Theory
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Pamphlet: What We Stand ForLatest International NewsWellred BooksThis month we recommend... Order from Socialist Appeal Fighting Fund appeal 2012
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TED GRANT WRITINGS
Click here to purchase Ted Grant Writings Volume One
This volume covers the period 1938-42 and is titled "Trotskyism and the Second World War." Also available:
Latest British NewsBook - 'Reformism or Revolution' - still available
Latest Trade Union NewsIn Defence Of MarxismLeon Trotsky's classic work "In Defence Of Marxism" Now available from Wellred at a special price
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Just
when you think it can’t get any worse for Gordon Brown, it does. New Labour has
succeeded in losing the Glasgow East by-election. Glasgow East is a solid
working class area with one of the finest labour movement traditions on the
country. It has been a Labour heartland for generations.
We republish one of Ted Grant’s most important
writings. In the years after the Second World War the Trotskyist movement had to
reorient itself to a very different situation to that envisaged by Trotsky when
he had founded the Fourth International in 1938. Rather than falling into
crisis, capitalism in Western Europe and North America was experiencing a boom
which was later described as a ‘golden age’. After the post-War revolutionary
wave was seen off in the advanced capitalist countries, this made conditions
for revolutionaries very difficult. Illusions that capitalism had solved all
its problems began to develop quite widely. Ted analysed the causes of the boom
and why it would come to an end in ‘
This book is written in the classic muck-raking style. But
then, there’s a great deal of muck to be raked. It deals with the introduction
of Independent Sector Treatment Centres into the NHS. ISTCs are capitalist
firms operating for profit. It was a New Labour brainwave for them to be given
NHS surgical procedures to perform. The argument was that harnessing the
private sector would help do away with the horribly long hospital waiting lists
left after 18 years of Tory penny pinching.
Wasn’t it good of
Mervyn King, the Governor of the Bank of England, not to accept a pay rise of
£100,000? What a model/example of restraint to us all! Instead he would only
take 2.5% pay increase each year for the next five years, out of his annual
salary of £289,551. We must feel sorry for him. That means he will only get a
bit more than £7,000 pay increase this year. How did anyone work out that he
should get such a pay rise in the first place? The way the economy has been going
over the last year, it can’t be .
