MONTREAL, QUE.: FEBRUARY 20, 2012– Students march up Sanguinet street south of Sherbrooke street in protest of increasing university tuition fees at Berri Square in Montreal on Monday, February 20, 2012. Students have been staging several demonstrations in the past weeks to protest the increasing fees. (Dario Ayala/THE GAZETTE)

The student strike in Quebec has been an extremely important event which has been virtually ignored in the mass media outside Canada.

The following first appeared on Signalfire. The introduction by Signalfire’s editor said:

“The following detailed report comes courtesy of a comrade in Montreal-Its a very useful summery though we must note that we disagree with the authors excessively pessimistic line on the potential for proletarian hegemony over mass movements in the metropole as the crisis of imperialism continues and deepens.”

Report back on the student strike on Quebec

We are now in the 13th week of a Quebec student strike against a 75% tuition hike – the longest student strike in Quebec history – the conflict has become a rallying point for any and all opposition to austerity here, and clearly represents a political milestone, perhaps (we can hope) a real turning point.

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So very familiar. So very outrageous. So very intolerable.

ANTARSYA, Front of the Greek Anti-Capitalist Left, is a united front of left-wing groups. It is separate from SYRIZA which we have been discussing on Kasama. There are a number of political differences between SYRIZA and ANTARSYA — including on whether to demand immediate withdrawal from the European Union (the ANTARSYA view), or whether the immediate task is an end to the loan repayments, austerity, and the Troika regime above the parliament (the SYRIZA view).

The differences also involve debates of how broad of a front to build in the struggle against the ruling regime. ANTARSYA argues for building a unity of the anti-capitalist left, while groups such as the Communist Organization of Greece (KOE) have argued for a broader front that contains both anti-capitalist forces and revolutionary bourgeois democratic forces, such as Greek national hero Mikis Theodorakis, a mainstream figure who has been calling for the overthrow of the ruling E.U. regime.

The following was ANTARSYA’s position before this week’s election. In the election they won 75,000 votes or 1.5% — which was not enough to  have one of their representatives enter parliament to use it as a platform.

ANTARSYA:

Statement on the parliamentary elections to be held on May 6 in Greece

• There is another way!
• Without debt, euro, EU and memoranda!
• For the anti-capitalist overthrow of the coalition government and the Troika!
• Power and wealth in the hands of the workers!
• For a battle front of the break with the system and the revolution – for a strong anti-capitalist left!

Whatever the parrots of the troika may tell us, the “haircut” (debt cut), carried out by the “black front” means the rescue of the bankers and social disaster for the population. The measures of the Memorandum No. 2 amount to a war of extermination against the majority of the working class. The EU is imposing a devastating austerity program throughout Europe. The bankers are compensated with 50 billion while social security funds and other public bodies are being robbed!

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Kasama has shared previous materials on this crisis in Greece and by the KOE. This includes a Kasama  pamphlet that gives considerable background to the revolutionary movement and this crisis in Greece. We urge people to read and share this pamphlet:

Greece’s Communist Organization: Learning to Swim in Stormy Weather
by Eric Rebellarsi
Epub format (Nook & many other e-readers); Mobi format (Kindle & others); PDF (for printing & some e-readers)

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From the Communist Organization of Greece

May 7, 2012

Dear Comrades,

For your information, below you may find the final results of yesterday’s national elections, as well as some short information about the parties with parliamentary representation.

Despite the antidemocratic and absurd electoral law (*), our organization is now represented by 3 comrades in the Greek Parliament.

On this occasion, we want to sincerely thank the dozens of fraternal parties and organizations from all over the world who have sent to SYRIZA and to KOE their solidarity and congratulations. In these critical times, we are very much aware of our responsibility towards our people and also towards the international movement.

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Athens, May 7, 2012. From the KOE.:

These first comments are based on the exit polls after the closing of the voting in Greece. The official results will be known later.

According to the exit polls, the two “big” bourgeois parties lost more than half of the votes they had gotten in 2009. From the 80%  they had together in the last elections, they now  total less than 40%.

The Coalition of Radical Left – SYRIZA — is the big winner, winning the 2nd place (from 4.7% in 2009,  SYRIZA now got, according to the exit polls, from 15% to 17.5% of the popular vote!).

We will send you more detailed results later.

Here are those first comments:

1. The Greek people have spoken. In fact, the Greek people have been speaking for two  years now, but those “above” were not listening.

Today the Greek people have swept the pro-troika (IMF-EU-ECB) political forces and have triggered an earthquake that makes the political system tremble. Our people have sent a  thunderous message to the troika.

2. The path towards a different type of  representation, a different political system, the path towards real democracy and a radical political transition, now gets open.

3. The people put our country on a course to a way out, leaving behind (and punishing) all those who have been managing Greece these last two years and imposing a regime of social destruction.

4. The great protagonists of this day, that is, the Greek people and the popular movement (which in great extent found
expression in SYRIZA –Coalition of Radical Left) today shoulder a huge task: to turn this way out into a reality.

[Note: Kasama has made minor corrections to the translation from Greek.]

It has been rare that a crisis creates possible openings for a revolution. We may well be watching such a moment in Greece — and it is important to learn from it, and to be politically active around it.

We are going to reproduce below pieces of a New York Times article written on the eve of elections in Greece — simply because it is valuable to note how this flagship of U.S. capitalism can’t situate the Greek political developments. They are sliding off the scale of controllable politics and you can hear that in the warnings and commentaries.

