سايت سازمان کارگران انقلابی ايران (راه کارگر)

يكشنبه ۲ فروردين ۱۳۹۴ برابر با ۲۲ مارس ۲۰۱۵

If we are really for historical-geographical materialism, then we have to recognise that contradictions are always evolving and so, too, must our categories. So by talking about the ‘1 percent’, Occupy succeeded in introducing this concept into common parlance. And it is clear that the 1 percent massively increased its wealth, as Piketty and all the data show. To put that into different terms, to speak of a 1 percent is to recognise that we have created a global oligarchy, which is not the same thing as the capitalist class but is at the centre of it. It is a sort of keyword that serves to describe what the global oligarchy is doing, saying and thinking......

يكشنبه ۲ فروردين ۱۳۹۴ برابر با ۲۲ مارس ۲۰۱۵

‘Out of the Euro!

Wolfgang Streeck

The countries of the south must be allowed a soft exit, perhaps with a south-euro that does not require from them society-destroying ‘reforms’ – and those who at the start of the currency union talked them into bottomless sub-prime credits must confess their guilt as much as those who were conscious of what was happening but said nothing. In place of the artificial gold standard in relations with northern Europe, there must be a currency regime that allows flexibility and excludes arbitrariness. The number of economists, including such heavyweights as the American Alan Meltzer, who demand just this, has grown rapidly in recent times. It is high time indeed for those who understand something of what has to be done to reflect constructively on the details. To paraphrase Mario Draghi: ‘whatever it takes’ – only, not to save the Euro, but to save Europe......

يكشنبه ۲ فروردين ۱۳۹۴ برابر با ۲۲ مارس ۲۰۱۵

Marx Still Matters

A recent biography tries to prove Marx’s irrelevance. It fails miserably.

Matthijs Krul

Marx’s life and personality may have been a nineteenth century one, but his ideas continue to make their mark on all spheres of twenty-first century thought, from revolutionary theory to social science. And that is surely all one can demand of a thinker from the past....

جمعه ۲۹ اسفند ۱۳۹۳ برابر با ۲۰ مارس ۲۰۱۵

Greece establishes Audit Committee of Public Debt

Zoe Konstantopoulou

Zoe Konstantopoulou, Speaker of the Greek parliament, on Tuesday announced the establishment of an Audit Committee of Public Debt to be headed by SYRIZA MEP Sofia Sakorafa and Eric Toussaint, the well known Belgian expert on odious debt. ....

جمعه ۲۹ اسفند ۱۳۹۳ برابر با ۲۰ مارس ۲۰۱۵

Netanyahu’s double gamble

Moshe Machover

Polls indicate that the joint list will get at least 12 seats, one more than the four components have at present. It is quite possible that the formation of the joint list will induce a greater participation of Arab voters than in the past. In the last election the participation of Arab voters was only 56%, which is very low by Israeli standards. It is now expected that over 62% of the eligible Arab voters will participate in the forthcoming elections....

جمعه ۲۹ اسفند ۱۳۹۳ برابر با ۲۰ مارس ۲۰۱۵

Israel: What Now?

Today is the first day of the rest of your life

I would say: “Today is the first day of the battle for the next elections!” ....The battle for the salvation of Israel must start right now....

URI AVNERY

To my mind, it is a mistake to try to hide our convictions. On the contrary, the fact that the words “peace” and “Palestine” were not mentioned at all in the campaign did not help the Left. Honesty is the first requisite for convincing people. ...In short, if the Left wants to win next time – which may come much sooner than expected – it must start to reform itself and overcome the reasons for its failure. .....It can be done. The time to begin is right now....

The End of the Liberal Zionist Façade NEVE GORDON

Fear and Loathing in Israel BINOY KAMPMARK

Israeli Election Postmortems STEPHEN LENDMAN

جمعه ۲۹ اسفند ۱۳۹۳ برابر با ۲۰ مارس ۲۰۱۵

Other Worlds Women Up in Arms: Zapatistas and Rojava Kurds embrace a new gender politics.

Charlotte Maria Sáenz

Zapatista and Kurdish resistances have taken on a radical paradigm shift that changes everything. In the Zapatista autonomous municipal administration center called “Caracol de Oventic”, there is an “Office for Women’s Dignity” where women gather to discuss the successes and failures of the Revolutionary Law of Women. Similarly, the PKK’s “Jineology Committee” studies women’s histories to understand the construction of hierarchies and nation-states that erode women’s power in society. Both communities come from intense patriarchal histories and contexts, so there is still a long way to go in both movements. Yet in a short time they have made extraordinary gains. Women are increasingly represented on governing councils and active in their armed ranks, but the real revolution is seen within the domestic sphere, where caring for children, health and home are shared labor between men and women....

