International Viewpoint - online socialist magazine

• Italy

  Italy votes on removing anti‑working class laws

  7 June, by Dave Kellaway, Sinistra Anticapitalista

  Italy votes this weekend in 5 referendums. Four are all about the existing restrictive, anti-working class labour laws and one is about the length of time involved in claiming citizenship. Meloni’s post-fascist led government defends the repressive labour legislation and the current citizenship law which means you have to have lived in Italy for 10 years before becoming Italian. A Yes in the referendum would halve that period.

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• Palestine

  Pity the people of Gaza!

  6 June, by Gilbert Achcar

  What we have witnessed in recent days in the negotiations between Hamas and the Zionist state under American and Arab auspices, following the Islamic movement’s rejection of the seventy-day truce accompanied by mutual prisoner releases and the entry of humanitarian aid, proposed by US envoy Steve Witkoff and accepted by Benjamin Netanyahu, is in fact a repetition of what we have been witnessing since the beginning of last year.

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• Belgium

  Fabian, 11-years-old, dead: this was no accident - this is the police

  5 June, by Elena Fernandez Fernandez

  On Monday afternoon, 2 June, in Elisabeth Park in Ganshoren, an 11-year-old child was struck and killed by a police vehicle. Another one. Once again, a young person has lost their life in a police operation. Once again, run over by a police officer. And once again, the institutions react coldly, relaying a version of events that incriminates the victim, while those responsible hide behind complicit investigations that generally lead nowhere.

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• USA

  Five Years Since George Floyd’s Murder

  4 June, by Malik Miah

  “His murder led to nationwide and international protests and a reexamination of societal and institutional racism, including policing. Five years later what is the legacy of Floyd’s death and movement for justice and police accountability?”

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• Panama

  Panama is the epicenter of the struggle in Latin America

  3 June, by José Cambra, Luís Bonilla-Molina

  A small country of four million 200 thousand inhabitants is showing Latin America and the world that it is possible to confront the interests of financial capital and vulture funds in the third decade of the 21st century.

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...and the rest of the current issue

• USA

  Trump’s Repression: “Worse than McCarthyism”

• Kurdistan

  Dissolution of the PKK and new perspectives

• Mali

  A dictatorship without complexes in Mali

• Britain

  Labour panders to racism – playing the far right’s game

• Portugal

  Hard questions for Left Bloc after a terrible parliamentary election

Recently posted Features

• 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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• Mexico

  Ayotzinapa, accelerator of the crisis of the state

  4 April 2015, by Arturo Anguiano

  Mexico seems to exist between terror and horror, always camouflaged by lies, dissimulation and the stage-managed set-ups of the army and the police, as well as of government agencies, which should be responsible for security, investigation and prosecution. From the massacre on June 30 this year at Tlatlaya in the state of Mexico of twenty-two alleged offenders by the army, a massacre falsely presented as a reaction to resistance to the police, to the murder of six people and the forced disappearance of forty-three students of the Normal School perpetrated by officers of the municipality of Iguala in Guerrero during the night of September 26, there has obviously been the same logic at work: abuse of power, arbitrary actions, disregard for human life and the belief that they could do anything, covered by an impunity that is at the heart of the Mexican regime.

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• Daniel Bensaïd

  We Are Alive: A film about the thought, activism and legacy of Daniel Bensaïd

  28 March 2015

  Carmen Castillo was born in Chile, and worked for the Allende government before entering the clandestine resistance together with her partner Miguel Enriquez after the Pinochet coup of 11 September 1973. Arrested and then expelled from her homeland (after an international campaign for her release), she recounted her tragic history in two books and then her 2007 film Calle Santa Fe.

  The director continues to be haunted by a number of questions. How can we pass on the memory of the defeated without suffocating it with nostalgia or bitterness? What can we do today to keep loyal to the ideas of friends, loved ones and comrades who are no longer of this world – a world that they were so passionate about changing? How can we hope, now that we know that nothing is written in advance (as some of us used to believe)?

  Castillo’s next film, We Are Alive, comes to French cinemas on 29 April. Making use of the thought of philosopher Daniel Bensaïd, Castillo portrays the daily struggles of all those across two continents who throw themselves into the ‘joyous passion’ of struggle – despite everything, and however ignored they are by the big media cartels.

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• Pakistan

  “We have lost one of the best women activists”

  26 March 2015, by Farooq Tariq

  One of main icons of the Left movement for over 6 decades, Tahira Mazhar Ali was a shining example to follow. She was active among workers, peasants and also among ordinary citizens to build a left movement.

  When few dared to challenge the West Pakistan military atrocities in Bangladesh, she was among the few in Lahore who dared to come out in the streets saying no to the military operation.

  She successfully built one of the great women’s organisations called “Women’s Democratic Association”. She was never an independent Left. She was always part of the process of party building. She was senior Vice President of the Workers’ Party before it merged to form the Awami Workers’ Party.

  After her funeral, Baji Nasim Shahmim Malik, another long standing women activist, cried contonuously as she was one of the trusted comrades along Tahira Mazhar. Najma Sethi, a former chief minister of Punjab, and one time close associate of Tariq Ali, narrated several incidents about his association with her. As Imtiaz Alam, a radical journalist expressing his deep sorrow over sad demise of Tahira, said “a chapter of left activism is closed”.

  Tahira Mazhar, a daughter of a former chief minister of Punjab rebelled against family tradition and married a revolutionary, Mazhar Ali Khan of View Point. Mother of three including Tariq Ali and Mahir Ali, she was always in the forefront of struggle.

  I would usually receive an early morning call from her up to 2009, when she fell seriously ill. She would urge me to take up issues relating to the working class, although she was not from our party. However, her respect was beyond party boundaries. I always found her a great comrade and some one who was there to help the Left. She donated bundle of books to our library when it was established in 1998. She donated her clothes for flood victims and gave money for the donation.

  We have lost one of the best women activists.

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