This year’s May Day celebrations are taking place against a backdrop of bitter strikes and struggles, with teachers, nurses, and civil servants all walking out in the coming days. To win, the working class needs a revolutionary leadership. This article was originally published by Socialist Appeal on 27 April.

In less than a week, a nationwide strike has broken out across Iran. Beginning on 21 April, with 18 workplaces affected in the oil-gas sector, it has now spread to now involve over 100 workplaces across the mining, steel and oil-gas sectors. The strikes began in the oil-rich province of Khuzestan, but they rapidly spread to Bushehr, Fars, Kerman, Isfahan, Kerman and Yazd province.

On 23 April, 152 comrades of der Funke/l'étincelle (the Spark) – the Swiss section of the International Marxist Tendency – met in Bern to discuss the crisis of capitalism and clarify the tasks of Marxists.

In his inaugural speech as President of France in 2017, Emmanuel Macron said that he wanted to “convince our compatriots that France’s power is not declining, but that we are on the threshold of an extraordinary renaissance”. Since then, the decline of French imperialism has accelerated, both economically, geopolitically and militarily. This is particularly the case in Africa.

During his televised speech on 17 April, French President Emmanuel Macron tried to move on from the uproar surrounding the recent pension reform by promising the Earth to all those who, since 19 January, have mobilised in the streets and have been on strike against this bill.

The carefully maintained picture of a unified bloc of unconditional support for Ukraine turned slightly grainy recently, as Poland imposed import bans on Ukrainian agricultural products. The move widened the rift within the EU as Hungary, Slovakia and Bulgaria followed suit. These unilateral moves have added to the friction that already existed between Brussels and these frontier states.

This week on International Marxist Radio, Tom Trottier, a leading comrade of Socialist Revolution, the US section of the International Marxist Tendency, speaks about exciting developments in the labour movement in the United States of America!

Today, 25 April, is a day of celebration in Italy. It is the anniversary of the final fall of the hated Fascist regime in 1945. The official history books tell us that the anti-fascist movement, the hundreds of thousands of armed partisans who fought in the resistance, were fighting for a democratic republic, which is what was finally established. This ignores the fact that what was taking place was a social revolution – not just for democracy, but for workers’ power. In this brilliant text written in 1930 – 15 years before these events – Leon Trotsky predicted that a “democratic republic”, i.e. a bourgeois-democratic regime, would only emerge from a defeat of the revolutionary

“Those of you who haven’t joined yet – now is the time to do it. Join the struggle to finish capitalism once and for all, to finish the history of class struggle, to finish our prehistory so that we can enter the era of communism.” With these powerful words, Ylva Vinberg ended the congress of Revolution (IMT in Sweden), gathering over 100 enthusiastic Marxists from all over the country. 

A new study by the London-based charity War On Want finds that, even though the global food system produces more than 2.6 times the average person’s caloric needs, 2.3 billion people lack secure access to healthy and nutritious food. How is this criminal contradiction to be explained?

The most recent launch of a rocket by Elon Musk’s spacecraft manufacturing company SpaceX ended dramatically on Thursday, as the vehicle touted as the most powerful rocket ever built went up in flames just off the coast of Texas. Despite being heralded as a “successful failure”, SpaceX’s escapades show the frivolous wastefulness of the capitalist class, who grow fat on government handouts, while the standard of living for workers only continues to worsen.

In the 1960s, especially in radical student circles, there were many fanciful ideas floating about. The most pernicious and erroneous of these was the view represented by Herbert Marcuse, Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, that “neo-capitalism” had evolved ways of avoiding capitalist crisis, and that the working class had been integrated into the system as passive consumers in the “affluent” society. As Daniel Morley explains, these were the pseudo-Marxist ideas of the so-called Frankfurt School.

Over 155,000 federal government workers organized with the Public Service Alliance of Canada (PSAC) are leading one of the largest strikes in Canadian history, after years of real wage cuts and fruitless negotiations.

We republish here an article written by comrades of Fightback, the Canadian section of the International Marxist Tendency, written in advance of the recent public sector strike. This strike involved over 155,000 workers organised by the Public Service Alliance of Canada (PSAC), making it one of the largest strikes in Canadian history. This article, originally published 18 April, provides useful background information for an international audience.

When the workers of Warrior Met Coal downed tools on April 1, 2021, they didn’t realize they were launching the longest miners’ strike in US history. But these miners had every reason to prepare for a serious fight, and they held their picket line for over 600 bitter days—until the union leadership threw in the towel. Just shy of the strike’s two-year anniversary, president Cecil Roberts of the United Mine Workers of America (UMWA) submitted an “unconditional offer to return to work.” He justified the surrender by arguing that the strike was at an impasse.