In autumn 1979, Tony Cliff, writing in International Socialism, surveyed the landscape of labour struggle in Britain. He concluded that, in the second half of the 1970s, the balance of forces had tilted in favour of the ruling class.1 A… Continue Reading
As a part of our ongoing coverage of the emerging strike movement in Britain, Charlie Kimber, editor of the weekly newspaper Socialist Worker, explores recent developments, asking what changed in 2022 and what has stayed the same. His analysis draws… Continue Reading
On 26 July 2022, it will be 50 years since an upsurge of unofficial strikes freed five dockers from Pentonville Prison. Through this action striking workers won what Tony Cliff, founder of the International Socialist tradition associated with this journal,… Continue Reading
A review of Nothing to Lose But Our Chains: Work and Resistance in Twenty-First-Century Britain, Jane Hardy (Pluto, 2021), £19.99 A typical protocol for a book review is to begin with an outline of its purposes and structure, to proceed… Continue Reading
The union organising model associated with Jane McAlevey has a growing influence among union activists in Britain and internationally.1 As a former union organiser in the United States, and now an advisor to unions and author of several books, her… Continue Reading
Avtar Singh Jouhl is the national president of the Indian Workers’ Association (IWA GB) and was a leading workplace militant and anti-racist activist in the Smethwick area and in the foundries of the West Midlands from the late 1950s through… Continue Reading
Along with Mark O’Brien and several other authors in this journal, I am anxious to understand what lay behind the dramatic drop in UK strike activity from the late 1970s to the early 1990s and the extremely low level ever… Continue Reading
Roger Cox was among the earliest members of the Socialist Review Group (SRG), founded by Tony Cliff in the 1950s, a group that would later evolve into the International Socialists (IS) and then the Socialist Workers Party (SWP). As one… Continue Reading
Mark O’Brien’s article in issue 157 of International Socialism, “What has Happened to the British Labour Movement and What Does it Mean for the Left in the Unions?”, adds to the debates in this journal over the last number of… Continue Reading
In February to March 2018, tens of thousands of university workers in the University and College Union (UCU) at 65 institutions in higher education took 14 days of strike action, in what was the biggest universities strike ever. The strike… Continue Reading