International Viewpoint - online socialist magazine

New Labour: a government with no mandate

Alan Thornett — 2001-06-03T00:00:00Z

By the kind permission of Britain's grossly undemocratic electoral system new Labour won a 'landslide victory' in the general election. This bizarre result was achieved with the support of just 42% of those who voted and a mere 25% of those entitled to vote. Labour's vote went down by nearly 3 million from the 1997 election.

- IV332 - June 2001 / Britain

A new political framework

Livio Maitan — 2001-06-03T00:00:00Z

The perspective of a victory for Silvio Berlusconi led to fairly lively reactions in the political circles of several European countries, which expressed two major concerns: the use that a personality with such economic power could make of access to political power and the threat that a coalition comprising a right populist party like the Northern League and the heirs of the neo-fascists, National Alliance, would represent.

- IV332 - June 2001 / Italy

PRC: The debate begins

Livio Maitan — 2001-06-03T00:00:00Z

The Party of Communist Refoundation (PRC) took a heavy battering throughout the electoral campaign and in the days following the announcement of the results. So-called democratic and/or left journalists and intellectual masterminds competed in a kind of witch hunt against the PRC denounced as guilty of having helped Berlusconi become Premier.

- IV332 - June 2001 / Italy

A worker in the Senate

Gigi Malabarba — 2001-06-03T00:00:00Z

Gigi Malabarba, one of three PRC senators elected on May 13, began working at Alfa Romeo in Milan in the early 1970s and participated in the fierce workers' struggles which took place at this factory, firstly against privatisation and then against the closure carried out by the new bosses, Fiat. Gigi is one of the leaders of Bandiera Rossa (Italian supporters of the Fourth International in the PRC) and the Party of Communist Refoundation.

- IV332 - June 2001 / Italy

Overcoming division

Yorgos Mitralias — 2001-06-03T00:00:00Z

Profoundly divided, disorientated and marginalised on the political chessboard, the Greek left has been in decline for a good decade or so, that is since its participation in the ephemeral government coalition led by the conservative right (the New Democracy party).

- IV332 - June 2001 / Greece

General strike resurrects workers movement

Yorgos Mitralias — 2001-06-03T00:00:00Z

It was enough for the PASOK government to disclose its central ideas on reform of the pension system for the social and political climate to change radically. It was as if the real menace of seeing the value of pensions halved and the retirement age going from 60 to 65 or even higher, brusquely awakened a long slumbering and fatalistic Greek society.

- IV332 - June 2001 / Greece

Quebec City 2001: 'An Ascending Movement'

Jackie Esmonde, Susan Bender — 2001-06-03T00:00:00Z

What happened during the Summit of the Americas meeting in Quebec City in April was big - anywhere between 40,000 to 60,000 people at its' biggest.

- IV332 - June 2001 / Canada, Global Justice

The anti-capitalist movement and the revolutionary left

Alex Callinicos — 2001-06-03T00:00:00Z

In the following article, which has been shortened for space reasons, Alex Callinicos, a leader of Britain's Socialist Workers Party, explains his party's viewpoint on the new world situation.

- IV332 - June 2001 / Marxism, World, Global Justice

“To speak with the people of Mexico”

Sergio Rodríguez Lascano — 2001-06-03T00:00:00Z

On the 2nd of December 2000, when the Zapatistas announced that they would travel to Mexico City to engage in dialogue both with civil society and with the National Assembly of the Union to persuade the legislators to be so kind as to approve the Law on Indigenous Culture and Right, no one, not even the most optimistic, would have imagined the tremendous success of this mobilisation.

- IV332 - June 2001 / Mexico

Highways of struggle

Ariel Ogando — 2001-06-03T00:00:00Z

This article is a contribution to the discussion of the social movements that are driving the protests in Argentina today, movements in which the old syndicalist and political identities are being reconfigured and mixed with new actors, where new voices are making room for the complaints of social sectors, hitherto pushed into misery as a result of the policies of neo-liberal "restraint", allowing them to be heard.

- IV332 - June 2001 / Argentina