International Viewpoint - online socialist magazine

• Hong Kong

  Two Narratives on the Hong Kong Fire

  24 December, by Au Loong-Yu

  The 26 November 2025 Wang Fu Court fire has a lot of similarity with London’s 2017 Grenfell fire. In terms of scale, the former was much bigger – instead of just one building there were seven on fire, and instead of 72 deaths there have been 160 deaths as of now. However, the combustible materials used in renovating the outer walls were the direct cause of both.

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• Japan

  Takaichi Administration’s Two Months

  23 December, by Toshizo Omori

  While LDP-JIP coalition government has been trying to promote right-wing policies, how should the left forces fight against them?

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• Indonesia

  When past and present collide: Indonesia 1965-2025

  22 December, by Adam Novak, Pierre Rousset

  “At the time of the US escalation in Vietnam, Indonesia was the scene of one of the worst bloodbaths in modern history, committed under the auspices of Washington and London. Sixty years later, the archipelago is at the heart of youth revolts against the privileges of the oligarchy and corruption, in defence of a democracy dearly won back since 1998.”

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• USA-Venezuela

  Trump reveals the real reasons behind the war on Venezuela

  21 December, by Luís Bonilla-Molina

  Venezuela and its people are the first direct victims of the "Trump Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine." This war, which has already been declared, is not against drug trafficking or the Maduro regime, but rather for oil and rare earth minerals, military bases, information, and misgovernment. All democratic, progressive, popular, and leftist forces must denounce and confront the US offensive against Venezuela, which in no way means defending the Maduro government.

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• Chile

  Kast: Chile’s “democratic route” back to Pinochetism

  20 December, by Karina Nohales, Pablo Abufom

  With José Antonio Kast’s victory, Pinochetism returns to power through electoral means, articulating neoliberal restoration, moral authoritarianism, and anti-communism as a response to Chile’s crisis.

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...and the rest of the current issue

• Mexico

  “Generation Z” and the advance of the far right in Mexico

• Portugal

  The general strike demonstrates that struggle can open up paths for the left

• Belgium

  After three days of strike, a vast social movement with no political alternative

• USA

  The US strategy, a threat to the peoples of the world

• USA

  Starbucks Workers Continue Strike for Union Contract

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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