IV469 - February 2014

IV 469 February 2014 PDF magazine available to download

One of the most positive developments in the Bosnian protests has been the birth of direct democratic assemblies — but some major challenges remain.

Zakhar Popovych, an economist and member of the leadership of “Left Opposition”, a Ukrainian political group, was interviewed by Manu Bichindaritz for “Hebdo L’Anticapitaliste”, the newspaper of France’s Nouveau Parti Anticapitaliste.

In Kiev tens of thousands risk their lives to protect the Maiden from police aggression. A participant in the January protests, socialist activist Ilya Budraitskis, argues that the left needs to be a stronger and more visible force in the movement.

At this point, most people are pretty familiar with Kshama Sawant’s election to the Seattle City Council. Sawant first ran for the Washington State House of Representatives in the fall of 2012 and used her notoriety and unexpected positive reception to run again at the municipal level in 2013, defeating her opponent Richard Conlin in a tight race.

The following is an article by ‘Radnicka Borba‘ (Workers’ Struggle) and first appeared on their website. It was translated into English by the blog Bosnia-Herzogovina Protest Files.

Since the Swiss referendum on February 9, 2014, narrowly backing a move to restore strict quotas for immigration from European Union countries, many have decried the vote as racist and xenophobic. They have thus drawn the necessary political conclusion, which makes racism the target of a policy, anti-racism the guideline. In my view, nothing would be more erroneous and above all ineffective given the political and social urgencies of the moment, in the country with the lowest rate of unemployment in Europe. Here are some preliminary lines of explanation.

Spring is in advance of the prevailing cold. Nobody knows how far the social and democratic explosion will go. But now, already, we know that it will leave deep scars and that it could spread like wildfire: the peoples of the region are beginning to see "what makes the system tick" in both the protests and the aspirations that are expressed. From the denunciation of "criminal privatizations" there could emerge a denunciation of the Euro-Atlantic institutions that have fostered them.

What to make of the Tokyo gubernatorial election results? How can we organize a campaign to stop reactivating nuclear power plants that connects the whole country? How effective is the “single-issue” focus?

While we might dub Enrico Letta, recently thrown overboard by Matteo Renzi, the Copenhagen giraffe, Renzi might be characterised as the last stand. The last stand for a political-social system that has been carved up, taken apart and put in debt to the European Union but which is still functioning and whose leaders do want to be overwhelmed by the only real tidal wave that is rising in Europe which is anti-European, nationalist or populist or with more contradictory characteristics like the Five Star Movement in Italy. In this sense Renzi is the last card for all those pro-austerity, pro-government forces.