| A new stage in the world class struggle: November-December 1995
In December 1995, David Walsh travelled to Europe as part of an international team of reporters to provide on-the-spot coverage of the massive strike wave in France. They studied the strike movement and the political crisis it produced and interviewed strikers, union officials and representatives of various "left" organisations, as well as non-strikers from various layers of the population. This pamphlet was first published as a series or articles. It presents a detailed analysis of the strike movement and the role played by the various unions, political parties and tendencies. It addresses a number of questions: Why did this movement erupt in France? Why has there been no comparable movement to this point in the US, although the attacks on social programmes carried out there go far beyond those proposed by the French government? What do these events portend for the future development of the class struggle in France, Europe and internationally? What have these events revealed about the revolutionary capacity of the working class, as well as the critical political problems which must be overcome? French workers in revolt: Contents What sparked the strike movement? A mass movement of social solidarity Political problems of the strike movement How the labour bureaucracy stifled the strike movement The culture of opportunism The spectre of a European-wide movement The significance of the strike movement Apendix: Two footnotes on the radicals Chronology Political parties and trade unions in France What sparked the strike movement? For three and a half weeks in November and December, masses of French workers did battle with the right wing government of President Jacques Chirac and Prime Minister Alain Juppé.
The top 40 Irish albums
We started work at midnight, went to bed in the morning, not really waking up until 10 at night. When you do that for months and months, a year, years, you get pretty disorientated. "But you see all the world events before everyone else does because you watch the morning news on TV-AM. And you see everything three or four times. "We got bombarded by the Gulf War. The only thing that didn't seem to fit in was the outside world. Serious world events were the only time gauge we had for what was going on." But work was being done. Shields explained the genesis behind the album's sound to Magnet. "When making records, I got it into my head that some of the big no-nos were no echo, no reverb, no chorus or flanger and no panning. The one effect I would use was this reversed-reverb effect, which is very reverb-y, all of these things I was against, right? "But the irony was that with these effects, you could actually play harder, and it sounded really different.
Four finalists for Finland’s prestigious Ars Fennica find a New York ...
If you worried that Ingmar Bergmans death had brought an end to the Nordic angst-filled view of life, you should hurry over to Scandinavia House, wherehurrah!youll find plenty of vigorous brooding. In the buildings quiet gallery, tucked away on the third floor, 40 works by last years four finalists for Finlands prestigious Ars Fennica prize present the regions most famous cultural exports: repressed desires, mystical urges, hidden demons, fleeting pleasure, and those beautifully bleak landscapes. Things get off to a bracing start with the drawings and paintings of Elina Merenmies, darkest in both theme and palette of the four artists. Anguish, it seems, drives every brushstroke. In several smaller works, trees finely inked in black sinuously grow outward to express a kind of desperate yearning, the branches dividing into increasingly delicate filaments and spreading across the paper like neurons.
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