Feature

In the years prior to what became known as the Great War, most of the nations that were to become embroiled in the conflict had standing armies numbering hundreds of thousands. The empires of Austro-Hungary and Tsarist Russia, Germany and France all used conscription — enforced recruitment — in varying degrees, to maintain their numbers.

Are robots and artificial intelligence (AI) set to take over the world of work and thus the economy in the next generation? And what does this mean for jobs and living standards for people? Will it mean socialist utopia in our time (the end of human toil and a superabundant harmonious society) or capitalist dystopia (more intense crises and class conflict)?

The Higher Education and Research Bill and its accompanying White Paper, working its way through parliament now, represents an attempt to turn the English Higher Education sector into a full blown neoliberal market on the US model.

For-profit private providers will be able to quickly and easily set up as universities, recruit unlimited numbers of students and claim £9,000 per student in tuition fees. Regulation will be ripped up and simplified in the interests of these corporations and at the expense of students, staff and academic freedom.

The summer conference of the Black Students’ Campaign, a liberation campaign within the National Union of Students (NUS), was framed by explosive debates about identity, racism and how we organise. These debates drew on the discussions happening in wider society, from the question of who can be involved in the Black Lives Matter movement, to how we can stop the Tories’ Islamophobic Prevent agenda.

Act 1: Arrival

The election of Gerry Carroll and Eamonn McCann from the radical left People Before Profit Alliance to the Stormont Assembly on 5 May has shaken the political establishment in Northern Ireland.

On 5 June 1916 the ruler of Mecca, Sharif Husayn, called for an Arab uprising against Ottoman rule. The goal, agreed with the British High Commissioner in Egypt, was to unite the Arab people, establish and then rule an independent Arab kingdom, ending 400 years of Ottoman domination of the Arab world. Britain promised funds, guns and grain in return for helping to defeat the Ottomans as part of the First World War.

In April the UCU lecturers’ union published a report revealing that higher education institutions are using casualised contracts to a shocking degree. The union estimates that 54 percent of all academic staff and 49 percent of all academic teaching staff are on insecure contracts. That includes staff on hourly-paid, zero-hours and fixed-term contracts, as well as agency workers.

David Cameron “won’t last 30 seconds if he loses the referendum”, said Ken Clarke, one of the few sitting Tories who was in parliament for the last referendum on Britain’s membership of the EU’s forerunner in 1975. And whichever way the vote goes, he continued, the Tory party will struggle to unite afterwards.

In April the UCU published a report revealing that higher education institutions are using casualised contracts to a shocking degree. The union estimates that 54 percent of all academic staff and 49 percent of all academic teaching staff are on insecure contracts. That includes staff on hourly-paid, zero-hours and fixed-term contracts, as well as agency workers.