Tag: Links International

Videos: France: Jean-Luc Mélenchon's speech at the 2013 Fete L´Humanité

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11 October 2013 — Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal

Front de Gauche leader Jean-Luc Mélenchon addressed the fete of left newspaper L´Humanité in Paris on September 15, 2013. In this six-part video Mélenchon discusses French foreign policy in relation to Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya, the colossal failures of “Chicago School” [neoliberal] economics, the attacks of the European Union, the Front de Gauche’s program when elected, religion and politics, and the front’s opposition to militarism. Continue reading →

‘Rocking the Foundations’ — the story of Australia’s pioneering red-green trade union

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14 August 2013 — Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal

An outstanding historical account of the “Green Bans” first introduced by the communist-led New South Wales Builders Labourers Federation (BLF) in the 1970s in response to community demand to preserve inner-city parkland and historic buildings. One of the first women to be accepted as a builders labourer, filmmaker Pat Fiske in 1985 traced the development of a union whose social and political activities challenged the notion of what a union should be. Continue reading →

Paul Le Blanc: Revolutionary elements in London — Marxism 2013 and its context

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20 July, 2013 — Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal 

The Socialist Workers Party (SWP) is an important “far left” organisation in Britain which, among other things, organises an annual educational conference — Marxism — in London. The SWP is undergoing a crisis which is only one aspect of a much larger phenomenon, taking place on a global scale within the revolutionary left. This involves a recomposition of the revolutionary socialist movement as a political force, in tandem with the struggles of the multi-faceted working class struggling against the effects of the present world crisis of capitalism.

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Obama in South Africa: Washington tells Pretoria how to ‘play the game’ in Africa By Patrick Bond

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1 July, 2013 – Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal

US President Barack Barack Obama’s weekend trip to South Africa may have the desired effect of slowing the geopolitical realignment of Pretoria to the Brazil-India-Russia-China-South Africa (BRICS) axis. That shift to BRICS has not, however, meant deviation from the hosts’ political philosophy, best understood as “talk left, walk right” since it mixes anti-imperialist rhetoric with pro-corporate policies. Continue reading →

Obama in South Africa: Washington tells Pretoria how to ‘play the game’ in Africa By Patrick Bond

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1 July, 2013 – Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal

US President Barack Barack Obama’s weekend trip to South Africa may have the desired effect of slowing the geopolitical realignment of Pretoria to the Brazil-India-Russia-China-South Africa (BRICS) axis. That shift to BRICS has not, however, meant deviation from the hosts’ political philosophy, best understood as “talk left, walk right” since it mixes anti-imperialist rhetoric with pro-corporate policies. Continue reading →

Video: Turkey: Unionised workers call general strike as mass protests reach more than 67 cities

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5 June 2013 — Links International Journal of socialist Renewal

June 4, 2013 — Real News Network — Today the uprisings witnessed a new development, when Turkey’s Confederation of Public Workers Unions, KESK, consisting of 11 unions and approximately 240,000 members, declared their decision to stage a massive two-day strike. The action, which was originally planned for a later date in response to labor law modifications, was rescheduled to June 4 now, in response to the government’s excessive use of police brutality and its increasingly undemocratic practices. For the full transcript, click HERE. Continue reading →

South Africa’s ‘sub-imperial’ seductions By Patrick Bond

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9 May 2013 — Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal

Thanks are due to an odd man, the brutally frank Zambian vice-president Guy Scott who last week pronounced, “I dislike South Africa for the same reason that Latin Americans dislike the United States”. Thanks are also due to South Africa’s President Jacob Zuma for forcing a long-overdue debate, just as the World Economic Forum Africa summit opens in Cape Town: is Pretoria a destructive sub-imperialist power? Continue reading →

Video: Michael Lebowitz: 'Spectres and struggles': a new vision for socialism in the 21st century

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3 May, 2013 — Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal

This talk was presented in Zagreb, Croatia.

A spectre is haunting the working class of Europe (both east and west) and the working class of developed capitalism in general. That spectre is the spectre of communism. For the working class, that frightful hobgoblin is a society of little freedom, a society of workers without power (in the workplace or community) and a society where decisions are made at the top by a vanguard party which views itself as the sole repository of truth. Of course, this was not what communism meant for Karl Marx and Frederick Engels nor, indeed, for Lenin.

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Reducing production: How should socialists relate to struggles against capitalist growth By Don Fitz

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19 March, 2013 — Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal

The question is not should we advocate reducing production within capitalist society but rather: How do we best relate to those struggles that are already occurring? Activists across the globe are challenging the uncontrollable dynamic of economic expansion which threatens the survival of humanity. It has never been more urgent to provide a vision of a new society that can pull these efforts together.

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BRICS: ‘Anti-imperialist’ or ‘sub-imperialist’? By Patrick Bond

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20 March 2013 — Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal

“We reaffirm the character of the ANC as a disciplined force of the left, a multi-class mass movement and an internationalist movement with an anti-imperialist outlook” — so said Jacob Zuma, orating to his masses at the year’s largest African National Congress celebration, in Durban on January 12, 2013.[1]

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Day of the people: Gracchus Babeuf and the communist idea By Doug Enaa Greene

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20 February 2013 — Links International

“We Communists, united in the Third International, consider ourselves the direct continuators of the heroic endeavors and martyrdom of a long line of revolutionary generations from Babeuf – to Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg.”[1]

Gracchus babeuf1

February 20, 2013 — Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal — The above words were spoken by Leon Trotsky during the opening session of the Third International in Moscow in March 1919. While Trotsky was speaking, the young Soviet Republic was fighting desperately for its life against counter-revolutionary White Armies and foreign intervention. The Soviet Republic was also struggling to maintain itself in the midst of economic breakdown and famine.

