In early February of 2023, citizens of the United States – ‘land of the free and home of the brave’ – are told that they have a new menace to fear. Is it a nuclear-armed stealth drone? A killer robot that invades your home? Or a cyber attack that takes away your savings and steals your identity? The truth is far more terrifying: a balloon from China! For weeks, a bright white spy balloon, visible to the naked eye from the ground, loomed above the world’s most powerful empire. Following the lead of the White House, world politics reeled in terror beneath its terrible shadow.

On 26 September 2022, news broke of explosions at the Nord Stream 1 and 2 natural gas pipelines, which run from Russia to Germany. The blasts rendered three of the four lines inoperable, and released vast quantities of gas into the Baltic Sea. Ukrainian and Western politicians immediately blamed “Russian sabotage”: a claim that was repeated verbatim by all the major media outlets, without a shred of evidence, as part of a relentless slew of war propaganda. Now, a bombshell exposé by a renowned American journalist has accused the US of orchestrating the attack.

Socialists around the globe, beware – the United States Congress has denounced your horrors! Earlier this month, that beacon of freedom and justice overwhelmingly passed H. Con. Res. 9 to denounce “the horrors of socialism.”

Ecuadorians went to the polls last Sunday, 5 February, for municipal elections and to vote in an eight-question referendum called by the banker-president Guillermo Lasso. Lasso’s party came out of the municipal elections completely defeated, while ‘Yes’ – defended by Lasso – lost in all eight questions of the referendum. The elections were a hard blow to the capitalist oligarchy and its political representatives.

The American Civil War is an event of world-historic significance. This revolutionary war, which consumed US society for four long and bloody years, overthrew slavery as a mode of exploitation and laid the ground for the rapid development of US capitalism. This episode in the class struggle graphically demonstrated the dynamics of revolution, and should be studied by all class-conscious workers and youth.

Outrage at police violence has erupted once again across the United States. Protests began in Memphis on Friday, January 27, following the release of video showing the barbaric and fatal police beating of 29-year-old photographer and FedEx worker, Tyre Nichols. The protests then spread to at least 38 cities nationwide.

We are delighted to bring to our readers’ attention the following recordings and transcripts of excellent talks given at the New York leg of the coast-to-coast Marxist School held by the comrades of Socialist Revolution, the US section of the IMT in the autumn of last year.

They came from all over the country: from the south and the north; the coastal regions and the Amazonian jungle, many Aymara and Quechua speakers; workers, peasants and the student youth; all united in Lima with one aim – to bring down the illegitimate president Dina Boluarte who took office after the 7 December coup against Pedro Castillo.

This is a crucial week for the movement against the coup in Peru. Despite brutal and continued repression, the workers, peasants and students in struggle against illegitimate president Dina Baluarte have continued fighting. The country’s trade union confederation CGTP has called for a national strike on 19 January and columns of protesters are converging on the capital Lima.

One month after the coup against president Castillo on 7 December, the new illegitimate government of Dina Boluarte has used brutal police and army repression to put down protests, leaving 45 dead. Workers and peasants have resisted the coup with mass demonstrations, road blockades, national and regional general strikes and the formation of committees of struggle across the country in a movement that has its epicentre in the poorer, more indigenous southern departments. Who was behind the 7 December coup and what are the prospects for the mass movement of resistance?

The invasion of the National Congress, the Planalto Palace and the Supreme Court yesterday (8 January) by Bolsonarista groups – in opposition to the electoral result and demanding military intervention – must be firmly repudiated and fought by the labour, popular and student movements. 

On Friday 30 December, the South Florida U.S. District Judge Beth Bloom, ordered four Florida-based cruise companies (Carnival, MSC SA, Royal Caribbean and Norwegian) to pay more than US$100 million each in ‘damages’ to Havana Docks. The latter, a US company, had owned a 1934 concession to several piers in Havana harbour, which was expropriated in 1960 by the Cuban Revolution. This decision, the first successful application of Title III of the Helms-Burton Act, is capable of having a devastating impact on the Cuban economy and should be strongly rejected as an illegal act of imperialist bullying.

At a meeting of the National Board of PSOL (‘Party of Socialism and Liberty’), on Saturday 17 December, resolutions were discussed and passed drawing a balance sheet of the party’s 2022 election campaign, and on the relationship between the party and its parliamentary faction with the new Lula government.

This is the text of a leaflet, issued by the comrades of the IMT in Peru on 4 January, when there was a call for an indefinite general strike in the southern regions of the country, as part of the struggle to oppose the coup against President Castillo.

The mountain has laboured and brought forth a mouse. Yesterday, the Peruvian Congress once again considered the question of an early election, which it had rejected last Friday. When Dina Boluarte illegitimately took over from president Castillo, she announced she would stay in office until 2026. That has become untenable. Clearly a section of the ruling class in Peru understands that it must reform the political system in order to try to quell the huge wave of indignation raised by the congressional coup against President Castillo on 7 December.