International Viewpoint

On the 21st of February, Berfo Ana, the mother of Cemil Kirbayir, who “disappeared” while in custody during the 1980 military coup died at the age of 105 in Istanbul. She was one of the “Saturday Mothers' who have been gathering in Galatasaray Square in Istanbul on Saturdays since 1995, for 17 years, to claim their sons and daughters who were declared to have disappeared during custody. Hers was a 33-year-long struggle to find the remains of her son. Despite the 2011 reports of the parliamentary commission, which recorded Cemil Kirbayir's death under torture, no measures were taken to bring the culprits to court. Her last will was not to be buried before the remains of her son were found, a wish that could not be realized.

The idea that socialists should be feminists too is uncontroversial to many revolutionary socialists. But why socialism needs feminism is still worth spelling out.

On 11 January 2013, French president François Hollande announced the intervention of his country's army in the war in Mali, which had until then opposed the Malian army to the Tuareg independence movement, the Mouvement national de libération de l'Azawad (MNLA – National Movement for the Liberation of Azawad), and the various jihadist groups apparently committed to the establishment of a West African caliphate: the Malian Tuaregs of Ansar Dine, the internationals of the Mouvement pour l'unicité et le jihad en Afrique de l'Ouest (MUJAO – Movement for Oneness and Jihad in West Africa) and the “narco-Salafists” of Al-Qaeda au Maghreb islamique (AQMI - Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb). France's entry into a war in one of its former colonies was presented as a response to an appeal for help from the head of the interim government in Mali, President Dioncounda Traoré. The latter owes his position to an agreement between the army, led by Captain Sanogo, which overthrew the legal government of Amadou Toumani Touré in March 2012 (a month before the presidential elections which the latter was not going to contest), and a part of the Malian “political class” under the patronage of the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS). Dioncounda Traoré felt threatened by the movement of the jihadists towards the Malian capital, Bamako.

In Latin America strategies are still being advanced focused on mining, hydrocarbons and monoculture, despite the fact that this means repeating the role of suppliers of raw materials and of civic resistance.

This comment was published on the Sinistra Critica website on 25 February as the results were still coming in. However, underlying trends in the results seemed clear.

Information about corrupt politicians is invading daily life in the Spanish state. This comes on top of the devastating effects of neo-liberal policies; rising levels of unemployment and debt, downward pressure on wages, the emigration of young people...

An accessible introduction to the relationship between the workers' movement and the women's movement. The first part is historical, the second theoretical. Historical examples range from the mid-19th century to the 1970s and include events, debates and key personalities from China, Russia, the USA, France, Italy, Spain and Britain.

“As the Economist put it at year-end 2006, ‘having grown at an annual rate of 3.2% per head since 2000, the world economy is over halfway towards notching up its best decade ever. If it keeps going at this clip, it will beat both the supposedly idyllic 1950s and the 1960s. Market capitalism, the engine that runs most of the world economy, seems to be doing its job well.'”

Gilbert Achcar is professor at the School of Oriental and African Studies of the University of London. His most recent book was The Arabs and the Holocaust. The Arab-Israeli War of Narratives (New York: Metropolitan, 2010). His next book, The People Want: A Radical Exploration of the Arab Uprising, is scheduled for publication in June 2013 (Los Angeles: University of California Press). He was interviewed by David Finkel from the Against the Current editorial board.

Responding to direct racist threats from the nazi party Golden Dawn against one of the founding members of CADTM Greece Moisis Litsis, the international CADTM network wishes to highlight how serious a danger the rise of fascism is, a development that is the direct consequence of the deterioration of social conditions imposed by creditors claiming that paying public debts is more important than fundamental human rights.

A night of chaos on Wednesday 6th February in the Irish Dail was justified by unsupported claims of a press leak. It was however strongly reminiscent of the scenes in 2008 when the previous government mortgaged Ireland to bail out the banks and concluded with the Fine Gael and Labour coalition voting through a draconian piece of legislation. The legislation liquidated the Irish Bank Resolution Corporation (IBRC), holding the promissory note guaranteeing the debts of Anglo-Irish bank an Irish Nationwide. The vote was taken after TDs were given 10 minutes to read the 68 page document.

