Global Left Midweek - February 6, 2019

Labor: Europeans Talk Strategy, Canadians Oppose Venezuela Coup Threat. Streets: Yellow Vests, Sudan, Russia. Jungle: Ecuador's Indigenous. And a New Appreciation of Rosa

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Indigenous women leaders from the Ceibo Alliance, Nemonte Nenquimo and Flor Tangoy, from the Waorani and Siona nations, participate in San Francisco's Rise for Climate March,Photo: AMAZON FRONTLINES
  1. Euro Trade Unions Talk Strategy
  2. Canadian Unions Oppose Threat of Venezuela Coup
  3. France's Class Wars
  4. Sudan: Third Revolution?
  5. A Failed Protest Fight in Russia
  6. Ecuador’s Ceibo Alliance Offers an Antidote to Reckless Industrialism
  7. Die Linke's Michael Brie on Rosa Luxemburg

 

Euro Trade Unions Talk Strategy

European Trade Union Institute (Brussels)

The ETUI organized an internal trade union discussion and a well-attended public conference, to explore the issue of increasing support for the far right across Europe, and assess trade union strategies for fighting those trends. Both events took place on 23 January in the International Trade Union House in Brussels.

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Canadian Unions Oppose Threats of Venezuela Coup

Karina Roman / CBC News (Ottawa)

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The Canadian Union of Public Employees (CUPE) — Canada's largest union — the Canadian Union of Postal Workers and the Canadian Labour Congress have expressed varying degrees of concern over Canada's move to recognize Guaido as interim president.

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France's Class Wars

Serge Halimi and Pierre Rimbert / Le Monde diplomatique (Paris)

The working class was supposed to have been edged out of active politics, but instead France’s elites have been frightened into making concessions by this winter’s uprising of the yellow vests. Its continuing popularity suggests that it is recasting French politics.

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Hope Rises For a Third Revolution in Sudan

Tarek Cheikh / The New Arab (London)

Protesters have rallied around cries of an essentially political nature, with "Liberty, peace and justice" the most common expression, as well as "Revolution is the people's choice." Both show the depth of the people's aspirations as well as the strength of the idea of a revolution. This has raised the game suddenly, and to previously unseen heights. 

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A Failed Protest Fight in Russia

Ilya Budraitskis / LeftEast (Bucharest)

The events of summer and early fall 2018 surrounding the pension reform bill allow us to evaluate the position of each major political force that made a call for protest rallies.

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Ecuador’s Ceibo Alliance Offers an Antidote to Reckless Industrialism

Alexander Zaitchik / Sierra (Oakland)

In the last decade, nearly 1,000 spills have released an average of 4,000 gallons of petroleum per day, much of it into the watersheds of Indigenous communities along several important Amazon tributaries. The region’s four main ethnic groups—the Siona, Waorani, Kofan, and Secoya—gathered at Amisachoin 2017 to found the Ceibo Alliance.

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Die Linke's Michael Brie on Rosa Luxemburg

Michael Brie / Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung (Berlin)

Rosa Luxemburg was neither primarily a strategist like Lenin nor a theorist like Kautsky, neither a sceptic like Bernstein nor an organic intellectual like Gramsci. She was, rather, in an entirely Old Testament sense and yet also a very modern one, a prophet—a “guide on the path out of the house of slaves.”