Portside

1. For a Diplomatic Humanitarian Convoy Now
2. This Century’s “Lenin Moment”
3. Indian and Pakistani Feminists Call for Peace
4. What’s Doing in Mexico
5. The Cause of Western Sahara
6. Samsung’s Union Battle
7. Burkina Faso’s Ibrahim Traoré
8. Antifascist Legacy Blocks Far Right Push
9. The Global Peasant Movement in a World in Crisis
10. Mujica, the Humble President

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For a Diplomatic Humanitarian Convoy Now

Al-Haq, Law in the Service of Man (Ramallah)

Palestinian civil society, joined by humanitarian and human rights organisations worldwide, issues this urgent and unified call: The manufactured famine in Gaza must be halted. The international community must act decisively, immediately, and with full moral and legal responsibility.

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This Century’s “Lenin Moment”

Emiliano Brancaccio / Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung (Berlin)

The global turmoil we observe today could be christened something like a “Lenin moment”. The reference, however, is not to Vladimir Lenin the Bolshevik revolutionary per se, so much as Lenin the indefatigable scholar who, at the outset of World War I, penned his famous essay on Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism, a text that is highly useful in understanding historical trends to this day.

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Indian and Pakistani Feminists Call for Peace

Saheli Women’s Resource Centre, et al. / South Asia Citizens’ Web 

We, feminists from India and Pakistan, unequivocally welcome the ceasefire declared by our two nations today. The tension and escalation of the last fortnight remind us of how fragile peace is. The ceasefire is also a vindication of calls for de-escalation and peace by lakhs of ordinary people on both sides of the border. 

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What’s Doing in Mexico

     • Sheinbaum Returns Stolen Land to Wixárika   / Esperanza Project (Guadalajara)

     • Building Digital Defenses Against Big Tech Colonialism   Tamara Pearson / Truthout (Sacramento)

     • Teachers Win Pay Hike with President’s Blessing   / Mexico News Daily (Guadalajara)

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The Cause of Western Sahara

Dr. Isabel Lourenço / The Pan Afrikanist 

In 2025, we mark 50 years since Morocco’s illegal occupation of Western Sahara — a colonial occupation sustained by a repressive military apparatus, a deliberate policy of demographic substitution, and, above all, a web of international complicity. It is a territory exploited, dominated, and manipulated to serve the economic and geopolitical interests of a metropolis aligned with imperialism.

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Samsung’s Union Battle

Kap Seol / Jacobin (Brooklyn)

Last year saw a historic strike by workers at Samsung, the Korean electronics firm with a global footprint. Yet the National Samsung Electronics Union (NSEU) that organized the strike has since stumbled over an old practice in South Korea’s labor movement — one often used to drive a wedge between the leadership and the rank-and-file members.

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Burkina Faso’s Ibrahim Traoré

Abubakar Isah / Modern Ghana (Accra)

A charismatic 37-year-old, Burkina Faso’s military ruler Capt Ibrahim Traoré has skilfully built the persona of a pan-Africanist leader determined to free his nation from what he regards as the clutches of Western imperialism and neo-colonialism. But is he a true torchbearer or merely a fleeting fire?

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Antifascist Legacy Blocks Far Right Push

Juan Masullo and Simone Cremaschi / The Conversation (Waltham MA)

Using an original dataset mapping resistance activity in 1943-1945, across about 8,000 Italian municipalities, we compared places with strong partisan mobilisation to those without. Even today, eight decades later, residents of areas with a resistance past are more likely to support initiatives that counter far-right ideologies.

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The Global Peasant Movement in a World in Crisis

Real World Radio (Montevideo)

The upcoming 3rd Nyéléni Global Forum to take place in September 2025, is set to be one of those milestones that shape the history of peoples’ struggles, in this case, the struggles of peasant movements and organisations that promote food sovereignty, alongside all the organisations that carry that banner in every corner of the planet.

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Mujica, the Humble President

Pablo Meriguet / Peoples Dispatch (New Delhi)

Former Uruguayan President José “Pepe” Alberto Mujica Cordano died from cancer on May 13. As the ex-guerrilla himself stated: “You are going to grow old and you are going to have wrinkles, and one day you are going to look in the mirror and you will have to ask yourself, on that day, if you betrayed the child you had inside you.”