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STATEMENT ON 4 JUNE EUROPEAN ELECTIONS
The collapse of the Labour vote in the 4 June European election has created a crisis on the left. With 15.7% of the vote (22.9% in the 2004 European election), Labour came third behind the Tories (27.7%) and UKIP (16.5%). The number voting BNP (943,500) was three times the number voting for the Socialist Labour Party (173,000) and for No2EU (153,000) together, and enabled it to win two seats. The Scottish Socialist Party nearly vanished, obtaining a mere 10,000 votes.
Responding to the results in The Guardian, Seamus Milne suggested that ‘if Brown were to ditch Royal Mail privatisation; launch a crash council house-building programme; take a leaf out of the German, French and US governments’ book and intervene decisively to protect manufacturing jobs; scrap the exorbitant Trident renewal and ID card schemes; and take full control of the half-nationalised banks to force up lending – the message would be clear that the government was responding seriously to public anger and fatal working class abstention. What has he got to lose?’ Echoing these sentiments, John McDonnell MP said: ‘If Labour MPs and Gordon Brown don't get the message from these results, we are finished...The message is clear that we need a complete change of political direction... New Labour is being eliminated at the ballot box. People are telling us that they want the Labour Party to become a people's party again. Only then will we regain the voters' trust.’
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Che Guevara
The Economics of Revolution
Helen Yaffe, Palgrave Macmillan, 20 February 2009.
Based on new archival research and interviews with his contemporaries and colleagues, this book records Guevara's contribution to industrial organisation, economic management and socialist political economy debates as a member of the Cuban government. It rescues the history of his work as President of the National Bank, head of the Department of Industrialisation and Minister of Industries from 1959-1965.
Guevara created the Budgetary Finance System, an economic management system unique to socialism and based on the productive and managerial techniques of US corporations. It was also consistent with his Marxist analysis and included policies to promote education and training, establish administrative controls, forge workers' participation in management, found science and technology institutes and raise consciousness whilst institutionalising psychology as a management tool. In addition, the book shows how Guevara was able to predict that capitalism would return to the Soviet Union
Available at the reduced price of £15 from our stalls or send a cheque to
Larkin Publications,
BCM Box 5909,
London
WC1N 3XX
for £17, including p&p. |
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EDITORIAL STATEMENT - FRFI 207 -
WHO SPEAKS FOR THE PALESTINIAN PEOPLE?
The savage Zionist onslaught on Gaza was yet another step towards Israel’s ultimate aim of destroying the Palestinian people. The issue was never Hamas rocket attacks, it was to complete the subjugation of the Gazan population. In this the Zionists failed. The Palestinian struggle for national liberation is one that communists and anti-imperialists throughout the world must support, for whilst the Palestinian people resist, imperialist control of the Middle East will always be under threat.
As the Zionists launched wave after wave of bombs and missiles on 27 December, the bourgeois media, where they did not immediately parrot Israeli lies about ‘terrorism’ and ‘self-defence’, presented an equivalence between the Israeli onslaught and Hamas rocket attacks on Sderot and Ashkelon. Never did they tell the truth: that Israel is a racist, colonial-settler, expansionist state; and that the Palestinians are engaged in a struggle for national liberation, for without such a struggle they would be obliterated as a people. Sderot and Ashkelon were Palestinian villages before their populations were expelled by Israeli forces in 1948; their descendants live today in dire poverty in Gaza whilst the settler population of those villages lives in relative prosperity.
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Capitalism is in crisis
From its start, the RCG has insisted on the inherently crisis-ridden nature of capitalism. It has consistently explained how capitalism’s tendencies to crisis have been countered in the imperialist countries by grinding down the living standards of billions of the poorest people in the world, by destroying socialist countries, privatizing their industries and re-enslaving their workers, and by a relentless expansion of credit. That expansion has reached its limit and the day of accounting is at hand; financial wizards have turned into City spivs, politicians, economists and business executives are helpless and clueless as paper fortunes vanish.
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Forthcoming events:
| Tuesday 7 July Glasgow |
7.30pm
Public forum: Lenin and imperialism
Partick Burgh Halls
Burgh Hall Street
G1
near Partick Rail station/underground |
| Sunday 12 July London |
4-6pm
Discussion of FRFI article
Contact us for reading material
Upstairs at The Perseverance
Corner of Lambs Conduit Street and Great Ormend Street,
WC1
Nearest tube Russell Square |
| Tuesday 14 July London |
7-9.30pm
Third in a series of discussions on Che Guevara: The Economics of revolution
Third in a series of discussion groups based on this important book. This month, Chapter 3: The Great Debate. This chapter is an examination of debates over the best way of building a socialist economy, between those who supported the Soviet-style Auto-Financing system, and those, like Che, who favoured the Budgetary Finance System.
Upstairs at the Calthorpe Arms
252 Grays Inn Road,
London WC1
Nearest tubes: Russell Square/ Kings Cross/Chancery Lane
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