IV446 - March 2012

Until Jan. 23, few people in the labor and social justice movements expected anything less than a major class confrontation at the state-of-the-art $200 million grain facility at Longview, Wash. The scab complex was operated by the multi-billion-dollar Export Grain Terminal (EGT) and owned by three giant international agribusiness holding companies—Bunge Ltd. (one of the seven top grain exporters in the world), Itoche, and STX Pan Ocean.

On January 14, 2012, the Taiwanese people voted for a new national assembly and president. Ma Ying-jeou, the outgoing president and chair of the Kuomintang (KMT) party, was re-elected with 51.60% of the votes, against 45.63% for the candidate of the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP). The KMT also gained an absolute majority in the National Assembly (60 seats out of 113). This was the fifth direct election since the democratic transition in 1994. The rate of participation in the election was the lowest since 1994, at around 75%. If the result held few surprises, the course of the electoral campaign showed to what point the political development of the country is under the influence of the economic interests of foreign powers, notably China and the United States.

This translation of a statement from the Syrian Revolutionary Left, a group of Marxists inside and outside Syria that in January published the first issue of a monthly newspaper was published by the New Socalist webzine on the 19th of February 2012. The introdction is taken from NSW.

As 2011 closed, the mainstream press was awash with ominous, dark assessments of the state of the relationship between the United States and Pakistan. After a cross-border NATO air strike in November resulted in the deaths of 24 Pakistani soldiers, Pakistan responded forcefully, closing the Af-Pak border to NATO traffic, expelling the U.S. military from an air base inside Pakistan,(1) and boycotting the International Conference on Afghanistan in Bonn, which had been tasked with outlining the next steps for the occupation.

He was not a big man, but he was impressive. His ability to speak, to explain difficult subjects in a way that everybody could understand, and his social capabilities attracted me, when I first met him middle of the seventies. And when I afterwards got to know his history, I was even more impressed. Jakob had lived a life, which included a big part of what Jews, Communists, Jewish Communists and especially left Jewish Communists had to endure and survive during the last century. But he had a dream, and he cited Lenin’s sentence about dreaming in his memoirs in 1978.

The penguinos came back, and their march turned into an all out anti-neoliberal stampede.The powerful movement of Chilean students (nicknamed “the penguins” after their dark-blue and white uniforms), which first rocked the presidency of Socialist Michelle Bachelet in 2006, returned with a vengeance last year. It grew in numbers, allies and intensity, and had the rightwing businessman president Sebastián Piñera on the ropes. And although the movement and government have entered a sort of stalemate, the struggle to democratize Chile’s educational system has, for the first time since the country’s return to democracy in 1990, challenged the very foundations of its neoliberal model.

After losing a war, one of the worst things that can happen to a society is for its people to be told it was a “victory.” The inability or failure to learn the lessons of the United States’ defeat in Iraq enables the plunge into the next disastrous adventure: Can you say “Iran”?

The devastating attacks of the Troika, i.e. of banking capital from the EU and the United States, but also of the (until recently) “Greek troika”—the black front of PASOK, the right-wing New Democracy party and the far-right LAOS—along with Greek big business continues with undiminished fury. This is an attack on the living conditions of the vast majority of the Greek population: the workers, pensioners, young people; also on the rights of the working class, on the concept of democracy itself and on any prospect for an economic recovery, even for the survival of the society, an assault on all who live and work (or try to do so) in Greece.

Amidst a general atmosphere of an extreme lack of transparency it has come to our knowledge that Egypt had sealed agreements with three European countries pertaining to the implementation of debt swap programs, and is currently negotiating with two further countries. The countries in question according to informal sources are Germany, France, Italy and Belgium. The Popular Campaign to Drop Egypt’s Debt would like to raise strong concerns regarding the conditions under which these agreement are being negotiated, as well as the practice of debt swap itself under the given circumstances.

Eleven all India trade union federations and about 5000 trade unions came together to call an industrial strike on 28 February 2012. It was reworked to become a general strike. This was against repeated court orders, according to which calling bandhs or hartals, i.e., total shut downs, which are of course political acts directed against the government over the heads of individual bosses, are not to be tolerated. In a number of provinces, governments reacted sharply.