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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.

International Viewpoint Online magazine

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Recently posted Features

  • Obituary

    John Percy, revolutionary party builder

    19 August 2015, by Allen Myers

    John Percy, a central figure in the development of the Australian revolutionary socialist movement over the past half century, died on Wednesday 19 August in Sydney, after suffering a severe stroke on 20 July and another on 13 August.

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  • Why is Turkey bombing the Kurds?

    15 August 2015, by Kamran Matin

    Given interlocking domestic, regional, and international developments, the AKP has launched attacks on ISIS and the PKK, the latter evidently being the main target, with four main objectives.

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  • 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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