International Viewpoint - online socialist magazine

• France

  Political instability in France: act before it’s too late

  27 November, by Elsa Collonges

  The global crisis of capitalism and its ecological dimension are provoking a major political crisis. In the countries of the Global North, and in France in particular, the bourgeoisie is seeking to settle accounts with the post-World War II social compromise, violently and rapidly.

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• Denmark

  The Unity List remains Copenhagen’s largest party

  26 November, by Jonathan Simmel

  Local and regional elections have been held in Denmark, and the Unity List [known internationally as the Red Green Alliance] has once again become Copenhagen’s largest party. The Social Democrats lost the mayoralty to the Socialist People’s Party and lost ground in 86 of 98 municipalities. The results clearly reflect the national political scene, where the Social Democrats chose to form a majority government with two bourgeois parties in 2022.

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• USA

  Six Lawmakers Tell U.S. Troop: Don’t Obey Illegal Orders

  25 November, by Dan La Botz

  “ The six Democrats by making their video have challenged Trump and they have done a great service to our country, to those in the military, and to those at home or abroad who might be victims.”

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• Britain

  Britain – difficulties and opportunities...

  24 November, by Veronica Fagan

  The last weekend of November will see a major conference take place in the city of Liverpool in the north west of England. Fronted by former Labour MP Zara Sultana and former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn and with more than 50,000 sign ups, this will formally launch a new political party. The proto-formation currently has the clumsy, name of Your Party but the membership will at some later point decide whether and how to rename it.

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• Ukraine

  Ukraine Faces an Unbearable Choice

  23 November, by Oleksandr Kyselov

  Exhausted by over three years of Russian attacks, Ukrainians are increasingly ready to accept unfair political compromises and harsh territorial concessions to end the war. Yet it’s far from clear that this hard choice will actually bring lasting peace.

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...and the rest of the current issue

• Britain

  Notes on the historic rise of the far right in Britain

• Venezuela

  Between Trump’s imperialist offensive and Maduro’s repression

• Portugal

  The bromance between André Ventura and Luis Montenegro in Portugal

• Tanzania

  Tanzania: When bullets replace ballots

• COP 30

  Social movements and COP 30: transnational alliances against the global extractivist offensive

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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