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.
May Day is not a holiday in the United States. In most states and cities, it is not celebrated. In some places, in schools or public parks, people put up a May pole and dance around it to celebrate the arrival of spring. We did that in my elementary school in Chicago when I was a child. The official Labor Day in the United States, which is a national holiday, is celebrated on the first Monday in September and marks the end of summer and students’ return to school. But maybe this year things finally changed.
read article...The Niger Delta has been totally devastated by decades of oil exploitation in Nigeria by the major Western oil companies. Huge tracts of land and mangrove swamps have been totally contaminated by oil, destroying all living things. People’s livelihoods, such as fishing and farming, have been wiped out. There is no longer any drinking water, and the air is polluted by the dozens of flares that burn continuously.
read article...José Luis is an activist in the Fourth International and a member of the Mexican electricians’ union. He spoke to Fabrice Thomas while visiting Europe for the world congress of the Fourth International.
read article...Despite recurring environmental disasters and the dangers to the population, the government of Zambia continues its extractivist policy. The southern African country has once again been hit by major pollution. 50 million tonnes of acidic sludge were discharged into the watercourse running alongside the Chinese company Sino Metals in Chambishi, which processes copper ores.
read article...Since taking office 100 days ago, President Donald Trump has been engaged in destroying America’s liberal, democratic state and its social welfare systems, taking away citizens’ and non-citizens’ rights, and attacking the institutions of civil society such as universities and the media. Trump’s attack on our government and our society has shocked, disoriented, and disconcerted the American people. The resistance has been growing, but is still too divided, small, and weak to stop Trump
read article...The philosophy of difference as it is theorized by Luce Irigaray today stems in part from the discussions within the French women’s movement at the beginning of the 1970s. The discussion has re-emerged today with publication of Luce Irigaray’s book Le temps de la différence in 1989, and her subsequent publications which, particularly the latest J’aime à toi (1992) she reformulates her project of a society based on the recognition of a gendered civil law. The discussion has become richer with other contributions, particularly from Italy.
The term postmodernism has entered into common currency with a rapidity that modernism, “after” which it is named, never achieved: it has a trendy contemporaneity but is little understood. Partly through its description of reality as a series of images, or “simulacra” in Baudrillard’s word, it has attained popular cultural status in the media, especially television, as well as modish respectability in the academy, across Europe and North America.
The Occupy Movement, the first such broad, national, multi-issue, mass movement in forty years, represented a test for the revolutionary socialist left in several senses. First, would the left recognize its important and immediately move to become an active part of it and work within it to help provide leadership? Second, would the left during Occupy be able to both appreciate its strengths and develop a critique of its weaknesses and limitations? Would it as the same time be able to conduct socialist propaganda and recruit to the socialist movement? Third, would the left in retrospect be able to analyze and learn from the Occupy experience in order to prepare itself for future movements?
Whatever the (well deserved) derision heaped on the head of Francis Fukuyama for his ‘end of history’ thesis, he has the merit of posing the big questions. In his ‘The Future of History’ article (Foreign Affairs, Jan-Feb) he poses two big questions that are vital for Marxists: Is the neoliberal undermining of the social position of the employed working class and poorer sections of the middle class compatible with liberal democracy? and What explains what he calls the ‘absent left’ – the lack in theory or practice of a powerful left/populist alternative to neoliberalism in a period of such drastic economic collapse and moral bankruptcy of the dominant neoliberal model?
The election of Donald Trump as President of the United States framed the discussion at the second Congress of Democracia Socialista [section of the Fourth International in Puerto Rico].
- read article...Deputies and councillors from parties such as PT and PSOL call for respect for Ibama’s decision and demand an energy transition plan.
- read article...APPEAL to the ITUC, ETUC, Trade Union Advisory Committee to the OECD, national trade unions on support of the Strategy of Ukraine on Peace and Security
- read article...At least 26 civilians, mostly tourists, have been brutally and callously killed by militants in Pahalgam on April 22, 2025. Radical Socialist mourns the death of every single civilian, and condemns this terrorist act perpetrated by The Resistance Front that has claimed responsibility for it. It is a senseless attack which is morally unjustifiable and is completely counterproductive politically because it can further stoke and strengthen existing currents of Islamophobia in Indian society and in state apparatuses.
- read article...Ten national unions and dozens of locals representing more than 3 million members have issued a joint statement demanding the release of immigrant workers recently snatched by Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
- read article...International Viewpoint is published under the responsibility of the Bureau of the Fourth International. Signed articles do not necessarily reflect editorial policy. Articles can be reprinted with acknowledgement, and a live link if possible.
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