Photo: María Paula Avila/Enfoque Rojo
World capitalism is knee-deep in mud since 2008, with no prospects of exiting the swamp any time soon. Despite hefty economic stimulus and billionaire bailouts, global markets cannot escape their fragile instability. Everywhere, the ruling class is attempting to make us pay for their crisis, through austerity, cutbacks, layoffs, repression, deportations, and imperialist wars.
Neither neoliberal nor social democratic governments have been able to offer a way out of the crisis at hand. In both the U.S. and Europe, the establishment parties who governed for decades are being undermined by their roles in the expanding crisis, while new political phenomena on the left and right have quickly gained ground. The extreme right has made serious inroads in Austria, Germany, France, the U.S. and elsewhere by channeling class anger away from the ruling class and toward most precarious sectors of the working class—refugees and immigrants.
But despite all obstacles, a new generation is rising up and resisting their attacks. Massive mobilizations and occupations led by an increasingly radicalized youth have shaken Paris and other cities across France demanding an end to Hollande’s labor reforms. In Brazil, over 100 high schools have been occupied by students who are fighting cutbacks and protesting dire conditions. In the U.S., a new generation of Black youth has taken to the streets to fight for their lives and their own vision of liberation and radical change.
Left Voice aims to amplify the struggles of these and other heroic youth and working class fighters and to tell the truth about the capitalist system— it is rotten to the core. In these pages, we present an account from the frontlines of the fight against labor precaritization in France and discuss the strategy needed to win. We consider the tasks of the left amidst a generalized right turn in South America and a new soft coup in Brazil. We attempt a balance sheet on the uprisings in Baltimore, a year after the killing of Freddie Gray. We look at the roots behind Bernie Sanders’s meteoric rise and debate with the left organizations which today find hope in Sanders. We examine the new reformist phenomena of Syriza in Greece and Podemos in Spain and their prospects for achieving reform. These are just a few of the questions we take up in our first printed issue of Left Voice.
This magazine and our ongoing Left Voice website are part of the La Izquierda Diario international news network, launched first in 2014 in Argentina, and now with editions in Chile, Mexico, Spain, Germany, France, Brazil, Uruguay and Bolivia. Together, the network has over 200,000 weekly readers. Our outlets in Argentina, Brazil, and France are the most widely read left news sites in their respective countries. A project of the Trotskyist Fraction – Fourth International, we are supported by revolutionary socialists in 13 countries.
We invite you to join us in this project and we welcome discussion on the ideas presented in this magazine. Opportunities for a new anticapitalist left in the U.S. and around the world are emerging. It is our duty to seize these opportunities. History is ours.
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