The results of the French presidential election in late April expose an intensifying crisis and polarisation within French society. In the second-round run-off, President Emmanuel Macron was returned to office with slightly more than 58 percent of the vote against his far-right rival Marine Le Pen. Although Le Pen was beaten, her 42 percent support was the highest yet recorded by a far-right candidate, an alarming development.
There are many competing explanations for Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. But the decision can be understood only with reference to the imperialist competition that dominates the world system.
Alain Krivine, a leader of the student revolt of May 1968, passed away on 12 March at the age of 80. Many of the other key student leaders of the May ‘68 uprising, like Daniel Bensaïd, have also already taken their leave. Krivine’s death marks the symbolic end of a generation of French Trotskyism. With his death, we not only lose one of the key student leaders of the ‘68 events, but also a revolutionary without whom the old heritage and tradition of the earliest anti-Stalinism may not have survived into a new generation.
Russian dictator Vladimir Putin is facing the biggest challenge of his twenty-year rule as his invasion of Ukraine spirals into a multidimensional crisis for the Russian regime and ruling class.
It seems resistance to foreign invasion and occupation, along with sanctions and other measures targeting countries guilty of mounting such invasions, are good after all. Only the target must be an enemy of the West like Russia, and not a Western client and ally like Israel.
The Russian invasion of Ukraine has not been the cake walk that Vladimir Putin seems to have expected. Putin appears to have believed that Ukrainian resistance would quickly collapse; that he could simply roll his tanks in, seize Kyiv and install a puppet government. Indeed he seems to have believed many Ukrainians would welcome the Russian forces as liberators.