International Viewpoint - online socialist magazine

Fascisation and strategy

Ugo Palheta — 2026-04-12T10:22:55Z

“Defence also means political self-defence, and therefore the broadest and most unified mobilization possible around democratic slogans aimed at preserving the political gains of the working class and oppressed minorities, and maintaining forms of counter-power or what we might call the infrastructure of protest (unions, neighbourhood collectives, anti-war groups, etc.).”

- Features / France, Far Right, Fascism

“A united and militant movement can prevent the RN from winning”

Ugo Palheta — 2026-03-15T09:10:23Z

The first round of the French local elections will take place on Sunday 15 March, the second on 22 March. There is a real possibility that the “traditional” right, which is increasingly radicalizing in a far right direction, will win in Paris, under Socialist Party government since 1995, and that the Rassemblement National could win in France's second, and very multi-racial, city, Marseilles.

- IVP614 - March 2026 / France, Far Right

Eleven political theses on the movement of January-March 2023 in France

Ugo Palheta — 2023-03-30T16:55:12Z

“The mobilization has undeniably created a new situation and the possibility of a bifurcation, in the sense of a dynamic of rupture with the established order. Not everything is in reach, but perspectives that might have seemed irrelevant just a few months ago are now possible.”

- Features / France

“There are common features between historical fascism and the far right”

Ugo Palheta — 2022-04-25T05:19:54Z

“[T]his kind of process can be set in motion without fascist forces being in power; this is the way we analyse what has been happening in France for the last few years, notably with Macronism, an authoritarianism of capital that has systematically shifted to the terrain of reactionaries.”

- IV567 - April 2022 / France, Far Right

Fighting French Fascism Means More Than “Anyone but Éric Zemmour”

Ugo Palheta — 2022-01-14T08:43:37Z

“This … means fighting the banalization (and radicalization) of Islamophobia at the highest levels of the state, as in mass media, and in resisting the state authoritarianism daily expressed in the fate imposed on migrants and the securitarian surveillance of working-class and immigrant neighborhoods.”

- IV564 - January 2022 / France, Far Right

Our pain is immense, and the scavengers are here

Ludivine Bantigny, Ugo Palheta — 2020-10-31T06:42:46Z

Horror, shock, dread : this is what we feel faced with the assassination of Samuel Paty, who taught of history and geography at the Collège du Bois d'Aulne in Conflans-Sainte-Honorine, by a fanatical murderer. This death is atrocious. It is atrocious in absolute terms, the death of a man killed in the middle of the street. It is atrocious because of the appalling way in which the murder was committed: by beheading. And also, because its author justified it by referring to the lesson given by Samuel Paty on freedom of expression, during which he presented his students with a caricature of Mohammed ; that a lesson could lead to a murder is unbearable.

- IV549 - October 2020 / France, Anti-racism and Islamophobia

Islamophobia on the beach - a new stage in the racist offensive

Ugo Palheta — 2016-08-30T06:23:30Z

France is currently going through a new stage in the Islamophobic offensive that has plagued the country for so many years. And once again, it is the ruling class that is manoeuvring, as the political class claims that it is responding to a pre-existing popular “expectation” or even “exasperation”.

- IV499 - August 2016 / France, Racism and Islamophobia

A new beginning in France?

Julien Salingue, Ugo Palheta — 2016-06-07T14:28:15Z

France is being rocked by massive protests and strikes against the Socialist Party government of President François Hollande and Prime Minister Manuel Valls and its plans to change longstanding labor rules that favor workers. Now targeting legislation known as the El Khomri law, the demonstrations have grown from their first stage—the Nuit Debout (Up All Night) protests that began with nightly gatherings in the Place de la République in Paris and spread to more public squares.

- IV497 - June 2016 / France

Forty years later: the grandeur and the limits of the Portuguese Revolution

Ugo Palheta — 2014-04-24T23:42:13Z

On April 25, Portugal will celebrate the fortieth anniversary of the “Carnation Revolution”. The last example of a popular and radical uprising in western Europe, it brought down the oldest dictatorship on the continent and deepened to the point of threatening the power of the bourgeoisie. At a time when the capitalist offensive is accelerating throughout Europe, particularly in the countries of southern Europe, this is a very cumbersome spectre for the Portuguese ruling class and the Troika (European Commission, ECB and IMF), which fears nothing so much as the eruption of the popular classes onto the political and social stage.

- IV471 - April 2014 / Portugal, Historical events and figures