International Viewpoint

The Executive Bureau of the Fourth International has issued this statement concerning its links with the NSSP (Nava Sama Samaja Party).

On the sixth anniversary of the forced disappearance of the 43 Ayoztinapa college students, a flurry of developments is spurring optimism among long traumatized relatives of the students and their dedicated core of supporters.

Ashley Smith interviewed Black Lives Matter activist and educator Jesse Hagopian about the struggle for Black Lives at school, the uprising for racial justice, the role of unions in that struggle, and the looming workers' fight against austerity in cities and states across the country.

Jesse Hagopian is a teacher at Garfield High School in Seattle, Washington and is co-editor with Denisha Jones of Black Lives Matter at School, forthcoming in December from Haymarket.

U.S. President Donald Trump has refused in repeated interviews to promise a peaceful transfer of power should he lose, his statements causing consternation among the public, the Democratic Party opposition, and even in his own Republican Party. Trump claims that mail ballots—being more widely used because of the coronavirus pandemic that has left 205,000 dead—are a “scam.” He says there will be massive voter fraud, though mail ballots have been used by some states for years and there is no evidence of fraud. All of America is now discussing the possibility of an illegal seizure of power by Trump.

The Nagorno-Karabakh conflict has been with us since 1988, ever since the largely ethnic Armenian population of this province of the Azerbaijan Soviet Socialist Republic demanded a union with Armenia. The ensuing war ended in 1994 with Nagorno-Karabakh and some neighboring Azerbaijani territories under Armenian control and nearly a million people as refugees. Ever since then, as Azerbaijan has tried to retrieve the lost territories and the occasional negotiations proving fruitless, there have been periodic escalations of the conflict such as the Four-Day War of 2016, but never has the fighting reached the magnitude of the fighting for the last couple of days, with hundreds of soldiers (and many civilians) killed on each side. As nationalist propaganda in both countries has reached a fever pitch and the very little anti-war activity is not only drowned by vitriol but punished with arrests, LeftEast is proud to share this statement of young Azerbaijani leftists.

The environmental catastrophe now occurring in the Pantanal, with the terrible fires that are devastating the fauna and flora of one of the most important biomes in Brazil, is unfortunately not just a natural disaster. Just like the destruction of the Amazon, this is first and foremost the direct result of the anti-environmental policies of the government of Jair Bolsonaro. The number of fires that have broken out in the Amazon in the first 14 days of September 2020 has already surpassed those recorded for the whole of September 2019.