IV464 - September 2013

IV464 September 2013 PDF available to download
IV464 September 2013 PDF available to download here

This article written on 25 September foreshadows the resignation from the Italian government of the members of Silvio Berlusconi’s PDL (People’s Liberty Party) on the 28 September 2013.

For more than a month in Tunisia, the signal for battle has been given on all sides, amid increasingly serious political, economic and social tensions. The detonator of the current political crisis was the assassination on July 25 of Mohamed Brahmi, a member of the National Constituent Assembly (NCA ), leader of the Popular Current party [1] and a member of the leadership of the Popular Front [2]. Then the tension mounted even further after eight soldiers were brutally killed, four days later, in an ambush on Mount Chaambi, on the border between Tunisia and Algeria.

For the majority of Tunisians, the current government is no longer legitimate. But at the same time the establishment of an alternative popular regime is not immediately on the agenda.

In its most recent world public opinion survey, the Pew Research Centre [3] found that ‘international financial instability’ is considered a major threat by 52 percent of those polled was a close second, after climate change at 54 percent).

The recent decision by the New York appeals court declaring that Argentina must pay its holdout creditors in full demonstrates that until Argentina repudiates its illegal and illegitimate debt, it will continue to be harassed by international capitalism.

The Belgian LCR asked Joseph Daher, Syrian revolutionary activist, member of the Revolutionary Left Current in Syria, currently living in Switzerland, to explain the state of the popular movements in his country, specifically the self-organization of the masses in the liberated regions, the struggle against sectarianism and against Islamists.

Europe is sinking into crisis and social regression under the pressure of austerity, recession and the strategy of “structural reforms”. This pressure is tightly coordinated at the European level, under the leadership of the German Government, the ECB and the European Commission. There is a broad consensus that these policies are absurd and even “illiterate”: fiscal austerity does not reduce the burden of the debt but generates a spiral of depression, more unemployment and despair among the European peoples.

The measures taken by both Labour and Tory governments in recent years to open up health services to the market are not just a British phenomenon. Similar measures have been taken in all other European countries. The main mover in this has been the European Commission, the political representative of European transnational corporations. The European Commission is politically the most neoliberal free-market body in the world, way ahead of the US administration. In the General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS 1995)) the signatories committed themselves to engage in ‘progressive liberalisation’ and, since that time, European governments have consistently implemented measures to commercialise health services and introduce more competition into the service. This international agreement to open up services to private corporations was given a boost by the financial crisis and the recession.

This statement on Syria was issued by the Venezuelan revolutionary organization Marea Socialista (“Socialist Tide”) on 8 September 2013. Active since the beginning within the Chavista movement and the Bolivarian process, Marea Socialista is a current organized within the PSUV (United Socialist Party of Venezuela), founded by Hugo Chavez. It advocates deepening the popular process in Venezuela and mobilizes against the bureaucratization of this process. It is interesting, in this respect, to know its analysis and its positioning concerning events in Syria. Its call for the internationalist and democratic radical Left to make itself heard in a coordinated manner is also important.