Since the beginning of the year, a group of amateur traders, organised on Reddit, have been playing the market against major hedge funds, who had shorted shares for GameStop: a US-based video game retailer. As a result, GameStop’s share prices have gone through the roof, and a billion-dollar hedge fund had to be bailed out to the tune of $2.75 billion. 

In the past few months, many have been speculating on the sudden disappearance of Chinese tycoon Jack Ma from the limelight from early October 2020 to late January 2021. The flamboyant multi-billionaire, CEO of Alibaba, and member of the Chinese Communist Party suddenly found his ambitions dashed and businesses investigated. What does this all mean?

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

Big protests broke out in Russia on 23 January in response to the arrest of oppositionist Alexei Navalny by Putin’s regime. While we have no illusions in liberals like Navalny, our Russian comrades intervened in these protests against political repression by Putin’s gangsters (which will hit working-class and socialist movements hardest), and raised a revolutionary Marxist banner.

Among the countries whose masses participated in what became known as the Arab Spring, the Egyptian Revolution is perhaps the richest in lessons, as well as prospects for the immediate future. This article provides a balance sheet of the revolution and its aftermath, 10 years later, and explains the revolutionary perspectives for Egypt today.

The reactionary regime of Rodrigo Duterte in the Philippines is attempting to harden its crackdown on dissent and consolidate power. Socialists, youth, and workers’ organisations must get ready for a fight.

We have covered recent India's farmers' movement in previous articles ( [1] [2] [3] [4] ) alongside ...

A new, powerful mass movement has erupted in Tunisia. The explosion of anger is due to the economic crisis, which has degraded the lives of Tunisians to a life of poverty and suffering. Exactly 10 years after the 2011 revolution that toppled Ben Ali, none of the problems of the Tunisian masses have been solved.

21 January 2021 was the 100th anniversary of the birth of the Communist Party of Italy. To mark the occasion, we publish a translation of an article by Francesco Giliani, which deals with Antonio Gramsci's Prison Notebooks and how the author has been abused by those who claim to speak in his name. Read the original in Italian here.

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.

For decades, Chancellor Angela Merkel’s German Christian Democratic Union (CDU) has been considered the largest, most-stable and most-influential bourgeois party in Europe. But the CDU is now in crisis and subject to a process of polarisation and emaciation. The election of Armin Laschet as the new party leader does nothing to change this.

Yesterday, Italian Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte narrowly survived a vote of no-confidence (156-149), but he’s not out of the woods yet. He is without a majority in the upper chamber, and opposition leaders are still seeking his resignation. His authority is in tatters and his coalition is hanging together by a thread. This article, published by our Italian comrades last week, explains the crisis embroiling the Conte coalition in the run-up to this vote.

Just before Christmas, outgoing US Attorney General Bill Barr announced additional charges relating to the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie in 1988. This announcement is clearly politically motivated, and is symbolic of how the entire investigation has been focused on imperialist interests, rather than a genuine desire to bring the perpetrators to justice.