International Viewpoint - online socialist magazine

The 17th World Social Forum was held in Benin in early August. While it remains an irreplaceable forum for debate, this session was a failure in terms of both numbers and political participation.

The first round defeated the left. Michael Löwy warns: democracy is at risk and, however contradictory, Lula is the only option for stopping fascism's “suicide train.” Braking it means buying time to build other political horizons.

“Socialism is the rule of the working class. Planning is an instrument of the democratic workers' state for organizing production for human need under its collective political and social rule and the transition to a classless society.”

Perhaps paraphrasing Marx and Engels in the Communist Manifesto, when they described the revolutionary process that swept through Europe at the end of the 1940s as a spectre, we could describe the counter-revolutionary cycle that is sweeping through Our America in these 2020s as a phantom, albeit of the opposite kind .

Labour leader Andy Burnham made his first leader's speech to Labour Party conference on 29 September 2026. It was warmly received. Following this Dave Kellaway discusses how there is still some life left in 'Old Labour' policies.
Some organisations and individual commentators in the movement define Andy Burnham as ‘Starmer continuity', ‘Starmer 2.0' or use the phrase ‘...