International Viewpoint

Thousands of protesters came out in Scotland, in Glasgow and Edinburgh, on Sunday, to take the knee in solidarity with the Black Lives Matters protests in the United States, and to express their opposition to institutional racism here in Britain too.

In several cities across Portugal, thousands of voices came together on Saturday to remember all of the George Floyds who have been victims of racism. The member of parliament, Beatriz Dias, also made her presence felt, calling for "public policies to combat racism and racial discrimination".

There have been Black Lives Matter demonstrations – in solidarity with the movement in the USA and also denouncing institutional racism at home – in cities throughout England, Scotland, Wales and Ireland North and South. This report is on the one in London on 3 June.

Fifty thousand people took to the streets in Paris on Tuesday 2 June, only two days after 10,000 undocumented migrants had protested against the immigration system.

The Living Flame – the revolutionary passion of Rosa Luxemburg by Paul Le Blanc, Haymarket 2019.

A march came by my house in Brooklyn a few nights ago, a river of thousands of young people of all races, wearing masks because of the pandemic, walking together, shouting out the name of George Floyd, demanding justice. I saw history making its way through the city, the young people carrying the future on their shoulders. So it has been everywhere in America for more than a week. And still the protests continue and grow in size. Cracks are appearing at the top of the society and attitudes are shifting at the bottom, and forces are in motion seeking to find a political expression for this inchoate demand for change.

The following statement by a large coalition of Latin American and Caribbean educators was first published at Otras Voces en Educación, an independent site dedicated to developing critical theory for educational change. Translated by No Borders News.

Ukraine received its independence 29 years ago. The cause of political independence has always been close to the struggle for the social liberation of Ukrainians, particularly the country's rebellious workers and peasants. The right of nations to self-determination was originally the slogan of the socialists Ivan Franko and Lesia Ukrainka.

Kevin Keating was born in Baile Átha Cliath (Dublin) Ireland on 29 January 1949 and died there on 8 May 2020. He joined People's Democracy (Irish section of the Fourth International) in 1980, and remained a Fourth Internationalist until his death as a member of Socialist Democracy.

The protests against police violence that have been sparked by the police lynching of George Floyd have now entered their second week and have involved hundreds of thousands of mostly youthful, often multiracial protestors in large and small cities throughout the country.

While restaurants, bars and pizzerias reopen, and the Confindustria employers' organization and the leaders of the FCA (formerly Fiat) claim, even more cynically than usual and despite the harshness of the times, the right to reap profits counted in billions and tax gifts, a new wind - even if it is a light one - seems to be blowing among the workers.

In recent days, a discourse favourable to the opening of schools has been building from the left. The slogan, formulated imperatively, is ambiguous. So much so that at the same time that although it is an immediate demand, what is proposed to achieve it is very long-lasting. From Roger Palà to Ada Colau, through Jordi Muñoz, a series of ideas have been launched in this direction. Let's go through them bit by bit and see the possibilities and weaknesses of the proposal. It should be said in advance that despite the responsive tone of this text, the intention is to put on the table all those elements that have not been considered in terms of reopening schools. Basically, maintaining and enriching the dialogue started.

The streets are the main site for resistance against Bolsonaro. We must reclaim them.

It is of course too early to say that Saturday 30 May will have been a turning point. But the ingredients are there. In the morning, thousands marched through the streets of Maubeuge in the North against the announcement of job cuts at Renault and the threat to close their factory. And in the afternoon in Paris, thousands of undocumented migrants imposed their right to demonstrate for their regularization.

The video recording of the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis on May 25, a black man strangled to death by a white police officer who kneeled on his throat for nine minutes until he was dead, sparked anger and outrage and has led to a full-scale national rebellion against police racism and violence as protests spread across the United States. What often began as peaceful demonstrations became violent clashes between demonstrators and police in at least 75 cities where buildings and police cars burned, stores were looted, many people were injured, and at least four were killed. The protests are reminiscent of the ghetto rebellions of the 1960s and 1970s and a more militant version of the Black Lives Matter movement of 2014.

“In Belgium too, the police have killed many times. The most significant recent cases are those of Mawda , Mehdi and Adil. Here too, the justice system tried to minimize the facts, or worse, to place responsibility on the victims. Here also legitimate anger was expressed through riots (which were strongly criticized in the media and by political leaders). Here too, justice regularly clears violent police officers. Here too the situation is getting worse and social insecurity is worsening.”

On Monday June 1, a large crowd rallied in the Dutch capital to express solidarity with the protests in the US and take a stand against racism in the Netherlands. The size of the crowd surprised many. With only a few days of mobilizing, the rally drew over 5000 people to a protest that felt very different from many previous ones.

The pre-electoral bluster of Greek prime minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis last year, that with him there would be no more “immigrant problem”, was certainly intended to attract the Nazi electorate and also reflected the alignment of the right with the far right current, very present now in power. But in reality, there has been a headlong rush for a year that has made the Greek government an emulator of the Orbán and Salvini, and it is imperative that the terrible fate inflicted on refugees in Greece be subjected to broad international denunciation .

As of May 28, Brazil reported 411,821 confirmed coronavirus infections, and 25,598 Covid-19 deaths, figures which are believed to undercount deaths by at least 50 percent. Meanwhile, the political crisis is escalating by the day as President Trump has banned all travel from Brazil to the United States and the Brazilian Supreme Court released a video of far-right President Jair Bolsonaro's cabinet meeting in which he threatens his opponents repeatedly in an obscenity-ridden tirade. As Bolsonaro attempts to sure up his right flank, Brazil's left-wing parties and social movements have united to file an impeachment petition in the national congress. [NBN]

Since its inception, the U.S.-Mexico border has assumed a life outside of itself, taking shape in an assemblage of fictions that inhabit the gringo imaginary. Contemporary references to “the border” evoke a wide spectrum of fantasies. On one end, there are the standard apocalyptic visions; the masculine tales of Western violence, the invading Central American child armies, desert streets running red with the blood of endless cartel wars. Other times, we encounter the more palatable, Beto O'Rourke-type tropes, invoking hard-working, bilingual communities, “Hispanic heritage,” and a smiling cast of multicultural characters who eat elote together in the sun, and generally feel very safe. Both visions have an entangled genealogy of course, as the sprawl of settler-colonialism and monopoly capital has always rested upon a contradictory set of rationales, juggling the racial subjugation of an unruly borderlands with a promising vision of progressive, and even inclusive, colonial governance. Yet, in their divergent efforts to conjure the U.S.-Mexico border into a comprehensible periphery, standard narratives miss the place of border communities in producing the world we live in.