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Friday, 23 October 2009 01:18 |
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In the last month or so, the International Socialist Organisation has put a lot of effort into building the Campaign for a Living Wage, which was launched by the Unite, New Zealandís newest and most dynamic union.
Why have we chosen to work on this campaign, when there are so many other issues at the moment? The most pressing is the campaign to provide relief to the Pacific islands which were hit by a lethal tsunami. That campaign has attracted widespread support as New Zealanders recognise the close ties between us and other Pacific islands.
Another campaign we have supported, although not as strongly, is the campaign against cuts to ACC which will protect rapists by making it harder for victims of sexual abuse to access support.
The biggest campaign is the international day of action on climate change. The scale of environmental damage poses a threat not just to working people, not just to NZ and the Pacific, but to the whole of human civilisation. Why then do we not throw all of our weight behind this campaign? |
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Monday, 13 July 2009 09:27 |
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From the ISR Issue 63, January–February 2009
Stonewall: The birth of gay power
By SHERRY WOLF
Sherry Wolf is the author of the forthcoming Sexuality and Socialism: History, Politics and Theory of Gay Liberation (Haymarket Books, 2009). Here the ISR prints an excerpt from her book. Wolf is on the editorial board of the ISR.
THE SIXTIES is often perceived as an era of social upheaval and orgiastic revelry. But for lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) folks in America, the efflorescence of sexual expression did not begin until the waning months of that decade in the heart of the nation’s then-largest bohemian enclave and gay ghetto, New York’s Greenwich Village. The Stonewall Riots that began in the wee hours of June 28, 1969,1 lasted six nights and catapulted the issue of sexual liberation out of the Dark Ages and into a new era.
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Friday, 26 June 2009 01:09 |
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Issue 95 of INTERNATIONAL SOCIALISM JOURNAL Published Summer 2002 Copyright © International Socialism
The wave of protests which swept the Arab world in the wake of the Israeli invasion of the West Bank on 29 March 2002 marked a turning point for an entire generation. Demonstrations pulled first thousands, then hundreds of thousands, then finally millions, onto the streets. In country after country rage at the butchery in Ramallah, Bethlehem and Jenin became an explosion of anger at Israel's imperialist backers and their local clients--the Arab regimes. Although several governments tried to channel anger into charity telethons, blood donation campaigns and official demonstrations as the weeks went by,1 the protest movement was a spontaneous explosion of anger from below. An important article in the Egyptian paper Al-Ahram Weekly argued in mid-April:
The political map, 'stagnant' as it is, seemed until now to consist of the NDP [the ruling nationalist party], a number of left and right wing parties, and the outlawed Muslim Brotherhood. But when thousands across the nation went out on massive Palestine solidarity, anti-Israeli and anti-American demonstrations over the past three weeks, it began to seem like new and different forces might well be redrawing the map.2 |
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Tuesday, 23 June 2009 11:18 |
By Bert Roth
[From Socialist Action, v.8 no.7, 7 May 1976, p. 4]
(The following is an edited transcript of a talk given by Bert Roth to a workshop at the Young Socialists National Conference, held in Auckland on April 16-18. Roth is a labour historian and Deputy-Librarian at Auckland University.)
Lenin’s paper Iskra (Spark) is generally considered the model for a Bolshevik paper, a paper that actually organises a party.
In Iskra No. 4 Lenin wrote:
The first practical step to take towards creating the organisation we desire, the factor which will enable us constantly to develop, broaden and deepen that organisation, is to establish a national political newspaper. A paper is what we need above all. Without it we cannot systematically carry on that extensive and theoretically sound propaganda and agitation which is the principal and constant duty of the social democrats in general...
It is a political paper we need. Without a political organ, a political movement deserving that name is impossible in modern Europe. Unless we have such a paper, we shall be absolutely unable to fulfil our task, namely to concentrate all the elements of political unrest and discontent, and with them enrich the revolutionary movement of the proletariat.
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