By Svenja Spunck ABOUT 5000 right-wingers rampaged through Chemnitz on Monday, August 27. The march was organised by Nazis and extreme nationalist groups and, coming just a day after a riot by a mob of more than 800 violent neo-Nazis, is a shocking warning signal. They marched through Chemnitz city centre without any challenge from […]

By Marcus Otono NASHVILLE, TN – In April of this year, inmates at the Lee Correctional Center in South Carolina took strike action in protest at the brutal conditions in the prison. As if to prove their point, seven men died as a result of the authorities’ actions to break the strike. In response, prisoners […]

By Dave Stockton THE LANDSLIDE victory on 1 July of Andrés Manuel López Obrador, known as AMLO for short, with over 24 million votes and 53 percent of the vote, was a humiliation for the traditional parties of the corrupt and repressive Mexican elite. Particularly well-deserved was the fate of the Institutional Revolutionary Party, the […]

By Svenja Spunck THE HEADLINE results of Turkey’s presidential and parliamentary elections are that Recep Tayyip Erdogan has won the presidential election and the alliance of his “Party for Justice and Development”, AKP, and the Party of the Nationalist Movement, MHP, has secured a majority in parliament. The People’s Democratic Party, HDP, has again secured […]

By Dave Stockton Donald Trump claimed victory over his European allies at the Nato heads of government conference in Brussels on July 11-12. Though he avoided reducing it to the total shambles of the June G7 Summit in Canada, he once again showed his scorn for the multilateral diplomacy that hitherto disguised US dominance over […]

By Hassan Raza, Revolutionary Socialist Movement Pakistan The Pashtun Protection Movement, PTM, is already changing the political landscape in Pakistan. It has rallied hundreds of thousands against military and police repression, the “disappearance” of 30,000 or more and against war and the denial of democratic rights. In the last two months it has been met […]

By Pericles da Lima, Liga Socialista IN THE last days of May almost nothing moved in Brazil. Crucial economic links such as motorway junctions, ports, airports and refineries were paralysed by some 500 blockades, each with around 150 trucks. South America’s largest port, Santos, near Sao Paolo, was closed, as were several major airports. Schools […]

By Dave Stockton THE YEAR 1968 was one of history’s “mad years” like 1848, 1917-18, 1989 and, most recently, 2011. It was a time when the eruption of revolts in one country quickly stimulated upheavals in others. The spread of international revolutionary upheavals seemed to offer the prospect of a dramatic thawing of the permafrost […]

By Katie Pelikanou THE SYRIAN regime is undertaking a thinly-veiled legal manoeuvre to punish the millions of refugees who have fled the civil war, and entrench the postwar sectarian redivision of Syria by repossessing their homes. The government of dictator Bashar Al-Assad enacted this law whilst the remnants of the Syrian army, along with Iranian […]

By Dave Stockton AFTER NEARLY three months of negotiations, a coalition government has been formed in Italy between the Five Star Movement (M5S) and the League (formerly Lega Nord). Coverage of the government’s difficult birth focussed on the Italian President’s decision to veto the coalition’s choice of a eurosceptic Finance Minister, but the real headline […]

By Dave Stockton PEDRO SANCHEZ, leader of the Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party (PSOE), is now in the Moncloa Palace as prime minister of Spain. Every progressive person in the Spanish state will be glad to see the back of the Popular Party’s autocratic leader Mariano Rajoy. The critical moment came when the Basque Nationalist Party […]

Red Flag Statement ISRAEL HAS celebrated the opening of Donald Trump’s Embassy in Jerusalem with a bloodbath, by massacring at least 60 Palestinian demonstrators, including eight children, and wounding more than 2,270. This brings the total number killed by the IDF since the protests began to over one hundred. Thousands have been injured, with Al […]

By Marcus Halaby “Why would Bashar al-Assad have gassed his own people when he was already winning the war?” This question is frequently asked by many in the West of a generally anti-war disposition, who see in it a repetition of the arguments made around Saddam Hussein’s alleged (and disproven) possession of weapons of mass […]

By Peter Main THE NEWS that the US Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo, has returned from his talks with Kim Jong-un with three US citizens released from prison in North Korea appears, at first sight, to validate the “tough guy” approach to diplomacy of his boss, Donald Trump. This interpretation had already been strengthened by […]

By KD Tait OVER THE past four weeks, at least 37 Palestinians have been killed, and more than 4,000 wounded, by Israeli troops firing indiscriminately into demonstrations organised as part of the Great Return March. As usual, the US and British representatives on the United Nations Security Council have blocked any condemnation of the Israeli […]

By Jeremy Dewar, Lambeth Unison delegate (pc) and Marcus Otono, Workers Power USA. THREE THOUSAND trade unionists assembled in Chicago for Labor Notes’ biennial conference on 8-11 April. Many there claimed it was the biggest Labor Notes conference ever. But numbers alone cannot convey the energy, the diversity, the militancy on display. Workers’ struggles At […]

By Marc Lassalle PARIS – After a month of militant but inconclusive strikes and occupations by railway workers and students, activists are organising to relaunch the mobilisation against the government attacks, with a national day of action in the first week of May. At the beginning of April workers on the state rail network, the […]

By Bernie McAdam THIS YEAR marks the twentieth anniversary of the signing of the Good Friday Agreement (GFA). The ‘peace process’ that this initiated between the British state and Sinn Fein/ Irish Republican Army (IRA), with ceasefire followed by decommissioning of IRA arms and recognition of the police, was crowned with a power sharing government […]

By Markus Lehner “Trade wars are good” – Donald Trump Though Donald Trump’s tweets often seem mere clowning, the decrees he signed imposing import duties on steel and aluminium, and subsequent threats of further punitive duties on Chinese imports, do have to be taken seriously. The US president has used a loophole that allows him […]

By Dave Stockton THIS YEAR’S celebrations of the anniversary of the foundation of the State of Israel were bigger than ever. They were held on 18 April, corresponding to a date in the Hebrew calendar that in the Gregorian calendar corresponds to 15 May. And this latter date is when Palestinians commemorate the 1948 Nakba […]

ON SATURDAY 21 April, a number of democratic and socialist activists were arrested by the Punjabi Police in Lahore, amongst them Ali Wazir, Bilawal Mandokhel, Muzammil and Ismat Shahjahan, all of them leaders of the Pashtun Protection Movement (Pashtun Tahafuz Movement, PTM), and the Awami Workers’ Party Chairman, Fanoos Gujjar. These arrests are designed to […]