IV541 - February 2020

Francisco Louçã is an economist especially known for being one of the founders and leaders of Bloco de Esquerda (Left Bloc) in Portugal. He is the author, with Michael Ash, of Shadow Networks: Financial Disorder and the System that Caused Crisis, Oxford: OUP, 2018.

While visiting Madrid and Barcelona to promote the Spanish edition of the book, he was interviewed by Jorge O. Maldonado for Público. The interview was published on 4 February 2020.

“At a time when left parties in Europe have been losing ground to their rivals on the Right and center, the Irish election bucked the trend. Whatever Sinn Féin does next, this was clearly a left-wing vote. The exit poll showed that health and housing were by far the most important issues for voters. Two-thirds wanted investment in public services to be prioritized over tax cuts. 31 percent agreed with the statement that Ireland ‘needs a radical change in direction’.

“It’s possible that this opportunity for change will be squandered. But right now, the momentum in Irish politics is with the Left, and the traditional conservative parties are on the back foot. An election that was supposed to call time on the political turbulence of the last decade has had the opposite effect.” [Daniel Finn “Ireland’s Left Turn”.]

Throughout these sixty days of mobilisation, the popular revolt in Chile has advanced three fundamental demands: a social agenda to immediately fight against the precariousness of life; a new Constitution through a constituent assembly; and justice and the punishment of human rights violations. These demands have been advanced both in the spaces formed in the heat of the struggle such as the territorial assemblies and in the social spaces organised before the explosion of 18 October.

Since late January, the social and political situation in France has remained marked by popular opposition to the government’s counter-reform targeting the pension system. And, even if it has weakened in recent weeks, the mobilization has had a direct political effect of weakening and destabilizing President Emmanuel Macron and his party, “La République en Marche” (LREM).

Chilean president Sebastián Piñera declared on television on 8 October 2019 that “Chile is a real oasis in a convulsed Latin America”. In fact, Chile has been presented to the world for almost thirty years as a model to be exported and an example of neoliberal stability. The key to “success” was the commitment of all parties, whether for or against Pinochet, to the management of the institutions and the economic model set up during the dictatorship (1973-1990). This “oasis”, based on a programme of crushing and super-exploitation of the working class, exploded ten days later, dramatically highlighting the increasingly unbearable living conditions of large sections of the population. The immediate result of this uprising was to break the conspiracy of the democratic transition, supported by the left and the right, against the class struggle. The class struggle came back to the fore in earthshaking force of which October was only the first attempt.

On January 28 in Washington, a so-called Middle East peace plan was presented by US President Donald Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and in the notable absence of the Palestinian side. The outlines of the project were put together by Jared Kushner, Mr. Trump’s son-in-law and advisor. He is also a big supporter of Israel and a defender of the Israeli colonial settlements, for which he even funded “educational institutions”. This plan constitutes a veritable program for a new attempt to liquidate the Palestinian question, and is in violation of all the international resolutions passed by the United Nations and of international law.

13 December, 2019, 43rd Friday of mobilisation: during the presidential election, dozens of demonstrators parade through the streets of Algiers, noses covered with flour – an allusion to the trafficking of cocaine and money laundering alleged against the son of the new president Abdeldmadjid Tebboune in 2018, who has since been in temporary detention.

The following statement is from Anticapitalistas, an organization of revolutionary socialists who helped initiate Podemos in the Spanish state. This statement was originally published at Anticapitalistas, translated by No Borders News.

Among the mass protests that erupted across the globe in October last year, Lebanon’s were some of the largest, targeting both a failing neoliberal system and ingrained sectarianism. Now in their fourth month, the protests are showing no sign of diminishing. Shireen Akram-Boshar interviews Rima Majed.

Many appalling details of the apartheid-annexation Steal of the Century proclaimed as the Middle East “peace plan” by Donald Trump, Benjamin Netanyahu and Jared Kushner – the troika of the impeached, the indicted and the idiotic — have been pretty well covered by the progressive media and Middle East commentators. (I’ll suggest a brief list of sources at the conclusion of this article.)