Articles (16)
Mindanao: "The main problem is the right to self-determination"
Written by AdministratorKuyasu, a member of the Teduray tribe in the Philippines, recently stayed for several weeks at the IIRE. He participated in the International Youth Camp in Perugia this summer and later, visited Denmark and Sweden. We had numerous talks, on his life in the Central Mindanao Region, in his village. The Teduray tribe consists of about 6000 people, claiming an ancestral domain of 201,850 hectares.
Eastern Europe faced with the crises of the system
Written by testuser64By IIRE Fellow Catherine Samary
European construction aroused popular aspirations, which were radically opposed to what is actually happening: aspirations for a continent that would resist antisocial policies while being open to the world, according to a democratic, social, ecological and solidarity-based logic... This was in particular what was hoped for in Eastern Europe, where the populations aspired to live better and more freely. Their hopes were profoundly disappointed, preparing the ground for xenophobic currents... Understanding what were the turns that history took, where things went wrong, understanding the present crisis is essential for the peoples to be able to re-appropriate their choices and thus their future.
The sudden disappearance of Denise Comanne is a shock to all of us who were active with Denise over the last thirty years. Her enthusiasm, her energy, her sense of humour, her warm and ever friendly personality, will remain with us.
People's Conference on Climate Breaks with Capitalist Logic
Written by testuser64
“Humanity confronts a great dilemma: to continue on the path of capitalism, depredation, and death, or to choose the path of harmony with nature and respect for life.”
Interview with Gilbert Achcar *
In the introduction to your book, you declare that you wrote it in order to "fight the symmetrical caricatures" often heard about Arab attitudes to the Holocaust? What are these caricatures?
Gilbert Achcar: These caricatures flourish in the ongoing propaganda war between supporters of the Israeli side and supporters of the Palestinian or Arab sides. The caricature spread by Israel's supporters presents a majority of Arabs as having been pro-Nazi, using the all too famous figure of mufti Amin Al-Husseni, referred to as the "mufti of Jerusalem".
By IIRE Fellow Michael Löwy.
We – I mean the Marxists, the ecosocialists, the radical climate justice activists – were quite pessimistic about the so-called United Nations Conference on Climate Change: we predicted that Copenhagen would end in a failure. We argued that the capitalist system doesn’t know any criteria other than more accumulation, greater expansion and higher profits, and therefore is unable to take the minimal measures necessary to prevent catastrophic climate change. And since we knew that the vast majority of the “world leaders” present in Copenhagen are nothing but faithful servants of capitalist interests, we thought that the conference would limit itself to vague promises about a 50% reduction of CO2 emissions by 2050. In a word, we believed that the Copenhagen mountain would give birth to a mouse.
The staff and friends of the IIRE were saddened to hear about the sudden death of Chris Harman on the evening of 6 November, in Cairo, where he was giving a talk.
A towering figure of the left in Europe, Harman was a pillar of the British revolutionary, anti-capitalist organisation, the Socialist Workers Party, and editor of the journal International Socialism. His monumental work A People’s History of the World, published in 1999, represented the first attempt to provide a single bottom-up account of the development of human civilisation.
Venezuela, Honduras, Peru, Ecuador small oversights and big lies
Written by testuser64Honduras: The Moment of Truth for the Obama Administration
Written by Former UsersThe military coup currently underway in Honduras is a hard coup accompanied by various vain attempts to make it appear soft and "constitutionalist." Behind the coup are diverse social, economic, and political forces, of which the most important is the administration of President Barack Obama. No important change can happen in Honduras without Washington's approval. The Honduran oligarchy and transnational corporations (banana growers, pharmaceutical manufacturers) are defending their interests, as they always have, with a military coup.
Keynesian Revolution and neo-liberal Counter-revolution
Written by Former Users
