International Viewpoint

We are not meat for slaughter! This is the hashtag the workers of many workplaces from the north to the south of Italy have used in response to the restrictive measures adopted by the Conte government to stop the spread of the Covid19 epidemic – which has already infected 13,000 people.

The emergency that we have experienced in recent weeks in Italy has a health, economic and social nature in a broad sense, which could soon turn into a real crisis, with security implications. As we write (data updated on the afternoon of 11 March 2020) in Italy there are 12,462 infected, with 827 deaths. Unfortunately, these numbers are constantly increasing, seeming to follow an exponential trend. But to understand where we are today and where we could be in a few hours, days or weeks, it is necessary to take a step back to define the characteristics of the particular political-social phase that we are going through.

The development of the Covid-19 epidemic has been strongest in Italy, the first country to be put completely into severe quarantine. Anti-capitalists are beginning to develop demands and actions. For a broad range of articles on the topic consult ESSF (Europe Solidaires Sans Frontières) under the keyword coronavirus.

“The Covid-19 is yet another warning: capitalism, which leads humanity to barbarism, must be ended.”

The events taking place on the Greek-Turkish borders are very worrying. Following the closure of the borders decreed by Greek Prime Minister Mitsotakis, applauded by the European Union, those who try to cross into Greece are violently driven back (with at least one death, possibly following a Greek shooting, and a child drowning under the eyes of the Coast Guard).

The Coronavirus Covid-19 pandemic is showing up the inadequacy of capitalist governments in dealing with such a crisis, and pointing to the responsibility of their policies regarding a public health service. It also raises broader ecological questions. These all merit broad discussion on the radical anticapitalist left, This statement from Anticapitalistas in the Spanish state indicates the guidlelines tio an initiaal response. For a broad range of articles on the topic consult ESSF (Europe Solidaires Sans Frontières) under the keyword coronavirus.

Joe Biden turned out to be the big winner on Super Tuesday. While not all of the votes have been counted, Biden seems likely to end up with a majority. He is now positioned to do well in the rest of the primaries and is likely to come into the Democratic Party Convention with majority of delegates. The major media, as to be expected, are hailing him as the Democratic Party savior.

The communal violence that erupted in the National Capital Region of Delhi on February 24th,and carried on for about a week, marks another orchestrated step in the Sangh's strategy of deliberately polarising the Indian public along Hindu-Muslim lines. In the past such politically motivated communal assaults have been large-scale and episodic. After 2014, such targeting of Muslims by the cadres and supporters aligned to Hindutva has taken the form of attacks, sometimes fatal, on individuals or very small groups, especially in the BJP-ruled states where the perpetrators mostly get away with what they have done. This kind of ‘low-intensity violence' makes such attacks a ‘routinised', ‘normalised' and ‘banal' affair. It displaces any blame on to the failings of the local ‘law-and-order machinery' thereby disguising the machinations of Hindutva's hate-filled project of terrorising, inferiorising and ghettoising Muslims while deliberately spreading fears among local Hindu communities of possible Muslim retaliation.

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.

Borders are killing, open the borders!

For a free world without borders, exploitation, and exile.

Terry Conway is a social feminist and LGBTIQ activist. She is LGBT officer in Islington North Labour Party, Chair of Hackney and Islington Unite Community and officer of Labour Women Leading and a supporter of Socialist Resistance. This is an edited and expanded version of a contribution she made at a meeting at Houseman's bookshop on March 4.

Materialist and Marxist feminist theory is currently undergoing something of a renaissance. Wide-ranging conceptual and empirical work on social reproduction is a major part of that theoretical innovation. So, too, are the recent international women's strikes highlighting key issues such as gender violence and attacks on reproductive autonomy, as well as the range of unpaid social reproductive labor often performed by those gendered as women.

Lebanon 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.

The 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.

Women in Mexico have been various activities around March 8, International Women's Day for several decades; and some years ago, the tradition of holding marches in various parts of the country on this occasion was revived. 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 (...)

JAPAN'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.

Livio Maitan, Memoirs of a critical communist. Towards a History of the Fourth International, Preface by Daniel Bensaid, translated by Gregor Benton, edited with and introduction by Penelope Duggan, Resistance Books, IIRE, Merlin Press, 2019, 455 pages

It 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]

Democratic socialists need an internationalist anti-imperialism that builds solidarity from below with progressive currents in Hong Kong and mainland China.

In her book titled The Accumulation of Capital, [1] published in 1913, Rosa Luxemburg [2] devoted an entire chapter to international loans [3] in order to show how the great capitalist powers of the time used the credits granted by their bankers to the countries of the periphery to exercise economic, military and political domination on the latter. She sought to analyse the indebtedness of the newly independent states of Latin America, particularly, following the wars of independence in the 1820s, as well as the indebtedness of Egypt and Turkey during the 19th century, without forgetting China.