IV483 - April 2015

IVP 483 April 2015 PDF magazine

Shouts of “Nijkaari ka jo yaar hai ghadaar hai ghadaar hai” rang through Aiwan-i-Iqbal where the Awami Workers Party Lahore held an Anti-Privatization Labor Conference.Thousands of workers representing All Wapda Hydroelectric Trade Union, All Pakistan Trade Union Federation, All Pakistan Workers Confederation, Home-based Workers Union and Railway Workshop Union among others participated in the conference. The speakers who addressed comprised AWP president Abid Hassan Minto, AWP labor secretary Nazli Javed, AWP general secretary Farooq Tariq, Wapda Hydroelectric Workers Union leader Khurshid Ahmed and several other leaders.

Since the 2008 and the spread of the global economic crisis, China has experienced a sharp rise in class struggle, both in Hong Kong and on the mainland. Ellen David Friedman, a long-time organizer of the National Education Association in Vermont, founding member of the state’s Progressive Party and member of the Labor Notes Policy Committee, has been working for the last decade with labor and union activists in Hong Kong and the mainland. She spoke with Ashley Smith about the dynamics and nature of these struggles.

From state meltdowns in Libya and Yemen to the overwhelming nightmares in Syria and Iraq, the spreading chaos in the Middle East today presents the most extreme examples of a core reality: imperial overreach creates problems for which it has no solutions, and the horrific human costs are paid by people who bear no responsibility for creating the mess. We’ll briefly look here at some of the key situations in the Middle East, pointing to how a relentless U.S. drive for “stability” produces the opposite, in increasingly brutal consequences (some deliberate and some unintended) and how these crises feed back into the peculiarities of U.S. domestic political culture.

The World Social Forum (WSF) was born following the emergence of the anti-globalisation movement in the 1990s, including the Zapatista uprising against NAFTA in 1994, the campaign against the Multilateral Agreement on Investment (MAI) in 1998 and the great mobilisation in 1999 in Seattle against the WTO summit, with nearly 50,000 participants from around the world.

The French press has said little or nothing about it... unlike the Greek media, which we can say really created the event. On Thursday, April 16 there took place in central Athens a workers’ rally and demonstration... entirely taken in hand by bosses and managers, and supported by every reactionary in the city.

A meeting of the Red Network was held in Athens on April 4, 2015. One of the three workshops brought together about a hundred people who are active to varying degrees in the health sector: doctors, nurses, paramedics, those responsible for hospital pharmacies, cleaners, members of local committees who have prevented the closure of a primary care centre, one of the doctors responsible for the social dispensary at Hellinikon. The discussion combined testimony, analysis and initiatives. A common thread ran through all the interventions: we should stop waiting for the results of the permanent and highly-mediatized negotiations of the government, which maintain the population in a passive attitude; we must build initiatives that ensure the connection between caregivers, population, the trade-union structure (META) influenced by Syriza and the members and supporters of Syriza. Given the massive and continuous state of decay of the health system, a slogan has to be put forward: immediate refusal to pay the interest on the debt and repayments that are presented as unavoidable, and the immediate use of these funds for the health sector.

Financial speculators are nervously asking whether Greece will pay its debt or default. Political leaders from Europe to the US and the IMF are telling the Greek government to leave aside its democratic mandate and accept further austerity as a condition for getting credit to continue to pay back its debt. But the right question politically is: should Greece pay this debt.?

Events in Greece have taken a dramatic turn, and insolvency is at the gates. On April 20, the Greek government issued a decree forcing local authorities to place cash reserves at the Bank of Greece.

The collapse of the Rana Plaza factory building is the bloodiest disaster in the history of the garment industry. Socialist Alternative’s industrial organiser Jerome Small visited the scene, just outside Dhaka in Bangladesh, late last year.