International Viewpoint - online socialist magazine

• Africa
  

  USA/Africa: privatisation of health aid

  12 February, by Paul Martial

  Recent agreements between the United States and some fifteen African countries are radically reshaping health cooperation on the continent, even as Washington has just left the World Health Organisation (WHO).
  These new partnerships are part of the so-called America First Global Health strategy, which makes aid conditional on US priorities. In December, Washington signed memoranda with some fifteen countries setting specific objectives for epidemic surveillance, laboratory strengthening (…)

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• Syria

  Where is Ahmad al-Chareh’s Syria heading?

  11 February, by Jean Batou, Joseph Daher

  “Daher provides an update on the worrying developments under Ahmad al-Chareh’s new government. He also highlights the opportunities opening up for working people and social movements, provided they prove capable of resisting sectarianism and ethnic discrimination.”

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• Portugal
  

  In the face of climate catastrophe, Portugal mobilizes vote against the far right

  10 February, by Jorge Costa

  António José Seguro was elected President of the Republic of Portugal on Sunday with 67% of the vote, comfortably beating the neo-fascist candidate he faced in the second round, André Ventura (33%).

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• China
  

  Purges and Regime Crisis in China

  9 February, by Pierre Rousset

  The dismissal of General Zhang Youxia was officially announced on January 24. This is another step in the purges that have been taking place within the Chinese army’s general staff. Zhang was considered “untouchable” given his supposed closeness to Xi Jinping. As for the Central Military Commission (CMC), it is now a hollow shell, having lost five of its seven members. Xi continues to clear the field around him, contrary to any form of collegiality.

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• USA
  

  Criticism of Trump by Democrats, Republicans Grows as his Support Falls

  8 February, by Dan La Botz

  “Now things have changed. Republicans have criticized his immigrant deportation policies, his racist posts, and his threat to take over the election process. At the same time support for Trump is declining as shown in polls.”

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...and the rest of the current issue

• Germany/Hungary

  Germany joins Hungary in prosecuting left‑wing activists

• Venezuela

  Redemocratise society and politics to overcome the colonial situation

• Mynamar/India

  Why Myanmar’s Election Matters for India’s Northeast

• Greece

  A historic peasant mobilization in Greece

• Syria

  On the Recent Agreement Between Damascus and the Kurdish Administration

Recently posted Features

• Cuba

  Building Socialism in Cuba

  10 July 2017, by Samuel Farber

  In July 2016, thanks to a 20 percent reduction in oil shipments from Venezuela, Cuba’s economy minister Marino Murillo announced a 6 percent cut in electricity and a 28 percent cut in fuel. Meanwhile, he ordered an immediate drop in public sector energy use, with consequent working-hour reductions for state employees, and warned of possible blackouts, raising the specter of the dark and hungry days of the Special Period of the nineties.

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• 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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