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Left Politics

Colombian Left May Be On The Verge Of Winning Power

May 31, 2022 Andrew Willis Garcés, Andrea Parra, and Nikki Marín Baena, Convergence. , , ,
The Colombian Left has seen its greatest electoral successes ever in 2022. In March, during the combined congressional general election and presidential primary (yes, they do both on the same day), for the first time ever, the Left party alliance won the most congressional seats of any party, and the two Left presidential candidates came in first and third, respectively, in votes received across all parties. The governing right-wing party has almost totally collapsed, winning only 12% of the vote. Those elected to Congress in March included a few leaders of an historic general strike last May, including a college student who went viral conducting an outdoor protest orchestra. Most U.S. news coverage of Colombia references gang violence and drug cartels, masking the vibrant web of Afro-Colombian, indigenous, feminist, student, campesino and worker movements that have shaken the country with mobilizations and now electoral wins over the last year.

Southern Workers Gather To Build Workers Assembly Movement

May 21, 2022 Southern Workers Assembly, Workers.org. , , ,
Under the slogan “Build the Workers Assembly Movement! Organize the South!” nearly 80 workers from eight Southern states gathered in Durham, North Carolina, for a Southern Workers Assembly Organizing School over the weekend of April 29 to May 1. Workers came to the School from Atlanta; New Orleans; Charleston, South Carolina; Richmond and Tidewater, Virginia; Charlotte, Raleigh, Durham, Asheville and Eastern North Carolina; northern Kentucky; and elsewhere. Over the last year, the network of areas building Workers Assemblies across the South has grown substantially to include nine different cities, the development of several industry-based councils — including Amazon, health care and education workers — and interest in developing assemblies in additional locations as well. 

The Left Must Be Ruthlessly Strategic

May 9, 2022 Nathan J. Robinson, Current Affairs. , ,
Sometimes I wish there were as many leftist reading groups on The Art of War as there are on Marx’s Capital. It’s not that I don’t think leftists should understand socialist economics. Plenty of people I respect teach classes on Marx’s Capital. But it’s one thing to know what you want; it’s another to know how to get it. One fair critique of the revived American left is that while we have developed a compelling platform and inspired many to embrace the creed of democratic socialism, we are insufficiently savvy about the pursuit and use of power. I don’t think this can entirely be blamed on the left. American socialism has always been marginal, and it’s impressive that we have as many democratic socialists in office around the United States as we do.

The Left Has Culture, But The World Still Belongs To The Banks

February 11, 2022 Vijay Prashad, Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research. , , ,
‘[T]here is great intellectual poverty on the part of the right wing’, Héctor Béjar says in our latest dossier, A Map of Latin America’s Present: An Interview with Héctor Béjar (February 2022). ‘There is a lack of right-wing intellectuals everywhere’. Béjar speaks with a great deal of authority on these matters because, for the past sixty years, he has been intimately involved in the intellectual and political debates which have taken place in his native Peru and across Latin America. ‘In the cultural world’, Béjar notes, ‘the left has everything, the right has nothing’. When it comes to the great cultural debates of our time, which are manifest in the political sphere around social changes (the rights of women and minorities, the responsibility to nature and to human survival, etc.), the needle of history bends almost fully to the left.

Cryptocurrencies: A View From The Left

January 8, 2022 Thomas Redshaw, Red Pepper. , ,
The use of cryptocurrencies is rapidly increasing across the world. In 2020, scholars at the University of Cambridge estimated there were 101 million people using cryptocurrencies worldwide, an increase from 35 million just two years previously. The rise of cryptocurrency is usually a story of pizzas bought with bitcoins now worth over a billion dollars, kingpins of darknet drugs markets ordering assassinations and hospitals being held to ransom by anonymous hackers. These new levels of activity however are pushing cryptocurrency, and its underlying blockchain technology into the mainstream – with significant consequences. The first and arguably biggest impact so far is cultural.

Next Steps In Recovering Democracy In Honduras After Historic Left Victory

December 7, 2021 Peoples Dispatch. , , ,
Following Xiomara Castro’s victory in the Honduran elections, Bertha Zúniga Cáceres, Coordinator, COPINH, spoke to Peoples Dispatch about what this means for people’s movements in the country. She talks about the government’s plans in its first 100 days, what movements like COPINH think are the next steps for rebuilding democracy, and more.

Five Reasons Why The Left Won In Venezuela

November 23, 2021 Leonardo Flores, Popular Resistance. , , ,
For the first time in four years, every major opposition party in Venezuela participated in elections. For the fifth time in four years, the left won in a landslide. Voters elected 23 governors, 335 mayors, 253 state legislators and 2,471 municipal councilors. The governing United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV) won at least 19 of 23 governorships (one race remains too close to call) and the Caracas mayoralty in the November 21 “mega-elections.” Of the 335 mayoral races, the vote count has been completed in 322 of them, with PSUV and its coalition taking 205, opposition coalitions 96 and other parties 21. Over 70,000 candidates ran for these 3,082 offices, and 90% of the vote was counted and verified within hours of polls closing.

The Politics Of Protection

November 23, 2021 Sarah Jaffe, Dissent Magazine. , , ,
The 2008 financial meltdown and the global economic crisis that followed put thousands of cracks into what Mark Fisher called “capitalist realism”—the idea that it’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism. The neoliberal era appeared to be at its end. But it staggered on; the next decade saw most Western states respond with the typical neoliberal playbook. Now, the coronavirus pandemic has made it even easier to imagine the end of the world, and the response of those same states has been quite different. Is neoliberalism actually ending? And what comes next? Political theorist Paolo Gerbaudo explores those questions in his new book, The Great Recoil: Politics After Populism and Pandemic. 

