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The first days of the December 3-14 Bali meeting on a post-Kyoto framework for tackling climate change showed that the US-led call for a “comprehensive new agreement” that would require Third World countries that are big greenhouse-gas emitters to commit to emission reductions had the support of most First World government delegations. This push would reverse one of the most valuable aspects of the Kyoto Protocol, which is due to expire in 2012.

This year marks the 90th anniversary of the Russian Revolution. In the years following the revolution, its leaders initiated the formation of the Communist (Third) International (Comintern), an international grouping of communist parties. In Venezuela, the leadership of the country’s unfolding socialist revolution have issued a call for a new international of Latin American left parties. This article, by John Riddell, is part of an ongoing series on the history of the Comintern.

In New South Wales
bridges tell the tale
of life’s travail
for the not so beautiful elite @poetry = The homeless out of work
share a space of dirt
beneath your bridges
under the souls of your feet @poetry = There’s no dreaming here
romance is out of date
beauty is the sadness
of a quintessential fate @poetry = Mums ’n kids share
8 x 2 tin cans with lids
and wait for that day of the meek
but it won’t be this week @poetry = There communards
sleep by streets
on a park bench
where the soup kitchen meets @poetry = Real jobs have gone
old industries fled
and the rest of youse
have left us for dead @poetry = In New South Wales
histories tell the tale
of a social elite
with mud at their feet @poetry = and egos that never skip a beat

@poetry = Someone is crying in the dark,
She lost her son (a monk who stood up for people)
Someone had woken up in the middle of the night,
She longs for her rights as a human being. @poetry = Someone had been beaten to death on the road,
For he was holding a signboard. @poetry = Someone is praying in Insein jail,
He was arrested and tortured all day. @poetry = They have sacrificed for their country,
But their country has not been freed. @poetry = We have to hand over their works,
If you dare to fight for their rights! @poetry = We have to follow their way,
Which they’ve walked with hope, love and prayers. @poetry = We will fight to reach our goal, @poetry = Don’t wait until tommorrow!

Ecology is often seen as a recent invention. But the idea that capitalism degrades the environment in a way that disproportionately affects the poor and the colonised was already expressed in the 19th century in the work of Karl Marx and Frederick Engels.