disposed to dialogue, were trying to maintain a certain balance between the sense of "responsibility," that is, negotiating with the government and the bosses over the attacks that have been swooping down on the subordinate classes, and the noticeable anger among the unions' rank and file. The CGIL leadership and its different federations are being pressured by the existing dissatisfaction among the workers because of the economic situation and the avalanche of announcing layoffs, because of right-wing provocations by the government and, in the final instance, because of the student mobilization that is serving as a social and political sounding board symbolized by the famous "we will not pay for your crisis," sung at all the university marches.
The CGIL leadership among government employees, had to keep the staggered strike during the first half of November, while the CISL and UIL drew back and preferred to negotiate with Berlusconi. In the commercial sector, one of the most precarious in Italy, the CGIL called the November 15 mobilization. On Tuesday, November 11, the main Italian cities had been paralyzed by a force general transportation strike, the third this year. On that same day, the workers of Alitalia, threatened with 2000 layoffs, stopped working at the Rome airport ... in a "wildcat" strike, that is, without legal authorization and against even the most combative unions that until now had opposed the plan to dismantle the company agreed to by the bosses, the government and the union confederation bureaucracies.
Meanwhile, at a local level, above all in the north of the country, calls to strike against factory closings, as in Turin on November 20 and in Brescia on November 21, were circulating, and the National Assembly of the FIOM metalworkers' delegates, decided to call the December 12 strike. This date ended up becoming a general strike called by the CGIL, as Roman students in struggle had requested at the end of October, a strike that rank and file unions now joined.
Towards the December 12 general strike, to be organized from below and coordinated, the better to prepare the confrontation with the "Cavalier" and the bosses
As some militant students and workers explained in the discussions this weekend in the University City, after several weeks of mobilizations, one can begin to draw some conclusions.
All these struggles show how the union bureaucracy, especially the CGIL, that "turned to the left" in the last few weeks, is in a state of tension, between continuing to negotiate and the bosses, and, at the same time, being part of the struggles and even leading them, so as not to lose control. That explains the apparently paradoxical character of the current policy of Epifani (leader of the CGIL). Alhtough in Alitalia the CGIL signed the agreement privatizing the company, scabbing on the workers' struggles, and although in the transportation sector the three main unions called for a strike, the better to resume negotiations with the government, Epifani found himself forced, at a global level, to change the call for a December 12 metalworkers' strike into a call for the general strike for the first time since 2004.
Acting as a social and political sounding board, the student vanguard in struggle, in a certain sense, has made a qualitative leap in the last few weeks, as shown by the main points of the appeal by the universities in Rome, adopted on October 31, after the massive strike by teachers and students. In that appeal, reference is made to the need to coordinate all the struggles underway, and that December 12 should bethe occasion for all the union leaderships to call a strike jointly, beyond their differences. The appeal also mentions the need to set up, for the first time in years, a national student coordinating committee, that ended up by meeting on November 14 and 15 in Rome. Although student pressure managed to impose the united front between the CGIL and rank and file unions and organize a national coordinating committee that would give the mobilization a political profile of greater scope, the road we have before us continues to be very complex, to guarantee that we workers and students really do not pay for the crisis.
As shown by the ambiguous orientation of the union bureaucracy, that buries the struggles on the one hand, and calls for mobilization on the other, the question of building the strike from below among workers and students, immigrants, workers in precarious situations, and the jobless, is more urgent than ever so that the general strike will be the most incisive possible. On the other hand, the national student coordinating committee showed that students organized from below achieved more weight than if the conflicts are fragmented. A struggle to set up a national worker and student coordinating committee of the vanguards in struggle would be the best way to build a tendency capable of opposing the vacillating line of the bureaucracy in an organized fashion and at the same time the best guarantee that the current wave of mobilization goes on, by creating the most favorable possible conditions for continuing to confront a shamelessly right-wing and reactionary government and bosses that have announced a million layoffs for the coming months.
