The Uruguayan ruling class made its first big move against Tabare Vazquez’s centre-left government by launching a lockout in the goods transport industry on Monday of last week.
The central aim of Tony Blair’s education policy is the abolition of the state comprehensive system.Education privatisation was not a New Labour invention. Margaret Thatcher’s Tory government set in motion processes to create a new world of competition between schools.
In Charles Dickens’s novel Great Expectations the main character, Pip, tells the story of how, as a rural, working class boy, he is invited up to the local Great House of someone called Miss Havisham.
New Orleans is still broken. There is a "beauty strip" along the river in mainly white neighbourhoods, where "les bon temps" are still celebrated, but the heart of the African-American metropolis, middle class as well as working class neighbourhoods, remains a ghost city. Vast areas of the city are still without power and bodies are still being discovered in the toxic rubble.
Many socialists and working class people around the world celebrated Tommy Sheridan’s recent libel victory. We should also welcome his call to launch a new party in Scotland, and the momentum which this is gathering.
The upturn in industrial militancy that took place from 1970-4 remains the most intense period of British class struggle since the turbulent years at the end of the First World War when Britain stood on the brink of revolution.
The Chartist movement of the mid-19th century was the first attempt to build a political party representing the working class. Central to the movement was the radical newspaper the Northern Star. In 1839, the paper sold 50,000 copies a week, rivalling the circulation of the Times.
‘If class warfare is being waged in America," Warren Buffett recently suggested, "my class is clearly winning." But, he added, "they shouldn’t be". Buffett is the second richest man in the world, behind only Microsoft’s Bill Gates.
The SeagullDirected by Katie MitchellNational Theatre, LondonUntil 23 September
This is a fresh and innovative production of one of the Russian playwright Anton Chekhov’s finest plays. It deals with conflicting visions of art, with love, class and the claustrophobia of bourgeois families.
The 30 years of armed struggle and mass resistance against British rule in Ireland began with the struggle for civil rights. The struggle was about fighting against second class citizenship.
Hidden (Caché)Directed by Michael HanekeDVD out now
George and Anne, a middle class French couple, receive a videotape which has two hours of surveillance of their home.
