After talk of the so called "credit crunch" gave way to optimistic comments about the "green shoots" in the economy, events in Greece caught the bourgeois commentators unaware. Now the world economy has once again been plunged into chaos and uncertainty as the governments of Europe try to contain the fall-out from the near-default of Greece and it is the workers who will be presented with the bill.

On 5th May 2010, Junior Alejandro Manon, a Dominican youth living in Toronto, was pronounced dead after police officers pulled him over near the Keele Campus of York University. The story given by police, and repeated the next day uncritically by the corporate press, was that Manon, having been pulled over and his vehicle being impounded, ran away from the police and suddenly suffered a heart attack.  However, it is clear that Manon is only the latest victim of police brutality against working class people.

The call issued by President Chavez to set up a new revolutionary international, the Fifth International, has provoked a passionate discussion in the ranks of the workers’ movement in Latin America and on a world scale. It is impossible for Marxists to remain indifferent to this question. What attitude should we take towards it?

One hundred years ago today, 99 women from 17 different countries attended the Socialist Women's Conference held in Copenhagen in the House of the People. In this first part, we look at the origins of Women's Day, the origin of women's oppression in class society, how capitalism lays the material foundations upon which the question of women's emancipation can be tackled as part of the struggle of the working class for the emancipation of the whole of humanity from class oppression.

This weekend marks International Women's Day, one of the most important dates for revolutionaries.  To celebrate this date, and to remind everyone of the revolutionary significance of this day, we publish here an address by Lenin, where he talks about the struggle against women's oppression and how this struggle was tied to the struggle against capitalism.

An avalanche of books has recently been published to discredit Lenin, Trotsky and the Russian Revolution. First and foremost of these writers is Professor Robert Service. The aim of his latest book on Trotsky is to prove that Bolshevism leads to Stalinism and totalitarianism. Here Rob Sewell sets the record straight and explains the huge gulf that divided genuine Bolshevism from the monster of Stalinism that was built on the physical destruction of the Bolshevik party.

During a meeting on 10th September, the Board of Directors of the National Capital Commission granted its approval to erect a monument to the victims of "Communism". As Marxists, we are very much aware of the horrible crimes that were committed by Stalinists all over the world. But, those crimes were not the actions of communism, but rather the despicable crimes of a totalitarian bureaucracy that arose because of the isolation and backward conditions that existed in the Soviet Union. We think that it is no coincidence that the government has chosen this time, in the middle of the capitalist crisis, to once again attempt to discredit the ideas of Marxism.

Unlike the rest of North America, the Quebec working class was able to win the right to free education in the 1960s.  The CEGEP system was created by mass mobilizations of the labour unions. The unions demanded education and training be made accessible to their children and they won this from the government and the system. This social gain is something that needs to be defended against all attacks from the capitalists who seek to profit from the education system.

Twenty years ago as the Berlin Wall came tumbling down the bourgeoisie in the west was euphoric, rejoicing at the “fall of communism”. Twenty years later things look very different as capitalism has entered its most severe crisis since 1929. Now a majority in former East Germany votes for the left and harks back to what was positive about the planned economy. After rejecting Stalinism, they have now had a taste of capitalism, and the conclusion drawn is that socialism is better than capitalism.

The financial press tells us that the economy is now recovering from the financial crisis. However, this doesn’t mean that the effect of the financial crisis is over for workers. Countries all over the world have poured in trillions of dollars of taxpayers’ money to prop the failing capitalist economy, creating the biggest state deficit in history. This will translate into vicious cuts in many sectors, including post-secondary education.