Big business politicians like Joe Biden and Boris Johnson are promising to ‘build back better’, with investment and jobs. But in reality, the working class will be presented with the bill for capitalism’s crises. Storms and struggle lie ahead.

Dominic Cummings has revealed the utter incompetence of the Tory government, which has the blood of thousands on its hands. Only the working class can bring these murderers to justice, but this requires a struggle to transform the Labour Party

We recently received the following article written by an Egyptian Marxist on the events in Israel/Palestine over recent weeks. Although it was written on 18 May – the day of the general strike that united Palestinians, and before the ceasefire – and events have since moved on, we nevertheless believe it will be of general interest to our readers. For further analysis on the unfolding of events since the general strike, click here.

After eleven days of the ruthless bombardment of Gaza – which has killed more than 240 Palestinians (almost half of whom were children and women) and left thousands severely injured – Israel has eventually agreed to a ceasefire. The bombardment caused the displacement of 75,000 people. Their homes have been destroyed and severe damage has been inflicted on essential infrastructure: schools, hospitals (including the only COVID-19 testing and vaccination centre), electricity and clean water supplies. The population of Gaza will pay a heavy price for many years to come for Israel’s attack.

The second episode of our US comrades' Civil War miniseries takes a closer look at the Constitutional foundations of the crisis that led up to the war, the economics of slavery, the abolitionists, the political scene at the time, and provides a brief timeline of events leading up to secession and the war itself.

The so-called “assault” on the Ceuta border (a Spanish enclave on the African side of the Strait of Gibraltar) by thousands of young migrants in the past few days is part of the same migration crisis that has plagued Africa in recent decades. However, the most recent events have been triggered by a new diplomatic dispute between Spain and Morocco, rooted in the economic crisis unleashed by the pandemic and the worsening of the conflict in the Moroccan-occupied Western Sahara.

California, the breadbasket of the United States, is facing devastation as a centuries-long drought cycle coincides with the ongoing effects of man-made climate change. Rather than mitigating the catastrophe through rational planning, the short-term profiteering of capitalism – and agribusiness in particular – threatens to create an even greater catastrophe. It will be workers, in California and far beyond, who will be made to pay. It has never been clearer that if our planet is to remain habitable for human beings, capitalism must die.

Over the last few days, dockworkers of the South African Transport and Allied Workers Union (SATAWU) in the port city of Durban have refused to handle cargo from an Israeli ship, in protest against Israel's bombardment of the besieged Gaza strip over the last few weeks. Currently, the ship is still lying in the Durban harbour waiting to take on cargo. 

On Saturday, while millions of households were distracted by Britain’s “nil points” Eurovision performance, a leaked Public Health England report found its way to the Financial Times.

Protests and strikes are now spreading across every sector of the economy in Iran. There have been at least 100 strikes and protests over the course of the past few months. While not yet on the scale that we have seen in the recent past, pensioners and workers receiving social security have also held weekly protests across the country.

The racist policy of the Social Democrats is worse than any of the right-wing parties in parliament. It is the result of the party’s inability to deliver on any of its promises of bettering the lives of the majority of Danes. However, as the protests last Wednesday hinted at, the government should expect massive opposition from the streets to their reactionary politics.

The United States was founded in the cauldron of a revolutionary war against British rule between 1775 and 1783. Almost a century later, in 1861, the country was plunged into a bloody civil war, which Marxists see as the second American Revolution. This first instalment of a miniseries on the American Civil War lays out the basic theoretical foundations for understanding these titanic events.

A worrying new strain of the coronavirus has emerged from the nightmarish second wave in India, which some scientists fear could spark yet another wave in Britain (where it has gained a foothold), and set back the global fight against the pandemic. This “double mutant” strain, which seems to be more transmissible than previous iterations of the virus, is spreading globally. The hapless Tory administration in Britain is making all the same blunders that provoked the catastrophic surge of infections last winter.

Capitalism has ceased to take humanity forward. It should long ago have been overthrown by the working class. Why hasn't it then? The key to answering that question lies in the role of leadership and of the revolutionary party. This article, based on a talk at the 2021 Montreal Marxist Winter School, looks at the different sides of this question and the rich lessons of the world working-class movement.

Last week, local residents in Glasgow successfully resisted an attempted Home Office deportation. This inspiring example shows the way forward in the fight against the Tories’ hostile environment – through mass mobilisation and class solidarity.