Rome, November 19
Friday, November 21, 2008
GERMANY: Workers and students mobilize
From www.ft-ci.org
GERMANY: Workers and students mobilize
By Antje Berlinger and Marcelo Torres
Thursday, November 20, 2008
The German working class is showing signs of wanting to follow in the steps of their class brothers in Italy and Greece. In Germany, a significant increase in struggles over demands that largely exceed the policy of wage moderation that the union bureaucracies have tried to impose, can be observed. Thus, last week, workers belonging to the metalworkers' union IG Metall partially shut down production in the heart of the German economy: automakers and electricity. Up to 550,000 workers of the plants of Opel, Mercedes Benz, Ford, Audi, BMW, Bosch, Nokia, Siemens and MAN forced the union leaderships to call warning strikes, work stoppages and demonstrations. They were demanding 8% wage raises, a demand that the IG Metall bureaucracy quickly betrayed, given its fear of calling a strike of indefinite duration, by arriving at an agreement, behind the backs of the workers, for a 4.2% raise, way below the 8% demanded originally.
While the President of the employers' association, Dieter Hundt, was welcoming the agreement as representing a "sign of common sense in a difficult economic situation," groups of rank and file workers were demanding and are still demanding "repudiation of that meager result and immediately beginning with a strike referendum," since "they cannot unload the crisis on our shoulders." According to estimates, in the coming year, 350,000 workers will lose their jobs, half of which would be in the automotive sector. Now, temporary workers have already been thrown into the street, and neither staff reductions of workers with permanent contracts nor wage cuts can be ruled out.
And the problem is that the "German marketplace" depends in large part on countries consuming its products, countries that are now stricken, as trade partners: the US, the United Kingdom, and the Spanish state. According to some estimates, exports, the preeminent German economic motor, will suffer a big sudden halt that will lead to only a 0.4% growth in exports (after this year's 4.2%) or even complete stagnation.
"Managers, out of the universities!"
Attacks by the bourgeoisie are also intensifying in the educational sector, where, besides the directives of the Bologna plan, a wave of privatizations is being carried out, from the kindergartens up to the universities, which intensifies the class character of the educational system. For instance, at present, only 16% of university students are sons or daughters of workers, and only 3.3%, children of immigrants. Last Wednesday, facing this situation, high school students, accompanied by university students and some professors, organized a 24-hour strike with demonstrations in approximately 40 German cities. More than 100,000 students filled the streets, demanding an end to inadequate funding of education, and a quality, unrestricted, and popular education, gratis. Students in Hannover surpassed the limits of bourgeois legality by blockading the regional parliament, and in Berlin they seized the Humboldt University by assault, waving red banners from its balconies. They forcefully entered a large room where businessmen were negotiating patent rights for universities, and they forced the businessmen to hold their signs while they helped themselves to the culinary delicacies from the banquet prepared for the occasion, to the cry of "a -anti -anticapitalist" and "managers, out of the universities."
These most recent acts are one more proof that young people in Germany are starting to wake up from their lethargy, beginning to see the need to find responses to the dominant ideologies and demand active participation in [determining] the conditions they live under. Precisely in this social climate where people are beginning to feel that in the context of the ideological failure of neoliberalism and the lack of responses from the bourgeoisie to face up to the economic crisis and from the traditional parties, the youth univerisites of the party Die Linke are organizing circles for reading and discussing Capital by Karl Marx. After years of the exile of Marxism from the universities, 2,000 young people meet every week in more than 40 German universities to read and debate that work, next to leftist intellectuals. After years of de-politicization and silence, of the alleged end of history, groups of young people are putting criticism of capitalism on the agenda.
GERMANY: Workers and students mobilize
By Antje Berlinger and Marcelo Torres
Thursday, November 20, 2008
The German working class is showing signs of wanting to follow in the steps of their class brothers in Italy and Greece. In Germany, a significant increase in struggles over demands that largely exceed the policy of wage moderation that the union bureaucracies have tried to impose, can be observed. Thus, last week, workers belonging to the metalworkers' union IG Metall partially shut down production in the heart of the German economy: automakers and electricity. Up to 550,000 workers of the plants of Opel, Mercedes Benz, Ford, Audi, BMW, Bosch, Nokia, Siemens and MAN forced the union leaderships to call warning strikes, work stoppages and demonstrations. They were demanding 8% wage raises, a demand that the IG Metall bureaucracy quickly betrayed, given its fear of calling a strike of indefinite duration, by arriving at an agreement, behind the backs of the workers, for a 4.2% raise, way below the 8% demanded originally.
