Protests In Peru Persist

Countercurrents | January 12, 2023

People are protesting Rightist government moves ousting President Pedro Castillo.

Tweeting from jail on Tuesday, Castillo said history will remember Peruvians “murdered for defending the country from the coup dictatorship,” and that “terror is the last bullet of a regime cornered by the people.”

At least 47 people have died in connection with the protests, according to official government figures published on Tuesday. This includes 39 protesters, as well as seven civilians who perished in “traffic accidents linked to protest roadblocks,” and a police officer.

Media reports said:

Protesters in the southern city of Juliaca ambushed a patrol car after 17 local civilians were killed the day prior, in a confrontation with police.

UK Strikes:

Meetings with ministers to resolve NHS, rail and civil service strikes ends ‘in total farce’

Morning Star | January 12, 2023

Mick Lynch, (left) general secretary of the Rail, Maritime and Transport union (RMT) arrives at the offices of the Rail Delivery Group (RDG) for a Transport Salaried Staffs’ Association (TSSA) meeting

ASTRIKE by 100,000 civil servants is set to go ahead next month after unions branded today’s crisis talks with Tory ministers a “total farce.”

Cabinet Office Minister Jeremy Quin met with the leaders of the PCS, FDA and Prospect unions after they said December’s Border Force walkouts would be followed by massive industrial action across 124 government departments and other bodies on February 1.

But despite discussions over pay, jobs, working conditions and pensions being “well-trailed by the government as a chance to resolve the crisis, it was nothing of the sort because the minister had nothing to offer,” PCS general secretary Mark Serwotka charged.

Thierry Meyssan: The world order already changed in 2022

Thierry Meyssan

VOLTAIRENET.ORG | January 12, 2023

After long months of pulling her punches, Russia is finally letting Ukraine get a taste of what it has sown through fanaticism, nonstop lies and indecent, often brutal acts against civilians and Russian personnel.

It is a constant of History: changes are rare, but sudden. Those who bear the brunt of them are generally the last to see them coming. They perceive them only too late. Contrary to the static image that prevails in the West, international relations have been turned upside down in 2022, mainly to the detriment of the United States, the United Kingdom and France, often to the benefit of China and Russia. With their eyes riveted on Ukraine, Westerners do not perceive the redistribution of the cards.

T. MEYSSAN

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IT is rare for international relations to be shaken as they were in 2022. And it is not over. The process that has begun will not stop, even if events disrupt it and possibly interrupt it for a few years. The domination of the West, both the United States and the former colonial powers of Europe (mainly the United Kingdom, France and Spain) and Asia (Japan), is coming to an end. No one obeys a leader anymore, including the states that remain vassals of Washington. Everyone is now beginning to think for themselves. We are not yet in the multipolar world that Russia and China are trying to bring about, but we are seeing it being built.

Capitalism’s Court Jester: Slavoj Žižek

Zizek’s popularity and almost intrusive visibility on the Internet testifies to another triumph by the Western propaganda machine.

Gabriel Rockhill

Only poseurs, sellouts to imperialism, or unwitting buffoons with inexplicable followings, can be elevated by the culture/media industry to its maximum heights. The gatekeepers would never let a genuine revolutionary thinker attract a mass audience. Putrid adulation by the bourgeois media (The British rag The Telegraph calls him “the hippest philosopher”) confirms his true deleterious role in the class struggle.

One of the most prominent intellectuals in the contemporary world was named to the list of the “Top 100 Global Thinkers” in Foreign Policy magazine in 2012.[1] He shares this distinction with the likes of Dick Cheney, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Benjamin Netanyahu, and former Mossad director Meir Dagan. The theorist’s best idea—according to this well-known publication that is a virtual arm of the U.S. State Department—is that “the big revolution the left is waiting for will never come.”[2]

Other ideas were surely strong contenders, and we could add to the list more recent positions. To select but a few examples, this top global thinker has described 20th-century communism, and more specifically Stalinism, as “maybe the worst ideological, political, ethical, social (and so on) catastrophe in the history of humanity.”[3] As a matter of fact, he adds for emphasis that “if you measure at some abstract level of suffering, Stalinism was worse than Nazism,” apparently regretting that the Red Army under Stalin defeated the Nazi war machine.[4] The Third Reich was not as “radical” in its violence as communism, he insists, and “the problem with Hitler was that he was not violent enough.”[5] Perhaps he could have taken some tips from Mao Zedong who, according to this theoretical grandee, made a “ruthless decision to starve tens of millions to death.”[6] This undocumented assertion positions its author well to the right of the anti-communist Black Book of Communism, which recognized that Mao did not intend to kill his compatriots.[7] Such information is of no import, however, to this theorist since he operates on the assumption that the worst ‘crime against humanity’ in the modern world was not Nazism or fascism, but rather communism.

