Globalisation

In the wake of one of the largest demonstrations in the history of Scotland, Edinburgh hosted one of the biggest political debates in the country in recent times. Up to 4,500 people spread over five different venues in the city centre participated in the G8 Alternatives Summit.

Marxist.com supporters from Edinburgh as well as Glasgow, London, Cambridge, Birmingham, Newcastle, Cambridge and Liverpool joined protesters at the Make Poverty History march today. Their aim was to put forward the ideas of Marxism as the way to end capitalism – the real cause of poverty nowadays.

As the G8 summit approaches the focus of the entire world is on Third World debt. G8 leaders are expected to announce the cancellation of debt for 18 of the world's poorest countries. Will this gesture actually achieve anything, or is it simply an attempt on the part of the imperialists to clean up their image?

Over the last month we have seen how all the various ideological ‘arguments’ of capitalism have been used to stop people from protesting at the coming summit of the eight most important political representatives of capitalism in the world.

The G8 is coming to town. During the G8 summit in Gleneagles we will see a whole range of experts and analysts lecturing us about the beauties and the problems of the world market, but that will only be a smoke screen behind which to hide the real issue.

Globalisation was supposed to bring progress and prosperity to the Third World. The reality is that it has only brought more poverty and misery.

The G8 countries are to meet at Gleneagles in July. In the build up to this summit the Blair government has been making a lot of noise about debt relief. But instead of going down the debt of the underdeveloped countries keeps going up. Mick Brooks looks at why this is happening.

Since the tsunami disaster in South Asia in December of last year, the bourgeois media have paid a lot of attention to the misery and poverty of  the Third World. Many people, including British Chancellor of the Exchequer Gordon Brown, have called for the cancellation of Third World  debt. Will this actually be done, and if so, what would it really achieve?

A lot of money was spontaneously donated by millions of people to help the victims of the tsunami in the Indian Ocean. The governments were then embarrassed into promising further millions. But will this money reach its destination? And will the governments come up with the promised funds? Originally written in Dutch and for a Belgian public, this article by Erik Demeester gives some revealing statistics about what is really happening and unveils the hypocrisy of the mass media campaign.

Ten days after the devastating tsunami that wreaked havoc in the Indian Ocean on December 26, 2004 it is becoming increasingly clear that much more could have been done to avert the massive destruction and the death of 146,000 people (so far) in the region. It is also clear that a lot more could be done to assist in aid and relief after the disaster.

UNICEF has just released its annual report that showed that at least one billion children, half of the world's children, suffer from poverty, war and the Aids epidemic. This figure is in itself a shocking condemnation of the kind of system we live in. The system needs to be overthrown.

In her usual style Naomi Klein provided many interesting facts, but failed to reach any concrete conclusions of how we can or whether it is actually necessary to abolish capitalism. In essence she would like another kind of capitalism, a more humane capitalism, which of course is utterly utopian.