"Probably the most important Russian monopoly is Gazprom, the world’s largest gas company, which by 2008 had about 400,000 employees. The company is reported to control over 93% of Russia’s natural gas production and about a quarter of the world’s known gas reserves."

By Chris Slee

April 7, 2014 – Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal -- Russia and China both play an important role in world politics. This includes involvement in armed conflicts distant from their borders. Russia for example supplies arms to the Syrian government. Both Russia and China supplied arms to the Sri Lankan government during its war against the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, who were fighting for an independent Tamil homeland in the north and east of the island of Sri Lanka. (The LTTE was defeated in 2009.)

In some cases, Russia and China intervene on the same side as the Western imperialist powers. This was the case in Sri Lanka, where the US, Britain, Israel and other Western powers also aided the Sri Lankan government in its brutal war against the LTTE, which was in fact a war against the Tamil people.

Land & Labour: Marxism, Ecology and Human History
By Martin Empson
London: Bookmarks Publications, 2014

The Left Unity conference backed the health policy commission’s “10 point plan to re-instate, protect, and improve the [National Health Service] NHS”.

By Tom Walker

April 2, 2014 -- Left Unity -- Left Unity’s national conference on Saturday, March 29, saw delegates come together in Manchester’s Museum of Science and Industry to make decisions about the policy of this new party.

The party’s founding conference in November set Left Unity’s broad direction as a new party of the left and set up its constitution. This conference looked in more detail at policy areas including economics, health, housing and anti-racism, based on months of work put in by those who volunteered for the party’s policy commissions as well as many submissions from branches. (You can see the motions booklet here.)

By Tony Iltis

March 30, 2014 -- Green Left Weekly -- The United Nations General Assembly voted on March 27 ― with 100 votes for, 11 against and 58 abstentions ― to not recognise the results of the March 16 referendum in Crimea. In the poll, most voted for the territory to leave Ukraine and join Russia.

The resolution was put by Ukraine and sponsored by the United States, the European Union and other Western powers, including Australia.

There are certainly questions about the conditions in which the referendum was held ― and of electoral fraud. But the resolution specifically upheld the “territorial integrity” of Ukraine, thereby condemning the unilateral separation of Crimea from Ukraine regardless of the circumstance of the vote.

The resolution’s sponsors have portrayed the events in Crimea since the February 21 overthrow of the Ukrainian government of Viktor Yanukovich as a Russian invasion, a viewpoint not questioned in the Western corporate media.

Russia and its allies have, for their part, portrayed the events as an act of self-determination.

Striking platinum workers, January 30, 2014.

'We are looking forward to the mass workers party to challenge the neoliberal ANC government and its capitalist allies'

Statement of the Democratic Left Front, South Africa

April 2, 2014 -- On the eve of the May 2014 national elections the Democratic Left Front held its second conference since its formation in 2011 at Stay City in Berea, Johannesburg, from March 27-30, 2014.

One hundred and forty delegates representing a number of important popular movements, independent trade unions, women, youth, socialist and environmental organisations from around the country met and were decisive in embracing the NUMSA break with the Tripartite [[African National Congress, Congress of South African Trade Unions, South African Communist Party] Alliance and the building of a mass united front and a movement for socialism. We believe that this represents the most significant opportunity for placing democratic, left socialist politics at the centre of our country’s political system.

Suddenly politics has become interesting. The dominance of the ANC’s exhausted nationalism and the [opposition] Democratic Alliance’s [the former apartheid parties] regurgitation of big-business interests will be decisively challenged and, we have no doubt, defeated. Tweedledee and Tweedledummer will meet their match.

Chavez’ revolutionary government spent $300 million to build a futuristic funicular [cable car]. It eliminates hours of climbing on foot up and down treacherous mountain sides to reach jobs, schools, health clinics and other vital destinations. It benefits tens of thousands of shack dwellers of San Agustin—most of whom are African descendants.

By Arlene Eisen

March 27, 2014 -- Venezuelanalysis.com -- It’s late morning in Caracas, February 12, 2014. From the restaurant inside the hotel around the corner from Plaza Venezuela we can hear chanting, but it’s too muffled to understand. Are they yelling “Maduro Salida” or “Maduro/burro Salida”[1] or something else? From the window, we can see people, almost all smiling white people, streaming down the street to join the first huge anti-government demonstration that signalled the onset of the current outrages in Venezuela.

Far-right militia in Ukraine. Photo via Drugoi

Kolesnik Dmitry is editor of a left-wing Ukrainian website. The following inteview was published at Counterfire on March 26, 2014 and first appeared on the In Defence of Marxism website. Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal has published a range of views from the left on developments in Ukraine and Crimea HERE.

* * *

Can you introduce yourself and the website?

Revolutionary Activism in the 1950s & 60s: A Memoir
By Ernest Tate
Volume 1, Canada 1955-1965
Vol. 1: ISBN 978-0-902869-69-1; EAN: 9780902869691
Vol. 2: ISBN 978-0-902869-60-8; EAN: 9780902869608
Resistance Books, London, 2014

Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal readers can read an excerpt HERE. To order a copy, email terryconway@tiscali.co.uk.

