International Viewpoint - online socialist magazine

We hold the CCP government responsible for Liu Xiaobo’s premature death. No one should be thrown into prison, let alone left to rot there, simply for exercising the right to free speech. The CCP even went so far as to intervene in Liu’s family’s arrangements for his funeral, scattering Liu’s ashes into the sea without the genuine consent of Liu’s wife, Liu Xia. It is even more outrageous to see the regime continuing to hold Liu Xia under house arrest, just to make sure that Liu’s legacy cannot be visible. Anyone who still thinks that the CCP government somehow carries some degree of a “socialist legacy”, as certain “new leftists” do, should think again. What we have now in Beijing is one of the most barbaric far right regimes in the world. It is this regime which should be tried by the people.

This piece was written for the German monthly Sozialistische Zeitung (SOZ), and so its target audience are foreign readers not expected to know a great deal about the situation in France. It’s also my way of wading into the debate on the recent elections and the campaign waged by Jean-Luc Mélenchon on behalf of the La France Insoumise (“France Unbowed”) movement. The debate covers a range of important questions, especially around the notion of “populism”, and I hope it will continue.

The origin of Daesh or the so-called "Islamic State" can be traced to the creation of al-Qaeda following the US and British military invasion of Iraq in 2003.

Popular mobilisation in the Moroccan Rif continued through June 2017 and has spread to several of the country’s towns, despite repression by security forces and the regime’s attempts to discredit the movement. Meanwhile several thousand police officers have been sent to Al-Hoceima to stop the demonstrations.

The Saudi Arabia–UAE battle against Qatar is a struggle for regional power with no heroes to cheer for.

Venezuela is experiencing a major crisis. Every day, mobilizations, social discontent, hunger, repression, death and social decay haunt its streets. Nothing like the boom years of the Bolivarian phenomenon that opened the doors to political change and to important social measures in favour of the majorities. Today that same population experiences in its daily life the disaster provoked by the Maduro government and at the same time the attempts of the right opposition to seize political power.

Over the last two months, Venezuela has faced a terrible wave of violence. Already there are more than 60 dead amidst looted schools, burned public buildings, destroyed public transport and evacuated hospitals. The mass media broadcast a chain of macabre reports of the government and have installed the image of a dictator in conflict with the opposition democrats.

On the occasion of the one hundredth anniversary of the Russian Revolution, the Spanish-language Viento Sur journal asked me to write an article on the “party question” (Rousset 2017). This is an expanded version of that piece. This version focuses far more on the present than on the past – and aims to contribute to an international debate, rather than a solely French one.

Corrections and clarifications will probably be added in the future.