International Viewpoint - online socialist magazine

ZAPATISTA ARMY OF NATIONAL LIBERATION. MEXICO.

February 2019.

To: women who fight all over the world. From: Zapatista women.

The rise and expansion of right-wing populism and the dramatic unfolding of global politics in the Trump era have had significant and alarming implications for the Palestinian people, leadership, and question overall.

The implosion of Podemos in the Community and the City of Madrid has been a surprise in terms of the time chosen, but for any minimally informed observer it was implicit in the situation. Currently the most naive or malicious opponents are pretending to be shocked by the shameful crisis of the Madrid left, but if we do a quick review of some political events of recent years, we will see that not everything that happened is an “aberration” or a “disgrace”, but the logical and inevitable consequence of a whole trajectory. Neither is it a psychodrama in which two friends are fighting, or just a bureaucratic dispute that is emaciated by power, though obviously it is also that. It is the end of a cycle for the transformational politics of this country.

The Jasic case, in particular relationships that were forged between students and workers, reveals important developments in China’s politics. China’s 1989 democratic movement saw intellectuals and students excluding workers from the very beginning. After the failure of that democratic movement, intellectuals soon divided into liberals and the New Left, cleaved by the false dichotomy of “state versus market.” Intellectuals may have adopted New Left rhetoric about “fairness” but remained indifferent to workers’ situation. Students simply retreated to their study. It was not until the 2009 strikes by Guangzhou sanitation workers that workers began to receive some support from students, mostly as individuals. Small circles of leftist students had started debating and practicing ronggong, literally “mixing with workers,” that is, going to work in factories after graduation and trying to organize there. Key to this development has been the role of students who identify themselves as Maoists.

On October 21 nine members of the Philippine National Federation of Sugar Workers were shot dead while participating in a protest. The killers are assumed to be employed by local capitalists. Killings of union, peasant, and other activists have increased sharply under President Duterte. Dozens of activists have already been killed. Under Duterte’s authoritarian rule, the Philippine left is faced with new difficulties.

In 1941, at Hitler’s military apex, Bertolt Brecht wrote The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui, wherein he reduces Hitler the politician and his lackeys to a vulgar band of bandits from 1930’s Chicago.

The Left Bloc was formed about twenty years ago in Portugal, by the fusion of forces from the anti-capitalist left and the social movement. Today, together with the Communist Party, it is the main formation of the combative left in the country. Based on the Bloc’s experience, Francisco Louçã gives an overview of the still problematic relationship between parliamentary opposition work and investment in social movements and mobilizations.

Should ecosocialists reject a program that includes carbon pricing? Ian Angus and John Bellamy Foster reply to Daniel Tanuro’s criticism of their approach “The right’s green awakening”.

The COP21 negotiators at the Paris 2015 convention enjoyed a rare moment of success. Unlike in Copenhagen six years before, the climate summit produced an agreement — and an ambitious one at that. The attending governments committed to keeping the temperature rise “well below 2° C” and “continuing efforts” not to exceed 1.5° C of warming. No one had imagined such a breakthrough. [1]