Socialism Today

The annual UN Climate summit, COP29, will be held in Baku, Azerbaijan at the end of November. Like the previous summit in Dubai, the president of COP 29 will be from a petrostate. The COP28 president was quoted as saying there was “no science behind demands for phasing out fossil fuels and this would take the world back into the caves”. Presiding over COP29 will be Muktar Babaev who spent 26 years working for the state oil company in Azerbaijan.

As conflict with Starmer’s new austerity develops, how best will trade union unity be achieved? In a contribution to the debate PAULA MITCHELL looks specifically at the experience of organising and representing school support staff and the broader issues it raises.

“Strikes are back” declared the Evening Standard, at the announcement of action on London Underground by RMT and Aslef unions over pay. This followed just weeks after members of the Royal College of Nursing (RCN) rejected the Labour government’s 5.5% pay award. The public sector pay awards in health, the civil service and to teachers, in the region of 5% and above, were made by chancellor Rachel Reeves in the hope of staving off trade union action.

That is the legacy of the 2022-23 strike wave, and it is a lesson lodged in the experience of hundreds of thousands of workers as they now face new Labour austerity from a government determined to rule in the interests of big business.

A major battle is underway in the PCS civil servants’ union, to determine how the eighth-biggest workers’ organisation in Britain shapes up to the struggles ahead, including in the UK civil service. PCS vice-president DAVE SEMPLE writes, in a personal capacity.

Civil servants in UK government departments and agencies might have breathed a sigh of relief on 4 July, as a Labour government swept to power after 14 years of Tory rule. Tens of thousands of jobs have been slashed. Real wages have fallen precipitously. Pensions have been devalued. Trade union rights have been diminished. Office closures have forced civil servants out of local communities, with deleterious economic impact in deprived areas. Many had had enough.

The European elections in June and the three state elections in eastern Germany in September showed very drastically the political upheavals in Germany. These are not snapshots, but indications of longer-term developments explains WOLFRAM KLEIN of Sol (CWI Germany).

The background to political developments in Germany is the deteriorating economic situation. In recent decades Germany distinguished itself from other developed capitalist countries by having a considerably higher share of industrial production in its economy. According to the World Bank, in 2022 this share was 10% higher than in the USA, France and the UK. For years German capitalism was able to achieve high export surpluses thanks to high productivity and low production costs. Those in power in Germany could often boast that they were the ‘world champion in exports’  – or at least runner-up to China.

Need Not Greed: Alan Hardman 1936-2024

Published by Bluecoat, 2024, £45

Reviewed by Linda Taaffe

Political cartoons appear regularly in the pages of many national newspapers and magazines. Some are quite amusing. But nowhere is there anything like the drawings of Alan Hardman. His cartoons go straight to the heart of the matter of class society, how the greedy few of the capitalist class exploit the downtrodden, hardworking, needy many of the working class. And in the process they inspire people to draw the conclusion that we must use our collective power to turn society upside down in a socialist revolution. Now Alan’s lifework has been brought together in this very impressive and memorable book. 

Goodbye to Russia – A personal reckoning from the ruins of war

By Sarah Rainsford

Published by Bloomsbury, 2024, £22

Reviewed by Clare Doyle

In Goodbye to Russia, Sarah Rainsford covers her two decades based in Moscow as a reporter for the BBC as well as an earlier period in St Petersburg as a student and an English teacher. In August 2021, like many journalists from Europe and the US, she was unceremoniously thrown out of Russia. Since then, she has been working for the BBC in other countries and is now based in Warsaw. In this book, she intersperses reports and reflections on her time in Russia with harrowing eye-witness accounts of life and death in war-torn Ukraine.

Starmer promised to introduce his ‘New Deal’ for workers within one hundred days of the election of a Labour government. Coming as it did two-thirds of the way through its first hundred days, the TUC Congress in Brighton should have drawn up a balance sheet of the initial stage of the new Labour government. This could have been the basis for a plan of union action to prepare workers for a response to Chancellor Rachel Reeves’ first budget at the end of October and the struggles to come. This didn’t happen. But the congress did reveal that there are two main trends within the union movement in how it responds to Starmer’s government.

It has been a tale of woes and anguish in Nigeria as the government, led by Bola Tinubu, has continued to unleash multiple attacks on the mass of working people, youth and the poor. Not only have living standards been driven down by continuous implementation of neo-liberal, anti-poor policies, but also brutal attacks and crack-downs on anyone or anything that appears to be in opposition to the government’s anti-poor policies.

The war in Ukraine catapulted to the top of the news on 6 August when Ukrainian forces launched an unexpected assault over the border into the Kursk region of Russia.

They rapidly took over 400 square miles of territory, capturing dozens of villages and towns. Unprepared Russian forces were overcome and hundreds taken prisoner. Fears were sparked in the local population with hundreds of thousands of civilians fleeing. This marked the first invasion of Russia since world war two and is a major humiliation for Putin. But can it change the course of the war?