Asia

One of the deadliest storms since records began hit the Philippines on 8 November. Over 10,000 people have died. Extracts from a declaration by the Party of the Labouring Masses (PLM, a Filipino socialist party), on 10 November. The people are still reeling from the impact of possibly the biggest typhoon to strike the country. Death toll numbers are rising rapidly. There is huge devastation. Firstly, we have to support and take whatever measures are necessary to protect the people. In the hardest hit city of Tacloban, in south eastern Visayas, the people are already taking what food and relief...

Class struggle in Nepal is in a period of “democratic reaction”. The masses feel betrayed. After the 2006 revolution, there has been no change in land and production relations. The revolutionary fervour has receded, and the revolution has been held back both by the opportunist leadership of the Maoists and the reactionary forces. Nepal is a country where almost 75-80% of the population are engaged in agriculture, mainly subsistence farming. Most of them own only small pieces of land, or no land at all. Over the years, the question of revolutionary land reform has been raised during every...

Hundreds of migrant Chinese bus workers in Singapore have struck for higher pay. Singaporean authorities have charged four workers with leading an illegal strike. If found guilty, they face imprisonment for up to a year, or a fine of S$2,000, or both. Around 200,000 migrant workers from mainland China work in Singapore, including 450 out of 2,000 drivers at the SMRT bus company. Over 200 workers have so far participated in the strike. Strikes in “essential services” are illegal in Singapore. The country’s last legal strike was in 1986. Mainland Chinese authorities have expressed concern for...

“What the West must realize is that in today’s geopolitical situation, particularly given the rise of China, it needs Myanmar”, declared a top official of Myanmar’s (Burma’s) military dictatorship in a recent article for the Washington Post. The military regime has been rebalancing away from its long-time ally, China, and trying to draw in Western aid and investment — in the first place, to get EU and US sanctions lifted. It has been spurred on by prospects of revenues from offshore gas fields and clothing exports. In January 2011, the Indian-based Burmese newsletter Mizzima reported that the...

Japan is prone to major earthquakes and buildings and other structures are designed accordingly. As was well demonstrated with this massive magnitude 9 quake, they had done very well in this regard, with few major building collapses. Otherwise the death and injury toll, bad enough as it was, would have been far worse. However, the tsunami added an extra dimension for structures on the coast, which is where most of Japan’s nuclear plants are located. The plants at Fukushima clearly didn’t fare so well — precipitating the worst nuclear disaster since Chernobyl. There were warnings about nuclear...

Get nuclear power’s risks in perspective The terrible events recently in Japan have resulted in at least 15,000 deaths, of which those attributable to the overheating cores and hydrogen explosions at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant amount to… zero. However, the situation at the power plant is potentially more serious if it is not controlled. What has been happening? Some time ago, the Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO) decided to build nuclear power plants in an earthquake zone. They judged that their design was robust enough to withstand a powerful earthquake. They judged that...

Click here for minutes of debate, 19 August 1979 Click here for notes written up after debate, 25 August 1979 Click here for the article that started the debate, Workers' Action no.86, 14 January 1978 In 1978-9 our organisation, then called the International-Communist League, had a debate on Cambodia which, in hindsight, was a stage on our road away from the "degenerated and deformed workers' state" thesis which we had inherited from our "orthodox Trotskyist" origins, and towards recognising that the Stalinist states were exploitative class societies. The national liberation war in Vietnam...

In the 1930s and 1940s Van was a Trotskyist. In later years, after he had fled to France to escape the massacres being carried out by the Vietnamese Stalinists, he rejected Trotskyism and Leninism and became a supporter of “council communism”. The bulk of In the Crossfire deals with Van’s youth and political activities in Vietnam. The latter part of the book consists of two chapters from Van’s unfinished story of his life in France and three articles written by Van in the 1960s. The book has its defects. It is too brief to provide a full insight into Van as an individual and his record of...

As Solidarity goes to press on 22 September, ten thousand garment workers in Cambodia are defying a court-ordered deadline to return to work. They are continuing a strike called to win reinstatement for more than 50 union representatives who were sacked after a big industry-wide strike over wages in mid-September. Union leaders called off the industry-wide strike on 16 September after the government called for a meeting to discuss extra "benefits" payments for workers earning the minimum wage. (The minimum wage is set by the government at $61 a month; the workers were demanding $93). But...

America’s war in Vietnam, and the international movements that sprung up in opposition to it, are central events in the history of 20th century radical politics. The events of that conflict continue to cast a long shadow over the contemporary left’s understanding of imperialist war. Looking back over a distance of 35 years, Vietnam still has a huge amount to teach us in terms of the nature of capitalist imperialism, the nature of Stalinism, and what kind of anti-war politics and movement socialists should aspire to fight for and build. Background Vietnam’s history is inextricably bound up with...