IV511 - August 2017

IVP 511 August 2017 PDF now available

On 21 August, the Chilean Constitutional Court approved the law of partial decriminalization of abortion, which had been totally banned for 28 years. How can we explain that this social conquest was so late and so laborious?

The "populist moment" is a concept proposed by the philosopher Chantal Mouffe. According to Mouffe, globalization, the hegemony of financial capital and the integration of social democracy into neo-liberal politics have created a "post-democracy".

New development in the case of Baba Jan.

In order to understand the violent campaign launched by the governments of Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain and Egypt against Qatar, it is necessary to look beyond trivialities such as the ransom that the Qataris allegedly paid In Iraq (to Shiite groups, in order to free more than twenty hawkers hunting in Iraqi territory) and accusations that Qatar supports terrorism. Such accusations lose credibility because they are made by actors who have done exactly that for decades. We must return to the context before the Arab Spring and how it was affected by the Great Uprising.

As feminists we often focus our attention on the effects gender inequality has on women. And while this inequality still exists and requires our unwavering attention, as socialist feminists we also focus on the effect this inequality has on our ability to organize a class conscious movement, where our differences do not impede our ability to act collectively against capital.

President Donald Trump’s failure for two days to condemn the violent Ku Klux Klan, neo-Nazis, and "alt-right" white supremacists, one of whom murdered a woman in Charlottesville, has led to a major development as sections of the capitalist class have begun to abandon him.

The last several years have seen cracks in the hegemony of bourgeois electoral politics unlike anything we’ve seen since the beginning of the neoliberal era in the late 1970s. Tens of thousands of radicalizing young people have been mobilized the campaigns of Bernie Sanders in the US, Jeremy Corbyn in the UK, and others around the world, and have swelled the ranks of organizations or caucuses like Momentum within the British Labour Party, and DSA in the US.

African feminist movements are diverse. But we can, and must, learn from decades of transformational organising on the continent.

Joseph Daher was interviewed about his book Hezbollah - The Political Economy of Lebanon’s Party of God (published by Pluto Press, London in October 2016) on the occasion of a visit to Berlin to speak about it.