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Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal seeks to promote the exchange of information, experience of struggle, theoretical analysis and views of political strategy and tactics within the international left. It is a forum for open and constructive dialogue between active socialists from different political traditions. It seeks to bring together those in the international left who are opposed to neoliberal economic and social policies, and reject the bureaucratic model of "socialism" that arose in the Soviet Union, Eastern Europe and China.
Inspired by the unfolding socialist revolution in Venezuela, as well as the continuing example of socialist Cuba, Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal is a journal for "Socialism of the 21st century", and the discussions and debates flowing from that powerful example of socialist renewal.
Links is also proud to be the sister publication of Green Left Weekly, the world's leading red-green newspaper, and we urge readers to visit that site regularly.
Please explore Links and subscribe (click on "Subscribe to Links" or "Follow Links on Twitter" in the left menu). Links welcomes readers' constructive comments (but please read the "Comments policy" above).
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The age of unreason or misology: The knowledge-practice relation and its political significance
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By Raju J Das
September 29, 2018 — Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal — In many contemporary societies, there is a typical distrust of knowledge claims that are backed by reason and evidence. Correspondingly, there is a popular penchant for knowledge claims that have no basis in reason or evidence. It is as if post-modernism is being put into practice in popular circles.
Is Latin America still the US’s 'backyard'?
By Alexander Main
September 17, 2018 — Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal reposted from CEPR — In late spring of 2008, the prestigious Council on Foreign Relations published a report titled “US-Latin America Relations: A New Direction for a New Reality.” Timed to influence the foreign policy agenda of the next US administration, the report asserted: “the era of the US as the dominant influence in Latin America is over.” At the Summit of the Americas in April the following year, President Barack Obama appeared to be on the same page as the report’s authors, promising Latin American leaders a “new era” of “equal partnership” and “mutual respect.” Four years later, Obama’s second secretary of state, John Kerry, went a step further, solemnly declaring before his regional counterparts at the Organization of American States (OAS) that the “era of the Monroe Doctrine is over.” The speech ― heralding the end of a nearly 200-year-old policy widely seen as a blank check for US intervention in the region ― was warmly applauded, and perhaps earned Kerry some forgiveness for having referred to Latin America as the US’s “backyard” a few months earlier.
The politics of hurricanes: how climate catastrophe victimises the poor
By Phil Hearse
September 17, 2018 — Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal — Climate change catastrophe is, as this article is written, facing hundreds of thousands on the eastern seaboard of the United States and on the Philippines island of Luzon, as Hurricane Florence and Typhoon Mangkhut make landfall simultaneously. Mangkhut also threatens Hong Kong, South China and maybe Vietnam.
In the United States, Donald Trump has promised all necessary aid to the affected states – North and South Carolina and Virginia in particular. But the recent hurricane history of the United States is one of neglect and indifference towards poor and non-white populations – often the same people – not least by the Trump administration towards the people of Puerto Rico.
Philippines: A critique of Duterte’s ‘Cha-cha’ and federalism
By Sonny Melencio
September 9, 2018 — Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal — The draft charter, also called the “Bayanihan Constitution,” presented by the Constitutional Committee headed by former Supreme Court Justice Reynato Puno to President Rodrigo Duterte, is neither imbued with Bayanihan spirit in its drafting or its implementation of federalism.
Bayanihan spirit means the entire community in action supporting the interests of all its members. The Bayanihan Constitution is not at all like this. It is not the result of consultation among the people, or the various sectors and communities that encompass the nation. It is the creation of a 22-person committee, all appointed by President Duterte himself. There has not been a single consultation where people have been asked about their views and proposals for a Charter change (Cha-cha).
Taking up the struggle: Defending electricity users in Mexico
By Nevin Siders
September 7, 2018 — Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal — The National Assembly of Electric Energy Users (ANUEE) imploded under the carrot-and-stick pressures the Mexican government applied in its privatization drive. Among the more forceful measures are changing the Constitution in an unending chain of neoliberal reforms that open ever wider sectors of the economy to private enterprise, each wrapped in a sweetening that their previous employees can become shareholders in one of the new companies — occasionally with a cooperative veneer.
The now neglected history of Soviet anti-colonialism
By Rohit Krishnan
September 7, 2018 — Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal reposted from Africa is a Country — In 1920, prior to the second Congress of the Comintern, Lenin circulated a draft of his theses on “The Question of Colonized People and Oppressed Minorities.” The end-result of this was the inclusion in the “21 Conditions” for Comintern membership, of an obligation to provide “direct aid to the revolutionary movements among the dependent and underprivileged nations and in the colonies.” While often cited by Marxists as evidence of the Bolshevik’s commitment to anti-imperialism, few cite the role of colonized activists in its formation.
