This time around, the starting signal was neither a terrorist attack nor an assassination attempt directed against Maduro. Trump has chosen a group of conspiracy experts (Abrams, Pence, Bolton, Rubio) to pursue escalation and has opted to seize the Venezuelan oil enterprise operating in the United States (CITGO). He has brushed aside all principles of legal guarantee in his quest to appropriate the world’s largest concentration of crude oil reserves.

By G.LL. Williams
 

February 10, 2019 — Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal — Britain’s politics is in crisis. Today there is a need to think about British politics to develop a better Left politics in Britain. Britain is faced with a simple choice today: capitalism or socialism, barbarism or socialism. British politics needs to lead to a better Britain — a socialist Britain.

By Steve Ellner

February 9, 2019 — Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal  republished from NACLA: Report on the Americas —  Since its outset, the Trump administration has ratcheted up pressure on Venezuela and radicalized its positions. In the process, the Venezuelan opposition has become more and more associated with—and dependent on—Washington and its allies. An example is the opposition protests slated for February 4. The actions were timed to coincide with the European Union’s “ultimatum” stating that they would recognize the shadow government of Juan Guaidó if President Nicolás Maduro did not call elections within a week’s time.

By Dick Nichols

February 9, 2019 — Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal — On February 15, 2003, in the face of the looming US-led war against Iraq’s Saddam Hussein, the Spanish state saw the biggest demonstrations in its history. Part of a worldwide anti-war outpouring, about four million people turned out on the day, with 1.3 million in Barcelona, a million in Madrid and half-a-million in Valencia.

Leaders of the Spanish Socialist Workers Party (PSOE) were among those at the head of these oceanic demonstrations, which directly targeted the conservative Spanish People’s Party (PP) government of prime minister José María Aznar.

By G.LL. Williams

February 9, 2019 — Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal — Brexit, the British vote to leave the European Union in 2016, has created a major political crisis in Britain and in the EU. This crisis has also created a dire political situation in Great Britain for the Left and for the Right. The Left has split between those supporting Britain leaving the EU and those supporting Britain staying in the EU. The close, but decisive, victory for Leave in the June Referendum, divide the British Left on the issue of the European Union and the place of Britain in Europe. This crisis has affected all the major forces of the British Left, including in the Labour Party and the other groups of the British Left. This crisis within the British Left needs to be confronted and tackled so that the British Left can unite on a common politics and a common programme about Brexit and Britain’s place in Europe. This issue and disunity is likely to cause serious problems for the British Left, unless it can be solved. The British Left cannot afford to be divided over Brexit and Europe. The Left needs a Brexit policy and a Brexit politics: it needs to come together on the politics of Brexit and present a united position on Brexit. A better position on Brexit will allow it to push for a better Britain today and for a better Britain in the future.

By Stansfield Smith

January 26, 2019 — Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal — For over two years we have been told Putin’s Russia has interfered with the 2016 US presidential elections. We now find the US government has decided it can unilaterally invalidate the actual presidential elections in Venezuela and recognize a person of its choosing as president. This is just the latest US-backed coup attempt against a progressive Latin American government, following Venezuela (2002), Haiti (2004, and every subsequent election), Bolivia (2008), Honduras (2009), Ecuador (2010, 2015), Paraguay (2012), and Nicaragua (2018).

January 25, 2019 — Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal — Sam Wainwright (who has just completed an honours thesis titled "Crisis and Renewal in the French left) speaks about the Yellow Vest movement in France at the Socialist Alliance summer school on January 16.

By James Jordan

January 24, 2019 — Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal — According to conventional wisdom, there should be no serious talk of foreign military intervention in Venezuela. But these aren’t conventional times. The conventional playbook would adopt a strategy of foreign coordination of the Venezuelan opposition, economic sabotage, infiltration of the military, and manipulation of popular movements against the elected government. All this is being done, but, so far, unsuccessfully. The frustrations of the Bolivarian movement’s enemies are palpable. Does this mean intervention is imminent? And what would such an intervention look like?

As a participant in this lie of the “war to end all wars” New Zealand had achieved the unique result of suffering the highest military casualty rate of any nation involved in that war.

January 21, 2019 — Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal — Russia is said to be an imperialist world power, one in conflict with the imperialist superpower that is the United States. Russia has been characterized in this manner both during the period of the Soviet Union and after the Soviet Union collapsed and separate states were formed. Russia is said to be imperialist both when it was a socialist state and now as a capitalist state.

Russia is also said to be a non-imperial capitalist state, one still struggling to recover from the crisis of the Soviet collapse and the political and economic catastrophe of the Boris Yeltsin years, when it degenerated into a near neo-colonial client looted by the US.[1]

This letter from John Riddell and Mike Taber was first posted at John Riddell's Marxist Essays and Commentary blog

*****

Dear friends,

Please join us in raising funds for the ninth installment of books in the Comintern publishing series The Communist Women’s Movement, 1920-1922. To help raise $3,000 in special editorial costs, go to https://www.gofundme.com/comintern-book-on-women

By Patrick Bond

January 19, 2019 — Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal — World Bank president Jim Yong Kim is an ex-leftist who claims that in the mid-1990s he wanted to shut down the Bank. At the time, it was an entirely valid, realistic goal of the 50 Years is Enough! Campaign and especially the World Bank Bonds Boycott. Kim’s co-edited Dying for Growth (2000) book-length analysis of the Bank’s attacks on Global-South public health offered very useful ammunition.

By Sam Gordon

January 19, 2019 — Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal — With the passing of 2018 we witness the passing of 100 years since the end of World War I. This year the Europeans, the whiter parts of the former British Empire, now Commonwealth of Nations, and the United States bade a somber farewell to the “war to end all wars.”

Since the end of hostilities much has been written about the suffering endured by men in uniform between 1914 and 1918. Collections of poetry, biographies — possibly most notably Robert Graves’s Good Bye To All That — and volumes of fiction are stacked on library shelves. Historical analysis has made its way into the printed news, radio and television.

Some even venture that Australia and New Zealand gained their national identity during the conflict. I’ll leave others, better placed than me, to deliberate on that one.

Some, but less, coverage has been devoted to the outcomes of the conflict. It saw the end of some empires, the expansion of others, and in the case of the US, following the acquisition of lands held by Native Americans, the emergence into new theaters of exploitation.

January 18, 2019 — Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal — What follows is chapter fifteen from volume one of Ernest Tate’s memoir, Revolutionary Activism in the 1950s and 1960s, published by Resistance Books, London. In this chapter, using archival sources, he describes in detail how a small group of Canadian revolutionary socialists in the Socialist Educational League, S.E.L., later to become the League for Socialist Action, L.S.A., of which he was a leader, organized in 1960 to defend the early Cuban Revolution against a right-wing propaganda offensive inspired by American imperialism, designed to quarantine it from the Canadian people. Their campaign in defense of Cuba, he writes, was one of the most successful of its kind in the English-speaking world.