As Europe teeters once more, staring
financial collapse and slump in the face, we provide an analysis of what
happened in Iceland, the first country to go under as a result of the
global crisis of capitalism.
October 28 is a National holiday in Greece marking ΟΧΙ (No) Day – the refusal of Greece
in 1940 to accept the Italian ultimatum advanced by Mussolini, to allow
the Italian fascist troops to enter the country. Not only did Greek
forces stop the Italian invasion, but actually forced Mussolini’s troops
back into Albania. Every year it is celebrated as a day of “national
pride”. Not so this year! The masses took over the celebrations and used
them to express their anger at the Greek ruling class. Here we publish a
report from Athens written on the day of the “celebrations”
On October 25, people on the streets
were confronted by hundreds of riot police launching anti-riot grenades.
Plumes of tear gas rose as protesters fled from the rubber bullets of
the police. The scene we have described was not in the streets of Tunis,
Cairo or Homs, but occurred in the streets of Oakland, California in
the United States. On that Tuesday, the police forcefully evicted the
occupation taking place in Oscar Grant plaza, renamed so after the
police killing of Oscar Grant on New Year’s Eve 2009 in the city of
Oakland.
USA: The mainstream media has made much ado
about the fact that #OccupyWallStreet does not have a unified, cohesive
message. In trying to belittle it, they smugly point out that the
occupy movement is an amorphous and heterogeneous mix of people. Every
shade of political opinion and ideology is present: Makhno anarchists
and Ron Paul libertarians; Trotskyist socialists and New Age
neo-hippies; Anonymous and Zeitgeist; atheists and hard core believers;
the homeless and those who have quit their jobs to become full time
protesters against unemployment.
On Thursday in Athens during the mass
workers’ protests we saw the state collaborating with hooligans and
provocateurs against the labour movement. What is now required is a
political general strike! Here we publish a statement by the Greek
Marxists of Marxistiki Foni.
The death of Gaddafi and the final collapse of his regime closes one chapter. However, this merely marks one turning point in the situation. Now that the old regime is finally gone, a struggle will open up over the future of Libya. In this struggle we will see the forces of both revolution and counter-revolution trying to get the upper hand. Here we publish an analysis of the situation by Alan Woods.
Today
(October 19), the first day of the 48-hour general strike in Greece was
sensational. Apart from the government and public utilities workers that
participated in the strike massively, hundreds of thousands of workers
from the private sector came out on strike for the first time, and also
joining the millions of striking workers were tens of thousands of small
businesspeople and shopkeepers who closed the shutters to their shops
in solidarity.
As
Portugal’s right-wing government announced the harshest austerity cuts
in the country’s history, economic forecasts were revised down and the
main trade union confederations CGTP and UGT announced the calling of a
general strike.
On October
15, Rome saw one of the biggest demonstrations of the last few years in
Italy. Up to half a million people flooded the streets of the capital.
Not only was this a huge demonstration in terms of the numbers taking
part, but even more significantly you could hear the most radical
slogans of the last decade. The masses, inspired by Athens, Madrid and
New York, chanted “we don’t want to pay the debt”, “No to austerity”,
“No to the dictatorship of the ECB and the banks”, etc.
The decision of the Secretary Of
State to revoke Marian Price’s release from prison has been met with
widespread opposition from the Republican movement. The justification
given was that the threat that she poses has “significantly increased”
and that she had been encouraging support for an illegal organisation
based on her involvement in an Easter comm
Today ULU Marxists received a letter from a student at New York University (NYU),
Cecilia Gingerich, who was a member of the University of London Marxist
Society while studying in London in the spring of 2010. She is now a
participant in Occupy Wall Street and in her letter gives a first hand
account of her experience of the movement from the beginning, her
narrowly escaping the mass arrest of the 700 protestors on October 1st
and the impact that had on the movement in the following days. Now the
unions have joined the protestors on Wall Street, along with walk-outs
from high schools and colleges, which Cecilia has participated with
students from her own university.
The
financial crisis in Greece is constantly in the headlines and focusing
everyone’ attention on what it could lead to. As we have explained
before, the reason for this is not due to the objective economic weight
of the Greek economy within European and world capitalism. In absolute
terms Greece only accounts for 2% of the European Union’s GDP and even
its public debt is only 3% of the total public debt of the Eurozone. The
point is, however, that Greece is the weakest link in European
capitalism which is now at the centre of the global capitalist crisis.