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Dave Packer’s life was one of triumph – over disability, over ill health and the kind of personal and political adversity that would have immobilised less determined comrades. His tenacity enabled him to apply his sharp analytical and propagandistic abilities to fight for revolutionary Marxism over four decades. To the end he was engaged in a sustained effort to analyse to new situation in world capitalism and the international left and apply the lessons for the socialist movement in Britain and elsewhere. For more than 30 years his work was sustained by a close political collaboration with his partner Jane Kelly.

I am going to concentrate more directly on Dave’s political contribution. I only hope it will be as interesting as the fascinating tributes we have just heard.

Few revolutionaries, past or present, have devoted their entire adult lives to the socialist cause as full-timers. Gerry Foley was one of them. He died unexpectedly on April 21 in San Cristóbal de las Casas, in the mountains of Chiapas, Mexico’s poorest state.

The general line of this article was approved by the National Committee of Socialist Resistance (British section of the Fourth International) on the 24th of March 2012.

The debate on the left over how to respond to the debt crisis is fundamental for defining socialist policies. That is what this text is about. In the first part, I look at the crisis of the euro. I will argue, as many others have, that this crisis is structural and permanent, contrary to the claims of both social democracy and the right. In the second part, I look at the two options that have been put forward as alternatives to the strategy of left-wing europeanism : first the nationalist exit strategy and second the leap towards a European State. I aim to show that both these alternatives have three problems: they are profoundly contradictory, they depend on concealing their real economic and social effects, and they ignore the balance of forces in which choices have to be made. In the third part, I take a fresh look at left-wing europeanism and seek to show that an economic alternative demands a strategy of class struggle. For that, we need to go back to basics.

The rise of China has been of enormous significance for the Australian capitalist class. The Sydney Morning Herald’s Ross Gittins outlines three major reasons why the East Asian giant now matters for Australian capitalism. First is its sheer size. With a population of 1.35 billion, it has 20 per cent of the world’s population and is 11 times larger than Australia’s second largest trading partner, Japan. Second, the Chinese economy has grown by 10 per cent a year for three decades, roughly doubling in size every eight years.

Movements always arrive unexpectedly. And those who have worked hardest in previous years and months to push towards an escalation of struggles and mobilizations are usually the most surprised by a movement’s arrival. In spite of the many surprises — Who would have imagined that the occupation of Tahrir Square was possible? Who would have imagined the Spanish acampadas? — Leftist activists tend to insist in thinking that movements and the specific forms the movements take can be predicted. The reality is that one can predict that there will be a struggle, for class conflict is inscribed in the capitalist relations of production. But when, where, and which form this struggle will take is impossible to predict. The impossibility of predicting the specific constellation in which those who are below decide that the situation is simply not acceptable any longer does not mean that movements explode like lightening in the sky.

The political dynamics of contemporary South Africa are rife with contradiction. On one hand, it is among the most consistently contentious places on earth, with insurgent communities capable of mounting disruptive protest on a nearly constant basis, rooted in the poor areas of the half-dozen major cities as well as neglected and multiply-oppressed black residential areas of declining towns. On the other hand, even the best-known contemporary South African social movements, for all their sound, lack a certain measure of fury.

Systems of food production and consumption have always been socially organized, but their organization has varied historically. In the last few decades, under the impact of neoliberal politics, the logic of capitalism has been imposed upon the ways in which food is produced and consumed (Bello, 2009). [1]

Felipe Calderón’s six-year term as president, which began to come to an end in 2011, represents one of the worst periods in modern Mexican history. The war on the drug cartels has taken 50,000 lives while failing to win a decisive victory against the cartels. The economy continues to experience very low growth while workers suffer unemployment or labor in the informal economy. The government’s war on the workers continues unabated, with no resolution of the earlier attacks on electrical workers, miners, and airlines employees. The failure of Calderón and the National Action Party (PAN) to successfully resolve the country’s most pressing problems while aggravating other issues has led to a decline of the PAN and the resurgence in recent years of the former ruling party, the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), known for its powerful political machine based on patronage and corruption.