FMLN and Via Campesina Back Constituent Assembly in Venezuela

by LUCAS KOERNER

VENEZUELANALYSIS.COM | July 24, 2017

FMLN International Relations Secretary Nidia Diaz expresses her party’s solidarity with Venezuela. (Prensa Latina)

Caracas, July 24, 2017 (venezuelanalysis.com) – Two prominent grassroots organizations have voiced support for National Constituent Assembly (ANC) elections in Venezuela amid mounting international pressure for Caracas to withdraw the initiative.

During its national conference over the weekend, El Salvador’s governing left-wing party, the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front (FMLN), rejected external intervention aimed at derailing the Maduro government’s effort to overhaul the country’s constitution.

The beginning of a crucial week in Venezuela

by Jorge Martin

In Defense of Marxism | July 25, 2017

The Venezuelan opposition, backed by Washington and Madrid, has launched an all out offensive to prevent Sunday’s Constituent Assembly elections form going ahead. We stand firmly against this reactionary attempt which can only be defeated by revolutionary means.

The disinformation campaign on Venezuela

by Farooque Chowdhury

MR Online | July 25, 2017

Venezuela, it seems, is a riddle to the audience of the mainstream media. Yet the riddle conceals a fact. A conflict between opposing interests is roaring in Venezuela, and attempts to stoke that conflict are being intensified by the imperialist-interventionist quarter as the day for a vote on the proposed Constituent Assembly—July 30—is nearing.

Every day the mainstream media showers its viewers with news reports that are partial and biased. Here are some examples of from the past several weeks:

Venezuela: Right-wing opposition supporters launch bosses’ strike

 by JAMES TWEEDIE

People’s World | July 21, 2017

An anti-government protester holds a fire bomb during clashes with security forces in Caracas, July 10. Opposition supporters have now called for a lockout to block President Maduro’s planned constituent assembly. | Ariana Cubillos / AP

Venezuela’s opposition launched a bosses’ lockout yesterday – a day after declaring a rival government to President Nicolás Maduro’s.

The Democratic Unity Roundtable (MUD) coalition called the “general strike” on Monday as part of its “zero-hour” plan for regime change before the July 30 elections over the new constitutional reform assembly it opposes.

It follows three months of street violence that has left more than 90 dead.

Women Fighters in the Days of the Great October Revolution

by Alexandra Kollontai

Source: Internet

The women who took part in the Great October Revolution – who were they? Isolated individuals? No, there were hosts of them; tens, hundreds of thousands of nameless heroines who, marching side by side with the workers and peasants behind the Red Flag and the slogan of the Soviets, passed over the ruins of tsarist theocracy into a new future…

Revolution and Counterrevolution, 1917–2017

by John Bellamy Foster

Monthly Review | Volume 69, Issue 03 (July-August 2017)

Petrograd workers drill on Palace Square. State Museum of the Political History of Russia, St. Petersburg.(The Bolsheviks in Power, p. 240)

The Russian Revolution of 1917 erupted on the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of Karl Marx’s Capital. From the start, the October Revolution seemed both to confirm and contradict Marx’s analysis. He had envisioned a working-class-based socialist revolution breaking out in the developed capitalist countries of Western Europe. But the 1882 preface to the Communist Manifesto, written a year before his death, amended this by pointing to a revolution in Russia as a possible “signal for proletarian revolution in the West.”¹ Yet although a worker-peasant revolution under Marxist leadership triumphed in Russia in 1917, Russia was still a largely underdeveloped country, and the revolutionary uprisings in Germany and Central Europe which followed were weak and easily extinguished.

This week in history: U.S. minimum wage rises to $7.25 an hour

People’s World | July 24, 2017

About 300 protesters gathered at Coffman Memorial Union on November 29, 2016, calling on the Minneapolis City Council and the University of Minnesota to pass a $15/hour minimum wage for all Minneapolis workers / Fibonacci Blue, via Wikimedia (CC)

On July 24, 2009, the federal U.S. minimum wage rose to $7.25 per hour, up from $6.55.

In the 2010 midterm elections, many voters typically stayed home, and Republicans took control of the House of Representatives. There has not been a wage increase in eight years.

In real terms, that is, in purchasing power, the federal minimum wage peaked near $10.00 per hour in 1968, using 2014 inflation-adjusted dollars. In other words, the American working class has been in a steady economic decline for the last almost 50 years, despite a near doubling of productivity.

Exposing Canada’s resource theft in Zambia

by Yves Engler

Pambazuka News | July 20, 2017

Proactive Investros

In Zambia, as with elsewhere in Africa, Canada’s mining industry, foreign policy and neoliberalism overlap tightly. It is a subject Canadians ought to pay attention to if they want their country to be a force for good in the world.

 

While few Canadians could find Zambia on a map, the Great White North has significant influence over the southern African nation.

A big beneficiary of internationally sponsored neoliberal reforms, a Vancouver firm is the largest foreign investor in the landlocked country of 16 million people.