Race, class and socialist strategy
By Jeremy Gong and Eric Blanc
September 7, 2018 — Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal reposted from The Call — Marxists have long understood that the workplace is the primary strategic site of class struggle, and that class struggle is essential for cohering a radicalized working-class majority with the capacity and will to overthrow capitalism in favor of socialism. At the same time, Marxists recognize our moral responsibility to oppose — and the strategic necessity to fight — all forms of exploitation and oppression.
In the United States today, a revitalized socialist Left is giving these questions of strategy new importance and prompting people across the political spectrum to more clearly articulate a position toward the respective roles of race and class in their politics.
The US-Turkey standoff in context: Global capitalism and the crisis of hegemony
By Vassilis K. Fouskas and Bülent Gökay
September 3, 2018 — Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal — Turkey was thrust into a full-blown currency crisis when United States President Donald Trump hoisted tariffs on Turkey’s steel and aluminium exports to the US — the country’s most serious crisis since President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s Justice and Development Party (AKP) came to power 16 years ago. The Turkish lira lost more than 40% of its value in the first two weeks of August, albeit its most recent humble recovery. The pretext for Trump’s punishing attack on Turkey, the seventeenth largest economy in the world, is the continued detention of the evangelical US Presbyterian missionary Andrew Brunson who was arrested in October 2016 on charges of espionage and accused of involvement in the attempted coup of July that same year.
At first sight, the US-Turkey standoff appears to be a uniquely Turkish problem triggered by a very public confrontation between two leading members of the “ring of autocrats” of the 21st century and worsened by the idiosyncratic and often misguided economic approach of both leaders. This is not the case. One cannot look at the Trump-Erdogan conflict in isolation from the global situation.
Is nuclear power a solution to the climate crisis?
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By Don Fitz
September 1, 2018 — Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal — Faith that environmental catastrophe can best be avoided by technological gadgetry rather than a change in social relationships received a big shot in the arm with the May 2018 publication of Energy: A Human History by prolific author Richard Rhodes. After completing 18 of his 20 chapters, Rhodes begins his exploration of nuclear power by comparing Rachel Carson, Ralph Nader, and Helen Caldicott to anti-humanists such as Thomas Malthus, Paul Ehrlich and followers of Adolf Hitler.
This bizarre connection is based on the writings of one obscure author who predated Carson with a foreboding of destruction caused by the over-reproduction of “undesirable people.”Rhodes claims that the environmental movement unknowingly brought anti-humanist ideology into its visions of a simpler world. By advocating a society less dependent on complex technology, environmentalists are supposedly condemning untold millions of impoverished humans to disease and starvation.
A self-enriching pact: Imperialism and the Global South
By Andy Higginbottom
September 1, 2018 — Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal reposted from Review Of African Political Economy — Does the concept of imperialism explain major characteristics of the capitalist world in the 21st century?
Dissolving Empire: David Harvey, John Smith, and the Migrant
By Adam Meyer
September 1 — Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal reposted from Review Of African Political Economy — In January and early February 2018 on roape.net, we witnessed a debate between David Harvey (Distinguished Professor of Anthropology, History and Geography at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, father of a range of disciplines around radical geography, and perhaps the single most recognizable Marxist name globally, beside Slavoj Zizek) and John Smith (formerly Kingston University, London, winner of the first Paul A. Baran–Paul M. Sweezy Memorial Award for an original monograph, Imperialism in the Twenty-First Century, and a working class activist).
Equality with a vengence: The over-incarceration of women
By Anna Kerr and Dr Rita Shackel
September 1, 2018 — Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal reposted from Precedent — The increased incarceration of women for violence-related offences in some Australian and overseas jurisdictions points to pervasive systemic gender bias and discrimination in the criminal justice process. Emerging anecdotal and recent research and court-related data are disturbing and suggest that women’s fundamental human rights and freedoms are under attack.
Read full article (pdf) here.
Asia-Pacific left parties' statement in solidarity with Bangladeshi student movement
Stop the repression of students in Bangladesh!
The undersigned Asia-Pacific left parties and organisations condemn the violent repression of the peaceful protests by students in Bangladesh.
