The Editorial

INTERNATIONAL CORRESPONDENCE IS LAUNCHED--reach for the stars

International Correspondence

There is a new magazine out this week, produced by my friends in the Fourth International.

More when it becomes available

An excellent new blog

There is an excellent new blog on the blogosphere.

The worldwide socialist network is a group of socialists active in the labour movement, many of whom come from the former Militant tendency background.

Here is a short excerpt of what they stand for:

a worldwide network for socialists!

It has been reckoned that the world is effectively in the hands of some 6000 billionaires: that is to say that national governments, local authorities, trans-national bureaucracies such as the various commissions and agencies of the European Union and of the United Nations as well as the terrifying death-machines deployed by NATO and others exist primarily to serve the immediate needs of the biggest global businesses: hence perpetual never-ending wars – to grab the world’s diminishing non-sustainable resources from the hands of the people who live around them and to secure them from rival would-be super-powers: hence rising inequality everywhere, increasing misery, starvation and disease for the bottom 2/3rds of humanity and increasing exploitation, cheap marketing tricks, cuts in jobs, pay, unionisation, welfare and health, theft of pensions, privatisation of public services, utilities etc.,

All this for the immediate apparent benefit of one person in a million and their inevitable hangers-on.

Their returns are getting ever harder to be sure of: their capital is ever harder to dispose of profitably: investment goes increasingly to fantasy future schemes, speculation in food futures and all sorts of imaginary and invented ‘products’ – their system is breaking down: the world financial crisis is but one aspect.

Modern capitalism had shown a total incapacity to organise effectively against what all now know could lead to the destruction of much of life on the planet – even while it has given rise to the technical means potentially to ensure a comfortable and productive life for all. This is something they will and can not grant us. While they rule the world our prospects are dismal.

But theirs is not the only way. What they will not give us we must take. What is needed is a universal party run for, by and on behalf of all those who have no ‘independent means’, all those who work for a living. The workers of the world have no vested interest in the continuing destruction of civilisation. Today experience has given them the knowledge and experience, the imagination and enterprise, the sheer capacity for work to run the world a thousand times over. Could they only act decisively with one voice everywhere the path to a safe future could be carved out.

But for the workers of the entire world to come together in such a way would be a monumentally difficult task of coordination. Their trade unions and surviving political parties would have to be transformed top-to-bottom.
This site grew out an online discussion forum: socialistdiscussion@yahoogroups.com

Many shades of socialist thought are represented on this list. There is no ‘party line’ None of us believes that we are the force that will be able to re-form the workers’ movement. Nor are we even the embryo of such a force. But all are committed to do what we can to engage in fight-to-win campaigns on behalf of workers where we can and to promote the general ideas that we believe in.

Caroline Bedale and the Certification officer

What a simply excellent decision!

It is good to know that the rules of the union apply equally to all union members regardless of which wing of the union you are on.


I hope that the leadership of the union now realise that baiting the left is not a useful pastime. I somehow doubt it though.

Well done Caroline.

Starting up again

Well folks, we are back after an absence of some year...

now I have two children aged two and a half and a year old!!!

More later

Mikey