2020 | rs21

Manifestations des agricultrices et agriculteurs en Inde

India’s farmers’ protests: the British left must show solidarity

In India, in the middle of the pandemic, a unique struggle is taking place. Hundreds of thousands of farmers from across the country are occupying the borders of Delhi in a protest against the combined forces of corporate power and an ultra-right-wing government. On the whole an estimated 2 million people are said to be involved.

It is, however, not only its magnitude which makes it significant. The farmers’ protest represents a potentially transformative moment in the struggle against fascism which has been sweeping India over the last year – fuelled by growing anger against the regime of Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

The most important events have been as follows: on 10 December last year the BJP (Bharatiya Janata Party, or Indian People’s Party) government passed the Islamophobic and exclusionary Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) which, together with a National Register of Citizens, effectively disenfranchises India’s Muslim population and violates India’s secular Constitution. It was met by peaceful mass protests by students, which were viciously attacked by police and right-wing mobs affiliated with the BJP. At that point thousands of Muslim women came out to protest and, breaking all stereotypes, began an occupation of public space in Shaheen Bagh in Delhi – sitting there continuously day and night, through the bitter cold of the winter months.

▻https://www.rs21.org.uk/2020/12/30/indias-farmers-protests-the-british-left-must-show-solidarity

#agriculture #Inde #manifestation

Revolutionary Reflections | Moving towards an ecological Leninism | rs21
▻https://www.rs21.org.uk/2020/12/18/revolutionary-reflections-moving-towards-an-ecological-leninism

https://www.rs21.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/Eco-leninism-RR-cover.png

#ecological_leninism #écologie #lenine #malm

Trump dépassé par le fascisme qu’il croit mettre à son service
▻https://www.rs21.org.uk/2020/08/31/fascism-beyond-trump
Alors que les discussions se concentrent de plus en plus sur les mouvements d’extrême droite qui se sont développés aux États-Unis sous l’administration Trump, David Renton se demande si l’étiquette de « fasciste » est utile pour décrire la politique de Trump.

Is Donald Trump a fascist? Judging by some of the speeches at last week’s Democratic Convention, key figures of American liberalism seem to think so. The election, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said in the sixty seconds allowed to her, was about ‘stopping fascism in the United States. That is what Donald Trump represents.’

Barack Obama was more coded, using the word democracy 18 times in his twenty-minute speech; he told listeners, ‘This administration has shown it will tear our democracy down if that’s what it takes to win,’ and urged them to resist authoritarianism: ‘Don’t let them take away your democracy.’

Trump’s critics are right to see him as something new and different, a more nationalist and authoritarian form of Republican politics than that which dominated from the start of the Reagan era until 2016. But we need to distinguish between the parts of Trump’s politics which are like fascism – principally, the encouragement of a far-right street movement, for example by actively promoting and retweeting its activists – and the parts which aren’t.

Between 1920 and 1922, fascism emerged in Italy through a campaign of violence against the left and its organisations. Michael Ebner, the historian of these attacks, writes that ‘Blackshirted squadristi beat, shot, ritually humiliated and destroyed the property of peasants, workers, politicians, journalists and labour organisers … Socialists and the working classes were the primary victims.’

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#USA #fascisme #Donald_Trump #Républicains #extrême-droite

Discrimination à l’égard des communautés de voyageurs au Royaume-Uni (criminalisation des campements, adoptions forcées)
A qui appartient la terre ? Résister aux plans de politique anti-voyageurs des conservateurs

One of the Tories’ less frequently talked about policy plans is to increase police powers to tackle ‘illegal’ encampments and to criminalise trespassing. Hanna Gál writes on why these must be resisted.
The landslide victory of the Tories has enabled them to form a majority government and will let them further entrench systemic state racism. This danger was clear from during the campaign, but received considerably less attention than their Brexit plans. Their manifesto contains extensive passages on increasing police powers, surveillance and incarceration, often ‘preventatively’ applied to specific groups racialised to connect them with ‘terrorism’ or ‘knife crime’.
Another key component of these aggressive criminalisation plans, however, received little attention bar some social media posts and a couple of articles. At the end of the three-page manifesto section about ‘Making our country safer’, we find the following passage:
‘We will tackle unauthorised traveller camps. We will give the police new powers to arrest and seize the property and vehicles of trespassers who set up unauthorised encampments, in order to protect our communities. We will make intentional trespass a criminal offence, and we will also give councils greater powers within the planning system.’
Gypsy, Roma and Traveller (GRT) communities have been at the sharp end of police harassment and state repression for several decades in all European countries where they live. Even now that the genocide that decimated Roma and Sinti populations during the holocaust (known as Porajmos) has finally been recognised, the ethnic cleansing of GRT peoples continues under the guise of ‘integration’ programmes.

▻https://www.rs21.org.uk/2020/01/09/whose-land-resisting-the-tories-anti-traveller-policy-plans

#Royaume-Uni #communautés_de_voyageurs #discrimination