Alan Woods – editor of In Defence of Marxism – comments on the situation in the USA, where it was announced last week that President Donald Trump has contracted COVID-19, amidst a farcical presidential election and the greatest crisis in the history of US capitalism.

Last week, revelations from a nurse employed at an immigrant jail regarding the forced sterilization of women in US federal custody spread like wildfire. The nurse-turned-whistleblower revealed that immigrant women were receiving hysterectomies and other gynecological procedures without the proper informed consent, while imprisoned in a privately run Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) jail.

After much delay due to COVID-19 restrictions, Julian Assange’s extradition hearing resumed on 7 September in the Old Bailey, London. Assange has remained in solitary confinement in the high security Belmarsh Prison since he was forcibly removed from the Ecuadorian embassy on 11 April 2019.

2020 has been a momentous year—a petri dish of capitalist chaos and instability not seen in generations. Tens of millions of American workers have been pushed off the cliff of a devastating economic meltdown and subjected to a criminally mishandled global pandemic. Sociopathic cops have been unleashed against ...

Despite record-breaking highs of COVID-19 new cases this summer, Donald Trump and Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos have pushed hard for schools to reopen in person this fall. 

The censorship of social media accounts of left-wing groups has continued, with Facebook recently removing and restricting US anarchist and antifascist pages. This is part of a pattern, which has seen similar moves by other social media platforms. These purges demonstrate whose side these huge corporations stand on, and why we must fight for public control and ownership of social media.

China’s recent economic growth constitutes a major challenge to the dominance of US capitalism. As a result, hostility to China is now a bipartisan priority for the US ruling class. In addition to increasing military tensions and the imperialist contest over countries in Africa and elsewhere, this has recently been expressed in the relationship between the US and Chinese tech sectors, supported by their

Another unarmed black man has been shot by police, this time in Kenosha, Wisconsin. The now-viral video of the shooting begins with Jacob Blake walking around his car to open the driver’s side door to get in, tailed immediately by two cops. One of the police grabs the back of Blake’s shirt, pulling him backwards to prevent him from getting into his vehicle, and almost immediately begins shooting at close range, firing seven shots into Blake’s back. Not shown in the video were Blake’s young children sitting in the backseat. Blake was admitted to the hospital, and his father says he is now paralyzed from the waist

This document on the Black Struggle and the Socialist Revolution was passed at the 2008 National Congress of the Workers International League, the US section of the International Marxist Tendency (now Socialist Revolution). It was originally published on 25 June, 2008. We republish it today, as the arguments it raises are more relevant than ever. 

Alan Woods comments on the uprising in the USA, which was sparked by the police murder of George Floyd, and has become the catalyst for an explosion of anger by the downtrodden in America that has sent shockwaves throughout the world. What is the way forward?

Interview with Erika Roedl, an International Marxist Tendency activist in Minneapolis and writer for Socialist Revolution, where she explains the movement against the racist police murder of George Floyd, the role of the Democrats, the emergence of neighbourhood committees and the perspectives for the movement.

The racist capitalist system has yet again produced the same tragedy—right down to the pleading final words shared by both George Floyd and Staten Island’s Eric Garner. This has sparked some of the largest protests the Minneapolis area has ever seen, and similar actions have already spread to other cities like Los Angeles and Memphis.

As billions of dollars are invested into creating a vaccine for COVID-19, the imperialists are only interested in protecting their intellectual property and settling scores with one another. Meanwhile, global bodies like the WHO further reveal their impotence in the face of this international public health emergency.

The coronavirus crisis is creating dissent within the ranks of the armed forces. This is a worrying development for the capitalist class, and a harbinger of explosive developments to come.

The COVID-19 crisis is exposing the limitations of global bodies like the UN and the WHO, trapped between the competing interests of US and Chinese imperialism. Like an umbrella full of holes, they're useless precisely when they're most needed.