New edition

Workers of the World

Volume 1 – Number 13

August 2024

Once again war threatens the world, the future of the planet and condemns the working classes to poverty. Once again, working classes must push hard to stop Ukraine/Russia war, NATO’s warmongering and the genocide of the Palestinian people. In this edition, we take on the urgency of the answers still to be built, of the workers’ movement that needs strength and of finding convergences with the youth for the climate emergency, with anti-fascists who fight against growing authoritarianism, with anti-racism on all continents, with the defence of public services and radical gender equality.

From the past, we get examples in which the left and the workers’ movement have achieved significant victories against the war waged by the empires. This is the case of Marina Kabat’s text about the frustrated participation of the Argentine military in the Korean War in the 1950s. It is the example of the workers of the North of France and Belgium occupied by the troops of the Reich, of their struggle for better living conditions, and of the extraordinary resistance to the Nazi occupation, in a review of Steve Cushion and Merilyn Moss’ book, On Strike Against the Nazis. From the present-day, we publish a text by members of the workers’ committee of the Portuguese public television (RTP) where the field of labour struggles fully assumes the positioning on the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the ongoing genocide in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank.

We also publish an interview with Michael Roberts where the path and thought of the British economist are a fundamental reference or thinking the world in which we live and the crucial alternatives to ensure the future.

A text on two recently published books, and presented at the 6th Conference of IASSC, is Buntu Siwisa’s contribution to this edition of the Workers of the World journal: Labour Revolt in Britain, 1910 – 1914, by Ralph Darlington, and Recasting Workers’ Power: Work and Inequality in the Shadow of the Digital Age, by Edward Webster are the two books that Siwisa talks to us about, showing us the evolution of capital accumulation and the continuity of exploitation, and how labour resists in strategies of organization and mobilization. In fair tribute to Edward Webster, who passed away in March 2024, we republish a text by Karl von Holdt, originally published in The Conversation. Eddie Webster was present at the 6th IASSC Conference, last February, presenting his book.

Resisting, organizing, mobilizing is the enormous urgency of the present to which this issue of Workers of the World intends to contribute on the reflection and response capacity of class internationalism.

in this edition…

João Carlos Louçã

Cushion, Steve and Moos, Merilyn. On Strike Against the Nazis. Published by Socialist History Society, 2021

We are warned at the outset of On Strike Against the Nazis that the two texts integrat- ed in it are a contribution to adding class struggle to the historiography of the Second World War, which both authors consider too imbued with assumptions of patriotism and class collaboration in the analysis of the resistance to occupation.

António Louçã, Paulo Mendes, Nelson Silva

From Ukraine to Gaza, stop the war!

Since the 19th century, the workers’ movement has often been the main social force committed to preventing imperialist wars where younger workers would be called to shed their blood and elder workers would be forced to work and starve. Since the Russian invasion and the outbreak of the Ukraine war, the urgent need for this commitment is back. At the first stages of that war, we, as members of the workers’ committee of the Portuguese public media network RTP, issued a statement as our own contribution to this task.

Buntu Siwisa

"...A display of temper..."

At the height of the South African summer this year, Ralph Darlington and Edward Webster met. It was not the first time they had met. But it was the first occasion that they gathered under the weights and glories of the thrilling new epistemologies thrown out in their respective new books: Darlington’s Labour Revolt in Britain, 1910 – 1914, and Recasting Workers’ Power: Work and Inequalities in the Shadow of the Digital Age, by Eddie Webster with Lynford Dor.