Britons rally in support of Greek striking steelworkers

Tuesday 24 July 2012 by John Millington Printable Email
Trade unionists in Britain flooded to the Greek embassy in London on Monday to show solidarity with striking steelworkers after their picket lines were attacked by riot police in Athens.
Workers at the Hellenic Steel factory have been on strike for 268 days, struggling for decent wages and demanding the reinstatement of sacked colleagues.
But last Friday Greece's coalition government ordered police to try and break the strike despite ongoing negotiations between unions and employers.
Riot police attacked picket lines with batons and tear gas.
But despite a handful of strike breakers and managers being escorted through police lines, the workers' union Pame has insisted the strike "will go on."
Greek and British communists alongside members of transport union RMT unfurled a banner saying: "Without you no cog can turn. Workers can do without the bosses."
Speaking to the Morning Star after delivering a letter on behalf of the union to the Greek embassy condemning the police action, RMT president Alex Gordon said: "Riot police have been deployed and workers quite rightly are resisting.
"I think the first thing, is to get the message out that the Greek workers are not alone."
Mr Gordon added that the example of the strike in Greece and the brutal response of the government was a sign of things to come.
"Things are getting difficult in Britain," he said, pointing to reports of ministers considering sacking striking border guards.
"The duty of trade unionists and socialists is to collective action and to defend our class interests."
johnm@peoples-press.com

Foreign news: p6
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Political art

Spanish coal miners ratchet up the pressure

Spanish coal miners ratchet up the pressure
Monday 09 July 2012by Tom Gill Printable Email
Spanish miners rallied in Madrid today for a day of protest demanding a reversal of subsidy-cuts which could cripple the country's coal industry.
Their Black March on the capital comprised two columns - one from the north, made up of miners who have marched 250 miles from Asturias and Leon, and one from the north-east arriving from Aragon.
They merged in the capital to highlight a brutal attack on their sector which will lead to the loss of thousands of jobs and devastate coal-mining communities.
The UGT and Comisiones Obreras trade union confederations, who represent the miners, will be taking part in a mass rally and march which will see the protests outside the Industry Ministry.
With this march the miners wanted to "take the conflict out of the pits and extend it to the rest of society to support their just demands," said Agustin Martin, a leading figure in the Madrid section of Comisiones Obreras, which has been planning the reception of the miners.
The miners have received "great and warm support" in every town they passed, he said - adding that their demands have been endorsed "by virtually all political organisations, except the (governing) Popular Party, and a large majority of social organisations."
For Marga Ferre of United Left, the miners "are giving a lesson to the whole country that things are won through struggle."
The representative of the radical left formation hoped that the protests of the coal sector would spread to other areas of society, as the miners have historically acted as the vanguard of the labour movement.
Among those who turned out to welcome the miners to the capital were members of the "indignados" (indignant ones) movement, who on day one of the Black March 17 days ago established a Miners Support Group together with neighbourhood organisations of Madrid.
The indignados - the movement led by disaffected youth that exploded onto the national scene with occupations of Madrid's central square, Plaza del Sol, in May 2011 - believe this conflict is part of the "massive transfer of income from the people to the banks and financial markets" and what they consider an attack on democracy and the people's social rights and living conditions.
One main website of the movement declares: "We stand together with the miners' resistance. Their struggle is ours."
Youth movement the Platform of Youth Without Future has also expressed support for the Black March.
"The poor youth, whether unemployed, student or low-paid casual worker," is on the side of coal miners, it says.
"This is a struggle for rights, for the right to a life worth living against the market system that robs us every day."
The cuts by Mariano Rajoy's right-wing government are in breach of a five-year Plan for Coal agreement signed between the government and unions last year.
Eight thousand mine workers will lose their livelihoods and a further 30,000 jobs will be affected indirectly if the 64 per cent cut to government mining subsidies, from €703 million (£560m) to €253m (£200m), goes through.
Spain's miners, who walked off the job at the start of June, are the first major group of workers in Europe to go on indefinite strike against the austerity measures that are wreaking havoc across the continent.