جمعه ۲۹ اسفند ۱۳۹۳ برابر با ۲۰ مارس ۲۰۱۵

Blockupy vs ECB: a battle for the future of European democracy

Jérôme Roos

Not only do the demonstrations in Frankfurt serve to re-politicize the ECB and lay the groundwork for a transnational movement against the rule of finance; they also bring the resistance against austerity right into the heart of the European crisis regime. Suddenly this is no longer just about a debtors’ rebellion in the periphery. Now, when the bankers’ party look down from their towering edifice, they will find the ground trembling beneath their feet. The skyscraper’s majestic glass walls, meant to convey a false sense of openness and transparency, will prove to be a poor cover for the steady decay of the single currency. Yes, the Eurozone is running itself into the ground. And no, it cannot be reformed. ...

جمعه ۲۹ اسفند ۱۳۹۳ برابر با ۲۰ مارس ۲۰۱۵

Behind the White House’s Sanctions Against Venezuela

Architects of Miscalculation

MARK WEISBROT

Since the Obama administration decided last week to impose new sanctions on Venezuela, many people, including journalists, have inquired as to what motivated them to do this. Some are curious as to the apparent incongruity between this move and the White House decision in December to begin the process of normalizing relations with Cuba. Others are wondering why the administration would do something that so obviously hurts the opposition in Venezuela, at least in the short run.....The main opposition group, the Democratic Unity Roundtable (MUD), issued a statement that did not support the sanctions: “Venezuela is not a threat to anyone,” it said in response to the White House’s absurd claim that Venezuela posed an “extraordinary threat” to U.S. national security. And then there is the problem of Washington’s isolation in the hemisphere, which has certainly increased with this latest move....

Venezuela is Not a Threat NICOLAS MADURO

ADAM FISHWICK Latin America Goes Bottom Up

When Do 43 Casualties in Latin America Matter? NICK ALEXANDROV

جمعه ۲۹ اسفند ۱۳۹۳ برابر با ۲۰ مارس ۲۰۱۵

Syriza’s Call for German Reparations

A Bolivaran Tsipras?

JOSHUA TARTAKOWSKY

The question remains to what degree will Tsipras continue to confront Germany despite the risks involved, whether he is doing so in order to prepare the people for a Plan B, and whether he will be willing to compromise after receiving compensation, assuming this is granted, rather than demanding an entire restructuring of the debt conditions.....Tsipras, at least for now, is pursuing the same line led out by Marti, Bolivar, Fidel and Chavez. Indeed, privately-owned television channels in Greece have already began their demonization campaign of Tsipras, reminding one of the Venezuelan corporate media campaign against Chavez.....

جمعه ۲۹ اسفند ۱۳۹۳ برابر با ۲۰ مارس ۲۰۱۵

The Collapse of French Intellectual Diversity

France Now an Obedient, Cowardly Nation

ANDRE VLTCHEK

If you think that France is not as much a police state, as the UK or the US, think twice. Heavily armed military and police are visible at all train stations and many intersections, even at some narrow alleys. Internet providers are openly spying on their costumers. Mass media is self-censoring its reports. The regime’s propaganda is in “top gear”

But the people of France, at least the great majority of them, believe that they live in an ‘open and democratic society.’ If asked, they cannot prove it; they have no arguments. They are simply told that they are free, and so they believe it.....

جمعه ۲۹ اسفند ۱۳۹۳ برابر با ۲۰ مارس ۲۰۱۵

Greece : Memory and Debt

Conn Hallinan

Indeed, its profile is eerily similar to that of the German National Socialist Party (Nazi) in its early years. Golden Dawn has 17 members of Parliament and is the third highest vote getter in the country, though its support has recently dipped......Old memories certainly fuel Greek anger at Germany, but so do the current policies of enforced austerity that Berlin has played a pivotal role in inflicting on debt-ravaged Greece. “Germany’s Europe has finished,” says Greek Social Security Minister Dimitris Statoulis, the Europe “where Germany forbids and all other countries execute orders....”

جمعه ۲۲ اسفند ۱۳۹۳ برابر با ۱۳ مارس ۲۰۱۵

Are Inter-Capitalist Rivalries Intensifying?

The Global Currency Wars

JACK RASMUS

Capitalists have begun fighting over a smaller export economic pie. That fight has set in motion global currency wars, and a crash of interest rates into negative territory as well, the consequences of which may prove highly risky and are yet unknown. Finally, the resort to economic sanctions as a inter-capitalist competitive measure, while taking the apparent form of a political event, in fact also represents a shift to a more risky long term form of inter-capitalist competition between entire macro-regions of the global capitalist economy...

جمعه ۲۲ اسفند ۱۳۹۳ برابر با ۱۳ مارس ۲۰۱۵

Quantitative Easing for Whom Part 1

Michael Hudson says quantitative easing is a pretext for assisting banks to make even more profit

Michael Hudson

The effect of the quantitative easing has been to make pension funds desperate, and it is been to support real estate prices on the idea that somehow this is helping the high costs of housing help recovery. Well, they dont help recovery, because to the extent that there has been quantitative easing, they mean that new homeowners have to pay even more of their income to the banks as mortgage interest. And that means they have even less money to pay for goods and services, so the actual markets continue to shrink....

