International Viewpoint - online socialist magazine

• 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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• East Asia

  East Asia: War and revolution

  5 May, by Pierre Rousset

  Once France had been defeated after the Vietnamese victory at Dien Bien Phu (1954), the great powers imposed the Geneva Accords, which were highly unfavourable to the Vietminh, temporarily dividing the country into two military regrouping zones.

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• USA

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

  4 May, by Dan La Botz

  May Day is not a holiday in the United States. In most states and cities, it is not celebrated. In some places, in schools or public parks, people put up a May pole and dance around it to celebrate the arrival of spring. We did that in my elementary school in Chicago when I was a child. The official Labor Day in the United States, which is a national holiday, is celebrated on the first Monday in September and marks the end of summer and students’ return to school. But maybe this year things finally changed.

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• Nigeria

  Nigeria: against oil industry impunity

  3 May, by Paul Martial

  The Niger Delta has been totally devastated by decades of oil exploitation in Nigeria by the major Western oil companies. Huge tracts of land and mangrove swamps have been totally contaminated by oil, destroying all living things. People’s livelihoods, such as fishing and farming, have been wiped out. There is no longer any drinking water, and the air is polluted by the dozens of flares that burn continuously.

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...and the rest of the current issue

• Mexico

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

• Zambia

  Zambia: people are victims of extractivism

• USA

  Trump and America: One-hundred days in the waiting room of fascism

• Argentina

  Argentina: opposition to Milei revives

• Greece

  Greece: anger in the streets

Recently posted Features

• Obituary

  Pierre Granet has left us

  9 May 2020

  Pierre Granet was born on 6 Septembre 1949 in Marseilles and died on 2 May 2020 in Toulouse. He became politically active as a high-school student in Cannes from 1963, notably in soldiarity with the Algerian revolution . He rapidly joined the JCR and the PCI, then French section of the Fourth International, and remained an active militant until the end of his life, as member of the LCR then the NPA. This tribute was written by his comrades from Toulouse.

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• Obituary

  "It is the Henri Weber who sang the Internationale with Higelin that we mourn, not the one at the service of the political apparatus of the PS"

  2 May 2020, by Philippe Cyroulnik

  Henri Weber was born in Leninabad (now Khujand), Tajikistan, Soviet Union on 23 June 1944. His Polish-Jewish parents had left Poland at the time of the German-Soviet pact but, refusing to become Soviet citizens, were sent to labour camp where he was born. They returned to Poland after the war but four years later left because of prevailing anti-semitism and moved to France. As a student in Paris Weber was recruited by Alain Krivine and became a leading member of the Jeunesse Communiste Révolutionnaire (JCR) and of the Ligue Communiste (subsequently Ligue Communiste Révolutionnaire LCR), French section of the Fourth International. In the early 1980s he ceased political activity and in 1986 joined the Socialist Party. A member of the leadership of the Socialist Party, he held elected positions as a senator (1995-2004) and then as a member of the European Parliament (2004-2014). He died in Avignon on 26 April 2020 from coronavirus.[IVP]

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• Historical events

  1918 flu pandemic killed 12 million Indians, and British overlords’ indifference strengthened the anti-colonial movement

  2 May 2020

  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.”

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• Pandemics

  Social contagion - Microbiological class war in China

  2 May 2020

  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.

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