Manchester College staff on strike

Tomorrow will see UCU members at Manchester College go on strike over contracts.

Members of the University and College Union (UCU) at The Manchester College – which has campuses in Crumpsall, Moston, Harpurhey and Collyhurst – will stage a walkout.

Lecturers are fighting proposed new contracts which they claim will create a two-tier system between those who teach teenagers and adult tutors.

Council cuts in Bolton

In the midst of the new Tory-Liberal coalition’s austerity measures due to the recession Bolton have started to bring the axe down on public services in the town.

EVERY public service in Bolton faces cuts in the council’s “worst ever” budget, as the Government tries to plug the national deficit.

Town hall bosses need to save more than £50 million over the next five years, which means that up to 500 posts will be cut and every major building project in the borough will be reviewed to see what can be put on hold. Council leader Cllr Cliff Morris said: “This is the worst I’ve ever seen. It will impinge on people’s lives — there’s no two ways about it.”

(The) Stuff Your Boss (doesn’t want you to know)

The Solidarity Federation’s pamphlet outlining your basic rights at work and how to fight against casualisation has been reprinted and updated and can be downloaded here.

Berlin Courts’ Logic Supply Dangerously Low

An interview with Lars Röhm about the fine against the FAU Berlin

In April, the FAU Berlin was charged 200 Euros for referring to itself as a union in its statutes. In December 2009, an injunction had been issued forcing them to remove the word union from all their publications. However the banned word remained in the statutes until mid-March as a change there would have taken several months. The management of the Babylon Mitte Cinema filed for the charges in February 2010. The injunction was also filed for by the same cinema’s management during a labor dispute with its employees, which the FAU Berlin was supporting. This is the first time that a workers’ association has been banned from calling itself a union in Germany. Lars Röhm has been the secretary of the FAU Berlin since 2009.

The Dead End of Nationalisation: how state ownership of industry does not, never has, and never will serve working class interests

This post originally featured in Direct Action #46 Spring 2009

For over a century now all sorts of social democrats, Stalinists and Trotskyists have espoused the view that the state can be used to bring about a communist society through reforms and/or seizing the state on behalf of the workers. This has often been dubbed by libertarian communists as “state socialism”. One of the staple demands of this statist strategy is the nationalisation of banks and other industries, bringing them under the direction of the state. This is usually disguised in leftist terms like “public” or “social” ownership, offering the illusion of a “worker’s state”.

However, state ownership of industry is in no way a communist measure – by communism we mean a society free of state direction and based on direct democracy, common ownership and production for need, not want. Nationalisation takes control out of the workers’ hands and into those of the state, which bolsters the rule of class over class. In the Soviet Union, as in the West, there was still a small boss class who gained profit from the labour of the mass of the population.