Adding insult to injury: Bush says starving India eats too much
By Kavita Krishnan
May 7, 2008 -- Karl Marx, born on 5 May, 1818, nearly two centuries ago, had in 1867 laid bare the ``intimate connection between the pangs of hunger of the most industrious layers of the working class, and the extravagant consumption, coarse or refined, of the rich, for which capitalist accumulation is the basis'' (Capital Vol. 1, Ch. 25). In May 2008, nearly a century and a half later, as we hear Emperor Bush hold forth on global hunger, we are reminded that capitalism and global wealth remains just as intimately wedded to hunger.
For related Links articles, including a video by Hugo Chavez, click here
Respect and the London election results
By Nick Wrack and Alan Thornett, Socialist Resistance
May 6, 2008 -- The New Labour project is falling apart at the seams. Its local election results were the worst in 40 years, with only 24% of the vote and coming third behind the Liberal Democrats. This is a disastrous result for British Labour Prime Minister Gordon Brown. In London, the election of the Conservative Party's Boris Johnson as mayor and the presence of a far-right British National Party (BNP) member on the Greater London Assembly will disturb and depress all who value the multi-cultural diversity of the city.
`Tipping point' in New Zealand politics at the grassroots: the Residents Action Movement
Are livable cities just a dream?
By Dave Holmes
Venezuela's labour movement at the crossroads; Stalin Borges Perez on May Day
See http://www.links.org.au/node/388#comment-527 for a report on the Caracas May Day March.
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Venezuela's labour movement at the crossroads
By Kiraz Janicke and Federico Fuentes
Militants mark May Day in Timor Leste, Pakistan and Malaysia (video)
Timor Leste: Workers and students rally for May Day in Dili
By Mericio Akara
Individual versus social solutions to global warming
By Terry Townsend
Nepal: Republican resurgence led by the red flag
By Lal Bahadur Singh, Liberation, magazine of the Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist) (Liberation)
Kathmandu -- ``Nepal Stuns World, Itself: Poll Peaceful, Turnout 60%'' -- that was the banner headline of the Kathmandu Post, the leading Nepal newspaper, on April 11, 2008, the morrow of the historic constituent assembly elections. It was stunning indeed that the constituent assembly elections in a Nepal torn by civil strife were held in a remarkably peaceful atmosphere, and with a huge participation of the people. However the real stunner was yet to come some hours later when by the midnight of April 11 it became clear that a Red Star was rising in full bloom over Sagarmatha, i.e. Everest, the highest peak in the world, in the erstwhile Himalayan Kingdom.
Indonesia: Call for Venezuela-style oil nationalisations; Papernas May Day statement
April 29, 2008 -- About
1000 workers, students and urban poor held a pre-May Day demonstration
outside GKBI Towers in Jakarta, a flashy skyscraper that is the
Indonesian headquarters of companies like ExxonMobil, ANZ Bank, Cable
& Wireless, Credit Lyonnais Capital, Coca-Cola, Dow Chemical,
France Telecom, KPMG, McKinsey & Company, OCBC Bank and the Swiss Bank.
South Korea: The general election and leftwing politics
By Won Youngsu
April 30, 2008 -- For the South Korean left, the general election of April 9 was another fiasco following the presidential election last December, in which the election of Lee Myung-bak brought forth the return of the conservative government, while Democratic Labor Party (DLP) candidate Kwon Young-gil received just 3 per cent of vote, less than the previous result in 2002 -- a drop of 300,000 votes.
The DLP won two constituency seats and three seats from the party list, with 5.6 per cent or 973,345 votes. The DLP's seats were halved compared with the result of the previous election in 2004 of 10 seats, two constituency seats plus eight list seats, respectively. The Progressive New Party, which split from the DLP, won no seats; it obtained 2.94 per cent, less the threshold of 3 per cent. In sum, the two leftwing parties suffered defeats in the election.
Main results of the election
John Bellamy Foster on the global financial crisis
‘Nobody knows where the toxic debt is buried and how much there is’
John Bellamy Foster is editor of the Monthly Review, a prominent political journal established by the Marxist economist Paul Sweezy in the 1940s.
Foster is a professor of sociology at the University of Oregon in Eugene, USA. He has written widely on political economy and has established a reputation as an environmental socialist.
He has proven that Karl Marx was a radical ecologist in his book, Marx’s Ecology: Materialism and Nature.
Foster is interviewed by Peter Boyle for Links - International Journal of Socialist Renewal and Green Left Weekly. It was conducted during the Climate Change Social Change conference in Sydney, April 11-13, 2008.
The written version of the interview is available at Green Left Weekly.