International Viewpoint

For the past four years, I have been breathing in a country where the sky is constantly collapsing on women's heads. As an Afghan girl, I welcome each sunrise not knowing whether I will see sunset on that day. In the ominous shadow of the Taliban, being a woman is not only a limitation but a crime, a crime whose punishment is exclusion from social and human life.

“When citizens see the state not as an enforcer but as a guarantor of rights, Lebanon will have moved from asserting sovereignty to constructing it.”

In Global Battlefields: My Close Encounters with Dictatorship, Capital, Empire, and Love, Walden Bello remembers a rich life as a scholar and activist, from agitating against U.S. support for Philippine dictator Ferdinand Marcos in the 1970s and 1980s to becoming a leading critic of neoliberal globalization to joining the Philippine House of Representatives and running for vice-president.

A concept that takes on a life of its own often says a lot about the material conditions and structure of feeling of the time. Polycrisis, recently re-popularised by the historian Adam Tooze, was first coined in an earlier era of multiple crises in the 1970s. For Tooze, polycrisis points to “this experience of not a single crisis with a single clearly defined logic…but this coming together at a single moment of things which, on the face of it, don't have anything to do with each other, but seem to pile onto each other”, and he locates the beginning of the current polycrisis in 2008 at the point of the Great Recession.

For more than twenty years, revolutionary Marxists have been questioning themselves: was their missed appointment with ecology, in the 60s to 90s of the last century, attributable to Marx and Engels? If so, to what extent? Hundreds of pages have been written on the subject. Although the thesis of a "Marx ecology," defended by J.B. Foster, is somewhat exaggerated, no one dares to seriously maintain anymore that the authors of the Communist Manifesto were productivists who fetishized technology and had no idea of natural limits...

The June 1960 arrests of Michel ‘Pablo' Raptis and his Dutch comrade Sal Santen in Amsterdam triggered a series of revelations regarding the Algeria-solidarity of Fourth International members. Together with a small number of comrades Raptis and Santen organised material support for the Algerian struggle against French colonialism. One aspect of this work was especially controversial: the plan to counterfeit money. The ‘Raptis and Santen case' led to fierce conflicts within the leadership of (…)

THE TRAJECTORY WAS always clear to anyone who was paying attention, and knew how to filter out the noise of Donald Trump's empty threats of “severe sanctions to destroy Russia's economy,” let alone 500% tariffs on Russia's oil customers, if there weren't an “immediate cease-fire” in the Ukraine war.

““Alaska's history teaches us the devastating cost of imperialism and fascism. From the Russian occupation of our lands to Putin's war in Ukraine and the ongoing oppression in Palestine, we see the same pattern of violence and erasure. We stand with all who resist, because true freedom is collective—none of us are free until all of us are free.” – Enei Begaye, Executive Director Native Movement ”

We're seeing an alarming revival of archaic gender role ideas, from the manosphere's remasculinization crusade to trad wives' rejection of public life. Veteran historian of gender roles Stephanie Coontz explains the moment's deep economic undercurrents.

What attitudes should socialists and trade unionists have to war?

A different view on the DSA convention.