While the President of the employers' association, Dieter Hundt, was welcoming the agreement as representing a "sign of common sense in a difficult economic situation," groups of rank and file workers were demanding and are still demanding "repudiation of that meager result and immediately beginning with a strike referendum," since "they cannot unload the crisis on our shoulders." According to estimates, in the coming year, 350,000 workers will lose their jobs, half of which would be in the automotive sector. Now, temporary workers have already been thrown into the street, and neither staff reductions of workers with permanent contracts nor wage cuts can be ruled out.
And the problem is that the "German marketplace" depends in large part on countries consuming its products, countries that are now stricken, as trade partners: the US, the United Kingdom, and the Spanish state. According to some estimates, exports, the preeminent German economic motor, will suffer a big sudden halt that will lead to only a 0.4% growth in exports (after this year's 4.2%) or even complete stagnation.
"Managers, out of the universities!"
Attacks by the bourgeoisie are also intensifying in the educational sector, where, besides the directives of the Bologna plan, a wave of privatizations is being carried out, from the kindergartens up to the universities, which intensifies the class character of the educational system. For instance, at present, only 16% of university students are sons or daughters of workers, and only 3.3%, children of immigrants. Last Wednesday, facing this situation, high school students, accompanied by university students and some professors, organized a 24-hour strike with demonstrations in approximately 40 German cities. More than 100,000 students filled the streets, demanding an end to inadequate funding of education, and a quality, unrestricted, and popular education, gratis. Students in Hannover surpassed the limits of bourgeois legality by blockading the regional parliament, and in Berlin they seized the Humboldt University by assault, waving red banners from its balconies. They forcefully entered a large room where businessmen were negotiating patent rights for universities, and they forced the businessmen to hold their signs while they helped themselves to the culinary delicacies from the banquet prepared for the occasion, to the cry of "a -anti -anticapitalist" and "managers, out of the universities."
These most recent acts are one more proof that young people in Germany are starting to wake up from their lethargy, beginning to see the need to find responses to the dominant ideologies and demand active participation in [determining] the conditions they live under. Precisely in this social climate where people are beginning to feel that in the context of the ideological failure of neoliberalism and the lack of responses from the bourgeoisie to face up to the economic crisis and from the traditional parties, the youth univerisites of the party Die Linke are organizing circles for reading and discussing Capital by Karl Marx. After years of the exile of Marxism from the universities, 2,000 young people meet every week in more than 40 German universities to read and debate that work, next to leftist intellectuals. After years of de-politicization and silence, of the alleged end of history, groups of young people are putting criticism of capitalism on the agenda.
Monday, November 3, 2008
General Strike in ITALY
From http://www.ft-ci.org/
A big call by rank and file unions
General Strike in ITALY
Wednesday, October 22, 2008
By comrades of the Communist Collective of Via Efeso
Berlusconi’s government is getting ready to unload the crisis, at its beginning, brutally onto the workers and the popular classes. Like Prodi, his center-left predecessor, he is seeking to isolate wage earners more and more, to pad the effects of a hidden crisis that had become obvious some time ago. In addition to racist measures against immigrants, an educational reform that continues the privatizing and pro-boss measures imposed under Prodi and a brutal campaign against state workers, with cutbacks and increasingly precarious employment, Confindustria, the big Italian employers’ association, is trying to impose a reform of the national work agreements. However, autumn in Italy has begun to get hot. Groups in the working class and among young people, that now count 15 million of their fellow Italians below the poverty line, are beginning to act. In September, the heroic resistance of the Alitalia workers showed that something could be changing in the workers’ state of mind. In turn, the “second generation Italians” from the suburbs (children and grandchildren of immigrants, born in Italy) showed up massively, with clashes and antiracist demonstrations. Protests among teachers, secondary-school and university students are growing, with marches by parents and teachers, and occupations of schools and universities in big Italian cities. The latest news is that Berlusconi is threatening to use cops to put an end to student protests and the seizures of universities and schools. This new social climate forced groups of the union bureaucracy to relocate. Another symptom of the intensity of the current wave of struggles: Veltroni’s Democratic Party, having wavered about keeping its October 25 national demonstration, in the name of “a sense of national responsibility” because of the economic crisis, nevertheless is now calling for a mobilization, and, while we were closing this note, it requested the withdrawal of the Gelmini reform, in order not to be cut off from the mobilizations. On the other hand, this new climate filled the demonstrations, that had been planned some time ago, with a different content, like the October 11 demonstration, called by Rifondazione Comunista (PRC) and the Italian Communists, that served as a means of expression for tens of thousands of young people and workers fed up with the government’s policy, and the massive October 17 general strike, called by rank and file unions, that we report on below.
