A Manifesto by a number of revolutionary amtcapitalst organizations. It condemns the Russian invasion of Ukraine, condemns U.S. imperialism, and supports the armed resistance of the Ukrainian people. It concludes with a list of 6 internationalist demands. ... read full story / add a comment

This year’s 8th March comes to remind us of the importance of massive, radical women’s-and not only -class struggles. It reminds us that the world is not won by praying and that the only prospect for us to live in a society of equality and freedom is the organization in unions and fight for the social revolution.
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In The Dangerous Class: The Concept of the Lumpenproletariat (University of Michigan Press, forthcoming 2020), I argue that US President Donald Trump should be understood as a “Prince of the Lumpenproletariat.” The question that will confront us on November 3rd and long afterward is whether Donald Trump will become “Emperor of the Lumpenproletariat.” These terms are taken from Karl Marx’s 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, where he applied them to Louis Bonaparte III. I argue that Trump has followed the script of the 18th Brumaire, which is the story of the exceptional rise to power of a lumpenproletariat organized and led by an authoritarian populist.

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At the time when the Covid-19 is spread around the world and is a huge threat to people’s lives, a few days ago (16/06) the Turkish state launched an aggressive attack on Iraqi Kurdistan and invaded many villages and small towns. In its intensive attack, both from the sky and on the land, it so far killed many innocent people, livestock, and destroyed anything they had: their houses their villages and lands. Their justification for this massive attack is defending their borders and fighting against the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, PKK. ... read full story / add a comment

A US strike which killed Iranian general Qassem Soleimani in Baghdad in January, and the counter-strike by the Iranian military on US targets in Iraq, raised serious questions about the legitimate use of force. When military force was used against targets within its territory, Iraq’s sovereignty was breached. ... read full story / add a comment

Ao longo deste ensaio, desenvolverei o conceito de “Sistemas de Poder” ou “Sistemas Políticos” como ideologia política, sujeito imaterial e indivisível nas relações sociais. A partir da compreensão deste conceito, situarei os quatro Modelos de Governação existentes na história política da humanidade. Os Modelos de Governação podem ter maior ou menor impacto nos governos ao longo da História, tendo em vista as suas próprias necessidades de buscar, em outros Modelos de Governação, soluções inexistentes em si para as demandas e necessidades específicas de cada sociedade, em cada época distinta. ... read full story / add a comment

Some of the governments supporting Trump's plan to starve Venezuela into submission are none too savory, themselves. ... read full story / add a comment

Whatever may be the conclusion of the strike, there is little doubt that the practice of contractualization, which has done so much damage to labor in this country, is facing a mortal challenge from its victims. ... read full story / add a comment

Anarchism in the UK is a joke. Once symbolising hard-fought struggles for freedom, the word has been stripped bare to make way for narrow-minded, separatist and hateful identity politics by middle class activists keen to protect their own privileges. We write this leaflet to reclaim anarchism from these identity politicians. ... read full story / add a comment

Syria’s war has transformed the country in both shattering and subtle ways. While many evolutions are for the worse, others inspire cautious optimism: Syrians have shown relentless ingenuity in adapting to every stage of a horrendous conflict, salvaging remnants of dignity, solidarity and vitality amid nightmarish circumstances. ... read full story / add a comment

The City of Tampa is rewriting a homophobic bathhouse ordinance to now criminalize sex workers. Please call and email city council members to oppose the criminalization of sex workers and stop the homophobic bathhouse ordinance. ... read full story / add a comment

Large parts of the western working class now seem to gather around right populists, demagogues, and racists. They vote for reactionary and fascistoid political parties. They helped to vote the UK out of the EU and to make Trump president of the world's superpower number one, and they vote so massively for the far right political parties that the latter have government power in sight throughout several of Europe's most populous countries. ... read full story / add a comment

After the killing of Michael Brown in the streets of Ferguson, Missouri in the late summer of 2014, protests erupted, and the Black Lives Matter spread across North America to protest police violence, too often systematically directed at poor and racialized communities. The massive police presence at these protests, with weapons and armoured vehicles that looked and felt like major military deployments, made it clear to all that something fundamental had taken place in policing practices and strategies. The intensification and extension of the coercive and security branches of the state was well-known since the declaration of the ‘war on terror’ in 2001, and the subsequent leaks of official documents by Edward Snowden, Chelsea Manning and others. The hardening of the state in its day-to-day operations at the most local levels could now be seen everywhere by all, in an increasing confrontation with the democratic rights of assembly and protest.

Lesley Wood's recent book, Crisis and Control: The Militarization of Protest Policing (2014), locates these developments in a longer term perspective in relation to the spread of neoliberalism. Analyzing police agencies, strategies and practices from the mid-1990s to the present, she identifies a range of the structural and political forces that have led to the militarization of policing, particularly in North America, but also in trends that extend to Europe. This involves detailing a new matrix in the relations between the security, national police and defence apparatuses of the state with local police forces and the defence and security industries. Professional police associations and their various conferences and conventions have become important nodes for the spread of ‘best-practice policing’, in the form of kettling, barricading, infiltration and pre-emptive arrests, usage of new anti-protest weaponry, security screening, local intelligence-gathering capacities and the like. But also as sites where the case is made for an increase in police budgets, more capital intensification of policing and thus for accumulation by the ‘coercive’ industries (which define modern urbanism as much as the so-called ‘creative’ sector).

In a period of sharpening inequality, permanent neoliberal austerity, and hard right forces gaining ground, the logic for a further militarization of policing, securitizing of cities, and curtailing and limiting protests. In her book, Wood seeks not only to map these developments in North America through time, but also to expose the contradictions in the new forms of policing in capitalist states, and begin to pose how social and anti-capitalist movements will have to respond to ‘demilitarize our relations’.

Lesley Wood teaches sociology at York University, Toronto and Greg Albo teaches political science at York University. ... read full story / add a comment

The current economic, political, and social situation in Venezuela is very complicated, which makes it somewhat difficult for outsiders to make sense of. On the one hand there are many people who defend the Bolivarian revolution, pointing to the successes it has had in reducing poverty and inequality and in increasing citizen participation and self-governance. On the other hand, there is a chorus of critics, not just from the usual suspects on the political right, but often from the left, who criticize the Maduro government's economic management of the country, corruption, the high inflation rate and shortages, and the trial of a high profile opposition politician, who the government accuses of fomenting violence. How did Venezuela get here? What happened since Hugo Chavez's death? Did the project derail, get stuck, hit a speed bump, or crash altogether? In order to answer this question, I will first analyze the origins of the current economic situation. ... read full story / add a comment

“Communists supposed it… but Syriza surpassed their expectations…” ... 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

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 US troop surges inspire an anarchist to another kind of surge. ... read full story / add a comment

The text “In Rojava: People’s War is not Class War”, which you can read below, represents a contribution of the “Internationalist Communist Tendency” (ICT) to a debate that has been taking place in certain circles claiming “anti-capitalist struggle” since several weeks. The central points of this discussion are current events in Western Kurdistan - Rojava. ... read full story / add a comment

A summary of the August 2014 amendments to the Labour Relations Act and their meaning and implications for workers. ... read full story / add a comment