Steel, water, energy, rail, banks: Nationalise the lot! For workers’ control!Steel, water, energy, rail, banks: Nationalise the lot! For workers’ control! The crisis playing out at British Steel has shone a light on the catastrophic impact of privatisation. The Scunthorpe steelworks – like that in Port Talbot – have been wrecked, ruined, and left to rust by the plant’s parasitic owners. Thousands of workers have been thrown on the scrapheap. The local area is at risk of becoming a ghost town. The chaos in the steel industry is no isolated example. For decades, government after government has sold off the family silver. And in every instance, the capitalist market has proven to be a disaster for workers. In the hands of corporate fat-cats, Britain’s industries and infrastructure have been asset-stripped and vandalised. Whether it be the country’s water, energy, mail, or rail networks: profiteering vultures have feasted on formally-nationalised utilities, gutting them and cutting them to the bone.Once they have had their fill, these big-business leeches then leave the rest of us to clean up their mess. Time after time, taxpayers have been left to foot any costs. Take the scandalous case of Thames Water. In the wake of privatisation, a series of ravenous owners treated the company as a cash cow. Shareholders engorged themselves, sucking up around £7.2 billion in dividends over the space of 32 years.
https://communist.red/steel-water-energy-rail-banks-nationalise-the-lot-for-workers-control/The Self-Liberation of the Jasenovac Death Camp and a New Serbian CatharsisEighty years have passed since April 1945, when the surviving inmates of the Croatian Nazi camp—Jasenovac—rose in revolt, staged a breakout, and thus brought an end to the existence of the largest death camp in the Balkans during the Second World War. That prompted me to reflect on a dilemma from the past. As a young author, I was prone to reductive comparisons. In contemplating the civil war in Bosnia and Herzegovina from 1992 to 1995, I wrote a text entitled The Serbian NDH, in which I compared Republika Srpska—on account of the systematic crimes committed against the Bosniak population, for which its wartime leadership is unquestionably responsible—to the criminal puppet creation o
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