The national demonstration that went across Rome showed that the general strike called by rank and file unions (RdB-CUB, Cobas and SdL [1]) had a big success. Support for the strike was higher than anticipated. In spite of the rain that fell all morning on the capital, an impressive demonstration (500,000 people according to the organizers, 350,000 according to La Repubblica) marched for more than four hours between Repubblica and the Piazza San Giovanni.
Other anti-government mobilizations were organized in the length and breadth of the country. In Milan, a demonstration called by the CUB and the SlaiCobas [2] joined with two other demonstrations, one, by the teachers, and the other, by the students, and then they marched towards the Rectorate Building. After having thrown eggs and firecrackers, the students knocked down the barriers and, in front of the main entrance, they left a banner on which was written, "We are blocking the decree [of the reform of the educational system], occupation! The school is opposed to Gelmini [the Minister of Education]! The revolt is in the street and has hardly begun!" Strikes and demonstrations also paralyzed traffic in Naples and Palermo, while students in Florence, Pisa and Siena mobilized, occupying the universities.
... On October 17, a clear message was sent to Berlusconi. The strike set forth that his policy of wage cuts, attacking civil servants, and attacks on education, displeases many people, not least, the most dynamic groups of workers and students. The strike made it clear that the government will not be able to get its policy approved automatically, at least, not without having to "pay some price." What is more, the more Berlusconi has to pay for the attacks he is unleashing, if the government is weakened, the better the conditions will be for the working class of the peninsula to struggle and reorganize its ranks.
Students, teachers, state employees, transportation workers, workers with uncertain employment: all united
Who were the ones who came out to the street and for what reasons? The most visible sector was the one the Italian press calls "the people of the schools," teachers, hit three times: by the widespread offensive against the working class (reform of the national labor agreements, reductions in wages and in retirements), by cuts in public services, and by the attack on education (the Gelmini reform anticipated a reduction in the number of workers, privatization, in the final instance, of the universities, through their transformation into "foundations," the implementation of a more authoritarian and even repressive educational model, etc.).
They were also public sector workers.... Berlusconi is trying to deepen an orientation carried out during the last few years, by both center-left governments and those of the center-right, that consists of continuing with the cuts in public adminstration, both from the point of view of wages and jobs.... In the different marches, the considerable number of transportation workers was observed. Traffic in several cities was disrupted with the strike, as attested, for example, by the 33% rate of participation in the strike in Rome.
There were likewise workers with uncertain employment, especially from the public sector....
In short, the mobilization went beyond all those sectors influenced by rank and file trade unionism. There lies perhaps the greatest innovation and potential of the mobilization and of the current phase. Among the demonstrators, there were many unorganized workers or others who have the membership card, especially of the main union organization in Italy, the CGIL.
What perspectives after the October 17 strike?
The fact is that the aims defended by the organizers of the October 17 strike (no to the cuts in public services, no to precarious work, for wage raises and the sliding scale, against bank and stock market speculation, for a social wage) have a reformist-redistributionist matrix (leftist Keynesianism). It is also a fact that those who participate in the strike and the real movement impose a content on it. From this point of view, considering the reduction of the spaces for redistribution, the workers that struck and went out to the street could become more "opposed to the system" and "incompatible" with respect to the demands proposed by the leaders of the rank and file unions.
Before the October 17 strike, the bureaucratic leaderships of the unions in the Confederation had announced (without giving any date or specifying the form of the actions of force) a series of mobilizations in the educational sector and the civil service. At the same time, however, they declared themselves prepared to continue a dialogue with the government, as shown by the public statements of Bonnani, leader of the CSIL, and of Angeletti, main leader of the UIL.
