Americas

On 17-19 May, 110 communists from all over Mexico (and abroad) met to found the Revolutionary Communist Organisation (RCO), which will be the Mexican section of the Revolutionary Communist International.

What began with teachers’ protests over pay rises has expanded into a week-long police riot and a grassroots rebellion of teachers, health, energy and other state workers in the province of Misiones, in the far northeast of the country, 1,000 km from the capital Buenos Aires.

In an electric atmosphere, nearly 400 communists gathered in Montreal from across Canada and Québec and officially founded the Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP)! Our goal: to be the generation to overthrow capitalism in our lifetime, and lay the foundations for building a society free of exploitation, violence and oppression. 

Here, we publish two eyewitness reports from our comrades who were involved in the encampments in Alberta when the police violently broke them up. Videos of police brutality from these campuses went viral on social media over the weekend, fueling outrage at the violation of the right to protest. These occupations are the first demonstrations in Alberta to be broken up physically by the police in a very long time.

On Tuesday night, police stood by as a mob of Zionist extremists were allowed to violently assault the Palestine solidarity encampment at University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). The peaceful pro-Palestine protests breaking out across the USA have been smeared as violent, racist and antisemitic by the media a politicians of all stripes. But there has been a conspiracy of silence around the real overt racism and extreme violence of the Zionists attacking campuses these past few days.

The government of Javier Milei is once more accelerating the deterioration of workers’ living and working conditions. Adding to the list of government subsidies which have been eliminated over the past few months, today he is attacking subsidies for long-distance train fares as well as those that serve the suburbs of Buenos Aires, which many poor workers depend on for their daily commute. Ticket prices will rise an average of 54 percent, although they will rise by 2,000 percent for long-distance trains.

Last week, workers at a Volkswagen plant in Chattanooga, Tennessee voted to join the United Auto Workers (UAW). The overwhelming result—2,628 to 985—is the UAW’s first success at a foreign-owned automaker in the South. UAW President Shawn Fain called it “the first domino to fall” in the union’s campaign to organize 13 companies including Tesla, BMW, Toyota, Nissan, Honda, and Hyundai. The next target is a Mercedes-Benz plant in Vance, Alabama where 5,200 workers will vote May 13–17.

Across the United States over 60 universities and colleges have seen students and faculty organising encampments in a growing movement against the massacre in Gaza. A whole generation is being politicised and drawing conclusions about the nature of imperialism, the role of the police and the state and the need for collective action.

Protests against Israel’s American-backed genocidal onslaught in Gaza are escalating on campuses across the country. On April 17, students at Columbia University in New York City set up the “Gaza Solidarity Encampment,” demanding the university divest from Israel and companies that profit off the slaughter. The protest coincided with Columbia President Minouche Shafik’s appearance at a Congressional hearing aimed at slandering the Palestine solidarity movement as

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Glauber Braga, a left-wing member of the Brazilian parliament for the Party of Socialism and Liberty (PSOL), is currently being threatened and victimised for boldly standing up against provocations from the far-right Free Brazil Movement (MBL). Communists of the International Marxist Tendency give their full solidarity to comrade Glauber Braga, who was absolutely correct to oppose the harassment and bullying of these far-right thugs. 

On Friday 15 March, Colombian President Gustavo Petro took to the streets of Cali. In the speech he delivered on the day, he proposed a constituent assembly as a route out of the various problems his presidency has encountered in attempting to pass the reforms for which he was elected.

It is not often that the Royal Canadian Mounted Police and the communists agree on something. But the deep crisis of capitalism that we are facing today is an existential threat that cannot be ignored by the most serious strategists of capital. Therefore, the latter are increasingly reaching the same conclusion as Marxists despite coming from the opposite side: that revolution is around the corner.