IV551 - December 2020

“Whether the crisis is climate related or not, racial capitalism establishes both who is vulnerable and who will be exploited. A politics of solidarity is the best answer.”

Forty years after his murder in New York City, we remember John Lennon’s record of political engagement as a champion of the anti-war movement and a self-styled “instinctive socialist” — which brought him into conflict with Richard Nixon and J. Edgar Hoover.[Jacobin]

“Workers in China and India deal with very similar exploitative practices across a broad spectrum of industries.”

On 19 December, scientists launched an international appeal for the containment of the Covd-19 pandemic throughout Europe. Trade unions, liberation movements and socialist organisations should unreservedly support this call and enrich it with a socio-ecological programme of demands. On this basis and inspired by the campaign #ZeroCovid recently launched in England, Wales, and Scotland they should launch mass campaigns throughout Europe.
The authors of the appeal note that European (…)

In December 2020, on the occasion of the fifth anniversary of the signature of the Paris Agreement on Climate, the UN General Secretary sounded the alarm because the situation has fundamentally worsened. In this article we analyse what the World Bank and the IMF have done in connection with the environmental crisis and climate change.

In October 2020, starting on the sixtieth anniversary of its independence (1 October 1960), Nigeria experienced almost two weeks of mobilization of the movement against police violence, #EndSARS, made up mostly of young people. While in Angola, after a demonstration against corruption in October, on the very day of the 45th anniversary of independence (11 November 2020), young people took to the streets, demonstrating once again their anger over their social relegation. These mobilizations (…)

THE CALAMITOUS MALFEASANCE of the outgoing Trump regime’s response to the coronavirus pandemic threatens to obscure deeper realities of this global as well as U.S. crisis. The incoming Biden-Harris team faces a deeper and more menacing emergence of both public health and the economy than the 2008-09 financial meltdown that confronted president Obama’s first year.

Scores of thousands of young people took over dozens of cities and towns in Nigeria for two weeks. This rebellion, with the slogan and hashtag #EndSARS, was sparked by the reported killing of a young man by the special anti-robbery squad (SARS), in Ughelli, a town in the Niger delta region on 3 October.
With each passing day, the supposedly “leaderless” movement waxed stronger. And while #EndSARS remained the primary and binding demand, calls for more radical measures to #EndInjustice (…)

For weeks a major conflict has been going on, which the press is not talking about, or perhaps it is too far away, over there... in Kanaky.

Do you remember last spring? The "first wave", flags, songs on balconies, "everything will be fine"? Someone even thought - and said - that something good should come out of this story, that nothing could ever be the same again. A kind of promise of change was in the air. Rubbish!