ANNOUNCING: A new cohort of Council members from 18 countries — activists and artists, MPs and ministers, trade union militants and tenant organizers — joins the @ProgIntl on the occasion of its first anniversary.
A thread on the newest members of the Council:
1/ Lina Attalah (@Linaattalah) is an award-winning journalist and campaigner for freedom of speech based in Egypt. She is co-founder and Chief Editor of @MadaMasr, an independent online Egyptian newspaper and member of the @ProgIntl Wire.
2/ Selay Ghaffar (@Selay_Ghaffar) is a fearless activist for political and women’s rights in Afghanistan. She is spokesperson for the Solidarity Party of Afghanistan (@hambastagi), a member of the @ProgIntl.
3/ Jeremy Corbyn (@jeremycorbyn) is a Member of UK Parliament and the founder of the Peace and Justice Project (@corbyn_project), a new member of the @ProgIntl.
4/ Walter Chambati (@wsschambati) is Executive Director of The Sam Moyo African Institute for Agrarian Studies (SMAIAS), Harare, Zimbabwe and Associate Editor of the Agrarian South: Journal of Political Economy.
5/ Hasina Khan is one of India's most courageous activists for women's rights in general and Muslim women’s rights in particular. She is the founding member of Bebaak Collective (Voice of Fearless), fighting repressive forces from an intersectional feminist perspective.
6/ Tara Raghuveer (@taraghuveer) the director of @KCTenants, organizing tenants across Kansas City, leading rent strikes, and directing the national campaign for a #HomesGuarantee.
7/ Ammar Ali Jan (@ammaralijan) a historian who works on Communist thought in the non-European world. He is a member of Haqooq-e-khalq Movement, an anti-capitalist organization that is working among workers, farmers, students and women to build an alternative political project.
8/ Baltasar Garzón is an international human rights lawyer, renowned for his courageous efforts to deliver justice for the victims of authoritarian repression, from his indictment of Augusto Pinochet in 1998 to his defense of Julian Assange two decades later.
9/ Dr. Yara Hawari (@yarahawari) is a Palestinian activist, academic and political analyst. She received her PhD in Middle East Politics from the University of Exeter in 2018. She currently works as the Senior Analyst for @AlShabaka, a Palestinian transnational think tank.
10/ Tom Morello (@tmorello) is an activist, advocate, and founding member of Rage Against the Machine. His rules are simple: "Feed the poor. Fight the power. Rock the f*ck out.”
11/ Solomon Yeo is the co-founder of the Pacific Islands Students Fighting Climate Change (@pisfcc) and the World’s Youth for Climate Justice (@WY4CJ), both organizations dedicated to address the climate crisis and inequality through a human rights-based approaches.
12/ Gerardo Pisarello (@G_Pisarello) is a member of the Congress of Deputies for @EnComu_Podem. He served as First Deputy Mayor of Barcelona between 2015 and 2019, and represents @CatEnComu, a member of the @ProgIntl on the Council.
13/ Vashna Jagarnath (@VashJag) works in the office of the General Secretary of the National Union of Metal Workers of South Africa (@Numsa_Media). She is also the Deputy General Secretary of the Socialist Revolutionary Workers Party.
14/ Luka Mesec (@LukaMesec) is a Member of Slovenian Parliament and a founding coordinator of @strankalevica, an eco-socialist party and member of the @ProgIntl.
15/ Zarah Sultana (@zarahsultana) is the Member of Parliament for Coventry South. Elected in 2019, Zarah has a background in community organising and anti-racist movements.
16/ Sacha Llorenti (@SachaLlorenti) is the Excecutive Secretary of ALBA–TCP. Previously he was Ambassador to the United Nations for the Plurinational State of Bolivia and President of the UN Security Council.
17/ Slavoj Žižek is a philosopher, political theorist, and — in his own words — a "moderately-conservative Communist." He is the international director at the Birkbeck Institute of Humanities, London University.
18/ Lidy Nacpil (@lnacpil) is the Coordinator of the Asian Peoples’ Movement on Debt and Development (@AsianPeoplesMvt), the Global Campaign to Demand Climate Justice (@gcdcj), and member of the Coordinating Committee of the Global Alliance on Tax Justice (@GA4TJ).
19/ Tiny Kox is a Senator for the Socialist Party in the Dutch Parliament and Chair of the Group of the Unified European Left in the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe, a new member of the @ProgIntl.
