North Korea’s Great Terror

Andrey Vyshinsky - prosecutor of the Stalinist show trials.
Andrey Vyshinsky – prosecutor of the Stalinist show trials.

The downfall of Chang Song-thaek, once considered the second most powerful person in North Korea, is a lesson in history for a new generation – and not only in Korea.

The parallels to Soviet history are so striking that one almost wonders if Kim Jong-un read Robert Conquest’s “The Great Terror” – the classic history of the Stalinist purges of the late 1930s.

That’s not an entirely rhetorical question either, as Kim was educated abroad and may well have had access to history books denied to ordinary North Koreans.

In any event, the regime he now heads openly reveres Stalin and is perhaps the only one in the world that does so.

Fidel Castro has criticized Stalin, but also says “He established unity in the Soviet Union. He consolidated what Lenin had begun: party unity.”

People with only a passing acquaintance with Soviet history may be surprised to discover that nearly all the victims of Stalin’s massive purge which peaked in 1937 were not, in fact, oppositionists. Continue reading →

ახალბედა პროფკავშირული მოძრაობა საქართველოში

My first article to appear in Georgian — on the website of the Georgian Trade Union Confederation (GTUC).

ავტორი: ერიკ ლი

ნოემბერში, ორი დღის მანძილზე, საქართველოს რკინიგზაში დრამა გათამაშდა, რამაც მშრომელთა მოძრაობა საუკეთესო მხრიდან წარმოგვიდგინა.ეს მოხდა იმ პატარა ქვეყანაში, რომელიც შავ ზღვისა და კავკასიის მთებში მდებარეობს.

Continue reading →

Проблема сталинизма и движение трудящихся сегодня

The Russian language version of my presentation on Stalinism and the Labour Movement to a conference in Kiev in November.

Эрик Ли (главный редактор веб-сайта международного профсоюзного движения LabourStart, Лондон)

В своем выступлении я не буду рассматривать происходящее на постсоветском пространстве – например, в России или Грузии, – а сосредоточу внимание на проблеме сталинизма и сталинистского наследия в движении трудящихся за пределами данного региона. Я буду опираться на опыт Великобритании, где живу.

Ключевое слово здесь – наследие.

Сталинизм, в определенном смысле доминировавший в международном движении трудящихся на протяжении десятилетий, оставил после себя ряд идей, которые сохраняют свое влияние на это движение и левых даже сегодня, через шестьдесят лет после смерти Сталина.

Continue reading →

Per SMS zum Arbeitskampf

Der israelische Gewerkschaftsbund Histadrut feiert große Erfolge, während Gewerkschaften anderswo gegen sinkende Mitgliederzahlen kämpfen.

Anfang November kündigte Ofer Eini nach acht Jahren seinen Abschied von der Spitze des israelischen Gewerkschaftsdachverbands Histadrut an. Das Ende der »Ära Eini« ist ein guter Anlass, um an einige der außergewöhnlichen Erfolge zu erinnern, die die Histadrut in den vergangenen Jahren erzielt hat, vor allem darin, einst für »unorganisierbar« gehaltene Beschäftigte zu organisieren. Dass diese Erfolge außerhalb Israels so gut wie unbekannt sind, ist auf die Feindschaft einiger Gewerkschaften gegenüber dem jüdischen Staat zurückzuführen, die auch die israelische Gewerkschaftsbewegung trifft. Continue reading →

Israel’s Histadrut wins big victories as unions elsewhere struggle to grow

This article appears in German in Jungle World with the headline “Per SMS zum Arbeitskampf” and also on Talking Union, the blog of the Democratic Socialists of America Labor Network.

In early November, Ofer Eini announced the end of his 8-year stint as the head of Israel’s national trade union center, the Histadrut.

The end of the “Eini era” is a good moment to reflect upon some of the extraordinary successes the Histadrut has had in the last couple of years, particularly in organizing workers previously thought of as “unorganizable”.

That these successes are largely unknown outside of Israel is due to the blind hostility shown by some trade unionists to the Jewish state – a hostility that extends to the Israeli trade union movement. Continue reading →

In Georgia, a newly-emboldened labour movement emerges

This article appeared today in Equal Times, which is the online magazine supported by the 175 million-member International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC).  It also appeared on the website of the Georgian Trade Union Confederation (GTUC).

Over the course of two days in mid-November, a drama played on the Georgian railways that showed the world a newly-emboldened labour movement in this small country wedged between the Black Sea and the Caucasus mountains.

Over 6,000 railway workers went on strike when management at the Georgian railways refused to negotiate on overtime pay, bonuses and other entitlements.

