International Viewpoint - online socialist magazine

• USA
  

  What Sort of Electoral Politics? A Debate in the U.S. Left

  8 June, by Dan La Botz

  The left in the United States is once again, as always, debating how to engage in electoral politics. The debate seems more meaningful this year when more voters consider themselves to be independents (45%) than to be either Republicans (27%) or Democrat (27%). Could the left now present the disaffected with a political alternative.

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• Palestine
  

  Israel mistreats Flotilla activists and tortures Palestinian prisoners

  7 June, by An Gwesped

  After the Israeli army’s violent interception of the Gaza flotilla, activists have denounced humiliation and violence — a long-documented glimpse into the torture and sexual violence suffered by Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails. More than 430 activists from the 50 boats that set out to break the blockade of Gaza were kidnapped by the Israeli occupation army between Monday 18 and Tuesday 19 May, in international waters off the coast of Cyprus, up to 500 km from the coast of Gaza for the most distant boats and about 100 kilometres for the closest.

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• Portugal
  

  General Strike Rejects Labour Reform Package Once Again

  6 June, by Adriano Campos

  “It’s turning out to be a major general strike; the data we have from last night shows workers are determined to treat today as a major day of struggle,” said the CGTP’s General Secretary in the morning outside one of the striking schools in Lisbon.

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• Bolivia
  

  “Until the president resigns...”

  5 June, by Javier Rojas

  In Bolivia, mobilizations against austerity and an agrarian reform favourable to the concentration of land have weakened the government of Rodrigo Paz and his neoliberal policies.

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• Spanish state
  

  A step forward in Andalusia

  4 June, by Daniel Albarracín, Pablo P. Ganfornina

  Is this the beginning of a shift in dynamics? To attempt to formulate an answer, our perspective cannot begin with the latest election results, but rather with an analysis of Andalusian political history. In this regard, we operate on a fundamental premise: there is no electoral victory without a prior social and political victory. In the south of the Spanish state, the right wing did not conquer the institutions by chance in 2018; it did so by first winning the battle for "common sense", displacing collective frames of reference and colonising the public agenda long before the ballot box validated its hegemony.

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...and the rest of the current issue

• Colombia

  “Surprise” election result poses new challenges for the left in Colombia

• Spanish State

  Public education comes to a standstill in a historic strike in Valencia

• USA

  Trump, Miller Take away Immigrants’ Rights, Sometimes Their Lives, but Resistance Continues

• Sudan

  France arms the war in Sudan

• Belgium

  Government brutalizes, the street protests in Belgium

Recently posted Features

• Part 6 of the Series: Centenary of the Russian Revolution and the Repudiation of Debt

  Russian loans never die

  7 October 2017, by Éric Toussaint

  Even though Russian bonds were repudiated by the Soviet government in February 1918, they were still traded right up until the 1990s.

  French government policy and that of other governments was directly related to this life after death.

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• Part 9 of the Series: Centenary of the Russian Revolution and the Repudiation of Debt

  The Soviet counter-attack: the Treaty of Rapallo, 1922

  7 October 2017, by Éric Toussaint

  The London report presented in the previous chapter was such a deliberate provocation on the part of Western powers that the Soviet delegation immediately got in touch with the German delegation, which Paris and London had somehow prevented from fully attending the Genoa Conference. France and Britain were hoping that they could coax the Soviet Russians into accepting the conditions mentioned above or, at least some of them, to strengthen their position when negotiating with Germany afterwards. The Russian issue clearly was a priority.

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• Part 5 of the Series: Centenary of the Russian Revolution and the Repudiation of Debt

  The French press in the pay of the Tsar

  6 October 2017, by Éric Toussaint

  With the overthrow of Tsarism in February 1917 and the seizing of power by the Bolsheviks and their Socialist Revolutionary allies in October, numerous previously confidential documents were made public (see further on). This allowed Boris Souvarine, a Franco-Russian communist activist to consult Russian imperial archives. He discovered a vast organisation of complicity with the French press that pre-dated the First World War, aimed at promoting Tsarist bond issues to French investors. This affair, in which influential people were corrupted and became accomplices, was denounced by the communist daily L’Humanité in a series of daily articles entitled ’The abominable venality of the French press’ that appeared over a period of several months during 1923 and 1924.

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• Part 4 of the series: Centenary of the Russian Revolution and the Repudiation of Debt

  The Russian Revolution, Peoples’ Right to Self-determination, and Debt Repudiation

  6 October 2017, by Éric Toussaint

  The Versailles Treaty was eventually signed on 28 June 1919 without Soviet Russia being involved. Even so, this treaty cancelled the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk. Under Article 116 of the Versailles Treaty, Russia could claim compensation from Germany;yet, consistent with its demand for peace without any annexation or any claim for compensation, it did not do so. What mattered most to Soviet Russia was that the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk should be cancelled and the territories that Germany had annexed in March 1918 be given back to the peoples to whom they had belonged (the Baltic, Polish, Ukrainian and Russian peoples), in accordance with the principle of peoples’ right to self-determination upheld by the new Soviet government.

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