Blogs

There is an ever-growing stream of media commentary on the Grenfell fire, increasing daily as the public enquiry unfolds. There are some elements in the media with the goal of obscuring or excusing the plain facts as part of a pre-emptive defence manoeuvre to protect those most implicated in what caused the fire and the 72 deaths. That they feel the need to use such distortions to defend the Grenfell landlords and those who ordered and oversaw the Grenfell refurbishment that fitted the lethal cladding only increases the suggestion of a general doubt on all sides about their innocence.

An idiomatic Tagalog adaptation of David Graeber’s “Are You An Anarchist? The Answer May Surprise You!” by Miyungs and edited by Lahumbuwan.

The crisis, which has been developing since the start of 2020, opens up new and unprecedented scenarios in class confrontations. For revolutionaries it is essential to clarify some basic points about the current period which are as original in form as they are classical in substance.

The demise of the USSR in 1990-1 was quickly followed by the splintering of Yugoslavia as rival imperialisms sought to draw different parts of it in their orbit. The Internationalist Workers’ Group article which follows reminds us of one particular horror of the war that followed.

Review of Marxism in a Lost Century: A Biography of Paul Mattick by Garry Roth (Haymarket Books/Historical Materialism Series).

An open letter by Filipino and Filipinx autonomists in the so-called Philippines and diasporas to the anti-fascists in the so-called United States asking them to resist the return of the transphobic murderer Joseph Scott Pemberton and to remember Jennifer Laude as a victim of white supremacy and transphobia.

Just as this piece was ready to go online, yet another blatant police shooting of a black US citizen in full sight has triggered angry protests in Kenosha, Wisconsin. Jacob Blake has been left paralysed from the waist down. Added to the re-run of nightime curfews, tooled-up police and National Guard lining up against protesters came a follower of "Blue Lives Matter": 17 year old Kyle Rittenhouse, with loaded rifle, promptly shot three people, killing two of them.

The communisers do not have a strategy for exiting capitalist society. The real and difficult problems of class consciousness, political organisation, bourgeois power and a period of transition are simply brushed aside as non-problems. What this represents is disillusionment and a cry of despair.

The demand for abolition becomes urgent in the face of a highly militarized response to the COVID-19 pandemic in the Philippines.

The following is a translation of a piece by our Italian comrades, a follow-up to the two articles we have recently published about the situation in Belarus. Since it was written, a number of developments have occurred.

An introduction to anarchism.

There is now “a state of emergency” in Beirut. No, not to deal with the devastating explosion in its port which left 200 people dead or missing, over 6,000 injured and 300,000 homeless. The “state of emergency” is to protect the political and economic elite from the anger of the Lebanese population who were already on their knees before the explosion on 4 August.

A disgruntled worker formally employed at a state university writes an open letter detailing the absurdity of unpaid labor they were forced to do.

In December 2018 we wrote an an article entitled Workers' Strikes in Iran: This Time it is Different about the end of the magnificent strikes and demonstrations of the Haft Tapeh sugarcane factory workers. The promises which were made to the workers then were once again broken, and when they had not been paid since March 2020 they resumed their strike on 15 June. As we write they have now been on strike for over 2 months.

Recently we have written about the background and escalation of the current opposition movement in Belarus, but in the days that followed the situation has already changed by quite a bit – with various developments in the struggle against Lukashenko’s regime. Particularly interesting are the news on the industrial action front.

An article examining the current protests in the US, applying the anti-imperialist perspective of the Grayzone, MintPress News and many others.

Revolutionary Perspectives 16 Editorial

Roberts (in tandem with the likes of Carchedi and Maito) frequently makes decent critiques of the existing trends in the capitalist crisis. However, despite criticising others on the capitalist left for their neo-Keynesianism, he offers little more than the suggestion that nationalisation would solve capital’s problems. The brief article here reveals a fairly fundamental error. (CWO)