A debate on a bill to withdraw 10 percent of pensions in Chile comes at a time when most of the working population is being affected by COVID-19 and the early stages of a capitalist crisis. The abysmal handling of the pandemic has led to the death of at least 7,000 people and the collapse of the healthcare system. A new wave of protest shows that the spirit of 2019 is still alive for the Chilean workers and youth. 

The leader of the Jóvenes Por Patria (Youth For Fatherland) JPP movement, a member of the Patria Para Todos Fatherland for All (PPT) party and close collaborator of the IMT in Venezuela, Luis Zapata, was arrested on Sunday 12 July at 4:00 PM, by officials of the Bolivarian National Police, near the town of Ospino, Portuguesa State. After 10:00 PM, and after the show of solidarity from a large number of leftist political organisations, the release of the comrade by the Attorney General of the Republic was announced.

Since the spread of COVID-19 began in Canada, there has been a huge surge in opioid-related overdoses across the country. This spike in overdoses is directly connected to the scaling back of resources for those struggling with opioid addiction. This is just another example of how COVID-19 has taken all the problems of capitalist society and exacerbated them, affecting the most downtrodden layers the hardest.

The battered “historical truth” about the disappearance of the student teachers from Ayotzinapa, an account constructed by the Enrique Peña Nieto government based on torture and grotesque distortions, has completely fallen apart. On 7 July, the Attorney General's Office confirmed the identification of Christian Alfonso Rodríguez Telumbre, one of the 43 student teachers. His remains were not found in the Cocula dump, or in the San Juan River, but in a place 800 meters from where Peña’s version of the “truth” was built.

The recent deaths of three migrant workers in Canada from COVID-19 have once again shed light on the horrific abuse and exploitation of workers under Canada’s Temporary Foreign Worker Program. Packed like sardines into overcrowded bunkhouses and workplaces with little regard for their health and no rights or protections, migrant workers have contracted COVID-19 at a far higher rate than the rest of the population. Far from being a new phenomenon, the situation is part of the long saga of Canadian capitalism killing migrant workers for the sake

The following letter is addressed by the leadership of our Venezuelan comrades to the Venezuelan Communist Party (PCV) and Fatherland for All (PPT) party, calling on them to establish a revolutionary alternative to the PSUV in the upcoming parliamentary elections, given the latter’s policies of privatisation, concessions to the capitalists and repression of workers’ and peasant struggle.

We condemn without reservation the outrageous decision of the UK High Court to deny Venezuela access to 31 tonnes of gold deposited at the Bank of England. This decision can only be described as daylight robbery and an act of piracy.

On 25 April 2020, in the midst of the coronavirus lockdown, the Guyana Geology and Mines Commission (GMC) met to debate a project involving an industrial-size, open-pit gold mine in the middle of the Amazon rainforest. The name of the project is Espérance, French for “hope” – hope for whom, one might ask? Despite opposition from environmentalist organisations and local Indigenous peoples, the project was approved.

The US is a country with a rich history of class struggle, which is not well known by most due to conscious efforts by the ruling class to bury the traditions of the labor movement. It is important for socialists in this country to study the history and lessons of the past in order to learn and prepare for events in the future. The following article was written before the coronavirus pandemic broke out, but it is even more relevant now in light of the unprecedented wave of wildcat strikes and labor unrest among frontline workers across the country.

On June 19, the International Longshore and Warehouse Workers Union (ILWU), a militant union of 42,000 members, shut down 29 ports along the West Coast of the United States and Canada, as workers withheld their labor for 8 hours. The strike was organized to demonstrate the labor movement’s solidarity with black lives after the murder of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis police, and held on the Juneteenth anniversary of the emancipation of the last chattel slaves in the US in 1865.

Susana Prieto is a labour lawyer and a prominent activist in the workers’ movement of the border factories (maquiladoras) in the municipalities of Matamoros (Tamaulipas) and Ciudad Juárez (Chihuahua), both of which are located in northern Mexico, on the US border. She has been arrested following orders of the Tamaulipas state government.

“Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it.” Finding ourselves at the beginning of a new depression, interest in the last one has increased considerably. In this in-depth study of the Great Depression, Alex Grant (editor of marxist.ca) details the crash, the response of the ruling class, and how the workers fought back.

Watch this livestream by John Peterson, editor of Socialist Revolution. The racist murder of George Floyd by the Minneapolis police has ignited a movement of enormous proportions, unleashing decades of accumulated discontent, and even reaching insurrectionary levels in many cities. As the conditions for revolution rapidly mature in the US, there is an urgent need for the movement to grapple with some serious questions: What role do police play under capitalism? What will it take to abolish this institution?

This document on the Black Struggle and the Socialist Revolution was passed at the 2008 National Congress of the Workers International League, the US section of the International Marxist Tendency (now Socialist Revolution). It was originally published on 25 June, 2008. We republish it today, as the arguments it raises are more relevant than ever. 

The remarkable protest movement last October represents a qualitative leap from the other mass movements and protests that for more than a decade have marked the landscape of post-dictatorial Chile. From a global perspective, it was a turning point in the context of the world crisis of capitalism. It was a truly insurrectional mass uprising that, from Friday 18 October to the end of November, involved between five and six million active participants.

Note: this article was originally published in Portuguese on 4 June, concerning a list of anti-Bolsonaro activists whose personal details were released, putting them at personal risk of attack by far-right and fascist elements, in a clearly illegal act of intimidation.

In recent weeks, the US has come closer to an outright revolutionary upheaval than at any time in living memory. The racist murder of George Floyd by the Minneapolis police has ignited a movement of enormous proportions, unleashing decades of accumulated discontent, and even reaching insurrectionary levels in many cities. The wave of protests has multiplied exponentially over the last two weeks, with nearly 1,400 cities, towns, and suburban areas seeing rallies and demonstrations.

Hundreds of thousands marched in hundreds of cities across the US on the weekend in the largest demonstrations since the racist police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis on 25 May. Worldwide, there were also protests in hundreds of cities involving hundreds of thousands of youth and workers, demonstrating against racism and police violence, both locally and in solidarity with the mass movement in the US.

This article was originally published by our Brazilian comrades on 29 May. The situation has developed subsequently, and we will release updates in due course.

Alan Woods comments on the uprising in the USA, which was sparked by the police murder of George Floyd, and has become the catalyst for an explosion of anger by the downtrodden in America that has sent shockwaves throughout the world. What is the way forward?