S Sivasegaram

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5. The Scene, the Players, Ideology and Approach

The Present Situation. The conflict escalated rapidly under President Rajapaksha and, between April 2006 and April 2007, over 4000 have been killed, mostly civilians. Although aerial bombing gave the government the edge over the LTTE, the latter seems to have retreated from bases in the East with minimal losses, while civilians suffered heavily. The LTTE has since switched to guerrilla attacks in the East. While the almost daily air attacks by the SLAF cause suffering to the people, skirmishes between the army and the LTTE have caused loss of life on both sides.

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 S Sivasegaram

1. Introduction

While class contradiction remains the fundamental contradiction in all class society, uneven development of capitalism has ensured that class exploitation and oppression would vary in form so that the struggle against class oppression, to succeed, needs to adopt different strategies. Under colonial and semi-colonial domination the struggle was against the main oppressor and emerged as an anti-colonial struggle that united anti-imperialist forces while being conscious of contradictions with the local capitalist and feudal classes. Imperialist strategy changed with the elimination of direct colonial rule; and neo-colonialism, while formally recognising the sovereignty of former colonies and semi-colonies, developed methods for direct and indirect control over them. In countries where a bourgeois elite group replaced the colonial masters, contradictions that were dormant under colonial domination became important for a variety of reasons.

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 Pranab Kanti Basu

The Myth

There is a wonderful sentiment warming the hearts of global intelligentsia. It is the glorious feeling that we have attained the age of the empire without an emperor, that it is truly the age of globalisation where empire does not imply the exercise of the sovereignty of one state over another. With the triumph of globalised capital the whole world has accepted the economic, moral and ethical supremacy of a homogeneous world order based prominently on individualism and the ethics of the market. The days of fighting the imperialist centre and its camp followers are over. So the proper strategy of the down and out should be to accept the empire and seek to end the discriminatory practices of empire operating to their disadvantage. The workers, for example, who are confined by various laws and regulations within the bounds of a nation state, should demand global citizenship.

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An interview with Coni Ledesma, International Spokesperson of Makibaka, Filipino Revolutionary Women's Association

E. San Juan, Jr.

May 14, election day in the Philippines, may signal a historic turning-point in its political devolution since the February 1986 "people power" revolt overthrew the U.S.-backed Marcos dictatorship. The prospect is grim. Either the country declines into unprecedented barbarism - so far, international monitors (Amnesty International, World Council of Churches, UN investigators) have documented thousands of victims of extra-judicial killings, forcible "disappearances," torture and massacres exceeding those committed by Marcos - or President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo is impeached by a majority of elected representatives for treason, violation of the Constitution, corruption, etc. This may temporarily stop the "impunity" for State-affiliated criminals. This legal route of redress of grievances is by no means a revolution; it can be aptly described as an in-house purging of decay and rot. Either way, this ritualized election of local officials and Congresspeople will prove a veritable test-case for the country's neocolonial, oligarchic institutions and the status quo of class inequality that have been, in one way or another, fostered by the United States, its former colonizer, for over a century now.

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James Petras 

Introduction

Never in recent history has US Middle East policy been subject to such a barrage of conflicting pressures from erstwhile allies, clients as well as adversaries. The points of contention involve fundamental issues of war and peace, foremost of which are divergent responses to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, the US-Iranian confrontation, the US occupation of Iraq as well as the US-Ethiopian proxy invasion and occupation of Somalia.

The major contenders for influence in the making of US policy in the Middle East include the 'war party' led by the Zionist power configuration and its followers in Congress and its allies among the civilian militarists in the White House led by Vice President Cheney, Secretary of State Rice, National Security Adviser for Middle East Affairs Elliot Abrams, along with an army of scribes in the major print media. On the other side are a small minority of Congress-people, ex-officials linked to Big Oil, a divided Peace Movement, Arab Gulf States, Saudi Arabia and a number of European countries on specific sets of issues.

