The United States trumpets education as one of its shining successes of the war in Afghanistan. But a BuzzFeed News investigation reveals U.S. claims were often outright lies, as the government peddled numbers it knew to be false and touted schools that have never seen a single student. ... read full story / add a comment

e Kurdish town of Cizre, a settlement with a population of approximately 150 thousand souls in Southeastern Turkey, is now under siege by the Turkish armed forces and the so-called “special operation force” of the police for a second time, after a previous one-week long siege was lifted for an interlude of two days. Around-the-clock curfew is accompanied by power cuts and the interruption of all means of communication including mobile telephones and the Internet. The evidence that came out when the first round of siege was lifted attests to a terrible human drama. Over 30 civilians are dead, ranging from a 35-day old infant to a 75-year old man. Before the siege was lifted, government sources claimed that security forces had killed more than a dozen fighters of the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK), the Kurdish guerrilla army, denying any civilian deaths. How the baby and the old man could have contributed to the fight of the PKK remains a mystery unexplored by government spokespeople after the facts have come to light. [Italiano] ... read full story / add a comment

Once again the radical left petite bourgeoisie has failed.
This is not particular to Greece. It is a general tendency of struggles in many other social formations as well, wherever the petite bourgeoisie instead of the working class is leading the struggle. One lesson to learn is that whenever we persist in hoping that something positive will come from petite bourgeois leadership, however radical they might seem, THE RESULT WILL BE THE SAME: A TOTAL CAPITULATION TO CAPITAL.
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“Communists supposed it… but Syriza surpassed their expectations…” ... read full story / add a comment

There are preliminary ideas about anarchism and the difficulty it faces. The short piece of writing is sombre in places but ends on a positive note. It is an attempt to separate anarchism from other ideologies. ... read full story / add a comment

This is by an author who summerized the " 60's civil war in the U.S." in a few short paragraphs.
I add in a long intro slamming the media etc. for reducing the 60's to ONLY the civil rights movement (leaving out the more radical/revolutionary currants like the Black Panthers), and the peace movement (leaving out the equally massive important- to way generalize a complicated mixed scene- anti-war/anti-imperialist movement.
I mention anarchistic tides such as the all over the map student movement that burned down buildings to fight en loco parentis- in the place of parents- fight for personal freedom and to be treated like adults- the effect of which, though modified, can be scene on today's campus's. I mention the hippies/freaks who were everywhere and anarchist if not conciously than in effect.
I go into womens/gay etc movements. The incredible revolution in creative music called "the soundtrack for the revolution" that was picked up in the underground of the Soviet Bloc whose lyrics could'nt be understood but meant "freedom". I mention BIG TIME that guys could be incredibly liberated to grow their hair long...
I give alot of play to the formation of the Vietnam Veterans Against the War which was the only group of vets in U.S. history to oppose a war still in effect that had plenty of effect as U'll see... much more...
Then finally i quote the text mentioned at the beginning by another author. ... read full story / add a comment

KSL: Bulletin of the Kate Sharpley Library No. 82-83, July 2015 [Double issue] has just been posted on our site. ... read full story / add a comment

Did those who are already raising Lenin from his tomb to render quick judgement on Syriza's abject “world-historic defeat” (without saying much about what victory would look like or require) actually bother to read the rather similar plans that Syriza put forward before the referendum and that were consistently rejected by the EU and IMF “Institutions”? This rejection is what the referendum was about. The resounding OXI was then used by Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras to secure the resignation of the leading political representative of the domestic ruling class (and former Prime Minister), Antonis Samaras, and to get all the party leaders with any such claim or ambitions to speak for that class to adopt Syriza's position on the need for debt restructuring and investment funds. One might even say that if there was a class crossover involved here it was the other way around, one that looks more like what Gramsci meant by a hegemonic strategy rather than the way it is presented from the perspective of those standing on Lenin's Tomb. ... read full story / add a comment

Change Group workers endured an intense union busting campaign to win their election 17-2. They are now about to engage in a contract fight with the company. ... read full story / add a comment

So at long last, despite all the meanders and sideways and detours of history, the logic of social struggles has finally put its stamp on the politics of Turkey. The resounding defeat of Recep Tayyip Erdogan and his AKP at the polls in the 7th June general elections in Turkey brings out into the open a loss of political clout on the part of Erdogan as a result of the successive blows he received in the last two years at the hands of the masses and, partly, his erstwhile partners. [Italiano] ... read full story / add a comment

On May 27th the United States Department of Justice issued a 47-count indictment against nine International Federation of Association Football (FIFA) officials and five executives of FIFA-affiliated sports management firms. The charges the United States pressed included racketeering, wire fraud, and money laundering amounting to $150-million over a 24-year period. That morning, the Swiss Government also arrested seven of the indicted defendants at a Zurich hotel, while holding them for possible extradition to the United States. The United States and Switzerland also announced that criminal investigations into FIFA's 2010 decisions to award the World Cup to Russia for 2018 and to Qatar for 2022 would continue. Is there a basis for the United States’ allegations of corruption against FIFA officials and affiliated sports executives? Why is the United States involved in issuing indictments against FIFA officials and affiliated sports executives? How will the United States targeting FIFA corruption play out? ... read full story / add a comment