20/ Nazma Akter (@NazmaAkter73) is President of the Sommilito Garments Sramik Federation, one of the largest union federations in Bangladesh. She is the founder and Executive Director of the Awaj Foundation and co-chair of Asia Pacific Women’s Committee of @IndustriALL_GU.
21/ Prashant Bhushan (@pbhushan1) is a senior public interest lawyer and human rights activist. He has been a relentless crusader for the rights of the poor and the marginalised. He is the convenor of the Campaign for Judicial Accountability and Reforms.
22/ Leïla Chaibi (@leilachaibi) is a member of the European Parliament La France insoumise. She is a fierce defender of workers' rights, and leads efforts in the European Parliament to protect digital platform workers and fight against the corporate ravages of Amazon.
23/ Eyal Weizman (@weizman_eyal) is the founding director of @ForensicArchi and Professor of Spatial and Visual Cultures at Goldsmiths, University of London. He is a prolific author and holds a range of positions at international organizations like the @cijournalism.
24/ This Council cohort joins a range of organizations — including @corbyn_project, @GravelInstitute, @IGJ2012, and @WiphalasW — as new members of our planetary front as we prepare for a second year of actions, campaigns, and internationalist organizing.
END/ So join us.
We rely *exclusively* on people like you to keep us going — and we are only 10% of the day to our fundraising goal for 2021.
🇵🇸 Today, the @ProgIntl delegation concludes its investigation of Israel’s systematic violations of international law with a clear and urgent call to governments across the globe: Now is the time for a total energy, economic and arms embargo against Israel.
Download the full report from the delegation: bit.ly/3CkHG0n
On 28 October 2024, an emergency international delegation landed in Palestine to amplify evidence of the Israeli regime’s systematic violations of international law since the start of its genocide in Gaza one year ago.
Over the course of a week in the field, our delegates found clear evidence of what Palestinian citizens have been telling the world for years: Israel relies on systematic violations of international law against the Palestinian people to advance its project of settler colonialism.
On 7 November 1917, the Russian working class sent shockwaves through the world by overthrowing the Tsar, dismantling Russia’s budding capitalism, and establishing history’s first proletarian state.
The October Revolution began months earlier, sparked by the women textile workers of Petrograd. They took to the streets with simple demands: bread, and the “return of our husbands from the trenches” of World War I.
Together with thousands of workers, they mobilized across the city in what became known as the February Revolution, launching a movement that would soon bring the nation’s workers to power.
On this day in 1952, the British colonial government in Kenya declared a state of emergency in response to the Mau Mau uprising.
During the eight-year crackdown that followed, 90,000 Kenyans were killed or injured and over one million were forcibly resettled into villages under military occupation.
The Pan-African journalist George Padmore described the British repression as “the biggest colonial war in Africa since the Boer war.”
The people of East London defeated Sir Oswald Mosley, the Blackshirts and their police protection on this day in 1936.
In what became known as the Battle of Cable Street, some 250,000 residents, trade unionists and communists banded together to halt Mosley’s fascist march into the heart of the capital’s Jewish community.
Sir Oswald Mosley was a British aristocrat and former Labour cabinet minister who founded the British Union of Fascists (BUF) after visiting Mussolini’s Italy in 1931. Amidst the depths of the Great Depression, soaring unemployment and rampant hunger, Britain’s ruling class fanned the flames of fascism to quell the threat of working-class insurrection.
On 30 September 1965, the Indonesian military, working closely with the US government, initiated a coup that would depose President Sukarno and install the brutal, 30-year dictatorship of General Suharto.
In the dark years that followed, the dictatorship massacred over a million Indonesian communists, with the CIA and US diplomats drawing up “kill lists” for the Indonesian military. The operation would become a template for the US’s regime change operations for decades to come.
In 1945, President Sukarno led Indonesia to independence from Dutch colonial rule. He championed the Non-Aligned Movement and hosted the historic Bandung Conference, a meeting of Afro-Asian states, in 1955.
On this day 65 years ago, Władysław Gomułka, leader of the socialist Polish People's Republic, announced the "1000 Schools for the Millennium" program — an ambitious plan, hatched in the ashes of WW2, to build one school for every year of Poland's existence.
When the program concluded, over 1400 new schools would be built — "for the benefit of the young generation."
The lack of schools was a burning question for post-war Poland. The country's reconstruction was accompanied by a rapid process of urbanization, and a dramatic demographic boom. In 1949-1959, over 700,000 children were born annually. By 1961, there were 74 children per classroom.