“Just when the lamps are being lighted countrywide for Deepavali, the festival of light, all light has been extinguished from our life.” How many times will such darkness descend, before you alight the fire burning up the whole lot of capitalism, imperialism?”– A retrenched worker of Tirupur In two countries, at two opposite ends of [...]

Part 2: The Fightback Richard Roman and Edur Velasco Arregui The Fightback: From Protest to Rebellion? The government’s blitzkrieg attack on the SME has failed to destroy the resistance. Rather, the Mexican regime faces the broadest, deepest, and most unified resistance movement in decades. And, as importantly, it is a national resistance movement that is [...]

In the Kraft Foods factory north of Buenos Aires, management touched off a firestorm of worker discontent that included a 38-day sit-in, a police attack, and marches of thousands of supporters. In the Kraft Foods cookie and candy factory north of Buenos Aires, management refused to act on simple, government-proposed safety measures against swine flu—such [...]

At least two people have been killed and scores injured in clashes between textile workers and police in Bangladesh, police have said. The violence broke out as workers protested over unpaid salaries in the outskirts of the capital, Dhaka, on Saturday. “Law-enforcers had to fire rubber bullets from shot guns to disperse the workers who [...]

More than 3,000 workers at a Rico Auto Industries plant in Gurgaon, India are waging a militant union recognition struggle in the face of state repression, corporate strikebreaking and goon violence. According to a Times of India report, police and management have transformed the Rico plant, into a veritable armed camp. Scores of police, flanked [...]

Speech by WFTU General Secretary George Mavrikos at the International Seminar on:”The Economic Crisis and the Role of the International Trade Union Movement”, 5-6 October 2009, Brussels 7 October 2009 Dear friends, We would like to welcome you to our Conference stressing that your presence here is very important for us. We believe that in [...]

THE Empire dominated the world more through the economy and lies than by force. It obtained the privilege of printing convertible currency at the end of World War II; it had a monopoly of nuclear weapons; it had virtually all the gold in the world; and was the only large-scale producer of productive equipment, consumer [...]

Claudio Katz interviewed by Fernando Arellano Ortiz. Translated by John Mage for IIRE. July 10, 2009 The exit from the systemic crisis of capitalism needs to be political and “a socialist project can mature in this turbulence”. So says the Argentine economist, philosopher and sociologist Claudio Katz, who also warns that the “global economic situation [...]

The principle of endless accumulation that defines capitalism is synonymous with exponential growth, and the latter, like cancer, leads to death. John Stuart Mill, who recognized this, imagined that a “stationary state of affairs” would put an end to this irrational process. John Maynard Keynes shared this optimism of Reason. But neither was equipped to [...]