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Michael Lebowitz: Socialism for the 21st century — re-inventing and renewing the struggle

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9 January 2013 — Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal

<img class=”alignleft” style=”margin-left: 10px; margin-right: 10px; border: 0px none;” alt=”Socialist alternative” src=”https://williambowles.info/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/socialist_alternative.jpg&#8221; width=”168″ height=”252″ border=”0″ hspace=”10″ />

[The following presentation was delivered to launch La Alternativa Socialista, the Chilean edition of The Socialist Alternative, in Concepcion, Santiago and Valparaiso, November 2012.]

By Michael A. Lebowitz

Every <strong class=’StrictlyAutoTagBold’>socialist in the 21st century should try to answer two questions.

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South Africa: Politics, profits and policing after the Marikana Massacre By Patrick Bond

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20 December 2012 — Links International journal of Socialist Renewal

Lover of fast cars, vintage wine, trout fishing and game farming and the second richest black businessperson in South Africa (global financial publication Forbes puts his wealth at $675 million or £416 million), Cyril Ramaphosa (left) celebrates his election as deputy president of the ANC with South Africa’s President Jacob Zuma. Ramaphosa demanded that police break the Marikana mineworkers’ strike; police massacred 34 mineworkers and wounded 78 others.

By Patrick Bond

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The commodification of crap and South Africa’s toilet apartheid By Patrick Bond

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5 December, 2012 – Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal

Durban — The December 3-6, 2012, World Toilet Summit offers an opportunity to contemplate how we curate our crap. Increasingly the calculus seems to be cash, generating contradictions ranging from local to global scales, across race, gender, generation and geography. Nowhere are they more evident than in the host city, my hometown of Durban. We’ve suffered an 18-year era of neoliberal-nationalist malgovernance including toilet apartheid, in the wake of more than 150 years of colonialism and straight racial-apartheid.

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Video: SYRIZA leader Alexis Tsipras on political and social situation facing Greece and Europe

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27 September 2012 — Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal

Alexis Tsipras, leader of Greece‘s left party SYRIZA, visited the European Parliament as a guest of the United Left Group/Nordic Green Left (GUE/NGL), the coalition of radical left parliamentarians in the European Parliament to which SYRIZA is affiliated. At a press conference, Tsipras discussed the current economic, political and social situation facing Greece and the European Union. Chaired by Gabi Zimmer, GUE/NGL president, from Germany‘s Die Linke party. Continue reading →

France: The Rise of the Left Front By Murray Smith

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21 August 2012 — The Bullet • Socialist Project E-Bulletin #685 – Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal

A New Force on the Left

The Left Front (Front de Gauche) emerged onto the political scene at the beginning of 2009. As the Left Front to Change Europe, it was established by three organizations – the French Communist Party (PCF), the Left Party (Parti de Gauche, PG) and the Unitary Left (Gauche Unitaire, GU) – with the aim of standing in the European elections of June 2009.

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Video: David Harvey addresses #OccupyLSX: The best system money can buy

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12 November 2011 — Links – International journal of socialist renewal

November 12, 2011 — Professor David Harvey addresses Occupy London Stock Exchange (#OccupyLSX) Tent City University about the global capitalist crisis and the Occupy movement. For more videos of talks at the Tent City University visit http://tentcityuniversity.occupylsx.org. Continue reading →

Cuba: ‘Information on results of the Debate on the Economic and Social Policy Guidelines for the Party and the Revolution’

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12 November2011 — Links International

[Once more a ‘progressive’ a site is making people who want to download a public document in PDF format, sign up with Scribd in order to get at it. The OWS ‘newspaper’ did the same thing. I don’t get it? Why not just make it available as a straight-up pdf download? WB]

Introduction by Marce Cameron, translator

November 12, 2011 — Cuba’s Socialist Renewal, posted at Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal with permission — Here is the complete English translation of the booklet Information on the results of the Debate on the Economic and Social Policy Guidelines for the Party and the Revolution, an explanatory document published together with the final version of the guidelines adopted by the Cuban Communist Party (PCC) Congress in April. As far as I’m aware there is no official translation of this document. Please note that this is an unofficial translation.

You can view or download it as a PDF file here, or read it on screen below.

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Cuba: 'Information on results of the Debate on the Economic and Social Policy Guidelines for the Party and the Revolution'

Leave a comment

12 November2011 — Links International

[Once more a ‘progressive’ a site is making people who want to download a public document in PDF format, sign up with Scribd in order to get at it. The OWS ‘newspaper’ did the same thing. I don’t get it? Why not just make it available as a straight-up pdf download? WB]

Introduction by Marce Cameron, translator

November 12, 2011 — Cuba’s Socialist Renewal, posted at Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal with permission — Here is the complete English translation of the booklet Information on the results of the Debate on the Economic and Social Policy Guidelines for the Party and the Revolution, an explanatory document published together with the final version of the guidelines adopted by the Cuban Communist Party (PCC) Congress in April. As far as I’m aware there is no official translation of this document. Please note that this is an unofficial translation.

You can view or download it as a PDF file here, or read it on screen below.

read more