We publish the following translation of a statement, published today by the Russian comrades of the Marxist Tendency on the current situation in Kazakhstan. Read the original here, click here for marxist.com’s latest analysis of the situation, and here for an earlier report by our correspondent on the

Yesterday, Kazakhstani army and security forces backed by Russian special forces moved in to forcibly put down what has become the biggest mass movement in Kazakhstan since the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Lenin once said that “war is terrible, terribly profitable.” The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic measures up to warfare, not only in terms of the lives it has taken, but also the grotesque windfall it has provided to capitalist profiteers. The US-based company Pfizer has emerged as the most egregious example of Big Pharma exploiting a horrific public health crisis to swell its coffers.

This report was received this evening from a correspondent in Kazakhstan following a 7 hour internet blackout. Overnight, protests which began against gas price rises have turned into an uprising that has already led to the resignation of the government but which show no sign of abating.

A number of key unions have seen seismic shifts to the left in recent months, as workers turn to the industrial front for action. To beat the bosses, the left needs a strategy for united action, as part of the struggle for workers’ power.

At the dawn of 2022, the cries of “Happy New Year” have an empty ring for most people, because most people are not happy at all. In the past, in troubled times, they looked for consolation in religion. But nowadays, the churches stand empty. Instead, people have tended to take refuge in their local pub, or perhaps in the cinema, which have become something like a modern opium of the people. But given that many of these are closed, many have nowhere else to seek comfort than in their television set.

As another dramatic year comes to a close, we present the most-read articles on marxist.com in 2021. We have compiled separate lists for newly published material from the past 12 months, as well as established pieces to which our readers keep returning. We thank all of our supporters and comrades for visiting our site this year for the best Marxist theory, news and analysis. See you in 2022!

At this festive time of year, we share the following lead off by Alan Woods on the origins of Christianity, which provides a Marxist answer to 2,000 years of myths, lies and distortions.

This month has seen a relentless series of over 230 strikes and protests in Iran. The most prominent of these was a two-day teachers’ strike on 11-13 December, involving tens of thousands of teachers in hundreds of cities across the country. The regime responded by arresting over 200 teachers and trade unionists.

Last week, the Tories suffered a humiliating electoral defeat in their formerly safe seat of North Shropshire, a rural constituency dominated by the Conservative Party for nearly 200 years. Boris Johnson is running out of road as he lurches from one scandal to another. This opens up further instability and crisis for British capitalism.

The candidate of Apruebro Dignidad, Gabriel Boric has won the presidential election with 56% of the votes. In absolute terms, this is a record majority, with some 4.6 million votes cast for Boric, putting him almost 1 million votes ahead of the pro-Pinochet candidate, Juan Antonio Kast, who obtained 44%.

The question of violence is often posed as an abstract theoretical one. Pacifists cordon off the concept of ‘violence’ and treat it apart from every other aspect of human relations. But as the military theorist Carl von Clausewitz said: “war is the continuation of politics by other means”. Declaring opposition to violence ‘in general’ is as meaningless and utopian as declaring opposition to politics ‘in general’. We must be concrete. What kind of violence are we opposed to? And how do we struggle against it?

Big demonstrations broke out in Brussels in November and December. In the former, 35,000 protested efforts by the government to blame the people for the course of the pandemic crisis, and impose stricter control measures. Sentiments of disgust, and distrust towards the establishment, underpin these protests, following intermittent lockdowns and a host of broken promises by the government, combined with the double standards of the measures taken thus far. All of this has caused disorientation, perplexity and anger that has pushed people onto the streets. Meanwhile, the threat to fire unvaccinated staff in healthcare and other sectors has led to strike action being called by the

Over the past period, a conflict has been brewing between the Polish government and the European Union, manifesting itself in multiple incidents. For example, the recent refusal by the Polish authorities to deploy the EU’s Forex border guards during the crisis at the Polish border with Belarus, or the open threat to suspend funding to the EU, advanced by members of the Polish government. This led to retaliation from the EU, which threatened to withdraw COVID-19 related relief funding.

In the post-war period, MI5 (the British state’s internal security agency) paid little attention to the activities of Trotskyists in Britain, regarding the threat that they posed to be minimal. But the rise of the Militant in the 1970s and 1980s – a tightly organised, professional and theoretically trained organisation founded by Ted Grant – completely transformed the Secret Services’ perception of Trotskyism.