VIJAY PRASHAD details how US support for Syrian President Ahmad al-Sharaa allowed him to break the resistance of the autonomous Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF)
WRITING in 1918, Lenin reflected on the “rottenness, mendacity and hypocrisy of capitalism.”
In the same text he wrote also of bourgeois democracy being “a paradise for the rich and a snare and deception for the exploited” — The Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky.
While of course Lenin knew nothing of Covid-19, the wisdom of both observations has been brutally exposed by the pandemic, as badly exploited workers have been failed by the state, with their trade unions increasingly both marginalised and vilified.
The Bill addresses some exploitation but leaves trade unions heavily regulated, most workers without collective bargaining coverage, and fails to tackle the balance of power that enables constant mutation of bad practice, write KEITH EWING and LORD JOHN HENDY KC
It is only trade union power at work that will materially improve the lot of working people as a class but without sector-wide collective bargaining and a right to take sympathetic strike action, we are hamstrung in the fight to tilt back the balance of power, argues ADRIAN WEIR



