After years of monotonous two-party ping-pong, American politics has started to get interesting. Without a mass political party of our own, US workers are forced to abstain, cast a protest vote, or choose between one capitalist party or another. So far, these are still the only options for 2016. But although the current contest is being played out within the narrow constraints of the two-party system, the limits of the current set up are increasingly apparent. Just a few months ago, it was shaping up to be a snoozefest between yet another Bush and another Clinton. However, Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump—and above all, the American electorate—had other ideas.

“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