IV474 - July 2014

Since when is solidarity with victims of aggression called ’importing a conflict’?

By banning French protests last Saturday against Israeli war crimes in Gaza, Hollande and Valls disgraced themselves. The French people, however, who ignored the ban and turned out en masse in various cities throughout France to express solidarity with Gaza, can be proud.

What is the thinking and strategy behind Spain’s new radical political sensation ? Podemos European election campaign chief Iñigo Errejón explains.

Download the latest issue of IV magazine as a PDF file here

Ukrainian capitalism today is distinguished by the most fortified oligarchy of the post-Soviet states. Politics in Ukraine have been subject to volatile lurches over the last decade, driven by the direct involvement of masses of Ukrainians. Meanwhile, shaping the economic, political, and ideological aspects of society and daily life in Ukraine is a ubiquitous inter-imperialist competition between Russia on the one side and the United States and the European Union on the other. Indeed, the accumulation of capital in this country is constantly conditioned and threatened both by these imperialisms and internal social upheavals. The actions and positions of the ruling class have been and will continue to be staked out upon the terrain delineated by their contradictions.

After leading a January 2014 academic and labor delegation to Palestine and Jordan, Dr. Rabab Abdulhadi has come under sustained attack from the rightwing McCarthyist AMCHA Initiative, which describes itself as “a non-profit organization dedicated to investigating, documenting, educating about, and combating anti-Semitism at institutions of higher education in America.”

Ukraine constitutes a test not only for democratic movements, or the unevenly matched imperialisms of the U.S./EU and Russia, but also for the global left. As with other “difficult” moments like the wars in Bosnia and Kosovo, Iran 2009, or the Libyan uprising, our support for democracy and human rights has in some quarters come into conflict with the long held stance that neoliberal capitalism, led by the United States, is the main danger confronting humanity. The Maidan uprising that toppled the oligarchical kleptocracy of Viktor Yanukovich in Ukraine was not socialist or even social democratic. Moreover, Maidan was cheered on by the United States and the EU, which clearly sought advantage from it against Russia. This has led some on the left to lean toward Putin’s Russia and to shy away from supporting the Maidan uprising and Ukraine, even in the face of Russia’s takeover of Ukrainian territory and threats to dismember the country. This article takes a different stance. In the tradition of the anti-Stalinist left and particularly the Marxist-Humanist stream of which I have long been a part, I maintain that we can and should support progressive democratic and popular movements, even when they undermine regimes that the U.S. government opposes, and at the same time, work to oppose U.S. war and hegemony.

This article retracing the events that led up to the ban of the Palestin e solidarity march in Paris on 19 July was first published on the French investigative news site Mediapart on 18 July.

Welcome to our struggle, Brother.

This morning I read your first speech as the President of the Republic of Indonesia. Surely it was a more daring speech than we’re used to hear from SBY. I’m glad it was you who received the majority vote from the people, because the other one shouldn’t have made it as presidential candidate from the start. Unfortunately, he too received quite a lot of votes from the people.

In every war, one of the fronts is that of information and misinformation. In the crisis that Ukraine is going through at present there is a discourse of the Russian state, expressed by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, relayed by the political world, broadcast by media that are increasingly under the orders of the state and by the pro-Russian militias in eastern Ukraine. Its purpose is to delegitimize the Ukrainian government and state and to legitimize Russian interference in the affairs of the country. This discourse has an impact on important sectors of the population is Eastern Ukraine, which are suspicious of Kiev and influenced by the Russian media. Sometimes it even finds an echo in the Western media and, what is much worse, in a part of the left in Europe. It seems important to challenge the Russian version of events in Ukraine.

This is part two of an interview with scholar-activist David McNally on the current economic crisis. The first part [1] focused on the crisis itself, its causes, the way in which working life has been reorganized, the perspective of ruling elites in managing the crisis and pursuing austerity policies, and how this should help inform our stance as movement activists.