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History and Theory
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In May 2004, we reported Scotland's worst ever industrial disaster when the
Stockline plastics factory in Glasgow exploded leaving 9 dead and 40 injured.
It was another searing indictment of breaches in Health & Safety
legislation, now a matter of course in Britain. Ex-employees told journalists
they had been sacked after raising concerns about safety. The 2 companies jointly responsible, ICL Tech and
ICL Plastics, faced only charges relating to Health & Safety, for which they have now been
fined a measly £400,000.
Just before the collapse of the Berlin Wall and later the Soviet Union,
Ted Grant delivered this speech on the crisis in the USSR. To deflect
any blame, Gorbachev and co. heaped blame on Stalin and Brezhnev, even
going so far as to rehabilitate some of the victims of the purge trials
- including those accused of "Trotskyism". But Trotsky was not
rehabilitated: he was still hated by the bureaucracy because they
feared the ideas he represented.
Hands Off Venezuela has produced a 
Michael Collins was a great
Irish revolutionary and nationalist who more than any one person may be
considered to have created modern Ireland. On 22 August 1922, 85 years ago, he
was killed in an ambush during the Irish civil war - he was 31 years of age.
The following is a short letter from a Postal Worker from Oxford, giving his impressions in his own humorous words of his experience on the picket line. For many of us, it is a grassroots view we can identify with.
The commemoration meeting in memory of Leon
Trotsky was an outstanding success. 300 people gathered in the Jose Felix Rivas
hall of the Teresa Carreño Theatre in Caracas to hear the first ever public
event organised by a government ministry on the life of Leon Trotsky.
Could the Communist party of India have made a decisive difference in the independence movement? Here Jamil shows they were above all the prisoners of the policies imposed by Stalin, which were normally reformist, indeed counter-revolutionary. But occasionally Stalin lurched into an ultra-left phase as in 1947-48, called the 'Zhdanov offensive.' In lurching from right to left, a drunk will at one point be found upright. That is the significance of the correct perception of what was happening in India by the Moscow commentators Dyakov and Zhukov.
This recording was made at the Socialist Appeal day school in London this July, where comrades gathered to hear Fred Weston, editor of www.marxist.com, talk on the current situation in the Middle East. The talk covers primarily the situation in Israel and Palestine, the war last summer between Israel and Lebanon and the situation in Iraq. Listen to 