International Viewpoint - online socialist magazine

• USA
  

  Progressives Strategic Failure: A Warning

  12 July, by Dan La Botz

  Democratic Party candidates are perceived by many voters as part of the system, part of the establishment, which indeed most are. The most common profession of Democratic congressional representatives and senators is law. Most don’t seem to share the common experiences of working class and lower middle-class people, because in fact they don’t. Lawyers’ average incomes range between $150,000 and $250,000, while the median income for American workers is $45,000 to $64,000,

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• Germany
  

  Forcing Refugees To Return to Syria is a Bad Idea

  11 July, by Joseph Daher

  “Not only are the conditions for a safe and dignified return to Syria not given. Without economic recovery and the reconstruction of critical state infrastructure a mass return of refugees to Syria would only worsen socio-economic conditions within the country and threaten large sectors of society dependent on remittances to survive.”

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• Palestine
  

  Israel targets and kills children

  10 July, by Édouard Soulier

  Two damning reports show that, in both Gaza and the West Bank, Israel is deliberately targeting Palestinian children.

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• G7 summit
  

  The G7: the imperialist order under Trump’s leadership

  9 July, by William Donaura

  Held in the shadow of Donald Trump, the G7 summit served above all to confirm the alignment of Western powers with US strategic and energy interests. Behind the declarations of principle, this summit points to strengthened imperialist cooperation, still built on the backs of the people.

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• Kenya
  

  Resisting “green capitalism” in Kenya

  8 July, by Paul Martial

  “Carbon credits enable multinationals to offset their carbon dioxide emissions by funding environmental projects. In Kenya, the Northern Rangelands Trust (NRT) specialises in this type of activity. It manages ‘conservancies’, i.e. areas set aside for this purpose.”

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...and the rest of the current issue

• Ecosocialism

  Many Fronts, One Struggle: A Report on the 7th International Ecosocialist Encounters

• USA

  Trump Campaigns on Anti-Communism as Left Opponents Are Indicted

• Venezuela

  215 years after Venezuela’s Declaration of Independence: Long live the republic

• Middle East

  The framework agreement Lebanon-Israel, a capitulation to multiple threats

• Colombia

  Colombia: in the eye of the storm

Recently posted Features

• Taiwan

  Beyond Fear and Complacency: Critical Remarks on Taiwan’s Democracy and Its Aporia

  14 August 2015, by Poe Yu-ze Wan

  Both inside and outside Taiwan, the research on Taiwan’s democratization has been overwhelmingly dominated by Western liberal discourses. In the mainstream liberal view, to the extent that the “most powerful collective decision makers are selected through fair, honest, and periodic elections in which candidates freely compete for votes and in which virtually all the adult population is eligible to vote” (Huntington, 1991: 7), Taiwan was no doubt democratic by 1996, a year marked by the first direct election for president (see e.g., Rigger, 1999).

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• 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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