IV391 - July-August 2007

The author looks at the prospects for Scottish society and politics as the Scottish National Party take power for the first time in the Scottish Parliament.

At the beginning of this year the Sinistra Critica (Critical Left) association in Italy had a discussion on drafting a feminist manifesto. While there are elements specific to Italy, the following notes on the discussions by Lydia Cirillo pose many important questions for the updating of a Marxist Feminist analysis.

Acccording to the author "It is time to recognize the utter inadequacy of first-wave environmentalism’s basic premises and forms of organization. There is a certain urgency to this recognition, for nothing less than profound and indeed unprecedented changes in human existence are forewarned by the ecological crisis".

Is the revolutionary process going forward in Bolivia, or is it stalled? How do the actions of the Morales government shape up against the president’s professed hostility to capitalism?

As of June 16, 2007 at 16.36h, the Linkspartei.PDS (Left Party. of Democratic Socialism) and the WASG (Electoral Alternative For Jobs and Social Justice) no longer exist. After two years of preparations, they formally merged to create the new party Die Linke (The Left).

1. The obvious political crisis of the Prodi government and the conflicts between its components mark the bankruptcy of the political project of the Union, which was victorious in the elections in 2006, but which is incapable of representing a real political and social alternative in opposition to the Right.

New Labour’s long awaited "plan B" – the replacement of Blair by Brown when Blair became electorally damaged beyond repair - is working, at least as far as Labour’s short term electoral prospects are concerned.

A local cartoonist, Ian Knox, summed up the May 8th re-opening of the Stormont executive in the North of Ireland as the coronation of the sectarian bigot Ian Paisley, representing Martin McGuinness of Sinn Fein as his consort. It was a deadly accurate satire.

The call to build socialism of the twenty-first century has re-opened the strategic discussion on the Latin American left. Once again characterizations of socialism and courses of action are being analyzed to advance the socialist objective.

The INSAD (National Authority for Solidarity with Political Detainees) is a unitary framework of the social and political left against the wave of repression which has recently hit Morocco. It promotes, among other initiatives, an activist campaign to gather a million signatures demanding the liberation of arrested and sentenced activists.