Place: Europe

Dear Friends,

As the uprising in Ukraine seems to be coming to a crisis after weeks of mass demonstrations and occupations, I would like to translate for you the following letter received last week from Julia Gusseva, the Russian translator of Victor Serge and co-organizer of the International Conference of Independent Labor Unions in Kiev last November. Julia, an activist since the ‘80s, is one of the founders of the Praxis Center in Moscow, and writes from an anarcho-syndicalist viewpoint.

In March 2010, a few months before his death, Mario Monicelli, the unforgettable director of the 1958 caper film Big Deal on Madonna Street (I soliti ignoti), was interviewed live on Michele Santoro’s program “Rai per una notte.”² Disillusioned, Monicelli sketched the portrait of a subdued country, an Italy overcome with fear, which he then followed with expressing the hope of “a real blow [to the system], a revolution, something Italy has never experienced,” because, according to him, redemption only comes from sacrifice and

For most Jews in the United States, the legacy of the Soviet Union is linked to anti-Semitism. This is understandable, given not only the targeting of Jewish writers, doctors, and others by Stalin’s terror but also the quotas and petty persecution of the Khrushchev and Brezhnev years. Some people remember that the Russian Revolution freed Jews from the pogroms and segregation of czarism. But few have any conception of the extraordinary flourishing of Yiddish-language culture under the Bolsheviks in the 1920s. 

Since the Conservative-Liberal Democratic coalition came into power in Britain in 2010, there has been a vicious attack on both the public sector and the social welfare state that is being justified as a response to the “high deficit.” Austerity is being introduced for two related reasons. First, the low profitability and resulting stagnation following the economic crisis of 2008 led employers to squeeze wages in order to keep profits up.

Many misconceptions still exist in the mainstream about the ongoing economic crisis in Southern Europe. First, the crisis is often considered a direct result of the 2008 banking sector collapse in the United States, but it is becoming abundantly clear that it is a by-product, an expected outcome, of the current economic system, capitalism, which relies on continuing growth and competition, profit maximization, power and wealth accumulation by the oligarchy, commodification of public goods and resources, and the voracious exploitation of the environment.

During the last ten years, a new Turkey has been created. The Justice and Development Party (AKP) government of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has begun the establishment of an authoritarian regime built upon Sunni Islamic principles and neoliberal economics. We are in an era where the two have combined to create the worst of all worlds for women.

The following is a response to an article trying to enlist the poet Homer on the side of hawks by the Boston Globe’s resident neocon right winger Jeff Jacoby. This letter was not published.

This essay is inspired by the recent article by Denis Godard titled: “The NPA in crisis: We have to explain because we have to start again.” His article is a review of the strategic orientation of the historically Trotskyist-origined tendencies that prioritize building independent class formations and which see electoral vehicles as expressions of anti-capitalist cum revolutionary socialist movements “from below” (that is, based in and directly responsive to grassroots and rank-and-file formations).

[New Politics readers will be interested in the following article by Dan Gallin, who advocates social justice unionism, international solidarity and the need for workers' movements that actually move.

Passionately watching last week’s election returns* at the Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung’s office in New York, without ever having been to Germany or learned more than a half-dozen German words, was an unusual experience. It was easy enough to orient my sympathies — as an American socialist they stood with the Left Party.

                        Both teachers unions and headline-writers seem to agree that the NUT (National Union of Teachers) and NASUWT (National Association of Schoolmasters Union of Women Teachers) joint strikes that start Tuesday 1 October are over pay and pensions. They’re wrong.

                        UK teacher Rob Price explains in this FB post why we should care about and support the upcoming joint strikes of the country’s two biggest teachers unions.  (My post tomorrow will discuss why this is a strike over much more than pay and pensions.) You can tweet messages of support to @nutonline with the hashtag #teacherroar.

Martin Comack is absolutely correct to recognize that I wrote a Leninist critique of his book Wild Socialism about the revolutionary shop stewards or council movement that existed in Berlin at the time of World War I and on into the early 192

I would like to comment on the Leninist critique of my book Wild Socialism: Workers Councils in Revolutionary Berlin, 1918-21 by Dan La Botz on your website. His review contains several errors and misinterpretations.

Review: Thomas Sakmyster. A Communist Odyssey: The Life of József Pogány / John Pepper. Budapest-New York: Central European University Press. 2012. Photos. Bibliography. Index. 249 pp.

Book Review of Martin Comack. Wild Socialism: Workers Councils in Revolutionary Berlin, 1918-1921. New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2012. Chronology. Bibliography. Index. 97pp. Paperback or e-book: $24.99

     The International Monetary Fund acknowledged making an egregious error in its evaluation of the Greek bailout it helped create after its ambitious push for harsh austerity last month. Their failed analysis highlights the dangers of austerity measures imposed on Greek citizens. According to the IMF report:

It was supposed to mark the beginning of a new era in Irish politics. The Green Party entered into a coalition government with Fianna Fail in 2007 bringing with it the ideas of a new greener economy and all the hopes and aspirations of environmentalists, but instead their time in power turned out like a comedic tragedy.

On January 9, 1992, as the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia splintered, the Serbian citizens of Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH) announced the independence of the Republika Srpska (RS). The precipitous announcement of Serbian autonomy could be considered the diplomatic origin of the RS quest to ethnically cleanse Bosnia, thereby making it suitable for inclusion in a Greater Serbia as was the goal of the RS’s first president, Radovan Karadžić.

There seems to exist a secret complicity between the rediscovery of Rosa Luxemburg and rebellious times. The last period when her life and writings raised much interest was in the 1960s and 70s, during the “street-fighting years” (Tariq Ali’s expression). Could the recent publication of several of her works, in many parts of the world, be the sign of a new “critical” epoch? In the English speaking world, the good news is the project of publishing The Complete Works of Rosa Luxemburg in fourteen volumes, five of which only with her correspondence.

(Translation By Özlem İlyas Tolunay; Turkish version here.)

Oğuzhan Müftüoğlu was born in Anamur, Turkey in 1944. He joined the Revolutionary Youth (Dev-Genç) movement while he was a law student at Ankara University during the 1960s.