En Passant

The coming months will see if the widespread anger French Socialist Party president François Hollande faces can be transformed into effective action against government policies and against redundancies writes John Mullen, a Gauche Anticapitaliste activist in the Paris region.

The West is keen to use the Algerian gas plant seige to justify new interventions in a region it once dominated. But the official version of events just doesn’t stack up, writes Ken Olende in Socialist Worker UK.

The Western powers have chosen war as the way to put Mali together again, and they’ve begun deploying all the king’s horses. Malians of the North and the South could all be in for a long, terrible ordeal. The imperialists don’t exactly care who wins – as long as they back the winner.

May 1968 in France shows the revolutionary left can’t just build and lead once the upsurge happens. We need to have done the steady work beforehand of building a mass working class party of revolution with real roots in the working class.

We revolutionaries need to build for the future now. A good starting point is building a revolutionary socialist party and all that that entails. Not tomorrow; not when the class moves; now. Such an organisation does not exist in Australia today.

As the revolutionary unity project Socialist Alternative initiated continues, isn’t it time we had a look at what is on offer? We might just owe it to history and to the future.

Terror struck the financial markets on Monday, writes Tim Arnot in Socialist Alternative. The Greek stock exchange plunged 8 percent. French stock markets fell by 1.5 percent. The Euro fell to a three-month low. This had ripple effects across the globe, with Japan’s Nikkei falling 3 percent and the ASX down 1.5 percent. What was the cause for such a crisis on the stock market? Democracy.

Sarkozy’s defeat is our victory, but there are bigger battles to come writes John Mullen on his blog John Mullen à Montreuil (Blog anticapitaliste).

In the short term, the key problem for revolutionaries is how to relate to the workers attracted to Mélenchon, how to debate demands, joint struggles and illusions, and how to win new revolutionary activists. This debate has divided the NPA deeply. On one extreme there is the “Mélenchon ate my hamster” brigade who cannot imagine anything positive about Mélenchon’s success and flood email lists with pathetic anecdotes showing him in a bad light. On the other extreme, a significant faction of comrades is talking of breaking away from the NPA soon, to set up a less sectarian grouping.

Laws that punish women for their choice of dress or religion do not liberate them. They are an instrument of oppression and prejudice.

History shows that politicians often use racist scapegoating in times of crisis and falling popularity. What is happening in France should be a warning to us all.

There is a great feeling that the working class is at the centre of things, people are taking notice of it. That was really very, very inspiring.

What is your impression of the situation at the moment, and where the movement is headed?

It’s very, very exciting; there were very excited people at the demonstration the other day, thousands of people running along the boulevard chanting “general strike.” I haven’t seen this for 20 years.

This is very possibly the beginning of a crisis for the regime in France, with a class fight in the form of strikes and demonstrations against the government on one side, and the working masses on the other side. The result will be key in Europe where the right wing, including the extreme right, has been on a political offensive.