International Viewpoint - online socialist magazine

• Civil liberties

  WikiLeaks: Defend Assange and Civil Liberties – History, Great Britain, and Julian Assange

  21 September, by Against the Current Editors, Clifford D. Conner, Dianne Feeley

  BELOW ARE THE comments Clifford D. Conner made at a September 8th press conference in front of the British consulate in New York City. Conner is an historian and author of Jean Paul Marat: Tribune of the French Revolution and The Tragedy of American Science: From Truman to Trump. The court in Britain is holding hearings on the Trump administration’s request to have Julian Assange, the Australian editor, publisher and founder of WikiLeaks, extradited. Assange would be tried in a Virginia court on 17 counts of espionage and one count of conspiracy to commit a computer crime. If convicted, he could face up to 175 years in prison.

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• Brazil

  Despite disasters and crimes, the Bolsonaro government continues

  20 September, by João Machado

  The Bolsonaro government in Brazil is a huge catastrophe and a dangerous threat: ineffectiveness in the face of the Covid-19 pandemic, disastrous international relations, a deliberate anti-environmental line, attacks on democratic institutions, human rights and the (precarious) gains of civilization. Its policy towards indigenous peoples is genocidal in nature. Even before the pandemic, its economic policy had failed. Brazil is the second most affected country in the world in number of Covid-19 cases and deaths, behind only the United States, with more than 125,000 deaths. The picture could be even worse, but Bolsonaro has been prevented by court rulings from imposing his line.

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• Mali

  What future for Mali?

  19 September, by Paul Martial

  In Mali, the seizure of power by the military on 18 August, 2020 opens a new page in a country which is experiencing an unprecedented crisis. The situation continues to deteriorate seriously.

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• USA Black Lives Matter

  Cop Shoots Jacob Blake: Kenosha Intensifies Racial Reckoning

  18 September, by Malik Miah

  “And I contend that the cry of ‘Black Power’ is, at bottom, a reaction to the reluctance of white power to make the kind of changes necessary to make justice a reality for the Negro,” King said. “I think that we’ve got to see that a riot is the language of the unheard. And what is it that America has failed to hear? It has failed to hear that the economic plight of the Negro poor has worsened over the last few years.” (Martin Luther King, Jr., in response to a frequent question asked by reporters in 1966)

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• USA

  Opening Up the Schools?

  17 September, by Robert Bartlett

  SIX MONTHS SINCE the worst health crisis in 100 years began, there is no sign that it is under control in most parts of the world. In the United States, it has created mass unemployment, exposed the vast rifts between the rich and poor, and promises to widen them unless the social movements impelled by Black Lives Matter and teacher/community organizing can continue to reframe the political, social and economic landscape.

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...and the rest of the current issue

• USA

  Nonviolence and Black Self-Defense

• Lebanon

  Macron on an imperial visit

• Greece-Turkey

  Aegean Sea: urgent anti-war mobilization needed

• China

  When Chinese eat grass: the economic crisis amid the coronavirus pandemic

• Public transport

  Experiments in Free Transit

Recently posted Debate

• Spanish state

  Radiance and sunset of Podemos - reasons for a farewell

  16 September, by Manuel Garí

  The creation of Podemos in the Spanish state was an important attempt to build an anti-neoliberal and pluralist mass party to the left of social-liberalism. That experience, which started very well, has finally ended very badly. Perhaps, for this reason, the title of this article could have been “Radiance and decline of Podemos ... as an emancipatory political project.”

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• Party building

  Anticapitalist strategy and the question of organization

  12 June, by Julia Camara

  No matter how much time passes, or how often history is declared to have ended, the debate over socialist strategy and organization always returns. This foundational question appeared in embryo at the very start of the workers movement in the nineteenth century and was raised explicitly by Lenin when he described his perspective as “tactics as plan” and when revolutionaries split with social-democracy during World War I.

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• Covid-19 pandemic and afterwards?

  Self-Extinction of Neoliberalism? Don’t Bet on It.

  4 May, by Gilbert Achcar

  For the second time since the turn of the century, governments in North America and Europe are intervening massively with public funds and in conjunction with central banks to bail out entire sectors of the economy and prevent a general economic collapse. The ongoing rescue operations necessitated by the Covid-19 pandemic has already reached a much higher scale than the one deployed against the 2007–08 financial crisis. These operations clash with the basic tenets of neoliberalism in that they constitute a massive regulatory intervention by the state in reining back the market, whereas deregulation and market “survival of the fittest” are central to neoliberal ideology.

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• Ecosocialism

  The role of planning in the ecosocialist transition – a contribution to the debate

  25 April, by Michael Löwy

  The semiannual French review Les Possibles, a publication of Attac France, in its most recent issue (No 23) features a number of articles on planning for the ecological and social transition. Most are addressed to the issue of socialist planning vs. capitalist markets that was prominent in the debates of 20th century socialism. The contribution by Michael Löwy puts this debate in the ecosocialist framework that has emerged in this century. My translation of it is published below.

  – Richard Fidler

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