By suggesting that the state of Israel should not exist, I am not being anti-Semitic. I am, however, being anti-Zionist. There is a distinct difference. An anti-Semite is someone who is prejudiced against Jews. An anti-Zionist, on the other hand, is opposed to that sector of the Jewish population who see it as their God-given right to establish a Jewish state in the Holy Land at the expense of the Palestinian people who have lived there for two thousand years. ... read full story / add a comment

On Sunday, the 31st May 2015, the Initiative to Keep Hasankeyf Alive has organized a protest meeting in Hasankeyf against a new declaration about the resettlement of the inhabitants in the town Hasankeyf, published on May 5. Five days before a lawsuit has been initiated by two inhabitants of Hasankeyf against this declaration at the Batman Administrative Court. ... read full story / add a comment

What should we call the current era? Post-everything? Or perhaps, the interregnum? Whatever the name it should be given, the current period is characterized by neoliberal trans-nationalization. In addition, U.S. hegemony has been under question since the beginning of this period. In fact, the Empire is no longer U.S.-American and a change in hegemony is in full swing. Despite what world-systems theorists such as Giovanni Arrighi suggest, the balance does not seem to be tipping toward China. Nevertheless, as Niall Ferguson points out, it is moving toward Chimerica. Furthermore, since the beginning of the global financial crisis, no project has been in sight that could reorganize the active consensus of the subalterns, move perspectives on accumulation one step up the ladder, and provide a position capable of establishing a new world order. ... read full story / add a comment

Officials calling for calm can offer no rational justification for Gray's death, and so they appeal for order. ... read full story / add a comment

To the memory of Stepan Shaumyan, Armenian Bolshevik leader of the Baku Commune in 1918, and of Hrant Dink, Armenian socialist intellectual from Istanbul who, until his assassination in 2007, exerted a Herculean effort to bring the genocide into the centre of attention in Turkey. ... read full story / add a comment

In the night between April 18th and April 19th a boat filled with up to 950 migrants sank in the Mediterranean Sea, 70 miles north of Libya, while trying to reach the southern European border. This was not only the greatest tragedy to date involving migrants in the Mediterranean Sea, it is also the last of a long series of deaths: around 14,600 from 1993 to November, 2012; 900 in little more than a year from January, 2014 to April, 2015, before this latest tragedy. ... read full story / add a comment

In the open­ing salvos of Latin America’s uneven lurch to the Left in the early twenty-first cen­tury, Bolivia dis­tin­guished itself as the region’s most rad­i­cal socio-political ter­rain.1 Left-indigenous move­ments in the coun­try­side and cityscapes alike threw the state into cri­sis and brought two suc­ces­sive neolib­eral pres­i­dents to their knees – Gon­zalo Sánchez de Lozada in 2003, and Car­los Mesa in 2005.2 Evo Morales’s party, the Movimiento al Social­ismo (Move­ment Towards Social­ism, MAS), leapt into the power vac­uum opened up by this series of revolts, and there has been seri­ous debate on the Left as to how best to but­ton down the cen­tral polit­i­cal dynamic of the coun­try ever since. In a coun­try where 62 per­cent of the pop­u­la­tion self-identified as indige­nous in the 2001 cen­sus, Morales became the first indige­nous pres­i­dent through the Decem­ber 2005 elec­tions with 54 per­cent of the pop­u­lar vote, assum­ing office in Jan­u­ary 2006. He repeated this extra­or­di­nary elec­toral suc­cess in Decem­ber 2009, with 64 per­cent, and again in Octo­ber 2014, with 61 percent. ... read full story / add a comment

The Thembelihle Crisis Committee, the United Front (UF), the Right to Know (R2K) Campaign and the Democratic Left Front call on all people of good conscience in South Africa to endorse the call for an end to the security siege of Thembelihle. Since the 25th of February 2015, Thembelihle has faced a de facto State of Emergency at the hands of the South African Police Services (SAPS) and other security agents. This undeclared, unofficial State of Emergency in Thembelihle is an attack on all our constitutionally guaranteed rights to and freedoms to organise, associate and freely express ourselves. We call for urgent action to put pressure on the SAPS to end the siege. We call for the creation of conducive conditions for free, open and democratic political activity in which the people of Thembelihle may express and exercise their right to protest, and have their demands for a decent life of dignity met.
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Hundreds of thousands of chiefly white middle class protesters took to the streets in Brazil on 15 March in an organized upsurge of hatred against the federal administration led by President Dilma Rousseff of the Workers’ Party (Partido dos Trabalhadores, PT). These protests are far more cohesive and better organized than the previous wave of anti-government demonstrations, in 2013; their demands are unambiguously reactionary, and they include primarily the country's elite. ... read full story / add a comment