International Viewpoint

The movement for the withdrawal of the pension counter-reform entered its 46th day of strike at the RATP and SNCF on 18 January, the 46th day of mobilisation in various forms across the country.

Livio Maitan, Memoirs of a critical communist. Towards a History of the Fourth International, Preface by Daniel Bensaid, translated by Gregor Benton, edited with and introduction by Penelope Duggan, Resistance Books, IIRE, Merlin Press, 2019, 455 pages

An Impatient Life by Daniel Bensaïd. Translated by David Fernbach Foreword by Tariq Ali.Verso Books, 2013 and 2015, 392 pages.

Russian Socialist Movement's Statement on the Proposed Constitutional Reforms and the Change of Russian Government

“What is missing in this budget is not just the willingness to negotiate, which the government demonstrated very late. It lacks answers and a strategy for today's problems”, said Catarina Martins, in her speech in the 2020 budget debate.

As the strike movement in France continues we republish testimonies from two striking railworkers from the NPA newspaper L'Anticapitaliste.

As of 3 January, the forest “mega-fires” ravaged 60,000 km², the equivalent of twice the size of Belgium. 500 million animals were charred in the disaster, say scientists at the University of Sydney. New Zealand's glaciers are covered in soot. Temperature records have been broken, January and February could exceed 50°C in the shade. Nothing is under control. These fires are out of the ordinary.

The criminal negligence of the Iranian regime and military — shooting down a passenger airliner that had just taken off from their own Tehran airport — should immediately remind us of the dozens, if not hundreds of occasions when United States forces have caused the same kind of civilian collateral carnage.

As the Lebanese revolutionary uprising enters its third month, the ancien régime has already unleashed its counterrevolutionary practices in all its forms. Fear mongering of pre-October 17 sectarian tensions alongside blaming the impending economic collapse on the continuous protests and reviving the spectre of the civil war are rife on Lebanese TV channels as members of the Lebanese ruling class battle to hold on to a sinking structure. Although the momentum is not as prominent as it used to be during the first weeks of the revolution, slogans, chants and demands are witnessing a sharp politicization that opens endless possibilities for class conscious struggles as the anger of the masses are directed at the main perpetrator of the economic crisis, local banks. Mattia Gallo, from Global Project, interviews Elia El Khazen on the recent developments and the “Nationalize the banks” campaign of which he is a member.

Amid rising tensions in a badly fragmented parliament (including 10 parliamentary groups and 22 parties), the leader of the Spanish Socialist Workers Party (PSOE), Pedro Sánchez, won a very tight second vote (167 to 165 with 18 abstentions) to be confirmed prime minister of the first coalition government in the history of post-Franco democracy, which has until now rotated between two dominant parties.

Taken as a whole, the current movement against Macron's planned pension reform is now on a par with the three main social movements of recent decades launched in response to pension reform: those of 1995, 2003 and 2010.

“Daniel was profoundly internationalist. (…) [He] ensured the historical continuity of open, non-dogmatic, revolutionary Marxism and adaptation to the changes of the new era, with the perspective of revolutionary transformation of society always in his sights.”

All thinkers have their father-thinkers; none more so than Daniel Bensaïd. The figures of Charles Péguy, Walter Benjamin and Louis Auguste Blanqui recur throughout his work. In this article, Émile Carmes studies Bensaïd's deep engagement over the years with the work of Blanqui.

Kohei Saito's book Marx's Ecosocialism is an essential contribution to the current debates on Marxism and the environmental question. What makes Saito's work particularly interesting is that it traces the evolution of Marx's thought from a “productivist” to an “anti-productivist” vision of human development, in particular by incorporating natural limits into perspectives for agriculture. This historical approach allows the author to transcend the quarrels between Marxists who see Marx's ecology as a glass which is empty, half empty, half full or full.

President Donald Trump has virtually declared war on Iran with the assassination of Maj. Gen. Qassim Suleimani, leader of Iran's elite Quds Force, in an airstrike near Baghdad International Airport. The assassination of Suleimani will very likely lead to war, though it is unclear how such a war will develop and what form it will take. How do American socialists decide our position on this new situation?

Emmanuel Macron repeated it in his New Year speech: he wants to push through his pension reform. Against all the arguments of common sense, he decides alone. The balance of forces is the only possible language with this government. Strikes and demonstrations will therefore be essential.

It is impossible to find words appropriate to the immensity and horror of Australia's bushfire catastrophe. Day in day out for months on end we've been bombarded with harrowing images and accounts of death and destruction – of roaring walls of flame over 100 metres high; of deadly “fire tornadoes” powerful enough to flip fire trucks; of bushfires creating their own super-cell thunderstorms with lightning strikes sparking new blazes ahead of existing fronts; of giant plumes of smoke turning day into eerie, pitch-dark night; of thousands forced to huddle on beaches and cower on boats as ash and embers rain down on them and their communities burn before their eyes; of convoys of evacuees stuck on roads blocked by flames, while others await evacuation by sea; of whole towns burnt to ashes by fires so intense that no fire fighting force on Earth could stop them.

The student mobilization on 29 November 2019 had a deep echo across Pakistan. Affirming solidarity with all the discriminated and exploited sectors of society, it became a rallying point for a wide range of social and progressive movements in a country and a state undermined by numerous regional, national or religious fractures and by abysmal social inequalities.

Phil Hearse argues that the Blairite Right and Lexit Left are drawing all the wrong conclusions from the general election.

The election of Boris Johnson as Prime Minister and the bitter defeat of the hopes of the Labour left represent a deeper cultural and institutional shift in the politics of the British Conservative and Unionist Party. They are not fools, the entitled gang who head the party, and the election and its aftermath has seen some canny moves that ride the wave of xenophobic reaction harnessed and amplified by the 2016 EU membership referendum.