International Viewpoint - online socialist magazine

• 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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• Colombia
  

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

  3 June, by Ana C. Carvalhaes

  The clashes over the next 20 days on the streets, in workplaces and on social media in Colombia will determine not only the name of the country’s new president – between a neo-fascist and a progressive – but also, to a large extent, the balance of power in South America. The Colombian presidential elections, with a second round on 21 June, are a precursor to the Brazilian elections in November and are of central importance to the construction of Trump’s “shield” on the continent.

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• Spanish State
  

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

  2 June, by Moisès Vizcaino, Vicent Mauri

  “May 11th will be etched in the collective memory of the Valencian people. The teachers, the grassroots and union movement, and the entire educational community will make history for the dignity, determination, and strength they demonstrated during weeks of mobilisation and organisation. The indefinite strike is already a moral and political victory against an arrogant, authoritarian government that is completely out of touch with the reality of educational institutions.”

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...and the rest of the current issue

• 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

• Ethiopia

  Dark clouds over Ethiopia

• South America

  Notes on the Political Situation in South America

Recently posted Features

• Historical events

  1918 flu pandemic killed 12 million Indians, and British overlords’ indifference strengthened the anti-colonial movement

  2 May 2020

  In India, during the 1918 influenza pandemic, a staggering 12 to 13 million people died, the vast majority between the months of September and December. According to an eyewitness, “There was none to remove the dead bodies and the jackals made a feast.”

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• Pandemics

  Social contagion - Microbiological class war in China

  2 May 2020

  Wuhan is known colloquially as one of the “four furnaces” (四大火炉) of China for its oppressively hot humid summer, shared with Chongqing, Nanjing and alternately Nanchang or Changsha, all bustling cities with long histories along or near the Yangtze river valley. Of the four, Wuhan, however, is also sprinkled with literal furnaces: the massive urban complex acts as a sort of nucleus for the steel, concrete and other construction-related industries of China, its landscape dotted with the slowly-cooling blast furnaces of the remnant state-owned iron and steel foundries, now plagued by overproduction and forced into a contentious new round of downsizing, privatization and general restructuring—itself resulting in several large strikes and protests in the last five years. The city is essentially the construction capital of China, which means it has played a particularly important role in the period after the global economic crisis, since these were the years in which Chinese growth was buoyed by the funneling of investment funds into infrastructure and real estate projects. Wuhan not only fed this bubble with its oversupply of building materials and civil engineers but also, in so doing, became a real estate boomtown of its own. According to our own calculations, in 2018-2019 the total area dedicated to construction sites in Wuhan was equivalent to the size of Hong Kong island as a whole.

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• Obituary

  Luis Sepulveda, revolutionary activist and Chilean writer, has died from Covid-19

  23 April 2020, by Sylvain Chardon

  Luis Sepulveda died on Thursday 16 April in Oviedo (Asturias, in the Spanish state) of Covid-19, which he had contracted at the end of February during a congress of writers in Portugal. Sepulveda was a great writer and his works, translated into more than 60 languages, have enjoyed worldwide success.

  Luis Sepulveda was also an activist. Member of the Chilean Communist Party from the age of 12, he quickly moved towards a more revolutionary commitment. In recent years, he had moved away from the debates on the socialist and revolutionary left. Nevertheless he was also very close to us because he had participated, in practice and with arms, in all the debates of the revolutionary movement from the beginning of the 1970s to the mid-1980s.

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• Feminism

  Women, race and class in social movements: An extract

  6 April 2020, by Jules Falquet

  Jules Falquet looks at the complexity of identities, loyalties and the interests of everyone in social movements. The book Imbrication. Femmes, race et classe dans les mouvements sociaux published in February 2020 by Éditions du Croquant, presents the history of guerrilla (Salvador), Indian-peasant (Zapatista movement in Mexico) or Black (Brazil, Dominican Republic, USA) struggles, as well as the women’s, feminist and lesbian movements of the continent: the women of the Americas and the Caribbean offer us an exceptional mirror to better understand “intersectionality” at a time of a profusion of struggles, sometimes confusing . Starting from the daily life of these movements in order to reach a veritable "science of the oppressed", this book is aimed at an inquisitive public as well as activists and the world of research. [Contretemps]

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