RAMIN MAZAHERI—French unions have done a woeful job leading the strike despite having everything going for them at the beginning. The alleged superiority of the so-called “independent” union model – favored by the West but opposed by any country with a revolution after 1917 – is once again failing the nation, if maybe not their dues-paying members. The general strike is wobbling, and by January 24th the pension bill will be formally presented to the government. It is amazing rapacity, because presenting a bill amid such strikes is obviously rushing it into the safe arms of a system dominated by President Emmanuel Macron.
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ERIC ZUESSE—The basic distinction is class, not ethnicity. The cause of all these wars — not only international but also civil conflicts — is the unlimited greed of the wealthiest. Ethnicity is merely used by them in order to expand their own wealth.
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PETER LACKOWSKI—In 1952, the National Revolutionary Movement (MNR) led a revolution that made historic gains with expanded rights for workers, land reform, and national economic sovereignty. It was supported by miners, workers and peasants, but it was led by a white and mestizo middle class who saw the indigenous majority as “primitive,” people who needed to be modernized, assimilated, and brought into the economy as workers and capitalist farmers.
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RAINER SHEA—The staggering selfishness that these petty tyrants showed when Stalin tried to make their resources available to a desperate populace-with many of the kulaks having burned their supplies rather than share it-is also ignored by bourgeois commentators who see the kulaks as victims. From a capitalist perspective, taking away someone’s means for exploiting the proletariat is a heinous crime, and the kulaks were only defending themselves.
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DAISY LUTHER—A new report says that more than 2 million Americans in West Virginia, Alabama, Texas and the Navajo Nation Reservation in the Southwest are living without clean running water or indoor plumbing. They’re drinking from polluted streams. They’re carrying buckets of the same water home for washing. They’re urinating and defecating outside with no wastewater treatment.
