The Red Review | Issue #14 (November 2024)
Editor: Tom Baker, Managing Editor: Flo Schade
The Situation of the Working Class in China
by Fin
On 17 August 2021, at the 10th meeting of the Central Financial and Economic Commission (CFEC), President Xi Jinping characterized "common wealth" as a new direction for China's development, with a focus on solving the gap between the rich and the poor. There may be good intentions behind this policy, but its top-down, campaign-style nature of the administrative order still makes outsiders question the effectiveness of this slogan.
When a government decree is issued, it is answered by a hundred people. Billionaires donate tens of billions of yuan to "common wealth" building efforts. Suddenly, overnight, they were all in favour of social justice. If nothing unexpected happens, the huge amount of investment and donations will eventually be spent on large public projects, construction, especially infrastructure. In fact, if these billionaires would abide by the existing labour laws and give fairer treatment to their workers, the goal of common prosperity could be achieved more readily.
Comrade President? Change and Continuity in Sri Lanka
by B. Skanthakumar
The new president was born to a rural poor family originally from the land-hungry highlands, that migrated as others have done to improve their lives in the dry zone irrigation-fed north central region. His father was a minor grade employee in a government department; and his mother cared for an extended household while tending their rice paddy smallholding. He was the first in his immediate family to attend university, studying physical science at a public university.
In the late 1980s at Kelaniya university he was a student activist of the then underground Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP-People’s Liberation Front) – it has been banned in 1983 by the right-wing United National Party regime and then severely repressed during its second anti-state insurgency between 1987 and 1989 – becoming a fulltime political activist after the party was legalised, and began rebuilding including through electoral politics. As someone from an exploited and marginalised class; as well as leader of a formally Marxist-Leninist party, his election as head of state and government in Sri Lanka’s Gaullist-style system, has broken the mould.
Righteous student activism and evolving anti-Palestinian reprisal in Canada
by Joshua Sealy-Harrington
It’s been a (deservedly) judgmental summer for Israel, as its public support in Canada declines and given its ongoing, precipitous collapse to the status of a pariah state.
On May 20, the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court announced that there are reasonable grounds to believe Israeli leaders have committed war crimes and crimes against humanity in Gaza. And on May 24, the International Court of Justice concluded yet again—on the heels of earlier judgments in January and March—that Palestinians in Gaza face a real and imminent risk of genocide (due to the particular risk posed by the current offensive in Rafah, the Court ordered Israel to immediately halt its military offensive there, which it has belligerently defied). These significant cases are testing the integrity of our supposed liberal international legal order.
Who will they add next to Canada’s ‘terror’ list?
by Yves Engler
Banning Samidoun Palestinian Prisoner Solidarity Network highlights the anti-Palestinian character of Canada’s terrorist list. This self-perpetuating tool of US-led global domination actually encourages terrorism.
On Tuesday the Liberal government listed Samidoun as a terror entity. Made in conjunction with Washington, the move criminalizes the Vancouver-based grassroots solidarity group. It’s now illegal to finance or materially assist Samidoun. After Israel labeled Samidoun a terror organization in 2021 Zionist groups and the National Post began pushing Ottawa to follow suit. But the Liberals wavered under pushback from the BC Civil Liberties Association, Canadian Union of Postal Workers and dozens of other civil society organizations. After October 7 the Conservatives launched a full court press to list Samidoun that seems to have tipped the scales.
Socialism Needs Disability Justice
by James Graham
Is crossing a picket line acceptable if the crosser is disabled and needs a certain product? What if the striking workers refuse to wear masks, putting the immunocompromised at risk – do we really owe them solidarity?
This kind of debate happens often, especially online, and achieves very little beyond confirming what many on either side already believe. On one hand, socialists and labour activists find “proof” that ableism is a trivial, petty-bourgeois concern not worth their time. On the other hand, disabled people find evidence that we are an object of public ridicule, that our isolation and desperation do not matter to anyone who doesn’t face those experiences themselves. No one wins. What exactly is going on under the surface here? How do these repetitive and unproductive arguments obfuscate the real dynamics of labour, disability, capital, and social oppression?
To build solidarity with Palestine, Canada’s labour movement must look to the past
by Chris Webb
The South African anti-apartheid movement of the 1970s and 80s serves as a significant source of inspiration for Palestine solidarity activists today. The reasons for this are hardly surprising; the movement was widely successful in pushing for sanctions and divestment at multiple levels of government, in business and across civil society. Less attention, however, is paid to exactly how this movement was so successful, what strategies and tactics it employed, and how these might be adapted by labour activists organizing around Palestine today.
It is worth remembering that opposition to South African apartheid was not a given for Canada’s labour movement. It took dedicated organizing amidst polarizing Cold War attitudes to get union leadership on side. Solidarity, after all, is not something that pre-exists, or can easily be assumed based on abstract principles—it has to be built through the messiness of social and political struggle.
How mainstream climate science endorsed the fantasy of a global warming time machine
By Wim Carton, Andreas Malm
When the Paris agreement on climate change was gavelled into being in December 2015, it briefly looked like that rarest of things: a political victory for climate activists and delegates from the poorest regions of the world that, due to colonisation by today’s wealthy nations, have contributed little to the climate crisis – but stand to suffer its worst ravages.
The world had finally agreed an upper limit for global warming. And in a move that stunned most experts, it had embraced the stretch target of 1.5°C, the boundary that small island states, acutely threatened by sea-level rise, had tirelessly pushed for years.
PRC 75 Today: the Transition to Socialism
by Michael Roberts
Today is the 75th anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic of China (PRC). The survival of the PRC is now longer than the Soviet Union, which lasted 74 years. China has nearly one-fifth of the world’s population and on some measures is the largest economy in the world, although per person national income is only 30% of that of the US.
What sort of economy and state is China? Is it capitalist or socialist? The answer to those questions must start with Marx’s law of value, which defines the nature of mode of production and social relations under capitalism. It continues with an understanding of the concept of a transitional economy between capitalism and socialism. We can define several criteria for an economy in transition to socialism. Based on those criteria, China is not a capitalist economy; its phenomenal economic success is product of a predominantly state-owned and directed economy clearly distinct from capitalist economies, whether democratic or autocratic. However, it is still far away from achieving socialism or communism. It is an economy in a “trapped transition”.
Exported gas produces far worse emissions than coal, major study finds
by Oliver Milman
Exported gas emits far more greenhouse gas emissions than coal, despite fossil-fuel industry claims it is a cleaner alternative, according to a major new research paper that challenges the controversial yet rapid expansion of gas exports from the US to Europe and Asia. Coal is the dirtiest of fossil fuels when combusted for energy, with oil and gas producers for years promoting cleaner-burning gas as a “bridge” fuel and even a “climate solution” amid a glut of new liquefied natural gas (or LNG) terminals, primarily in the US.
But the research, which itself has become enmeshed in a political argument in the US, has concluded that LNG is 33% worse in terms of planet-heating emissions over a 20-year period compared with coal. “The idea that coal is worse for the climate is mistaken – LNG has a larger greenhouse gas footprint than any other fuel,” said Robert Howarth, an environmental scientist at Cornell University and author of the new paper.