At 6pm on Friday 10 October, at the Plekhanov Memorial Library in St. Petersburg, comrade Alan Woods, the editor of marxist.com and a leading member of the International Marxist Tendency, addressed an audience of about 70 people, who crowded into the small conference room. In addition to the members of the older generation associated with the library, the majority of those present were young people — students and workers — members and sympathisers of the Revolutionary Workers’ Party who had organised the event in collaboration with the Plekhanov Library. The meeting was chaired by the director of the Library, Tatyana Filimonova.

Our comrades have continued to march alongside workers and youth on climate demonstrations all over the world, participating in enormous mobilisations against capitalism's destruction of the planet. 

Following our global intervention in the climate strikes on 20 September, comrades around the world once again took to the streets for another day of action last Friday. Some of these demonstrations broke records for attendance, showing how the question of climate change is bringing millions of people – particularly the youth – into political activity. Our comrades raised the slogan of class struggle and socialist revolution, as the only way to save the planet!

Friday 20 September saw the biggest climate strike in history, uniting millions of people across the globe in the fight to save the planet from the ravages of climate change, for which capitalism is the culprit. We share the following series of reports from comrades all over the world, who intervened in these events, arguing that only class struggle and socialist revolution can avert climate catastrophe!

The British Labour Party has been holding its national conference over the past several days. At a Labour4Clause4 fringe meeting on Monday evening, a packed room of grassroots Labour activists heard from Labour Chancellor of the Exchequer, John McDonnell and leading trade unionists, who speakers pledged their support for the restoration of Clause 4 and Labour's commitment to socialist policies.

It was with a deep sense of sadness and personal loss that Ana and myself learned of the death of our dear old friend and comrade, Bob Lee, last Friday. We had been very close for many years, and we learned to love and respect him as a great comrade, a tireless fighter and above all as a warm, loving and generous human being.

The international climate strike movement has created waves across the world. Over the past year, during the course of several global days of action, millions of young people from over 100 countries have walked out of school in order to join the ‘Fridays for Future’ protests, demanding immediate action against the climate crisis.

Recently, we published an article dealing with the struggle inside Militant and the CWI in 1991-1992. Since the publication of my first article last week, we have received many messages of support. Mostly, these have come from comrades who 30 years ago supported the Taaffeite Majority, but were completely ignorant of what was going on behind the scenes.

The recent convulsive faction fight and split in the Committee for a Workers' International (CWI), driven by Peter Taaffe, the General Secretary of SPEW, the Socialist Party of England and Wales, is now plastered all over social media for the world to see. Despite the stream of allegations coming from the Taaffe faction, and the rebuttals from the other side, the dispute in reality centres around prestige politics, a highly pernicious tendency that is invariably fatal in a revolutionary organisation.

18 comrades from Lagos, Ibadan and Ekiti gathered at the Digital Bridge Institute, Cappa, Lagos state, on Saturday and Sunday 15-16 June for the national congress of the Campaign for Workers’ and Youth Alternative – the Nigerian section of International Marxist Tendency (IMT). Comrades arrived with a lot of enthusiasm, which reflected the radical change in the situation in the country.

The crisis unfolding within the Committee for a Workers’ International (CWI) is reaching a critical phase, and a deep split is now imminent. The Spanish group of the CWI, Izquierda Revolucionaria, which only joined the CWI in 2017, has already split away and what remains of the Mexican and Venezuelan groups have followed suit. The Portuguese group has also left. To help readers understand what is happening, we take this opportunity to publish two opposition documents from 1991 and 1992, when a heated dispute took place within the Militant Tendency

Our comrades held a seminar from 7-10 June in the countryside in upper Austria. The motto of the seminar was: “The Internationale unites the human race – 100-year anniversary of the Communist International”. With 108 guests from Austria, Germany, Switzerland, the Czech Republic, Britain, Bosnia and, for the first time, Hungary, the event was true to this motto, and was the Austrian section’s biggest Pfingstseminar in many years.

More than 160 revolutionaries gathered in Toronto, May 18-20 for the 19th congress of Fightback and La Riposte Socialiste, the supporters of the International Marxist Tendency in Canada. The three-day congress brought attendees from Toronto, Montreal, Edmonton, Victoria, Waterloo, Hamilton, Ottawa, Oshawa, as well as international guests from Britain, Sweden and the United States.

On 1 May 2019, IMT comrades in El Salvador were very proud to commemorate the 10th anniversary of Militante - BPJ, the paper of the revolutionaries of the BPJ (Popular Youth Bloc). The enormous amount of work that has maintained our publication on a more-or-less regular basis over these past 10 years would not have been possible without the invaluable collaboration of sellers, writers, designers, correspondents, but above all, the help of all our readers. We can say proudly, and without exaggeration, that they are spread all over the country.

The Salvadoran section of the International Marxist Tendency, Bloque Popular Juvenil, has marked 10 years of publication of its paper BPJ – Militante. From a modest first issue in February 2009, when it was a quarterly three-page tabloid, the paper has improved into a regular monthly paper with a print run of 600 copies, which doubles for the May Day edition.

Today, In Defence of Marxism is proud to publish for the first time a number of articles in the Burmese language. They have been sent to us by the Social Democratic United Front (SDUF) in Myanmar (formerly Burma), an organisation that took an active part in the student protests against the military dictatorship, together with the Burma Federation of Student Unions.

Despite a great many difficulties, an international seminar on Leon Trotsky was held in Cuba on 6-8 May. The event was convened by the Institute of Philosophy and with the participation of the Leon Trotsky House Museum in Mexico. The International Marxist Tendency’s presence was felt through the Carlos Marx Socialist Studies Centre and a message from Alan Woods.

On the 1 May demonstration in Warsaw, the presence of the Czerwony Front (Red Front) was marked by our banner, slogans and red flags. On that same day, we also released our first booklet, Marxism and Anarchism by Alan Woods. The reception was enthusiastic, as proven by the sale of our whole stock during the first hour of the demonstration. This confirms that, in Poland as in the rest of the world, there is a thirst for the only ideas that are able to guide the working class to victory: the ideas of Marxism.

We publish here a second round of May Day reports, from Pakistan, Indonesia, El Salvador and Nigeria. In all these countries, the on-going capitalist crisis has led to great exploitation and injustice, and workers are engaged in struggles on several fronts for decent wages and living conditions. Many are drawing radical conclusions, and responded very well to our comrades’ message of revolutionary class struggle!

On 3-4 May 2019, the Thirteenth Congress of the Revolutionary Workers' Party was held in Russia. Dozens of congress delegates voted to unify with the Russian section of the International Marxist Tendency, and the unified organisation voted to join the IMT!