Syriza poster, Synaspismos office in Athens, Helena Sheehan on the streets with Syriza in Athens.

[For more discussion of SYRIZA, click HERE.]

By Helena Sheehan

January 21, 2013 -- Irish Left Review, posted at Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal at the author's suggestion and with her permission -- A monumental drama is playing out before our eyes. It is a true Greek tragedy. The plot: A society is being pushed to its limits. The denouement is not yet determined, but survival is at stake and prospects are precarious. Greece is at the sharp end of a radical and risky experiment in how far accumulation by dispossession can go, how much expropriation can be endured, how far the state can be subordinated to the market. It is a global narrative, but the story is a few episodes ahead here.

Somyot Prueksakasemsuk.

January 17, 2013 -- Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal -- The following protest letter, signed by 381 organisations and individuals inside and outside Thailand, was submitted to Thai Prime Minister Yingluck Shinawatra and other Thai authorities on January 17. The letter was organised by the Thai Labour Campaign. Many more individual letters are due to be delivered on and before January 23, organised by Amnesty International, Australia Asia Workers Links and Clean Clothes Campaign. Readers of Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal are urged to send their own letters to the addresses below. Please cc a copy to freesomyot@gmail.com

[For more articles by or about Michael Lebowitz, click HERE. For a free excerpt from The Contradictions of "Real" Socialism: the conductor and the conducted, click HERE.]

January 18, 2013 -- Since Monthly Review Press published Michael A. Lebowitz’s The Contradictions of “Real Socialism”: The Conductor and the Conducted it has generated quite a bit of discussion. Building on concepts he developed in The Socialist Alternative, Lebowitz examines the record of “real socialism”—the post-revolutionary societies of the 20th century, particularly in Russia and Eastern Europe. He makes a provocative argument that has implications for how we understand socialist planning and the struggle for socialism in the 21st century.

Now, Monthly Review Press is offering a special discount of 35% off the list price and has asked Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal to make this offer available to its readers. This offer is good until the end of January.

By Mercia Andrews

January 13, 2013 -- International Viewpoint -- The protests and mobilisation that started in the small town of De Doorns on November 6, 2012, galvanised the anger of farm dwellers against decades of discontent at extreme exploitation and oppression that persist on farms, in rural towns and South Africa's agricultural sector.

"Iskra. It is often argued that the early period of the organisation of Iskra resembled the small, highly homogenous and monolithic cadre grouping that today is promoted as the sine qua non of revolutionary organisation, but if one looks at the original concept of the Iskra editorial board, we can see it promoted debate among a plurality of tendencies."

[Click HERE for more discussion on revolutionary organisation.]