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.
Fascism has been, over the last decade, and especially more recently, an object of vigorous debate on the left. But, as a long editorial from the Salvage collective bemoaned about debates over what to make of Russia’s war on Ukraine, much of this debate has been stuck in the ditch of historical analogy. Is Trumpism more like Mussolini’s or Hitler’s fascism? When we stack up all the measures of rights violated and attacked, does the far right today pass the test of comparison with major fascist events of the 20th century?
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The Together Alliance march against the far right on Saturday, 28 March, was probably the biggest anti-fascist protest in British history. It was comparable to some of the early Palestine solidarity demonstrations.
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Local elections were held in France on 15 March (first round) and 22 (second round). The confusion that has emerged, one year before the presidential election, is a sign of a fragmentation of the central bloc and the right, which is likely to produce a shift towards the far right and, in the face of this, a splintering of the forces of the Nouveau Front populaire (New Popular Front - NFP) which compromises the construction of a unitary alternative.
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Never had a military initiative of the Lebanese Hezbollah (literally, Party of God) been so much repudiated in Lebanon as its decision on March 2 to launch rockets across the country’s southern border with the Israeli state, in retaliation against the killing of Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei. This opening salvo was immediately seized upon by the Zionist state as a pretext to launch a long-premeditated invasion of southern Lebanon.
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Land Day, on 30 March, marks a central moment in Palestinian history: in 1976, a general strike broke out in historic Palestine against the confiscation of land belonging to Arabs by the state of Israel. It was the first mass mobilization of Palestinians in the 1948 territories, where they are supposed to be “equal”. The targeted lands are located in particular in Sakhnin, Arraba and Deir Hanna, as part of the policy of “Judaizing Galilee”. On that day, six unarmed Palestinians were killed by Israeli forces during demonstrations. 50 years later, the Palestinians are still there and continue to fight against the confiscation of land and the bloody repression of the Israeli state.
read article...Rosa Luxemburg’s defense of socialist democracy and her critique of the Bolsheviks in her pamphlet The Russian Revolution (1918) are well known. Less well known and often forgotten is her critique of bourgeois democracy, its limits, its contradictions, and its narrow and partial character. We propose to examine this critical line of thought in some of her political writings without any pretentions to completeness.
It’s 40 years since workers, students and school-students broke the oppressive regime that had come out of the Cultural Revolution in China and forced a change of direction on their rulers with mass protests in the spring of 1976.
This series of articles analyses Greece’s major debt crises by placing them in the international economic and political context, an approach that is systematically absent from the dominant narrative and very rarely present in critical analyses. Since 1826, a series of major debt crises have profoundly marked the lives of the Greek people. Each time, European Powers formed a coalition to impose new debts in order to repay the earlier ones. This coalition of Powers dictated policies to Greece that corresponded to their own interests and those of the few big private banks and large fortunes. Each time, those policies were aimed at extracting the tax resources necessary for repayment of the debt and entailed a reduction in social spending as well as decreased public investments. In a variety of ways, Greece and the Greek people were denied the exercise of their own sovereignty. With the complicity of the Greek ruling classes, this kept Greece in a subordinate, peripheral condition.
Since 2010, Greece has been the centre of attention. Yet this debt crisis, mainly the work of private banks, is nothing new in the history of independent Greece. The lives of Greeks have been blighted by major debt crises no less than four times since 1826. Each time, the European powers have connived together to force Greece to contract new debts to repay the previous ones. This coalition of powers dictated policies to Greece that served their own interests and those of a few big private banks they favoured. Each time, those policies were designed to free up enough fiscal resources to service the debt by reducing social spending and public investment. Thus Greece and her people have, in a variety of ways, been denied the exercise of their sovereign rights, keeping Greece down with the status of a subordinate, peripheral country. The local ruling classes complied with this.
The first round of the local elections took place against a backdrop of widespread creeping fascism in France and comes after a brutal offensive by the far right, during which the traditional ‘Republican’ right has decisively broken from much of its historical framework and values.
- read article...The majority of the party votes to maintain its autonomy and a commitment to social change.
- read article...After 59 days of unjust imprisonment, Lyes Touati has finally been acquitted - 59 days of waiting, mobilization, solidarity and determination.
- 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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