International Viewpoint - online socialist magazine

• Ukraine

  Ukrainian socialist: Five main problems with the US-Ukraine mineral deal

  10 May, by Vitaliy Dudin

  The minerals deal signed between Ukraine and the United States reflects US capital’s desire to gain unhindered access to Ukraine’s mineral resources. It also gives the US new leverage over Ukraine’s economic and political situation. In contrast, there are no obvious benefits for Ukraine, despite it ceding sovereignty.

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• Syria

  Syria: Fishing in Troubled Waters

  9 May, by Gilbert Achcar

  Israel has accustomed us to fishing in troubled waters. The Zionist state has long been interested in sowing discord and fanning its flames in striving to redraw the map of the Middle East in its image, so that the logic of sectarian and ethnic fragmentation prevails over the logic of citizenship and shared loyalty to a state that merges sectarian and ethnic groups into a single melting pot while preserving their rights. Inspired by the Roman Empire’s famous principle of “divide and conquer”, Israel has sought, since its inception, to exploit the differences it found in its immediate and distant surroundings, playing sectarian minorities against the regional Sunni majority and ethnic minorities against the Arab majority: Druze, Christians, Kurds, and others – even Shiites during the time of the Shah of Iran, before that country became a hotbed of anti-Israel hostility and contributed in turn to fuelling Shiite sectarianism in neighbouring Arab countries in an effort to expand its regional influence.

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• DRC - Rwanda

  Peace under the seal of business

  8 May, by Paul Martial

  The option of peace between the DRC and Rwanda is now becoming plausible, albeit fraught with obstacles. However, this is proving disadvantageous for Kinshasa.

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• South Africa

  Climate sanctions against fossil-addicted capitalists

  7 May, by Patrick Bond

  The implications of climate-unjust politics are ever more important to interpret and resist. United States President Donald Trump, an unabashed ‘climate denialist’, withdrew his country, the main historic emitter of greenhouse gases, from United Nations negotiations, and should now be sanctioned. But annual UN COPs (Conferences of the Parties) won’t, because the ‘climate action’ approach is dominated by the West and BRICS. They continue to deny the world long-overdue ‘climate justice’ and they won’t punish Trump’s climate crimes.

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• Britain

  Reform – Labour is feeding the monster

  6 May, by Dave Kellaway

  The centre cannot hold! In the wake of Reform’s massive gains in local elections, Dave Kellaway investigates the new political landscape.

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...and the rest of the current issue

• East Asia

  East Asia: War and revolution

• USA

  May Day in America, is it now here to stay?

• Nigeria

  Nigeria: against oil industry impunity

• Mexico

  Mexico: “The right-wing parties are practically in the worst phase of their history”

• Zambia

  Zambia: people are victims of extractivism

Recently posted Features

• Environment

  The biodiversity crisis and the environmentalist left

  13 May 2015, by Alan Thornett

  In this presentation I want to advance four propositions that may be controversial:

  • That biodiversity is the planet’s most valuable resource. It is also its most abused and threatened.

  • That the biodiversity collapse we are witnessing today—the greatest mass extinction of species for 65 million years—is the most fundamental aspect of the whole environmental crisis.

  • That most left environmentalists—including Marxist and socialist environmentalists—have failed to adequately recognise or address it.

  • That this represents a serious failing in the overall approach of the left, including the Marxist left, to the environmental crisis.

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• Ecosocialism

  Environment: The foundations of revolutionary eco-socialism

  3 May 2015, by Daniel Tanuro

  The concept of eco-socialism is based on a double paradoxical note: the solution to the “ecological crisis” due to the capitalist mode of production necessitates a response of a socialist type, whilst the environmental balance sheet of “actually existing socialism” is catastrophic. I will briefly develop these two elements and then present some foundations of an eco-socialist aggiornamento as it is conceived inside the “International Eco-socialist Network”. I hope to bring forward evidence that eco-socialism is something more than a new label on an old bottle: a necessary alternative adapted to the challenges of our times.

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• Intellectuals and the “The New Cold War”: from the Tragedy to the Farce of Choice

  20 April 2015, by Ilya Budraitskis

  Observers speak of the “New Cold War” as a self-evident and incontrovertible reality. Already in the spring, the new contours of international politics, demarcated by sanctions and mutual rhetorical incursions, were fully recognized by the broadest segments of the public in Russia, Europe and the United States—including those who were very far from decision-making processes—as a return to the familiar and frightening principles of the second half of the twentieth century.

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• Russia

  Who Is Behind the "Trotskyist Conspiracy"?

  16 April 2015, by Ilya Budraitskis

  Speaking at a meeting of his All-Russia People’s Front a couple days ago, Vladimir Putin said, “Trotsky had this [saying]: the movement is everything, the ultimate aim is nothing. We need an ultimate aim.” Eduard Bernstein’s proposition, misquoted and attributed for some reason to Leon Trotsky, is probably the Russian president’s most common rhetorical standby. He has repeated it for many years to audiences of journalists and functionaries while discussing social policy, construction delays at Olympics sites or the dissatisfaction of the so-called creative class. “Democracy is not anarchism and not Trotskyism,” Putin warned almost two years ago.

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