IV538 - November 2019

In office since 2006, Evo Morales, Bolivia’s first indigenous president, has been overthrown in a coup d’état. Debate on how this happened and what it all means has been proliferating on the international left. Ashley Smith talked with Jeffery R. Webber and Forrest Hylton, two long-time observers of Bolivia, to get a better sense of the issues at stake.

Gilbert Achcar was interviewed for the Marxist Left Review by Darren Roso.

The year 1989 saw a profound upheaval in the geopolitical order established after the Second World War symbolised by the fall of the Berlin wall on 9 November 1989. This essay examines the effects, implications and context in Eastern Europe.

Election campaign, elections, results and within 48 hours, the announcement of the pre-agreement for a coalition government by Pedro Sánchez and Pablo Iglesias. Everything very fast and, suddenly, silence. The negotiations between the PSOE and Unidas Podemos to form a government and a programme continue away from the media, while, in parallel, the Socialists work to obtain the necessary support to carry out the investiture before Christmas.

Latin America is experiencing an abrupt change generated by enormous confrontations between the dispossessed and the privileged. This confrontation includes both revolts by the people and reactions by the oppressors.

After nearly 14 years in power, the government of Evo Morales fell in a little less than a month, due to allegations of fraud and the desire to remain in power. Previously, Morales was a campesino leader, but this time he could not appeal, in the face of the rise of a racist and opportunist right wing, for support from Bolivian popular organizations, which have been weakened after years of cooptation and repression.

There’s a construction boom in Hong Kong, but no-one is getting paid to build the barricades everywhere around town. The youth insurrection is not only the biggest uprising in China since the 1989 protests in Tiananmen Square, it is one of the most explosive student radicalisations of modern times. The depth of their rage, and willingness to risk everything in a fight that most think they can’t win, is almost beyond words. “Unrelenting” is the closest approximation.

Much of the world at this moment is a laboratory searching for the cure for capitalism, and the social scientists running the experiments are in the streets.

The British General Election campaign is off to a flying start. The election formally began with the dissolution of Parliament on the 6th of November and will be concluded on the 12th of December 2019. Needless to say, the 5 week campaign period as compared to the US is rather short (and much less expensive).

Interview with Frank Gaudichaud by Jean Baptiste Thomas and Julien Anchaing for Révolution Permanente. Translation by Héctor A. Rivera