The Ecuadorian elections on Sunday pit Rafael Correa's successor Andrés Arauz against the businessman and banker Guillermo Lasso, representative of the Ecuadorian capitalist oligarchy. The polls put Arauz ahead of Lasso, but not by enough of a margin to avoid a second round of voting. 

A strike by refuse workers in Brazil against job losses and state repression has ended after 15 days with an important, partial victory. We publish below a report by our Brazilian comrades of Esquerda Marxista from yesterday (available here in Portuguese), giving a balance sheet of the strike. Additionally, we publish an earlier report (Portuguese here) giving some further background on these events.

Our Canadian comrades' 11th annual Montreal Marxist School will be held on Zoom over the February long weekend from Saturday 13th to Monday 15th. As they will not have to worry about travel they decided to expand the school to cover three days instead of two—adding four sessions! As usual, all presentations and discussions will be held in French and English with translation. Over 600 people have already registered! If you haven’t registered, don’t wait any longer!

Retired Mexican General Cienfuegos, who served as Minister of Defence in Peña Nieto’s cabinet in 2012-18, has been cleared of all charges. He had been arrested in the US in Octoberon serious accusations of drug trafficking. This angered and alarmed the Mexican military, fearful that the trial would disclose the army's wider involvement in the drug trade. The generals pressed the left-wing López Obrador government to secure repatriation. After heated back-channel negotiations, the US attorney general decided to release him under the pretext that he would be prosecuted in Mexico. Unsurprisingly, this has

The economic, social and political situation in Haiti continues to deteriorate. Anti-government protests continued in the last few months of the year. Faced with these repeated uprisings against his regime, Jovenel Moïse is using the police and gangs to massacre and terrorise the masses in the streets and in poor neighbourhoods. Note: this article was written in December 2020.

Yesterday, Joe Biden was sworn in as US president surrounded by armed troops, in the middle of a pandemic, weeks after a far-right mob stormed the Capitol building. These are unprecedented times. The capitalists are pinning their hopes on the new administration to pull US capitalism out of this period of chaos and decline, but the writing is on the wall.

In this recent talk to Socialist Appeal supporters, Antonio Balmer (from the Socialist Revolution USA editorial board) discusses the recent dramatic events in Washington, which are yet another symptom of the decline of American capitalism – and a harbinger of revolutionary explosions to come.

Workers of Florenzi Industries in El Salvador are battling their bosses and the state institutions over factory closures and non-payment of wages. Send your support to redaccionmilitantebpj@gmail.com and post declarations of solidarity on social media with the hashtag #SolidaridadObrerasFlorenzi, along with images and videos.

Ford announced last Monday the end of production of vehicles in Brazil. The decision led to immediate cessation of activities at the Camaçari (Bahia) and Taubaté (São Paulo) facilities, maintaining only the production of parts for stock, while the production of Troller jeeps will be maintained only until the last quarter of 2021 in Horizonte (Ceará). There are thousands of workers who will be newly unemployed in Brazil and Argentina, in addition to the thousands indirectly affected by the layoffs.

Trump has been summarily banned from Twitter and a host of other major social media platforms after he encouraged supporters to storm the Capitol building last week. While there is a gratifying irony in this, Marxists must soberly consider the implications of this move by the Big Tech capitalists. 

In yet another scandalous provocation, on 11 January the US has decided to designate Cuba as a “state sponsor of terrorism”. The statement, signed by Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, comes as the Trump administration has less than 10 days left in office. It has no basis in reality and is clearly motivated by cynical political calculations.

2021 has kicked off with a bang. If anyone had any remaining doubts, yesterday's events exposed the depth of the crisis of US capitalism—and it is only the beginning. Even in the turbulent years before and after the US Civil War, we have never seen the US Capitol building breached by protesters—and encouraged by the sitting president! Anti-terrorist attack emergency protocols were activated as tear gas wafted through the corridors, and at least one person was shot and killed. As former president GW Bush put it, these are the scenes one would expect in a “banana republic"—i.e. in a country ravaged by US imperialist intervention, not in the belly of the beast itself.

On Monday, it was announced at the Old Bailey that Julian Assange would not be extradited to the US to face charges of endangering the lives of informants in Afghanistan, and for collusion with Chelsea Manning to hack US government computers. This news has rightly been greeted with enormous relief from Assange’s supporters. Yet there is a caveat. The British court’s ruling was based on concerns that the US prison system would be incapable of preventing Assange from taking his own life. In fact, the court ruled in favour of the prosecution, stating that Assange should be extradited to the US. The message is clear: the British judicial system is subservient to the whims of US

Argentina’s approval of a one-off wealth tax has been presented as a model by some on the left in Britain, as well as in other Latin American countries – where the idea is very popular. What is its real content, however, and is it a useful proposal to deal with the crisis of capitalism and the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic?

The crisis that began in 2008 exposed capitalism. It started a process in which millions of young people and workers began to challenge, not just so-called ‘neoliberalism’, but capitalism itself. Yet this crisis of capitalism, rather than propelling the left to power, has pushed the left into crisis. Superficially, this is a contradiction, but if we look beyond the surface, we see it flows from the limitations of reformist politics in a period such as the one we are living through.