Options
are starting to run out for the Irish ruling class, already this week
they have deployed Jedward, Jack Charlton and the British Queen, while
Obama is waiting in the wings. Sooner
or later Bono and Geldof will appear and then it’ll be back to normal,
maybe they’ll even take the seals off the post boxes. Normal of course
is the IMF/EU, the Croke Park agreement and trying to reduce the
interest rates on the bailout.
It leaps across frontier,
defying all barriers, it laughs at the threats and curses of the ruling
class and it sweeps aside the forces of the state. It cannot be halted.
The mass protests that are spreading from one country to another have
caught all the forces of the old society by surprise. They do not know
how to react. If they do nothing, the movement grows, but if they
attempt to crush it, it will grow much more rapidly.
Latin American activists and supporters of the Bolivarian struggle gathered together in London on Saturday for this year’s HOV conference.
First it was
Tunis, then Cairo, then Wisconsin, and now Spain. The crisis of
capitalism has set in motion a tsunami that is impossible to control.
All the representatives of the old order have combined to halt it:
politicians and police, judges and trade union bureaucrats, the hired
press and the television, priests and “intellectuals”. But the tsunami
of revolt rolls on from one country to another, from one continent to
another.
If anyone was under any illusion that the mere detail of a
general election would have made any difference to the prospects for the
Irish economy and for unemployment in the state then by now their
illusions will have been severely tested.
How the
mighty have fallen! Whatever the truth of the allegations of sexual
assault and rape brought against him in New York, Dominique Strauss-Kahn
is guilty of horrific crimes. As the head of the IMF, he is guilty of
the political rape of the working people and the poorest sections of
society in many underdeveloped countries. He is guilty of the rape of
Greece and Portugal. Before finding himself in prison, he contributed to
locking millions of people into a living hell. His brutal “remedies”
inflict suffering and hardship on the poor in order to protect the
interests of the bankers, the capitalists, the rich.
The
revolutionary wave sweeping through the Middle East has acquired a new
dimension with the eruption of the Palestinian masses along Israel’s
borders last weekend. Every 15 May, Palestinians commemorate the Nakba
(catastrophe) of the declaration of independence of the state of Israel
on 15 May 1948. In recent years, protests have been marked by clashes
between Israeli security forces and stone-throwing Palestinian youths,
but Sunday was the first time the commemorations took on a more
widespread and militant character.
On 21st May the 2011 National Conference of Hands Off Venezuela in
Britain will be taking place in London. Free to members, or join on the
day, and hear speakers coming from Venezuela as well as debate and wider
discussion in solidarity with the Bolivarian Revolution. After the conference we will be joining a picket against the visit of Alvaro Uribe (the former
Colombian president) who is here to speak at a meeting of "investors" looking to make a quick buck at the expense of working people.
Last
Thursday’s elections in the North saw a further swing towards both the
DUP and Sinn Féin. This reflects a drawn out process that has gradually
eroded the support for the Ulster Unionist Party and the SDLP since the
signing of the Good Friday Agreement in 1998.
Alan Woods, Political Editor of the In Defence of
Marxism website and a leading cadre of the International Marxist
Tendency, and Muayad Ahmed a leading cadre of the Worker Communist
Party of Iraq & Editor of the ‘Alsheoiya Al-Omalya’ (Worker
Communism) monthly paper, spoke on the way forward for the Revolution
in the Arab world at a meeting in London.
The arrest
in Venezuela of Colombian political refugee Joaquín Pérez Becerra and
his hand over to the Colombian authorities by the government of
president Chávez has raised deeper questions about the strategy of the
Venezuelan revolution.