Voices From The African Left: China Vs The US And The New Cold War

September 29, 2021 Rania Khalek, BreakThrough News. , , ,
Western governments along with their loyal media and think tanks warn that China is colonizing, exploiting, and forcing Africa into a debt trap. Is this true? Or is it Cold War propaganda? What is China’s actual role in Africa and how does it compare with the West’s? To help us understand what's really happening, Rania Khalek was joined by two leading African leftists: Mikaela Nhondo Erskog, an educator and researcher with Pan Africanism Today, a researcher at the Tricontinental Institute, and a member of the organizing committee of No Cold War. And Kambale Musavuli, an activist, writer, and analyst with the Center for Research on the Congo. Read the report Erskog worked on, “Defending Our Sovereignty: US Military Bases in Africa and the Future of African Unity.”

The Limits Of ‘Lived Experience’

September 15, 2021 Erica Caines, Black Agenda Report. , ,
Online, the “left” continues to find itself in a never ending series of bad faith arguments around self-determination. Many terms/frameworks that may have had a subversive character within their original context when first articulated, have now been incorporated and distorted by liberalism encouraging radical individualism and anti-materialism. More and more, analyses that are dependent upon identity and “lived experience” are propped up, ultimately resulting in ad hominems, mud-slinging, intellectual dishonesty, and the inevitable tried-and-true anti-communism. Anti-communist rhetoric from self-identifying socialists/communists is not new, but the relatively recent trend of rejecting revolutionary theory in favor of “lived experience” shows a lack in our processes for political education.

Loyalty

September 10, 2021 Dakotah Lilly, Popular Resistance. , ,
Whenever I wear one of my many shirts, necklaces, or buttons adorned with the faces of great leaders such as Hugo Chavez, Nestor and Cristina Kirchner, Che, or Evita, I will commonly get a comment in real life or on social media about how I am “worshipping” or engaging in a “cult of personality”. It’s not true, what I am exhibiting is loyalty, which is expressly different because of a simple fact; this political loyalty is a two way street. Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner, two time president of Argentina and current Vice President put it succinctly on the day of her inauguration as VP in 2019. She says that “Loyalty, that value that some do not understand and think that loyalty is only following a political leader. No! Loyalty between a politician and the people must be two points. The People are not stupid.

Evo Morales And Social Groups Create ‘People’s General Staff’

September 1, 2021 Telesur English. , , ,
"The social, union and indigenous organizations decided to form the General Staff of the People for the people as a space to defend the sovereignty and dignity of our democratic and multicultural revolution (...)," Morales announced on Monday after a meeting of leaders, held in Cochabamba in the center of the South American country. In this sense, the former president stressed that the "Estado Mayor" is made up of "national organizations affiliated and not affiliated to the Central Obrera Boliviana (COB)," including the peasant and indigenous confederations grouped in the Unity Pact, one of the pillars of the ruling Movement Towards Socialism (MAS). The founding declaration of the "Estado Mayor" has been disclosed by the media.

ALBA Movements Issue Alert Over Coup Attempt In Peru

August 23, 2021 Kawsachun News. , , ,
ALBA Movimientos is issuing an alert of a coup underway against the government of Pedro Castillo in Peru and is calling for international solidarity, saying, the removal of Héctor Bejar from the Foreign Ministry, just two weeks into government, “is a clear sign of the coup in progress in its political & military facet and expresses the linkage of right-wing parties with fascist sectors of the human rights violations [of past decades]”.

Peru: A Coup Brewing

August 18, 2021 Ángel Guerra Cabrera, Orinoco Tribune. , , ,
The onslaught of the Peruvian right wing against the government of President Pedro Castillo Terrones began long before he was proclaimed president after many delays—it began when his passage to the second round of the elections was confirmed—and has been intensifying for days with virulence and a frankly coup-like character. It includes, among other maneuvers, demands for the president’s resignation in small but very widespread demonstrations of Fujimorism, and requests from deputies for the replacement of Prime Minister Guido Bellido and Foreign Minister Héctor Béjar. The latter, by the way, has laid the basis for an independent and sovereign foreign policy, a defender of non-intervention, a promoter of unity and regional integration through UNASUR and CELAC, which is a distinct departure from the moribund Lima Group: “we condemn blockades, embargoes and unilateral sanctions that only affect the peoples,” he has said.

From Elder To Ancestor: Remembering Glen Ford

August 9, 2021 Margaret Flowers, Clearing the FOG. , , ,
Glen Ford, a brilliant and powerful force in the media throughout his life, died recently at the age of 71. In this century, Glen was the founder of the Black Commentator in 2002 and then Black Agenda Report in 2006. He was an activist as well on a range of issues, part of the Black is Back Coalition. In this program, Clearing the FOG compiles a few previous conversations with Glen about the state of Black America, systemic racial injustice, how power is organized and how to confront power. In the final interview, from November of 2018, Glen describes fascism in the United States and the lack of resistance to it. The interviews were conducted prior to the death of Clearing the FOG co-host Kevin Zeese.  Clearing the FOG extends its condolences to the family and friends of Glen Ford. His wit and wisdom are deeply missed.
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