The call for measures of force by the bureaucracy of the Confederation had as its aim, weakening the strike by the rank and file unions. It is also a symptom of a change in the state of mind in some mobilized groups. Taking into account, for example, the assemblies of state workers in which we participated: all the workers attacked by the government, few of them unionized, who have not yet broken with the bourgeois political leaderships of the center-left, nor with the bureaucratic leaderships of the unions, are today demanding a real, effective and united struggle, although timidly and without having the ability to impose it.
Considering the stage we are going through, the October 17 strike cannot remain as a mere work stoppage, whose main objective consists in organizationally strengthening the space that the rank and file unions have at their disposal. If the leaders of the rank and file unions pose the problem of building a real and effective counteroffensive against the government, if they know how to take up again the banner of the different struggles that are crossing the peninsula now, then the October 17 strike could become the first stage of a movement that would serve to build a broader, more permanent and combative front of struggle.
With the October 17 strike, the workers and students that joined the measure of force more massively than anticipated, marked a milestone. Will the union and political forces that consider themselves militant and class-conscious respond to their demands? In the national post-strike communiqué, the Cobas leadership sets forth that "the exciting demonstration in Rome sends a united message of increased awareness to continue stronger than ever in defending social rights and workers' rights for everyone: forward!" Continuing in this direction would mean carrying out a consistent and united struggle (based on workers' assemblies, with openness to current struggles, up to and including when they are led by the bureaucracy of the Confederation, etc.) to broaden the current front of struggle and transform it into a more general movement against the government and the bosses.
[Notes]
[1] According to the abbreviations in Italian, Representatives of the Base-United Confederation of the Base (RdB-CUB), Confederation of the Committees of the Base (Cobas), Inter-category Union of Workers (SdL), the three main rank and file union organizations in Italy. Although small, they are characterized by more radical positions than those of the historical union confederations, CGIL, CISL, and UIL.
[2] The Intercategory Union of Self-organized Workers-Committees of the Base (SlaiCobas, according to its Italian abbreviations), of lesser size, compared to the other rank and file unions, generally defends more militant and class-conscious positions.
A big call by rank and file unions
General Strike in ITALY
Wednesday, October 22, 2008
By comrades of the Communist Collective of Via Efeso
Berlusconi’s government is getting ready to unload the crisis, at its beginning, brutally onto the workers and the popular classes. Like Prodi, his center-left predecessor, he is seeking to isolate wage earners more and more, to pad the effects of a hidden crisis that had become obvious some time ago. In addition to racist measures against immigrants, an educational reform that continues the privatizing and pro-boss measures imposed under Prodi and a brutal campaign against state workers, with cutbacks and increasingly precarious employment, Confindustria, the big Italian employers’ association, is trying to impose a reform of the national work agreements. However, autumn in Italy has begun to get hot. Groups in the working class and among young people, that now count 15 million of their fellow Italians below the poverty line, are beginning to act. In September, the heroic resistance of the Alitalia workers showed that something could be changing in the workers’ state of mind. In turn, the “second generation Italians” from the suburbs (children and grandchildren of immigrants, born in Italy) showed up massively, with clashes and antiracist demonstrations. Protests among teachers, secondary-school and university students are growing, with marches by parents and teachers, and occupations of schools and universities in big Italian cities. The latest news is that Berlusconi is threatening to use cops to put an end to student protests and the seizures of universities and schools. This new social climate forced groups of the union bureaucracy to relocate. Another symptom of the intensity of the current wave of struggles: Veltroni’s Democratic Party, having wavered about keeping its October 25 national demonstration, in the name of “a sense of national responsibility” because of the economic crisis, nevertheless is now calling for a mobilization, and, while we were closing this note, it requested the withdrawal of the Gelmini reform, in order not to be cut off from the mobilizations. On the other hand, this new climate filled the demonstrations, that had been planned some time ago, with a different content, like the October 11 demonstration, called by Rifondazione Comunista (PRC) and the Italian Communists, that served as a means of expression for tens of thousands of young people and workers fed up with the government’s policy, and the massive October 17 general strike, called by rank and file unions, that we report on below.
The national demonstration that went across Rome showed that the general strike called by rank and file unions (RdB-CUB, Cobas and SdL [1]) had a big success. Support for the strike was higher than anticipated. In spite of the rain that fell all morning on the capital, an impressive demonstration (500,000 people according to the organizers, 350,000 according to La Repubblica) marched for more than four hours between Repubblica and the Piazza San Giovanni.
