International Viewpoint - online socialist magazine

• Britain

  Radicalisation on right and left while centre crumbles in Britain

  4 November, by Dave Kellaway

  Dave Kellaway assesses the political situation where creeping fascism is advancing, the Labour centre is not holding but radicalisation to the left is also significant.

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• USA

  Trump Takes Food from the Poor Poor during Budget Crisis

  3 November, by Dan La Botz

  President Donald Trump has taken advantage of the current budget crisis, which has lasted more than a month, shutting down the federal government, to stop funding food programs that affect tens of million. Trump said the shutdown provided an opportunity to close “Democrat programs that we want to close up or we never wanted to happen.” By “Democrat programs” he means social welfare programs that provide food and education to low-income people.

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• Indonesia

  “We Are The Working Class”?: Indonesia’s Labour Party and the Limits of Reformist Politics

  2 November, by Mark Johnson

  When more than 50 Indonesian labour unions gathered in Jakarta on 5 October 2021 to establish the Partai Buruh (Labour Party), it appeared to mark a historic moment: workers organising their own political vehicle to challenge an oligarchic system that had stripped away their rights. Yet from its inception, the party embodied a contradiction. Led by union bureaucrats with histories of elite collaboration, the Labour Party promised working-class independence whilst its president courted the very politicians who had passed anti-worker legislation. It claimed to represent the marginalised whilst maintaining "deafening silence" on human rights abuses and democratic backsliding.

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• Venezuela

  Venezuela’s authoritarian turn and the repression of its Left

  1 November, by Edgardo Lander

  Since Venezuela’s disputed 2024 elections, Nicolás Maduro’s government has escalated its authoritarian turn. More than 2,000 people were detained in the days following the vote, and targeted persecution has widened to include journalists, trade unionists, academics, and human rights defenders. Human rights activist Marta Lía Grajales was disappeared for two days after denouncing the brutal beating of mothers demanding freedom for their imprisoned children. María Alejandra Díaz, a Chavista lawyer and former Constituent Assembly member, was stripped of her license and harassed after calling for transparency in the vote count. These cases illustrate a broader strategy of intimidation and criminalization.

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• Serbia

  The streets against the regime in Serbia: one year of mobilization in review

  31 October, by Gaëlle Guehennec

  For a year now, young people in Serbia have been continuing their fight for a democratic society in the face of Aleksandar Vučić’s authoritarian regime. On both sides of Serbia, student marches are criss-crossing the country in the direction of Novi Sad to commemorate the collapse of the railway station, responsible for the deaths of 16 people on 1 November 2024. This tragic event triggered a political protest on an unprecedented scale.

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...and the rest of the current issue

• Ukraine

  Bruised but determined, the Ukrainian people fight on

• Madagascar

  After Rajoelina’s regime collapses - desire for a radical break

• Brazil

  Oil Speaks Loudest: Environmental backsliding and the limits of Brazil’s energy transition

• USA

  The United States Prepares for War on Venezuela

• Ireland

  Catherine Connolly wins: An historic victory for the left in Ireland

Recently posted Features

• Sexuality and capitalism: The Italian Renaissance

  3 December 2014, by Colin Wilson

  Revolutionary struggles against capitalism have raised, time and again, the issue of sexual liberation. Right at the start of capitalism, the English revolution of the 1640s and 1650s involved what historian Christopher Hill has called a “sexual revolution” against the old order. The more radical forces included “ranters” such as Lawrence Clarkson, who argued that “What act soever is done by thee in light and love is light and lovely, though it be that act called adultery.” [1]1 The “utopian socialists” of the early nineteenth century also challenged accepted ideas about sexuality.

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• Bensaïd on Lenin

  “Leaps Leaps Leaps”: Lenin and politics

  24 November 2014, by Daniel Bensaïd

  Hannah Arendt was worried that politics might disappear completely from the world. The century had seen such disasters that the question of whether ’politics still has any meaning at all’ had become unavoidable”. The issues at stake in these fears were eminently practical: ’The lack of meaning in which the whole of politics has ended up is confirmed by the dead end into which specific political questions are flocking.’

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• Series : Bretton Woods, the World Bank and the IMF: 70th anniversary (Part 12)

  Theoretical lies of the World Bank

  24 November 2014, by Éric Toussaint

  The World Bank claims that, in order to progress, the Developing Countries [2] should rely on external borrowing and attract foreign investments. The main aim of thus running up debt is to buy basic equipment and consumer goods from the highly industrialised countries. The facts show that day after day, for decades now, the idea has been failing to bring about progress. The models which have influenced the Bank’s vision can only result in making the developing countries heavily dependent on an influx of external capital, particularly in the form of loans, which create the illusion of a certain level of self-sustained development. The lenders of public money (the governments of the industrialised countries and especially the World Bank) see loans as a powerful means of control over indebted countries. Thus the Bank’s actions should not be seen as a succession of errors or bad management. On the contrary, they are a deliberate part of a coherent, carefully thought-out, theoretical plan, taught with great application in most universities. It is distilled in hundreds of books on development economics. The World Bank has produced its own ideology of development. When facts undermine the theory, the Bank does not question the theory. Rather, it seeks to twist the facts in order to protect the dogma.

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• Sexual politics

  LGBT Activism in Mainland China

  15 November 2014, by Holly Hou Lixian

  The 21st century has witnessed the rapid growth of the LGBT movement in mainland China. A bigger and more diversified LGBT community has emerged along with a more tolerant attitude from both government and society. This article aims to delineate this complicated development.

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