Vitali Giorgadze, Chairman of the Georgian Railway Workers New Trade Union (GRWNTU), told Equal Times: “We had been trying to start collective bargaining negotiations with the administration for about a year. It was due to these struggles that we decided to use every legal action we were granted by the labour code to speed up the process.”

Desperate to reach a compromise, union leaders not only gave the railway management the legally-required 21-day-notice for the strike, but they also gave the administration an additional 10 days.

But to no avail. At 10am on 14 November, 2013, the GRWNTU called a strike. Just six hours later, however, following a flurry of national and international solidarity, Georgian Railyways management called the unions to the table to start negotiations. By 3am that morning, an agreement had been reached.

It was a moment to savour for the Georgian trade unions which has been battling a repressive labour code and some of the most difficult working conditions in Europe.

But Georgia has a long tradition of working-class struggle.

Georgian labour and social democratic leaders punched far above their weight in the Russian Social Democratic Party and the Second International in the years up to 1917.

Until the Russian Revolution of that year, Georgia was a province of the tsar’s empire.

But for three short years starting in 1918, Georgia’s democratic socialists had the chance to show the world the possibility of a new, fairer and more democratic society in stark contrast to the dictatorial regime then being established by Lenin in Russia.

Among the features of their independent state were a multi-party democracy, a free press, a powerful cooperative movement, and strong and independent trade unions.

But Georgia’s experiment with democratic socialism ended abruptly in early 1921 when the Red Army invaded and for 70 long years, the Georgian people knew nothing of independent and democratic trade unions.

The collapse of the Soviet Union and Georgia’s independence in 1991 was meant to bring about a new era of freedom – but for the Georgians, it brought on an era of instability and dictatorship that lasted for more than a decade.

During this period, unions were first crushed by President Zviad Gamsakhurdia, who they had dared to oppose.

But his overthrow by former Soviet foreign minister Eduard Shevardnadze a year later did not make things much better.

It was only following the ‘Rose Revolution’ in November 2003 and the assumption of power by Mikhail Saakashvili, that things began to change.

However, change did not come immediately.

In fact, the Saakashvili years were marked by some major struggles as unions faced increasingly intransigent employers and one of the most restrictive labour codes around.

As Gocha Aleksandria of the Georgian Trade Union Confederation (GTUC) put it, Georgian workers have had to endure: “Policies that focused on exploitation of the labour force, lack of governmental labour market institutions and a legal code that fought against the practice of social dialogue.”

The most famous example was the Hercules Steel struggle in 2011, when the local governor and police in Kutaisi, one of the country’s largest cities, broke a strike with a campaign of repression.

The railways were also the scene of attempts at union-busting.

An attempt by the railway workers’ union to convene a congress in early 2011 were disrupted in several places by employers and their agents trying to prevent delegates from attending.

“The employing companies were motivated into thinking that they were exempt from punishment if they practiced bad employment policies,” said Aleksandria.

“However, the union has been fighting against these circumstances and the sense of solidarity is high with the members.”

Though Saakashvili was anything but a friend of the unions, and was widely seen as a promoter of neo-liberal reforms that made it harder than ever to build trade unions in the country, it was under his rule that unions and government negotiated changes in the country’s labour laws that finally produced positive results.

The new labour law, announced in the summer of 2013, was far from what the unions wanted.

It was a watered-down version of the one the unions had earlier agreed to, and it was weakened in part due to pressure put on by the American Chamber of Commerce in the country.

But as the International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC) conceded, the new legislation “provides some protection against anti-union discrimination, increases paid leave for people in hazardous occupations, prohibits dismissal of pregnant women and increases the duration of temporary disability provisions.”

There are now signs – such as the recent railway strike – of a new vigour among the Georgian trade unionists.

The GRWNTU’S concerns – overtime pay, increased wages and bonus system based on experience, as well as a return of the 13th month pay system – will be familiar to workers in many countries.

The union called for a nationwide strike to begin on Thursday, 14 November, 2013 but the railway company did all it could to disrupt the strike and prevent its spread.

While in the capital Tbilisi the strike was solid, in western Georgia, it ran into strong resistance from the employer.

Some key union leaders were uncontactable, and in reports that are reminiscent of the attempts to block the railway workers’ congress in 2011, they said that threats were made against them.

The GTUC put out an appeal for help, and got a quick response from the ITUC.

In a strongly worded statement to the Georgian authorities, ITUC General Secretary Sharan Burrow expressed her grave concern “regarding the on-going pressure and defamation exerted by the management before and during the strike.

