Over 250,000 school students, university students and trainees took to the streets on June 17. The students were demonstrating against cuts in education and also against the increasing involvement of private enterprise in the school system. The protests took place in more than 70 cities all over the country.
REVOLUTION calls for general strike, shoras and a constituent assembly to bring down the government!
The imperialist government of the United States has demonstrated, once again, to all forces resisting is oppression and subjugation, whether direct or indirect, that there will be no let up of the slaughter so long as resistance to its position as the world’s sole superpower exists. All those who refuse to bow to its wishes will be destroyed as quickly and as gruesomely as possible, as the recent events surrounding this past Tuesday’s bombings in the South Waziristan region of Pakistan illustrate.
Lenin outlines in The State and Revolution the Marxist position on the state, its origins, and what its purpose is. He then shows the need for revolution, and the need to replace the state with a workers’ democratic dictatorship - a workers’ state. The leader of the Russian revolution found time during 1917 to write a crucial text on the Marxist position on the state, and the tasks of the proletariat during and after the social revolution. He was driven by the practical needs of the revolution in Russia at the time: to show that the opportunists (i.e., the Social-Democrats, Kautskyian-centrists, etc) had distorted Marxism and to refute the anarchist claims that all states are reactionary.
Violent clashes erupted this past week between Islamist and government forces in Pakistan following insistence from the United States that the Zardari administration does more to combat “extremism” in the Swat District of the North-West Frontier Region of Pakistan. Since the government offensive began, upwards of 500,000 civilians have been driven from their homes while, at the same time, caught in a deadly cross-fire between Islamist and government forces.
If you thought that the Army could do no “better” than America’s Army (the popular first-person shooter designed by the military itself and used to recruit impressionable young people who enjoy playing video games), than think again!
by Christopher Müller, student representative of the “AHS Kleine
Sperlgasse (Vienna)” and spokesman of REVOLUTION
Our second school strike was a great success. According to the ORF(television station in Austria), 2,500 students marched in Vienna to the Ministry of Education and about 10,000 were protesting nationwide against the deprivation of education by the SPÖVP government. The youth organization REVOLUTION had already organized a first school strike in Vienna on April 2nd and also took the initiative to organize this second school strike. Today we were able to mobilize students from a large number of schools. An important force in the mobilization process was the action committees which formed in a number of schools to organize the resistance against the deprivation of education.
Whenever we challenge the multimillionaire corporations that rule the world, against every march, every protest, every picket, boycott, strike, and action… there is an organized force trained, prepared, and waiting to block us, smother and stop us. What is this force? Revolutionaries call it the State.
Who is the State?
It’s the police that threaten us, move us on, caution us, batter us, arrest us, and imprison us. It’s the judges who try and condemn us, even though they know nothing about how we live and never will. The faceless civil servants, bureaucrats, and lawyers who pore over documents and draft complicated laws to isolate, stifle, and stamp on any resistance to the power of big capital. And there’s the last deadly line of defense for the system, the army - a killing machine waiting to spring unthinkingly into action when their paymasters’ dirty work needs to be done. So how did the State come into being? What makes it tick? How can it be abolished?
Beginning at noon on Saturday March 21st, several thousand protesters gather in downtown Washington D.C. in remonstration of the 6th anniversary of America’s invasion and subsequent occupation of Iraq. Other issues, however, found prominence as well. They included: the expansion of the war in Afghanistan, the plight of workers and all the oppressed in the United States with regard to the current economic calamity, the scrapping of all U.S plans to militarily intervene in Iran or Pakistan, and the particular struggles of African-Americans and other minority groups who face continued and intensified economic and social oppression.
This coming Friday marks the 6th anniversary of that ominous date back in 2003 when US - led coalition forces, on the pretext of eradicating a “participatory” member of the “Axis of Evil,” invaded the country of Iraq. Since those initial stages, a great multitude politically has changed. The year 2006 witnessed the temporary defeat of Congressional Republicans in favor of a new Democratic majority in both the House and the Senate - the first such instance in over a decade. Millions of Americans were hopeful that with a Democrat-controlled Congress, the war in Iraq would be brought to a swift and decisive end. The only problem, however, was the current Commander-in-Chief was due to serve out his second term in office for another two years. The wait for most people would prove excruciating. The jubilance that followed the election of Barrack Obama last November attested to the rejection by millions of Americans of Bush-Cheney style militarism in the Middle East and around the world more generally. Barrack Obama, through his perennial slogans of “hope” and “change,” provided solace to those progressive forces by promising a timely end to the occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan along with a new course in general for American politics. It is now clear, however, that, by all accounts, such promises were nothing more than subterfuge on Obama’s part.
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