These peaceful protests were sparked by the killing of two students — and critical injury of several others — by a speeding bus in Dhaka on July 29. The students began protesting the poor regulation and corruption of the transport sector but they were violently attacked by police. Gangs of armed thugs were allowed by the police to attack the students with machetes and other weapons and sexually harass female students. More than 100 students have been injured.
Bangladesh: Challenge of the students uprising
By Lal Khan
August 26, 2018 — Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal reposted from Asian Marxist Review — The students’ movement that erupted on 29 July following the death of two students in a tragic road accident in Dhaka spread to almost all the major cities of the country. Thousands of outraged school and college students laid siege to the streets of the capital Dhaka for a week demanding road safety across the country. Within days its verve and militancy shook the despotic ‘democratic’ regime of Prime Minister Hasina Wajid’s Awami League (AL), the party of Bangladesh’s national bourgeoisie. This movement yet again demonstrates that the molecular processes in the womb of a society in crisis and the socioeconomic contradictions seething below the surface can abruptly erupt into a volcanic explosion. Any major event or issue can trigger the outburst of accumulating grievances of youth and the hitherto inert oppressed. The issues may or may not be directly linked to the class struggle.
How did socialists respond to the advent of fascism?
The following talk was given on 21 July 2018 to a two-day seminar at York University
entitled “Historical perspectives on united fronts against fascism and the far right.”
entitled “Historical perspectives on united fronts against fascism and the far right.”
By John Riddell
August 26, 2018 — Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal reposted from John Riddell's Marxist essays and commentary — The framework for our panel this morning is “Unity against the Right: A historical approach.”
Argentina: They are afraid of us
By Verónica Gago
August 26, 2018 — Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal reposted from Viewpoint Magazine — The contempt implied by the Argentine Senate’s rejection of the bill to legalize abortion rewrites – and makes us remember – a scene that we know well: the domestic scene, where all our effort seems to become invisible, almost as if it didn’t exist, as if it didn’t count. Thus the Parliament sought to repeat what, for centuries, the patriarchy has wanted us to get used to: an act of disdain to discredit us. Where our power does not enter into the account, where it does not count. But, this time, due to the unfolding of the feminist movement we cannot go back to that scene of submission and invisibilization ever again. Our fury comes from the certainty that there is no going back and that the power we have gained cannot be reversed. Based on that certainty, we also say that we will never return to a condition of clandestinity.
The fight for the right to abortion spreads in Latin America despite politicians
By Fabiana Frayssinet
August 25, 2018 — Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal reposted from IPS News — The Argentine Senate’s rejection of a bill to legalise abortion did not stop a Latin American movement, which is on the streets and is expanding in an increasingly coordinated manner among women’s organisations in the region with the most restrictive laws and policies against pregnant women’s right to choose.
Approved in Argentina by the Chamber of Deputies and later rejected by a vote of 38 to 31 on Aug. 9, the bill to legalise abortion in the first 14 weeks of pregnancy and the historic social mobilisation on the streets offered hope for other countries in the region.
The Guttmacher Institute estimates that between 2010 and 2014, some 6.5 million abortions were practiced annually in Latin America and the Caribbean, up from 4.4 million between 1990 and 1994.
Climate change in the Anthropocene: An unstoppable drive to Hothouse Earth?
By Ian Angus
August 19, 2018 — Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal reposted from Climate & Capitalism — Scientific papers do not often make front-page news, but a recent one certainly has.
On August 6, the British Guardian declared that a “Domino-effect of climate events could move Earth into a ‘hothouse’ state.” The New York Times warned of a “World at risk of heading towards irreversible ‘hothouse’ state.” Sky News said that “Earth is 1°C away from hothouse state that threatens the future of humanity.”
The basis for those excited headlines was an article with the distinctly unexciting title “Trajectories of the Earth System in the Anthropocene,” published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.[1] Normally, PNAS articles can only be read by those who pay high subscription fees, but interest in this one ran so high that after one day the publisher removed the paywall, making it accessible to all.
Samir Amin (1931-2018): Africa’s pioneering Marxist political economist
By Patrick Bond
August 19, 2018 — Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal — Samir Amin’s celebrated life was amongst the most trying, but also rewarding, of his generation’s left intelligentsia. Following Amin’s death in Paris on Sunday, his political courage and professional fearlessness are two traits now recognised as exceedingly rare. Alongside extraordinary contributions to applied political-economic theory beginning 60 years ago, Amin’s unabashed Third Worldist advocacy was channelled through unparalleled scholarly entrepreneurship when establishing surprisingly durable research institutions.
