International Viewpoint - online socialist magazine

Support Ukrainian Resistance and Disempower Fossil Capital

2022-09-16T10:22:53Z

“Those who now tolerate a Russian victory also tolerate a victory for both global and “domestic” fossil and commodity-based capital, which is closely intertwined with the Russian fossil and extractive sectors. Therefore, a new anti-militarist movement must uphold solidarity with the civil as well as armed resistance of the Ukrainian people, and with the Ukrainian, Belarusian and Russian leftists who oppose the Putin regime's war.”

- 2022 - Ukraine / Russia, Ecology and the Environment, Ukraine, NATO, Ukraine debate

The oligarchic rebellion in the Donbas

Zbigniew Marcin Kowalewski — 2015-01-27T20:26:37Z

Seventy-five people were killed on the Maidan in Kiev on February 20, 2014. The following day, Polish Foreign Minister Radoslaw Sikorski insisted: “If you do not sign the agreement, you will have a state of war and the army in the streets. You will all be dead.” The foreign ministers of France and Germany echoed his words. The trio of Ukrainian opposition leaders eventually folded under the pressure. Although they feared the worst – they were very afraid of the reaction of the Maidan – they accepted a deal with Yanukovych. He was to remain president until December - until the early presidential election. The Western political elites breathed a sigh of relief: the revolution was hijacked onto the institutional path, where it was sure to get bogged down. But immediately there was a first surprise. The troops of the Ministry of the Interior and the police reacted to this agreement as if it was a capitulation by Yanukovych. At full speed, even panicking, they deserted the battlefield, thereby depriving the regime of its security forces. More and more police went over to the side of Maidan.

- IV480 - January 2015 / Ukraine

Russian imperialism

Zbigniew Marcin Kowalewski — 2014-11-27T07:20:45Z

Sergey Nikolsky, a Russian philosopher of culture, says that perhaps the most important idea for Russians “from the fall of Byzantium until today is the idea of empire and the fact that they are an imperial nation. We have always known that we live in a country whose history is an unbroken chain of territorial expansion, conquest, annexation, of their defence, of temporary losses and new conquests. The idea of empire was one of the most precious in our ideological baggage and it is this that we proclaim to other nations. It is through it that we surprise, delight or drive mad the rest of the world.”

- Imperialisms today / Russia, Imperialism today

Russian White Guards in the Donbass

Zbigniew Marcin Kowalewski — 2014-07-04T15:19:12Z

There is no revolution in the Donbass, not even a mass movement. They exist only in the propaganda of the supporters of an armed separatist movement, led by far-right nationalists. Imported from Russia, they seek the restoration of the Tsarist Empire. The Kremlin supports this reincarnation of the White Guards and the Black Hundreds who are destabilizing Ukraine; but it seems that it is also afraid of them.

- IV474 - July 2014 / Ukraine

The springtime of the peoples arrives in Europe

Zbigniew Marcin Kowalewski — 2014-03-26T16:04:27Z

The Arab Spring arrived in winter 2010, close to Europe; in the countries located on the other side of the Mediterranean. Four years later, we see that the springtime of the peoples is not solely an Arab phenomenon. Now in winter it has also erupted in Europe, although for now in the external periphery of the European Union. We probably did not recognise to what point the process of capitalist integration in Europe contributed to the explosive accumulation of tensions in its near but extra-European periphery. This is still truer now in its nearer European periphery. The link this time was direct, clearly visible: initially, the conflict broke out in Ukraine around the question of adhesion to the EU. This was the first slogan which began to gather the crowds, which gave birth to a mass social movement and which led to huge upheavals including the threat of war. Not a civil war as in Libya or Syria – although that was expected and incited in Russia and in all the propaganda networks linked to it around the world – but an international war.

- IV470 - March 2014 / Ukraine

50 years since the Poznan uprising

Zbigniew Marcin Kowalewski — 2006-06-30T17:54:48Z

The insurrectional uprising in the Polish town of Poznan in June 1956 shone a searchlight on the crisis of Stalinism. Preceded by a similar event in East Berlin (in 1953) and followed four months later by the Hungarian Revolution (October 1956), the Poznan insurrection opened the great cycle of the Polish workers' struggles against the bureaucratic dictatorship (1970, 1976, 1980-1).

- IV379 - June 2006 / Poland, Historical events and figures

Death on the road to a workers' party

Zbigniew Marcin Kowalewski — 2006-01-08T13:18:37Z

Zbigniew Marcin Kowalewski writes on the suspicious death of Daniel Podrzycki, a trade unioninist and veteran of the Solidarnosc era, who was on the road to becoming the key leader of the Polish workers' movement.

- IV374 - January 2006 / Poland

A Revolution Betrayed

Zbigniew Marcin Kowalewski — 2005-09-10T15:20:55Z

The purpose of the noisy ceremonies of the anniversary of the birth of Solidarnosç is to hide its real nature - a workers' revolution conducted in the name of authentically socialist values.

- IV370 - September 2005 / Poland

Socialist Revolution and Latin American Unity

Zbigniew Marcin Kowalewski — 2005-04-30T15:33:50Z

Zbigniew Kowalewski analyses the formation of multiple states in Latin America as a consequence of the defeats of bourgeois democratic revolutions before these states were born, and argues that the development of the Latin American revolution will pose again the unity of the continent, in the perspective of permanent revolution.

- IV366 - April 2005 / Latin America

The strange death of Solidarnosc

Zbigniew Marcin Kowalewski — 2001-12-10T00:00:00Z

The results of the Polish parliamentary elections of September 23, 2001 have profoundly restructured the country's political landscape. Polish observers are generally agreed that what has happened amounts to a genuine earthquake, albeit a limited one, in three respects.

- IV336 - December 2001 / Poland