The fate of Tibet and its unelected superstar figurehead has captured the attention of western liberals, not to mention the US government. But the real fascination of Tibet is not its exoticism but its similarity to the rest of an undemocratic global system, argues Paula Cerni

In-depth to say the least (it's 55 pages if you print it out) interview with marxist writer/activist and recent Mute collabor Loren Goldner by the South Korean SaNoShin group, covering the 20th century history of class struggle and present developments/future prospects.
From Goldner's Break Their Haughty Power website (http://home.earthlink.net/~lrgoldner/)

The Situation of Left Communism Today:
Interview with the Korean Socialist Workers Newspaper Group (SaNoShin), November-December 2007

Loren Goldner

Overview of the maoist victory in the Nepalese Constitutent Assembly election by long-term observer and sympathiser Gary Leupp, a US academic and regular Counterpunch (www.counterpunch.org) contributor.  It's not necessary to agree with Leupp that the maoists stand for 'communism' to recognize that the election result represents a major strategic success for the provisionally demilitarized 'people's war' and a geopolitical upheaval at the borders of India (where the Naxalite maoists continue to wage war) and China.  More open to question, perhaps, is Leupp's claim that the event is o

Back in Beijing, after a tense couple of days in Chengdu. The city is the Eastern gateway to Tibet, located at the foot of the mountains. It has a huge PLA base, and was the jumping off point for the troops which are now saturating Tibet. The serious action is now apparently in the villages. There are reports of serious clashes in several rural districts, though Lhasa is now locked down. Police have been killed, and in the Aba area, the ratio of Tibetans to army is now 1:1 according to someone I talked to.

While bird flu panic made a return to the UK mainland last autumn, the promised pandemic failed to materialise. What does continue to evolve, however, are repressive forms of population management sustained by hypothetical threats of megadeath – writes C. L-Stavrides

Loren Goldner will be giving a talk on the subject of the Korean working class at Housmans bookstore in Kings Cross, London at 6pm on Saturday 19th of January.

More details: http://www.metamute.org/en/Three-Talks-by-Loren-Goldner

ABSTRACT

From New Left Review (http://www.newleftreview.org/?page=article&view=2678) some solid statistical evidence -- particularly strong on intersections of national, municipal, private and foreign capital -- for a point that might have seemed to border on truism but apparently is not gasped in mainstream 'China studies: the expansion of Chinese industrial capitalism in the last 20 years can is broadly comparable to the same process in Europe and America in the 19th century, and speculation over notions like 'the paradoxes of market socialism' is useless.  (Anyone who doubted this s