Category: Analysis

  • World Social Forum 2004 – Mumbai: NGOs Provide No Solutions For The Exploited

    OVER 120,000 people attended the World Social Forum (WSF) in Mumbai, India. The majority came in their tens of thousands from the most poverty stricken areas of India as well as other countries in Asia such as Pakistan, South Korea, Tibet and the Philippines. Also present were hundreds of trade unionists who explained the horrific conditions they…

  • World Social Forum: Workers Speak Out

    AS WE reported in last week’s issue of the socialist, over 120,000 people, mainly from the Indian sub-continent and other Asian countries, attended the fourth World Social Forum in the Indian city of Mumbai. Members of the Committee for a Workers International (CWI – the international organisation to which the Socialist Party is affiliated), have sent these…

  • The return of the Indian working class

    “The country does not mean brick and mortar; the country means its working people”. (Gurazada, the Telugu poet who galvanised millions into action against the British Raj.) FOR A long time, India has been mainly in the news for its political instability, communal and caste pogroms, environmental degradation and so-called ‘natural disasters’, and the nightmarish…

  • Workers strike with a vengeance

    According to V. K. Gupta, one of the joint secretaries of the National Confederation of Bank Employees, 50 million took part in this historic strike. Some of the veterans of the movement say this was the biggest strike since independence. The all-India general strike of 21 May was a resounding success. The country’s press did…

  • Thousands march against imperialist conquest of Iraq

    Leading up to the planned demonstration of 12 April, in Bangalore, there was a week-long campaign demanding, “No to war”. In spite of the apparent ‘conquest’ of Baghdad, the action was quite successful in terms of reaching a broad layer of people. Members and supporters of New Socialist Alternative (CWI in India) took to the…

  • Gujarat Elections, 2002 – Communalists profit from hate

    Though hardly any of the political observers predicted a defeat for the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), very few foresaw the huge victory that the protagonists of Hindu chauvinism managed to secure in the Gujarat elections of December, 2002, through their hate campaign against Muslims. The BJP increased its strength in the Gujarat assembly from 117…

  • Ten million strike against privatisation

    Jagadish Chandra, New Socialist Alternative (Nava Samajavaadi Paryaya – the CWI’s section in India) spoke about the struggle against privatisation in India in an interview with Offensiv (newspaper of the Swedish section of the CWI) during the Eighth World Congress of the CWI. In April this year 10 million public sector workers took part in…

  • Kashmir: the roots of the crisis

    Kashmir has been fought over by India and Pakistan ever since British imperialism’s divide-and-rule partition of the subcontinent in 1947. The Kashmiri people have been brutally oppressed, denied democracy and self-determination, and suffered two wars and many military mobilisations. Today a million troops face each other across the Indo-Pakistan border. KEVIN SIMPSON details the historical…

  • Planning green growth

    Tens of thousands of delegates will spend hundreds of millions of dollars junketing at the second UN summit on sustainable development in Johannesburg South Africa, one of the biggest international conferences ever held. Pete Dickenson A socialist contribution to the debate on environmental sustainability Preface This important and timely new pamphlet (published on the eve…

  • Kashmir conflict: Capitalist Crisis Threatens Nuclear War

    The world is nearer to nuclear war than at any time since the Cuban missile crisis in 1962. The United States and the Soviet Union came close to a nuclear exchange, when Khrushchev based nuclear-armed missiles on Cuba. Fortunately, US imperialism and the Soviet bureaucracy negotiated their way out of the crisis, despite pressure from…