Europe

On Monday afternoon (January 19), after leaving a press conference, Stanislav Markelov was shot dead near Kropotkinskaya metro station in Moscow. Anastasiya Baburova, who was with Stanislav at the time, was also murdered. Some activists and journalists have asked who was responsible for these disgraceful murders. It’s not possible to say at this stage, but nobody believes that the state will seriously seek to bring the perpetrators of these crimes to justice.

Stock exchanges in Britain and the USA have been on the slide over the past few days. The reason is not hard to seek. The FTSE has been spooked by bank shares collapsing. Barclays, for instance, saw 25% of its share price shaved off in one hour last Friday (16.01.09). This was the day after the bank announced 2,100 job losses. It’s starting to look like the time back in October when it seemed that banks such as Barclays and the Bank of Scotland (now HBOS) that had been in existence for hundreds of years would be destroyed by a share collapse in a matter of hours.

Last weekend the IMT organised the 5th Northern European Winter School in Berlin. 150 comrades and sympathisers from many different countries came to a city with a great revolutionary history and tradition. We set ourselves the target of learning from the ideas and lives of Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht, and to study the successes and the mistakes of the German Revolution. On Sunday we participated with a sizeable block at the traditional Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht commemoration demonstration.

The events that have unfolded over the past month in Greece have revealed the immense revolutionary potential that had accumulated below the surface of society. The anger of the youth can only be explained by the severe crisis of capitalism afflicting the country, a reflection of the international economic crisis. And the conditions that exist in Greece are the same that exist across the whole of Europe.

This month marks the 90th anniversary of the murder of Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht, two outstanding revolutionary leaders of the German working class. To commemorate that tragic day we are republishing Rosa Luxemburg's last article "Order Prevails in Berlin", Karl Liebknecht's famous speech against voting the war credits in the German parliament in 1914 and his 1915 leaflet "The Main Enemy Is At Home!".

As the realities of capitalist crisis are biting deeper into the Hungarian economy, more and sections of the working class are beginning to mobilise and take strike action.

The situation in Greece is growing ever more tense with each hour that passes. Today the country is being rocked by a general strike, while the youth continue to mobilise massively. In this situation the state is exploiting lumpen and ultra-left groups to portray the movement as a crazy violent outburst of criminal elements, but the anger of the Greek workers and youth cannot be calmed with these methods.

He is the hero of the hour, the man who, if we are to believe the media, single-handedly has saved the world financial system from meltdown. When all around were panicking and in despair, here was a man who kept his head and threw billions of pounds at the banks, a veritable 21st century miracle! That man is Gordon Brown, a man who dances to the tune of the bankers and capitalists, not the workers who voted Labour into power.

Workers and youth are being radicalised in Switzerland and are seeking answers to the crisis of capitalism, but their leaders are not providing those answers. That explains the successful intervention of the Swiss Marxists in recent rallies organised by the trade unions, Young Socialists and Social Democratic Party.

Yesterday the Spanish Student Union, Sindicato de Estudiantes, called a student general strike involving school and university students. The turnout as massive, with hundreds of thousands coming out to protest against cuts in education and privatisation.