war

We publish below a text that originally appeared on the French website Lundimatin. Not because we agree with everything its author writes: we reject in particular her biological-determinist view “that perhaps the root of the problem, and of all the violence that shakes the world, is masculinity”. But we share the nausea she so passionately expresses. Her voice must be heard.

Nausea

The Israeli government is a shameful entity, a shameless colonial and imperialist power that has been committing heinous war crimes on a daily basis for 75 years. It kills, humiliates and arbitrarily imprisons children and civilians whose only crime is to dare to be Palestinian. Nausea at every demand of the government, its army and its fanatics. Anger and grief at every Palestinian death.

The Israeli government and the massacres it has committed since 1948 are the real enemy, the criminal – and therefore the one that must be destroyed. THE ISRAELI GOVERNMENT.

Now I’m feeling sick again. The assimilation of an entire population, within which class struggle, racial discrimination and political differences exist, as they do in every country in the world, the assimilation of this entire population to its government, to its ethnic identity, is fascist, harmful and murderous thinking.  

Read More →

1. THE STARK PRESENT

The summer of 2023 has drawn to a close. The pandemic is in the lull, ‘normality’ has resumed but the grim atmosphere has not disappeared. The climate crisis is getting worse, disasters attributed to “Mother Nature” dominate the news. But the economic crisis also proliferates. What both crises have in common is that they affect people very unequally. They show that we live in a class society.

The Dow Jones, the so-called barometer of the US economy, has been doing quite well. Those with a lot of money can still make it grow. The rest of us are doing less well. Inflation is eroding wages. Millions of Americans are currently losing their health insurance. There are increasing numbers of homeless people. The gap between rich and poor is widening in every country, but globally, the gap is deepening between countries capable of playing a competitive role in the ultra-productive information economy and all the others.

Mass flight from poorer countries is the result. The information revolution has unified the global economy but at the same time it is expelling many. The deeper the global crisis sinks and the more the information technology increases productivity, the more ‘superfluous’ people there are.  

Read More →

15 months have passed since Russian tanks rolled into Ukraine and still the war drags on. Hundreds of thousands are killed or maimed, is that enough? No, it is not enough. Not for the capitalists of both sides in the conflict, locked in their power plays, callously sending the children of the working class to the killing fields while checking their overseas bank accounts.

There is no end in sight to this war. Both sides prepare a spring offensive. It seems the slaughter can only end when one or both warring parties run out of cannon fodder. That is becoming a problem for them. Hundreds of thousands have fled both countries to avoid being forcibly enlisted. In Ukraine there are special apps circulating which send warnings on where the recruiters are on the prowl. Russia still has hundreds of thousands of soldiers in reserve but the Kremlin doesn’t trust them. Why else is it not sending them to the battle? Or is it to maintain the illusion that this is not a war, just a “special military operation”? Instead of using these trained battalions, the prisons are skimmed and all those willing to join the mercenaries and the young recruits (most from distant provinces) at the front, get a ‘get out of jail free card’.  

Read More →