International Viewpoint, the monthly English-language magazine of the Fourth International, is a window to radical alternatives world-wide, carrying reports, analysis and debates from all corners of the globe. Correspondents in over 50 countries report on popular struggles, and the debates that are shaping the left of tomorrow.
Former president Donald Trump and Vice-president Kamala Harris continue to campaign in a neck-and-neck race, both holding large rallies in swing states in an attempt to pull ahead. Trump continues his racist rants against immigrants, whom he calls “stone-cold killers,” and his vicious insults against Harris, now calling her “mentally disabled.” He has blamed immigrants, released from other countries’ prisons and mental hospitals, for an invasion of the country that has “poisoned our blood” and destroyed the economy, taking jobs from American Blacks and Latinos. “And if you think about it,” says Trump, “only a mentally disabled person could have allowed this to happen to our country.”
read article...Anura Kumara Dissanayake’s (AKD) victory on 21 September as the candidate of the centre-left National People’s Power (NPP) coalition is highly significant for symbolic and substantive reasons. His predecessors have been from the social and political elite that has mis-ruled Sri Lanka since independence from Britain in 1948. Some were born into that elite, while a couple (Ranasinghe Premadasa, Maithripala Sirisena) made their way into it through the business of politics before they occupied the presidency. In contrast, Dissanayaka’s political life has been as an outsider and critic of that elite.
read article...The French publishing house Editions Amsterdam has just published the first book from the La Boétie Institute , entitled Extrême droite: la résistible ascension. Coordinated by Ugo Palheta , with a preface by the historian Johann Chapoutot and an afterword by Clémence Guetté, this work aims to provide intellectual weapons, rooted in contemporary research ,on the far right, in order to understand and combat the rise of the FN/RN (National Front/National Rally).
read article...Since the fall of President Yanukovych in 2014, all Russian interventions in Ukraine - from the annexation of Crimea and the hybrid war in the Donbass to the February 2022 invasion - have been presented by Putin as responses to an ‘anti-Russian, NATO-backed fascist coup’. A part of the international left has embraced this narrative, unlike the small Ukrainian left in the making.
read article...The need is greater than ever for a consolidated voice of the working class and the poor. On the one hand, daily community protests seem to indicate a population that is not by any means apathetic. But when it comes to elections, the majority don’t participate. No political party has been able to capture the imagination of the mass of people who experience unemployment, sewage in the street, erratic water supply, unaffordable electricity and intolerable levels of gender-based violence. Yet enough of those people are desperate and sufficiently concerned to protest.
There are a number of candidates vying to capture this imagination. The field is becoming crowded. But they are by no means genuine supporters of the interests of the working class and the poor.
read article...“Anti-capitalists and internationalists support unconditionally the people of Ukraine in their armed resistance to liberate their country from the Russian genocidal invasion. But the support for Ukraine is not necessarily uncritical.”
This contribution highlights the effects of this war in the opposite direction to what Putin was seeking, both in Ukraine - on the basis of popular mobilizations for dignity - but also in its Eurasian neighbourhood, as well as in NATO and the EU.
“The Ukrainian left should also determine its position on the terms for ending the war, as it cannot adhere unconditionally to the view of Ukraine’s government.”
“Those who now tolerate a Russian victory also tolerate a victory for both global and “domestic” fossil and commodity-based capital, which is closely intertwined with the Russian fossil and extractive sectors. Therefore, a new anti-militarist movement must uphold solidarity with the civil as well as armed resistance of the Ukrainian people, and with the Ukrainian, Belarusian and Russian leftists who oppose the Putin regime’s war.”
The last days of August saw the 14th edition of the Summer University of Anticapitalistas with the slogan ‘A new internationalism in the face of war and climate barbarism’ with the just over 750 people attending. This year there was a significant increase in the number of young people as a result of the work to establish the student movement, the role played in promoting solidarity with Palestine and the intervention around the queer question.
- read article...This solidarity statement was adopted by the 39th edition of the Fourth International youth camp in France in July 2024.
- read article...The People’s Struggle Alliance (PSA—Jana Aragalaya Sandanaya/Makkal Poraata Munnani) is a newly formed movement of Left political organisations and individuals active in the 2022 people’s uprising (‘Aragalaya/Poraatam/Struggle’) in Sri Lanka who are advancing and deepening its demand for ‘system change’. The Socialist People’s Forum (SPF), supporters of the Fourth International in Sri Lanka, is among its founders.
- read article...Anti*Capitalist Resistance statement on far right violence sweeping Britain and Northern Ireland in August 2024
- read article...International Viewpoint is published under the responsibility of the Bureau of the Fourth International. Signed articles do not necessarily reflect editorial policy. Articles can be reprinted with acknowledgement, and a live link if possible.
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