Only 14 years after the end of apartheid some say that this is a new apartheid. Only 14 years after the genocide in Rwanda some say that this is a genocide South African style. But this time it is not just about the still existing economic gap between South Africans of different skin colours, nor about a war between different ethnopolitical groups like in Rwanda.

It is about nationality and the fight between those who have the minimum security of being born in South Africa, and the unlucky ones who have no such security – who have, in many cases, had to flee to South Africa from violence or starvation elsewhere. The events of May 2008 show a deep xenophobic sentiment in South Africa that is largely due to social and economic circumstances. It is a poisonous cocktail of nationalism mixed with lack of service delivery.

[Italiano]

An anarchist review of Stuart Townsend's Battle in Seattle, a fictionalized drama about the 1999 WTO protests in Seattle, Washington by Seattle anarchists who were at the WTO protests.

I spent my nineteenth birthday in the cold and rain, breathing in tear gas and fleeing the police. It was 1999 and I was in Seattle, joining in the tens of thousands who descended on the city to protest the World Trade Organization’s first Ministerial Conference in the United States. I was sympathetic to the myriad of issues represented by the various sections of protestors, from the environment to workers struggles to access to medicine. I proudly marched with my banner reading, “Think the WTO is bad? Wait til you hear about capitalism!” The reasons to oppose the WTO were a thousand-fold, but central to me was the larger system at play: global capitalism.

With financial giants toppling at rates that shock even seasoned financial commenter, many of us are left wondering, how did this state of affairs come to pass. What is becoming obvious is that the financial markets have become increasingly complex. In this article, Paul Bowman looks the nuts and bolts behind the economic headlines, explaining what is it that is being sold and why nobody seems to be able to stop the chaos from unfolding.

This is the first part of a series of articles investigating the capitalist financial markets from a critical perspective. With such a large topic it is tricky finding a route into the subject and a plan of enquiry. The chosen road is to start with a look at the financial markets, particularly focusing on the mechanics of some of the instruments that have led to a momentous transformation of the workings of global financial markets in the most recent decades.

At first sight, this approach may seem odd, perverse even, like examining the internal workings of a clock as a prelude to discussion the social relations of time. However this "inside-out" approach is justified by the fact that as well as a system of social relations, capitalism is also a system with internal mechanics. Those mechanics evolve in response to the historical development of struggles over exploitation, but what new directions the new mechanics make possible in terms of capitalist strategies, in turn, shape the new struggles of today and tomorrow. The next article in the series will place these market mechanics in their fuller historical context. But for now let's start by investigating the mechanics of capitalist financial markets.

Hoje é na Bolívia, em 2002 foi na Venezuela, por três vezes nos últimos 11 anos o povo do Equador derrubou um presidente, em dezembro de 2001 a garra argentina derrotou o neoliberalismo e todo o seu projeto de desmonte da vida em sociedade. Hoje a guerra dos povos latino-americanos rumo à sua libertação livra a Batalha na Meia Lua boliviana.

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O impasse político do governo Morales deveria ser resolvido indo além das possibilidades legais. Existe uma esquerda popular muito mais à esquerda do que o recalcitrante vice-presidente Linera e dos burocratas de sempre oscilando entre as universidades latino-americanas e os governos com vernizes nacionalistas. À esquerda do MAS está a ex-guerrilha do Movimento E.G. Pachakuti, está a Coordenação Regional de El Alto, estão as instituições sociais de tipo Justiça Comunitária, existe um enorme tecido social organizado que não vai entregar o país e a terra ancestral para os herdeiros de Cortez e Pizarro.

La llegada de la Corte Penal Internacional a Colombia, en medio de la agudización de la crisis que enfrenta al Ejecutivo en contra de la Corte Suprema por los casos de parapolítica, así como el recrudecimiento de los ataques de Uribe en contra de la oposición, abren una nueva coyuntura en Colombia, dentro de la cual la superación de la crisis mediante la dictadura abierta se vuelve una posibilidad cada vez más palpable.

"Es importante hacer algunas precisiones antes de terminar: mientras muchos comentaristas culpan a la actual crisis y a la deriva autoritaria del gobierno de Uribe a la personalidad del presidente[12], no podemos seriamente sostener que esto se trata, sencillamente, de una cuestión de carácter psicológico. Cierto es que Uribe es de carácter camorrista y pendenciero, rencoroso y vengativo, pero en este caso estamos ante una verdadera campaña sistemática de ataque a la oposición, con el pleno respaldo de los medios, que tiene un claro fin de intimidar cualquiera que atreva a hacer el menor cuestionamiento al régimen, a sabiendas que el precio por semejante “atrevimiento” es demasiado grande. No estamos, sencillamente, ante los descalabros de un personaje un poco desequilibrado. Estamos ante una estrategia que busca la supresión del disenso al más propio estilo del fascismo. Pero esta es una estrategia que no viene de la nada, y que es parte de la implementación de la estrategia de contra-insurgencia que se viene implementando mediante el Plan Colombia. El Estado de contrainsurgencia, por experiencia histórica, es una manera de dictadura que puede revestir formas “democráticas” pero que carece completamente de la sustancia de la democracia más formal.