The oil blockade decreed by Trump on 29 January is slowly but surely asphyxiating Cuba, which relies on oil imports for 60 percent of its energy production. The Cuban government has admitted talks are taking place with the United States, but these take place in conditions of extreme imperialist blackmail. How can the Cuban Revolution be defended?
The first casualty of war is truth. This is also the case of the Russian military intervention in Ukraine. Marxists need to be able to cut through the fog of lies and war propaganda and analyse the real reasons behind the conflict; what has caused it; and the real interests that lie behind the excuses and justifications of the different parties involved. Above all, we must do so from the point of view of the interests of the world working class.
When the National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS) was launched in 2013, it was sold as proof that the state could be compassionate toward the working class. It promised “choice and control.” Then Prime Minister, Julia Gillard called it “a fundamental social reform that will change our nation,” ensuring that “people with disabilities have the same opportunities as everyone else to participate in work and in the community.”
The planet is burning. The seas rise, the air thickens with smoke, and the workers’ human life and soul bend and warp under the crushing weight of capitalist decay. Every sharpening contradiction: the ecological, the economic, the social and psychological – dialectically echoes and reverberates another, because they are born of the same parent: The capitalist system that subordinates that essence which makes us human, to profit. In Australia, as in every capitalist nation, this rot reaches into our most intimate spaces. Behind closed doors, in the homes that capitalism once called “the heart of society,” domestic violence festers and grows. It is not an anomaly. It is a product of the system itself.
