IV355 - December 2003

After the immense success of the first European Social Forum (ESF) in Florence last year, the 2003 ESF in Paris-St-Denis-Ivry-Bobigny represented an unprecedented advance in the construction of a European social movement at two levels.

More than 3,000 women and about 150 men took part in the European Assembly for Women’s Rights that took place on November 12, 2003 in Bobigny on the outskirts of Paris. This was an undeniable success for an event that constitutes very much a “first” as a feminist initiative in Europe. Let’s look at where it came from...

For the first time in 20 years, a counter-offensive has been launched to stop the disasters that are threatening us: war, neoliberal policies, and ecological catastrophe.

The resolution which follows was adopted by the seventh National Conference of the Socialist Democracy Tendency of the Brazilian Workers’ Party (PT).

Until recently the international press, when covering Turkey, always had some standard topics such as violations of human rights, the Kurdish problem, or the Cyprus question. There was nothing peculiar in this since this country has almost never played a role as regional power - except perhaps with the military intervention in Cyprus in 1974. However, in the last twelve months, Turkey has been the source of many stories in the international press related to international strategic questions.

The neoliberal structural adjustment imposed on the sub-Saharan African states from the 1980s onwards, aimed at dismantling the underdeveloped or dependent welfare states established in the first decades of independence, aroused popular opposition in a good number of sub-Saharan countries. The loss of legitimacy of the traditional neocolonial regimes allowed a relative “democratic opening” in the areas of freedom of expression, a multiparty system and change of government by electoral means rather than military coups. Meanwhile, in South Africa, the regime of constitutional apartheid was ended.

When I returned to Chile for the first time in 32 years to attend a weeklong seminar called “30 Years - Allende Lives! Popular Alternatives and the Socialist Perspective in Latin America”, I found myself entering the chilling atmosphere of the world’s first laboratory for militarily imposed economic neoliberalism. This model had been introduced after the September 11, 1973 US-assisted military coup d’état against President Salvador Allende, a democratically elected parliamentary socialist.

The 20th People’s National Assembly met in Beijing in March 2003 to approve changes in the leadership of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and the executive bodies of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) which had been decided on four months earlier by the nomenclature of the party at its 16th Congress.

Discussing the ideas in this book is useful, not because John Holloway has legions of devoted followers, but because many of the ideas he advances about fundamental social change are widespread in the global justice movement and anti-war movement internationally.