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.
As the U.S.-Israeli war on Iran goes into its third week, the people of the United States are still figuring out what they think about the conflict. Since the war began, most polls show a majority of Americans disapprove of the war, something unseen in modern American history. A majority of Americans approved of World War II, the Korean War, and initially of the Vietnam War. After the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2000—the American government, anxious for revenge—was backed by huge majorities when it made war on Afghanistan in 2001. When in 2003 the George W. Bush administration wanted to make war on Iraq, it fabricated false evidence that Saddam Hussein had nuclear and biological weapons of mass destruction, and, bamboozled by Bush, nearly three-quarters of the American people supported the war.
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The first round of the French local elections will take place on Sunday 15 March, the second on 22 March. There is a real possibility that the “traditional” right, which is increasingly radicalizing in a far right direction, will win in Paris, under Socialist Party government since 1995, and that the Rassemblement National could win in France’s second, and very multi-racial, city, Marseilles.
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“This landmark ruling highlights the links between institutional politics, militias and economic interests in Rio de Janeiro.”
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The upcoming mass No Kings! demonstrations planned for March 28 and ambitious plans for May Day mobilizations point to the growing convergence of anti-Trump forces. This convergence takes place against the backdrop of Trumps’ destructive assault on democratic rights in the US and the sovereignty of nations abroad, most recently his reckless aerial attack on Iran, and plummeting approval ratings in the polls.
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“"Either their profits or our lives": the slogan is everywhere.”
read article...Lucien Goldmann (1913-1970) is one of the most important representatives of the humanistic and historicist current of Marxism in the twentieth century. His works of philosophy and sociology of culture – including “The Hidden God” (1955), an innovative study of the tragic world vision in Pascal and Racine – are strongly marked by the influence of the Lukacs of “History and Class Consciousness” and are radically opposed to positivist or structuralist readings of Marxism. A Romanian Jew who had lived in France since the 1930s, Goldmann identified with a self-managed socialism, critical of both social-democracy and Stalinism. Whereas in the United States and in Latin America his thought and work continue to generate a very keen interest, a strange forgetfulness seems to have affected him in France. [1] It is true that this is a sociology in total rupture with the dominant tradition of French social science, stretching from Auguste Comte to Claude Lévi-Strauss and Louis Althusser, via Emile Durkheim. But, on the other hand, through his reinterpretation of Pascal, he is nonetheless the heir of a dissenting current of French modern culture.
Yolanda (Haiyan by its international name), the strongest typhoon touching land ever registered, devastated the center of the Philippine archipelago in November 2013 [2]. In July 2016, two years and eight months after, when I landed on Tacloban airport, life had returned to normal. The churches, all new, were dominating — they were rebuilt in priority, before the hospitals, even if it were possible to receive communion under a canopy, while an operating room could prove very useful to a surgeon. Carcasses of buildings that have not yet been rebuilt still stand and there is what one does not see: these “internal refugees”, these “displaced persons”, still without homes, pushed away in the peripheral areas or recently driven to the mountainside.
The starting point of this study is a paradox: among social, institutional and political actors, peasant and family farming are gradually becoming established as legitimate and credible alternatives to an agro-productivist model that has ’run out of steam’. [3] They address both environmental and food-related challenges, are sustainable and successful in agro-economic terms, contribute to social change and operate on a human scale. This is one side of the coin.
Behind the humanitarian disaster of the Syrian civil war is a political crisis the Left urgently needs to understand.
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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