After years of arduous and heated discussions, tactical rearrangements, and adjustments in the political activity of the organisations, the Alternativa Popular Revolucionaria (Peoples’ Revolutionary Alternative) has finally been born in Venezuela. It is an alliance of leftist parties and movements that are determined to mark a decisive break from the anti-worker policies of the national government and to offer the country a new working class, peasant, and peoples’ point of reference for a revolutionary solution to the crisis of capitalism.

We received this article from ELAPRE, a group of revolutionary youth in Haiti. Haiti has experienced the same intensification of the class struggle we have seen in many countries around the world. In recent years, the masses in Haiti have fought to change society and could have overthrown the Moïse government many times. But his government is saved by the ruling class and the reformist leadership of popular movements. Seeing no way forward on this basis, ELAPRE was formed to study the ideas of Marxism, learn the lessons of the past, and to build a revolutionary organisation capable of leading the struggle for socialism. 

For weeks on end, the George Floyd protests against racism and police violence shook America. Support for the movement overflowed all demographic boundaries as an estimated 10% of all American adults—some 25 million people—participated in at least one protest. However, although mass gatherings have continued unabated in some cities, in most of the country the torrential river has inevitably receded into its banks as it was deprived of a revolutionary outlet—for now.

A debate on a bill to withdraw 10 percent of pensions in Chile comes at a time when most of the working population is being affected by COVID-19 and the early stages of a capitalist crisis. The abysmal handling of the pandemic has led to the death of at least 7,000 people and the collapse of the healthcare system. A new wave of protest shows that the spirit of 2019 is still alive for the Chilean workers and youth. 

The leader of the Jóvenes Por Patria (Youth For Fatherland) JPP movement, a member of the Patria Para Todos Fatherland for All (PPT) party and close collaborator of the IMT in Venezuela, Luis Zapata, was arrested on Sunday 12 July at 4:00 PM, by officials of the Bolivarian National Police, near the town of Ospino, Portuguesa State. After 10:00 PM, and after the show of solidarity from a large number of leftist political organisations, the release of the comrade by the Attorney General of the Republic was announced.

Since the spread of COVID-19 began in Canada, there has been a huge surge in opioid-related overdoses across the country. This spike in overdoses is directly connected to the scaling back of resources for those struggling with opioid addiction. This is just another example of how COVID-19 has taken all the problems of capitalist society and exacerbated them, affecting the most downtrodden layers the hardest.

The battered “historical truth” about the disappearance of the student teachers from Ayotzinapa, an account constructed by the Enrique Peña Nieto government based on torture and grotesque distortions, has completely fallen apart. On 7 July, the Attorney General's Office confirmed the identification of Christian Alfonso Rodríguez Telumbre, one of the 43 student teachers. His remains were not found in the Cocula dump, or in the San Juan River, but in a place 800 meters from where Peña’s version of the “truth” was built.

The recent deaths of three migrant workers in Canada from COVID-19 have once again shed light on the horrific abuse and exploitation of workers under Canada’s Temporary Foreign Worker Program. Packed like sardines into overcrowded bunkhouses and workplaces with little regard for their health and no rights or protections, migrant workers have contracted COVID-19 at a far higher rate than the rest of the population. Far from being a new phenomenon, the situation is part of the long saga of Canadian capitalism killing migrant workers for the sake

The following letter is addressed by the leadership of our Venezuelan comrades to the Venezuelan Communist Party (PCV) and Fatherland for All (PPT) party, calling on them to establish a revolutionary alternative to the PSUV in the upcoming parliamentary elections, given the latter’s policies of privatisation, concessions to the capitalists and repression of workers’ and peasant struggle.

We condemn without reservation the outrageous decision of the UK High Court to deny Venezuela access to 31 tonnes of gold deposited at the Bank of England. This decision can only be described as daylight robbery and an act of piracy.

On 25 April 2020, in the midst of the coronavirus lockdown, the Guyana Geology and Mines Commission (GMC) met to debate a project involving an industrial-size, open-pit gold mine in the middle of the Amazon rainforest. The name of the project is Espérance, French for “hope” – hope for whom, one might ask? Despite opposition from environmentalist organisations and local Indigenous peoples, the project was approved.

The US is a country with a rich history of class struggle, which is not well known by most due to conscious efforts by the ruling class to bury the traditions of the labor movement. It is important for socialists in this country to study the history and lessons of the past in order to learn and prepare for events in the future. The following article was written before the coronavirus pandemic broke out, but it is even more relevant now in light of the unprecedented wave of wildcat strikes and labor unrest among frontline workers across the country.

On June 19, the International Longshore and Warehouse Workers Union (ILWU), a militant union of 42,000 members, shut down 29 ports along the West Coast of the United States and Canada, as workers withheld their labor for 8 hours. The strike was organized to demonstrate the labor movement’s solidarity with black lives after the murder of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis police, and held on the Juneteenth anniversary of the emancipation of the last chattel slaves in the US in 1865.

Susana Prieto is a labour lawyer and a prominent activist in the workers’ movement of the border factories (maquiladoras) in the municipalities of Matamoros (Tamaulipas) and Ciudad Juárez (Chihuahua), both of which are located in northern Mexico, on the US border. She has been arrested following orders of the Tamaulipas state government.

“Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it.” Finding ourselves at the beginning of a new depression, interest in the last one has increased considerably. In this in-depth study of the Great Depression, Alex Grant (editor of marxist.ca) details the crash, the response of the ruling class, and how the workers fought back.