IV407 - December 2008

The December 2008 issue of International Viewpoint can be dowlonaded here.

The current economic crisis has broken the temporary solutions which have ruled the world economy since the mid-1980s. Profits had been created through production but, in contradiction, were realised through circulation and exchange. British is now exceptionally vulnerable to the crisis.

The energy-climate question is one of those areas where the policy of Barack Obama could be most radically distinguished from that of George W. Bush. Under the leadership of the new president, in fact, the United States should quickly adopt an obligatory plan of reduction of greenhouse gases, invest massively in renewable energies and play an active role in the negotiation of a new international treaty to take over from Kyoto, in 2013. The turn is undeniable. We should take note of it, but we should also measure its limits… and dangers.

Alex Callinicos’s article in the current edition of the SWP’s International Socialism ‘Where is the Radical Left going?’ is significant in terms of the current debate in the SWP as well as the line of argument he defends.It marks the end of the era of John Rees’s leadership of the SWP electoral work, and its transition to the new Central Committee majority.

The Moroccan regime seems an exception to the sombre general picture of the Arab region. Although known at the time of Hassan II as an autocratic and medieval regime symbolized by the terrible prison at Tazmamart, Hassan had, right before his death in 1999, released the majority of political prisoners, in particular Abraham Serfaty, and signed a compromise with the opposition in the form of a government, 38 years after having expelled this opposition from the government.

Climate change is much more than one ecological problem among others: it is the chemically pure expression of the fact that the irrepressible capitalist logic of accumulation is leading humanity to destroy the environment in which civilizations have developed for six thousand years.

November 21 2008 marked the fortieth anniversary of the end of the student strike in Czechoslovakia against the occupation of the country by Russian troops the preceding August.

We, the organizations of the anticapitalist Left that sign this text, want to condemn the murder, in cold blood, of 16 year old Alexis Grigoropoulos by a police special guard in the evening of December 6th.

On Saturday 6 December, the Greek police murdered in cold blood Alexis Grigoropoulos, a 15-year old school boy, in the centre of Athens. Spontaneous protests erupted immediately after the killing in Athens, Thessaloniki and other cities of Greece and escalated to widespread revolt all over the country, joined by thousands of people.

The terrorist attack on Mumbai (Bombay) on the night of November 26-27 led to nearly 200 deaths and 300 wounded. The attention of the Indian and international media was above all concentrated on the two luxury hotels Taj Mahal and Oberoi, drawing an analogy with the “twin towers” of New York destroyed on September 11, 2001.