Home
IV Online magazine
Debate
Features
Documents of the FI
Links
Reviews section
Index
Contact us

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.

International Viewpoint Online magazine

  • 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.

    read article...
  • 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.

    read article...
  • 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.

    read article...
  • 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.

    read article...
  • Ukraine

    Bruised but determined, the Ukrainian people fight on

    30 October, by Dominique

    While diplomatic manoeuvres take centre stage, the Ukrainian people, in an increasingly difficult context, continue to resist, including in the occupied zones.

    read article...

...and the rest of the current issue

All articles

Recently posted Features

  • Feminist theory

    On the question of sexual difference

    10 September 2012, by Josette Trat

    The philosophy of difference as it is theorized by Luce Irigaray today stems in part from the discussions within the French women’s movement at the beginning of the 1970s. The discussion has re-emerged today with publication of Luce Irigaray’s book Le temps de la différence in 1989, and her subsequent publications which, particularly the latest J’aime àtoi (1992) she reformulates her project of a society based on the recognition of a gendered civil law. The discussion has become richer with other contributions, particularly from Italy.

    read article...
  • Feminist theory

    Postmodernism and Feminism

    10 September 2012, by Jane Kelly

    The term postmodernism has entered into common currency with a rapidity that modernism, “after” which it is named, never achieved: it has a trendy contemporaneity but is little understood. Partly through its description of reality as a series of images, or “simulacra” in Baudrillard’s word, it has attained popular cultural status in the media, especially television, as well as modish respectability in the academy, across Europe and North America.

    read article...
  • USA:

    The significance of Occupy

    29 August 2012, by Dan La Botz, Joel Jordan, Robert Brenner

    The Occupy Movement, the first such broad, national, multi-issue, mass movement in forty years, represented a test for the revolutionary socialist left in several senses. First, would the left recognize its important and immediately move to become an active part of it and work within it to help provide leadership? Second, would the left during Occupy be able to both appreciate its strengths and develop a critique of its weaknesses and limitations? Would it as the same time be able to conduct socialist propaganda and recruit to the socialist movement? Third, would the left in retrospect be able to analyze and learn from the Occupy experience in order to prepare itself for future movements?

    read article...

  • Francis Fukuyama and the ‘absent left’

    21 August 2012, by Phil Hearse

    Whatever the (well deserved) derision heaped on the head of Francis Fukuyama for his ‘end of history’ thesis, he has the merit of posing the big questions. In his ‘The Future of History’ article (Foreign Affairs, Jan-Feb) he poses two big questions that are vital for Marxists: Is the neoliberal undermining of the social position of the employed working class and poorer sections of the middle class compatible with liberal democracy? and What explains what he calls the ‘absent left’ – the lack in theory or practice of a powerful left/populist alternative to neoliberalism in a period of such drastic economic collapse and moral bankruptcy of the dominant neoliberal model?

    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.

We need your help to get our message across! Send donations payable to International Viewpoint 10b Windsor Rd N7 6JG, Britain - or why not donate online:


Site Map | | Contact | RSS 2.0

ACCESSIBILITY