The workers of the Casino Flotante of Buenos Aires have been waging a struggle for the last three months against mass dismissal, repression by security forces and pitiful work conditions. They have received international solidarity and support from countries such as Uruguay, Chile, Brazil and Greece. A letter of solidarity was also circulated among certain trade unions in Turkey. Below is the text of the letter to the casino workers of Buenos Aires and the unions, branches and unionists who have signed this text.

The bombing of the PKK camps in Northern Iraq by the Turkish air force on 16 December 2007 is the first major product of the U.S.-Turkish alliance against the Kurdish national movement sealed in the White House on 5 November 2007 between Bush and the Turkish prime minister Tayyip Erdogan. It destroys a multitude of myths concerning U.S. policy vis-à-vis Turkey on the Kurdish question rampant within the Turkish left and the Kurdish movement. But it also symbolizes the opening up of a new period for the Kurdish national movement.

The following statement was made immediately after the talks between the US and Turkey held in Washington, D.C. on 5 November 2007. However, because of a breakdown in our web site due to a problem on the server's side, we were not able to publish it here. Considering the continuing importance of the question, we are publishing the statement below.

How disgusting to see Bush and the Turkish Prime Minister Erdogan sit comfortably in the Oval Office of the White House and plot together against the Kurds of Turkey! The very same Bush who, taking under his wing the Quislings Barzani and Talabani, has been posing for years as the protector of the downtrodden Kurds! A fine protection indeed to promote the interests of the several million Kurds of Iraq and lend a helping hand to the Turkish state in its effort to repress its own tens of millions of Kurds! The very same Erdogan who, on a visit only a couple of years ago to Diyarbakir, the major Kurdish city in Turkey, hypocritically evoked the "Kurdish question" and vowed not to repeat the "mistakes of the past", is now preparing for a new incursion of the Turkish army into Northern Iraq, repeating the 24 already made in the 1990s, in order to try to smash the PKK, the Kurdish guerrilla movement!

On this 90th anniversary of the October Revolution, a debate on the question of why the new state and society born of that world historical event have collapsed is as important as a celebration of the event itself. The October Revolution led by the Bolshevik Party under the leadership of Lenin and Trotsky was an event that determined the course of history not only for Russia but on a world scale all throughout the 20th century. For Russia it meant a first glimpse of how ordinary workers and peasants could rise to the helm of the state; it also meant industrialisation, an end to underdevelopment, victory against fascism, the absence of unemployment and misery for the masses, universal social services and a life free from all the scourges endemic under capitalism. But through the workers' state and the economy of transition between capitalism and socialism that it established, it also had immense repercussions for the whole world on the economic, political and ideological levels. It proved, for the first time in history, that ordinary working people were capable of overcoming the brute power and ideological obfuscation of bourgeois rule and take over the state in order to rule society. It represented a glorious precedent to be emulated for revolutionary movements all around the world. It forced capitalism to adopt the so-called welfare state to keep the working class in check. It provided political ground for manoeuvre for the liberation movements of colonial peoples. And above all, it acted as a living refutation of the major pillar of bourgeois ideology that postulates that a complex, technologically advanced modern economy can only function on the basis of the “free” market, competition and private property.