Revolutionary Communist Group

Swaleside – collective misery will become common purpose

Details: Created: Wednesday, 15 February 2017 15:03; Written by John Bowden

On 22 December 2016 the fifth ‘serious disturbance’ in English prisons in two months broke out at Swaleside Category B prison in Kent. The unrest throughout the system now seems uncontainable as conditions within most prisons become increasingly inhuman. Long-term prisoner and FRFI contributor John Bowden, who was recently moved back into the English prison system from Scotland, comments from Swaleside.

Following each recent riot the Prison Officers Association (POA) offered its own well-publicised and opportunist explanation for the ‘crisis of control’ now afflicting most prisons: insufficient staff. Whilst it is certainly true that financial cutbacks in prison resources have caused a serious decaying of conditions and infrastructure, as well as reduced staffing levels, the actual cause of the current prisons crisis originates in the ‘get tough’ criminal justice policy of the Tony Blair government, and those that succeeded it.

Overcrowded, violent and desperate – prisons erupt

Details: Created: Wednesday, 15 February 2017 15:10; Written by FRFI

breack the chains rcg

The final months of 2016 saw prisons across England gripped with an outpouring of frustration and rage against a brutal and overcrowded system in which prisoners are becoming increasingly desperate.

• 29 October – Lewes prison, Sussex; a six-hour ‘rampage’ took place on one wing of the prison: three prisoners face charges of criminal damage, violent disorder and prison mutiny.

• 6 November – Bedford prison: 200 prisoners took over two wings, one of which was heavily damaged; 50-60 prisoners were moved to other prisons and three face charges.

• 20 November – Moorland prison, Doncaster: 40 prisoners smashed up a wing of the prison; 30 of them were moved out to other prisons.

• 16 December – Birmingham prison (formerly known as Winson Green, and now run by notorious private security company G4S): 100 prisoners were involved in a disturbance described by the POA as ‘the worst since Strangeways’; 240 prisoners were moved out to prisons across the country, as far apart as Hull, Cardiff and Thameside in south London. The POA warned of further riots at the receiving prisons but this did not transpire. Eight prisoners have so far been charged with criminal offences.

• 22 December – Swaleside, Kent: 60 prisoners took over a wing of the prison (see article).

While the government talks of ‘reform’ (by which it means decentralisation and yet greater involvement of private profiteers) and the Prison Officers Association (POA) repeats its endless mantra that all problems will be solved by a combination of increasing staffing levels and locking up prisoners for even longer, those at the sharp end are making their own comment on the prison system heard by the only means at their disposal.

On 18 December FRFI comrades in Birmingham attended a solidarity protest outside the prison and we send our support to all those who have been charged and who are being made scapegoats for the brutality of the prison system.

Fight Racism! Fight Imperialism! 255 February/March 2017

Palestine: Zionists tighten their grip

Details: Created: Wednesday, 15 February 2017 15:15; Written by Louis Brehony

Trump Palestine Jerusalim

Trump’s election as US president has given confidence to the Israeli right that their plans for settlement expansion will not be held back. Three days after the Washington inauguration the Zionist regime announced the construction of 2,500 new settlement homes in the occupied West Bank. The fact that many of these are planned for the illegal Beit El settlement near Ramallah, the site of settler violence against protests by Palestinians living in the area, shows that Israeli leaders expect no significant constraints from the new US presidency. The plans come as Israel accelerates house demolitions and land grabs in historic Palestine and proposals to annex other illegal settlements. Trump’s stated aim of moving the US embassy to occupied Jerusalem has become another flashpoint for Palestinian protests. Louis Brehony reports.

Brexit, Trump and the populist right

Details: Created: Wednesday, 01 February 2017 11:51; Written by David Yaffe

Brexist - Trump

20 years ago ‘globalisation’ was the latest fashionable term to describe the all-pervasive forces of a rampant capitalism. It was said to be a new stage of capitalism in which multinational companies and financial institutions, attached to no particular nation state, moved their capital around the world in search of the highest returns, and in so doing created a truly global market and global capital. At the time FRFI explained that, far from being new, globalisation was a return to those unstable features of capitalism which characterised imperialism before the First World War. It had begun to recreate the very conditions which produced those dramatic shocks to the international capitalist system that led to the revolutionary developments in the first decades of the 20th century. It reflected a deep crisis of the capitalist system that would soon lead the most powerful capitalist countries into a renewed struggle over world markets and global spheres of interest, into brutal wars in less developed parts of the world, into a new process to redivide the world according to economic power.¹

Until the late 2000s, Martin Wolf, chief economic commentator at the Financial Times, was an enthusiastic advocate of neo-liberal globalisation. In 2002, the deepening crisis of the capitalist system forced him to raise the question whether the global expansion of capitalism had come to a halt and was about to be reversed. Will the second era of global capitalist integration, he asked, end like the first, which went into reverse between 1914 and 1945, after inter-imperialist rivalries led to war and socialist revolution in Russia? Wolf’s answer was no. Conditions he assured us were very different this time.² Today, 14 years on, he is no longer convinced.

Trump in power - Imperialist rivalries, trade wars and the threat of armed conflict

Details: Created: Wednesday, 01 February 2017 13:32; Written by Trevor Rayne

Donald Trump trade war

At the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland on 17 January 2017, China’s President Xi Jinping warned that ‘no one will emerge as a winner from a trade war’. He was responding to the then President-elect Donald Trump’s threat to impose a 45% tariff on US imports from China and a 35% ‘border tax’ on Mexico’s exports to the US. Trump’s declaration of ‘America First’ signals a willingness to wreck the post-Second World War economic order imposed by a dominant US imperialism, and to unleash inter-imperialist rivalries not seen since the economic devastation of the 1930s, through which marched the forces that led to world war. Trevor Rayne reports.

‘But what the hell? I’ll wing it and things will work out.’ – Trump

In his inaugural address on 20 January President Trump said, ‘Protection will lead to great prosperity and strength.’ Three days later Trump withdrew the US from the 12-nation Trans-Pacific Partnership and said he intends to renegotiate the North American Free Trade Agreement between the US, Mexico and Canada, signed in 1993. One Chinese economics professor said before the Davos summit, ‘The US is declining and China is rising. China will defend the international system as the US, under Trump, goes in the opposite direction.’ A section of the US ruling class believes that by turning to protectionism it can reverse the relative economic decline of the US in the world. This will not happen nor will manufacturing jobs return to an imperialist US. However, the US and China are the world’s two biggest economies and increasing tensions between them means peril: economically and militarily.