Review by Barry Sheppard

March 30, 2014 – Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal -- European Trotskyists writing recently about this movement tend to give short shrift to Trotskyism in North America, in the US and Canada. An example is An Impatient Life by French leader Daniel Bensaid, who died this year.

By Venezuela's Ministry of People’s Power

March 2014 -- Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal -- The passing away of Venezuela's President Comandante Hugo Rafael Chávez Frías, the top leader of the Bolivarian Revolution, on March 5, 2013, was perceived by Venezuelan people as an irreparable loss, one of historical dimensions.

During 14 years, President Chávez led Venezuela along a victorious political process that pursued the recovery of the nation’s dignity and the construction of social justice. The affectionate warrior who with his accurate words guided Venezuelans through the transition between two centuries, and despite big obstacles, was able to take society to an upper level regarding satisfaction of people’s needs...

In the middle of the grief ...,Venezuela's people decided to keep on walking the revolutionary way and elected Nicolás Maduro as their president on April 14, 2013.

But one day after the presidential elections, opposition supporters of the candidate Henrique Capriles took to the streets complying with his call to drain their repressed anger, and spread death and destruction in opposition bastions governed by right wing’s mayors.

By Egypt Solidarity

March 25, 2014 -- Egypt Solidarity -- A court in the Upper Egyptian province of Minya has sentenced 529 defendants to death in a trial which has been condemned as “grotesque” by Amnesty International.

Take action now – sign our statement using the form at http://egyptsolidarityinitiative.org/2014/03/25/take-action-on-egypt-death-sentences/ . Signatures will be published and delivered to the Egyptian embassy by April 28, the likely date for an appeal against the sentences.

We condemn the death sentences issued by a court in Minya province in Egypt on March 24, 2014, against 529 defendants who were found guilty of the murder of a police officer during the storming of Matay police station in August 2013.

The use of the death sentence against such a large number of defendants underscores that the current regime is not interested in finding out the truth about the events which led to this prosecution but rather in imposing collective punishment on its opponents.

The sentences were issued without hearing any arguments from the defence in a trial which lasted only 45 minutes according to defence lawyers.

Hundreds participate in the democratic plenums.

By Olivier Besancenot

March 19, 2014 -- International Viewpoint -- Why does Bosnia-Herzegovina inspire so little interest and curiosity in the media and the political class when, on the contrary, Ukraine is front-page news? Is it because of its non-membership in the European Union? Is it because its name evokes the war that, 20 years ago, claimed the lives of hundreds of thousands of men and women -- more than 200,000 dead and 600,000 exiles -- in the face of virtual indifference in the West as to what was happening one and a half hours by plane from Paris? Or because it often wakes up to the call of the muezzin?

Yet in recent weeks, this country has also risen in revolt. The people have rebelled against social injustice and poverty and expressed loud and clear their desire for change.

By Anej Korsika

March 19, 2014 -- Links Internaional Journal of Socialist Renewal -- On March 8, the Initiative for Democratic Socialism (IDS) had its founding congress and officially transformed itself into a political party. In the invitation to the congress we have written that in the last 20 years all political parties in Slovenia have been representatives of one and the same fraction, the fraction of capital. We have emphasised that it is high time Slovenia gets a proper socialist party that openly and consciously represents a socialist alternative to both the crisis in Slovenia as well as the crisis in European Union.

By Rupen Savoulian

March 24, 2014 -- Antipodean Atheist, posted at Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal with the author's permission -- In 2005, Palestinian human rights groups and civil rights organisations launched a campaign of boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) against the state of Israel. This campaign has multiple aims, one of them being to pressure the Israeli government to comply with United Nations resolutions and ensure that its policies conform with international law and the Universal principles of human rights.

Specifically, the BDS campaign intends to achieve the full recognition of Palestinians as equal citizens within the state of Israel, to achieve the right of return of Palestinian refugees displaced by Israel since 1948, as demanded by Article 11 of the United Nations general assembly resolution 194, to end Israeli occupation of Palestinian and Arab land, cease the building of settlements and dismantle the ongoing Israeli West Bank barrier (also known as the Apartheid Wall).

In three parts.

[For more on NUMSA, click HERE. For more on South Africa, click HERE.]

Presentation by Irvin Jim, general secretary of National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa; chaired by John S. Saul.

March 6, 2014 -- Left Streamed, posted at Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal with permission -- The dramatic upsurge of popular grass-roots protest in South Africa's townships and rural areas in recent years has marked a “rebellion of the poor” in that country. The working-class itself has also been assertive, prompting the African National Congress administered state's horrific massacre of dissident mineworkers at Marikana in 2012.

Until recently, leading trade unions have confined been within the tripartite governing coalition of the ANC, the South African Communist Party and the Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU), the country's largest trade union federation.