Joe Biden beating Donald Trump in the race for the White House shouldn’t come as a surprise. After all, his opponent was an incompetent reality TV star presiding over a devastated economy and an uncontrolled pandemic. Just a few months earlier, the Commander in Chief had been forced to hide in a bunker in the face of the most massive protest movement in the country’s history. What is surprising is that the result was ever anything but a foregone conclusion.

On 15 October, retired General Salvador Cienfuegos was arrested when he arrived with his family at the Los Angeles airport. The US authorities took him into custody under serious accusations of money laundering and drug trafficking. This was no ordinary arrest. Cienfuegos had served as head of the armed forces and Mexico’s Minister of Defence under Peña Nieto’s presidency in 2012-18. This incident unleashed a major diplomatic crisis between Mexico and the United States. The prestige of the Mexican army (and much else besides) was put at stake. On 20 November, the General Attorney of the United States withdrew the charges and repatriated Cienfuegos to Mexico. He has since remained

For months, the bourgeois press has gushed over Joe Biden’s supposedly progressive climate plans. A headline in the New York Times tells us, “Biden Plans to Move Fast with a ‘Climate Administration.’” The article goes on to paint a glowing picture of a visionary “Climate President” boldly changing course after four years of Trump’s climate denial and environmental rollbacks. Taking the Biden campaign at face value, many climate ...

Nineteen years after the approval of the Agricultural Land and Development Law promoted by Hugo Chavez in 2001, land reform remains an unfinished task in Venezuela, with tendencies seeking to reverse Chavez’s expropriations of large non-productive farms. These expropriations initiated the process of land socialisation and its transfer to those who work it.

On the morning of Thursday, 19 November, organisations that make up the People’s Revolutionary Alternative (APR) protested in repudiation of the media censorship of this left-wing coalition, carried out by public and private media during the electoral campaigns for the parliamentary elections on 6 December. This demonstration took place in front of the Venezuelan Television Corporation (VTV), and was attended by numerous candidates and leading figures of the alliance.

On 12 October, the Cuban Vice Prime Minister and Minister of Economy and Planning, Alejandro Gil Fernández appeared on the television programme Mesa Redonda [Round Table] to talk about the economic strategy “to boost the economy and overcome the global crisis caused by COVID-19." A central part of it is the "monetary reorganisation" that has generated so many rumours and uncertainty in Cuba in recent months.

[The approval by Congress of a budget of cuts, at 5.30 am on 17 November, has unleashed a wave of protests in the Central American country. A section of the ruling class opposes the budget as it increases the country’s indebtedness. The vice-president broke ranks with president Giammattei and asked him not to ratify the budget. 

On November 14 and 15, Marxists from across the United States and around the world came together for our US comrades' virtual Marxist School, “After the 2020 Elections: Preparing for the American Socialist Revolution.”

Yesterday, the Peruvian congress elected a new leadership headed by Francisco Sagasti, who will be sworn in as the new country’s president today. The election of Sagasti (Partido Morado) at the head of a list composed exclusively of congressmen who did not vote for the impeachment of president Vizcarra on 11 November is a desperate attempt to maintain the continuity of the institutions of discredited bourgeois democracy and to rebuild their legitimacy.

Events are moving very fast in Peru. On 9 November, the president Martin Vizcarra was removed from office; a week later the new Merino government has fallen under the pressure of the mass movement unleashed in recent days. The crisis in the bourgeois state has opened the floodgates of the class struggle in the streets and the working class and the youth have defeated the regime in this first battle.

The upcoming municipal elections in Brazil are being seen as a litmus test of Bolsonaro's electoral support following two years of chaos, demagogy, attacks on the working class, and now the disaster of the COVID-19 pandemic. There is clearly a desire for radical change in Brazil, despite the shameful policies of class collaboration by leaders of the left.

In the evening of Friday 7 November, 20-year-old Bianca Alejandrina, known to friends as Alexis, did not return home after she had gone out to sell electronic cigarettes in the suburbs of Cancún, in Quintana Roo, southeast Mexico. On Sunday, her dead body was found. She had been quartered. Her remains had been put in plastic bags. Thousands of youths took to their streets of Cancún and other cities to protest against this brutal murder.

Joe Biden has been named president-elect, though Donald Trump is still refusing to concede. What will the 2020 election results mean for the US working class? What should socialists be doing in the aftermath? Join our US comrades at Socialist Revolution for a two-day online event, providing a Marxist analysis of the elections and the path to revolution in the USA. International participants welcome! Register now using the form on this page or by visiting our US comrades' registration site!

The following document is the product of over 20 years of study and participation in the fight of Indigenous peoples against Canadian capitalism. Over the years, we have learned from real-world struggle, and have detailed these experiences on the www.marxist.ca website. Revolution not Reconciliation encompasses the accumulated conclusions of the supporters of the International Marxist Tendency, Indigenous and non, applying Marxist theory to the movement on the ground.

Joe Biden has won the 2020 presidential elections, to the delight of the establishment, and the relief of millions of ordinary Americans fed up with Donald Trump. However, US society remains polarised, and Biden represents the same bourgeois politics that led to Trump’s rise to begin with. Workers and youth need a real, class-based alternative to the rotten Democratic Party.