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

• Series : Bretton Woods, the World Bank and the IMF: 70th anniversary (Part 13)

  South Korea : the miracle unmasked

  4 December 2014, by Éric Toussaint

  The supposed South Korean success story has been achieved thanks to policies that run contrary to the economic model advanced by the World Bank. Far from being a virtuous accumulation of wealth through the advantages of free-market forces, the economic development of South Korea came about by "a brutal primitive accumulation achieved by the most coercive methods, in order to produce virtue by force" (J-P Peemans). Korea has obtained its economic results under the yoke of a very repressive regime that had the support of the United States in the framework of its containment of the so called "socialist" regimes. South Korea has adopted a production-driven economic system that has little respect for the environment. The South Korean example is not to be recommended, nor is it repeatable, but it deserves to be analysed.

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• Sexuality and capitalism: The Italian Renaissance

  3 December 2014, by Colin Wilson

  Revolutionary struggles against capitalism have raised, time and again, the issue of sexual liberation. Right at the start of capitalism, the English revolution of the 1640s and 1650s involved what historian Christopher Hill has called a “sexual revolution” against the old order. The more radical forces included “ranters” such as Lawrence Clarkson, who argued that “What act soever is done by thee in light and love is light and lovely, though it be that act called adultery.” [1]1 The “utopian socialists” of the early nineteenth century also challenged accepted ideas about sexuality.

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• Bensaïd on Lenin

  “Leaps Leaps Leaps”: Lenin and politics

  24 November 2014, by Daniel Bensaïd

  Hannah Arendt was worried that politics might disappear completely from the world. The century had seen such disasters that the question of whether ’politics still has any meaning at all’ had become unavoidable”. The issues at stake in these fears were eminently practical: ’The lack of meaning in which the whole of politics has ended up is confirmed by the dead end into which specific political questions are flocking.’

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• Series : Bretton Woods, the World Bank and the IMF: 70th anniversary (Part 12)

  Theoretical lies of the World Bank

  24 November 2014, by Éric Toussaint

  The World Bank claims that, in order to progress, the Developing Countries [2] should rely on external borrowing and attract foreign investments. The main aim of thus running up debt is to buy basic equipment and consumer goods from the highly industrialised countries. The facts show that day after day, for decades now, the idea has been failing to bring about progress. The models which have influenced the Bank’s vision can only result in making the developing countries heavily dependent on an influx of external capital, particularly in the form of loans, which create the illusion of a certain level of self-sustained development. The lenders of public money (the governments of the industrialised countries and especially the World Bank) see loans as a powerful means of control over indebted countries. Thus the Bank’s actions should not be seen as a succession of errors or bad management. On the contrary, they are a deliberate part of a coherent, carefully thought-out, theoretical plan, taught with great application in most universities. It is distilled in hundreds of books on development economics. The World Bank has produced its own ideology of development. When facts undermine the theory, the Bank does not question the theory. Rather, it seeks to twist the facts in order to protect the dogma.

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