The internationalists

Portugal has become the latest Eurozone country to be unable to meet its sovereign debt obligations and to be forced into asking the European Union to bail it out. In late March the minority “socialist party” government collapsed after failing to get a further round of austerity measures through parliament.

Introduction · We print below a translation of a leaflet produced by our German sister organization, the Gruppe Internationaler SozialistInnen, in the wake of the Japanese earthquake and tsunami. · As all the world knows, this natural disaster was compounded by its unleashing of a man-made (or rather, capitalism-made) disasters waiting to happen - not least, the Fukushima reactor problems.

(The Communist Left has a long and honourable history in fighting capitalism in all its forms, as well as the distortions of socialism by both Social Democrats and Stalinists. Our tendency can arguably claim the longest lineage in the Communist Left, as the historical part of the article which follows, shows. This in itself is no claim to virtue since we look to the future and not the past.

(The Libyan Crisis - Leaflet of Battaglia Comunista distributed in demonstrations against the war in Italy including that in Rome on April 9) · The imperialist roots of the military operations on Libyan soil (for now) are more than obvious, as is the global crisis of capitalism. Safeguarding bourgeois interests and the preservation of the dominant system of exploitation and oppression is reducing...

(Image - No Cuts No Capitalism) · It is difficult to overstate how serious the present situation is. £80 billion of state spending cuts are in the offing for the next four years, much of this via the slashing of local authority spending on public services by almost 30% each year. People who have never been on a demonstration before are being moved to protest as they experience the draconian cuts...