“Instead of negotiating, the management interfered in the union internal affairs and in particular its right of assembly. When the notice of the strike went public, the management started to threaten workers of reprisals in case they joined the strike. To mislead public attention, GR management also tried to slander the railway union and GTUC by speaking of blackmail and sabotage as well as by accusing the GTUC leadership of masterminding the process.”

But the employer’s efforts to break the strike only made it stronger.

Within a few short hours, the GTUC issued a statement saying that: “Following six-hour talks, a consensus has been reached regarding all three issues raised by the Georgian Railway Workers New Trade Union.

“The just fight of the railway workers has been successful and the outcome meets the interests of the railway workers. The Georgian Railway has now resumed its operation in a usual mode.”

For the workers’ movement in Georgia, this victory – sweet though it is – is only the beginning.

Unions will need to make the most of the new labour law to organize many thousands more workers and reverse years of declining membership.

And they’ll need an improved labour law, one that really does fully comply with International Labour Organization (ILO) core conventions.

To get that, the occasional organisation of a successful strike will not be enough.

The Georgian unions of the 21st century, like their predecessors a century ago, will need to become much more engaged politically to challenge the neo-liberal agenda in their country.

Why the left should have nothing to do with Russia Today

This article appears in the current issue of Solidarity.

Thom Hartmann is a prominent left-wing radio broadcaster from the USA. I first came across him when he interviewed me at a conference in Washington and was promptly told by everyone just how prominent he is. He describes himself as a “democratic socialist” and his nationally-syndicated radio show has an estimated 2.75 million listeners.

George Galloway needs no introduction to a a left-wing audience in the UK.

What Hartmann and Galloway have in common is that they host shows on Russia Today (RT), a global satellite television channel that performs the same function for Vladimir Putin as Press TV did (and still does) for the Iranian dictatorship.

Hartmann’s show, “The Big Picture”, typically covers the standard fare of the US left – most recently with reports on how badly Walmart treats its workers, or why Vermont’s socialist senator Bernie Sanders should run for president.

Galloway’s new show on RT is called “Sputnik: Orbiting the world with George Galloway”.

RT uses the language of the mainstream left to cover politics that are fundamentally reactionary and that serve Russian imperial interests.

Of course that’s not how the TV channel describes itself. “RT news covers the major issues of our time for viewers wishing to question more,” says their website, “and delivers stories often missed by the mainstream media to create news with an edge.”

By “news with an edge”, they may sometimes mean that quite literally – and the edge belongs to a Russian bayonet.

For example, according to a timeline published on RT’s website, in 2008, “RT leads the coverage of the conflict in South Ossetia. RT is the only international news network to report from Tskhinvali during the Russia-Georgia War of 2008 and the first to confirm atrocities committed by the Georgian military against the civilian population.”

They were probably the only news network in South Ossetia because they were embedded in the Russian army.

One of RT’s regular shows “exposes the BIG STORIES Mainstream Media dare not touch,” according to their website.

But those stories are invariably ones in which the West, and in particular the USA, comes out looking bad.

When RT turns its attention closer to home, the progressive mask drops rather quickly and the strident tone of late-Stalinist Soviet propaganda comes to the fore.

This week, while “Mainstream Media” reported on the mass street protests in Kiev, RT brought on experts to discuss what was behind the new, giant wave of demonstrations.

One Moscow-based expert came on to explain that while it appeared that the European Union was behind the unrest – for which the United Nations should be called upon to intervene, as the EU was violating Ukraine’s sovereignty – this was not actually the case. The EU, we’re told, is only acting as a proxy for Washington. The real behind-the-scenes players are the National Endowment for Democracy and Freedom House – the same shadowy organizations that brought on the original “Orange Revolution”.

RT can’t enforce a party line, and the speaker that followed – a Russian academic – forcefully disagreed, insisting that it was in fact the EU that was sabotaging Ukrainian sovereignty, and not merely the EU acting as an American proxy.

Both speakers of course agreed that it was Western “interference” that was the source of the trouble.

While the two speakers were “debating” who was more at fault, the news ticker scrolling across the bottom of the screen talked about how protestors in Kiev were throwing rocks at police, how an estimated 100 police officers had been injured so far (no mention of civilian casualties), and how some protestors were using “an unknown gas” to attack the defenders of public order.

The film footage shown again and again was of masked, violent protestors hurling objects at the police, who stood still for the cameras.

It was made abundantly clear to RT’s viewers that the Russian state is not happy with pro-EU demonstrators in Ukraine, and that Mr Putin would be delighted if the Ukrainian leadership would deal with them the way he has dealt with such threats to state security as “Pussy Riot” and the Greenpeace “pirates”.

