Workers’ Memorial Day

April 28 – this year as every other year since 1985 – is Workers’ Memorial Day, an occasion the British labour movement really needs to mark more strongly than it usually does.

The event is designed to highlight the shocking death toll regulary seen in workplaces around the world. According to statistics from the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions – almost certainly an underestimate – 200,000 workers per annum die on the job. Many more are injured, often seriously.

That is equivalent to an attack on the scale of 9/11, perpetrated against the working class every single week of every single year.

We are currently in the grip of a war on terrorism. But the idea of a war on negligent employers somehow doesn’t make it onto the political radar screen. Bosses continue – quite literally – to get away with murder.

Unions in Britain have been pushing for adequate legislation on this one for around 40 years. The Zeebrugge and Piper Alpha tragedies of the Thatcher period served to put the issues into even sharper relief.

But most deaths occur in ones and twos. Even without any spectacular accidents, there were 2,157 workplace deaths in Britain in the five years to 2004.

Labour has promised to do something about the scandal ever since the early 1990s. Its 1997 manifesto promised legislation on corporate manslaughter. But subsequent delay and prevarication make the ban on foxhunting look the very model of alacrity.

Tentative proposals have been advanced several times, but still nothing has been done. Thankfully, there are recent reports that draft legislation is in the offing. About bloody time.

If company directors can be prosecuted for dodgy book-keeping, why not for negligence that leads to somebody’s death? Or is the sanctity of accounting standards worth that much than a human life?

Egypt: neither Mubarak nor the Muslim Brotherhood

Egypt is – second only to Iraq – the country where many current theoretical debates in the anglophone blogosphere play out in real life, with real consequences for tens of millions of real people.

It’s also a country I can claim to know, at least a little, having visited it a couple of times on journalistic assignment.

Tonight we read that at least 22 people have died, with perhaps 150 injured, in a triple bomb attack in the resort town of Dahab. Although no group had claimed responsibility at the time of writing, the operation bears the familiar hallmarks of al Qa’eda inspiration.

One section of the far left – the one that sells papers uncritically hailing this brand of terrorism as ‘the new anti-imperialist ideology‘ – will strike its usual posture of ‘refusing to condemn’ the atrocity, just as they refused to condemn 9/11.

Meanwhile, foreign policy realists will stress the need for continued support of the de facto dictatorship of Hosni Mubarak. The US already does that big time. Egypt receives $2bn a year of American economic and military aid, more than anybody else save Israel.

Mubarak goes through the motions of holding elections, of course, albeit elections subject to ballot-rigging, intimidation, censorship and violence. Then he goes and jails the main opposition presidential candidate, simply for calling Mubarak a ‘loser’ at a campaign rally.

So much for US claims consistently to be promoting democracy in the Middle East. The hypocrisy of Washington’s stance will be more than apparent to most politically-aware Arabs.

Surely the answer must be a free and fair vote, then? But there’s a little snag here. There is little doubt that the Muslim Brotherhood would walk any properly democratic contest. And as the electoral victory of Hamas in Palestine underlines, many democrats don’t like it when democracy produces the wrong results.

Will either the neoconservatives or the Euston Manifesto group have the courage of their convictions, and advocate putting their theoretical prescription to the test if the inevitable outcome is an anti-Israel Islamist regime in Cairo? We shall see.

And even if the likes of Ayman Nour could be built up into a serious contender, he would simply prove another corrupt third world bourgeois politician, interested chiefly in implementing neoliberal policies so long as they do not contradict the real imperative of lining the pockets of his family and associates.

The only consistent leftwing policy is to support the stuggles of Egyptian socialists as they seek to build themselves within the working class. I know of small groups bravely attempting to do just that, often in conditions of clandestinity and repression. Sadly, the dominant politics of the British left – in either SWP or Euston Manifesto variants – will be of no assistance to them whatsoever.

David Osler, libertarian Marxist

… and I’m Dave Osler from London, in my mid 40s and so probably old enough to be Benjamin’s dad. I first got involved in politics thanks to movements like Rock Against Racism and Youth CND that arose from the punk rock scene in Britain in the late 1970s.

By the early 1980s, I joined the Labour Party Young Socialists and then Labour itself. At that time Labour was a mass working class-based party with substantial socialist and revolutionary currents, and nothing like the neoliberal Blairite organisation it is today.

My best known book – Labour Party plc – documents the transformation. As a result of writing it, I occasionally appear on television and radio programmes, arguing the case that New Labour is institutionally corrupt.

I have also been a member of several Trotskyist groupings, but these days have departed from Trotskyist orthodoxy on several points, and my politics have evolved in a more libertarian direction.

When it comes to the Aussie far left, I like some of what I read and hear about Democratic Socialist Perspective, but I’m not entirely convinced by some of their theory.

I’m a newcoming to blogging, only starting two months ago, but my main blog Dave’s Part has generally been well received, even though it has criticised almost everybody on the UK left … and right, for that matter.

Benjamin Solah, Marxist-Trotskyist

Hi, my name’s Benjamin Solah. I’m a young Marxist revolutionary from Sydney, Australia. More accurately, I’m a Trotskyist without allusions in electoral socialism or socialism in one country.

I became involved in politics in 2004 when I became interested in Australia’s refugee movement (Australia mandatorily detains all asylum seekers while their cases in pending, which is in direct breach of international law and results in massive abuses of human rights.) I was also in my final year of school at the time and through Legal Studies and Modern History, I took a further interest in politics. It was when I became involved in Left-wing activism generally, that I became involved with Socialist Alternative. They’re a small Trotskyist group based mainly in Melbourne with branches all around Australia, including Sydney.

I became open to Marxist politics because it seems to me that the reason this world is so fucked up is because it’s driven by profits for a minority and everyone else gets pissed on. The US seems to have this fetishism over blowing up countries to help their own pockets, and that’s not helping the people in the States, but the government and the CEOs. I also got involved with Marxist politics because I don’t believe voting in a party with the right ideas will change anything because you don’t elect everyone. You don’t elect all the executives who decide what products to produce and at what cost, and how much you pay your workers and you’re electing someone to run a system that’s fucked up. And if you want to change the world, you have to change the system. You have to destroy capitalism.

Welcome!

Welcome to the Far-Left Bloggers Union. This is a collective blog organized by yours truly, and a place for Far-Left bloggers. Too often have I seen group conservative blogs and soft liberal blogs that support the Democrats, who can be just as scummy as the Republicans sometimes.

If you’re interested in becoming a blogger for the FLBU, then email me at benjamin@benjaminsolah.com with a short bio of your politics. There isn’t very strict guidelines, you just have to be very left-wing. I’ll be working on the template and posting my political bio soon.