IV499 - August 2016

The holiday period and the Olympic Games, which started on Friday August 5, have been a contributory factor to Brazilians not taking to the streets in large numbers to contest or support the impeachment of Dilma Rousseff. Fatigue after more than a year of demonstrations, combined with the feeling that it’s all over bar the shouting – and that the possibility of Dilma Rousseff regaining her position is very small – seem to be the most probable reasons to explain why both the left and the right are demobilized.

The Leap Manifesto is, in a way, Canada’s version of the burst of Left and socialist energies that have come with the Bernie Sanders campaign in the Democratic Party in the U.S. and the Jeremy Corbyn leadership win in the Labour Party in Britain. As with these, the explosion of popular interest reflects general disquiet about the limits of recent protests demanding changes from the state but having no strategy to transform it, on the one hand; and disappointments with electoral politics and social democratic parties that only seem to reinforce neoliberalism, on the other.

IVP 499 August 2016 PDF magazine
IVP 499 August 2016 PDF magazine available to downloadhere

France is currently going through a new stage in the Islamophobic offensive that has plagued the country for so many years. And once again, it is the ruling class that is manoeuvring, as the political class claims that it is responding to a pre-existing popular “expectation” or even “exasperation”.

The past year of migration through the Balkans was both a driving force and result of a number of fractures, all of which cannot be covered in a single article. But to understand the political importance of the recent migration movements along the so-called Balkan route, as well as the lessons they hold for today’s migration activists, we must at least explore the core developments that have taken place over the past year. I will do so with reference to the political project Moving Europe, and this article is partly a product of collective discussions within this project.

The Syrian Revolution has tested the left internationally by posing a blunt question: Which side are you on? Do you support the popular struggle against dictatorship and for democracy? Or are you with Bashar al-Assad’s brutal regime, his imperial backer Russia, his regional ally Iran and Iran’s proxies like Hezbollah from Lebanon?

Black Lives Matter, the Bernie Sanders movement, the presidential campaign with the unlikely presence of Donald Trump and of the first woman candidate of a major party. The political situation in the USA has sparked a lot of interest. The NPA newspaper Anticapitaliste spoke to Joanna Misnik, leading US activist present at the NPA summer university.

On the steamy evening of July 27 in Philadelphia a raucous audience of close to 800 gathered to discuss electoral politics and movement-building. This was day three of Socialist Convergence, organized by a coalition of left organizations to create a socialist presence during the Democratic National Convention. Our target participants were the Sanders delegates and supporters who had promised to challenge the party’s lack of democracy and to organize protests in and around the convention that would serve notice on the party establishment.

As many as 1,900 people—or about 36 per day—have been killed in the seven weeks since the tough-talking Philippines President Rodrigo Duterte took office, promising a crackdown on drugs , the country’s national police chief said Tuesday.

A year after marriage equality was legalized nationwide, and two months since the June 12 massacre at a gay club in Orlando, the LGBT movement confronts a contradictory future. Although Orlando dramatized that violence against LGBT people persists, fueled by rightwing politicians’ hateful attacks, great victories have been won, and public acceptance of queer people has expanded to levels that once seemed unimaginable.