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.
“We face a deadly spiral of combined crises (the ’polycrisis’), to which the established political and economic powers are offering no response. Poverty and widespread insecurity continue to spread. However, in recent months, in the face of humanitarian disasters, protest movements have taken on a new dimension, with impressive demonstrations and uprisings. Asia is at the heart of these developments, including Pakistan, Bangladesh, Indonesia and the Philippines, where our partners are based.”
read article...Belgium experienced a crescendo of strikes on Monday 24 November in public transport (trains, buses, trams, metros), Tuesday 25 November in all public services (including education and hospitals) and Wednesday 26 November, with the addition of the private sector, a day long interprofessional general strike that was widely followed in Flanders, Wallonia and Brussels.
read article...Openly supremacist, colonialist and racist-xenophobic, Trump’s national security strategy includes new or reformulated threats. It is old-style imperialism , adapted to deal with the current challenges to US hegemonic power.
read article...Thousands of Starbucks workers continue their fight for a union contract with strikes and rallies across the country. The latest strike began on November 13 and continues off-and-on at stores across the country. In mid-December some 3,800 Starbucks baristas were on strike at more than 180 stores in over 130 cities. The union, Starbucks Workers United claims a total 14,000 members at about 650 stores.
read article...“Thirty years ago, the largest mass mobilization since May 68 thwarted the Juppé Plan, the public sector pension plan, and clearly stood in defence of a model of society based on solidarity and public service.”
read article...In India, during the 1918 influenza pandemic, a staggering 12 to 13 million people died, the vast majority between the months of September and December. According to an eyewitness, “There was none to remove the dead bodies and the jackals made a feast.”
Wuhan is known colloquially as one of the “four furnaces” (四大火炉) of China for its oppressively hot humid summer, shared with Chongqing, Nanjing and alternately Nanchang or Changsha, all bustling cities with long histories along or near the Yangtze river valley. Of the four, Wuhan, however, is also sprinkled with literal furnaces: the massive urban complex acts as a sort of nucleus for the steel, concrete and other construction-related industries of China, its landscape dotted with the slowly-cooling blast furnaces of the remnant state-owned iron and steel foundries, now plagued by overproduction and forced into a contentious new round of downsizing, privatization and general restructuring—itself resulting in several large strikes and protests in the last five years. The city is essentially the construction capital of China, which means it has played a particularly important role in the period after the global economic crisis, since these were the years in which Chinese growth was buoyed by the funneling of investment funds into infrastructure and real estate projects. Wuhan not only fed this bubble with its oversupply of building materials and civil engineers but also, in so doing, became a real estate boomtown of its own. According to our own calculations, in 2018-2019 the total area dedicated to construction sites in Wuhan was equivalent to the size of Hong Kong island as a whole.
Luis Sepulveda died on Thursday 16 April in Oviedo (Asturias, in the Spanish state) of Covid-19, which he had contracted at the end of February during a congress of writers in Portugal. Sepulveda was a great writer and his works, translated into more than 60 languages, have enjoyed worldwide success.
Luis Sepulveda was also an activist. Member of the Chilean Communist Party from the age of 12, he quickly moved towards a more revolutionary commitment. In recent years, he had moved away from the debates on the socialist and revolutionary left. Nevertheless he was also very close to us because he had participated, in practice and with arms, in all the debates of the revolutionary movement from the beginning of the 1970s to the mid-1980s.
Jules Falquet looks at the complexity of identities, loyalties and the interests of everyone in social movements. The book Imbrication. Femmes, race et classe dans les mouvements sociaux published in February 2020 by Éditions du Croquant, presents the history of guerrilla (Salvador), Indian-peasant (Zapatista movement in Mexico) or Black (Brazil, Dominican Republic, USA) struggles, as well as the women’s, feminist and lesbian movements of the continent: the women of the Americas and the Caribbean offer us an exceptional mirror to better understand “intersectionality” at a time of a profusion of struggles, sometimes confusing . Starting from the daily life of these movements in order to reach a veritable "science of the oppressed", this book is aimed at an inquisitive public as well as activists and the world of research. [Contretemps]
Lyes Touati, a member of the Parti Socialiste des Travailleurs (PST), was arrested yesterday in Aokas (Algeria) and remanded in custody. We do not know the reasons for his arrest or the charges against him.
- read article...Samir LARABI, a doctoral student in the Sociology Department of Abderahmane Mira University in Béjaia (Algeria), has been subjected to repeated obstructions for 29 months, following abusive refusals by the rectoral administration to allow him to defend his doctoral thesis. Validated by his research supervisor, the validity of his thesis has been confirmed three times by the scientific bodies of the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences. Despite validation by the faculty’s Scientific Committee of the changes imposed by the rectoral administration, the latter persists in refusing to allow him to defend his thesis.
- read article...“This is not simply a humanitarian appeal—it is a call to uphold our shared global commitment to justice, dignity, and collective care. As climate disasters intensify, international leftist solidarity remains essential to ensure that working people everywhere can survive, rebuild, and continue the struggle for a more just world.”
- read article...The organizing committee holds the first preparatory meeting of the First International Antifascist Conference.
- read article...For nearly two years, Israel has waged a livestreamed genocide against Indigenous Palestinians in Gaza and across historic Palestine, devastating lives, land, and ecosystems. UN experts have described Israel’s crimes as including domicide, urbicide, scholasticide, medicide, cultural genocide and ecocide. In September 2025, the UN Commission of Inquiry confirmed that Israel is committing a genocide in Gaza.
- 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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