On 2nd January last there were serious clashes during a demonstration organized by the National Committee for the Defense of the Rights of the Unemployed (CNDDC), part of the SNAPAP union. For an hour, right in the city centre, police used teargas and batons to disperse demonstrators, making several arrests. Beginning in the morning, hundreds of unemployed youths blocked the city centre of the town of Ouargla to protest against the poor management of employment in this oil town in the south of the country, Roads were closed to traffic and most shops and cafes closed. Demands included the dismissal of all local employment leaders ​​as well as the Labour Minister, Tayeb Louh, and the setting up by the government of a crisis office to start a dialogue with the unemployed workers. When protesters blocked the traffic, police forces were brutally launched against the protesters in order to restore circulation.

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Book review of David Porter’s “Eyes to the South; French Anarchists and Algeria”

by Wayne Price

How did French anarchists deal with the Algerian revolution? How did anarchists in an imperialist country reacted to a war for national liberation? What does this tell us about how anarchists today should relate to current struggles for the self-determination of oppressed peoples?

From 1954 to 1962 a vicious war raged between the people of Algeria and the French state. Anarchists in France played a small but significant role in opposing their government’s colonial war. Their activities and views are covered in this exceptional book, along with anarchists’ attitudes toward post-war Algeria. The ways French anarchists opposed the war, and the varying views they held about it, may help today’s anti-authoritarians (in the U.S. and elsewhere) in thinking through our views about struggles against national oppression.

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In a context of capitalist crises, the popular revolts are expanding since several years. In Egypt, the revolt took a revolutionary dimension by chasing Mubarak. But it was confronted since the begining to the counter-revolutionary dynamic of religious fascism.

The Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, after staying carefully away from the popular revolt, a revolt they didn’t initiate, were called as a spare wheel by Egyptian bourgeoisie as well as western bourgeoisie.

Playing the historical role the fascists currents – whether they put forward a religion or not – always played, they took a pseudo-revolutionary stance to gain access to political power, becoming thus the real tool of the counter-revolutionary takeover.

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Farmworkers Strikes Continue: Forward with Mass Mobilisation, Unity and Solidarity

For over 2 weeks now, farmworkers in different areas of the Western Cape have been striking. This is a spontaneous strike driven by workers on the ground in response to decades and decades of brutality at the hands of farmers and a government that has thus far refused to listen to workers and transform the rural landscape characterised by dependency master-slave relations, racism, sexism, starvation wages and violations of the limited freedoms won from decades of working class struggle. Farmworkers do backbreaking work sometimes for 12 hours a day to produce food and wine for everybody in this country and countries overseas yet they are forced to work under unsafe and unhealthy conditions, to drink dirty water, live without electricity, live without toilet facilities, on poverty wages, suffer threats of evictions, and violent physical and verbal abuse and intimidation at the hands of the bosses.

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