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New dimensions of resistance to corporate globalization in India

Aseem Shrivastava 

"It's a terrible thing to be a worker exploited in the capitalist system. The only worse thing is to be a worker unable to find anyone to exploit you." - Joan Robinson

A May Day disruption

We were visiting Badli, a village of some 11,000 people, in the district of Jhajjar, Haryana, about 30 kms west of New Delhi's International Airport. We were there to begin our research on the impact of the 25,000-acre Special Economic Zone (SEZ) planned in the area by Reliance Industries. Like in so many other parts of India where resistance to corporate plans is building up, farmers in the area have organized themselves into a Kisan Jagrukta Samiti (Farmers Awareness Committee) to battle Reliance.

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Ebrahim Harvey

We may well be on the cusp of a dramatic breakthrough in leftist South African politics. For the first time, the South African Communist Party (SACP) - the decades-old slavishly loyal ally of the ruling African National Congress - is on a course of action whose internal and inevitable logic is a likely and even probable split with it. Its recent rapid growth of membership to a reported figure of about forty thousand comes in the wake of a discernable radicalisation in its ranks amidst a growing crisis in the ANC alliance around its leadership, the close, cosy and conniving relations between the ANC, government and big business - white and black - and the devastating socioeconomic effects the government's current neo-liberal policies have had on the black working class in particular. There are many other elements to this crisis, which only exacerbate it: rising black unemployment, grinding poverty, the unresolved and still-smouldering Khutsong debacle, spreading and ravaging HIV/Aids, a basic income grant that the ANC still resists but millions hope for, poor or often absent basic services, the explosive presidential succession battles and much more.

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Ravi Kumar

Michael Lebowitz, Build it Now: Socialism for the Twenty-First Century, Monthly Review Press, New York (Daanish Books, Delhi), 2006. 

"In the various struggles of people for human dignity and social justice, a vision of an alternative socialist society has always been latent. Let us reclaim and renew that vision" (p. 60).

I 

The crisis of capitalism could not be more overt and exposed, but the instruments of survival at its disposal - both material and ideological - are also very effective with growing financialisation, commodification and consumerism. There are stark similarities in the way the welfarist face of the State has been on wane, along with its increased instrumentalisation in favour of global capital, in the so-called developed world and the inappropriately coined euphemistic developing world. At the level of movements too, if at one moment and place we hear sagas of popular and sustained confrontation against the global capital, the next we see a fragmented and weakened struggle against capital.

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Ebrahim Harvey  

South Africa is once again on the verge of a public sector strike. Has the government not learnt the many-sided adverse consequences of earlier strikes, which took a heavy toll on service delivery in all the relevant sectors, employee morale and severely damaged union and public confidence in government?    

Already this country is going through a social crisis of unprecedented proportions. A public sector strike at this point is bound to worsen this crisis, including more generally relations between the unions and government and more specifically between the ruling party and its allies. But it is also precisely because of this crisis that workers require a real and meaningful "living wage" to counter spiralling cost of living increases - especially that which is going to follow the recent highest-ever fuel increase - and the fact that the inflation rate does not capture all the real costs of living and often underestimate costs even for those indices it does consider. All progressive economists know this and in fact so does the government, but it persists in strictly tying unions down to inflation rates and resisting real increases above the inflation rate.

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Soumitra Bose

Specially Enclosed Zones for forming Capital through production or servicing within a nation-state and without the encumbrances of law of the native land is what gets called as Special Economic Zone (SEZ). What speciality of Economy this zone is going to provide is hazy not only from the content point of view but even from every angle of view one looks at it. Can a nation state, by definition, have multiple "economies" within its territorial boundary? Can an "Economy" be quantified through any stretchable definition of qualification as one co-existing with "others"? Is the usage of "Economy" over determined by factors other than "Economy" or if not then where is the line drawn to distinguish the exchange mechanism or production process or even production relation with the regulating rules relating to human rights, social benefits and even simple polity of the nation-state?

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