JOHN HAYLETT: Pravda, still speaking out

JOHN HAYLETT: Pravda, still speaking out
Just over two decades ago when the Soviet Union imploded in 1991, its Communist Party claimed over 20 million members and Pravda was the party's daily voice writes John Haylett, political editor of the Morning Star.
Self-styled democrat Boris Yeltsin banned both by Russian presidential decree, prompting an exodus of careerists, opportunists and those without the stomach to fight for the cause they previously championed.
He seized the assets of party and paper, forcing those loyal to the Communist Party and Pravda to rebuild from scratch, relying on conviction rather than state power.
Pravda had been set up in 1912 by Bolshevik leader Lenin as Russia's first legal working-class daily paper and was constantly persecuted by the autocracy, being closed down at the beginning of the first world war before reappearing after the first February 1917 Russian revolution.
It marked its centenary last month in Moscow with a weekend of celebration, receiving guests from two dozen communist parties and left-wing papers from around the world for a round-table discussion and staging a mass rally and concert for Pravda readers and supporters in the historic House of the Unions, which hosted all major Communist Party congresses and also provided the setting for state funerals.
Communist Party of the Russian Federation (CPRF) president Gennady Zyuganov, began the anniversary celebrations by leading international guests in laying red carnations on the memorial to Marshal Georgy Zhukov and at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier in tribute to the role of the Red Army in crushing the Third Reich.
CPRF delegations from across Europe did likewise, linking in to national observation of Victory Day on May 9, for which many citizens sported commemorative red and yellow ribbons.
Both party and paper refer constantly to the second world war, evoking the national unity, comradeship and self-sacrifice of those days.
Zyuganov told the House of the Unions rally that capitalism was living through its 12th crisis in 150 years, vindicating Marx's forecast that they would occur every 10-15 years.
"Imperialism seeks a way out of the current crisis through military adventures and financial injections. It hasn't worked," he said, noting that two previous crises had had "tragic consequences," leading to the first and second world wars.
"Four empires collapsed as a result of the first world war while our country was rescued by the Great October Socialist Revolution and by Lenin, leading to the new economic policy and electrification," he said.
"The second crisis ended with victory in 1945. Winston Churchill had called on the world to strangle the Bolshevik baby in its cradle, but after Hitler began bombing London, he said that Britain had a choice of an alliance with the Soviet Union or perishing.
"The main anti-Sovieteer signed an alliance with the Soviet Union because he was aware of the threat from German fascism."
Zyuganov cited the cold figures of the human cost of the war to his country - 28 million lives lost, "among them our strongest, youngest people," and 19 million children orphaned.
He contrasted the two global conflicts, pointing out: "In the first world war not one enterprise was removed. In the second, 1,500 factories and 10 million workers were evacuated beyond the Urals and new productive facilities set up in a very short time.
"It was said that we did not know how to make modern military goods, but nothing surpassed the T34 tank and Katyusha rockets. They were superior to German weaponry, as were our fighter planes," he added proudly.
The Communist Party leader listed the Soviet Union's postwar achievements of free universal education and full employment, together with achieving nuclear military parity and exploring space.
However when the Soviet system entered critical times, he said, "Gorbachov and others failed to meet the challenge."
He contrasted the experience of China which had seen 100 million victims of the ill-starred cultural revolution but, under Deng Xiaoping, had laid the basis for improving industry, becoming a space power and emerging as the workshop of the world, exemplified by one in four goods sold in US being made in China.
"This proves that it is possible to modernise under Communist Party leadership, but we had one leader, Gorbachov, who was a windbag and then Yeltsin was a drunk. The party had no control over these leaders," he asserted.
"The grassroots didn't have the courage to solve this problem reasonably and peacefully," he said in what appeared a rationalisation of the adventurist and botched 1991 coup by CPSU leaders that proved a godsend to Yeltsin.
Zyuganov slated Yeltsin's prime minister Viktor Chernomyrdin for selling weapons grade plutonium and pumping "a sea of resources" to the US and bringing in US "specialists" to set commodity prices.
Anatoly Chubais, who spearheaded the privatisation of Russian state property and the creation of a number of oligarchs in the 1990s "would have been executed in the US as a traitor" for his deeds, in Zyuganov's view.
"They should all be brought to account," he declared, laying down an alternative economic approach, including public ownership of all mineral resources.
The Communist leader congratulated party workers for the efforts in the recent general election that, despite widespread ballot rigging, had returned CPRF candidates across the country, doubling the party's parliamentary representation.
Zyuganov awarded Pravda gold medals to eight veteran workers at the paper, stating: "Pravda is a symbol of the Soviet era. It has survived all ups and downs. It mobilised citizens to fight for Soviet power and to be victorious.
"Congratulations for preserving the existence of Pravda to support broad patriotic movement, which can say: 'Truth is on our side'," he said. Pravda of course means Truth in Russian.
Congratulatory messages were read to the audience, drawing warm responses in the main, none more so than Belarus President Alexander Lukashenko's "Pravda loyally and truthfully covers the situation in Belarus."
However, then Russian president Dimitri Medvedev's message that Pravda embodied "the best traditions of Soviet journalism" was greeted by whistles and boos among some applause.
Editor Boris Komotsky welcomed international guests to the Pravda offices where staff had just completed production of a special centenary edition and an Age of Lenin calendar.
Komotsky recalled the hard days of the early 1990s when anti-communist mobs had attacked the paper's headquarters, saying: "We had to fight to defend the building against vandalism.
"Our opponents were engaged in violent activities. There was a ban on the party and paper and subsequently there were several times when our paper was forced to close for lack of finance."
There were other trials, not least the sale of the paper to Greek entrepreneurs posing as communists by then editor Gennady Seleznyov, who was later expelled from the party and now sits in parliament as the sole representative of the Russian Renaissance Party.
Some Pravda journalists left the paper and its political inspiration to set up a Pravda Online website, while the CPRF succeeded finally in 1997 in regaining ownership of the newspaper as its party organ.
Pravda had 300 editorial staff in Soviet times. Now it has just 14 full-time journalists, some veterans who have worked there since the 1960s and younger people who have joined more recently.
Over 80 per cent of the paper's content is contributed by volunteer worker correspondents - "in the Leninist tradition," as Komotsky puts it - across Russia.
"Several TV teams have visited us to mark our 100th birthday, which is very atypical and was surprising to us," said editor Komotsky.
"Our party has gained weight and strength as a result of election results. We hope they'll tell the truth about the Truth," he added.
Current circulation for Pravda, which is now published three times a week, is 100,000, based on four editions in Moscow, the Caucasus, the Urals and Siberia. There are also weekly regional versions, plus specials.
The paper's bank sent along a birthday cake decorated to show a Pravda front page, including its distinctive masthead showing the two orders of Lenin and one of the October Revolution.
Those reminders of Soviet times were dropped at one time, but Komotsky was insistent on their reappearance, calling Pravda "a beachhead of Soviet civilisation that never surrendered."
"We have withstood all trials. We have remained true and loyal to its name and the principles on which Lenin founded it. It reports truthfully on workers' struggles.
"It's a school for strong characters. It was not made by political wizards but arose out of the suffering of working people and the desire for change."
Komotsky is pleased at the response to Pravda's first invitation to international guests in over 20 years to witness "the tremendous job of restoring the work of Pravda. This work continues.
"The best outcome of today's meeting would be closer ties between ourselves. There are technical and financial difficulties, but it is possible to overcome them," he stresses.




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