In At the Dark End of the Street, Wayne State University historian Danielle McGuire persuasively and powerfully argues that the history of Black women's anti-rape activism must be understood as an integral part of the Civil Rights Movement, but that standard accounts of civil rights have neglected the significance of these women's efforts.

Since January 1, 2013 in Tallinn, capital of Estonia, a city of 419,830 inhabitants, residents can take the bus, trolleybus or tram for free. Non-residents must still pay for public transport; they just have to obtain, for the price of 2 euros, a special green card, which tourists must recharge when paying, or else buy a ticket from the driver.

In 1988, Rosa Parks attended a film screening of the first segment of the documentary “Eyes on the Prize” in Detroit. Afterward she spoke about her involvement in the civil rights struggle, and I was lucky enough to be in the audience. She was a small woman with a quiet but steel-sharp voice that made an ever lasting impression on her audience.

We reproduce here the statement by the Popular Front* adopted after the mobilization that followed the assassination on February 6 of Chokri Belaïd, leader of the Party of United Democratic Patriots and a leader of the Popular Front. Chokri Belaïd was one of the lawyers who had defended the accused in the Gafsa mining basin under the dictatorship of Ben Ali.

Slovenia, a country of two million inhabitants which was once the jewel in the crown of Yugoslavia's industrial economy, and the first Republic to separate from Yugoslavia and become a member of the European Union and the Euro zone, is experiencing a serious social and political crisis which could have significant repercussions for the future of other countries where capitalism has been restored.

The programme of austerity imposed on Portugal in response to the crisis has been one of the most humanly devastating in Europe. And nowhere in Europe has popular resistance been more massive or determined. Yet so far the parties of austerity continue to dominate Portuguese politics. The governing parties of the right (the confusingly named Social Democratic Party and People's Party) face only sham opposition from the Socialist Party, which itself imposed the first harsh cuts until the elections of June 2011 sent it into opposition. The Left Bloc (Bloco da Esquerda) is working to create a real left-wing alternative that can win a popular majority and throw the Troika's ultimatums into the rubbish bin. Grenzeloos (magazine of the Dutch section of the Fourth International) talked in Lisbon to Jorge Costa of the Left Bloc's top leadership body about the challenges the Bloc faces.

Against the Current interviewed Rodrigo Santaella, a member of the revolutionary socialist organization Enlace and an activist in the Brazilian Socialism and Freedom Party (PSOL). We met him at the Fourth International's Ecosocialism School in Amsterdam in December 2012 . This annual, three-week school serves as an intensive Marxist political education for FI members and allies. Readings and audio of presentations from the school can be found here. PSOL emerged out of the Brazilian Workers Party (PT) in 2004. The PT was originally a radical left party which the FI section in Brazil was instrumental in building. With the election of Lula da Silva in 2002, however, the party took a decisive turn to the right and began implementing a neoliberal program. A section of the party's left-wing exited the PT and eventually founded PSOL, in an effort to create an anti-capitalist alternative to the PT. Rodrigo discusses this process and the state of PSOL and the Brazilian left today. For a more detailed discussion of the PT's political trajectory, see João Machado's article "The Experience of Building the DS and PT, from 1979 to the first Lula government."

While the two jaws of the Malian trap - the warmongering Western intervention backed by the countries of West Africa, and the reactionary Islamism in the North - have not yet closed, an independent voice, the voice of Malian women, is trying to make heard its refusal of this war by proxy. We publish below their appeal, which is dated November 20, 2012.

The 2012 Quebec student strikes delivered one of the few victories we have seen in anti-austerity struggles in the Canadian state. The mobilization, which at its high point saw over 300,000 students on limited or unlimited strike, and demonstrations of hundreds of thousands, was a crucial highpoint that has a great deal to teach radicals. The attempted clampdown by the Jean Charest government through Bill 78 [1] that attempted to outlaw the movement, unleashed a new and innovative round of resistance including the casseroles night marches.