After the November 4 referendum: For a free New Caledonia

Workers’ protest, Noumea, January 2016

by Phil Duncan

Sunday November 4 saw the long-awaited referendum in New Caledonia on whether to become independent or stay part of France.  Given the population make-up, as the French government has historically ensured a sizeable pro-French settler population, the rejection of independence was hardly surprising.  The vote was 56.4% for staying with France and 43.6% for independence.  French president Macron declared this outcome to be a show of “confidence in the French Republic”.  However, the voting figures suggest that the majority of Kanaks, the Melanesian indigenous population, continue to favour independence.

France maintains artificial majority

For instance, the territory is divided into three provinces and in the two with predominantly Kanak populations, people voted decisively for

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Colombia: the real and bloody legacy of Belisario Betancur

by Gearóid Ó Loingsigh

Belisario Betancur, the ex-president of Colombia (1982-1986) died in his bed on the 7^th of December, 2018.  He corpse hadn’t even time to go cold before he received and avalanche of eulogies from politician, ns and the press.  El Espectador gave over various pages to him and the magazine Semana did likewise.  They are all in agreement, the man of peace has died, but unlike Salvador Allende, the real Man of Peace in Benedetti’s poem, he did not die under fire from the bullets, warplanes and tanks of the Empire, but rather he died in peace and will be buried in the midst of a wave of praise.

The eulogies from the press are not surprising.  Betancur was, after all, one of them and social etiquette is to speak well of the dead, especially if he happens to be a president of the country.  You only have to look at all the liberals praising the recently deceased president of the USA, George H.W. Bush, the man who brought new vigour to conventional warfare and also to the death squads in Central America.  Death pardons everything.  It would seem scientists can discuss whether we are born with a blank slate, but without a doubt the press and the powerful give a kind of blank slate to some when they die.  It is hardly surprising.  But, what has the reformist left in Colombia to say for itself?

Reformist view

There are two tweets that embody a certain vision of Betancur and the issue of

Haiti: poverty more damaging than earthquake

Pic: Caribbean 360

On Saturday October 6th, a magnitude 5.6 earthquake hit the northwest region of Haiti. The worst-affected area was ​​Port-de-Paix, a city of just over 460,000 people and the capital of the North-West department. The quake killed at least 17 people and injured about 430.

The North-West Department is one of the most remote areas of the country. Running water, electricity, roads, hospitals, schools, universities, are mirages – the government talks about them but the people do not see them.

Just over 200 years ago Haiti was at the front of the struggle for human freedom

Indeed, the state does not provide any public services.  The roads linking this department to other parts of the country are in a sorry state.  In the houses anti-seismic or anti-cyclone standards have not been applied. The state does not apply them in public buildings either.

The area of Port-de-Paix struggles under the weight of poverty and ill-health, while the situation is even worse in the other communes of the department. With such a cocktail, any natural phenomenon, depending on its scale, can be transformed into a social catastrophe and a human tragedy. And it is always the poorest who are the most affected.

Some areas are difficult to access, because of the state of the roads, so relief is hard.  The hospital in Port de Paix is ​​

The Journey to Prison: Celia Lashlie’s writing revisited

by Don Franks 

“New Zealand has one of the highest imprisonment rates in the world, second only to the United States, with over 5000 people currently in our 17 prisons. We could be excused for thinking the problem is huge, too big too handle …”

Social reformer Celia Lashlie wrote that in 2002. Today, 10,645 inmates are crammed inside 18 overflowing jails.

Successive government policies paved the way for this massive increase.

Workers and left confront Labour Party in Dublin

Yesterday (October 3) there was a big protest in Dublin over the housing crisis in the south of Ireland.

The Labour Party tried to take part, but there is a sizeable layer of working class activists who are totally hostile to Labour being allowed to be part of working class and left campaigns.  The Irish Labour Party is hated in many working class communities and by many left activists for its role in imposing vicious austerity against the working class when it was in coalition with Fine Gael (2011-2016).  Not only did they cut benefits and pensions, they also tried to railroad anti-austerity protesters to prison.

At the rally yesterday it was announced that a private member’s bill is being introduced to the Dublin parliament to start to tackle the housing crisis.  A list was read out of supporters of this bill, and this is what happened when Labour was mentioned (this is also the kind of attitude the left in this country needs to create in relation to Labour here):

General strikes in Costa Rica and Argentina

Workers protesting in San Jose; pic: AP.

by Phil Duncan

The past few weeks have seen two nationwide strikes in Latin America, a region that in recent years has been playing a pivotal role in the resurgence of working class struggle and revolutionary left developments.

While workers in New Zealand usually shie away from even striking for just a day, workers in Costa Rica workers are now into the fourth week of an ‘Indefinite National Strike’.  The strike began on Monday, September 10 and on Sunday, September 30, workers’ assemblies across the country rejected the preliminary agreement reached by union leaders with the government.

The main issue is a

Introducing ‘Notes from Below’

Every now and then we add a new site to our Links section.  We usually announce this and sometimes we even get around to saying something about the site/publication and why we’ve linked to it.

Today we are adding a link to Notes from Below, a new online journal.  Rather than saying something about it ourselves, here is the text of their ‘About’ section.  Do take a good look across their site, but a good place to start might be issue #3, “The Worker and the Union”, which contains articles examining how working class self-organisation is changing today, the possibilities for a revival of rank-and-file organising and struggle, and the need to advance anti-capitalist politics in the workplace and workplace organisation rather than merely trade union politics.

Anyway, here is their About section:

Notes from Below is a publication that is committed to socialism, by which we mean the self-emancipation of the working class from capitalism and the state. To this end we use the method of workers’ inquiry. We draw our methods and theory from the class composition tradition, which seeks to understand and change the world from the worker’s point of view. We want to ground revolutionary politics in the perspective of the working class, help circulate and develop struggles, and build workers’ confidence to take action by and for themselves.

We argue that an understanding of ‘class composition’, that is to say, how the classes within society are formed and operate, is an