covers 50% of Britain's arable land, is thought to be more damaging than maize in causing species loss, although the comparison has not been made.
The basic problem is the over-intensifica tion of agriculture, with its huge reliance or inputs of chemical fertilisers, herbicides and insecticides. GM is another step in the same direction, a direction which Karl Marx aptly termed 'robbing the soil"
This kind of agriculture has often been presented by agribusiness and its government and EU apologists as necessary in order to ensure high yields to feed a growing population. In fact far more important has been massive job cuts on the land. In order to reap huge profits, for the food processing industry in particular, the soil has is being poisoned and exhausted. With so few people working on the land, there is no other way to feed the population. The quality of food suffers too, as crops are made to grow so fast that they do not have time to absorb essential minerals from the soil.
A change to a more rational system of food production is impossible under the laws of the market. While a small niche for organically grown food may exist, the extra labour time required to produce such food inevitably leads to higher prices. In addition, factory-processed organic food is unlikely to be much more nutritious than non-organic.
Food should be of the best quality that current knowledge can provide and available at prices everyone can afford. If the Farm Scale Evaluations have shown us any thing, it's that it's not only GM that is not viable: the same applies to capitalist agricul ture in general.
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badly Jane Kelly
mages of Edwardian middle class
women "behaving badly' often dominated peoples' view of the battles for the right to vote by women in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
But the reality is much more complex, and the history of the movement raises issues of the relationship between gender and class, and between alliances and tactics. The history of women's suffrage has lessons for how we fight for our rights today.
The Women's Social and Political Union (WSPU), founded in 1903 by the Pankhursts was, by 1908, so frustrated with the lack of success that they adopted the militant tactics which now dominate our view of women's suffrage. These included disrupting political meetings, smashing windows, setting fire to post in post boxes, chaining themselves to railings, and Emily Davison throwing herself in front of the Derby horse.
For these misdemeanours they were often imprisoned, went on hunger strike and were forcibly fed. Davison herself, according to Rebecca West was imprisoned eight times; she hunger-struck seven. times; she was forcibly fed forty nine times."
There is no doubt that this image of a middle class (and sometimes working class) woman, dressed in long skirts and large hats breaking all the conventions of acceptable feminine behaviour, made a powerful impact. But whether women finally gained the vote in 1918 and 1928 as a result of this militancy is questionable.
In fact women had been organising around suffrage since at least the 1860s, and there were many and varied groups, adopting different tactics to do so. The great book by Jill Liddington and Jill Norris, One Hand Tied Behind Us (Virago, 1978) documents the activities of working class women and their organisations as well as the difficulties they encountered with the male dominated trade union movement and left political groups and parties like the Social Democratic Federation, the Independent Labour Party (ILP) and the Labour Party itself. behaving
FINSBURY ONAL FEDERADO OMEN WORKE StarF-Lamo ALVEEK THEN II OR ITOFWORK
The arguments against female suffrage (at best that they should fight for universal suffrage, and at worst that women could not be trusted to vote the right way) were similar to the trade unions' adoption of the idea of the 'family wage'.
Like many reforms at this time this was a double-edged sword for women. While it meant that men earned a better wage to include support for a wife and children, it also assumed that women should then earn less than men, because part of their support was already paid to the man.
The 1880s was the period of the rise of the New Unionism. Unions like the Amalgamated Association of Card and Blowing Room Operatives which was founded in 1886 and organised unskilled weavers, mostly women.
A decade later this had a 90% female membership, with no membership restrictions. While their wages were low for cotton workers, they were well paid by other
WORKERS *FELLOW NEY WORKES OUT OF Different faces of the struggle for women's suffrage, which mobilised working women as well as bourgeois forces women's standards
It was the experience gained by women in these organisations that was put to use in suffrage campaigns: how to organise and run a meeting, how to convince by argument, how to build alliances so that a mass movement could be constructed.
But as in the trade unions, so in the suffrage campaigns: women's double burden of waged work as well as responsibility for the family, meant they were often unable to go to committee meetings after work, or travel for regional or national meetings.
In the union men did those jobs: in the suffrage campaigns, middle class women represented their working class sisters.
The alliances built by these working class organisations led to the Trades Union Congress voting in favour of women's suffrage in 1884, but Parliament rejected an amendment on women's suffrage put to the Third Reform Bill (to enfranchise male agricultural workers) in the same year.
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Partial victory followed by defeat was repeated several times in the next thirty years. The ILP voted in 1895 to enfranchise all adult men and women; in 1904 a women's suffrage motion put by Burnley Weavers was agreed by the Labour Representation Committee; in 1912 the Labour Party voted to support women's right to vote.
But at every point when these agreements could have been pushed further, other issues were given priority.
By 1908, having failed to exert enough influence on the ILP, Emmeline and Christabel Pankhurst had had enough, and gave up trying to build alliances within the labour movement. Urging women, 'not to be divided, but to belong to one party, to join together on one question - the vote, they argued that women should throw off the 'party' and stand together with the motto: 'He who is for us, for him we are.'
This strategy led to the forming of cross sistance Winter 2003 15 Fighting for women's rights class alliances and the adoption of militant and often violent tactics. Such activities can only ever be engaged in by a small minority of women, and although the WSPU organised some large mass demonstrations such as the 500,000 strong "Women's Sunday Hyde Park rally in June 1908, by the end of the same month they had given up the mass approach.
The rejection of any party alliances, including with the Labour Party, led the WSPU away from the working class as well, just at the point when militancy was increasing after 1911.
This role was taken by the National Union of Women's Suffrage Societies (NUWSS), which set up an Election Fighting Fund for Labour Party candidates
The NUWSS linked together professional women such as Millicent Fawcett and Elizabeth Garrett-Anderson, with an industrial base, especially in Lancashire. It had over 300 branches, 30,000 members and unlike the WSPU, democratic structures.
However, none of the groups with their different alliances and strategies, was suc cessful. For it was not until after the 1914. 18 war that limited women's suffrage was achieved - the vote given to women over thirty.
Then in 1928 all adults over twenty-one were enfranchised.
The roles women had played during the war, as nurses, in factories, and at home looking after families as single parents meant that it was impossible to go back to pre-war social relations.
Not only did women refuse to go back into service after experiencing economic independence, but the huge increases in women working - in shops, in offices and in factories - meant that the arguments usec against them in the early 20th century were no longer credible.
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16 soca International resistance tance Winter 2003 Demanding changes: Trimble