International Viewpoint - online socialist magazine

President Donald Trump and his alt-right advisor Stephen Bannon—“President Bannon” as he is being called—are making enemies fast, and lots of them. Leaders of some of the country’s largest corporations have come out against Trump’s Muslim and refugee ban. Some Christians, including Evangelicals, object to the ban’s privileging of Christians. Trump’s statement on the holocaust, which failed to mention Jews, offended major Jewish groups. Workers, workers’ centers, and labor unions, which represent many immigrants, have also spoken out against the Muslim ban.

The organizers of the January 21 Women’s March on Washington were expecting a large turnout, but the almost 3m people who decided to take to the streets around the country, and in a number of cities around the world, went well beyond the most optimistic expectations and represented a serious embarrassment to Donald Trump. The most notable fact about the Women’s March is the massive participation of people with no previous political experience, nor participation in protest. This fact alone, regardless of the political limitations that have characterized the call for the march and its public representation in the media, should be a reason for optimism, as well as an invitation to think seriously about how to maintain momentum and about the ways in which women’s mobilizations can work as a trigger for the birth of a mass movement; tackling not only the aggressively right wing policies of the Trump administration, but also the effects of neoliberalism and institutional racism on the life of millions of women and the working class more generally.

The following statement was published by the Revolutionary Workers’ Party, PRT, Mexican section of the Fourth International, as the U.S. President, Donald Trump, signed his executive order to begin work immediately on a wall along the border between the two countries, and repeated that Mexico would have to pay for it. As a result, the Mexican president, Enrique Peña Nieto, was forced to cancel his planned visit to the White House on 31 January.

On December 9 2016 , Parliament voted in favor of a presidential impeachment by 234 votes to 56, with 7 invalid votes and 2 abstentions. Over 30,000 protesters were present to celebrate the impeachment. The votes in favor of impeachment exceeded what was expected, though it was slightly lower than the 81% support for impeachment among public opinion.

A mere week into his presidential term Donald Trump has created an enormous protest movement. Across the US protestors invaded airports on Sunday in protest at his Executive Order banning travelers from seven premoninantly-Muslim countries. The protest have apread elsewhere and over a million people in Bortin have signed a petition calling for the invitation to Trump to pay an official state visit be withdraw. David Finkel, editor of Against the Current and Joanna Misnik leading member of Solidarity gave us their opinion on the current situation.

The emergence of the Die Linke party constituted a substantial change in the political landscape in Germany . To give an order of magnitude, Die Linke has about 80,000 members (compared to 400,000 for the SPD and 60,000 for the Greens). With 8.6 per cent of the vote it currently has 76 members of the Bundestag out of 614. It is a member of the European Left Party and sits in the European Parliament in the Group of the European United Left/Nordic Green Left with 7 MEPs. (7.4 per cent of the vote in the 2014 European elections).

Die Linke is currently participating in three regional governments: in the Länder of Brandenburg since November 2014, Thuringia since December 2014, and following the elections of last September and the so-called red-red-green coalition agreement (SPD-Greens-Die Linke) concluded in November, in the Land of Berlin, now for the second time. Despite all this, no one in Germany considers it very likely that this party can be integrated into the national government; journalists and social democrats broadly concur in describing it as "irresponsible and not capable of governing", with within it forces that are considered utopian, leftist and extremist, and that are the object of close supervision by the state security services. [IVP]

For the Left the Brexit vote is absolutely no cause for celebration. We can neither support the motivation of the vast majority of the Brexit voters, nor can we use the outcome of that vote for our political work. Social welfare systems will be increasingly under attack, the flow of workers from Eastern Europe and refugees will diminish, racist class divisions will intensify, not to mention the rise of racist forces in other EU countries spurred on by this vote.

The Communia Network political project in Italy is very much connected to a profound reflection about the crisis of the class struggle left and also what has been defined, somewhat provocatively, as “the end of the workers’ movement”.

We are at a cross roads in terms of the impact of our species on the planet. The actions of modern human beings, ‘homo sapiens’—i.e. us—are set to determine, during the course of the 21st century, whether or not the planet we live on, along with millions of other species, will remain habitable .