La situation sociale et politique, en France, évolue à une vitesse vertigineuse. En moins d’un mois, le développement du mouvement des gilets jaunes a placé le pays au seuil d’une crise révolutionnaire. Dans les jours qui viennent, ce seuil peut être franchi. Qu’est-ce qui en décidera ?
Depuis le 1er décembre, les journaux télévisés passent en boucle les images des affrontements qui ont embrasé Paris. Journalistes et politiciens se relayent, jour et nuit, pour « condamner les violences » – à l’exception notable des violences policières, qui ont fait au moins un mort, de nombreux blessés et visent sans cesse des rassemblements pacifiques. Les manifestations de lycéens sont brutalement dispersées. Lundi, les ambulanciers mobilisés ont subi le même sort. Pendant que la société officielle baigne l’Arc de Triomphe de ses larmes hypocrites, les grenades lacrymogènes et les coups de matraque pleuvent aux quatre coins du pays.
La mobilisation des gilets jaunes marque une étape importante dans le développement de la lutte des classes en France. Sans parti, sans syndicat, sans organisation préexistante, des centaines de milliers de personnes ont participé à des actions de blocage, balayant d’un revers de main les pseudo-concessions et les menaces du gouvernement. Ils sont soutenus par une grande majorité de la population. Leur détermination est à la hauteur de leur colère et de leurs souffrances. Ils brûlent d’indignation contre un gouvernement qui ne cesse d’accroître la pression fiscale sur les travailleurs, les retraités et les classes moyennes, pendant que les plus riches bénéficient de toutes sortes d’« allègements de charges », de subventions et autres ristournes fiscales. Les gilets jaunes ont parfaitement compris que l’argument de la « transition écologique » n’est qu’un nouveau prétexte pour piller la masse de la population au profit d’une poignée de parasites richissimes.
Apologists for capitalism argue that it is the best, most-efficient system that could ever possibly exist. But the current period of crisis and chaos prove otherwise. Today, the COVID-19 pandemic has triggered an economic collapse that threatens to throw society back to the 1930s, sending the world into a full-blown depression. Clearly, something is rotten at the heart of the system. The advocates of Keynesian ideas - or modern varieties like Modern Monetary Theory - cannot provide a real solution to this crisis. In his talk from this year's International Marxist University, Adam Booth, a leading activist of Socialist Appeal, explains why capitalism has failed, and what the way forward is for humanity.
On the morning of Thursday, 19 November, organisations that make up the People’s Revolutionary Alternative (APR) protested in repudiation of the media censorship of this left-wing coalition, carried out by public and private media during the electoral campaigns for the parliamentary elections on 6 December. This demonstration took place in front of the Venezuelan Television Corporation (VTV), and was attended by numerous candidates and leading figures of the alliance.
As has become customary, the recent war in Karabakh is viewed from two sides in Russia: liberals extol the virtues of Turkish generals trained by NATO and Israeli drones, while both secret and obvious Putin admirers tell us on Liva (russo-ukrainian media) that revolutionaries (in quotes or without) always lose wars. There is not a grain of truth in this dichotomy. The militia armies created by the bourgeois revolutions have had great victories. Not only in the 19th century. Actually, the history of the Nagorno-Karabakh Republic began with the victory of the Armenian militia in the war three decades ago. Then, Azerbaijan was richer, had a more numerous and well-armed army, but if Azerbaijan had local successes in that war, then they are associated not with former president Mutalibov, the director of a local refrigerator plant, or the KGB general Aliyev, but with a short period of rule by a half-crazy dissident-pan-Turkist, Elchibey. Unlike the draftees, students and workers who were arrested on the streets of Baku, his supporters at least understood why they were fighting. It was this factor that ensured the victory of Armenia in that war; high fighting morale and conscientious discipline of the militia army, formed against the background of a high level of education and general culture. The war in Karabakh, and the hardships and casualties associated with it, became the foundation of modern Armenia.