Quantitative Easing for Whom Part 2

جمعه ۲۲ اسفند ۱۳۹۳ برابر با ۱۳ مارس ۲۰۱۵

Greece and the European Neoliberal Cage

SYRIZA's mild Keynesian programme has been gutted. Is a more democratic economic alternative possible within the framework of the EU?

Dimitris Pavlopoulos and Yiorgos Vassalos

Greece now has four months to decide whether it wants to continue under the austerity straightjacket imposed by Schauble, Dijsselbloem, Draghi, Juncker and Lagarde, or to show the rest of Europe that a different path is possible. The Left all over Europe should take note of the severe constraints that an anti-austerity government faces within the Euro and the Treaties. Juncker has remarked that 'there can be no democratic choice against the European treaties' - if he is right, it follows that a genuinely democratic economic alternative will only be possible outside of the framework of EU.....

جمعه ۲۲ اسفند ۱۳۹۳ برابر با ۱۳ مارس ۲۰۱۵

Happy Birthday Rosa Luxemburg

Rosa Luxemburg [1871-1919], the Polish-born revolutionary and writer, was one of the most original theoretical minds of the early twentieth century. Her work stands as a testament to the great social of upheavals of the time and a life lived in struggle for a better world. She ultimately suffered for her convictions, spending time in jail between 1904 and 1906 and again for three and a half years for opposing the First World War, before her brutal and untimely death in 1919 at the hands of the proto-fascistic Freikorp. To mark her birthday, we have an extract from The Letters of Rosa Luxemburg that shows her characteristic mix of astute political and social analysis and incredible compassion for her fellow creatures. The letter, written around Christmas 1917 from her prison cell in Breslau to fellow SPD-member Sophie Liebknecht, relates an incident in the prison courtyard between a guard and a buffalo carrying piles of torn and bloodied clothes sent from the frontlines.....

جمعه ۲۲ اسفند ۱۳۹۳ برابر با ۱۳ مارس ۲۰۱۵

The Nicos Poulantzas I knew

Michael Löwy

Poulanztas was close to Goldmann and Sartre in his early thinking, before he discovered Althusser. So he was not completely foreign to what Ernst Bloch called the ‘warm currents’ of Marxism.

At a conference on Poulantzas’s work held in Greece about ten years ago, I presented a paper saying that the experience of ‘participatory budgeting’ in Porto Alegre, in Brazil, is an example of the combination of representative and direct democracy that Nicos talked about. I still think I was right on that point. Recently I returned to this idea in a short volume that I wrote together with Olivier Besancenot on the links between Marxism and anarchism. Indeed, there’s a chapter in this book in which we discuss anarchist ideas on direct democracy, and where we show that in practice anarchists have always made use of forms of delegation or representation.....

جمعه ۲۲ اسفند ۱۳۹۳ برابر با ۱۳ مارس ۲۰۱۵

Greece: Phase Two

Greek MP Costas Lapavitsas on the economic barriers ahead for Syriza and the challenges of eurozone exit

Sebastian Budgen & Costas Lapavitsas

People have to appreciate that for Greeks, joining the monetary union and using the same money as the rest of Western Europe was also a leap in identity. In popular consciousness, and given the history of Greece, it allowed Greeks to think that they had become “real Europeans.”...The importance of that has been manifested in the last few years. The deeper the crisis gets, the more absurd the membership in the monetary union becomes, the closer the attachment to the euro becomes among some sections of the population. And the reason is identity. People wish to maintain the contact with the idea of Europe, the idea of not being part of the Middle East, or the Near East.....

جمعه ۲۲ اسفند ۱۳۹۳ برابر با ۱۳ مارس ۲۰۱۵

The Meaning of International Women’s Day

The first International Women’s Day was celebrated 102 years ago by revolutionaries in Russia

Alexandra Kollantai

The following article was published in Pravda one week before the first celebration of the “Day of International Solidarity among the Female Proletariat” on March 8, 1913. In St Petersburg this day was marked by a call for a campaign against women workers’ lack of economic and political rights and for the unity of the working class, led by the self-emancipation of women workers.....

جمعه ۲۲ اسفند ۱۳۹۳ برابر با ۱۳ مارس ۲۰۱۵

The Next Four Months

Georgios Giannakopoulos

Though many were hard to accept, recent compromises have bought the Greek government valuable time.....Since the beginning of the economic crisis, a considerable part of the Greek left has argued that the only realistic alternative for the country is to default on its debts, exit the eurozone , and start printing its own currency.

Freed from Europe’s monetarist prison, the argument runs, Greece would be in a better position to radically restructure its economy in anti-capitalist directions. Such a prospect requires a well-thought-out and detailed “Plan B ” in order to confront the enormous challenges that would follow

جمعه ۲۲ اسفند ۱۳۹۳ برابر با ۱۳ مارس ۲۰۱۵

What’s driving Germany’s hardline stance on Greece?

Juan Torres López

The media and the centres of economic and political power in Europe try to make us believe that the difficulties in reaching agreement with Greece come from the demands and bad practices in this country and that it is the position of the new Greek government which justifies the intransigent treatment by its European partners, with Germany leading the way....