Other anti-government mobilizations were organized in the length and breadth of the country. In Milan, a demonstration called by the CUB and the SlaiCobas [2] joined with two other demonstrations, one, by the teachers, and the other, by the students, and then they marched towards the Rectorate Building. After having thrown eggs and firecrackers, the students knocked down the barriers and, in front of the main entrance, they left a banner on which was written, "We are blocking the decree [of the reform of the educational system], occupation! The school is opposed to Gelmini [the Minister of Education]! The revolt is in the street and has hardly begun!" Strikes and demonstrations also paralyzed traffic in Naples and Palermo, while students in Florence, Pisa and Siena mobilized, occupying the universities.
... On October 17, a clear message was sent to Berlusconi. The strike set forth that his policy of wage cuts, attacking civil servants, and attacks on education, displeases many people, not least, the most dynamic groups of workers and students. The strike made it clear that the government will not be able to get its policy approved automatically, at least, not without having to "pay some price." What is more, the more Berlusconi has to pay for the attacks he is unleashing, if the government is weakened, the better the conditions will be for the working class of the peninsula to struggle and reorganize its ranks.
Students, teachers, state employees, transportation workers, workers with uncertain employment: all united
Who were the ones who came out to the street and for what reasons? The most visible sector was the one the Italian press calls "the people of the schools," teachers, hit three times: by the widespread offensive against the working class (reform of the national labor agreements, reductions in wages and in retirements), by cuts in public services, and by the attack on education (the Gelmini reform anticipated a reduction in the number of workers, privatization, in the final instance, of the universities, through their transformation into "foundations," the implementation of a more authoritarian and even repressive educational model, etc.).
They were also public sector workers.... Berlusconi is trying to deepen an orientation carried out during the last few years, by both center-left governments and those of the center-right, that consists of continuing with the cuts in public adminstration, both from the point of view of wages and jobs.... In the different marches, the considerable number of transportation workers was observed. Traffic in several cities was disrupted with the strike, as attested, for example, by the 33% rate of participation in the strike in Rome.
There were likewise workers with uncertain employment, especially from the public sector....
In short, the mobilization went beyond all those sectors influenced by rank and file trade unionism. There lies perhaps the greatest innovation and potential of the mobilization and of the current phase. Among the demonstrators, there were many unorganized workers or others who have the membership card, especially of the main union organization in Italy, the CGIL.
What perspectives after the October 17 strike?
The fact is that the aims defended by the organizers of the October 17 strike (no to the cuts in public services, no to precarious work, for wage raises and the sliding scale, against bank and stock market speculation, for a social wage) have a reformist-redistributionist matrix (leftist Keynesianism). It is also a fact that those who participate in the strike and the real movement impose a content on it. From this point of view, considering the reduction of the spaces for redistribution, the workers that struck and went out to the street could become more "opposed to the system" and "incompatible" with respect to the demands proposed by the leaders of the rank and file unions.
Before the October 17 strike, the bureaucratic leaderships of the unions in the Confederation had announced (without giving any date or specifying the form of the actions of force) a series of mobilizations in the educational sector and the civil service. At the same time, however, they declared themselves prepared to continue a dialogue with the government, as shown by the public statements of Bonnani, leader of the CSIL, and of Angeletti, main leader of the UIL.
The call for measures of force by the bureaucracy of the Confederation had as its aim, weakening the strike by the rank and file unions. It is also a symptom of a change in the state of mind in some mobilized groups. Taking into account, for example, the assemblies of state workers in which we participated: all the workers attacked by the government, few of them unionized, who have not yet broken with the bourgeois political leaderships of the center-left, nor with the bureaucratic leaderships of the unions, are today demanding a real, effective and united struggle, although timidly and without having the ability to impose it.
Considering the stage we are going through, the October 17 strike cannot remain as a mere work stoppage, whose main objective consists in organizationally strengthening the space that the rank and file unions have at their disposal. If the leaders of the rank and file unions pose the problem of building a real and effective counteroffensive against the government, if they know how to take up again the banner of the different struggles that are crossing the peninsula now, then the October 17 strike could become the first stage of a movement that would serve to build a broader, more permanent and combative front of struggle.
