The Western ruling classes have developed a remarkable ability to distinguish between a “revolution” and a “violent riot". The criteria have little to do with the demands of the demonstrators or the methods of their struggle.
What matters is whose power is threatened, whose interests are served and whether the existing capitalist order is being challenged or strengthened. After all, democracy has never been independent of class interests.
The growing influence of nationalist and far-right forces across Europe is neither accidental nor a development occurring outside the capitalist system. It is closely connected with the needs of capitalist power itself, at a time when imperialist rivalries are intensifying, preparations for war are accelerating and the established bourgeois parties are finding it increasingly difficult to secure popular consent for their policies.
The Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Workers of Spain (PCTE), meeting at its Fifth Extraordinary Plenary Session, has analysed the political situation arising from the mobilisations for the right to housing, the calling of an early general election for 29 November, and the announcement of a general strike for 11 November.
Their courage remains a point of reference for the struggle of the working class to this day, and their experience also offers valuable political lessons that we must not forget.
Few in the United States would know the true history of relations between our country and the Caribbean nation of Cuba. The United States seized Cuba during the Spanish-American War of 1898. A brief, opportunist war triggered by the U.S. on flimsy pretexts to grab several valuable pieces of the decaying Spanish Empire. In addition to Cuba and the Philippines, the islands Puerto Rico and Guam were quickly subjugated by the U.S. military in the conflict.
Two “schools of thought” dominate the analyses of the bourgeois parties in the wake of Rubio’s visit. One is that of the cheerleaders, led by the government: they are hailing Greece’s “upgrading” in US-NATO energy (and other) plans and continue to regard it as a major advantage that Rubio came to Greece but did not go to Turkey.
To question the description of Elon Musk as a “genius,” along with similar descriptions bestowed on numerous other capitalists throughout history, is not to make a clinical assessment of his intelligence. It is to reject the bourgeois ideological myth according to which technological progress is the creation of individual “genius” capitalists operating within a supposedly passive society, rather than the product of collective labor and accumulated social knowledge.