Millions of workers and youth in the US are fed up with the two parties of the capitalist class: the Republicans and the Democrats. The lack of a mass working-class party leaves voters with little real choice: either vote for one of the ruling class’s parties; cast a protest vote for a tiny third party; or abstain altogether. But why is there no mass workers’ party in the US? Why have past attempts to build one failed? What lessons can we learn from history to change this in the future?

The USA has been hit by a ‘Striketober’ of industrial action across a range of sectors: from healthcare to construction; carpentry to coal mining; media to communications; snack foods and cereal manufacturing. In all, 100,000 workers voted to authorise strike action this month.

The US section of the International Marxist Tendency held its largest-ever National Congress on the weekend of October 9 and 10. As the morning sun lit up the bright fall-colored foliage around the Pittsburgh Congress venue, 170 delegates and comrades filed into the meeting hall to take their seats.

The following perspectives document was discussed and unanimously approved by the National Congress of the US Section of the IMT in October 2021. It draws a balance sheet of the profound transformation of the political landscape in the US and analyzes the major factors that are shaping mass consciousness today. Tens of millions are drawing revolutionary conclusions. Never before in living memory have there been so many opportunities for the ideas of Marxism to take hold and become a mass political force. If you agree with the analysis presented here, we invite you to join the IMT and prepare for the historic events ahead.

We would like to bring our readers’ attention to this article by Cuban Communist Frank Josué Solar Cabrales, which was published in Granma, the official newspaper of the Cuban Communist Party under the title “The realism of the ‘impossible’”. The article deals with the question of the conditions for Latin American unity. We fully share the author’s contention that this can only be achieved through socialist revolution and the impact that such a development would have on the class struggle worldwide.

This year marks the 500th anniversary of the capture of Cuauhtémoc [the last Aztec ruler] on 13 August 1521 by the Spanish invaders, an event that marked the date of the fall of Mexico-Tenochtitlán. This fall represented a very important stage in the process of the ascent of capitalism and its worldwide rise to dominance. It was one of the starting points of capitalist globalisation. And it represented a clash between two modes of production: capitalism in its early stage of development, and the mode of production of the Mesoamerican world, with its own peculiarities.

On Wednesday, 6 October, Guido Bellido resigned from the Presidency of the Council of Ministers and President Pedro Castillo announced a new cabinet that represents a clear shift to the right. Those ministers that the bourgeois press described as “radicals” and “senderistas” [Shining Path supporters] were turfed out. In their place came businessmen, the “moderates", and the so-called “caviar left” committed to the stability of the bourgeois regime. Finance Minister Francke, the fifth column of CONFIEP business federation in the government, remains in his post. The Peru Libre parliamentary group has declared it will not support the new government.

This article was written on 14 September, before the shift in events detailed in today’s main article. However, the essential points about the background to and dynamics of the political struggle in Peru today remain valid, and help to place the latest developments in their proper context.

The recent agreement between Australia, the UK and the US has caused a crisis in international relations. With France temporarily recalling its ambassador from Washington and China issuing a protest, the new agreement has upset feelings across the board. This deal, however, merely constituted one more step in a wider realignment among the imperialist powers.

Senior officials within the CIA and the Trump administration plotted to kidnap, and even assassinate, Julian Assange: whistle-blower and founder of WikiLeaks, as revealed by a shocking report in Yahoo News, published last Sunday.

In a historic and unanimous vote by ten ministers, the Supreme Court of Mexico has declared the penalisation of women who decide to get an abortion unconstitutional. That this vote has taken place now is clearly the result of our struggle in the streets, which has made it impossible for women’s rights to be ignored any longer. Without this struggle, the vote simply never would have happened.

Last week, in a desperate gamble the Bukele government in El Salvador introduced a new Bitcoin Law that will make the volatile cryptocurrency legal tender in the Central American nation. The measure has been extremely unpopular and has met with all manner of technical and political problems. Since the first of these two articles was written, a massive protest of 10,000 people against the Bukele regime took place on 15 September, marking El Salvador’s 200 years of independence. The comrades from the Bloque Popular Juvenil (Salvadorean section of the IMT) participated actively.

On 7 September, competing demonstrations were held in Brazil, both for and against the Bolsonaro government. We publish two reports from our Brazilian comrades about these protests and what they indicate about the political situation in the country.

The US Supreme Court has voted to uphold a new Texas state law that drastically limits access to legal abortions. This scandalous attack on reproductive rights must be met with working-class resistance in defence of fundamental democratic freedoms, which are under threat from the rotten US capitalist system.

Twenty years ago today, the United States witnessed the biggest and bloodiest attack on its soil in modern history. At least 2,977 men and women died and at least 25,000 were injured after a gang of terrorists crashed a series of commercial aircraft into the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center in New York, leaving the American people in a state of shock and disbelief. Across the world, millions of people looked on in horror at devastating scenes of desperate people trapped in the upper floors of the towers, some of whom jumped to their deaths rather than face being burnt alive, shortly before the towers collapsed, leaving thousands buried under the rubble.