Global Left Midweek – December 27, 2023

Looking back/Looking ahead

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Dub poet Benjamin Zephaniah (1958-2023). Credit, Shutterstock.com
  1. Looking Back
  2. Looking Ahead
  3. Racism and Workers’ Rights
  4. Ukraine
  5. Philippines: Delivery Riders Organize
  6. ¡Que Viva América Latina!
  7. Kolkata Rainbow Pride
  8. The Day Women Took the Streets of Rome
  9. Namibia Reparations
  10. Dub Poet Benjamin Zephaniah 1958-2023

 

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Looking Back

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Looking Ahead

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Racism and Workers’ Rights

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Nancy Kachingwe / Public Services International (Geneva)

A look at some of the work that has been done by anti-racist and decolonial scholars and activists globally exploring why racism and white supremacy (as a legacy of slavery, imperialism and colonialism) remain entrenched in the global political economy, and how the resurgence of both overt and covert racism, xenophobia and other forms of intolerance are constitutive of neoliberal globalisation.

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Ukraine

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Philippines: Delivery Riders Organize

Yvan Ysmael Yonaha / Socialist Project (Toronto)

SENTRO supported actions by delivery riders with their organizational resources, aiming to build associational power for Grab riders and other platform workers. Associational power derives from the workers’ capacity to organise themselves to advocate for their interests and pressure decision-makers. This could be through unionization, setting up demonstrations, or building political parties.

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¡Que Viva América Latina!

  • Women in Mexican Politics   Kurt Hackbarth / Jacobin
     
  • Argentina   Julia Conley / Common Dreams (Portland ME)
     
  • Honduras   Nina Lakhani / Democracy Now! (New York)
     
  • Chile   Nyki Duda / NACLA Report
     
  • Peru   Magda Gibelli / openDemocracy
     
  • Panama   / Building and Wood Workers’ International (Carouge, Switzerland)

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Kolkata Rainbow Pride

Debabratee Dhar / Feminism in India (New Delhi)

The Kolkata Rainbow Pride Walk returned with love, resistance, pride, and a flourish of beautiful colours and artful posters. Kolkata’s Pride Walk serves as a reminder that to be queer is to not only exist outside the mainstream, but to reject the norm, to establish and to recognise with dignity and respect, every way of loving, living, and existing.

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The Day Women Took the Streets of Rome

Barbara Piccininni / transform! Europe

Can the remarkable demonstration in Rome on 25th November, orchestrated by Non Una di Meno (Not One Less), be dubbed a perfect storm? A monumental 500,000 people took to the streets to demand an end to violence against women. This unprecedented turnout is the immediate backdrop for a deeper exploration of the political landscape over the past decade.

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Unfulfilled Promise: Namibia Reparations

Shola Lawal / Al Jazeera (Doha)

Herero and Nama leaders had long pushed for a holistic reparations framework that would include recognition of the 1904-1908 massacre as a genocide by Germany, direct compensation for generational economic loss to their communities, land transfers, and crucially, full participation in the process.

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Dub Poet Benjamin Zephaniah: 1958-2023

Ella Creamer / The Guardian

His work was heavily influenced by Jamaican music and poetry, and he was often classified as a dub poet. In 2003, Zephaniah rejected his OBE. “Me? I thought, OBE me? Up yours, I thought,” he wrote. “I get angry when I hear that word ‘empire’; it reminds me of slavery, it reminds of thousands of years of brutality, it reminds me of how my foremothers were raped and my forefathers brutalised.”