IV549 - October 2020

Horror, shock, dread : this is what we feel faced with the assassination of Samuel Paty, who taught of history and geography at the Collège du Bois d’Aulne in Conflans-Sainte-Honorine, by a fanatical murderer. This death is atrocious. It is atrocious in absolute terms, the death of a man killed in the middle of the street. It is atrocious because of the appalling way in which the murder was committed: by beheading. And also, because its author justified it by referring to the lesson given by Samuel Paty on freedom of expression, during which he presented his students with a caricature of Mohammed ; that a lesson could lead to a murder is unbearable.

Indonesia’s new Omnibus Law was passed earlier this month, enacting a major series of counterreforms to workers’ rights and the environment. In protest, tens of thousands of workers went on strike, and in dozens of cities, students took to the streets.

The popular will has been forcefully expressed in a historic plebiscite. Rather than a finishing point, this huge triumph should represent the signal for starting the construction of a new Chile

Last Friday, Poland’s Constitutional Court banned almost all abortion, as part of a wider Catholic-conservative offensive against women’s rights. But the ruling has already sparked strikes and blockades across Poland — and the working-class women least able to afford a clandestine abortion are leading the revolt.

Since the election, it has been two months of sustained leaderless protests, police violence, and local self-organization.

After relatively peaceful Sunday marches of past several weeks, amounting each time to 100+thousand people, Sunday 11 October saw resumption of police violence on the mass scale.

“This movement has given a tremendous push to working-class movement and for the first-time the scattered demands of the workers from all across the country were presented in shape of a common charter of demands. As a vanguard of this movement, the Pakistan Trade Union Defence Campaign (PTUDC) will continue to fight for all the workers. Whatever the outcome of the negotiations, the labour movement will continue. 14 October is only the beginning of the joint struggle that continues till the overthrow of capitalism in the region.”

On Friday [16 0ctober], an Islamist extremist murdered a schoolteacher in a suburb northwest of Paris. In response, the French interior minister has called for a ban on an anti-Islamophobia legal association wholly unconnected to the atrocity. We need to resist this turn against democracy and justice.

Female school students, with the support of feminist collectives, are mobilizing against sexist punishments put in place by their school management for wearing outfits deemed provocative. It all started during the orientation cycle at Pinchat [in the commune of Veyrier (canton of Geneva)], where the management forced ten girls and two boys to wear a very large “t-shirt of shame” because their clothes were considered indecent and “not correct”. When they arrived at the school, the students had to march past a line of judges formed by the administration who divided the students into two categories: outfits deemed “correct” and “incorrect”.

“I believe that there will ultimately be a clash between the oppressed and those that do the oppressing. I believe that there will be a clash between those who want freedom, justice and equality for everyone and those who want to continue the systems of exploitation.?

‒ Malcolm X, from an interview in the final weeks of his life, 1965.

The triumph of the Bolivian people against the coup leaders and the right wing in the October 18 elections, the strength of the results, and the possibility of deepening a process of change marked by the decolonization of the Plurinational State today constitute a tremendous inspiration for the peoples of the whole continent.[NBN]