It is undeniable that the pandemic has hammered the final nail into the coffin of the previous epoch. But jubilant claims that austerity is a thing of the past have proved premature, as the ruling class begins to wind up its COVID spending spree and resume attacks on workers. The question is, what is the character of this new period, and what will it entail for the working class?

On 13 September, Norway held its parliamentary elections. These elections came at a very significant period in Norwegian politics: They are the first elections since the outbreak of the pandemic in March last year. The pandemic revealed the contradictions hidden under the surface.

Young people around the world are “losing the generation game” because of the global capitalist crisis. Such is the conclusion drawn in a recent article published in the Financial Times, the mouthpiece of big business in Britain. To the ruling class’ horror, the crisis is leading to increasing radicalisation of the youth.

With a tsunami of austerity and attacks looming, the TUC [Trades Union Congress] is meeting this weekend to discuss the way forward for workers in Britain. The trade unions need a fighting programme, and a militant, unified resistance to the Tories and bosses.

World music and the class struggle for democratic rights have both lost an important figure, Mikis Theodorakis, the much-loved composer of the Greek people. Mikis Theodorakis dedicated his life to the musical rebirth of post-war Greece. His musical compositions combined an incredible artistic prowess with a remarkable expression of the Greek working class’ mood, aspirations and struggles against poverty and oppression.

Over the past few months, a rising number of migrants have attempted to cross from Belarus into the EU via Lithuania, Latvia and Poland. The numbers are small – amounting to a few thousand people at most (roughly 4,000 entering Lithuania, 340 Latvia and 870 Poland). What has been the response of the EU, which presents itself as a paragon of democratic humanitarianism? It has given its member states on the Belarussian border the green light to meet the innocent victims of imperialism with barbed wire, the deployment of soldiers, imprisonment in prison camps and the construction of a wall along the border.

The Norwegian state energy company, Statkraft, has attempted to impose an extremely exploitative contract on construction workers involved in the ‘Los Lagos’ hydroelectric project in Chile. The workers of SINACIN union are fighting back. Meanwhile, comrades from the IMT have led efforts to build international solidarity for the workers, whose struggle has found a sympathetic echo in the Norwegian labour movement. We provide a report here by comrades of the IMT in Chile and Norway.

With Labour conference approaching, the right wing of the Labour Party in Britain are going on the offensive, expelling socialists from the party in order to crush the left. We appeal to grassroots members and affiliated unions to help us in the fight against the purge.

Left-winger Sharon Graham has won the race to become general secretary of one of Britain’s biggest unions, Unite, which has almost 1.3 million members. She did so by appealing to rank-and-file members with a promise to defend jobs and conditions. This early tremor is a sign of the earthquakes that will shake the trade unions from top to bottom.

Otelo Nuno Romão Saraiva de Carvalho died last month. As a young army major, Otelo planned and coordinated the military coup of 25 April 1974 against the Estado Novo dictatorship in Portugal, despite the fact that the army had previously been one of its main pillars of support. What Otelo could not foresee was that the masses would surge onto the stage of history through the breach that the 25 April coup created at the very core of the bourgeois state. This date therefore also marked the beginning of the Portuguese Revolution.

The Western withdrawal from Afghanistan is not only a humiliation for US imperialism, but also for Brexiteer Tories, whose jingoistic delusions have been shattered. To help the Afghan masses, we must overthrow this rotten Tory government.

Four years after the murder of Daphne Caruana Galizia, a journalist and blogger who led the investigation of the Panama Papers leak in Malta, a new inquiry has concluded that the state should “shoulder responsibility for her death”. The 437-page report does not directly blame the Maltese state for the orchestration of her murder, but it deems that an atmosphere of impunity was generated by the highest echelons of the

British Marxist Ben Gliniecki recently received a letter of automatic exclusion from the Labour Party officialdom for the 'crime' of supporting Socialist Appeal, as part of the recent purge of left-wingers by Keir Starmer and the Blairites. We republish his reply to the Labour bureaucracy.

The immense destruction caused by the wildfires in Varybobi, Evia and dozens of other areas of Greece is not solely due to the winds, high temperatures and climate change, as the ND government and the bourgeois media claim. The real cause of this catastrophe is the reactionary policies and the criminal indifference of the Greek ruling class.

The 11 July Bulgarian parliamentary elections dislodged the right-wing GERB (“Citizens for the European Development of Bulgaria”) party from power. Deep divisions in the ruling class now threaten to transform a crisis of the regime into one of the whole political system.