International Viewpoint

George Shriver was born in India in 1936 of missionary parents. He died April 24, 2020 in Tucson, Arizona.​ Having joined the Socialist Workers' Party in his 20s, he was a lifelong Fourth Internationalist.
I knew about George Shriver (who used the party name George Saunders) long before I got to know him. Since the early 1960s he had been part of the Socialist Workers Party (SWP), which I joined in 1973, and shortly after I joined a very important book was published that he (...)

“I hated unions,” says Sathya Vani, now Joint-President of Sri Lanka's Domestic Workers' Union (DWU). “My parents were part of a union, who did nothing for them. So for a long time I avoided trade unions.”

Vani's parents work in a tea plantation in the Kandyian hill country. “We saw how our parents suffered,” she continues matter-of-factly. “We wanted a better life.” A better life is not always easier.

As the world confronts a global economic crisis exacerbated by the current pandemic, what lessons can the U.S. left learn from those outside our borders?

In this interview, Gilbert Achcar discusses with Ashley Smith how Middle Eastern oil-exporting countries' price war has impacted the world, the ongoing revolutionary actions that could result in a “Second Arab Spring” and how the U.S. left must revive the true meaning of internationalism. The following transcript has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

Pierre Granet was born on 6 Septembre 1949 in Marseilles and died on 2 May 2020 in Toulouse. He became politically active as a high-school student in Cannes from 1963, notably in soldiarity with the Algerian revolution . He rapidly joined the JCR and the PCI, then French section of the Fourth International, and remained an active militant until the end of his life, as member of the LCR then the NPA. This tribute was written by his comrades from Toulouse.

As the pandemic rages we realize that “necessary work” is not Wall Street and its stock market or the manufacturing of cars but the health and well-being of society. That is, the work that is central to society turns out to be what socialist feminists call “social reproduction.” These are the functions necessary to sustain human life, whether performed inside or outside the home, whether paid or unpaid. For the most part this has been considered “women's work,” and if paid work, generally poorly paid.

Part 3 of the series: The Pandemic of Capitalism, Coronavirus and the Economic Crisis Part 1: “The Capitalist Pandemic, Coronavirus and the Economic Crisis”, Part 2: “To confront capitalism's multifaceted crisis the bankers must be expropriated and the banks socialised”.

For the third time since the handover of Hong Kong from British colonial rule to Chinese sovereignty, the region exploded in protest in 2019. One million people took to the streets in a 9 June mobilisation called by the Civil Human Rights Front, a coalition of pro-democracy groups, in the biggest demonstration since 1997. Three days later, tens of thousands of masked protesters surrounded Honk Kong Island's Central Government Complex to prevent lawmakers convening.

With the big demonstrations having receded and with the government on a new offensive, this article looks at the Chinese Communist Party's latest moves and evaluates the strengths and weaknesses of the pro-democracy movement.

As Covid-19 deaths spiral upward in Brazil, health care workers are not backing down in the face of far-right President Jair Bolsonaro's threats. Nurses in Brasilia, Brazil's capital city organized a May Day action across from the presidential palace. Harassed by Bolsonaro supporters, the nurses stood strong and gained national attention as they courageously fought for their fallen co-workers in the fight against Covid-19. [No Borders News]

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Pakistani authorities made a bad start to the coronavirus response, using the crisis to push through an IMF agenda of hospital privatization. Faced with protests by health professionals, the government immediately opted for repression — showing that it considers health care for the masses mere unnecessary spending.

As of May 3, Mexico has 22,088 confirmed coronavirus infections and 2,061 Covid-19 deaths. The real figures are likely significantly higher. If these numbers follow the pattern in Brazil, then Latin America's first and second biggest economies will soon rank beside the U.S. and Western Europe as global pandemic hotspots. Meanwhile, Left-of-center populist President Andrés Manuel López Obrador has surprised his supporters by pivoting to the right. As the Guardian explained, AMLO as he is known, “has introduced austerity measures so severe that his critics have compared him to Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan. This week, the president, popularly known as AMLO, unveiled more cuts in response to the Covid-19 crisis, including the abolition of 10 government departments, a hiring freeze and a 25% cut in government salaries. He also eliminated Christmas bonuses.”[No Borders News]

This has been a rather impressive week [13-19 April] even for Donald Trump. Whenever you think that he has reached the nadir of his Presidency, he always manages to continue the downward trend; it is like a sink-hole that appears in the middle of an area that simply sucks everything in its path downwards.

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.

On Friday, the 1st of May, Arif Wazir, a leader of Pashtun Tahafuz Movement (PTM), was shot three times by unknown assailants near his home in Wanna, Waziristan. He was critically injured and rushed to a local hospital. He was then shifted to Dera Ismail Khan and further to Islamabad's PIMS hospital for treatment. Unfortunately, he succumbed to his injuries the next day on Saturday. Arif Wazir hails from Ahmadzai Wazir tribe of Wana Waziristan. He was the first cousin of Comrade Ali Wazir, the main leader of Pashtun Tahafuz Movement and a Marxist member of Pakistani parliament.

The fact that the current coronavirus pandemic has spread conditions of dystopia tells us a great deal about the politics of health. A virus may be a natural phenomenon, but the destruction wrought by this pandemic is a product of the way our society is organized. The scale of suffering and dislocation created by a health emergency is the result of human actions and inactions, just as the differential impact on various communities follows along the lines of prevailing social inequalities, disproportionately hitting people who are racialized or Indigenous, with specific devastating consequences for those who are homeless, incarcerated, elderly, living with disabilities and migrants without status.

This city-state located to the south of the Malaysian peninsula is often taken as an example of alternative strategies to containment in the fight against the Covid-19 epidemic. Dishonestly, it is used to justify the implementation of tracking applications. But the second wave that the city is currently experiencing should above all remind us that health measures cannot be analysed independently of the class struggle and of specific oppressions such as racism.

How has the pandemic made itself felt in Palestine? S C Molavi and Eyal Weizman, of Forensic Architecture, look at how Israel has used the coronavirus crisis in order to further consolidate its regime of surveillance and domination against Palestinians.

Revolutionary Salute to the Workers of the World!

Revolutionary Salute to all Comrades in the Revolutionary Workers Party-Mindanao, Comrades in Arms in the Revolutionary Peoples' Army and all other Revolutionary Friends and Allies!

Lahore: Scores of doctors and nurses under the banner of the Grand Health Alliance on Monday took to the street to press the Punjab government for accepting, what they call, their legitimate demands.

Henri Weber was born in Leninabad (now Khujand), Tajikistan, Soviet Union on 23 June 1944. His Polish-Jewish parents had left Poland at the time of the German-Soviet pact but, refusing to become Soviet citizens, were sent to labour camp where he was born. They returned to Poland after the war but four years later left because of prevailing anti-semitism and moved to France. As a student in Paris Weber was recruited by Alain Krivine and became a leading member of the Jeunesse Communiste Révolutionnaire (JCR) and of the Ligue Communiste (subsequently Ligue Communiste Révolutionnaire LCR), French section of the Fourth International. In the early 1980s he ceased political activity and in 1986 joined the Socialist Party. A member of the leadership of the Socialist Party, he held elected positions as a senator (1995-2004) and then as a member of the European Parliament (2004-2014). He died in Avignon on 26 April 2020 from coronavirus.[IVP]