In the following polemic, Jorge Martin (editor for marxist.com) responds to a pair of articles in a Cuban magazine, which mischaracterise the 27N movement as being left wing. In fact, this movement of artists and intellectuals for ‘democratic freedoms’ is liberal at best, and openly counterrevolutionary at worst. We also include a letter by Martin, addressed to the Comunistas blog, laying out our differences and calling for communists to stand unequivocally on the side of defending the Cuban Revolution and its conquests.

June 4th marks the 32nd anniversary of the brutal crushing of the Tiananmen Square movement in China in 1989. This year, like every year, we will no doubt see many bourgeois commentators producing articles that use the tragic events of 1989, not to explain what the movement was actually about, but to denounce “communism/socialism” as a failure. They will paint it as a system that cannot work, and present capitalism as the only viable system available to humanity. The media in the west present it as a movement for bourgeois parliamentary democracy and for capitalist restoration in China.

With just a few days until the second round of the presidential election in Peru, Pedro Castillo has only a very narrow advantage over his rival, Keiko Fujimori. The election reveals the enormous political polarisation in the Andean country, which has been devastated by the COVID-19 pandemic.

A mass grave containing the remains of 215 children, some as young as three years of age, was discovered at the end of May on the grounds of the former Kamloops Indian Residential School in British Columbia, Canada. The grisly discovery, the result of a search organized by the Tk'emlúps te Secwépemc First Nation using ground-penetrating radar, confirms what the survivors and families of victims of the residential school system have known for years—that many of the children forced into

On 22 May, 1,400 farmers protested against the lack of permanent access to water in the Iranian province of Isfahan. The regime answered by sending riot police, who brutally beat the farmers, who fought back, leading to clashes. This was not an isolated incident; there is widespread discord among farmers, with recent protests in Khuzestan, Sistan-Balochistan, Khorasan and elsewhere.

Governments across the world have spent the last year propping up the capitalist system with unprecedented state support. But these desperate measures have built dynamite into the foundations of the world economy – which is now set to explode.

One century ago, on 31 May and 1 June 1921, a so-called “race riot” erupted in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Despite a brave attempt by black residents of Tulsa to fight the pogromists, an estimated 300 black people were murdered in those events. The true history of these events has been airbrushed to this day. They represent the horrific fruit of centuries of divide and rule by the American ruling class.

We are very pleased to present this re-publication of Trotsky's classic text, The Revolution Betrayed, in the Vietnamese language. This essential critique of Stalinism is now available to a whole new audience. Click here to download the PDF. 

Big business politicians like Joe Biden and Boris Johnson are promising to ‘build back better’, with investment and jobs. But in reality, the working class will be presented with the bill for capitalism’s crises. Storms and struggle lie ahead.

Dominic Cummings has revealed the utter incompetence of the Tory government, which has the blood of thousands on its hands. Only the working class can bring these murderers to justice, but this requires a struggle to transform the Labour Party

We recently received the following article written by an Egyptian Marxist on the events in Israel/Palestine over recent weeks. Although it was written on 18 May – the day of the general strike that united Palestinians, and before the ceasefire – and events have since moved on, we nevertheless believe it will be of general interest to our readers. For further analysis on the unfolding of events since the general strike, click here.

After eleven days of the ruthless bombardment of Gaza – which has killed more than 240 Palestinians (almost half of whom were children and women) and left thousands severely injured – Israel has eventually agreed to a ceasefire. The bombardment caused the displacement of 75,000 people. Their homes have been destroyed and severe damage has been inflicted on essential infrastructure: schools, hospitals (including the only COVID-19 testing and vaccination centre), electricity and clean water supplies. The population of Gaza will pay a heavy price for many years to come for Israel’s attack.

The second episode of our US comrades' Civil War miniseries takes a closer look at the Constitutional foundations of the crisis that led up to the war, the economics of slavery, the abolitionists, the political scene at the time, and provides a brief timeline of events leading up to secession and the war itself.

The so-called “assault” on the Ceuta border (a Spanish enclave on the African side of the Strait of Gibraltar) by thousands of young migrants in the past few days is part of the same migration crisis that has plagued Africa in recent decades. However, the most recent events have been triggered by a new diplomatic dispute between Spain and Morocco, rooted in the economic crisis unleashed by the pandemic and the worsening of the conflict in the Moroccan-occupied Western Sahara.

California, the breadbasket of the United States, is facing devastation as a centuries-long drought cycle coincides with the ongoing effects of man-made climate change. Rather than mitigating the catastrophe through rational planning, the short-term profiteering of capitalism – and agribusiness in particular – threatens to create an even greater catastrophe. It will be workers, in California and far beyond, who will be made to pay. It has never been clearer that if our planet is to remain habitable for human beings, capitalism must die.