Students in America and increasingly across the world are demonstrating against the Gaza genocide. They’re right to do so, opposing a genocide is never the wrong thing to do.
Student protests that began in the United States have spread to other countries .
At the University of Melbourne in Australia this morning, students pitched tents and began their protests against the genocidal war in Gaza. pic.twitter.com/8oyRXhvRks
— S p r i n t e r F a c t o r y (@Sprinterfactory) April 25, 2024
During the past decade, it has become obvious that economic interconnectedness did not bring forth frictionless international relations as many liberal theorists had predicted. To the contrary, the fact that economic integration has been profoundly uneven has enabled the weaponisation of asymmetrical economic relations for the achievement of geopolitical and/or economic goals (Whyte 2022; Farrell 2023). The weaponisation of the unique international role of the US dollar is one of the most consequential examples of this trend. For instance, in the period since 2001, US sanctions designations have expanded by an extraordinary 933%. In the context of Russia’s war in Ukraine, dollar hegemony made it possible to freeze Russia’s foreign reserves and expel the country from the SWIFT payments system and US correspondent banking.
Sitting on the banks of the River Trent, the market town of Rugeley in Staffordshire has a rich industrial history. In 1777, it benefited from the construction of the Trent and Mersey Canal, which enabled the smooth transportation of fragile pottery and created a thriving industry. Cooling water from the river later made it an […]
I wish to honour the miners and pay tribute to the families who, in 1984–5, fought the greatest workers’ fight seen in this country since the Chartists, the Diggers, the Tolpuddle Martyrs, and the Suffragettes in the battle to save pits, jobs, and communities. I especially want to pay tribute to the young miners, who […]
A possible week in London in 1984: first thing on Monday morning on your way to work, you are greeted at your local tube station by a group of miners collecting donations for the coalfields. When you arrive in the office, your union rep is doing the rounds signing people up for a regular levy […]
In the battle of the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) against Margaret Thatcher’s campaign to break the back of the British labour movement, international solidarity with the NUM remains, forty years on, one of the most inspiring dimensions of that titanic twelve-month dispute. As Seumas Milne, interviewed elsewhere in this issue, has written: ‘The 1984–85 […]
On a busy corner in Barnsley, opposite the local college and a dentist’s office, sits the headquarters of the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM). Built in 1874, the grade II listed building nestled among rows of Victorian townhouses is easy to miss. Once you pass through the wooden doors and climb the stairs, though, it’s […]
Jonathan Blake has a clear memory of his first trip to Onllwyn, a village in the Neath Valley in South Wales, in October 1984. The night before we’d got lost, so the first evening of the visit never happened. When we eventually arrived, we all crammed into Dai Donovan’s house, and then the next day […]
The noise and the thick black dust, shimmering and sparkling when hit by the light, were almost overwhelming. Just in front, a mighty mining machine continuously rotated along the thick face, its teeth ripping into the wall of coal, whereupon it then loaded great chunks of the black stuff onto a conveyor to take it […]
Over the past forty years, we have experienced a massive shift of wealth from working people to the tiny minority in whose interests our society is run. Between 1955 and 1980, the average share of income spent on wages was 68 percent; post-1980 the average share dropped to 58 percent. This was also reflected in […]
Forty years have passed, but the cruelty of Margaret Thatcher’s vendetta against the miners isn’t over. Today, tens of thousands of former pit workers are losing billions in pension entitlements in a deal imposed on them decades ago. Successive governments have taken £4.4 billion out of the miners’ pension fund. Retired workers, meanwhile, struggle on […]
Seumas Milne’s The Enemy Within: The Secret War Against the Miners, first published by Verso in 1994, remains an elementary text for socialists navigating the question of where established power truly resides in modern Britain. Reviewing the book at the time in the pages of Tribune, Tony Benn concluded: ‘Seumas Milne has written a major […]
The miners’ strike is often heralded as the beginning of the end for Britain’s once fearsome trade unions, the moment at which the backbone of workers’ organisation within industry was broken. Much less referenced (yet no less significant) was the manner in which the breaking of the miners, and subsequently the destruction of much of […]
One summer morning in Sheffield, a young Pakistani man stood beneath his friend’s bedroom window clutching a handful of pebbles. When Mukhtar Dar sent the pebbles sailing through the air, the thud against the windowpane woke up his friend Sadiq. It was 18 June 1984, and the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) had called for […]
Over the last quarter-century David Peace has helped to shape the meaning of historical memory in this country. Since the publication in 1999 of the first volume of his Red Riding Quartet — a suite of novels narrating the decay of social democracy and the rise of Thatcherism in a scarcely fictionalised West Yorkshire setting — Peace’s […]
