IV443 - December 2011

International Viewpoint 443 December 2011 PDF

The death of the former Czech president and emblematic figure of the dissident movements in the countries of Eastern Europe is giving rise to a somewhat debatable rewriting of history. Havel is presented today as an “anticommunist resistant”, a combatant “against communism”, the liberator of Czechoslovakia “from the communist yoke” against which the Czechoslovak people “rose up” in 1968 during the Prague Spring and in 1989 during the Velvet Revolution.

The following statement was issued on December 17 by the Revolutionary Socialists in Egypt

Tehreek Insaaf is in fast forward mode to become the latest political party of the capitalist and feudal class. Originating in the middle class, it is en route to becoming the third largest party of the rich in Pakistan.

The Pakistan Afghan Progressive parties two days conference ended December 22 in Lahore. It was first time after decades that a formal meeting was organised between the progressive groups of the two countries. It was attended by 10 political groups from both countries, four from Afghanistan and six from Pakistan. Almost all the main Left groups of Pakistan attended this conference. It was chaired by three young activists, Sonia Qadir, Ammar Ali Jan and Aman Karriaper. This is the joint declaration it agreed.

The Tunisian elections of October 23, 2011 are far from having closed the chapter opened in January 2011. Faced with the contination of neoliberal social and economic policies as well as the attacks agains women’s rights, mobilisations have resumed with still more vigour.

A collective call for the mass general strike which will begin on December 11, 2011 has been launched. This call is the first common initiative of all the structures and groups engaged in the popular revolution, which constitutes in itself a significant positive development for the unification of popular and political energies in the revolution against the regime of arbitrariness, oppression and exploitation. We consider that this amounts to a qualitative step towards its fall.

On November 21, 1927, under the leadership of Peng Pai, pioneer of the Chinese communist revolution as well as a committed socialist, the country’s first rural Soviet administration was established in area of Hailufeng, Guangdong province. Thus began the first chapter of the communist movement in China. On November 21, 2011, less than a few kilometres away from the founding site, at Wukan village (part of Lufeng city in eastern Guangdong province), a few thousand villagers took to the street. Holding up signs that read “Down with dictatorship”, “Curb corruption”, “Down with government-business collusion” and “Return land to the people”, villagers marched to the government headquarters at Lufeng city to protest against officials’ illegal land seizures and sales.

Thousands of lobbyists from multinationals swarming the UN, and the oil companies that are part of negotiation delegations to COP without any intention to cut back on their emissions have, so far, more power than a few phrases about women’s rights and a woman chairperson to the COP.

As the Assembly of the Oppressed we are gathered here to demand the transformation of the entire neo liberal capitalist system. The fight against climate change is a fight against neoliberal capitalism, landlessness, dispossession, hunger, poverty and the re-colonization of the territories of the people’s of Africa and the global South. We are here to declare that direct action is the only weapon of the oppressed people of the world to end all forms of oppression in the world.