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.
The Mexican right, backed by oligarchic sectors and the open applause of Donald Trump, is trying to capitalize on social discontent to destabilize the government of Claudia Sheinbaum. Although their ability to mobilise remains limited, the danger is real. The only effective barrier remains the deepening of the project of transformation and the building of an autonomous social movement capable of confronting the fascist threat.
read article...“The general strike, the first since the days of the Troika, was called by the two main trade union confederations, CGTP and UGT, which has only happened in half of the ten general strikes held since the end of the dictatorship.”
read article...Belgium experienced a crescendo of strikes on Monday 24 November in public transport (trains, buses, trams, metros), Tuesday 25 November in all public services (including education and hospitals) and Wednesday 26 November, with the addition of the private sector, a day long interprofessional general strike that was widely followed in Flanders, Wallonia and Brussels.
read article...Openly supremacist, colonialist and racist-xenophobic, Trump’s national security strategy includes new or reformulated threats. It is old-style imperialism , adapted to deal with the current challenges to US hegemonic power.
read article...Thousands of Starbucks workers continue their fight for a union contract with strikes and rallies across the country. The latest strike began on November 13 and continues off-and-on at stores across the country. In mid-December some 3,800 Starbucks baristas were on strike at more than 180 stores in over 130 cities. The union, Starbucks Workers United claims a total 14,000 members at about 650 stores.
read article...The philosophy of difference as it is theorized by Luce Irigaray today stems in part from the discussions within the French women’s movement at the beginning of the 1970s. The discussion has re-emerged today with publication of Luce Irigaray’s book Le temps de la différence in 1989, and her subsequent publications which, particularly the latest J’aime à toi (1992) she reformulates her project of a society based on the recognition of a gendered civil law. The discussion has become richer with other contributions, particularly from Italy.
The term postmodernism has entered into common currency with a rapidity that modernism, “after” which it is named, never achieved: it has a trendy contemporaneity but is little understood. Partly through its description of reality as a series of images, or “simulacra” in Baudrillard’s word, it has attained popular cultural status in the media, especially television, as well as modish respectability in the academy, across Europe and North America.
The Occupy Movement, the first such broad, national, multi-issue, mass movement in forty years, represented a test for the revolutionary socialist left in several senses. First, would the left recognize its important and immediately move to become an active part of it and work within it to help provide leadership? Second, would the left during Occupy be able to both appreciate its strengths and develop a critique of its weaknesses and limitations? Would it as the same time be able to conduct socialist propaganda and recruit to the socialist movement? Third, would the left in retrospect be able to analyze and learn from the Occupy experience in order to prepare itself for future movements?
Whatever the (well deserved) derision heaped on the head of Francis Fukuyama for his ‘end of history’ thesis, he has the merit of posing the big questions. In his ‘The Future of History’ article (Foreign Affairs, Jan-Feb) he poses two big questions that are vital for Marxists: Is the neoliberal undermining of the social position of the employed working class and poorer sections of the middle class compatible with liberal democracy? and What explains what he calls the ‘absent left’ – the lack in theory or practice of a powerful left/populist alternative to neoliberalism in a period of such drastic economic collapse and moral bankruptcy of the dominant neoliberal model?
“We face a deadly spiral of combined crises (the ’polycrisis’), to which the established political and economic powers are offering no response. Poverty and widespread insecurity continue to spread. However, in recent months, in the face of humanitarian disasters, protest movements have taken on a new dimension, with impressive demonstrations and uprisings. Asia is at the heart of these developments, including Pakistan, Bangladesh, Indonesia and the Philippines, where our partners are based.”
- read article...Lyes Touati, a member of the Parti Socialiste des Travailleurs (PST), was arrested yesterday in Aokas (Algeria) and remanded in custody. We do not know the reasons for his arrest or the charges against him.
- read article...Samir LARABI, a doctoral student in the Sociology Department of Abderahmane Mira University in Béjaia (Algeria), has been subjected to repeated obstructions for 29 months, following abusive refusals by the rectoral administration to allow him to defend his doctoral thesis. Validated by his research supervisor, the validity of his thesis has been confirmed three times by the scientific bodies of the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences. Despite validation by the faculty’s Scientific Committee of the changes imposed by the rectoral administration, the latter persists in refusing to allow him to defend his thesis.
- read article...“This is not simply a humanitarian appeal—it is a call to uphold our shared global commitment to justice, dignity, and collective care. As climate disasters intensify, international leftist solidarity remains essential to ensure that working people everywhere can survive, rebuild, and continue the struggle for a more just world.”
- read article...The organizing committee holds the first preparatory meeting of the First International Antifascist Conference.
- 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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