The Red Review | Issue #13 (October 2024)

The Red Review October publication

Oct 1, 2024 | Multiple Authors

Editor: Tom Baker, Managing Editor: Flo Schade

FRANCE: ACCORDING TO MACRON, THE WINNERS LOSE

President Emmanuel Macron’s party (the ultraliberal right) suffered a severe defeat in June’s European election. The night the results came in, Macron took everyone by surprise by announcing the dissolution of the National Assembly, thinking he would reinforce his shrinking majority in parliament. The opposite happened. Once again, his party was severely defeated in the July legislative election, coming in behind the left-wing coalition. The latter, the “New Popular Front” (NFP), won the largest number of seats than any other group in the lower house of parliament.

The NFP is an alliance formed by La France Insoumise (radical left), the Ecologists, the Communist Party and the Socialist Party (equivalent of the NDP). Within this coalition, La France Insoumise won the most seats and it constitutes the NFP’s most dynamic component. The coalition’s programme includes revoking Macron’s counter-reform on retirement rights, increasing the minimum wage, restoring unemployment insurance benefits, reinforcing public services, piloting the energy transition to fight climate change and taxing the rich in order to finance all of these measures.

When is it Wrong to Support the Liberals?

Always. Does that mean it is wrong to vote for legislation that benefits the working class and its allies? No. It is imperative to fight for social and economic gains.  Never hesitate to grab any concessions that can be pried from the icy grip of the bosses and their political parties.

But it is always a mistake to give political support to a bosses’ government, or to enter into a pact like the “Supply and Confidence” agreement (March 2022-September 2024) between the labour-based New Democratic Party and the hard-core capitalist class Liberals. This is not a matter of bowing to a dusty old dogma.  It is, rather, the foundation of practical principle.  Only the political independence of the working class, engaged in mass action, enables workers to attain the leverage needed to wrest gains from the ruling rich.  It is a matter of one proposed law, or one gain at a time.  Just say no to any pledge of allegiance that carries with it abominable baggage.

No to US Twin Parties of War, Racism and Poverty!

The two multi-billionaire-backed, 2024 presidential candidates faced off before some 67 million ABC-TV viewers on September 10. Pollsters recorded that Democrat Kamala Harris handily “won” the debate by a 66-34 margin. The New York Times’ fact checkers found that Republican Donald Trump lied or distorted facts 33 times; Harris made but one slightly inaccurate statement, said The Times, a Harris supporter.

In truth, both candidates lied by omission, as is the norm with all capitalist elections. Indeed, whoever is elected, the fundamental decisions that govern the capitalist state’s affairs are made behind the scenes, in the leading corporate boardrooms where the nation’s elite assign their representatives to craft the annual $7 trillion 4,000-page US budget that guarantees their interests. These include annual $trillions for the war machine and the US “national security state,” and enormous corporate tax gifts made by a few pen strokes in the unseen tax codes.

A Conversation with New Brunswick Socialist Caucus NDP Provincial Candidates

How has recent upheaval in federal political dynamics affected the provincial election? Josh Floyd and I protested the visit of Pierre Polievre to Saint John in March during which Polievre made headlines by opposing the Liberal carbon tax ahead of the provincial election campaign.

Many NB NDP supporters welcome the end of the confidence-supply deal because they see the need for the NDP both here and elsewhere to differentiate itself from the Liberals and PCs, especially here because the former right-wing leader of the NB NDP, Dominic Cardy left the party in 2017 to join the NB PCs and accepted the position of Education Minister. Demonstrations in support of Gaza continue to be held weekly in Saint John and Fredericton. 

IIPPE 2024: Imperialism, China and BRICS+

The International Initiative for the Promotion of Political Economy (IIPPE) holds a conference every year.  It brings together radical and Marxist economists to discuss the latest theories of and developments in capitalism in sessions where many papers are presented.  I have reported on previous conferences in this blog.  This year’s conference took place in Istanbul, Turkey and the theme was: The Changing World Economy and Today’s Imperialism.  I participated online by zoom in some sessions and also obtained papers from participants at the conference.

There were two plenary sessions on the main theme of the conference led by Trevor Ngwane of the University of Johannesburg, South Africa and Utsa Patnaik of Jawaharial Nehru University, India.  I was only able to get second hand snippets of these plenaries, but as far as I can tell, Professor Ngwane was keen to tell his audience that socialists should not rely on the BRICS (or BRICS+ including new entrants, Iran, Saudi Arabia and soon Turkey) and its expanding institutions to resist the hegemony of the imperialist bloc led by the US. 

The Draft Resolution of the Left Wing at Zimmerwald

The present war has been engendered by imperialism. Capitalism has already achieved that highest stage. Society’s productive forces and the magnitudes of capital have outgrown the narrow limits of the individual national states. Hence the striving on the part of the Great Powers to enslave other nations and to seize colonies as sources of raw material and spheres of investment of capital. The whole world is merging into a single economic organism; it has been carved up among a handful of Great Powers. The objective conditions for socialism have fully matured, and the present war is a war of the capitalists for privileges and monopolies that might delay the downfall of capitalism.

The socialists, who seek to liberate labour from the yoke of capital and who defend the world-wide solidarity of the workers, are struggling against any kind of oppression and inequality of nations. When the bourgeoisie was a progressive class, and the overthrow of feudalism, absolutism and oppression by other nations stood on the historical order of the day, the socialists, as invariably the most consistent and most resolute of democrats, recognised “defence of the fatherland” in the meaning implied by those aims, and in that meaning alone. Today too, should a war of the oppressed nations against the oppressor Great Powers break out in the east of Europe or in the colonies, the socialists’ sympathy would be wholly with the oppressed.

‘We are willing to fight. We are not scared’: A new resistance to LNG unfolds in northern ‘B.C.’

As construction of the PRGT pipeline begins on Nisg̱a’a lands, their Gitanyow neighbours set up a blockade. In the misty mountains of northwestern “B.C.,” resistance is unfolding under the looming shadow of the Prince Rupert Gas Transmission (PRGT) pipeline. Hereditary chiefs who signed pipeline community benefits agreements in 2014 are backpedaling — fearful of environmental impacts and the acceleration of the climate crisis. 

“This project doesn’t make any sense,” said Gitanyow Hereditary Chief Gamlakyeltxw, Wil Marsden, of the Lax Ganeda (frog) Clan, via phone from a blockade erected August 22 on unceded Gitanyow lax’yip (territory). Marsden, who holds the highest chief name out of four Gitanyow clans, along with Lax Ganeada Hereditary Chief Watkhayetsxw, Deborah Good, helped lead the recent shutdown of the remote Cranberry Connector or Nass Forest Service Road (approximately 128 kilometres north of “Terrace”) in Watakhayetsxw territory. 

Britain’s authoritarian spiral threatens press freedom

As Western liberal democracies crack down on journalists and activists, CLAUDIA WEBBE urges resistance against the Labour government’s part in this slide towards Saudi-style repression. KEIR STARMER’S authoritarian inclinations, highlighted a year ago by Peter Oborne and Richard Sanders, have become increasingly evident since his efforts to purge the left from the Labour Party.

These tendencies appear to be steering Britain toward a trajectory reminiscent of totalitarian and oppressive regimes, such as Saudi Arabia. This shift is marked by assaults on freedom of speech and journalistic freedom, both of which are essential to a functioning democracy and a healthy society.