International Viewpoint - online socialist magazine

Comrade President? Change and Continuity in Sri Lanka

B. Skanthakumar — 2024-09-30T06:17:07Z

Anura Kumara Dissanayake's (AKD) victory on 21 September as the candidate of the centre-left National People's Power (NPP) coalition is highly significant for symbolic and substantive reasons. His predecessors have been from the social and political elite that has mis-ruled Sri Lanka since independence from Britain in 1948. Some were born into that elite, while a couple (Ranasinghe Premadasa, Maithripala Sirisena) made their way into it through the business of politics before they occupied the presidency. In contrast, Dissanayaka's political life has been as an outsider and critic of that elite.

- IV596-September 2024 / Sri Lanka

No Fist Is Big Enough to Hide the Sky”: 100 Years of Amilcar Cabral

B. Skanthakumar — 2024-08-30T08:10:54Z

Anticolonialist and anti-imperialist, party organizer and guerilla warfare strategist, diplomat and publicist, revolutionary theorist and internationalist, Amílcar Cabral was among the most original Marxists of the 20th century.

- IV595 - August 2024 / Portugal, Historical events and figures, Guinea-Bissau, Cape Verde

Malaysia after GE-15: ‘A Government with No Direction'

B. Skanthakumar — 2023-02-13T11:12:08Z

“Malaysia's 15th general election (GE-15) on 19 November 2022 resulted in no single political coalition commanding a majority in the 222-seat federal legislature.”

- IV577 - February 2023 / Malaysia

“The Canary in the Coal Mine”: Sri Lanka's Crisis is a Chronicle Foretold

B. Skanthakumar — 2022-08-08T07:51:10Z

“This struggle is unfinished and is presently experiencing a serious setback. But it is undoubtedly the most uplifting and hopeful social struggle in Sri Lanka of the 21st century.”

- IV571 - August 2022 / Sri Lanka

In Sri Lanka's crisis, a new president and old problems

B. Skanthakumar — 2022-07-22T15:27:54Z

B. Skanthakumar reports from Colombo

- IV570 - July 2022 / Sri Lanka, Debt

Sri Lanka's Crisis is Endgame for Rajapaksas

B. Skanthakumar — 2022-07-13T05:38:17Z

“The demand of the Janatha Aragalaya has consistently been for the formation of an all-party government, after the resignation of the President and Prime Minister, which should focus on providing economic relief to the people and to enacting a new constitution that abolishes the presidential system of government.”

- IV570 - July 2022 / Sri Lanka

Local Government, Local Governance, Local Democracy

B. Skanthakumar — 2018-09-18T14:19:18Z

The shock result of the February 2018 local government election, on a high turnout exceeding 75%, has triggered governmental instability and continuing turmoil within the â€˜good governance' touting coalition that rode to power in the presidential election of January 2015, and stabilised itself after the August 2015 parliamentary election.

- Features / Sri Lanka

At the Interstices of Race, Class and Imperialism: A. Sivanandan (1923-2018)

B. Skanthakumar — 2018-02-22T15:21:10Z

Ambalavaner Sivanandan, who has died aged 94 in London on 3 January 2018, was an organic intellectual working at the interstices of race, class and imperialism. A skillful essayist and gripping orator, he chiselled powerful idioms and imagery which travelled across his writing, and from his speeches to his writing, and back again. His prose was crafted not so much to be read quietly, as recited aloud.

- IV517 - February 2018 / Britain, Obituary, Sri Lanka, Anti-racism and Islamophobia

Accounting for 40 years of market reforms

B. Skanthakumar — 2017-10-24T10:42:14Z

The Sri Lankan government recently released its â€˜Vision 2025' manifesto, aiming to revive the momentum of pro-market reforms. Its timing coincided with the 40th anniversary of Sri Lanka's embrace of deregulation, trade liberalisation and privatisation, well ahead of the rest of South Asia.

- IV513 - October 2017 / Economy, Sri Lanka

“The democratic content in self-determination struggles must be safeguarded”

Anzelmo Guerrero, B. Skanthakumar — 2012-06-12T06:35:25Z

Anzelmo Guerrero, a central leader of the Rebolusyonaryong Partido ng Manggagawa-Mindanao (Revolutionary Workers Party-Mindanao) <http://www.rpm-m.org/> spoke to B. Skanthakumar in Manila in late April 2012. The interview focused on the application of the right to self-determination by revolutionary Marxists in the specific context of Mindanao.

- IV449 - June 2012 / Philippines, National question