Over the past few months, the world’s media has been full of talk of a new war in Europe. According to US intelligence services, Russia has moved over 100,000 troops to its border with Ukraine.
A motion is up for discussion at this week’s TUC Congress, calling for ‘solidarity with Ukraine’. Instead of backing the Tories and their imperialist aims, the labour movement must fight for an internationalist, class-based position.
NATO’s latest summit in Vilnius is being heralded by its members as a great success and a new step in the process of strengthening the military alliance. But then, they would say that. We need to separate the facts from the press conference statements. If you peek into the goings on behind the scenes, you might get a glimpse of the actual divisions, rifts and challenges facing the imperialist organisation.
The world woke on Tuesday 6 June to reports of a new ‘Russian atrocity’. A massive dam in Nova Kakhovka, a Russian-controlled area in Southern Ukraine, was breached, unleashing a torrent of water from the Dnipro River, resulting in devastating flooding in the Kherson Oblast.
The partial and confused reports of clashes on the Donbass front, point to the beginning of the much-heralded Ukrainian counter-offensive. On the basis of sketchy information it is impossible to make a definitive prognosis. The following lines therefore bear an entirely conditional character.
Author: Ivan Loh and our correspondent in Kazakhstan
The January uprising in Kazakhstan, and particularly in Almaty, was the most notable event in the living memory of most Kazakhstanis. In his address to the extraordinary session of the CSTO [Collective Security Treaty Organisation], the president, Kasym-Jomart Tokayev, described it as “the heaviest crisis in the whole 30-year history of independence”. This was the first time that the bourgeois regime of modern Kazakhstan has ever faced such a threat.
The following statement – in solidarity with the revolutionary movement in Kazakhstan and against Russian military intervention – was originally published in Russian on 6 January and signed by a number of left-wing Russian organisations. Read the original here, as well as our most recent analysis, and a statement by our correspondent in Kazakhstan.
We publish the following translation of a statement, published today by the Russian comrades of the Marxist Tendency on the current situation in Kazakhstan. Read the original here, click here for marxist.com’s latest analysis of the situation, and here for an earlier report by our correspondent on the ground.
Yesterday, Kazakhstani army and security forces backed by Russian special forces moved in to forcibly put down what has become the biggest mass movement in Kazakhstan since the collapse of the Soviet Union.
Saturday 16 September marked the first anniversary of the murder of Mahsa Jina Amini, which sparked the ‘Women, Life, Freedom’ uprising in Iran last year. It was commemorated with a bazaar strike in Kurdish towns, and with street protests by the youth in Tehran, Kermanshah, Sanandaj, Amol, Hamedan, Rasht and Bukun, among other cities.
In less than a week, a nationwide strike has broken out across Iran. Beginning on 21 April, with 18 workplaces affected in the oil-gas sector, it has now spread to now involve over 100 workplaces across the mining, steel and oil-gas sectors. The strikes began in the oil-rich province of Khuzestan, but they rapidly spread to Bushehr, Fars, Kerman, Isfahan, Kerman and Yazd province.
A new wave of youth protests coupled with student and bazaari strikes in Iran began on 5 December, and were planned to continue until 7 December. The protests, which have so far reached 83 towns and cities, were initially called by revolutionary students, but the call was echoed by workers’ organisations.
Over two months since the beginning of the revolutionary uprising of Iranian youth, following an ebb under heavy repression, a new round of protests took place between 16-19 November, which show the whip of counter-revolution driving the movement forward. For final victory to be achieved, there must be mass, organised participation by the working class!