Making postal work great again: Royal Mail’s job quality has plummeted, with gruelling hours, two-tier pay, intense surveillance, and poor work-life balance for postal workers — but our union is fighting back with significant success, writes CWU branch secretary JOHN CARSONIN MOST traditional workplaces, any new worker will usually hear those irrepressible words “this used to be a great job” — and nowhere is this truer than in Royal Mail. When I first started in Royal Mail, the longest-serving worker in my delivery office was Willie Jackson. Jackson started as a postie in 1964 and retired in 2024, after nearly 60 years’ service. Jackson was a member of the CWU (and its predecessors) for the entirety of that time. In workplaces with such a solid historical memory, you will always get a strong sense of perspective. This is inevitable for a number of reasons, nostalgia being one, but also in the case of Royal Mail, it has been driven by a very real sense that the job itself is no longer what it used to be. One of the principal misconceptions out there is that the job is all “Postman Pat” riding round Greendale, drinking tea and having chats. A quaint, fulfilling and stress-free life. Nothing could be further from the truth.
https://morningstaronline.co.uk/article/making-postal-work-great-again‘Greater Israel’ and the annexation of the West Bank: The burial of the ‘two-state solution’Whilst the eyes of the world have been fixated on the horrors in Gaza, the Zionist regime has maneuvered to seize control of the West Bank. At the beginning of the year, ‘security’ in the occupied West Bank was declared an official Israeli war aim. Under the cover of ‘war’, Operation Iron Wall was launched in January – the largest IDF campaign in the West Bank in decades. Israel Katz, the foreign minister, declared that the battle in the camps was “a war in every sense”, insisting that Palestinians be treated “exactly” as in Gaza. The assault began in Tulkarem and Jenin, before spreading to camps in Nablus and Tubas. Armoured bulldozers followed Israeli airstrikes, upending life in the camps. The brutal siege on Jenin was described by one refugee as “worse than the Second Intifada”. Roads, water, and sewage infrastructure were deliberately targeted, while entire residential blocks were detonated. With strict prohibitions on rebuilding homes and roads, this flagrant aggression was an attempt to permanently displace the predominantly refugee population. It was an extension of the genocidal campaign in Gaza – with the Zionists carrying out collective punishment of an entire people, designed to ‘cleanse’ the land and crush dissent. A refugee interviewed by 972+ Magazine captured it clearly: “What’s happening here is simply a smaller version of Gaza…A deliberate campaign to destroy, make life unlivable, and send a message to everyone in the camp and the city: leave. Get out of the West Bank. Go somewhere else.” Over 40,000 Palestinians – the vast majority descendants of those expelled during the Nakba – were displaced. This was the largest act of displacement in the West Bank since 1967. The IDF campaign cleared the way for settlers. Indeed, settler violence has reached unprecedented levels this year, with over 200 Palestinian communities brutalised. Before 7 October, when settler pogroms struck towns like Huwara, Israeli authorities would intervene to say: “Don’t be vigilantes, leave it to the IDF.” No longer. This year, Itamar Ben Gvir, the Israeli interior minister, established a ‘First Response Unit’ under the West Bank police – composed of settlers. It erased any line between security forces and messianic settler militias. Unchecked, unmonitored, and underreported, the settler movement now acts with complete impunity. Their violence is not incidental – it is a direct product of orders from above.
https://communist.red/greater-israel-and-the-annexation-of-the-west-bank-the-burial-of-the-two-state-solution/Frederick Engels: The Program of the Blanquist Fugitives from the Paris Commune Blanqui is essentially a political revolutionist. He is a socialist only through sentiment, through his sympathy with the sufferings of the people, but he has neither a socialist theory nor any definite practical suggestions for social remedies. In his political activity he was mainly a "man of action", believing that a small and well organized minority, who would attempt a political stroke of force at the opportune moment, could carry the mass of the people with them by a few successes at the start and thus make a victorious revolution. Of course, he could organize such a group under Louis Phillippe's reign only as a secret society. Then the thing, which generally happens in the case of conspiracies, naturally took place. His men, tired of beings held off all the time by the empty promises that the outbreak should soon begin, finally lost all patience, became rebellious, and only the alternative remained of either letting the conspiracy fall to pieces or of breaking loose without any apparent provocation. They made a revolution on May 12th, 1839, and were promptly squelched. By the way, this Blanquist conspiracy was the only one, in which the police could never get a foothold. The blow fell out of a clear sky. From Blanqui's assumption, that any revolution may be made by the outbreak of a small revolutionary minority, follows of itself the necessity of a dictatorship after the success of the venture. This is, of course, a dictatorship, not of the entire revolutionary class, the proletariat, but of the small minority that has made the revolution, and who are themselves previously organized under the dictatorship of one or several individuals. We see, then, that Blanqui is a revolutionary of the preceding generation. These conceptions of the march of revolutionary events have long become obsolete, at least for the German worker's party, and will not find much sympathy in France, except among the less mature or the more impatient laborers. We shall also note, that they are placed under certain restrictions in the present program. Nevertheless our London Blanquists agree with the principle, that revolutions do not make themselves, but are made; that they are made by a relatively small minority and after a previously conceived plan; and finally, that they may be made at ally time, and that "soon".
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1874/06/26.htm