The protests in Belarus have widely been painted as a pro-Western “color revolution” or “Minsk Maidan,” ignoring the deeper reasons for popular discontent with president Alexander Lukashenko. Volodymyr Artiukh for Jacobin spoke to left-wingers in Belarus about the forces behind the protests and the prospects of organized labor asserting its own agenda.
Triple Crises and the Parliamentary Election in Sri Lanka 2020
20 August 2020, byThis statement was unanimously adopted by the steering committee of the Left Voice at its meeting held on August 16.
“Don’t ask me to be calm because I’m tired of your requests. How long will you keep saying I’m the same as those who want to kill me?”
19 August 2020, by“How long will they accuse me of being responsible for the racism I’m a victim of? How long will they keep saying I’m the same as those who rape me and want to kill me? How long will they keep asking me to wait while they kill or threaten to kill a part of me? Until when? (...) The only decency I expect from those who insist on denying or relativizing racism is that they have the intelligence and courage to kill racism before it kills us.”
How Can Current Struggles in Lebanon & Iran Come Together in a Revolutionary Socialist Direction?
18 August 2020, byWe need to explicitly state that without a fundamental transformation in labor conditions, without ending the dehumanization of women, without ending the Kafala system in its variety of forms, without ending anti-Black racism, without ending discrimination against Kurds and other oppressed minorities including sexual minorities, and without preserving and detoxifying our environment, we will not move forward.
‘It is time for rage’
17 August 2020, byComrades, we are trapped.
We are trapped between the barbarism of capital accumulation and the subsequent nonchalant greed it enables.
Partisans or Workers? Figures of Belarusian Protest and Their Prospects
16 August 2020, byThese week’s protests in Belarus have clearly overcome their initial electoral focus and morphed into an expanding dissident movement of urban middle class and workers. In a recent (August 4) article for Open Democracy platform on the presidential campaign in Belarus, I tried to explain why the opposition candidates from the ruling elite and the “creative class” attracted a record number of supporters, which led to mass demonstrations unseen in this country for decades. I argued that these were the culmination of a protest sentiment simmering in Belarusian society since the economic crisis of 2009, that found expression in 2017 in the form of grassroots populist protests challenging Lukashenka’s degrading populist rhetoric. Before the most recent elections, his main opponent, Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya, began to articulate an anti-authoritarian populist discourse that appealed to a cross-classalliance of entrepreneurs, young professionals, and workers. In this article I reflect on the questions I asked two weeks ago, about the role of the leadership and the masses in the current protests, the forms of their organization and the reaction of the Belarusian state. My reflections are based on a six-day marathon of digesting shreds of information coming through the fog of censorship, Internet disruptions and propaganda, as well as from communications with my comrades in Belarus. I am also building on my fieldwork experience among Belarusian workers and trade union activists in 2015-2017, which I conducted as a social anthropologist.
The Fight of LGBTQ Activists in Poland against Post-Election Repressions
15 August 2020, byOnly one day after the Polish National Electoral Commission announced the incumbent president Andrzej Duda as the winner of the close runoff elections, a queer activist was arrested in Warsaw. According to witnesses, Margot’s arrest looked more like a kidnapping because ununiformed police officers handcuffed her with the use of force and dragged her out of her friend’s flat. She is part of a queer collective “Stop Bzdurom” (Stop the Bullshit) that uses direct action to counter the persistent disinformation campaign targeting the LGBTQ community, sexual education, and reproductive justice.
The International Aid the Lebanese People Urgently Need Must Not Be Used to Enforce Neoliberal Measures
14 August 2020, byAs activists in the international CADTM network we were deeply moved when hearing of the disastrous explosions that hit Beirut on Tuesday 4 August. In this press release we want to convey our solidarity to the Lebanese people who, for too many years, have had to suffer an unfair concatenation of murderous crises. We think that it is also important to expose political responsibilities and those who attempt to profit from the situation; it is even more important to try to find how the country can escape this vicious cycle.
The New Right Wing Triangle in the Trump-Orbán-Netanyahu Era
13 August 2020, byOn 8 July, 2020 a videoconference was broadcast by Viktor Orbán, Janez Janša and Aleksandar Vu?i?, respectively the heads of government of Hungary, Slovenia and Serbia. The moderator, François-Xavier Bellamy, was the leader in the European Parliament (EP) of the French right-wing party Les Républicains (LR), which. like the parties of the Hungarian and Slovenian leaders, is a member of the European People’s Party (EPP) . They defended a Europe “without censorship” which protects itself from “foreigners” (and LGBT people).