Let’s be absolutely clear about what RT actually is. This is a state organ of the Putin regime and though it occasionally uses the language of the left (when attacking Russia’s rivals) the one thing consistent about its coverage is its uncritical support of Russian imperialism.

Honest leftists should refuse to have anything to do with RT, shouldn’t watch it, should refuse to be interviewed by it, and certainly should not host shows on it.

My new best friend: todo.txt

As some of you will be aware, I’m an avid user of to-do lists.

Long before such lists were commonplace on the net, I used something we techies call “pen and paper” to keep my lists.

By the late 1990s, I had my first Palm Pilot and still think that the To Do list that came with the device was one of the best thought-out bits of software I’ve ever used.

Ever since then I’ve tried pretty much all the available options and have to say that I liked Toodledo best of all of them, and synced it to my various phones and tablets over the years.

I recently thought I’d give Wunderlist another try as it keeps getting amazing reviews from places like Lifehacker.

But Wunderlist has one fatal flaw.

The default display of tasks is not in the order in which you need to do them.  In other words, if I have 100 tasks, some of them due today, some due next month, the default should be to show the ones due today first, right?

But if I look at all tasks, Wunderlist shows me them grouped by category — so I may very well see non-urgent tasks appearing on top of the page, but urgent ones appearing far further down.

As I use my to-do list as a calendar, I need to be able to see rather quickly if I’m free on a certain date.  With Wunderlist, that’s pretty much impossible, especially if you have a bunch of categories.  (If you keep everything in a single category, it would work.)

So I decided this week to try, once again, an old favorite — todo.txt.

Originally developed by Gina Trapani, who founded Lifehacker, todo.txt is basically a stripped-down, open source system for power users of to do lists.

It’s feature-poor, which is perfect, because you can add the features you want.

And it’s based a simple text file (todo.txt) with a human-readable, easy-to-understand syntax, which you ideally host on Dropbox.

Here’s what a typical task would look like in todo.txt:

Write article about todo.txt

That’s right — that’s all you’d need.  Make a list of those, and you’ve got a working database for todo.txt.

But I’m going to improve it by adding a category, in the case, “Writing”.

Write article about todo.txt +Writing

That’s built-in to the “official” spec for todo.txt.  But it’s also very easy to hack.

For example, the default version that appears on my Android devices doesn’t include a field for the due date (though there is a way to due this using the command line interface).

This would normally be a deal-breaker.

But I can insert a date as the first bit of text in the title, and voila, it sorts by date when you sort alphabetically, which I can leave as the default (unlike Wunderlist).

Here’s how the line would now look:

2013.11.26 Write article about todo.txt +Writing

And within a single date, I’d like to highlight essential tasks without using the existing priority field, which would look like this:

(A) 2013.11.26 Write article about todo.txt +Writing

This is because I don’t want to choose between sorting by priority and sorting by date.

So instead, I put an asterisk just after the date.  That way, the automatic alphabetic sort by title works perfectly.  In other words, this would be one line for a top priority task for me, due today:

2013.11.26 * Write article about todo.txt +Writing

The one thing that would make todo.txt perfect would be if the Android version would include recurring tasks and the due date, but maybe that will happen in the future.

So, sorry Toodledo — you’re not getting a renewal of my $14.99 “Silver” subscription.

And Wunderlist — well you can forget about getting those €45.00 you ask to become a “pro”.

I’m sticking with Gina’s solution because, while not perfect, it’s flexible and it’s free.

 

Railway workers win in Georgia

This article appeared this week in Solidarity.

Over the course of two days earlier this month, a drama played on the Georgian railways that showed the labour movement at its best.

This has not always been the case in Georgia, a country whose most famous sons in recent times have been Stalin and Beria.

And yet Georgia has a long tradition of working-class struggle, and Georgian labour and social democratic leaders punched far above their weight in the Russian Social Democratic Party and the Second International in the years up to 1917.

That tradition was largely forgotten in the decades following the 1921 Red Army invasion of Georgia.

But there are signs – such as the recent railway strike – of a new vigour among the Georgian trade unionists.

The issues that concerned the “Georgian Railway Workers New Trade Union” (GRWNTU) will be familiar to workers in the UK and elsewhere.

According to Ilia Lezhava, the deputy chairman of the union, those issues included the following demands: “pay for overtime work, increased wages and bonus system based on experience, as well as a return of the 13th pay system by the end of the year.”

The union called for a nationwide strike to begin on Thursday, November 14th, but the railway company did all it could to disrupt the strike and prevent its spread.

While in the capital Tbilisi the strike was solid, in western Georgia, it ran into strong resistance from the employer.

Some key union leaders were uncontactable, and reported that threats were made against them.

