International Viewpoint - online socialist magazine

• Portugal
  

  General Strike Rejects Labour Reform Package Once Again

  6 June, by Adriano Campos

  “It’s turning out to be a major general strike; the data we have from last night shows workers are determined to treat today as a major day of struggle,” said the CGTP’s General Secretary in the morning outside one of the striking schools in Lisbon.

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• Bolivia
  

  “Until the president resigns...”

  5 June, by Javier Rojas

  In Bolivia, mobilizations against austerity and an agrarian reform favourable to the concentration of land have weakened the government of Rodrigo Paz and his neoliberal policies.

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• Spanish state
  

  A step forward in Andalusia

  4 June, by Daniel Albarracín, Pablo P. Ganfornina

  Is this the beginning of a shift in dynamics? To attempt to formulate an answer, our perspective cannot begin with the latest election results, but rather with an analysis of Andalusian political history. In this regard, we operate on a fundamental premise: there is no electoral victory without a prior social and political victory. In the south of the Spanish state, the right wing did not conquer the institutions by chance in 2018; it did so by first winning the battle for "common sense", displacing collective frames of reference and colonising the public agenda long before the ballot box validated its hegemony.

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• Colombia
  

  “Surprise” election result poses new challenges for the left in Colombia

  3 June, by Ana C. Carvalhaes

  The clashes over the next 20 days on the streets, in workplaces and on social media in Colombia will determine not only the name of the country’s new president – between a neo-fascist and a progressive – but also, to a large extent, the balance of power in South America. The Colombian presidential elections, with a second round on 21 June, are a precursor to the Brazilian elections in November and are of central importance to the construction of Trump’s “shield” on the continent.

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• Spanish State
  

  Public education comes to a standstill in a historic strike in Valencia

  2 June, by Moisès Vizcaino, Vicent Mauri

  “May 11th will be etched in the collective memory of the Valencian people. The teachers, the grassroots and union movement, and the entire educational community will make history for the dignity, determination, and strength they demonstrated during weeks of mobilisation and organisation. The indefinite strike is already a moral and political victory against an arrogant, authoritarian government that is completely out of touch with the reality of educational institutions.”

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...and the rest of the current issue

• USA

  Trump, Miller Take away Immigrants’ Rights, Sometimes Their Lives, but Resistance Continues

• Sudan

  France arms the war in Sudan

• Belgium

  Government brutalizes, the street protests in Belgium

• Ethiopia

  Dark clouds over Ethiopia

• South America

  Notes on the Political Situation in South America

Recently posted Features

• South Africa

  Exploding with Rage, Imploding with Self-Doubt—but Exuding Socialist Potential

  8 July 2015, by Patrick Bond

  The fast-reviving South African left is urgently coming to grips with the most acute national crises of structure and agency the country has experienced since the historic freeing of Nelson Mandela in February 1990 and the shift of the entire body politic in favor of the African National Congress (ANC) and the South African Communist Party (SACP). At that time, the ANC soon took control of the country’s progressive forces, winning mass social hegemony, vanquishing other liberation tendencies (Pan-Africanism and Black Consciousness), and dissolving the anti-apartheid United Democratic Front (UDF) that civil society activists founded a decade earlier. It then negotiated the first democratic election, which it won handily in April 1994 under Nelson Mandela’s leadership. Afrikaner state managers and corporate titans, as well as multilateral agencies and other forces of imperialism, demanded from the ANC an elite transition that opened both the macro- and microeconomies. Property rights were granted maximum protection, even though whites had acquired the bulk of those through what is widely termed a crime against humanity: apartheid.

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• Sexual politics

  Logic or History? The Political Stakes of Marxist-Feminist Theory

  5 July 2015, by Cinzia Arruzza

  When I first started writing this series of remarks in Italian (“Riflessioni degeneri”), subsequently collected into a single piece for the English version Remarks on Gender, my aim was twofold. The first was to make a complex debate – one that has unfolded over the course of several decades – accessible to a public of activists and people interested in gender, race, and class politics. The second was to contribute toward reopening this crucial debate about how we should conceptualize the structural relationship between gender oppression and capitalism.

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• Gender and Capitalism

  Capitalism and Gender Oppression

  10 June 2015, by Johanna Oksala

  Feminist theorists today are increasingly returning to the insight that capitalism must constitute the critical frame for understanding contemporary forms of gender oppression. Investigating the relationship between feminism and capitalism raises a host of difficult questions, however, which Cinzia Arruzza faces head on in her lucid essay Remarks on Gender. She gives an illuminative roadmap of the terrain in which this issue was debated in the 1970s and 1980s by laying out three different theses on how capitalism and gender oppression are related: dual or triple systems theory, indifferent capitalism, and the unitary thesis. She begins by assessing carefully the problems of the first two positions and concludes by defending the third, the unitary thesis: in capitalist societies, a patriarchal system that would be autonomous and distinct from capitalism no longer exists. Instead of treating gender and sexual oppression as separate forms of domination, a unitary Marxist-feminist theory must incorporate them in the total framework of capitalist accumulation.

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• Gender and Capitalism

  The Intersectional Conundrum and the Nation-State

  10 June 2015, by Sara R. Farris

  It is not an easy task to reconstruct succinctly the main problematics that have traversed Marxist feminism in the last 40 years, without risking simplifications or serious omissions, or without producing a mere summary that avoids critically engaging with the subjects that it raises. And yet, I believe Arruzza’s text “Remarks on Gender” accomplishes the task very well: her reconstruction of the key theses on the relationship between patriarchy and capitalism proposed by different currents within socialist and Marxist feminism from the 1970s onwards is not only lucid and informative, but also extremely clear and accessible. Furthermore, her partisan critique of the different positions on the table, alongside an indication of the most promising questions for debate, give us – as feminists who locate ourselves in the Marxist tradition(s) – a great opportunity to begin and/or deepen a much needed discussion and exchange. A new generation of Marxist feminists has emerged in the last years; it begins to question, re-articulate, expand and criticise the theorizations and disputes it has inherited from previous generations.

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