How the FBI Hacked Twitter: The answer begins with Russiagate

Lee Smith

Tablet Magazine | January 05, 2023

AFTER journalist Matt Taibbi published the first batch of internal Twitter documents known as the Twitter files, he tweeted that the company’s deputy general counsel, James Baker, was vetting them.

“The news that Baker was reviewing the ‘Twitter files’ surprised everyone involved,” Taibbi wrote. That apparently included even Twitter’s new boss, Elon Musk, who added that Baker may have deleted some of the files he was supposed to be reviewing.

Baker had been the top lawyer at the FBI when it interfered in the 2016 presidential election. News that he might have been burying evidence of the spy service’s use of a social media company to interfere with the 2020 election, is rightly setting off alarm bells.

‘Let them die?’ Life expectancy collapses in the US

Zoltan Zigedy

Morning Star | January 13, 2023

IN the spirit of Jonathan Swift’s satirical tract A Modest Proposal, we might facetiously attribute the recent decline in US life expectancy to a concerted effort to strengthen the social safety net.

Politicians have been maintaining for decades that it would be necessary to reduce social security, Medicare and Medicaid benefits to keep the systems solvent.

Leaders of both political parties have urged cutting benefits, changing eligibility requirements or raising the already high age thresholds to preserve the reserves for future recipients.

Rising Food, Rents, Energy Prices Threatened Rights Of People In UK, Says Human Rights Watch

Countercurrents | January 13, 2023

The NGO Human Rights Watch (HRW) has said: Rising food, rents, and energy prices, and inadequate social protections threatened the rights of people on the lowest incomes, including to food and housing.

The HRW has warned: The UK could become known as a “human rights abuser,” if it does not reverse a series of controversial laws.

The NGO criticized Britain’s treatment of illegal immigrants, protesters, welfare recipients, and ethnic minorities, among others.

The NGO’s World Report 2023 (https://www.hrw.org/world-report/2023/country-chapters/united-kingdom) said:

India: Workers of Bhagwati Products and Zydus Wellness protest illegal retrenchment

Harsh Thakor

Countercurrents | January 08, 2023

Workers of Bhagwati Products based in Sidkul Pant Nagar and Zydus Wellness located in Sitarganj, Uttarakhand launched a rally and demonstrated at the district collectorate under the leadership of Shramik United Morcha Udham Singh Nagar with regard to resumption of work and other problems. On the conclusion of the rally, the workers of both the companies submitted a 6-point collective memorandum to SDM Rudrapur in the absence of the District Magistrate.

Apart from this, on December 27, the workers of Micromax celebrated black day by tying black ribbon outside the labour office Rudrapur Udham Singh Nagar on completion of four years of struggle due to illegal retrenchment by the management.

Note from the Editors

We wish our readers and well-wishers a happy new year!

After a long holiday, Journal of People resumes its work.

As always, JoP is committed to continue presenting information on significant political, social and economic issues as it believes information is necessary for learners. Along with these, JoP tries to present, from time to time, classics, which are still relevant and essential for learning.

We hope we will be able to continue our work in 2023 as well.

Soviet Literature

Maxim Gorky

August 1934

Portrait of Maxim Gorky by Nikolay Bogdanov-Belsky

THE ROLE of the labour processes, which have converted a two-Legged animal into man and created the basic elements of culture, has never been investigated as deeply and thoroughly as it deserves. This is quite natural, for such research would not be in the interests of the exploiters of labour. The latter, who use the energy of the masses as a sort of raw material to be turned into money, could not, of course, enhance the value of this raw material. Ever since remote antiquity, when mankind was divided into slaves and slave-owners, they have used the vital power of the toiling mass in the same way as we today use the mechanical force of river currents. Primitive man has been depicted by the historians of culture as a philosophizing idealist and mystic, a creator of gods, a seeker after “the meaning of life.” Primitive man has been saddled with the mentality of a Jacob Böhme, a cobbler who lived at the end of the sixteenth and the beginning of the seventeenth century and who occupied himself between whiles with philosophy of a kind extremely popular among bourgeois mystics; Böhme preached that “Man should meditate on the Skies, on the Stars and the Elements, and on the Creatures which do proceed from them, and likewise on the Holy Angels, the Devil, Heaven and Hell.