Americas

As the crisis of world and American capitalism continues to unfold, continued attacks on the living standards of the working class will eventually lead to militant strikes and protest movements. Labor activists and young workers will rediscover the traditions of the past. In this process they will break with the Democrats and move towards building their own party.

Millions of US families are being threatened with eviction from their homes, some because they cannot pay their mortgages and others because their landlords cannot pay theirs. Now a County Sheriff in Illinois, has refused to carry out any more evictions.

It was not the immediate crisis on Wall Street that has “caused” the public outrage against the Big Business bail out. This was only the “straw that broke the camel’s back.” This has simply brought to the surface deep-seated discontent that had been brewing for years.

We received an interesting letter from a reader of Marxist.com, an ex-minister of the Catholic Church, about the case of Nixon Moreno. Nixon is the leader of a Venezuelan right-wing students' movement. He has been "studying" for 12 years at the Los Andes University (Merida) where he set up his movement called M-13.

Last weeks' rallies in New York against the proposed bail-out of failed banks revealed a very angry mood. Comrades of the Workers' International League were on the rallies and they provide here an interesting insight into the real mood that is developing among US workers as capitalism plummets into crisis.

The much ballyhooed movie There Will Be Blood is supposedly based upon Upton Sinclair’s 1927 novel Oil!, but it surely miscasts Sinclair’s focus and technique. The movie limits itself to a study of a manic, ruthless oil prospector, more a personality study, but the novel is a much wider socialist attack on corporate power and labor suppression, top-to-bottom government corruption, and corporate control of war, universities, and Hollywood . The social and economic concerns read just like the present even though it is set in the World War I and 1920s era, mostly in the early California oil fields. 

A recent screening of Part Two of The Battle of Chile (The Coup d’État) in Bolivar Hall in London highlighted the events that led to the September 11, 1973 coup that removed Allende from power. That experience is full of lessons for today’s revolutions in Bolivia and Venezuela, and beyond.

After years of Bush’s open-ended war on working people at home and abroad, many on the “left” in the United States and beyond are desperate for an alternative. For many, that alternative is Barack Obama. Obama, has been careful to portray himself as a “sensible progressive”. However, far from being a “progressive” alternative, Obama is at his core a typical representative of the bosses’ political parties.

Up to the present, the working class in the United States has not yet built its own political party, unlike in most major industrial countries and even in many less industrialized countries. So what are the prospects that the US workers will eventually build such a party?

We publish here this statement signed by all the working class and people's organisations in the city of Santa Cruz on September 13. The statement clearly expresses the anger of the people faced with the fascist attacks organised by the oligarchy and correctly appeals for mobilisation and legitimate defence in order to face up to them.

On Friday, September 12, we reported on the attack on pro-MAS peasants in the department of Pando, in the East of Bolivia. We said at the time that 9 people had been killed by the hired thugs of the opposition regional prefect (governor), Leopoldo Fernández. But only later was the full scale of the massacre revealed, with the death toll currently at 30, and many more still missing.

We publish a statement of the Marxist Left in Brazil (Esquerda Marxista), which is addressed to Lula and the government, condemning their approach to the crisis in Bolivia and calling on them to support the revolution.

A brief statement by supporters of the International Marxist Tendency in Honduras, highlighting the growing militancy in the country and the need to build a genuine revolutionary leadership within the workers' and students' movement.