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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

  • Series: Governments submit to “Too Big to Fail” banks (part 7)

    The European Central Bank’s true priorities

    4 December 2014, by Éric Toussaint

    We have seen that since the beginning of the 2007-2008 crisis, the ECB has played a vital role in saving the big private banks, their owners and directors, while at the same time guaranteeing the continuity of their privileges. We can clearly see that without the ECB, the big banks would have sunk and that would have forced the authorities to take very severe action against them. Beyond bank bail-outs, the ECB is charged with maintaining an inflation rate of around 2%.

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  • Series: Governments submit to “Too Big to Fail” banks (part 6)

    The big private banks run on LTRO

    4 December 2014, by Éric Toussaint

    From 2012, the banks were overflowing with cash and made massive purchases of the bonds issued by their own countries. Sovereign debt securities do not require equity, as they are considered to be non-risk. [1]

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  • Series : Bretton Woods, the World Bank and the IMF: 70th anniversary (Part 13)

    South Korea : the miracle unmasked

    4 December 2014, by Éric Toussaint

    The supposed South Korean success story has been achieved thanks to policies that run contrary to the economic model advanced by the World Bank. Far from being a virtuous accumulation of wealth through the advantages of free-market forces, the economic development of South Korea came about by "a brutal primitive accumulation achieved by the most coercive methods, in order to produce virtue by force" (J-P Peemans). Korea has obtained its economic results under the yoke of a very repressive regime that had the support of the United States in the framework of its containment of the so called "socialist" regimes. South Korea has adopted a production-driven economic system that has little respect for the environment. The South Korean example is not to be recommended, nor is it repeatable, but it deserves to be analysed.

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  • Sexuality and capitalism: The Italian Renaissance

    3 December 2014, by Colin Wilson

    Revolutionary struggles against capitalism have raised, time and again, the issue of sexual liberation. Right at the start of capitalism, the English revolution of the 1640s and 1650s involved what historian Christopher Hill has called a “sexual revolution” against the old order. The more radical forces included “ranters” such as Lawrence Clarkson, who argued that “What act soever is done by thee in light and love is light and lovely, though it be that act called adultery.” [2]1 The “utopian socialists” of the early nineteenth century also challenged accepted ideas about sexuality.

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