International Viewpoint - online socialist magazine
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.
-
USA
What Sort of Electoral Politics? A Debate in the U.S. Left
8 June, byThe 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.
read article... -
Palestine
Israel mistreats Flotilla activists and tortures Palestinian prisoners
7 June, byAfter 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.
read article... -
Portugal
General Strike Rejects Labour Reform Package Once Again
6 June, by“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.
read article... -
Bolivia
“Until the president resigns...”
5 June, byIn 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.
read article... -
Spanish state
A step forward in Andalusia
4 June, by ,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.
read article...
Recently posted Features
-
Women’s Liberation
Clara Zetkin in the lion’s den – Workers’ unity and feminism at the 1921 Comintern congress
3 February 2014, byread article...In 1921, when the Communist International (Comintern) held its Third World Congress, Clara Zetkin was the most widely respected Communist outside Russia. Yet she was the victim of vigorous efforts on the eve of the congress to vilify her and drive her out of the Comintern leadership, if not from the movement. Nonetheless, she ranks, together with Lenin and Trotsky, among the dominant intellectual figures at the congress.
-
Fourth International and women’s liberation
The Liberation of Women
31 January 2014, byread article...This article was written in May 1960 and originally published in Quatrième Internationale. This translation is from Fourth International, Autumn 1960. We are publishing it as part of our effort to constute an archive of the Fourth International’s writings on women’s liberation.
-
Obituary
"We Shall Overcome": Honoring Pete Seeger
29 January 2014, byread article...Tributes are pouring in to honor the memory and legacy of Pete Seeger. Among so many other contributions to the movements for social justice, he was a supporter of the struggle for rank and file union power. Ken Paff, national organizer of Teamsters for a Democratic Union, recalls his support of TDU with a Detroit benefit concert in April, 1985. [Republished from Solidarity January 29, 2014.]
-
Political theory
Luxemburg and Trotsky on Russian Revolution
20 January 2014, byread article...The so-called “Leninist” orthodoxy is history, and the campaign that Stalin and his ideologists launched for decades against “Luxemburgism”, which they identified since 1931 with their most hated nightmare, “Trotskyism”, has fallen into oblivion. So we are free to examine the Marxist theories on the structure of the Russian society and the prospects of a revolutionary uprising against the rule of the Czar – written a century ago –, in order to explore the capacity of these theories to present an explanation of the state of affairs – one hundred years ago – and a prognosis of its future development (in and after 1917).
