IV389 - May 2007

Climate change threatens catastrophe. How should socialists face up to the challenge?

We can all say good riddance to Tony Blair. It was fitting that it was the war that got him in the end. However he tried he could never shake off the lies and bloodshed involved. Gordon Brown will now be crowned Labour leader and then Prime Minister on June 27. Its goodbye Blair, but Blairism continues.

The Israeli national commission of enquiry into the war in Lebanon has just published an intermediate report. The final document is expected only some months from now. It is already clear that, for the Vinograd commission – so-called from the name of the judge who chairs it - the second Lebanon war – that it is the official name which the Israeli government has just given it - was a fiasco.

There is a tension at the heart of Venezuela’s Bolivarian revolution. It’s been there for several years. It is the tension between the revolution’s anti-neoliberal and anti-imperialist achievements – which are undeniable – and its socialist promise – which remains just that, a promise.

On 8th March 2007, no-one in Pakistan would have thought of a mass movement erupting in the near future with the potential to overthrow General Musharraf’s regime. A day later on 9th March, he suspended the chief justice of the Supreme Court of Pakistan. He had the illusion that nothing would happen and business as usual would go on. He had done it in the past successfully.

Russian speaking youth rioted in the Estonian capital after the government ordered a statue commemorating the Red Army torn down. According to "Ilya" the Russian speaking minorities in the Baltic are mainly poor and excluded.

From the point of view of the radical Left in Western Europe, and beyond, the most striking thing about the 2007 Scottish parliamentary elections was the wiping out of the parliamentary representation of the anti-capitalist, socialist Left, and in particular the Scottish Socialist Party.

By any standards this was a massacre for the left. The red-green presence in Holyrood, represented by the Scottish Socialist Party, the Greens and Solidarity was slashed from 15 to two.

The election of the Lula-PT government in Brazil led to a sharp dispute between the Fourth International and the majority of its Brazilian section. This article provides an overview of the debates.

Socialist Democracy takes issue with the Fourth International over its position on the Lula government, its conception of internationalism and its relations with the Brazilian section.