Production at the
American dream factory has slowed down as workers organised in the Writers
Guild of America just completed their third week on strike. 4,000 marched in
support of the strike down the famous Hollywood Boulevard.
Although Dieterich does his best to cloud the issue, the facts speak
for themselves – Baduel has broken with the revolution, and now stands
on the side of the counterrevolution. To propose the unity of the two
forces – revolution and counterrevolution – is like hoping to unite
fire and water.
The Marxists have long argued that the only way forward for the
Venezuelan revolution is to strike blows against the
counterrevolutionary bourgeoisie, by expropriating the bankers,
landlords and capitalists, etc. However, there are other voices saying
rather different things. One of the most persistent of these voices is
that of Heinz Dieterich, who has been waging a noisy campaign in favour
of what he calls "Socialism of the XXI Century" – a strange kind of
socialism indeed in that it differs very little from capitalism.
On Saturday the "Der
Funke" Marxist tendency organised a big event with Trotsky’s grandson, Esteban
Volkov, as special guest, to commemorate and celebrate the 90th anniversary of
the 1917 Russian Revolution. Around 200 people came to listen to the speeches in
defence of "Red October" and between 400-500 celebrated all night long at the
party that was organised after the meeting.
When you watch a Michael Moore film, it doesn’t take long to realise just why the US bosses find him so irritating and why his films have never been shown on US mainstream TV.
Today, 7th of November a big meeting organised by the Danish
Marxist tendency, Socialistisk Standpunkt, will take place in Copenhagen to
celebrate the 90th anniversary of the Russian Revolution. However,
2007 marks another anniversary, and one with special importance for Denmark. It
is 75 years since Leon Trotsky held his last public speech in November 1932,
which was held at a huge meeting in Copenhagen, where Trotsky was invited by
the Social-Democratic Students Association.
On Saturday November 3 President Pervez
Musharraf declared virtual martial law, imposing a state of emergency
throughout Pakistan,
suspending the Constitution and replacing superior courts. This amounts to his
second coup d’etat after he seized power in October 12, 1999. It is a desperate
move that underlines the extremely unstable nature of the regime, which is
losing support by the day.
The December 2006 re-election of Chávez marked a new shift to the left
in the Bolivarian revolution. One of the key features of this was the
initiative to launch a United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV).
Last Saturday, October
20th, hundreds of thousands workers and youth marched through the
streets of Rome, called out by the main left papers to put pressure on
the Prodi government to change its policies in favour of working people.
The Indian Hindustan Times published an interview with Lal Khan in its
Sunday edition of 21st October. In this newspaper, which claims to be
the largest in the world with a circulation of 35 million, Lal Khan
openly defends the ideas of socialist revolution.
The British media has been giving enormous coverage to the manoeuvres of Benazir Bhutto, leader of the Pakistan People’s Party and former Prime Minister, in seeking to negotiate a return to Pakistan from her comfortable exile in London. In this extract from a wider analysis (see Whither Pakistan on Marxist.com ), Lal Khan, leading figure of the Marxist tendency, The Struggle, explains what is going on.
A critical
comment by Moroccan Marxists on the line of thought developed in the article,
The
victory of Hamas in Gaza and the questions facing Israeli and Palestinian
workers by Yehuda Stern in Jerusalem, that we
published on Wednesday, 11 July 2007. It is the opinion of the Editorial Board
that the Moroccan Marxists are absolutely correct in their criticisms.