Finally Got the News Saturday, June 28, 8pm, £0 The Pullens Centre, 184 Crampton St, Elephant & Castle, London SE17 Rare screening of documentary (dir. Steward Bird, Rene Lichtman, Peter Gessner) on the League of Revolutionary Black Workers, from wildcat movement to formidable independent workers organization, inside and outside the auto factories of insurgent turn-of-the-'70s Detroit.

Shot as the events were happening, the film features interviews with participants and footage from inside the plants. With speaker Brian Ashton, ex-car industry shop steward. Below are brief descriptions (with URLs) of six online texts, which combine to form a sort of virtual 'reader' expanding on the content of the film. The first three deal directly with the the Detroit events, their historical background and immediate aftermath. The last three go further into the surrounding questions of class struggle, racial politics and industrial production and its evisceration.

In-depth to say the least (it's 55 pages if you print it out) interview with marxist writer/activist and recent Mute collabor Loren Goldner by the South Korean SaNoShin group, covering the 20th century history of class struggle and present developments/future prospects.
From Goldner's Break Their Haughty Power website (http://home.earthlink.net/~lrgoldner/)

The Situation of Left Communism Today:
Interview with the Korean Socialist Workers Newspaper Group (SaNoShin), November-December 2007

Loren Goldner

Preface: The following interview was conducted on three separate occasions in Seoul, South Korea, in November-December 2007 with militants of a small Korean Marxist group, SaNoShin, which is becoming increasingly influenced by left communist theory. It was the third in a series of surveys undertaken by SaNoShin, following similar dialogues with the International Communist Current (ICC) and Internationalist Perspectives (IP). The latter two groups in the past few years have, like myself,  been involved in introducing left communist theory to South Korea, where it was previously all but unknown.

The syndicalist SAC union in Sweden has over the last few months been campaigning for fair wages for undocumented immigrants , resulting in thousands of pounds in unpaid wages being paid to migrant workers.

The increasing organisation of undocumented immigrants within the syndicalist union SAC have lead to more and more blockades to force the payment of unpaid wages, mainly from employment agencies in the restaurant, cleaning, hotel and building industry. Millions of Swedish Kronor in unpaid wages have been have been won by the SAC. Because these companies and their customers don't want to attract attention to their exploitation of undocumented immigrants, in most cases the mere threat of a union blockade has been enough to get the wages paid.

Last year's Royal Mail strikes responsded to an ongoing attack on postal workers' conditions, the origins of which can be traced directly to the competitve, 'harmonized' market being gradually introduced under the EU Postal Directives of 1997 and 2002.  The threatened closure of post offices across the UK also falls within the Directives' market logic.  (It remains to be seen if local post office user campaigns, whose bandwagon now groans under the weight of Ken Livingstone and a posse of embarrassed/embarrassing Labour MPs, will manage to organize in solidarity with the Royal Mail workers.)  This Private Eye squib mentions the workers only in passing and the Directives not at all, but it draws attention to an important mediating stage in the restructuring: the banker-run Shareholder Executive, created in 2002 to subject the UK's remaining state-owned companies to the ultra-short-term criteria of 'shareholder value'

Shareholder Executive
BIG CHEQUES IN THE POST

Where did the ruthlessly commercial approach to Britain's post offices, and with it the massive closure programme, come from?

On March 26 a Financial Times 'Lex' columnist wrote:
"Happily for nuclear power, there are new bogeymen in town.  Flatulent cows and coal fires are heating up the planet, while autocratic regimes seem to control most of the fossil fuel reserves.  As democratic Canada and Australia sit on plenty of uranium, and nuclear power generation is relatively clean once the plants are up and running, the industry seems set to make a comeback. [...] Russia announced this month that it expects to build as many as 42 new domestic reactors by 2030, compared with the 31 it is running now.  Its nuclear holding company, Rosatom, created in another fit of state-led industrial reorganisation, hopes to export another 60.  Some of these will go to China, which has 11 reactors in operation and five in construction.  The plan is to increase Chinese nuclear generation capacity fivefold by 2020, and then triple that by 2030.  In the US, plans for 30 new plants have been announced, and several developed countries are eyeing the replacement of similar reactors.