Americas

Fred Weston, editor for marxist.com, explains how the Italian left wrecked itself on the rocks of 'lesser-evilism', starting in the 1970s. With early voting for the US elections underway, and huge pressure on the left to vote for Joe Biden in order to kick out Donald Trump, there are valuable lessons to be learned from the Italian experience.

The following article explains the situation in Haiti, where President Jovenel Moïse is hurtling towards naked dictatorship. With parliament dissolved in January, he is ruling by decree (with the support of Haiti’s capitalist mafioso and foreign imperialism), murdering and terrorising all opponents to his authority. The workers, youth and poor must organise on a class basis to overthrow this rotten system! Please read, share and add your organisation’s name to this solidarity statement.

We ask worker and student activists and organisations around the world to show their solidarity with the struggle in Haiti by sharing this statement, taking pictures and making statements of their own on social media using the hashtags #SolidaritéAvecLaLutteEnHaïti and #ABasLeRégimeMoïse. To add the name of your organisation to the statement please contact webmaster@marxist.com.

The Colombian workers and youth are trapped in a nightmare. The parasitic bourgeoisie has totally failed to curb the coronavirus pandemic, and has used the economic crisis as an excuse to carry out further cuts and attacks on the working class. Socialist struggle is needed to free Colombia from its unbearable condition.

Alan Woods – editor of In Defence of Marxism – comments on the situation in the USA, where it was announced last week that President Donald Trump has contracted COVID-19, amidst a farcical presidential election and the greatest crisis in the history of US capitalism.

Below are some of the messages of solidarity our Brazilian comrades of Esquerda Marxista have received in the face of the attacks suffered by one of their leading activists, Johannes Halter. Earlier this month, a hacker threatened to disclose personal data about Halter and his family if he did not take down the Esquerda Marxista Instagram page, which he manages. For more details, read this article, originally published in ...

In March of this year, three Louisville police officers broke into Breonna Taylor and her boyfriend’s home after midnight. The cops fired 32 shots in the apartment, killing Taylor in a barrage of bullets. In its recent ruling, the capitalist courts did not indict a single officer for this extrajudicial murder. The announcement was met with outrage and brought tens of thousands back into the streets in at least a dozen cities across the country.

Last week, revelations from a nurse employed at an immigrant jail regarding the forced sterilization of women in US federal custody spread like wildfire. The nurse-turned-whistleblower revealed that immigrant women were receiving hysterectomies and other gynecological procedures without the proper informed consent, while imprisoned in a privately run Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) jail.

In the early hours of 9 September, the lawyer and taxi driver Jorge Humberto Ordoñez, father of two, was murdered by two National Police agents after 16 taser discharges and a beatdown, as he begged for his life. This crime, which was recorded by witnesses, was the straw that broke the camel’s back and pushed the masses into the streets against police brutality and in demand of effective action against massacres, unemployment and the COVID-19 pandemic.

The US is standing on a precipice overlooking an abyss of hitherto unimagined proportions. Since March, over 56 million workers have filed unemployment claims, and as of this writing, roughly half of them are currently receiving unemployment benefits.

The Brazilian section of the International Marxist Tendency has faced an online attack from an anonymous individual in an attempt to silence our revolutionary ideas. The IMT would like to send our full support and solidarity to the Brazilian comrades of Esquerda Marxista and comrade Johannes Halter, who has endured personal threats as well as threats towards his family. We ask all our readers to support the campaign by sending messages of solidarity to contato@marxismo.org.br.

After much delay due to COVID-19 restrictions, Julian Assange’s extradition hearing resumed on 7 September in the Old Bailey, London. Assange has remained in solitary confinement in the high security Belmarsh Prison since he was forcibly removed from the Ecuadorian embassy on 11 April 2019.

Swathes of the USA have been hit with devastating wildfires: a tragic consequence of climate change and capitalist negligence. With people on the West Coast having already faced COVID-19, multiple disasters are being piled one on top of another.

50 years ago, the Allende government was elected in Chile. It carried out a host of radical reforms. But capitalism was not abolished. The tragic conclusion was the coup of 11 Sept 1973. We must remember this important episode from history.

Esquerda Marxista, the Brazilian section of the International Marxist Tendency, honored and paid tribute to comrade Roque Ferreira at his funeral on 5 September in Bauru. Because of the conditions of the COVID-19 pandemic, the burial at Jardim Ypê cemetery was restricted to 15 family members. Roque passed away on 4 September after complications during his hospitalisation after testing positive for COVID-19. However, like everything in Roque’s life, his funeral was filled with not just displays of affection, but also a deep revolutionary spirit.

On 4 August, the Supreme Court of Justice of Colombia was filled with hope for the thousands of families awaiting justice for the crimes for which the former president and, until recently, senator Álvaro Uribe has been indicted. The court issued a sentence of house arrest based on the charges of possible witness tampering, procedural fraud and bribery. Those would be the least-serious crimes Uribe has committed.

It is with great sadness that we have to report that Comrade Roque Ferreira, member of the Central Committee of Esquerda Marxista (Marxist Left) and of the National Coordination of the Black Socialist Movement, died yesterday afternoon (4 September), a victim of COVID-19.