IV471 - April 2014

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The battle for Syrian women’s liberation is multi-faceted; and from first-hand experience, we learn just how often the intersectional modes of oppression are themselves used to undermine power.

Report on the world situation to the Fourth International’s International Committee in February 2014.

On the eve of April 25, Portuguese society was smouldering from contradictions accumulated in half a century of dictatorship. At the heart of these contradictions was a war that lasted thirteen years, to hold on to the African colonies of Angola, Mozambique, Guinea, Cape Verde and Sao Tome and Principe. This conflict conditioned the whole of national life, because of the social suffering caused by the mobilization of two hundred thousand men, a tenth of the working population (a human cost equivalent to twice that of Vietnam), because of the wave of migration driven by hunger and the war, and because of the impossibility of a military solution, the only one contemplated by the regime.

On April 25, Portugal will celebrate the fortieth anniversary of the “Carnation Revolution”. The last example of a popular and radical uprising in western Europe, it brought down the oldest dictatorship on the continent and deepened to the point of threatening the power of the bourgeoisie. At a time when the capitalist offensive is accelerating throughout Europe, particularly in the countries of southern Europe, this is a very cumbersome spectre for the Portuguese ruling class and the Troika (European Commission, ECB and IMF), which fears nothing so much as the eruption of the popular classes onto the political and social stage.

1) The last municipal elections represent a new worsening of the political balance of forces for the left and the labour movement. 150 cities of more than 10,000 inhabitants swung from SP or CP-led to the right or far right.

Though the DLF is not standing in the 2014 elections we cannot and will not be silent. We support the vote No Campaign as articulated by Sidikiwe Vukani. This is a step forward in breaking with support for parties that collaborate with or represent capital and its interests. The Sidikiwe Vukani no Campaign must be placed in context. As we mark 20 years since the end of Apartheid and the advent of democracy, there is a deep rupturing of the post apartheid social consensus in the face of intensifying class struggle. The signal for its end is the Marikana massacre and the great mineworkers’ strike and farm workers’ rebellion of 2012/13, as well as the low intensity service delivery revolts that have spread to all corners of the country. It’s not just the negotiated settlement that is rupturing but the legitimacy and effectiveness of the ANC and the Tripartite Alliance as the political guarantor of the 1994 historic compromise. The Vote no Campaign led by some of the most committed and honest leaders of the ANC and the SACP is further evidence that Zuma’s ANC has become too ghastly to contemplate.

With 15,000 members, two elected Members of the National Assembly (MNAs) in Québec’s provincial parliament, [1] and about 10 percent in the polls, Québec Solidaire (QS) is now a well-established force in a shifting political landscape. A party uniting different currents and sensibilities on the left, it has emerged in the context of a series of mass mobilizations against austerity policies and imperialist wars. It embodies the enormous potential of those movements as well as their limitations and contradictions.

Last year, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change started the publication of its 5th Assessment Report (or AR5), initially showing the work by the Working Group I, which deals with the physical basis of climate change. Now, the AR5 process continued with the publication of the “Summary for Policy Makers” by the Working Group II, concerning "impacts, adaptation and vulnerability."

This statement was issued by the People’s Liberation Faction and the Revolutionary Left Current in Syria on April 14, 2014.