After more than two months of strikes and demonstrations against the pension counter-reform, the National Assembly began debating the two government bills on 15 February. In an act of parliamentary guerrilla warfare, France Insoumise and the PCF had tabled 36,000 amendments to 81 articles of the first law (ordinary law) and a debate which was scheduled to end by 9 March at the latest. On Saturday 29 February, the Prime Minister, Edouard Philippe, according to a predictable scenario, used the shock parliamentary weapon for a government of the Fifth Republic: recourse to Article 49.3 of the Constitution.
Movement against neoliberalism and confessionalism grows
9 March 2020, byLebanon is currently seeing mobilizations at a level not seen for decades, starting from 17 October 2019 following the government’s announcement of new taxes, notably on the WhatsApp instant messaging application and against a backdrop of an ever deeper economic crisis. The popular protest quickly spread to all the cities of the country, causing the resignation of Prime Minister Saad Hariri on 29 October 2019. The demonstrators oppose the government’s neoliberal economic policies, austerity measures and corruption, but are also challenging the entire Lebanese confessional system. All the confessional political parties which compose it and dominate political life are targeted.
Feminists, internationalists, anticapitalists
8 March 2020, byThe new rise of the women’s movement in recent years has been propelled largely by the issue of violence. Since the first manifesto of Ni Una Menos in Argentina in 2015, the challenge has been to violence against women in its economic, social, state, domestic and gender forms. In 2016 Polish women mobilized on the issue of abortion, and the first feminist women’s strikes took place.
International Women’s Day in Mexico
8 March 2020, byWomen in Mexico have been carrying out activities around March 8, International Women’s Day, for several decades; and some years ago, we revived the tradition of holding marches in various parts of the country on this day. With the new worldwide rise of the feminist women’s movement, a response to the worsening conditions of oppression and exploitation resulting from patriarchal, neoliberal capitalism, and in Mexico in particular, also to the growing violence against women simply because they are women, this year united activities are being planned in many cities around the country.
#MeToo in Japan
8 March 2020, byJAPAN’S #ME-TOO MOVEMENT was sparked by a television reporter who said she was sexually harassed by the country’s highest-ranking finance ministry official.
Separating the man from the work?
7 March 2020, byIt is being called “France’s #MeToo moment”. A walkout at the French Césars as Roman Polanski is awarded best director for the film J’accuse (An Officer And A Spy). Criminal charges brought against writer Gabriel Matzneff.
All this has reopened the ongoing debate “can you separate the man from the artist, the artist from his work?”. [IVP]
Neither Washington Nor Beijing: Socialists, Inter-Imperial Rivalry, and Hong Kong
6 March 2020, by ,Democratic socialists need an internationalist anti-imperialism that builds solidarity from below with progressive currents in Hong Kong and mainland China.
Coronavirus is not responsible for the fall of stock prices
5 March 2020, byWe are witnessing a big crisis in the stock markets of the Wall Street, Europe, Japan and Shanghai, and many blame the coronavirus for it. In the last week of February 2020, the worst week since October 2008, the Dow Jones fell 12.4%, the S&P 500 fell 11.5% and the Nasdaq Composite fell 10.5%. The scenario is similar in Europe and Asia for the corresponding period. On the London Stock Exchange, the FTSE-100 fell by 11.32%, in Paris the CAC 40 fell by 12%, in Frankfurt the DAX lost 12.44%, on the Tokyo Stock Exchange the Nikkei fell by 9.6%, the Chinese stock exchanges (Shanghai, Shenzhen and Hong Kong) also fell. On Monday, March 2, following (promises of) massive interventions by central banks to support the stock markets, most of the indices went up again except in London.
We Need to Learn Lessons From Labour’s “Antisemitism Crisis”
4 March 2020, byThe British Labour Party botched its response to false allegations of rampant antisemitism among the party membership. Left-wing movements in other countries can’t make the same mistake.
Canada Lays Bare the Lie it Calls “Reconciliation”
3 March 2020, byThe Canadian state today is in the throes of a historic crisis of its own making, as it stands off against the Wet’suwet’en Nation, an Indigenous nation in northern British Columbia (BC) that is blocking construction of the Coastal GasLink (CGL) pipeline through their land (called the Yintah). The CGL pipeline would bring fracked gas from northwestern British Columbia to a planned LNG Canada liquid natural gas terminal on the BC coast at Kitimat that is to be built by an international fossil fuel consortium. Condensate, a byproduct of the fracking, will also be used as diluent needed to send tar sands oil through another planned pipeline, the TransMountain Expansion pipeline.