International Marxist Tendency

February 20th and 21st saw Spain’s Congress (Parliament) debating the “State of the Nation”. While the debate was going on an opinion poll showed that of 80% the people do not feel they are represented by the Congress.  A growing wave of discontent is being translated into struggle. Spain is like a pressure cooker without a safety valve, facing a crisis of the regime which can only be solved through the eruption of the masses onto the scene.

Two years ago, on February 20th, 2011, a wave of protests began against the Moroccan regime. Was it just about imitating the events in Tunisia and Egypt or do young people and workers from Morocco have their own reasons to take to the streets?

Rui Faustino is a librarian and a civil servant in Lisbon. He talks about the economic crisis in Portugal as part of the general crisis of European capitalism. The government is implementing the demands of the troika (IMF, ECB, EU) by attacking the conditions and rights of the workers and youth, which leads to a social disaster. Meanwhile unemployment is rising to a record high. The workers and youth fought back on several occasions with demonstrations and general strikes. He is proposing a united front of the Left Block (Bloco de Esquerda) and the Communist Party against the austerity measures in breaking with the capitalist conception of Europe.

As we explained in Part One, the Arab Revolution brought down several despotic regimes, but due to the lack of a clear revolutionary workers’ alternative, the vacuum was filled by Islamist parties. But once in power, these forces soon began to expose their true reactionary nature, and thus prepared the ground for a second wave of mobilisations. How did all this affect Syria and other countries in the region?

There has been an aggressive campaign in the media that the recipe for growth and the solution to the economic crisis is privatisation and not the nationalisation of industry, agriculture, finance capital and the economy. Nationalisation has been dubbed as a failure and an economic disaster.

The ninth edition of The Communist, paper of the Moroccan section of the IMT, is out! This new edition contains articles on the new government budget, the uprising of the masses in the Sidi Youssef Ben Ali neighbourhood in Marrakech, the meaning of the imperialist intervention in Mali, and the future of the left student movement.