A year and half ahead of the 2018 general elections, the poor and working people of Zimbabwe are up in arms against President Robert Gabriel Mugabe and his ZANU-PF regime which has been in power for 36 years. In the last 3 months Zimbabwe has been shaken by protest actions of workers, informal traders, commuter omnibus operators, and unemployed youths. These actions have occurred at a time when the country is experiencing a liquidity crisis and the ruling party structures are crumbling from within as liberation war veterans, once Mugabe’s staunch loyalists, break ranks from the regime. Meanwhile, the opposition political parties (a myriad of MDC splinter groups and two ZANU-PF splinter groups) are in talks to form a coalition party. The regime has since stepped up its repressive measures in a bid to squash dissent.

There is currently a military coup in Turkey. It is not certain what the outcome will be, but tanks are on the streets, soldiers have taken over state television, airports are shut down, and gunfire and explosions have been heard in Istanbul and Turkey. It is clear that a substantial section of the military has taken action against the government and is in control of parts of the country. At this moment there are reports of soldiers killing protesters. Given the historic weakness of the Turkish military as a political power relative to the eras in which it carried out previous coups, there is a strong chance that the government will prevail.

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The Leave / Brexit vote in the referendum came in the end as a surprise, a narrow win for Remain was expected. This may be because the core Leave vote was in the run-down white working class communities of the now desolate English and Welsh industrial zones. A population trapped in conditions of long-term unemployment and poverty who no one really pays much attention to anymore.

Some on the left have seized on the makeup of this core vote to suggest that there was some progressive element to the Brexit vote despite the campaign being led by racist hatemongers and wealthy US-oriented neoliberals. Mostly that's a mixture of wishful thinking and post hoc justification for having called for a Leave vote in the first place, but it is true that a section of the working class, C2DEs in marketing speak, voted to Leave in close to a 2:1 ratio. Is the class composition of that vote enough to automatically make it progressive regardless of content? And what does it tell us that a section of the radical left seems to think the answer to that question is yes, that it is enough to be anti-establishment?

See also:

• Observations on Brexit and Lexit in the UK EU membership referendum
• 10 point guide for post Brexit resistance as racist right wins EU referendum

Our hearts ache for the victims of the homophobic hate crime that took place over the weekend in Orlando, Florida where a gunman attacked an LGBT+ club killing 50 and wounding over 50 more. Much has been asked by us and by other left queers about the LGBT+ community, whether it exists and if it exists why don’t we feel a part of it. Sadly it is at times like these that we become aware of its existence. When people are considered deviants and deserving of a murderous assault for their sexuality, a trait all of us in the community share, we cannot but come together in sadness and in mourning.

Palestinian workers are one of the most forgotten and abandoned social categories whether in the political. economical or social contexts, Almost all Palestinian workers suffer from Various sides: the Palestinian Authority, the Zionist state, and Israeli and Palestinian bosses, its noticeable that the worker’s rights. stability and future are roughly mentioned in the policies of the two conflicted Entities. since neither one of them gave any importance to reflect on the issue of Palestinian workers. besides. this point was not Discussed as it should in the Palestinian-Israeli negotiations. note that according to the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics ; the number of Palestinian workers in Israel is estimated of 105 thousand workers which constitutes 2.2% of the labor force in Israel and about 11.7% of the size of the labor force in the West Bank .