International Viewpoint - online socialist magazine

• Japan
  

  The Political Landscape Surrounding the Snap General Election

  23 January, by Toshizo Omori

  Prime Minister Takaichi announced the dissolution of The House of Representatives and the general election at a press conference on January 19th. The general election is to be held on Sunday, February 8th. This brief essay will examine the current political situation, focusing on what the snap election means and why a new party, the Centrist Reform Coalition, was formed by the Constitutional Democratic Party (CDP) and the Komeito Party (Komeito).

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• USA
  

  Resisting Trump’s Assault on Democratic Rights and the Sovereignty of Nations

  22 January, by Kay Mann

  “The efforts to defend immigrants from ICE raids have all the markings of an authentic nascent social movement. ”

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• Portugal
  

  New neofascist advance in presidential elections

  21 January, by Jorge Costa

  “The reduction in the electoral strength of the left is an invitation for activists to reflect on the fragmentation of this camp. In the downward spiral of the last three years, the only time the left has made its mark on the public debate to contest popular opinion was during last December’s general strike, called jointly by the CGTP and UGT against the new labour laws that the government wants to impose.”

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• Big Tech
  

  Techno-feudal lords or oligarchy of data traffickers?

  20 January, by Françisco Louçã

  Intensive use of social networks, more than other forms of Internet presence, with the possible exception of games, generates behaviours comparable to other forms of drug addiction, such as excessive consumption and psychological, or even physical, hangovers. This article argues that this is the product sold by this new oligarchy.

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• Ukraine
  

  Kyiv in crisis: how wild capitalism is exacerbating the devastation

  19 January, by Vitaliy Dudin

  The year 2026 began with devastating Russian shelling of Kyiv’s infrastructure, which, in freezing conditions, brought the population to the brink of survival. The city, home to 3 million people, is experiencing an acute shortage of heat and water, and electricity is being supplied on a short-term basis. It has become clear that the authorities had no plan B in case of a catastrophic deterioration in the security and weather situation.

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...and the rest of the current issue

• USA

  Trump’s Occupation of Minnesota and the Resistance

• Europe

  Europe in 2025

• Burkina Faso

  The proper use of conspiracies

• Far right and academic freedom

  Academic freedom under attack

• Arab Spring

  From the Ashes of the Arab Spring

Recently posted Features

• Theory

  Socialism as a wager, from Lucien Goldmann to Daniel Bensaïd

  15 May 2017, by Michael Löwy

  Lucien Goldmann (1913-1970) is one of the most important representatives of the humanistic and historicist current of Marxism in the twentieth century. His works of philosophy and sociology of culture – including “The Hidden God” (1955), an innovative study of the tragic world vision in Pascal and Racine – are strongly marked by the influence of the Lukacs of “History and Class Consciousness” and are radically opposed to positivist or structuralist readings of Marxism. A Romanian Jew who had lived in France since the 1930s, Goldmann identified with a self-managed socialism, critical of both social-democracy and Stalinism. Whereas in the United States and in Latin America his thought and work continue to generate a very keen interest, a strange forgetfulness seems to have affected him in France. [1] It is true that this is a sociology in total rupture with the dominant tradition of French social science, stretching from Auguste Comte to Claude Lévi-Strauss and Louis Althusser, via Emile Durkheim. But, on the other hand, through his reinterpretation of Pascal, he is nonetheless the heir of a dissenting current of French modern culture.

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• Philippines

  Three years after super typhoon Yolanda’s passing, social reconstruction of damaged communities

  10 May 2017, by Pierre Rousset

  Yolanda (Haiyan by its international name), the strongest typhoon touching land ever registered, devastated the center of the Philippine archipelago in November 2013 [2]. In July 2016, two years and eight months after, when I landed on Tacloban airport, life had returned to normal. The churches, all new, were dominating — they were rebuilt in priority, before the hospitals, even if it were possible to receive communion under a canopy, while an operating room could prove very useful to a surgeon. Carcasses of buildings that have not yet been rebuilt still stand and there is what one does not see: these “internal refugees”, these “displaced persons”, still without homes, pushed away in the peripheral areas or recently driven to the mountainside.

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• Environment

  Food sovereignty: a feminist struggle?

  8 May 2017, by Aurélie Leroy

  The starting point of this study is a paradox: among social, institutional and political actors, peasant and family farming are gradually becoming established as legitimate and credible alternatives to an agro-productivist model that has ’run out of steam’. [3] They address both environmental and food-related challenges, are sustainable and successful in agro-economic terms, contribute to social change and operate on a human scale. This is one side of the coin.

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• Syria and the Left

  8 May 2017, by Yasser Munif

  Behind the humanitarian disaster of the Syrian civil war is a political crisis the Left urgently needs to understand.

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