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Jeremy Corbyn is the most smeared politician in history
EuropeThe media serves an important if not vital function in a democratic society. But, what if the bulk of the mainstream press becomes controlled by a handful of foreign-based billionaires? Anyone can see the obvious perils of a state-controlled media, but the dangers of the extreme opposite scenario are not widely understood. In the UK and the US, we are justified to mock countries like Russia for their consumption of a state-owned media and propaganda, but we need to acknowledge that we have serious problems of our own.
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The Plot to Keep Jeremy Corbyn Out of Power
EuropeIn the latest of the interminable media “furores” about Jeremy Corbyn’s supposed unfitness to lead Britain’s Labour party – let alone become prime minister – it is easy to forget where we were shortly before he won the support of an overwhelming majority of Labour members to head the party. In the preceding two years, it was hard to avoid on TV the figure of Russell Brand, a comedian and minor film star who had reinvented himself, after years of battling addiction, as a spiritual guru-cum-political revolutionary.
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Belgium’s Left Breakthrough
EuropeThe Workers’ Party will join the European Nordic-Green Left (GUE-NGL) formation in the European parliament, now deprived of some its recent support base across the Mediterranean. If the left is to regain the ground it has lost in recent years, it would do well to learn the lessons of the Belgian Workers’ Party, which looks set to become one of the country’s most impactful political forces just at the moment the threat from the far-right is growing.
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The Yellow Vests of France: Six Months of Struggle
EuropeThe Yellow Vests are still here, in the fray, holding the breach open. The crisis in France is far from over. If and when the other oppressed and angry groups in France – the organized workers, ecologists, North African immigrants, students struggling against Macron’s educational ‘reforms’ – also turn off their TVs and go down into the streets, things could change radically. The Yellow Vests’ avowed goal is to bring France to a grinding halt and impose change from below.
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The ‘Russia connection’ that unites the European right
EuropeIt’s not the rejection of immigration, the defense of a notion of national identity or the impulse to say no to the dictates from Brussels. If there’s something Europe’s new right-wing parties have in common, it’s not their slogans or electoral programs, but rather their geopolitical stance. What truly unites the “sovereignist front” is the figure—or, if you prefer, the long shadow—of Vladimir Putin.
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NATO: 70 Years Too Many
EuropeSince its foundation in 2009, the international network “No to War – No to NATO” has successfully managed, through various actions, to reduce support for NATO among the population in key states, and even to delegitimize NATO. Our objective remains the same – twenty years after the illegal attack on Yugoslavia, and 70 years after NATO’s founding: to overcome the dinosaur named NATO and to replace it with an international organization for collective security and disarmament.
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International Observers to Venezuela’s Election Pen Letter to the EU
EuropeInternational observers to Venezuela’s elections have written to Federica Mogherini, High Representative of the EU for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy, about the problems with the EU declaration on the elections. You can read a short extract of the EU declaration statement and the letter in response below. You can read the full EU declaration here.
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Corbynism and the Labour Party
EuropeThe leadership of the UK Labour Party by Jeremy Corbyn continues to enjoy enormous popularity across the UK. This even despite continual attacks from the corporate press and opposition from within the Labour Party itself. Indeed, under Corbyn’s leadership, the Labour Party has once again become a mass party, with a larger membership than any other social democratic party across Europe.
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Participatory Socialist Economics
EuropeUK Labour’s vision is of a radically democratic government sharing power with knowledgeable and productive supporters. This opens up the possibility of developing a “new socialism” based on self-government rather than rule from above. Now that, surely, is a story for a media genuinely curious about where a Corbyn-led government will lead.
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The Real Russian Interference in US Politics
EuropeThe Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union was ostensibly a conflict between two ideologies and two socio-economic systems. All that seems to be over. The day of a new socialism may dawn unexpectedly, but today capitalism rules the world. At first glance, it may seem to be a classic clash between rival capitalists. And yet, once again an ideological conflict is emerging, one which divides capitalists themselves, even in Russia and in the United States itself. It is the conflict between American unipolar dominance and a multipolar world.
