International Viewpoint - online socialist magazine

• Women’s rights in Poland

  Poland Is in Revolt Against Its New Abortion Ban

  28 October, by Ewa Majewska

  Last Friday, Poland’s Constitutional Court banned almost all abortion, as part of a wider Catholic-conservative offensive against women’s rights. But the ruling has already sparked strikes and blockades across Poland — and the working-class women least able to afford a clandestine abortion are leading the revolt.

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• Belarus

  Police violence on a mass scale in Belarus

  27 October, by Siarhei Biareishyk

  Since the election, it has been two months of sustained leaderless protests, police violence, and local self-organization.

  After relatively peaceful Sunday marches of past several weeks, amounting each time to 100+thousand people, Sunday 11 October saw resumption of police violence on the mass scale.

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• Pakistan

  October 14 and the Sparks of Workers’ Movement in Pakistan

  26 October, by Pakistan Trade Union Defence Campaign (PTUDC)

  “This movement has given a tremendous push to working-class movement and for the first-time the scattered demands of the workers from all across the country were presented in shape of a common charter of demands. As a vanguard of this movement, the Pakistan Trade Union Defence Campaign (PTUDC) will continue to fight for all the workers. Whatever the outcome of the negotiations, the labour movement will continue. 14 October is only the beginning of the joint struggle that continues till the overthrow of capitalism in the region.”

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• France

  France’s Demonization of Muslims Is Getting Worse

  25 October, by Emre Öngün

  On Friday [16 0ctober], an Islamist extremist murdered a schoolteacher in a suburb northwest of Paris. In response, the French interior minister has called for a ban on an anti-Islamophobia legal association wholly unconnected to the atrocity. We need to resist this turn against democracy and justice.

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• Switzerland

  An exemplary feminist mobilization

  24 October, by Françoise Nyffeler

  Female school students, with the support of feminist collectives, are mobilizing against sexist punishments put in place by their school management for wearing outfits deemed provocative. It all started during the orientation cycle at Pinchat [in the commune of Veyrier (canton of Geneva)], where the management forced ten girls and two boys to wear a very large “t-shirt of shame” because their clothes were considered indecent and “not correct”. When they arrived at the school, the students had to march past a line of judges formed by the administration who divided the students into two categories: outfits deemed “correct” and “incorrect”.

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...and the rest of the current issue

• USA

  Next steps for Black Lives Matter movement, elections and beyond

• Bolivia

  All power to the peoples of Bolivia

• Covid-19 pandemic

  A convergence of crises, dominated by the covid-19 pandemic

• Italy

  Clash over national labour agreements

• USA

  USA on the Brink?

Recently posted Debate

• Spanish state

  Radiance and sunset of Podemos - reasons for a farewell

  16 September, by Manuel Garí

  The creation of Podemos in the Spanish state was an important attempt to build an anti-neoliberal and pluralist mass party to the left of social-liberalism. That experience, which started very well, has finally ended very badly. Perhaps, for this reason, the title of this article could have been “Radiance and decline of Podemos ... as an emancipatory political project.”

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• Party building

  Anticapitalist strategy and the question of organization

  12 June, by Julia Camara

  No matter how much time passes, or how often history is declared to have ended, the debate over socialist strategy and organization always returns. This foundational question appeared in embryo at the very start of the workers movement in the nineteenth century and was raised explicitly by Lenin when he described his perspective as “tactics as plan” and when revolutionaries split with social-democracy during World War I.

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• Covid-19 pandemic and afterwards?

  Self-Extinction of Neoliberalism? Don’t Bet on It.

  4 May, by Gilbert Achcar

  For the second time since the turn of the century, governments in North America and Europe are intervening massively with public funds and in conjunction with central banks to bail out entire sectors of the economy and prevent a general economic collapse. The ongoing rescue operations necessitated by the Covid-19 pandemic has already reached a much higher scale than the one deployed against the 2007–08 financial crisis. These operations clash with the basic tenets of neoliberalism in that they constitute a massive regulatory intervention by the state in reining back the market, whereas deregulation and market “survival of the fittest” are central to neoliberal ideology.

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• Ecosocialism

  The role of planning in the ecosocialist transition – a contribution to the debate

  25 April, by Michael Löwy

  The semiannual French review Les Possibles, a publication of Attac France, in its most recent issue (No 23) features a number of articles on planning for the ecological and social transition. Most are addressed to the issue of socialist planning vs. capitalist markets that was prominent in the debates of 20th century socialism. The contribution by Michael Löwy puts this debate in the ecosocialist framework that has emerged in this century. My translation of it is published below.

  – Richard Fidler

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