International Viewpoint - online socialist magazine

Black Mirror back to back

Ian Parker — 2023-07-19T16:20:30Z

Charlie Brooker's near-future tech frightener Black Mirror Series Six has just landed on Netflix. Some of the review responses have been lukewarm, and the worry boils down to a shift of emphasis in the series. Up to now, Black Mirror has been interrogating our relationship with technology, with what it is doing to relationships between people. We could say that it has been showing how late capitalism has mutated from classic capitalism, in which relations between people are replaced with relations between things, commodities, to a dystopic world in which we are replaced with relations between images.

- Reviews section / Reviews

Ernest Mandel's ‘Introduction to Marxist Theory'

Ian Parker — 2021-10-08T07:24:10Z

“Mandel's main fault, several speakers at the commemorative meeting claimed, was over-optimism. But he left us with writing on the history and economic grounding of capitalism, analyses of bureaucracy and alienation, and an account of the underlying structural preconditions for the world we live in today.”

- Ernest Mandel Archive / Marxism, Fourth International, Ernest Mandel, Features

British Conservative Party tacks right

Ian Parker — 2020-01-07T08:21:49Z

The election of Boris Johnson as Prime Minister and the bitter defeat of the hopes of the Labour left represent a deeper cultural and institutional shift in the politics of the British Conservative and Unionist Party. They are not fools, the entitled gang who head the party, and the election and its aftermath has seen some canny moves that ride the wave of xenophobic reaction harnessed and amplified by the 2016 EU membership referendum.

- IV540 - January 2020 / Britain

A revolutionary for life

Ian Parker — 2018-11-27T11:05:49Z

Hugo Blanco is an inspiration to revolutionary ecosocialists. Born in Cusco, once capital of Tawantinsuyuand now in Peru, in 1934, his first struggles were school protests. He travelled to Argentina, where he abandoned university to work in a meat-packing factory in La Plata, and his encounter with the Fourth International eventually led him back to Peru where he became a factory and then peasant organiser.

- Reviews section / Ecology and the Environment, Peru, Latin America, Reviews

Against austerity, Brexit and Fortress Europe

Ian Parker — 2018-07-28T06:24:28Z

Britain is in the midst of a profound political crisis around the question of how to navigate “Brexit”. The outcome of the EU referendum in 2016 now sets the coordinates for the main political parties, none of which wanted the result, “leave”. The Liberal Democrats pushed for a referendum that they were sure would endorse “remain” as a tactical manoeuvre within their coalition with the Conservative Party, and the Conservative Party split over the issue, a split that has led to recent ministerial resignations at the rate of more than one every six weeks. The Labour Party campaigned for “remain”, but cautiously so, with Jeremy Corbyn, the Party's new radical leader, elected the year before, quite rightly responding to a journalist question about his enthusiasm for the EU that he was about “7 out of 10” in favour of it.

- IV522 - July 2018 / Britain, European Union

Dangerous Liaisons: Revolutionary Theory and Practice

Ian Parker — 2014-01-23T13:07:40Z

Cinzia Arruzza's Dangerous Liaisons: The Marriages and Divorces of Marxism and Feminism (published in English edition by Merlin Press, available from Resistance Books)

- Reviews section / Women, Reviews, Sexual politics

China studies Marxism: twelve pro-capitalist lines

Ian Parker — 2011-11-09T18:03:17Z

Capitalism in China is rapidly uprooting and throwing into the market-place all that seemed fixed and fast frozen since the revolution in 1949 but, as with all other forms of capitalism, this market is all but free. The bureaucracy holds in place systems of authority necessary for capital accumulation, and the Chinese state is a key player in the enrichment of a new bourgeoisie. There are particular political-economic and ideological conditions for this transition, of course, and one of the most important is the legacy of Maoism, and how the claim to be a socialist country is squared with the rapid abandonment of each and every tenet of socialism.

- Features / Marxism, China