These Years and Workers' Control Not Immigration Controls, two pamphlets by STEVE. COHEN Reviewed by K. Govindan WHAT could be more predictable than the Tories reaching for the race card when their fortunes hit bottom?
Labour's support for immigration controls is just as predictanto Steve Cohen recounts in Still resisting how the TUC and trades councils opposed the agitation of Jewish workers around the 1905 Aliens Act, Britain's first immigration law. Jews fleeing from antisemitism in Europe were feared as potential rivals for jobs.
It was for Jewish worker militants to remind British workers that "the vast amount of poverty and unemployment which exists is in no way due to the influx of foreign workmen, but is the result of the private ownership of the means of production".
Trade union and Labour Party activists will find Cohen's work full of useful insights. It is an invaluable addition to our campaigning work.
As well as offering a summary of a century's campaigning against immigration controls he frames a programme for trade union action.
The pamphlet Workers' control not immigration control expands and explains the thinking behind slogans such as "All immigration controls are racist" and "Repeal all immigration controls".
If we can raise one flaw in useful contribution then it is the absence of more precise economic analysis explaining the reasons for legislation.
Cohen's discussion of the international dimensions of the controls is particularly important in an age of globalisation. In Britain we are becoming more aware of the racist motivation behind ideas of Fortress Europe. This is combined with particularly repressive internal controls to police resident immigrants.
The next stage of our campaign must therefore be to link national campaigns to the Europe-wide struggle. • For more information and copies of the pamphlets contact Greater Manchester Immigration Aid. 400 Cheetham Hill Road, Manchester M8 9LE, Telephone 0161 740 7722. workers movement to show that some acts of revolting barbarity" were necessarily inscribed in the conditions of civil war.
But he does not consider whether summary executions, secret trials, censorship and the banning of all the anti-Bolshevik parties might not have fostered the rise of Stalinism and the authoritarian regression of the Russian Revolution - whether there are means human liberation.
With the benefit of hindsight and without wishing to idealise or make ahistorical comparisons, we can say that the Sandinista revolutionaries in Nicaragua proved Serge right.
In this extremely poor country, economically strangled and the victim of imperialist military aggression, not only did the revolutionary government not carry out executions of hostages, they also abolished the death penalty, permitted
at Socialists In The sectarians work!
counted for almost entirely selling Socialist Worker! SOCIALIST OUTLOOK No. 82, April 29 1995, Page 13