In ancient Rome the ruling class maintained its hold on power by offering the people bread and circuses. Yesterday millions of people watched the first US presidential debate, held at Hofstra University, New York. This was the modern equivalent of the kind of circus that served as a spectacle to divert the attention of the masses from their miserable conditions of existence.

Childhood is supposed to be a simple, happy time, the ascendant years of a human’s life when, according to the traditional bourgeois world view, the possibilities for the future are wide open. Having lived through the relative prosperity of the postwar boom themselves, Baby Boomer parents confidently assured their children that they could be anything they wanted to be when they grew up.

The champions of the free market never miss an opportunity to extol its virtues: peace, prosperity, efficiency, integrity, a wide range of freedoms, and let’s not forget: lots and lots of choices. If you work hard and play by the rules, you too can get ahead. However, far from the myth peddled by the free marketeers, capitalism is organically and incurably irrational, exploitative, and corrupt.

With the crowning of Hillary Clinton at the DNC in Philadelphia, the 2016 election cycle appears to have come full circle. She began as the frontrunner twelve months ago, and she is now officially the party's nominee. However, what we have passed through over the last few months is not a circle, but a contradictory spiral of development. The river of American political struggle has overflowed, and while Sanders' capitulation will inevitably lead to a temporary ebbing of the tide, its course has been changed forever.

The grisly images on television and social media are unrelenting: car bombings, nightclub massacres, killer cops, and cop killers. It is what Lenin called capitalist “horror without end”—without end. Not only in “far away” Iraq, Afghanistan, and Mexico, but in some of the most prosperous cities in the richest country on earth. This is the gruesome face of the capitalist crisis, the crisis of a system that threatens to take the entire human species down with it.

On June 28, 2016, Bernie Sanders penned an op-ed piece in the New York Times titled “Democrats Need to Wake Up.” In it, he highlighted the following facts: the 62 richest people on planet earth own as much as the poorest 3.6 billion; the top 1% owns more than the bottom 99%, and the top one-tenth of 1% own almost as much as the bottom 90%. He wrote that his campaign was a fight for a political revolution, to take political power away from the super-rich, and he correctly identified Hillary Clinton as part of the

Many decades ago, Lenin characterized capitalism as “horror without end,” As if to prove the point, in the early hours of Sunday, June 12, an armed Omar Mateen stormed into a popular gay nightclub in Orlando, Florida and massacred those inside, leaving forty-nine people dead and fifty-three wounded.

The results are in from the final state primaries and the outcome is no real surprise. With the media, the Democratic Party machine, and big money behind her, Hillary Clinton has more pledged delegates than Bernie Sanders, and with the hundreds of superdelegates in her pocket, is all but the party’s nominee. Nonetheless, Bernie Sanders won primaries and caucuses in 22 states and more than 11 million votes. Sanders’ strong showing, including his latest victories in North Dakota and Montana, is proof that millions do not want to settle for Hillary Clinton versus Donald Trump.

The results are in from the final state primaries and the outcome is no real surprise. With the media, the Democratic Party machine, and big money behind her, Hillary Clinton has more pledged delegates than Bernie Sanders, and with the hundreds of superdelegates in her pocket, is all but the party’s nominee. Nonetheless, Bernie Sanders won primaries and caucuses in 22 states and more than 11 million votes. Sanders’s strong showing, including his latest victories in North Dakota and Montana, is proof that millions do not want to settle for Hillary Clinton versus Donald Trump.

In a recent press release, Dr. Anne Schuchat, a senior Obama administration official with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), stated that “Everything we look at with this [Zika] virus seems to be a bit scarier than we initially thought.” As of April 2016, there have been 700 confirmed cases related to the Zika Virus in the United States.

Following a hugely successful three-month campaign which received support from around the planet, the US section of the IMT is thrilled to announce that we have obtained offices in New York City. This is a tremendous victory for our organization and an important step for the growth of the forces of Marxism in the US. This achievement comes at a time when interest in the ideas of socialism and revolution have reached unprecedented levels in modern memory.

Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) has been in a militant struggle with the city of Chicago and the state of Illinois for several years. Starting with the Republicans’ “No Child Left Behind” legislation, relentless attacks on students and teachers have followed in the past decade and a half.

That “the system is rigged” is the sentiment of millions of Americans as we head into the final stretch of the candidate selection process. Both Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump, who are seen as anti-political establishment outsiders, have tapped into this deep vein of discontent.

The following is the draft US perspectives document which will be discussed at the National Congress of the US section of the International Marxist Tendency. The document aims to outline the main economic, social, and political developments in the United States over the past period and lay out perspectives for the class struggle in the coming period.

ْْْْْْThe 2016 presidential election is not like most recent US elections—it is actually interesting and exciting! For the first time in US history, a mainstream candidate who calls himself a socialist and says we need a “political revolution against the billionaire class” is having a major impact.