The situation in Venezuela is reaching a critical point. Imperialism and the right-wing opposition are using the despair and discomfort that exist in large sectors of the population because of pro-capitalist policies and the corruption of the bureaucracy to organize a coup d’état and take power.
he journalist Jamal Khashoggi’s murder in the Saudi Arabian consulate in Istanbul has caused ructions throughout the world. The Saudi government claimed that he died in a spontaneous fist fight, but Turkish government sources claim that he was tortured and murdered by a hit squad.
A misogynist, racist homophobe, he has been called the ‘Trump of the Tropics’. In reality, he poses a more profound threat even than Trump, partly because his own politics are more extreme but also because of the recent history of military dictatorship in the country (ending in 1985), remnants of which are still very much alive in the armed forces and other state institutions.
The run-up to the US mid-term elections saw Trump ramp up his blatantly misogynistic, LGBTQ+-phobic, and xenophobic agenda to a new and horrific level, even for him. This was an attempt to drive turnout of his base and has acted to have a deeply polarising effect on US society.
The technology and the wealth necessary to tackle climate change exist, but capitalism’s incessant, myopic drive for profit above all else is a fundamental barrier to safeguarding our further. By taking society’s wealth out of the hands of the super-rich elite and using it in a planned and democratic way, we could rapidly transfer to renewable energy, creating millions of jobs in planning, constructing and maintaining the infrastructure necessary for this, and furthermore, providing electricity and other vital services for vast swathes of the world currently lacking. Environmentalists must campaign for socialist solutions to climate change – the only real solutions – and discard the half-measures of capitalism.
Young people today have grown up in a period when the trade union movement has been in retreat. It has been the unions’ decline from militancy to conservatism that has caused young people to no longer consider them vehicles for change and why they have been struggling to understand their relevance in a world of global social upheaval. This has meant that trade union membership has fallen to its lowest since 1995. But material conditions are driving small groups of young workers to organise and fight back.
After a landslide vote of just under 67% to repeal the constitutional abortion ban on 25th May, on 18th September, the eighth amendment was formally repealed in the South, after all appeals made seeking to the challenge the referendum result were dismissed.
The landslide victory of left-populist Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO) on a programme of increased welfare and tackling corruption marks a potential turning point for the Mexican working class.
