International Viewpoint - online socialist magazine

• Puerto RIco

  The 2019 Uprising Produces an Electoral Opening Toward the Left

  17 January, by José A. Laguarta Ramírez

  “If a solid leftist electoral front can be built while maintaining the pressure of street mobilization on a much weakened colonial capitalist regime, a true sea change is not just possible but within reach.”

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• Bolivia

  The Return of Democracy and an Uncertain Future

  16 January, by Bret Gustafson

  “Wherever one stands on Evo Morales, and despite the challenges ahead, it is clear that at least for the moment, Bolivians continue to challenge capitalism and its orthodoxies.”

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• Romania

  First as tragedy, then as farce? AUR and the long shadow of fascism in Romania

  15 January, by Raul Carstocea

  “Yet if the story of the defeat of fascism and of the central role played by socialism in its demise teaches us any lesson, it is that we surely have to keep trying.”

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• USA

  Post-Election 2020: A Crisis of Representation

  14 January, by Barry Eidlin

  Failed beer hall putsch re-enactments aside, Donald Trump will be leaving the White House on January 20 if not sooner—at least for the next four years. The focus now shifts to the post-Trump world: what can we expect from the incoming Biden administration?

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• Venezuela

  Parliamentary elections – Results and prospects

  13 January, by Elio Colmenarez

  “Taking control of the AN from the right was vital for the Bolivarian revolution, with elections in the midst of a serious economic crisis, mainly the consequence of the blockade imposed by imperialism. ”

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...and the rest of the current issue

• Venezuela

  2021 begins with a new National Assembly. Will it lead to advances?

• Britain

  Five Things we have Learnt from the National Education Union’s Mobilisation to Keep Schools Safe.

• South Africa

  Nationalism and patriotism: the opium of the masses

• Hong Kong

  Hong Kong’s mass arrests are an assault on grassroots advocacy

• USA

  The Freedom Struggle Is a Labor Struggle, Then & Now

Recently posted Debate

• Covid-19 pandemic and afterwards?

  Self-Extinction of Neoliberalism? Don’t Bet on It.

  4 May 2020, by Gilbert Achcar

  For the second time since the turn of the century, governments in North America and Europe are intervening massively with public funds and in conjunction with central banks to bail out entire sectors of the economy and prevent a general economic collapse. The ongoing rescue operations necessitated by the Covid-19 pandemic has already reached a much higher scale than the one deployed against the 2007–08 financial crisis. These operations clash with the basic tenets of neoliberalism in that they constitute a massive regulatory intervention by the state in reining back the market, whereas deregulation and market “survival of the fittest” are central to neoliberal ideology.

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• Ecosocialism

  The role of planning in the ecosocialist transition – a contribution to the debate

  25 April 2020, by Michael Löwy

  The semiannual French review Les Possibles, a publication of Attac France, in its most recent issue (No 23) features a number of articles on planning for the ecological and social transition. Most are addressed to the issue of socialist planning vs. capitalist markets that was prominent in the debates of 20th century socialism. The contribution by Michael Löwy puts this debate in the ecosocialist framework that has emerged in this century. My translation of it is published below.

  – Richard Fidler

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• Hong Kong

  A Left Case for Hong Kong Self-Determination

  22 April 2020, by Promise Li

  The social revolution of the nineteenth century cannot take its poetry from the past but only from the future. It cannot begin with itself before it has stripped away all superstition about the past. The former revolutions required recollections of past world history in order to smother their own content. The revolution of the nineteenth century must let the dead bury their dead in order to arrive at its own content. There the phrase went beyond the content – here the content goes beyond the phrase.”

  Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1852)

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• USA - debate

  Problems with an Electoral Road to Socialism in the United States

  23 January 2020, by Kit Wainer, Mel Bienenfeld

  In a welcome sign, the recent revitalization of the socialist left, particularly the spectacular growth of Democratic Socialists of America, has revived debate about the road to socialism. Also, fortunately, the discussion, which has partially played out in the pages of Jacobin, has gone beyond a simple revisiting of the old “reform versus revolution” argument of early twentieth-century social democracy. Vivek Chibber “Our Road to Power,” Jacobin, 5 December 2017) and Eric Blanc (most recently in his debate with Charlie Post, “Which Way to Socialism,” Jacobin, 21 July 2019) have raised important problems with applying a revolutionary model from the Russian Revolution of 1917 to modern industrial countries with parliamentary systems. Blanc’s observation that “a government elected by universal suffrage has vastly more popular legitimacy than the tsarist autocracy” is particularly valid and important.

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