Portside

1. CPI(M) General Secretary Sitaram Yechury (1952-2024)
2. The European Left and Immigration
3. Missing Voices of Climate Defenders
4. Hondurans Rally for Xiomara Castro
5. Israel’s General Strike
6. Working Class Sisterhood
7. New Popular Front Tells Macron ‘Up Yours!’
8. An Epic Life in the Fight Against Apartheid
9. Women in the Forefront: Guatemala, Thailand, France
10. Former World Leaders Write to Biden About Cuba

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CPI(M) General Secretary Sitaram Yechury (1952-2024)

• Lifelong Communist   A M Jigeesh / The Hindu (Mumbai)

• Tributes   Namita Singh / The Independent (London) 

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The European Left and Immigration

Roger Martelli / Regards (Paris)

[Translated by Portside. Read the original in French here.]

Running after a “public opinion” that is cut with the theses of the extreme right, the left ends up taking the migratory "problem” for granted.

In Germany, the Social Democratic Chancellor, Olaf Scholz, has decided to strengthen border controls to combat illegal immigration. In Denmark, which in 1952 was the first country in the world to ratify the Geneva Convention on Refugees, the socialists began to assume a migration policy that makes their country a champion of migration restrictions.

Is it the reality of social problems that drives this choice? No. We resolve to do so because the extreme right has imposed its anti-immigration credo as a matter of course. And, as always when it scores points, we are capable of explaining that the questions it asks are relevant and that they must simply be answered differently. In Germany, Sahra Wagenknecht has been saying this for a long time, even though she was a figure on the left wing of Die Linke. And her words found favorable echoes in us at the time, including within La France insoumise.

In any case, we are back at the starting point, at a time when the European political scene is tilting to the right. We must not give weapons to the extreme right. Researchers, associative activists, experts in the migration file can always explain that migratory movements have nothing of a tsunami, that the “great replacement” is an absurdity, that the rise in migratory flows is a global phenomenon, etc., those responsible do not care: if “public opinion” thinks that immigration is a “problem”, it must be treated as such.

As François Héran writes in Immigration: the great denial (2023):

‘The new migration policy will have to balance the interests of all instead of pushing the cursor all the way in one direction. The challenge is considerable: anticipate the “migration crises” announced by the front-line bodies; mobilize the necessary human resources as soon as possible (and not only in the form of precarious jobs); recall successes as well as the failures of integration; salute the major role of immigrants in “essential” jobs (and not only in times of pandemic); publicly relay that work like that of the OECD in its 2001 report, demonstrates that immigration brings more to the public budget than it costs it; break with a perverse logic that would make integration — or even assimilation — a condition of entry into the territory, while integration into the nation has always been a long-term process, taking one or two generations and requiring mutual effort on all sides. In short, we need to get out of denial.’

It will be agreed here that the reality of migrations does not lend itself well to the game of extreme oppositions, to the sanctification of walls and to the ethical affirmation of “no borders”. But when, on the left, we begin to explain that “we cannot welcome all the misery of the world”, we quickly end up getting caught in a gear that, in the name of realism, leads to successive setbacks and, at the end, to the very abandonment of values. Because, since increased border control is by no means a solution, committing to it inexorably leads to having to go further and further in the repressive direction. This is no problem if, as on the extreme right, we believe that the national fence is in itself a value.

But if we refuse to do so, we must have ambitions other than those of doing better than the right or the extreme right and, in no case, can we suggest that voluntary human management of migratory flows is primarily based on technical means of control. To “welcome” — and how not to do it when we know that migration will continue to increase on a global scale? — we need a society compatible with the requirement of sharing, solidarity, absolute imperative of human rights, inclusion and not exclusion.

If the left is not able to bring itself to this level of project, if it does not install the narrative of this necessary and possible society, it will lose itself, and it will lose in the field of values as much as in that of realism.

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Missing Voices of Climate Defenders

Global Witness (London)

We are land and environmental defenders. And when we speak up many of us are attacked for doing so. This report shows that in every region of the world, people who speak out and call attention to the harm caused by extractive industries – like deforestation, pollution and land grabbing – face violence, discrimination and threats. 

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Honduras Fights Back

• Thousands Show Support for Libre Party   Pablo Meriguet / Peoples Dispatch (New Delhi)

• US Pressure and Coup Threat  W.T. Whitney / CounterPunch (Petrolia CA)

• Eco-Activist Shot   / Deutsche Welle (Berlin)

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Israel’s General Strike

Assaf S. Bondy, Erez Maggor and Jonathan Preminger / Jacobin (Brooklyn)

This almost unprecedented declaration was a response to growing pressure on the powerful labor federation Histadrut to support those protesting against Benjamin Netanyahu’s government and demanding an agreement that would bring home the Israeli hostages held by Hamas in the Gaza Strip. 

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Working Class Sisterhood

Trade Unions for Energy Democracy (New York)

The TUED South Asia-Pacific Regional Policy Meeting in Bali, Indonesia, highlighted women’s leadership and raised several gender issues. The regional meeting reflected the understanding that the Public Pathway is feminist, working class and internationalist. A feminist approach to a just energy transition deals with the question of the ownership of energy and the need for democratic control.

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New Popular Front Tells Macron ‘Up Yours!’

Filippo Ortona / il manifesto Global (Rome)

As soon as Michel Barnier’s appointment became official, La France Insoumise leader Jean-Luc Mélenchon delivered a short but pointed message: “It will not be a member of the NFP – which came in first place in the elections – who will appear before the deputies, but instead a member of a party that came last in the legislative elections.” 

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An Epic Life in the Fight Against Apartheid

Vishwas Satgar / The Conversation (Walham MA)

The former South African Finance Minister Pravin Gordhan, who has died aged 75, was a national liberation and post-apartheid leader. Today with majoritarian African nationalism paying lip service to non-racialism or worse expressing a reverse racism, the legacy of the likes of Gordhan gives us all a basis to advance a principled unity and commitment to radical non-racialism.

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Women in the Forefront

• Guatemala: Defense of Democracy   Laura Carlsen / Common Dreams (Portland ME)

• Thailand: Defiance and Determination   Nitchakarn Rakwongrit (Memee) / International Center on Nonviolent Conflict (Washington DC) 

• France: Mass Protest Against Rape Culture   / Le Monde (Paris)

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Former World Leaders Write to Biden About Cuba

Carla Gloria Colomé / EL PAÍS (Madrid)

Dozens of former presidents and prime ministers from around the world have signed a letter in which they convey to U.S. President Joe Biden, a few months before the end of his term, a request made by others in the past: to remove Cuba from the list of state sponsors of terrorism in which it was included under Donald Trump, reversing Barack Obama’s attempt to remove it from this list.