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We are delighted to announce the publication of important articles from marxist.com into the Kurdish language, thanks to the enthusiastic work of dedicated Kurdish-speaking comrades. We are proud to be able to make these translations, which have been published on the Kurdish section of the Arabic language website of the International Marxist Tendency marxy.com, available on the Kurdish language section of marxist.com. We are certain that they will play a valuable role in theoretically equipping a new generation of class fighters in the Kurdish-speaking world.

The crisis of capitalism is radicalising countless young people, who are hungry for revolutionary ideas and organisation. More and more are identifying themselves as communists. The youth wing of the Communist Party of Britain, the Young Communist League (YCL) has grown on this basis. The British Marxists of Socialist Appeal issued a friendly but sharp open letter to the comrades of the YCL, showing how the opportunism of their leaders, and their emphasis on stunts over theory, stand in sharp contrast to the real ideas of Lenin. The response from the YCL’s official channels entirely proved the comrades’ point.

The devastating effects of global warming are being felt by billions of people all around the world. Meanwhile, capitalist fat cats are openly downplaying the risk of entire cities being buried beneath the rising oceans as a trifling inconvenience. Like Emperor Nero before them, the rulers of this destructive system are fiddling – this time – as Rome drowns.

On Friday 8 July, a few minutes after 5pm local time, Shinzo Abe was pronounced dead. The former PM of Japan, and one of the most influential bourgeois politicians of the last decade, not only in his country but in East Asia generally, was assassinated while making an electoral speech in favour of one of his fellow Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) members.

At the start of July, the Ukrainian courts ordered the closure of the Communist Party of Ukraine (CPU) and the seizure of its assets. The anti-democratic attack is part of a scandalous campaign to crush political dissent and stain the image of ‘communism’ by associating it with Russian imperialism. 

On 27 June, 53 immigrants from Mexico, Guatemala, and Honduras died of heat stroke in the back of a tractor trailer in Texas, 150 miles north of the US-Mexico border. Another nine people in the truck, including children, remain hospitalised. These 62 people, who left home looking for a better life, spent hours and were eventually abandoned in an unairconditioned metal box in over 100F heat with no water.

On Saturday 9 July, tens of thousands of ordinary Sri Lankans overcame transport chaos to descend on the capital, Colombo. Police barricades were swept aside like matchsticks, and the masses stood before the steps of the president’s official residence. And then, they surged forward. The masses, in the floodtide of their ‘aragalaya’ (struggle) suddenly overflowed the safe channels that the ruling class had erected to keep them out of politics. Within minutes, thousands of people had taken over the presidential residence. Within hours, the president-in-hiding was forced to name the date of his resignation.

The Ulster loyalist celebrations known as ‘The Twelfth,’ celebrated every 12 July in the North of Ireland, commemorate the victory of William of Orange over King James II at the Battle of the Boyne in 1690. They are used to whip up sectarian tensions by specifically anti-catholic groups such as the Orange Order, who amongst other things promote the myth that the Williamites’ victory was fought to “overthrow the Pope and popery.” This was recognised for the falsehood it is by the great Irish socialist and revolutionary James Connolly, who understood the pernicious role sectarianism played and continues to play in dividing the workers of Ireland. We republish his thoughts on ‘The Twelfth’

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This summer marks a century since the outbreak of civil war in Ireland, when fighting began between supporters of the Anglo-Irish Treaty and those demanding a sovereign Irish Republic. Today, the struggle for a Socialist United Ireland continues.

On July 2 and 3, 2022 over 100 people gathered in Edmonton for the third annual Western Canadian Marxist Summer School. This was the first large in-person gathering of Marxists in Western Canada since 2019, and the biggest in living memory. People from all over the country, from Montreal to Victoria and even the Yukon attended. The success of the school shows that workers and youth in Western Canada want to fight against capitalism, and they’re looking for ideas and an organization that can help them win.

The NATO Summit in Madrid on 28-30 June took place against the backdrop of the war in Ukraine. For all the talk about “unity”, the reality is that there is a deep rift between the US and the Germany-France axis. For the first time, the new NATO Strategic Concept document describes China as a “systemic challenge.” This is an official recognition of the relative decline of US imperialism and the threat posed by a rising power.

Yesterday in Myanmar, we saw a spontaneous outbreak of industrial workers’ protest against wage cuts, worsening conditions in the workplace and the intensification of work at the A Dream of Kind (ADK) garment factory in Mingalardon township, Yangon. Around 2,000 women workers are demanding labour rights, guarantee of sick leave, casual leave, social welfare, and a wage increase.

The war in Ukraine, rising oil prices and spiralling global inflation have fuelled food scarcity and surges in the price of basic goods in Egypt. Most worrying among the goods affected is bread, which makes up almost 40 percent of the average Egyptian’s diet. President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi has suggested that poor people survive by eating leaves. The absurd and callous response of the ruling class to the food crisis reflects the dead-end of the capitalist system, and places class struggle firmly on the order of the day.

As of the evening of Friday 1 July, an uprising has broken out across Libya. The parliament building in Tobruk, Cyrenaica was stormed by protesters, and partly burned, after the masses used a bulldozer to smash through the gates of the palace.