IV410 - March 2009

The articles in the March 2009 issue of International Viewpoint can be downloaded in PDF format.

For several years the organisations of the European Anti-Capitalist Left (EACL) have built links and met regularly to debate, gain familiarity and try to act together on a continental scale. On May 31 and June 1 2008, such a meeting in Paris allowed a step forward to be made: around a hundred representatives of 37 organisations from fifteen European countries debated over two days the capitalist offensive and how to pass to the necessary counter-offensive, the evolution of social democracy and the Communist Parties, the dynamic of the class struggle.

It would be wrong to see last Thursday’s massively successful protest actions in France as distant and exotic, of no particular relevance to us here in Canada. With the economic meltdown heralding a new political era, and with most of the country’s Left and social movements still stunned and disoriented following their embrace of the misguided and failed Liberal-led coalition plan, the French experience is instructive and inspiring.

A conference of the European anti-capitalist left took place in Paris last December on the invitation of the LCR and the NPA. The organisations that supported the conference have made this common statement.

Because the globalisation of economic and climate crisis makes ecosocialism so urgent and necessary, the declaration should give much more importance to the social demands of workers.

In the thirty five years since the first oil crisis world car production has doubled, going from 33 million in 1975 to 73 million in 2007. In most developed capitalist countries, the usual mode of management of this growth has been that of crisis with restructuring among firms, factory closures and suppression of jobs. The car industry in the oldest capitalist economy, Britain, has been profoundly reduced over this period. Detroit and Boulogne-Billancourt in Paris bear the scars of closed factories with industrial wastelands in the heart of the city.

With the global capitalist crisis continuing to escalate Alan Thornett examines its general character; the responses of governments; the turn to interventionism; nationalisation and what it represents, the response of the working class and the kind of demands the left should put forward.

The preparation of the next World Congress is underway in a context marked by an unprecedented combination of a global economic crisis and a worldwide ecological crisis. This is a major turning point. This dual crisis shows the failure of the capitalist system and puts on the agenda the reorganisation and reconstruction of an anti-capitalist workers’ movement.

Long March, identified globally with Mao, initiated last week in Pakistan transformed country’s political landscape in a matter of five days. Unlike Mao’s adventurous escapade amid wildernesses, the Long March spearheaded by Pakistan’s legal fraternity was a mass urban uprising that finally forced the late Bhutto’s ruling Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP) to reinstate Chief Justice Iftikhar Chaudhry, deposed by former military ruler General Pervez Musharraf on 3 November 2007.

The Fourth International demands an immediate end to repression, the release of all detainees and a halt to all legal pursuit.