Egypt: Workers impose a new agenda
By Asma Agbarieh-Zahalka
The road from the airport to the hotel shows the story: modern buildings partly conceal dilapidated, crowded structures that seem on the verge of collapse. Ancient jalopies chug along as if by inertia, while the latest luxury models zip past them. Huge billboards advertise multinational corporations. All this goes side by side with centuries-old mosques of breathtaking beauty, witnesses to a time when Egypt was the centre of Islamic culture — not just another third-world country offering the world cheap labour for exploitation. This was my first encounter with Cairo. Love at first sight.
I wasn't there as a tourist. What brought me to Egypt with my colleague, Samia Nassar, was the wave of strikes which, since December 2006, has been shaking the regime of Hosni Mubarak. In 2007 there were 580 strikes, demonstrations and protests, involving between 300,000 and 500,000 workers. The number for 2008 is likely to be more than twice that, reflecting enormous hikes in food prices.
Prospects for socialist revolution in Venezuela and Latin America -- Celia Hart
Cuban revolutionary Celia Hart addresses the “A World in Revolt'' conference, Toronto, Canada, May 22-25, 2008.
El Salvador: FMLN's Jorge Schafik Handal Vega discusses the 2009 election
May 24, 2008 -- Jorge Schafik Handal Vega --son of the legendary FMLN founder ``Comandante Simon''' Jorge Schafik Handal -- joined the militant left in El Salvador in 1968 as a student. He was a combatant commander throughout the people’s war in the 1970s and 1980s and, following the 1991 peace accords, was integral to the successful transition of the FMLN’s combatant structures into the political and civil institutions of El Salvador. He is currently a deputy for the FMLN in the Central American Parliament.
Handal Vega is toured Australia in May 2008 to build solidarity with the FMLN’s 2009 election campaign, a message that was enthusiastically received. All recent opinion polls in El Salvador indicate that the FMLN will win both the mayoral and presidential elections next year, wresting the last Central American country to be governed by the extreme right wing out of its control. Desperate to prevent this, the US-backed ruling Arena party has launched a massive campaign of bribery and intimidation, which is accompanied by a growing number of brutal attacks on, and murders of, FMLN leaders and activists.
The FMLN is expecting Arena to also use fraud to try to win the elections, and is urging Australian activists to travel to El Salvador in December-January to act as international observers of the election.
Bolivia: The letter of the law and the law of power
By Guillermo Almeyra, La Jornada, Mexico
Photo essay: Silicon Valley janitors go on strike against Yahoo!, Cisco
Photos and text by David Bacon
Building trade union solidarity with Palestine
By Adam Hanieh
Myths answered: How the workers and peasants made the Cuban revolution
Review by Graham Matthews
Cuba: How the Workers & Peasants Made the Revolution
By Chris Slee
Resistance Books, 2008
55 pages, $6 (pb)
Available from <http://www.resistancebooks.com>
May 10, 2008 -- There is a myth perpetrated by some on the left, that there never really was a revolution in Cuba.
The Cuban “revolution”, they claim, was just the result of the collapse
of the brutal, US-backed Batista regime, followed by the filling of the
political vacuum by the few hundred guerrillas that made up the July 26
Movement (J26M). These fighters simply marched down from the mountains
to take power in Havana, installing the Castro brothers as virtual
dictators.
Indonesia: Anti-communism in the age of reformasi: the case of Papernas
By Vannessa Hearman
Timor Leste - Fretilin's comeback; literacy and governance
May 13, 2008 (Latin Radical) -- Estanislau Da Silva
was a prime minister of Timor Leste (East Timor) when Fretilin was the
party in government. Before that, he was the minister for agriculture. He was in Australia this week to attend the
launching of a book by a Timorese man, Naldo Rei, who grew up in Indonesian-occupied Timor Leste, as a committed supporter of the Fretilin-led resistance movement.
Pakistan: Trade unions under attack -- `We have no option but to fight back!'
By Farooq Tariq
May 18, 2008 -- The announcement by the Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP) government lifting restrictions on trade union activities has brought a new wave of unionisation in many private industries. The bosses are not used to it. They have made tremendous profits under General Pervez Musharraf's eight years of dictatorship. Although he is still there as ``president'', there is some breathing space. Wherever workers have tried to form new unions, the bosses have tried their best to intimidate union activists with false legal cases, arrest, torture and kidnapping. The PPP government has yet to take any action against these bosses.
Along with several trade union leaders, I addressed a press conference today, May 18, at the Lahore Press Club to present eyewitness accounts to this torture.
Cuban VP: `Sustainable development requires a revolution in our values'
Address by José Ramón Machado Ventura, First Vice-President of Cuba’s Council of State, at a session on ``Sustainable Development: the Environment, Climate Change and Energy'', during the 5th EU/LAC (European Union/Latin America and Caribbean) summit meeting in Lima, Peru, May 16-17.
Your Excellency:
At the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development held in Rio de Janeiro 16 years ago, Fidel Castro issued a prophetic warning, stating that ``an important biological species is at risk of disappearing as a result of the rapid and progressive destruction of its natural living conditions: humanity''.
Time has proven him right.
Let us not mince our words: we won’t attain sustainable development, the negative impacts of climate change will not be halted or reversed, and the environment will not be preserved for future generations, if the irrational patterns of production, distribution and consumption imposed upon us by capitalism prevail. The globalisation of neoliberal policies has drastically exacerbated the crisis.