There’s been extensive discussion about the migrant caravan that embarked from San Pedro Sula in Honduras in October. By now, however, we know that this caravan is impossible to categorize as a homogeneous entity, as its members have made, and are still making, their way to Tijuana via different means of transportation and according to varying timelines, not to mention the many-faceted desires they hold. And there is at present the more disquieting reality that, after facing repression near the San Ysidro port of entry, thousands of caravan members are sheltered in makeshift encampments on the peripheries of Tijuana.
AMLO inauguration – the old regime collapses and a new period in the class struggle opens
11 December 2018, byFrom the first hour of 1 December, the Zócalo square in Mexico City saw the arrival of thousands of people to witness the inauguration of the new government, headed by Andrés Manuel López Obrador. AMLO spoke in front of 160,000 people who packed the main public square of the country.
Lessons from Irish unions: The Trade Union Campaign to Repeal the 8th
10 December 2018, byIn May, the Republic of Ireland overwhelmingly voted to repeal the 8th Amendment to its constitution; Irish President Michael Higgins signed the change into law in September. [1] [2] The amendment, passed in 1983, was in effect a total ban on abortion; the law stated “the unborn” has the same rights as the person carrying it. Some 67 percent of Irish voters voted “yes” to repeal after a years-long campaign that split political parties, created surprising alliances, and saw a flood of American conservative dollars into the “Vote No” campaign’s coffers.
A Ruling Class Activist: A Not-Eulogy for George H. W. Bush
9 December 2018, byThe flowing tributes to George Herbert Walker Bush recall what we’re told was a more dignified, less brutal and “tribal“ time in U.S. political life. Indeed, the 41st President carried himself with a certain grace, confidence and even humor — befitting the kind of man who believed that he and his family belonged to that estate born to rule the world.
From Women’s Strikes to a New Class Movement: The Third Feminist Wave
8 December 2018, byOn October 23, thousands of Glasgow cleaning workers kicked off the union demonstration for equal pay organized by Public Services International, Unison, and GMB with a minute’s silence, in memory of the women workers who died before being able to see the day when their work would be finally granted the same dignity and value as the work of their male colleagues. In this act there was full awareness of a long history of great and small humiliations, of invisible, unacknowledged, or underpaid work, of countless instances of injustice and petty abuses, as well as of the enormity of the challenge faced by the women’s strike. Equal pay: a reasonable, almost trivial goal, and yet so difficult to achieve, to such an extent that the World Economic Forum has calculated that – based on current trends and data – it will take at least 217 years to finally bridge the wage gap between women and men globally. (Assuming that the world will still be habitable in 217 years time…)
The workers who won’t snitch
7 December 2018, byMetalworker union Numsa will today [Friday] file legal arguments in the Constitutional Court on behalf of 65 Dunlop factory workers from Howick, KwaZulu-Natal. The workers were dismissed in 2012 because they did not snitch on fellow workers during a protected strike.
Organizing resistance in Brazil and international solidarity against neofascist Bolsonaro’s government
5 December 2018, byFourth International statement on the situation in Brazil issued by the Executive Bureau on 5 December 2018.
Turkey: Relentless - Forty Years of struggle from “Sürekli Devrim” to “Yeniyol”
4 December 2018, by“Trotskyism”: an insult, betrayal or, in the best of cases, an exotic strangeness. It was in 1978, at the heart of a period when ideologically Stalinism and its variants weighed heavily on the radical left which, while valiantly leading its fight against fascism, was beset by fratricidal conflicts, that Sürekli Devrim (Permanent Revolution-SD), the first revolutionary Marxist review in Turkey, was born. Of course, Trotsky was not unknown to Turkish and Kurdish revolutionaries. Alongside a number of books denouncing the “counter-revolutionary essence” of Trotskyism, Deutscher’s trilogy and Trotsky’s books such as “My Life”, “Fascism – What it is and how to fight it” and “The Permanent Revolution”, had been published. But it was the first time that an organized revolutionary Marxist movement had emerged in the country of Nazim Hikmet.
A special day. Living and struggling in the occupied and self-managed RiMaflow factory.
4 December 2018, by ,Rarely has the Milanese sky and its foggy metropolitan area been so open and starry as tonight. But maybe it is climate change that has also caused this.
Progressive MPs yet again target of state oppression
3 December 2018, byOn November 30th, two members of Pakistan’s federal parliament (National Assembly), Ali Wazir and Mohsin Dawar, were stopped from boarding a UAE flight at Peshawar airport. They were detained for over six hours by the state agencies to make sure that they cannot travel abroad. This is the latest action of the military establishment to target comrades Mohsin and Ali merely because both these parliamentarians have been leading a mass grass roots civic and socioeconomic rights movement, critical of state’s “war on terror” policies.