Portside

What do we celebrate, then, when we look back at 1917? What have we learned?

Che’s legacy was not revenge. It remains a doctor’s love for humanity.

Indian farmers - carrying the Red Flag of the Kisan Sabha and the Communist movement - used the technique of the mahapadav (sit in) to stop local governments from operating and to paralyze the state. This forced the neoliberal government to negotiate. Perhaps if the French workers hear about this struggle and its victory, it might inspire them in their own battles against anti-labor laws.

The United States is fueling a conflict that has resulted in war crimes and famine.

Rather than evaluate one’s own behavior in a bad situation, one tends to blame others and to disregard the constraints that others operate under. This is typically considered to be a “self-serving bias”. The character of the man of the West always surmounts the character of the man of the East. The violence of the West is prophylactic, while the violence of the East is destructive.

“The inhuman exploitation on the peoples of three continents,” he said in reference to Africa, Asia and Latin America, “marked forever the destiny and lives of over 4.5 billion people living in the Third World today.” It was this history, he said, that left “the current victims of that atrocity” in poverty, unemployment, illiteracy and sickness. Castro’s words mirrored reality. He would not end there. It was hope, not despondency, that captured his personality.

Mr. Erdogan deliberately linked the Gülen movement to the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), which the Turkish army has attacked in its bases in south-eastern Turkey and in Iraq. To call both the Gülen movement and the PKK ‘terrorists’ is a convenient way to sweep up all Erdogan enemies into one target and use the coup — a “gift from God” — as the opportunity to go after them with vehemence.

The entire discourse on refugees and migrants is suffused with racism. When Americans and Europeans live overseas, they are called expatriates – not migrants. It is the darker bodies who are migrants and refugees.

The LDF, which comprises the Communist Party of India (Marxist), the Communist Party of India and nine other allied parties, gained over 20 extra seats over the 2011 election results in Kerala defeating the Congress Party and the ultra-right BJP. This was a victory to celebrate even though the Left Front continued to lose ground in West Bengal.

For generations, the Extreme Right in India has sought to erase the Left. What is it about the Left that the Extreme Right fears? It fears that the Left has an alternative narrative of India’s history and of its possible future -- one rooted not in social exclusion and economic inequality, but in the very opposite of that.