Aslef general secretary DAVE CALFE looks at how rail workers and miners stood together against wage cuts 100 years ago – and why the legacy of collective action endures today
ONCE we grasp the connection between a decade or more of ever-rising levels of corporate profits (and the enormous bonuses and remuneration packages which inevitably accompany corporate power and ownership) and the year-on-year decline in the purchasing power of our wages, the systemic nature of Britain’s crisis becomes clear.
The dual character of British capitalism — simultaneously a key player in the global imperialist system engaged in the extraction of super-profits from the labour of millions both at home and abroad — emerges.
Supranational entities like the European Union, the European Central Bank, the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank appear as part of the natural order and only bit by bit does it emerge that these are the superstructural elements that police this system of super-exploitation.
International solidarity can ensure that Trump and his machine cannot prevail without a level of political and economic cost that he will not want to pay, argues CLAUDIA WEBBE
Western nations’ increasingly aggressive stance is not prompted by any increase in security threats against these countries — rather, it is caused by a desire to bring about regime changes against governments that pose a threat to the hegemony of imperialism, writes PRABHAT PATNAIK
Starmer sabotaged Labour with his second referendum campaign, mobilising a liberal backlash that sincerely felt progressive ideals were at stake — but the EU was then and is now an entity Britain should have nothing to do with, explains NICK WRIGHT
Speaking to a CND meeting in Cambridge this week, SIMON BRIGNELL traced how the alliance’s anti-communist machinery broke unions, diverted vital funds from public services, and turned workers into cannon fodder for profit