Here are some of the statements the New York Times reported:

“It’s the end of an era. A discredited political system and its contract with society are coming to an end,” said Stavros Lygeros, a political commentator and the author of “From Kleptocracy to Bankruptcy,” about Greece’s economic collapse. “The problem is that there is nothing to replace it. The old order is dying, but the new one has not yet been born.”…

The Coalition of the Radical Left, called Syriza, which opposes the loan agreement but wants Greece to stay in the euro zone, is expected to place third, which would be the party’s strongest showing. It has campaigned under the slogan, “They chose without us, we’re moving on without them.”…

Even as smaller parties are expected to make gains, many Greeks are resigned that the Socialists and New Democracy will continue to dominate. “If there were a chance these elections would change things, they wouldn’t hold them,” said Dimitris Tsoukas, 56, a shop clerk. “They’re just opening the valve a bit to release some of the pressure. In a few weeks people will be back out on the streets protesting.”

Lenin described what marked the emergence of crises where revolutionary moments are emerging:

“The fundamental law of revolution, which has been confirmed by all revolutions and especially by all three Russian revolutions in the twentieth century, is as follows: for a revolution to take place it is not enough for the exploited and oppressed masses to realise the impossibility of living in the old way, and demand changes; for a revolution to take place it is essential that the exploiters should not be able to live and rule in the old way. It is only when the “lower classes” do not want to live in the old way and the “upper classes” cannot carry on in the old way that the revolution can triumph. This truth can be expressed in other words: revolution is impossible without a nation-wide crisis (affecting both the exploited and the exploiters).”

Without making a crude formula out of Lenin’s words — it is possible to see a crisis that can’t be easily resolved by the powers that be, and within which important sections of the people become politically unmoored. In Greece (and Europe more widely) the whole existing political establishment (and the very logic of the capitalist system) demand brutal, ongoing austerity. And the people are determined not to allow their lives to be ruined in that way.  It is a crisis that de-legitimizes established politics and propels new radical forces to the fore (from both the fascist right and from the communist left).

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The Committee to Stop FBI Repression has created a video on the life of Carlos Montes, and the fight to beat back the attempt to jail him.

Montes is a veteran Chicano activist known for his leadership of the 1968 East Los Angeles student walkouts, the historic Chicano Moratorium against the U.S. war in Vietnam, and the recent immigrants’ rights mega-marches of 2006. Montes was a co-founder of the Brown Berets. In recent years he has be active in the anti war, Chicano, labor and immigrant rights movements. He currently one of the 24 anti war and international solidarity activists who have been targeted by the FBI, and is scheduled to go on trial May 15.

The video urges people to call Los Angeles District Attorney Steve Cooley, at 213-974-3512 to demand that all charges against Montes be dropped.

“Everyone should see this video and share it with their friends. It‘s the inspiring story of a heroic activists, Carlos Montes, who facing an FBI frame up. We can’t let him go to prison,” says Jess Sundin of the Committee to Stop FBI Repression.

FBI provocateur Shaquille Azir.

Information is starting to leak out following the arrest of five anarchist activists in Cleveland.

This piece (from Raw Story) gathers information on the police informant who gained the confidence of the activists, and then set them up for serious charges.

Raw Story focused on the fact that the FBI snitch, Shaquille Azir, had a “criminal past.” And it is worth knowing that career  criminals often “get themselves in a bind” with police — and are convinced to perform work as informants.

The large and growing networks of FBI (and JTTF) operatives are not simply off-duty cops or formal FBI agents — the government can exploit and squeeze many kinds of people (including people who are facing charges, who are mentally damaged, who desperately need money etc.).

There are no simple profiles of “who is a likely informant.”  (Some people mistakenly think “He smoked pot with others, he can’t be an informant.” Or “She seems seriously mentally confused, she can’t be with the FBI.” Or, “He just drifts in and out of meetings, and doesn’t seem that engaged.” Or “She is highly sophisticated in political and academic theory, she can’t be an agent.” Or whatever.)

There are, however, profiles of behavior — and politically active people should be aware of which behaviors should set off their “red flags.”

But there is more to draw out here.

First, even the media’s word “informant” may be too soft. Did Azir merely pass on “information” to the FBI, or was he manipulating his victims, inducing them to shift their plans, creating the very plan that they may now go to prison for? 

If (alleged) plans went from home-made smoke devices to military-grade C-4 (and from fantasy to increasingly serious), and if this FBI operative was the one providing the C-4 (as is  alleged) — then this is not simply a snitch (or an “informant”).

If this proves true, then Azir is an agent provocateur using classic (and increasingly common) FBI techniques of entrapment — to fabricate alleged crimes where none might have materialized, and ensnare the unwary and susceptible, all for larger quite-sinister purposes of the state.

These people are now charged with “attempting to use a weapon of mass destruction” because they (supposedly) agreed to help use c-4 explosives (they had never seen or touched) that was in the possession of Azir (who was both their employer and an operative of the FBI.)

Note: This article  points out that Aziz employed the young men who were arrested. And that one of them allegedly did not want to participate, but ” still sought to retain his employment with Azir.” It raises the question: How much did these young men feel pressured to “go along” with talk of this conspiracy to appease their employer — who was setting them up in the process?

It is still very early in this case. The information leaking out may prove unreliable.

We urge our readers to take it all skeptically. And we expect to make more information available — as it emerges, and as it becomes confirmed. (If you come across information, please send it to us.)

And we urge everyone to be aware of the now common use of agent provocateurs by the FBI (especially in this post-911 period): Discard naive ideas of what an agent “must be like,” and guard against being draw in by such government entrapment.

FBI informant in Ohio bomb plot had criminal past

By Stephen C. Webster

The FBI’s key informant in the recent Ohio bomb plot had a long criminal history and faced multiple indictments even as he cooperated with authorities, court documents revealed this week.

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A far-ranging discussion of science under capitalism by the evolutionary biologist (and revolutionary activist) Richard Lewontin.