World

The Venezuelan revolution, led by socialist President Hugo Chavez, has captured the imagination of millions of people around the world with its increasingly successful challenge to US imperialism and US-backed neoliberal policies that have caused widespread impoverishment across Latin America. Since Chavez’s re-election in December on an explicitly socialist platform, there has been a struggle to significantly “deepen” the revolutionary process towards creating a “socialism of the 21st century”.

Protests involving more than a million students shook the streets and classrooms of Chile in mid-2006. This movement, also known as the “penguins’ revolution” (after high school students’ black jacket and white shirt uniform), arose in response to the continued neoliberal approach to education in the country.

In the lead-up to Indonesia’s 2009 elections, a new left party has been formed. The National Liberation Party of Unity (Papernas) was founded on the basis of three main demands: the cancellation of Indonesia’s foreign debt, the nationalisation of the minerals sector, including oil and gas, and national industrialisation.

Various leaders of Venezuela’s primary pro-government labour union, the National Workers Union (UNT), have called on all sectors of the organisation to join together and hold elections later this year. At a press conference on July 17, labour leaders Marcela Maspero and Orlando Chirino invited all sectors of the UNT to a general meeting on July 26 to organise general elections and, in that way, unite the principal labour union of the country that has remained divided in recent years.

The campaign to isolate Israel through boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) has taken meaningful steps forward in the past few months, with major trade unions in Britain, Ireland, South Africa and Canada declaring their support for an international boycott.

On the evening of July 24, New Zealand hospital workers claimed a major victory against the aggressive industrial tactics of Australian company Spotless Services.

“Seven of the most important Sunni-led insurgent organisations fighting the US occupation in Iraq have agreed to form a public political alliance with the aim of preparing for negotiations in advance of an American withdrawal”, the July 19 British Guardian reported it was told by leaders of the groups.

Denouncing the congress as “rubbish” and a “national disgrace”, left-wing Ecuadorian President Rafael Correa called on the upcoming constituent assembly, for which there will be elections held on September 30, to dissolve the body, which is widely viewed as corrupt. The calls came after the opposition-controlled congress amended a number of recent laws introduced by the executive to curb unprecedented rises in the price of food.

On July 26, the International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC) and the International Transport Workers Federation (ITF) issued a call for their affiliates to join an international day of action on August 9 to protest the imprisonment of two trade union leaders in Iran. Mansour Osanloo, president of the Tehran bus workers’ union, Sandikaye Kargarane Sherkate Vahed, has for the third time over the past year-and-a-half found himself in detention. The latest arrest took place after he was abducted while travelling on a Tehran bus on July 10. He is being held in Evin prison, charged with “conspiring against national security”.

In an attempt to bolster the regime of Fatah leader and Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, Israel and the US have proposed a plan to “kick start” the “peace” process by rehashing the Olso Accords and the “Road Map to Peace”.

Michael Moore’s Sicko, released in the US on June 22, has already become one of the five highest grossing documentaries of all time. Predictably, the film’s withering attack on the US’s profit-driven health-care system has elicited a strong response from apologists for neoliberalism. The following article on the reaction to Moore’s film originally appeared as an editorial in the US Socialist Worker.

Although slated to run on July 20-28, the Zapatista “Intergalactica” gathering really began on July 19 in Tuxtla Gutierrez, with an event in the main square in support of the People in Defence of the Land. Several busloads of Zapatistas from Mexico City arrived to join those already there in demanding indigenous land rights.