New picture album

* This editorial comes from issue #53 (May-June 2008) of El Libertario, a Venezuelan anarchist voice of ideas and proposals for action. It confirms our commitment to autonomous social mobilization, which has already begun to express itself through concrete struggles from below, as in the recent steelworkers conflict.

The leaflet below was prepared for this May Day by the International Communist Party which continues after more than fifty years to represent the line of the objective historical interests of the world proletariat, by keeping alive the 145 year old militant and communist tradition of Marx and Engels, the Red October of Lenin and Trotsky, the uncorrupted Communist International, the Struggle of the Left Opposition sustained by the Italian Communist Left against the Stalinist Counter-revolution which lead to today’s tragic enfeeblement and confusion of forces seeking an authentic revolutionary response to all the attacks of Capital.

Shared by US Labor Against War

The first message is a May Day greeting from a broad cross-section of union leaders from many different unions and labor federations in Iraq as an expression of their appreciation for the solidarity demonstrated by organized labor, working people and all peace-loving people of the world in support of their efforts to end the foreign occupation of Iraq and the sectarian violence that occupation has spawned.

The second is a statement of solidarity from the General Union of Port Workers in Iraq to the members of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU) in support of the decision by ILWU members to shut down all the ports on the West Coast as a demonstration of their opposition to the war and occupation of Iraq.

Politicians like Giles Duceppe, leader of the Block, have become political assets on the backs of workers. Their slogan may be “Buy Canada” but what they’re really saying is “Sell everywhere”. Today it’s “Buy Canada” and tomorrow it’s “Defend Canada or Quebec”… And let us kill our enemies, the workers of Vietnam, China, Russia, Romania or elsewhere through a world war of their choosing. Capitalist competition, economic crises are always regulated by wars with workers from opposing imperialist camps, obliged to kill themselves.

Here are actions for the International Workers' Day or Labour Day (May Day), which celebrates international solidarity between the workers of the entire world ! [source: Wikipedia]

In Montreal :

• April 27 to May 4, Mayworks ! - events every day to May 4th !
     A festival of working class art and resistance dedicated to bringing down the walls that divide those who face injustice from war, racism, and neoliberalism.
     Any Wall Turned on Its Side Becomes a Bridge

• May 1st, 18h Anticapitalist and autonomous protest
     organized by many collectives and organizations.
  
  
• Le 4 mai, Status for All, No One Is Illegal!
  A march for immigrant justice, and against poverty, racism & racial profiling

In Québec City :

• 9h to 17h, Journée d'étude: La Puissance de la finance globalisée
  - Laval University, free access

• 18h, May First Protest in Quebec City: Workers of the world unite!
     - Vanier / Quebec City.

• 19h, Cabaret du 1er mai
     - Café-bar L'AgitéE: 251 Dorchester

• 19h30, On the concentration of media ownership, in solidarity with the locked-out of the Journal de Québec -by Quebec solidaire.

Also: Mai 3rd, National protest to keep our health care universal and free!

[ ignore the Read more link if any ]

A workers committee formed independently of the trades union apparatus organised the mobilisation.

* This is a brief outline of the libertarian footprint in the history of Venezuela, prepared by members of the Collective Editorship of El Libertario www.nodo50.org/ellibertario. We hope that this serves as a useful point of reference for those who are interested in the subject.

Action & Info - Human Rights First

Four Colombian trade unionists--some of whom were reportedly associated with a March 6 demonstration protesting state and paramilitary human rights violations--were killed between March 4 and March 11. Members of human rights organizations have been subject to physical attacks, harassment, office break-ins and thefts of files in the past weeks. Over two dozen organizations and individuals received death threats purporting to come from paramilitary groups in the capital, Bogota.

It allows to notice once again that, whatever are the "opinions", "the feelings" and "the points of view" that can express a high-level representative of a national bourgeoisie at given moment, the decisions which it is brought to take are at first and above all determined by the global interests of this national bourgeoisie.

Then, each capital will seek, even more than it does already, to protect itself from the general storm and thus to weather the crisis better than its competitors. Example: Quebecor World which closes its printing works of Magog.

On March 27, the U.S. appeals court in Philadelphia reaffirmed the frame-up conviction of Mumia Abu-Jamal, the former Black Panther Party spokesman and world-renowned radical journalist who has been locked up on Pennsylvania’s death row for more than a quarter century. After previously rejecting Mumia’s request to present evidence of his innocence, as well as a host of issues showing that he was railroaded by a racist court, the Court turned down Mumia’s request for a new trial. It upheld the 2001 ruling by a federal district judge that ordered a new hearing on the sentence, but limited the “choice” to the living hell of life imprisonment without parole ... or execution. Mumia is innocent. He was declared guilty and sentenced to die because of his revolutionary politics and because for years he had been a thorn in the side of the racist rulers of the misnamed “city of brotherly love.” Around the world, millions have come out in defense of Jamal. This latest ruling, like all those that preceded it, shows that the exploited and oppressed must have no faith in the racist injustice system. We call on the workers movement to mobilize its power to free Mumia now!

We publish this article from our comrades of Revolutionary Perspectives, a quarterly Magazine of the Communist workers’Organisation Bristih Affiliate of the International Bureau for the Revolutionary Party.

Some internationalist communists, Montréal (ICM)

US Imperialism’s Hundred Years War?