Class Follow

A STRIKE often brings out the best in working class people. It always brings out the worst from the rich who run the media. The handful of men who control most newspapers and TV stations hate strikes and strikers. They unleash every lie, every bit of filth, to try and demoralise strikers and turn other people against them.

THE PETER and Paul Fortress in St Petersburg was once a prison but is now a museum. You can wander round its cells and see grainy photographs of its former occupants, political prisoners under the old Russian Tsars 100 years ago. A large number are women-revolutionaries usually from middle class backgrounds who braved torture and exile for their cause.

The film Donnie Darko is set in a middle class school in small town America. It is a far cry from most teen movies on offer today. It is a satire about the end of US president Ronald Reagan's era in the late 1980s. Donnie Darko shows how you have to deal with more than your sexuality and your parents when you're a teenager. This film recognises that you also have to confront the world you live in.

TONY BLAIR accused the firefighters last week of bringing back the spectre of "Scargillism". He wanted to use the name of miners' union leader Arthur Scargill to try to discredit the firefighters. When Blair refers to "Scargillism" he means working class militancy. Workers in the 1970s showed that they could beat off attacks from the bosses and the government, through striking and winning active solidarity from other workers.

SOCIALIST Worker readers will be saddened to hear of the recent death of one of the paper's oldest readers. Beatrice Mary Jones was born into a fairly privileged family in August 1901. As a teenager she read about the harsh lives of working class people, and in 1917 her sympathy for the Russian Revolution led her aunty to declare her a "Bolshie".

JOAN LITTLEWOOD, who died at the age of 87 last month, was arguably the major figure of radical political theatre in Britain. She dedicated her life to the theatre, and entertaining and educating working class people.

THE NEW edition of International Socialism offers a reply to all those who argue that the working class is dead. Chris Harman argues that the working class is bigger than it ever has been before on a global scale and that it continues to play the vital role in the struggle for a decent society.

SWEET SIXTEEN is the latest film by director Ken Loach. His films always focus on the struggles of working class people to survive when all the odds are stacked against them. This film is no exception. Liam's mum, Jean, is in prison but she will be released in time for his 16th birthday.

DUNCAN HALLAS, who died last week, was a lifelong fighter for revolutionary socialism. A whole generation of supporters of the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) remembers him as an inspired speaker and teacher of Marxist ideas. Year after year he would fill halls with hundreds of people at the SWP's annual Marxism event as he spoke about a range of topics - historical materialism, the struggle of the working class in Britain, the revolutionary tradition, the origins of humanity.

"UP THE workers!" That was the headline in the Daily Mirror last week. The paper was reporting on a new Mori poll which found that 68 percent of the population agreed with the statement, "I'm working class and proud of it." That is up from 52 percent of people who agreed with that statement three years ago, and from 51 percent in 1994.

HOME SECRETARY David Blunkett's new policy on drugs announced last week shows how New Labour cannot adopt a rational approach to the issue. His "drugs tsar", Keith Hellawell, resigned in protest at Blunkett putting cannabis in the least dangerous category of illegal drugs, class C. The overwhelming evidence that cannabis is far less dangerous than alcohol or tobacco and that most people support a change in the law has forced Blunkett to retreat.

ONE VIEW held by socialists often bewilders many people. That is the contention that the state machine in capitalist society serves the interests of the ruling class and cannot be used for a move to socialism. "But", some people insist, "you will always need the police. However much you dislike them, they do a necessary job. Without them there would be complete chaos."