https://portside.org/2024-04-10/global-left-midweek-april-10-2024

1. A Revolution in Russia?
2. Venezuela Report
3. Jayati Ghosh: Analysis and a Call to Action
4. Senior Women Win Climate Lawsuit
5. Working Class Environmentalism
6. UK Protesters Shut Down Israeli Military Contractor
7. LGBTQ+ in Africa
8. Syrians Protest Prison Torture
9. Haitian Defenders
10. Marxist Theory in Japan

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A Revolution in Russia?

Mikhail Lobanov / Links (Sydney)

The war in Ukraine can only truly end once there has been profound political change in Russia. A revolution or profound political change is indeed possible in Russia in the medium term. A lot of the people with experience in political participation are from younger generations, and in this demographic left-wing and democratic views are the most widespread.

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Venezuela Report

Steve Ellner / Venezuelanalysis (Caracas)

Since the early days of Chávez, Washington has favored the opposition’s radical right wing, not so much the opposition as a whole. The U.S. has gone from Leopoldo López to Guaidó and now to María Corina Machado. All polls indicate that Machado is popular with the opposition’s rank and file, but her program for Venezuela, her confrontational approach and her pro-U.S. discourse are not.

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Jayati Ghosh: Analysis and a Call to Action

Sorcha Brennan / Frontiers (Lausanne)

We really need to transform our global food systems, to move away from a heavily commercialized and chemical agriculture to one that relies much more on local produce, on enabling and living with the current environment and a nature that is changing. By using traditional knowledge, we give validity and viability to smallholders — small cultivators in agriculture — rather than the big corporations.

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Senior Women Win Climate Lawsuit

Ajit Niranjan / The Guardian (London)

The KlimaSeniorinnen, a group of 2,400 older Swiss women, told the court that several of their rights were being violated. Because older women are more likely to die in heatwaves – which have become hotter and more common because of fossil fuels – they argued that Switzerland should do its share to stop the planet heating by the Paris agreement target of 1.5C (2.7F) above preindustrial levels.

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Working Class Environmentalism

Lorenzo Feltrin and Emanuele Leonardi / Platforms, Populisms, Pandemics and Riots (London ONT)

It is necessary to break free from the fetish of a complicity between capital and the environment to open the space to (re)link environmental and labour movements. The memory of the struggles of half a century ago takes on a renewed relevance today. The convergence between workplace disputes and climate and environmental mobilisations reveals itself as extremely timely. 

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UK Protesters Shut Down Israeli Military Contractor

Al Mayadeen English (Beirut)

UK-based Palestine Action activists "occupied" a US-owned Teledyne factory in West Yorkshire in the UK on because it exports weapons for the Israeli occupation forces. In its statement, the group said, "Breaching security, the activists have scaled the factory to take the roof, forcing the site closed and rendering it unable to fulfill its shipment of weapons parts to be used in the Gaza genocide."

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LGBTQ+ in Africa

Clarisse Sih and Bibbi Abruzzini / Global Voices (Amsterdam)

There are 64 countries in the world whose laws criminalise homosexuality, and nearly half of these are in Africa. Many of the laws criminalising homosexual relations date from colonial times. This reality is pushing many queer people to choose the relative comfort of the closet while dreaming of a day when they will be free at last.

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Syrians Protest Prison Torture

Ali Haj Suleiman and Husam Hezaber / Al Jazeera (Doha)

Despite the dangers of dissent, people in northwestern Syria have been taking to the streets in recent weeks to protest an armed group formed out of an al-Qaeda breakaway faction. Hay’et Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) controls a large portion of Idlib province. Protests with hundreds of participants have taken place across Idlib, with banners calling HTS prisons “slaughterhouses”.

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Haitian Defenders

Danny Shaw / Truthout (Sacramento)

Exasperated by mercenaries raping, looting and massacring their communities, neighborhoods set to kicking the sanguinary criminals out. The decentralized movement exploded, inspiring neighborhoods across the sprawling city to take every measure to defend themselves from government-linked death squads.

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Marxist Theory in Japan

Gavin Walker / Historical Materialism (London)

While little-known in contemporary European or North American intellectual circles, Marxism was the dominant strand of theoretical inquiry in Japan for most of the 20th century. Japanese has remained perhaps the most important language for Marxist-theoretical scholarship beyond English, German, and French, yet its theoretical history remains isolated within its own linguistic boundaries.