IV476 - September 2014

This interview with Luciana Genro, presidential candidate of the PSOL, was first published in Correio da Cidadania, 30 August, 2014. It was conducted by Gabriel Brito and Valeria Nader.

Whenever he gets around to it, president Obama might or might not take “executive action” to slow down the machinery of destruction that has earned him the title of “Deporter-in-Chief.” Meanwhile, the new tide of desperate children and families fleeing Central America piles up at the U.S. border.

The likely candidacy of the president of the Chicago Teachers Union, which led one of the most important strikes in recent years in the USA, against the incumbent Democrat Rahm Emanuel, formerly the chief-of-staff of the White House and a champion of the privatization of the school system, is a major political event.

An activist of Izquierda Anticapitalista, Teresa Rodriguez was elected as a member of the European parliament (MEP) for Podemos in May 2014. This interview was given to Manu Bichindaritz of the NPA’s newspaper l’Anticapitaliste in late August 2014.

Danish socialists voting for a parliamentary decision to send a military plane to Iraq under US command is not usual. Even more unusual is the fact that I – considering myself a revolutionary Marxist – voted to support that decision. Nevertheless, that is what happened a few weeks ago.

It was as if an earthquake had hit the debate on Scotland. Shock polling last weekend put the yes campaign in front while others indicated that the two campaigns were neck and neck. This threw the Westminster establishment into a state of blind panic.

Imperialism creates crises that it cannot solve. That’s the ultimate takeaway from president Obama’s September 10 speech – and the entire series of cascading catastrophes from Syria and Iraq to Afghanistan and beyond. As the United States slip-slides into its next Middle East war, are there any reasons to expect this time will turn out differently?

This interview with Alister Black, editor of the Scottish independent Marxist review Frontline, member of the Scottish Socialist Party and activist in the Radical Independence Campaign (RIC), by Dick Nichols, European correspondent of Green Left Weekly and Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal, was published on 9 September 2014.

The military operations decided by Paris in Libya (from March 2011), Mali (in January 2013) and the Central African Republic (CAR) (in December 2013), to which must be added the decisive intervention of the Licorne force to oust Gbagbo in the Ivory Coast (April 2011), have contributed to reviving the debate on the current strategy of French imperialism in Africa. What in fact are the causes of this increased warlike activism?

We are publishing below the “Foreword” [1] to the Japanese edition of Au Loong Yu’s China’s Rise: Strengths and weaknesses [2]. This edition comes at a time when a violent territorial dispute opposes Beijing and Tokyo over the Diaoyu (Chinese name) or Senkaku (Japanese name) islands. The author addresses readers of the Japanese archipelago in particular, explaining why it is necessary today to unite against the claim of either government to assert its sovereignty over distant and depopulated islands, while he himself in his youth had “defended the Diaoyu” initially for nationalistic reasons and later on for internationalist ones. This foreword is an opportunity for an historical review of Chinese nationalisms and for a cutting critique of big-power chauvinism manifested today by the Chinese Communist Party against the smaller Southeast Asian countries, among others.