Month: August 2011

28 posts
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London’s Burning: Looking back at the Brixton riots of 1981

The recent riots in the most unequal borough in the UK - Tottenham, London - in response to the shooting of Mark Duggan by police have many parrallels with the Brixton riots in London 30 years ago. In advance of a fuller analysis of the recent events, we repost an article for our readers from April of this year, where the Socialist Party of England and Wales (our sister group) loked back at the Brixton riots on it's thirtieth anniversary and warned that the "conditions for new 'Brixtons' are being prepared".

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Stock market collapse: Global economy shaking

Thursday, 4 August was a black day on world stock exchanges. In New York, the Dow Jones index fell by 4.3 per cent and the Nasdaq index closed down 5.3 per cent "and all the gains that have occurred since year end were deleted to zero" (as the financial website E24 said, 5 August). "It was an outright massacre," said John Richard, head of strategy at RBS Global Banking & Markets, to the Wall Street Journal about yesterday’s events.

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Lenin – the original dictator?

Vladimir Lenin, the main leader of the Russian revolution, made the following insightful observation in mid-1917: “During the lifetime of great revolutionaries, the oppressing classes constantly hounded them, received their theories with the most savage malice, the most furious hatred, and the most unscrupulous campaigns of lies and slander. After their death, attempts are made to convert them into harmless icons, to canonise them, so to say, and to hallow their names to a certain extent for the ‘consolation’ of the oppressed classes and with the object of duping the latter, while at the same time robbing the revolutionary theory of its substance, blunting its revolutionary edge and vulgarising it”. (State and Revolution)

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Warning: Capitalism’ a health hazard

TASC, an independent Irish think-tank, has produced a report that puts the reality of the detrimental impact of poverty, lack of education and class division on human health, in an Irish context. Eliminating Health Inequalities – A Matter of Life and Death, TASC 2011 points out, for example, that according to Census 2006, men living in the most affluent areas live 4.5 years longer than men living in the poorest areas.

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Eurozone: Last-minute rescue package

The last-minute rescue package put together by eurozone leaders on 21 July has averted an immediate Greek debt crisis. A default by Greece would have triggered a European financial crisis, with world-wide repercussions. The package, however, merely eases the Greek government’s cash-flow problem. It does little or nothing to reduce the unsustainable debt mountain or stimulate economic growth. While the eurozone leaders are heading for the beaches or the mountains, Greek workers continue to labour under the yoke of intolerable austerity measures.