Issue 19

Police raid Asia-Pacific Solidarity Conference in Jakarta

By Sundaram

This article originally appeared in the July issue of Liberation, the central organ of the Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist).

The Asia-Pacific Solidarity Conference, scheduled June 7-10 at a site 50 kilometres outside the Indonesian capital, Jakarta, was meant to discuss ways of fighting neo-liberal policies and militarism in the region. But thanks to a draconian attempt by police and paramilitary groups to scuttle the event, the participants turned it into a real battle against the neo-fascist forces that are making a bid for power again in Indonesia.

It all started on June 8, the second day of the conference, when more than 100 policemen armed with carbines and tear gas barged into the venue to arrest foreign participants for alleged ``visa violations''. Sealing off the conference hall, switching off the lights and using megaphones to bark out their orders, the gun-toting policemen presented, to the more than 40 representatives of left groups from around the world, a taste of what former Indonesian dictator Suharto's New Order regime must have been like.

The Cuban Revolution in the epoch of neoliberal globalisation

Resolution adopted by the nineteenth Congress of the Australian Democratic Socialist Party, January 2001

Back to good old Marx in the brave new world of globalisation

By Dipankar Bhattacharya

A decade after the collapse of the Soviet Union, it is now an established fact that capitalism rules the roost in the world. The supremacy of capitalism as the dominant system does not face any immediate challenge. Yet the dominant voice of capitalism is no longer one of euphoria. The triumphalist cries of a few years ago are increasingly giving way to notes of caution and uncertainty. More and more people now realise that what collapsed with the demolition of the Berlin wall or the disintegration of the Soviet Union was not just Soviet-style socialism but also the edifice of what had come to be known as the welfare-state version of capitalism. The end of the Cold War period has come to signify the beginning of a new era of great uncertainties in which even good old capitalism looks increasingly unfamiliar.

Links 19: Editor's introduction

The future of revolution

Only a decade after “the end of communism” and even “the end of history”—the capitalist vision of an eternal neo-liberal utopia for the wealthy—capitalist globalisation has given rise to a new movement challenging capital’s prerogatives, its privileges and even its right to exist. Revolution—the remaking of history by the masses of working people—clearly has more life in it than its

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