International Viewpoint - online socialist magazine

Call for donations to ESSF's Asia 2026 Solidarity Fund - A time of youth revolts, people's power, and ecosocialist alternatives

ESSF, Mark Johnson , Pierre Rousset — 2025-12-17T16:36:19Z

“We face a deadly spiral of combined crises (the 'polycrisis'), to which the established political and economic powers are offering no response. Poverty and widespread insecurity continue to spread. However, in recent months, in the face of humanitarian disasters, protest movements have taken on a new dimension, with impressive demonstrations and uprisings. Asia is at the heart of these developments, including Pakistan, Bangladesh, Indonesia and the Philippines, where our partners are based.”

- News from around the world / Asia

Labour's Polycrisis

Kevin Lin — 2025-08-20T12:11:28Z

A concept that takes on a life of its own often says a lot about the material conditions and structure of feeling of the time. Polycrisis, recently re-popularised by the historian Adam Tooze, was first coined in an earlier era of multiple crises in the 1970s. For Tooze, polycrisis points to “this experience of not a single crisis with a single clearly defined logic…but this coming together at a single moment of things which, on the face of it, don't have anything to do with each other, but seem to pile onto each other”, and he locates the beginning of the current polycrisis in 2008 at the point of the Great Recession.

- Features / Philippines, South Korea, China, Indonesia, Asia, Trade unions/workplace organizing, Hong Kong

Call for donations for ESSF's Asia 2025 Solidarity Fund - Joining forces

Adam Novak, Pierre Rousset — 2024-12-05T20:02:39Z

The annual appeal of Europe Solidaire Sans Frontières.

- IV599 - December 2024 / Solidarity after disasters , Asia

Covid-19: Asian contrasts and lessons

Pierre Rousset — 2020-07-21T06:07:51Z

The evolution of the pandemic is particularly contrasted in Asia where it is much more difficult to compare national situations and policies than in Europe. However, we can try to identify a few lines of reflection, which are necessarily fragmentary.

- IV546 - July 2020 / Philippines, South Korea, China, India, Asia, Thailand, Covid-19 Pandemic

China's rise as a world power

Ashley Smith, Au Loong-Yu — 2019-06-10T05:15:00Z

China's rapid rise as a new center of capital accumulation has increasingly brought it into conflict with the United States. The ISR's Ashley Smith interviewed activist and scholar Au Loong Yu about the nature of China's emergence as a new imperial power and what it means for the world system.

- IV533 - June 2019 / China, Asia

Faced with the humanitarian crises in Asia, our annual call for financial solidarity

Pierre Rousset — 2019-01-06T11:45:13Z

We need you to maintain the ESSF Solidarity Fund.

- News from around the world / Solidarity after disasters , Asia

Asia and Europe in Changing Geopolitics, Rising Powers, Peoples' Security

Achin Vanaik, Anuradha Chenoy — 2018-12-26T09:56:46Z

Major trends of changing geopolitics impact Asia and Europe and provide space for positive interventions from peace movements for people's security. Even as the rise of Asia is seen as impacting international geopolitics the current reality in the Asian Continent is as follows:

Most riven by nationalist tensions of various kinds, religious, ethnic or otherwise.

Uncertain implications of China's general rise even as no other country has so many neighbours (14) although border demarcations with most (12) have been agreed upon.

Four of the five most significant world powers (as evaluated by population size/total GDP/military strength) operate here – Russia, China, India, Japan – plus two other emerging powers of Turkey and Indonesia.

- Features / United States (USA), Ecology and the Environment, Economy, China, India, Asia

Making the world safe for Big Business

Sean Starrs — 2015-05-28T10:42:34Z

The Trans-Pacific Partnership is about expanding US hegemony in East Asia. After five years of intense negotiations, the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) may come to fruition by the end of this year. Much has been written (and rightly so) about the negative consequences of the TPP for American labor. But what are the international implications of the TPP, and in a world awash with bilateral and multilateral trade and investment treaties (there are over 3,200 international investment treaties alone), how is this one different?

- IV484 - May 2015 / United States (USA), Asia

Contribute to ESSF permanent Solidarity Fund for Asia

2014-12-08T21:20:19Z

Since 2004 – the year when a devastating tsunami hit the coasts of the Indian Ocean â€”, Europe solidaire sans frontières (ESSF) launched numerous financial campaigns to assist Asian victims of humanitarian disasters. As a complement to such specific initiatives, we opened in 2012 a permanent Solidarity Fund for Asia. Today, with growing climate chaos, industrial safety hazards, wars, poverty, we feel more than ever its need.

- News from around the world / Ecology and the Environment, Solidarity after disasters , Asia

US Imperialism's pivot to Asia

Ashley Smith — 2013-04-16T14:22:53Z

In his second inaugural address, President Obama announced that after he withdraws combat troops from Afghanistan, the United States will be “ending a decade of wars.” On the very same day, the United States conducted three drone strikes in Yemen. In reality, Washington is now in a permanent state of “low-intensity” drone wars all around the world and is preparing, through what has been called the Pivot to Asia, to contain China. Obama is no pacifist. In his second term, he intends not to retreat from American imperial assertion but to strengthen it.

- Features / United States (USA), Asia