International Viewpoint

Western analysts often regard the Gulf as a strange anomaly among capitalist states. In fact, it has the same underlying dynamics as capitalist countries elsewhere, and it is powerfully shaping the politics of the Middle East.

For an analysis of the state of the Gulf's political economy, Hamza Culin spoke with Adam Hanieh. His most recent book, Money, Markets, and Monarchies, examines how the six states of the Gulf Cooperation Council are shaping the political economy of the wider Middle East. Here, he discusses the specific nature of Gulf capital, its role in regional and global markets, and its future in a post-COVID-19 world.

Orlando Gutiérrez spent fifteen years working in the depths of the mines of Colquiri, in the province of Inquisivi, in the department of La Paz. Today he is the highest reference point of the mineworkers' union, the Federación Sindical de Trabajadores Mineros de Bolivia (FSTMB). He is a key figure in the union's support for Luis Arce Catacora, the economist (and former minister of the economy who, on 6 September, 2020 – on condition the elections take place – will be the presidential candidate for the MAS (Movimiento al Socialismo) led by Evo Morales. He was interviewed by Gustavo Veiga for the Argentine daily newspaper Página 12. The interview took place before the interim government installed by the coup decided to postpone the presidential elections to 18 October, 2020.

On December 24, 2019, the New York Times reported that U.S. Defense Secretary Mark Esper was weighing a reduction in troop levels in West Africa. Although the numbers involved were small, this news was met with official outcry and unleashed a fierce policy debate on the wisdom of such a drawdown. Military and elected officials have pushed back on the notion of a troop reduction as a “retreat” and a missed opportunity to counter both China's regional influence and terrorism. In fact, by the military establishment's own definition, “counter-terror” across the continent has failed: Attacks by militant groups have been sharply rising and have increased with foreign intervention. And devastating strikes by the United States have continued unabated: Somalia, for example, was the target of an unprecedented level of attacks in early 2020 alone.

One of the laws voted on by the Viktor Orban government during the pandemic makes mandatory a “sex at birth” rubric on official identification documents. This makes legal gender recognition impossible, violently ruling against trans and gender non-conforming persons' right to exist. Tina Kolos serves as vice-president of Transvanilla Transgender Association – the only active NGO focusing only on trans issues in Hungary. They have kindly answered our questions about the effects of the law in Hungary, the trans community's fight against it, and the broader associational landscape in which Transvanilla carry out legal and social work.

This statement was issued to the national press on July 20, 2020 in solidarity with the Black Lives Matter uprising in the United States and internationally. While Nigeria has thus far been spared the brunt of the coronavirus crisis, its oil oligarchy and international companies such as Exxon Mobil, Shell, and Chevron combine brutal repression and super exploitation to ensure the country remains one of the most unequal in the world, on part with Brazil and Mexico.

We don't have to leave ourselves at the mercy of the most profitable sector on Earth to get the drugs we need. We must nationalize the pharmaceutical industry and turn the medicines millions rely on into public goods.

The new rise of women's and feminist mobilizations in recent years is an inescapable fact. In July 2019 the women's commission of the Fourth International, through an international seminar, started the process of writing a resolution to propose to the March 2020 meeting of our International Committee to outline our positive appreciation of this upsurge.

The Covid-19 pandemic prevented the holding of our meeting. Nevertheless we think it is useful to publish the resolution as it was at the end of 2019, knowing that a new version at our meeting in early 2021 will take into account the state of the mobilization we have seen since then and in particular the way that the Cov-19 pandemic highlighted the importance of women's work in both the public and private sphere.

In 2019 the IC of the Fourth International discussed a “Proposal for a programmatic debate”. Following this it decided to pursue in a broad and open way the discussion on our conception of a new society. In this light it requested three of its commissions that alongside organizing ongoing activity in the existing social movements develop our thinking on the type of society that we want. These three commissions, on Ecology, LGBTIQ questions and women's oppression and feminism, each wrote a short contribution to develop the discussion. We publish these three contributions, along with the original document below, in the spirit of promoting such a discussion which is more than ever necessary today. These contributions were of course written before the Covid-19 pandemic.

