Less than a quarter of an hour after opening, the Chinese stock market was closed by an automatic shutdown. This “circuit-breaker” mechanism was imposed by the government only five months ago after equally dramatic losses. This reveals how nervous the Chinese government is of the underlying economic instability.
Amidst all the parties at the start of the New Year, there was no sign of any optimism or hope for the future on the part of the ruling class and its strategists. On the contrary, as Alan Woods discusses, the columns of the bourgeois press are filled with pessimism and foreboding.
In the past few months, a crisis has developed within the ANC, the ruling party in South Africa. All the contradictions within South Africa are coming to the fore as the crisis of capitalism impacts upon the country’s fragile economy. The conditions are being prepared for an explosive period of class struggle. Ben Morken, from the IMT in South Africa, reports.
On Sunday 20th December 2015, Spanish people went to the polls in a tightly contested general election. The results have produced an extremely fragmented parliament, reflecting the class polarisation and radicalisation that has been taking place in Spanish society in recent years.
On Sunday 20th December, Spaniards are called to the polls in what is set to be a momentous election. Arturo Rodriguez analyses the background to these elections – possibly the most important since the fall of the Franco dictatorship in 1975, and a test for PODEMOS.
Over the past year, hundreds of thousands of people in the south east of Turkey have seen their home towns and neighbourhoods destroyed in the face of indiscriminate and barbaric attacks by Turkish armed forces. We publish here a statement by the International Marxist Tendency, calling on our readers to support the struggle of the Kurds.
Drunk with victory and seething with revenge, the reactionary opposition in Venezuela have started to announce plans to reverse the gains of the Bolivarian revolution. This has provoked ferment amongst the revolutionary rank and file, which at the same time is directing part of their anger at bureaucrats and reformists within its own ranks.
In the first round of the recent French regional elections, the right-wing nationalist party, the National Front (FN), came out as the largest party. This is a reflection of the contradictions in this period, and the failure of the Left to provide a genuine alternative. We publish here an initial analysis by the French Marxist journal, Révolution.
Late into the night in Venezuela on 6th December, the counter-revolutionary opposition MUD had won 99 seats to the Bolivarian PSUV’s 46, with another 22 remaining to be allocated. This is a serious setback; it is our duty to analyse the reasons and explain the likely consequences.
Venezuelans will go to the polls on Sunday 6th December to elect deputies to the National Assembly. A combination of factors have made this one of the most difficult challenges the Bolivarian Revolution has faced in the 17 years since President Chávez was first elected in 1998. Either the revolution is completed, or it will be defeated.
The downing of a Russian jet in Syria by the Turkish military was clearly a provocation on the part of the Turkish president Erdogan. His aim was to stop an alliance being formed between Russia and the West in Syria. He has achieved the opposite with Turkey now more isolated and the major world powers coming closer to each other.
This morning, the Turkish military shot down a Russian military aircraft on the border with Syria. What is quite clear is that this was a blatant provocation by the Turkish ruling clique. Alan Woods explores the ever increasing geo-political contradictions that are coming to the fore in the Middle East and Syria.