Summary of strikes collected in our “Strike Channel” during the month of December 2021
Month: December 2021
The ten most read articles during 2021 in order from highest to lowest. A barometer of where our readers’ concerns have gone during this year: the Green Deal consequences, the future of BLM movement and the imperialist tensions shared the spotlight with the homogenization of the web and the fall of purchase power of the wages.
2021 saw the end of the “Covid strikes”, but also the promising appearance of mass struggles in new regions as well as quite a few useful lessons and signs of what’s to come.
In 2021 it became clear that the magnitude and duration of the slaughter is the product of policy decisions made in order to subordinate human lives to the profitability of capital. Moreover, vaccines have not put an end to the pandemic nor to the appearance of new variants because from the beginning their development and production has been dependent on the concentration of large capital. The opinion industry, “democracy’s backbone”, has been forced to devote all its efforts to sustaining the criminal nonsense under which we live.
In 2021 the global economy was reconfigured to prepare for war; imperialist tensions converged strongly around the US-China conflict; Europe lost its centrality; and new hot spots appeared that, for the first time, directly involved two of the main South American states on the road to war.
During 2021 media campaigns, states and the drift of an increasingly angry and openly reactionary petty bourgeoisie have produced an unusual pressure through new and increasingly reactionary discourses on youth, protest, property, parenting or “vulnerability”. It has been the year of the rise to state ideology of environmentalism and the year in which the “gender pay gap” has become an official part of the statistical “dashboard”.
Gabriel Boric will be Chile’s new president. The global press and the left today hail a new stage in Chilean history. Is it that big a deal? What does it mean for workers in Chile and in South America?
In Argentina but also in Spain and half the world, the germs of fascism are widespread, but not where the media usually focus on. The xenophobic and homophobic gangs are dangerous, indeed, but just by themselves they are not going to control, subdue and mobilize the neighborhoods. It is quite a different matter when the state itself generates autonomous, “grassroots” structures to mediate access to basic necessities and “social justice” plans to “build the people.”
The Third International, from the experience of the russian revolution, was the first to address the role of cooperatives in a revolutionary phase.
The Kellogg’s strike in the US continues after two months despite union attempts to end the strike as soon as possible and threats by the company to fire the strikers. While Biden takes the opportunity to advertise himself once again as the most pro-union president since Roosevelt, the company tries to take the “tiered” agreements signed by the unions to their ultimate consequences and the unions tell workers not to complain about the 12-hour workdays and instead leave things as they were prior to 2015.
It is expected that 65% to 70% of the world’s population will be crowded into cities by 2050. The news warns about the urban population of tropical countries literally dying of heat exhaustion in their cities, while there is no week in which images and videos of some new Chinese ghost city -product of large-scale real estate speculation- fail to show up in the international media.
Media around the world spoke this weekend of the tornadoes in the U.S. and their impact on a candle factory in Kentucky, an Amazon distribution center and hundreds of razed homes. The White House called for investigating whether the disaster is related to climate change. But the cause of the human disaster is much simpler: precarious workforces and bonded laborers who can’t walk off the job even in the middle of a natural disaster as well as wooden houses unable to withstand storms and freezing temperatures.
The “Democracy Summit” organized by the US was intended to develop an ideological argument underpinning a “bloc ideology” amid the escalating imperialist conflict. The narrative of an increasingly polarized world between an authoritarian China and a democratic US nevertheless floundered, showing the difficulties of the US in rallying its own allies around an ideology that would commit them beyond their immediate interests.
Summary of strikes collected in our “Strike Channel” during the month of November 2021
A few days ago, in November, was the 30th anniversary of the outlawing of the CPSU… by its own leaders. We now publish a selection of four texts originally published between 1987 and 1991 in FOR newsletters and magazines with analyses of the Gorbachevian “Perestroika”, of the coup d’etat of ’91 that precipitated the implosion of the stalinist USSR and of the so-called “New World Order” immediately advanced by imperialist powers hoping to get their share of the spoils.
“The Bite” is the first series to deal, under the guise of a zombie comedy, with the gritty realities of the management of the Covid pandemic.
Environmentalism is beginning to be refined and distilled as a state ideology beyond the pressing need to impose the Green Deal. This trend goes beyond propaganda. It constrains scientific development and paves the way for a brutal acceleration of poverty imposed on the working class.