This contribution to the debate in the FI on the “Future Society” takes up a series of elements from the document “Capitalist Destruction of the Environment and the Eco-Socialist Alternative”, but also some paths explored in a more personal way by authors, members or not of our current. It should undoubtedly make a greater distinction between what is part of the society we want and the strategy to achieve it. Finally, questions are only raised because they will necessarily be the subject of other contributions (question of social reproduction, democracy, etc.). Ecology Commission

A contribution from the Women's Commission.

The question of the relationship between the fight for LGBTIQ liberation and our vision of socialism was addressed to some extent in the document On Lesbian/Gay Liberation agreed at the 15th World Congress of the Fourth International in 2003 ”On Lesbian/Gay Liberation ” particularly its second section, “0ur standpoints”.

The LGBTIQ commission therefore started from that text in writing these theses for the IC and also attempted to incorporate key insights from Peter Drucker's book Warped: Gay Normality and Queer Anti-Capitalism (2015). We have tried to make our language more inclusive than in the 2003 text and adding new points which we hope reflect key discussions which we and the movement have had more generally since then.

We think this is an important, if not an easy, discussion. Especially in these dark times it is important to affirm the principle of hope.

As I watched the coronavirus pandemic spread globally and the resulting global economic crisis my only thoughts were that Trump would run his re-election campaign based on divide and rule and trying to create a white-backlash, writes Susan Pashkoff. It was an obvious deduction and I claim no powers of divination (think of that as a good thing as I often sit postulating what is the worst thing that can happen while praying to non-existent gods that hopefully I am wrong).

Below is our [Chuang] translation of an anonymous Chinese article from the mainland left blog Worker Study Room (工人自习室), originally published in May 2020. It is the only attempt we're aware of to provide a systematic overview of workers' lives and job conditions, labour struggles and related activism in China since the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic in January, although there have been accounts of individual cases, some of which are cited here. It is also written from a perspective with which we are largely sympathetic. That said, the emphasis here, as in much writing of this style, is placed on somewhat schematic and dry documentation of exact demands made within the workplace and the precise order of events, to the exclusion of any substantial inquiry into the broader psychology of proletarians confronted with a moment such as this. The piece is a good representation of what we consider to be the most fruitful left-wing current in contemporary China, which concerns itself primarily with worker inquiry and the transmission of workers' stories between factories. At times, writing from this current can produce a “workerist” form of analysis that sometimes risks missing the forest of capitalism in the trees of individual factory struggles, and which can occasionally even fail at its own allotted tasks when its descriptions of events are too banal to hold the interest of anyone aside from other similarly workerist activists.

Pandemics generate their own vocabularies, and the “novel coronavirus” is no exception. In the United States the vocabulary of COVID-19 of “sheltering-in-place” and “lockdowns” resonates with Cold War era anxieties about nuclear war and more recent fears about gun violence.

“It is essential to build a new militant solidarity-based internationalism that can construct an eco-socialist project that responds from different contexts and regional particularities to the common challenge of facing a post-capitalist scenario.”

The crisis of the neoliberal stage of capitalism has been unfolding spectacularly under our eyes in recent months, provoking ever greater social upheavals in an ever greater number of places.

By sacking Rebecca Long-Bailey on a trumped-up pretext, Keir Starmer has set the seal on a drastic shift to the right for the British Labour Party. That shift comes just as the key arguments by Jeremy Corbyn's opponents to justify a break with his left leadership have been falling apart in the face of overwhelming evidence.

During the evolution of the pandemic in Europe, the financial system has received little attention in the media. It was only at the end of February/beginning of March that a very sharp fall in the stock markets made the front page of newspapers and television broadcasts. Indeed, between February 20 and March 9 we saw a collapse in prices of between 23 per cent and 30 per cent, depending on the financial centres. We now know that it is thanks to the intervention of the Fed (Federal Reserve, the central bank of the United States). Today, the support it provides to financial investors is without fail.

The Democratic Socialist of America (DSA), which now claims 70,000 members, will go into the November 2020 national presidential election endorsing no candidate. The last DSA Convention voted if Bernie Sanders was not the nominee, it would endorse no one. The motion, however doe not stop DSA members as individuals from working for or voting for Biden, and some will work for him while many can be expected to vote for him, despite the fact that virtually no DSA members actually support him politically.

The Covid-19 pandemic has only exacerbated the economic, social and food crisis in Africa. This deterioration has hit people hard, especially the most precarious.