As the Georgian Trade Union Confederation (GTUC) reported – in a language reminiscent of an earlier era, “Some of the attendants at the strike were unknown individuals. They were not in uniform, however we knew that they were working for certain structures.”

The GTUC put out an appeal for help, and got a quick response from the International Trade Union Confederation, based in Brussels.

In a strongly worded statement to the Georgian authorities, ITUC General Secretary Sharan Burrow wrote “I am very much concerned by the information I received regarding the on-going pressure and defamation exerted by the management before and during the strike. Instead of negotiating, the management interfered in the union internal affairs and in particular its right of assembly. When the notice of the strike went public, the management started to threaten workers of reprisals in case they joined the strike. To mislead public attention, GR management also tried to slander the railway union and GTUC by speaking of blackmail and sabotage as well as by accusing the GTUC leadership of masterminding the process.”

The employer’s efforts to break the strike only made it stronger.

As a leader of the GTUC in Tbilisi put it in an email message, “the workers of the Western part of the railways have been joining the protest all day long and now it resembles a real general strike.”

Within a few short hours, it was all over.

The GTUC issued a statement saying that “Following 6-hour talks a consensus has been reached regarding all three issues raised by the Georgian Railway Workers New Trade Union. The just fight of the railway workers has been successful and the outcome meets the interests of the railway workers. The Georgian Railway has now resumed its operation in a usual mode.”

In Brussels, Sharan Burrow issued a second statement later in the day saying that “Management should have had the good sense to negotiate from the beginning. Thanks to the solidarity of the railway workers and their determination to achieve a just settlement, good sense has prevailed and the workers and their families will now get fair reward for their work.”

For the workers’ movement in Georgia, this victory – sweet though it is – is only the beginning.

JFK fifty years on: What Marxists need to remember

This article was published in Solidarity.

In about a month, the world will remember the assassination of US President John F. Kennedy fifty years ago – on 22 November 1963.

It’s easy to predict how the media will play this – people will talk about where they were when Kennedy was shot, there will be some speculation about what might have been had he lived, the old conspiracy debate will resurface, and there will be lots of film footage of the American Camelot, with the President’s photogenic family once again put on display.

The Left is likely to engage in a bit of myth-busting and no doubt articles will appear about the dark side of Kennedy, his role in starting up the Vietnam war, his ruthless opposition to the Cuban revolution, and his relatively weak commitment to civil rights.

Both accounts will leave something to be desired because the reality is, as always, a bit more complex than that.

While all the negative criticism of the Kennedy administration will be based on fact, one almost needed to be around in 1963 to get why everyone was so upset when he died.

I should qualify that: not everyone was upset. The far-right lunatic fringe in America, including the terrorist Ku Klux Klan, was not upset at all. They considered Kennedy to be a Negro-loving liberal from the north, someone who was “soft” on Castro and who was willing to sign a nuclear test ban treaty that would weaken the “Free World” in its fight with Communism.

But the people who today we’d consider essential for any progressive coalition politics in America – the Blacks, Hispanics, young people, union members – were all deeply affected by the killing.

It wasn’t just the horror of seeing a relatively young man (with an even younger family) cut down brutally in his prime, though that played a role – as it did a generation later when Diana died. There was more to it.

The American folk singer Phil Ochs, who famously trashed mainstream liberalism in some of his songs, had a soft spot for Kennedy. In his song “That Was the President” he writes of the assassination, “it seemed as though a friendless world had lost itself a friend.”

In the liner notes to the album that song appeared on, Ochs wrote that his Marxist friends couldn’t understand why he’d write such a song. And he added – that’s why he couldn’t be a Marxist.

It would be a pity if Marxists fifty years on can’t understand what Phil Ochs could about the tragedy of Kennedy’s death.

The point is not that Kennedy would have stopped the Vietnam war from getting any more serious, or that he would have wound down the Cold War a generation earlier, or that he would eventually have passed the civil rights laws that his successor, Lyndon Johnson, got through.

Oliver Stone and others imagine a different decade, with a second Kennedy administration taking on the Military-Industrial Complex and the white racist Southern politicians, in a way that he hadn’t done in his first term. I don’t think these fantasies help us understand the Kennedy years at all.

Instead, it’s important to remember the context in which Kennedy was elected, the tremendous sense of relief progressive Americans felt at the end of eight years of the Eisenhower-Nixon administration, with the McCarthy era now fading into memory. The March on Washington with Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech took place only weeks before the killing in Dallas. Millions of people thought that, as another folk singer of the time put it, “the times they are a changin’”.

It was a time of enormous hopes, hopes that would be dashed by the end of the decade.

But those hopes were very real in November 1963.