“New York City is a great monument to the power of money and greed . . . a race for rent.”—Frank Lloyd Wright

In this epoch of capitalist crisis, it is only a short step from an amorphous striving for basic rights and modest reforms to drawing fully revolutionary conclusions. The rising interest in socialism is a worldwide phenomenon, with different versions flowing from each country’s traditions and history. Here in the US we are experiencing our own variant, distorted through the prism of a country with an anticommunist past and without a traditional mass workers’ party.

Bernie Sanders, the Democratic Party candidate for president of the United States, has attracted huge crowds and generated enormous enthusiasm at campaign stops around the country. He calls himself a socialist and urges a “political revolution against the billionaire class.” What does Sanders’ campaign reflect and represent? How should revolutionary Marxists approach it?

With the heinous murder of Freddie Gray, the #BlackLivesMatter movement came roaring back to life. Tens of thousands of people again flooded streets across the country to protest against racism and police brutality. These once-routine and largely unrecognized murders are now churning up powerful forces long dormant in the womb of society.

The death of Freddie Gray in Baltimore, Maryland is just the latest in a string of police killings of black men to hit national headlines. But it seems that it may mark the end of a national ebb in the #BlackLivesMatter movement. As things heat up in the coming months, an important question must be asked: what is the way forward for the movement?

In a world bleak with news of ISIS, Boko Haram, and the never-ending murders of unarmed black men by the police, Europe offers more than a glimmer of excitement and genuine hope. The election of Syriza in Greece has electrified the world. Podemos in Spain is shaking up politics as usual in the eurozone’s fourth-largest economy. By taking the global struggle against austerity to the next level, Greek and Spanish workers are showing the way forward. However, these political parties didn’t arise in a vacuum. They are the result of a protracted process of crisis and class struggle, of wave after wave of strikes and social movements, the testing of traditional leaders and organizations, of

On February 1, 3,800 workers walked out of 9 oil producing facilities in the US. In the past three weeks, the strike has spread to 6 additional plants, including the Motiva Enterprises refinery in Port Arthur, Texas, which has a crude capacity of 600,000 barrels a day, the largest of its kind in the country. The strike now involves 6,550 workers, at plants accounting for 20% of the country’s refining capacity. This is the largest walkout since 1980, and there is the possibility of it spreading to more workplaces.

After many months of work, the Workers International League is proud to unveil our brand new website! We hope the new functionality and ease of use will make it even easier for workers and young people to learn more about Marxism and the ideas and work of the IMT in the USA. Check it out and join the struggle for a better world!

Overshadowed by Obama's request to Congress for formal authorization to use military force against ISIS, comes news of the grisly murders of three young Muslim students in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. Throughout Tuesday evening and into Wednesday morning, coverage of the murders was notably absent from the major news outlets—CNN's top story was an op-ed piece about whether or not another Spiderman movie reboot was necessary. Late into the night, the valley of the news giants was filled with the sounds of peaceful snoozing. Trying to find additional information about what had happened proved fruitless and frustrating for the thousands on social media demanding—through tweets, status

The vicious cycle of state and individual terror continues unabated. Now France has been pulled violently into the maelstrom. The Marxists have long explained that imperialism and Islamic fundamentalism are two aspects of the same reactionary phenomenon—the decay and decline of capitalism—which threatens to take the whole of humanity down with it.

A grassroots upsurge has swept the US over the past few weeks, its sudden eruption marked by huge weekend marches on the East Coast and by smaller, broadly based protests across the length and breadth of the country.

The ugly face of Obama's “hope we can believe in” has been starkly revealed. The extrajudicial killings of Michael Brown, Eric Garner, and 12-year-old Tamir Rice, all unarmed black males killed by white police officers, have set off an emotional firestorm of protests and outrage on a scale not seen in the US in many years. Even more than the deaths

America is number one . . . in its prison population. In the “land of the free,” several million humans languish in cages in the name of law and order. Since its exponential growth in the past four decades, there is not another nation on this planet that comes near America’s incarceration rate. Instead of being given the help they need most, the workers and youth who are hardest hit by the poverty, unemployment, and social decay endemic to capitalism are brutalized by the police and traumatized by hellish prison conditions until they no longer become a problem to the system. Furthermore the expansion of the prison system is used as a battering ram by the bosses against any resistance

First came Chelsea Manning and Julian Assange, with sickening revelations of US war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan, and of the cynical conduct of US diplomacy. Then Edward Snowden exposed the full extent of NSA information gathering: anything and everything you have read, written, or spoken on the phone or internet in the last decade or more has been recorded and archived and can be retrieved at will. Branded as enemies of the state, traitors, and threatened with the death penalty, all three of them are either in prison or

Millions of US immigrants, their families, co-workers, friends, and supporters had their hopes for relief from their difficult conditions built up by advance hype for President Obama’s November 20 speech on immigration policy reform. All such hopes were cruelly shattered once the outlines of his policy shift became more clear—an outline with an ...

Private ownership of the means of production has hit a dead end on a world scale. The system is dying on its feet, and this inevitably has profound political and social consequences in the country par excellence of capitalism. Francis Fukuyama, who, upon the fall of the USSR, famously declared “the end of history,” now says that America “suffers from the problem of political decay in a more acute form than other democratic political systems.” In plain English: capitalism and its institutions are in big trouble.

More than a month after the killing of Michael Brown, an unarmed 18-year-old black youth, Darren Wilson, the police officer who shot him multiple times despite Brown having raised his arms in surrender, remains free and safely in hiding. The St. Louis region is tense in anticipation of the grand jury's ruling on whether or not to file charges against Wilson. Brown's shooting has drawn attention to the chilling fact that an average of two black men are killed by police every week in the United States. Michael Brown's killing, however, is not just another repetition of this tragic cycle. In many ways, it was "the straw that broke the camel's back," opening up a new stage in the changing

What if they held an election and nobody came? In some ways, the 2014 midterm election was very much like this. Just 36.6 percent voted, only 13% of them under age 30, and as many as 70 million eligible voters are not even registered. The main capitalist parties—the Democrats and Republicans—do not deal with real issues related to the lives of the overwhelming majority of the population. This is true bourgeois democracy. That is, democracy for the top 1% or 2%, but not for the rest of us!

We republish below the transcript of a speech delivered by​ WIL member Martin Michaels ​on ​November 1 in Minneapolis, MN​,​ at the March Against​ ​Corruption.​ ​

Join members of the International Marxist Tendency and the Marxist Student Association for this year's North East Regional School on 1 November. Speakers from Belgium and Canada will speak on the Arab Revolution and the Student and Youth movements throughout the Americas. More info below.