IV461 - June 2013

IV461- June 2013 PDF can be downloaded here

Comrade Rohit Prajapati, member of Radical Socialist, and veteran trade unionist and environmental activist, associated with Paryavaran Suraksha Samiti (Environmentalist organisation), Peoples Union for Civil Liberties, Jyoti Karmachari Mandal and Vadodara Kamdar Union (independent trade unions), and Paryavaran Suraksha Samiti, as well as connected intimately to the anti-fascist militants of Gujarat from before the 2002 pogroms, has been under various kinds of political harassment, both from the Narendra Modi government, and from the big business companies that have been making huge profits under Modi’s regime.

This interview was conducted by Juan Tortosa of the Swiss journal SolidaritéS on 23 June 2013. Additional questions were asked on 27 June 2013.

For as long as capitalism and patriarchy have existed as systems linked to each other, they have made an alliance to establish a relationship of domination over nature and of appropriation and exploitation of everything that, on this basis, they stereotyped as beings of an "inferior nature", which includes women and their bodies. At the same time, the condition of blacks, mestizos and the indigenous, and their ethnic and cultural subordination, became something natural. Everything that comes from nature and does not match the standard of masculine and bourgeois social evolution and that does not fit the paradigm of white and Western, exists only as something of an "inferior nature"

This statement by the Partido Socialismo y Libertad [Party of Socialism and Freedom] was adopted on 14 June 2013.

This statement was adopted by Kokkino on 14 June 2013 and published on their website.

After days of hesitation and negotiation, the government has finally decided to evacuate the Taksim Commune, where thousands camped in Gezi Park and which tens of thousands visited every night. Police attacked Gezi Park yesterday evening (June 15) and after evacuating it using tear gas and, as a novelty, water cannon apparently supplemented with a special kind of chemical since it burnt the skin of everyone it touched, razed the tents, the infirmary, the kitchens and the library established there to the ground.

Francisco Louçã is an economics professor at Lisbon’s Instituto Superior de Economia e Gestão. He is the author of numerous books and essays including Ensaio para uma Revolução [Rehearsal of a Revolution]; As Time Goes By — From the Industrial Revolution to the Information Revolution, with Chris Freeman; Portugal Agrilhoado — A Economia Cruel na Era do FMI [Portugal in Chains — The Cruel Economy in the Age of the IMF]; and most recently, co-authored with Mariana Mortagua, A Dividadura [The Dictatorship of the Debt] and Isto é um Assalto [This Is a Robbery].

In the current context of international crisis of capitalism, sub-Saharan Africa is presented as a zone of the world economy which is doing well. In 2012, none of the states in the region was considered as in recession: 0.8% growth in GDP in Swaziland, 8.7 % (after 13.7% in 2011) in Ghana, or 7% in Congo-Brazzaville, 2.7% in South Africa and 4% in Mauritius [1]. The average growth of the sub-region is 5.8%, well above the world average of around 3%.

Lidia, Waheba, Nandini, Ilona y Ana Paula are women farmers from Paraguay, Palestine, Norway, India, and Mozambique. On the occasion of the 4th Women’s Assembly of La Vía Campesina, These women have gathered in Jakarta, Indonesia, to give voice to the situations faced by women in their respective countries. Although they live very different realities and contexts, these women share a common struggle: the struggle for the rights of women farmers and farmworkers and the defense of women as the mothers of food sovereignty.