Though asbestos in now banned in Britain, many buildings we live and work in today predate the ban. For example, about 90% of schools still contain asbestos. As a result, thousands of people are dying, and will continue to die, from asbestos related diseases which very often are not manifest until many years, even decades, after exposure.
Asbestos is a fibrous substance found in seams between layers of rock. The fibres are strong, flexible, and will not burn below 1000 ºC. There are different types but these days 95% of all asbestos mined is white asbestos, or Chrysotile.
When processed it is broken down into tiny fibres, which are so strong and pliable they can be spun and woven. There is practically no limit to how small these fibres can get. When asbestos is used, even if only handled, it gives off dust, some of it invisible. These invisible fibres can enter the lungs and are responsible for asbestos related diseases.
From Reykjavik to Rio, from Woolies to Whittards, the fall out from the economic downturn reverberates like a Mexican wave around virtually every inhabited corner of the globe. But this crisis, just as surely as it began, will eventually peter out – but not before wreaking misery and destitution upon millions. Alongside this latest recession is the environmental crisis, with far more irretrievable consequences, and a severity we are now only just waking up to.
Over 100 years ago Karl Marx foretold, how the inbuilt tendency of industrial capitalism to expand would give rise to not only continual cycles of boom and slump, but also the phenomenon we now call “globalisation”. More contemporary analysts, such as Murray Bookchin and the social ecology movement of the late 1960s and 70s, later warned of the profound ecological crisis that we now face.
Workers at Metronet, the former London Underground (LUL) engineering contractor, have developed their Strike Committee as a form of rank and file organisation that represents an interesting step beyond the confines of the usual trade union structures. Now that the track contract is back in house, they are rolling this organising model out across the whole of the underground to become the London Underground Strike Committee. Here we look at the background of struggle against which the strike committee has been built up, and the bottom up tactics that have been vital to its successes.
Historically, the RMT’s strength on the underground had been among train drivers and station staff. Engineering workers had been the poor relations, and the union had relied on drivers to win disputes.
All predictions point to how the current crisis will hit Britain much harder than Brown and Darling care to admit. Understandably, working people are angry at the loss of security, livelihoods and, for some, even their homes. Beyond doubt, however, is the fact that this cost will rise even further in the years to come as the state tries to force us to pay for the billions it has borrowed and is still doling out to the rich and powerful.
In what will amount to a gigantic wealth transfer, the state bails out the bosses with one hand, while with the other it calculates how best it might claw this back in the future. One thing is certain; no government, whether Tory or Labour, will inflict undue pain on the so called “wealth producers”, the capitalist class. So the tax rises, cats in wages, attacks on services and benefits and the rest will fall disproportionately on us, the working class.
This collection of articles charts the tragic story of Salvador Puig Antich, a Catalan anarchist who was the final victim of the executioner’s garrotte in Franco’s Spain. The pieces, including several by Spanish and Catalan anarchists, also detail Puig Antich’s legacy and attempts to expropriate it by those who did not share his ideals.
His political journey began early, his family being steeped in democratic Catalan nationalism and opposition to the forces of Spain’s right, which they saw as a lethal threat to Catalonia’s identity and integrity. Yet it was the events of May 1968 in Paris and the armed actions of ETA which are generally acknowledged to have inspired Puig Antich to become actively involved in the fight against the Spanish dictatorship in the late 1960s. From initially supporting communist inspired workers’ groups, he embraced anarchism and joined a fledgling paramilitary organisation, the Movimiento Ibérico de Liberación (MIL).
