What Lula’s victory means for Palestine solidarity in BrazilOver the weekend, Brazilians elected Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva president once more by a very narrow margin, defying polls that had him trailing. No candidate had won a Brazilian runoff from second place since 1989. That precedent is broken, and it was broken from below: by student-led rallies in Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo, Minas Gerais and Porto Alegre. The rallies were called without Lula, by pop-star fan communities and influencers who injected energy into a campaign that had flagged all year, and by widespread mass communications like Deputy André Janones's WhatsApp channel, which passed 10 million followers. Many of those young figures have been vocal on Palestine. Their job now is to make sure their government hears them. That mobilisation will matter all the more given the political landscape Lula faces. The Congress that convenes on 1 February will comprise 594 members, 513 deputies and 81 senators, with the right and its allies holding a comfortable majority in both houses. With 90 members close to the Palestinian struggle, the challenge will be to turn that support, alongside pressure from civil society, into concrete political action.
https://www.newarab.com/opinion/what-lulas-victory-means-palestine-solidarity-brazil Serbia: A whole list of monopolies and geopolitical rivalries behind the “Student List” (Kostas Papadakis member of the Central Committee of the KKE and a Member of the European Parliament)We must not forget, of course, that Serbia has for many years been at the center of fierce rivalries between the EU, the United States and NATO on the one hand, and China and Russia on the other. It plays an important role in the outcome of the broader struggle for control over the Balkans. The elections were therefore inevitably shaped by competing powerful interests, as well as by an extensive effort to restructure the bourgeois political system. The principal vehicle for this restructuring was the “Student List” (hereafter SL), which emerged victorious with 52% of the vote. In May 2025, a process began to establish a political movement that would capitalize on the prestige of the student mobilizations, which had already continued for six months, as well as on the support of student assemblies and the leaders of the protests. In effect, these bodies gave their endorsement to the movement, even though not a single current student stood as a candidate. A list of 250 candidates was drawn up, supposedly “selected through university assemblies.” Among those “excluded” from the SL's electoral slate were also “all serving politicians and members of parliament from both the government and the opposition.” The 250 candidates included “prominent personalities,” “technocrats” and others, ranging from well-known academics to actors, athletes and public figures. The SL was headed by Srđanović, a pediatrician from Vojvodina and one of the earliest prominent supporters of the Novi Sad protest movement, although the campaign generally promoted the idea of “collective representation.” Among its most prominent candidates were former basketball player Dejan Bodiroga, who heads the organization responsible for running the EuroLeague basketball competition, and the well-known Serbian actors Tihomir Stanić and Dragan Jovanović. Beyond these recognizable personalities, however, the list also included Dejan Šoškić, the former governor of Serbia's central bank, who had resigned from that position and played a role in drafting the SL's economic programme. An indication of the supposedly “pro-people” opposition stance that qualified him to become the SL's leading economic figure is that, over the years, he has repeatedly proposed reducing wages in order to lower production costs, supposedly in the interest of strengthening the competitiveness of the Serbian economy.
https://www.idcommunism.com/2026/10/serbia-whole-list-of-monopolies-and-geopolitical-rivalries-behind-the-student-list.htmlCondition of the Working Class in England, by Engels ch12. The Agricultural ProletariatWe have seen in the introduction how, simultaneously with the small bourgeoisie and the modest independence of the former workers, the small peasantry also was ruined when the former Union of industrial and agricultural work was dissolved, the abandoned fields thrown together into large farms, and the small peasants superseded by the overwhelming competition of the large farmers. Instead of being landowners or leaseholders, as they had been hitherto, they were now obliged to hire themselves as labourers to the large farmers or the landlords. For a time this position was endurable, though a deterioration in comparison with their former one. The extension of industry kept pace with the increase of population until the progress of manufacture began to assume a slower pace, and the perpetual improvement of machinery made it impossible for manufacture to absorb the whole surplus of the agricultural population. From this time forward, the distress which had hitherto existed only in the manufacturing districts, and then only at times, appeared in the agricultural districts too. The twenty-five years' struggle with France came to an end at about the same time; the diminished production at the various seats of the wars, the shutting off of imports, and the necessity of providing for the British army in Spain, had given English agriculture an artificial prosperity, and had besides withdrawn to the army vast numbers of workers from their ordinary occupations. This check upon the import trade, the opportunity for exportation, and the military demand for workers, now suddenly came to an end; and the necessary consequence was what the English call agricultural distress. The farmers had to sell their corn at low prices, and could, therefore, pay only low wages. In 1815, in order to keep up prices, the Corn Laws were passed, prohibiting the importation of corn so long as the price of wheat continued less than 80 shillings per quarter. These naturally ineffective laws were several times modified, but did not succeed in ameliorating the distress in the agricultural districts. All that they did was to change the disease, which, under free competition from abroad, would have assumed an acute form, culminating in a series of crises, into a chronic one which bore heavily but uniformly upon the farm labourers.
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/condition-working-class/ch12.htm