With the October 17 strike, the workers and students that joined the measure of force more massively than anticipated, marked a milestone. Will the union and political forces that consider themselves militant and class-conscious respond to their demands? In the national post-strike communiqué, the Cobas leadership sets forth that "the exciting demonstration in Rome sends a united message of increased awareness to continue stronger than ever in defending social rights and workers' rights for everyone: forward!" Continuing in this direction would mean carrying out a consistent and united struggle (based on workers' assemblies, with openness to current struggles, up to and including when they are led by the bureaucracy of the Confederation, etc.) to broaden the current front of struggle and transform it into a more general movement against the government and the bosses.
[Notes]
[1] According to the abbreviations in Italian, Representatives of the Base-United Confederation of the Base (RdB-CUB), Confederation of the Committees of the Base (Cobas), Inter-category Union of Workers (SdL), the three main rank and file union organizations in Italy. Although small, they are characterized by more radical positions than those of the historical union confederations, CGIL, CISL, and UIL.
[2] The Intercategory Union of Self-organized Workers-Committees of the Base (SlaiCobas, according to its Italian abbreviations), of lesser size, compared to the other rank and file unions, generally defends more militant and class-conscious positions.
Sunday, November 2, 2008
General Strike in GREECE
Europe: General strike in Greece
By Celeste Murillo
Thursday, October 23, 2008
In Greece, on Tuesday, October 21, a 24-hour general strike in which millions of workers from the public and private sector participated, took place against the bailout announced for the banks, costing millions, against privatizing the state-owned Olympic Airlines, and to demand wage raises.
In Greece, on Tuesday, October 21, a 24-hour general strike in which millions of workers from the public and private sector participated, took place against the bailout announced for the banks, costing millions, against privatizing the state-owned Olympic Airlines, and to demand wage raises.
Most of the economic and transportation activities of the country were paralyzed because of the action by the workers, who responded unanimously to the call from the General Federation of Workers and the Civil Servants Union, that, between them, represent 2,500,000 workers, half of the country’s workforce.
The strike affected both public transportation in the cities and air traffic, which caused the cancellation of 200 domestic and international flights in a single day. There was no activity in the ports, and the state railway company suspended almost all services; the electric and suburban trains and the trolleybuses did not run either. Public offices, post offices, schools, universities and hospitals were closed; hospitals were on duty for emergency cases only. According to the unions, compliance with the strike was massive: 90% of workers participated in the action.
In Athens, 15,000 people marched to the government palace to oppose conservative Prime Minister Costas Karamanlis’ privatization plans. The police blocked the way of the demonstrators, and clashes occurred. Thousands of young people and workers participated in the march with signs that showed the Greek people were fed up with watching the government bail out the banks while a large part of the population is suffering the consequences of the economic crisis.
The strike demanded a wage raise at the same time that it asked the government to increase social spending to help working-class families that are already suffering the results of the economic crisis. Another one of the slogans was rejection of privatizing the state-owned Olympic Airlines and rejection of the already unpopular plans to reform the retirement system. The protests continued on Wednesday, October 22, and the unions and other organizations announced that they are going to intensify the actions if the government fails to back down.
This week, the Greek parliament was supposed to discuss the 2009 budget and look for ways to reduce the deficit, that already brought Greece to the attention of EU, because it exceeded the deficit allowed the countries of the Eurozone. For this, the government is planning a series of privatizations, including that of the state-owned airline, cutting the budget for social programs and reforming retirements and pensions.
Faced with protests and the unpopularity of the government, Costas Karamanlis has promised wage compensations and measures to alleviate the rise in prices. So far, the main expenditure announced by the government was the promise of the Finance Minister, George Alogoskoufis, to pay out 28 billion euros to support the banks of Greece. Meanwhile, one out of every five Greeks is already living beneath the poverty line, according to official data. The first consequences of the crisis and its impact on the daily life of millions of workers could impoverish millions more.
The recent general strike and the struggles that have taken place in the country during the last two years (including the March 2006 general strike and the big student mobilizations in March 2007) show that the workers and the Greek people are not prepared to pay for the crisis of the capitalists.
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