IV413 - June 2009

The June 2009 issue of International Viewpoint is now available in .pdf format as a free download.

Upon the arrival in Copenhagen of the morning’s ship from Poland Søren
Søndergaard, an MEP and a leader of the People’s Movement against the
European Union, demanded that the parliament and government should
ensure that foreign labour is not subjected to unacceptable and highly
dangerous working conditions.

Since June 13th, after the faked presidential election, millions of Iranian are expressing their anger with cries of “down with the dictatorship”. Their mobilization increases the crisis of the regime. Ferocious repression has already caused hundreds of dead and wounded. Our place is at the side of the Iranian people!

For some time now in Slovenia skinheads have been attacking immigrant workers. This has caused indignation and provoked a reaction from radical youth and the Slovenian left.

We are not yet at the stage of building a European anti-capitalist party, far from it, the organizations each have their place, their history, their activity, but we are moving towards an anti-capitalist pole on a European scale, which has its particular profile, takes its own initiatives, has its own exchanges of views.

THE ISSUE OF same-sex sexualities in the Arab world is a political and intellectual minefield, and more so since 9/11 than before. In a bizarre twist, neoconservatives and other rightists who were hostile for decades to the lesbian/gay movement(1) have repackaged themselves as defenders of oppressed Arab women and gays. Responses from the left have been divided.

Peter Gowan, Professor at London Metropolitan University, a member of the New Left Review editorial board and a former leader of the International Marxist Group (IMG), died on 12 June. He was probably the leading Marxist expert on international relations writing in English, and wrote and spoke with an astonishing grasp of the inter-relationship between economic, political and military power in the modern world. His ability to knit together theory with a vast range of factual knowledge held his audiences spellbound.

The civil war which has raged in the north and east of Sri Lanka for more than 30 years now has taken a significant turn since mid January. The government of Mahinda Rajapaksa has launched an offensive with the full military might of the Sri Lankan army seeking to definitively put an end to the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE). For the first time in thirty years, the LTTE seems on the way to being defeated.

These European elections have first confirmed a broad popular abstention. Nearly 60% of voters did not go to the ballot boxes. This abstention can give only a deformed vision of the real relationship of forces in Europe. But it confirms the crisis of legitimacy of the European Union and of the governing parties who implement their policies within this framework.

This article set was written by me in hiding when NSSP was banned in 1983. At that time Militant printed and circulated it as an internal discussion document. After the break up of the party it became a public document.