The Red Review | Issue #5 (January 2024)

COP 28 Failure Proves One Thing

By Gary Porter - A Truly Massive Independent and Internationalist Movement of the Working Class and Oppressed is Needed to Overcome Capitalist Climate Change. Socialism is the Only Way Forward

“We must accelerate a just, equitable transition to renewables. The science is clear: The 1.5-degree limit is only possible if we ultimately stop burning all fossil fuels," said UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres in a speech during the opening days of the summit. So what happened?

After all night deliberations on Tuesday, Dec 12, Conference Chair Sultan Al Jaber, CEO of ADNOC, the petroleum corporation of United Arab Emirates, announced a deal on Wednesday morning. For the first time, the text calls for a "transitioning away from fossil fuels in energy systems, in a just, orderly and equitable manner, accelerating action in this critical decade, so as to achieve net zero by 2050 in keeping with the science."

At least one earlier draft had not even mentioned fossil fuels.

Will Strikers’ Determination Defeat the CAQ and the union bureaucracy?

600,000 strikers, 13% of Quebec work force, against the bosses' state

By Marc Bonhomme - From December 11 to 14, all public sector workers, with a few exceptions, will be on strike: the 420,000 of the Common Front, the 80,000 of the Fédération Interprofessionnelle de la Santé Quebec (FIQ), (most nurses), and 65,000 members of the Fédération Autonome de l'Enseignement (FAE), some 40% of primary and secondary school teachers. The workers march partly-separately but strike together. As 78% of the strikers are women, fighting both for better working conditions and for the socialization of "caring", this strike is also a feminist struggle, more precisely an Eco-feminist one. Public services run mainly on human energy, with little reliance on fossil fuels. Above all, they are creators of rich human links that are obstacles to consumerism and miserable solitude.

Scott Ritter Debunks The Israeli Lies About The Hamas Military Raid On October 7

by Scott Ritter* - There is a truism that I often cite when discussing the various analytical approaches to assessing the wide variety of geopolitical problems facing the world today—you can’t solve a problem unless you first properly define it. The gist of the argument is quite simple—any solution which has nothing to do with the problem involved is, literally, no solution at all.

Israel has characterized the attack carried out by Hamas on the various Israeli military bases and militarized settlements, or Kibbutz, which in their totality comprised an important part of the Gaza barrier system, as a massive act of terrorism, likening it to the September 11, 2001 terror attacks against the United States. Israel supports this characterization by citing the number of persons killed (some 1,200, a downward revision issued by Israel after realizing that 200 of the dead were Palestinian fighters) and detailing a wide variety of atrocities it claims were perpetrated by Hamas, including mass rape, the beheading of children, and the wanton murder of unarmed Israeli civilians.

Foreign Interference by Canada in Other Countries

By Hugh Pedersen - Recently there’s been significant attention devoted to purported foreign interference in Canadian politics. But there’s been little discussion of Ottawa’s far more significant interference abroad.

The front page of the National Post on December 6, 2022 noted: “Alarming escalation of espionage, foreign interference”. The story reported Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) analyst Noura Hayek saying foreign interference is one of the “most serious” and “most complex” threats facing Canada. China was the main country cited.

But it’s not just China that’s allegedly interfering in Canada. Christya Freeland, whose grandfather was a Ukrainian Nazi and who leads the charge in Canada for all out support to Zelensky’s Nazi riddled autocracy, previously said she was “very concerned that Russia is meddling” in Canada’s election and claimed there had “already been efforts by malign actors to disrupt our democracy.” Before the 2019 federal election the government established a special task force to monitor potential threats to Canada’s democracy that included representatives of CSIS, RCMP, Communications Security Establishment and Global Affairs’ intelligence branch.

The Anti Trans Campaign Mobilizes Hate Against Everyone's Democratic Rights

By John Wilson - The ongoing right-wing campaign against trans rights and trans kids and youths has been generated by an avalanche of lies and slanders.  These have been picked up by opportunist politicians looking to attract more of the bigot vote to their base,  amplified ceaselessly by the growing hard-right sector of the corporate media. Even sectors of the corporate media thought of as "liberal" repeat them mostly without even examining the most obvious lies and distortions. All in the name of "free speech" and "balance" of course, terms that never apply, to ignoring leftist candidates in elections or non- coverage of major events. It is important for trans rights supporters to be aware of these issues.

"Parental rights" was the watchword of the ludicrously misnamed 1-Million March, and that of its much smaller successor. It has no basis in existing law. It reflects the concept that parents own their children; an idea openly put forward by many in the original "March". What about the rights of children? They don't exist according to these people. But even existing law says otherwise.

Only Way to End the War

by Susan Rosenthal - This article initially appeared on https://susanrosenthal.com/strategies/theres-just-one-way-to-stop-war/.

A magnificent anti-war movement is exploding all over the world!

On its own, revulsion over the Israeli war on Gaza cannot explain the rapid rise of the largest anti-war movement ever. There are deeper systemic factors.

Opposition to the war has opened space for people to express their grievances against the ruling class: their failure to meet our basic needs for medical care, housing, and social support; their decision to let millions die from COVID rather than curb corporate profits; their refusal to stop climate change and environmental destruction; and their barbaric wars that risk nuclear annihilation. Fueled by mass discontent, the anti-war movement could grow into a general rejection of the social system that drives us to war.

Who Did It Better, United Auto Workers Or Unifor?

by Adam D.K. King - Had Unifor deployed a strategy more like the UAW, there could have been more to celebrate in recent Ford and GM deals.Over the past weeks, all eyes have been on bargaining and, in the United States, strikes at the “big three” automakers. Given that auto talks are happening simultaneously in Canada and the U.S., comparisons between union demands and strategies on either side of the border have been all but inevitable. That roles seem to have reversed, with the formerly conservative United Auto Workers (UAW) taking a more militant stance and Unifor appearing traditional and reserved in its approach, makes such comparisons all the more interesting. 

While the UAW under new reform president Shawn Fain broke from tradition and chose to bargain with all three major American automakers at once, Unifor went the traditional “pattern bargaining” route of selecting a lead firm — in this case, Ford — and later attempting to replicate the Ford contract with General Motors (GM) and Stellantis.  

Lenin’s Big Ideas

By Gary Porter - Until the Russian revolution in 1917, scientific socialism was most commonly referred to as Marxism. After the revolution, it became Marxism Leninism. Why? What did Lenin contribute that placed him on the level of Karl Marx and his collaborator, Freidrich Engels?

Lenin contributed decisively both  to the theory of Marxism and to its practice in the class struggle. Lenin, together with Leon Trotsky, was a decisive leader of the workers’ revolution in Russia in 1917, and the establishment of the first workers’ State in history. Toward the very end of his life Lenin allied with Trotsky once again to resist the takeover of the Communist Party and the new Workers’ state by a flood of opportunists and bureaucrats led by Joseph Stalin.

While the range and depth of  Lenin’s contributions was great, this series of articles concentrates on four: