IV516 - January 2018

In 2018, the average age of a Hibakusha (???) — the Japanese word for a survivor of the atomic blasts at Hiroshima and Nagasaki — is eighty-one. When you speak with these survivors, you’ll most likely hear the story of what it feels like to have an atomic bomb dropped on you as a six-year-old child.

IVP 516 January 2018 PDF magazine available to download

Even as many mainstream liberals and feminists recently celebrated the anniversary of Roe v. Wade, which solidified the legal right to abortion - for those who can afford it - economic inequality continues to limit abortion access. Being unable to access wanted abortion deepens poverty and vulnerability to other forms of social suffering.

1. The Catalan parliamentary elections of December 21st, 2017 (21D) saw an unexpected electoral mobilization, with a historic rate of participation of 79.04% (these are the official figures after the counting of votes from abroad). The balance of power between the two big blocs in contention is relatively similar to that of September 27, 2015 (27S): 2,079,340 votes (47.49%) and 70 deputies for the pro-independence camp against 1,902,061 votes (43.49%) and 57 supporters of Article 155.

The sight of Michael O’Leary, who declared once that Hell would freeze over before he would allow a trade union in to Ryanair, having to eat his words is indeed enough to bring a glow to the heart of any class conscious worker. At the company AGM in the Autumn O’Leary gloated that “I don’t even know how there would be industrial action in Ryanair, … There isn’t a union.”! So how then was this victory achieved?

The electoral sequence of spring 2017 revealed and accelerated the crisis of the French political system. Nothing happened as expected. The election of Emmanuel Macron to the presidency of the Republic, followed by a the winning of a crushing majority of deputies from La République en Marche (LReM) to the National Assembly marked an unexpected transformation of the political landscape. The logic of alternation would have given the classic right, represented by Les Républicains (LR) an overwhelming victory against the Parti Socialiste (PS) which had for five years held power at all levels, the presidency of the Republic, a majority in the National Assembly and the Senate, in nearly all the regions and in most of the big cities and metropolitan areas. The PS was certainly swept away, but so were LR.

A letter was published in Le Monde newspaper on January 9th signed by artists and intellectuals of whom the most well-known was Catherine Deneuve. It is an unacceptable and mistaken reaction to something which is itself debatable. The letter is a call to women not to give in to the ‘new puritanism’. The letter argues that while rape is a crime, insistent or unsubtle flirting is not – and neither is gentlemanly courtship equal to macho aggression. For the signatories, the legitimate and necessary awareness of sexual violence against women has been transformed into a conformist moralism:

We, the Alliance of Middle Eastern Socialists oppose the various military attacks on Afrin, Idlib and Eastern Ghouta and support all the innocent civilians in Syria. . . There has been a consensus between all the international and regional powers on the necessity to liquidate the revolutionary popular movements initiated in Syria in March of 2011 . .

On Sunday January 21, Portland’s streets were filled by Indigenous women, men, and two-spirited people marching with their allies to honor Indigenous Womxn Warriors, to remember and demand justice for Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women, girls and transgender people(#MMIW), to honor the earth and the Water Protectors, and to protest the oppression of Indigenous women throughout the globe, including jailed DAPL activist Red Fawn Fallis and Berta Caceres, environmental justice leader murdered by the Honduran regime.

Nicole Colson rounds up reports from the Women’s Marches mobilized to protest one year of Trump—and looks at the debates about building an effective opposition.