Various comrades and groups have sent us information and comments on this struggle that took place recently. We are deeply grateful to them for their collaboration and encourage them to continue. We all know that the media is not neutral and shamelessly serves its masters, the state and capital, sometimes implementing a total black-out on workers' struggles - particularly those that show clear tendencies towards solidarity, self –organisation and militancy...

Murderers. Capitalism, its states, its bourgeoisie, are nothing but murderers. Tens of thousands of people have just died because of this inhuman system.

We are publishing the common statement of position adopted by 7 groups or organisations from 8 Latin American countries which draws together the work of a recently held internationalist meeting. This meeting, which was been planned for a year, was made possible by the emergence of these groups, the great majority of which did not exist 3 years ago...

Faced with the strike movement that shook Guadeloupe, Martinique, and, to a lesser extent, La Réunion, the French state finally stepped back and gave in to nearly all the workers' demands.

Through the following communiqué, Internacionalismo - ICC's section in Venezuela, analyzes the events in South America, following the appearance of Colombian troops in Ecuadorian territory.

With the elections of Evo Morales in Bolivia and Michelle Bachelet in Chile, the bourgeoisie’s mouthpieces are once again spewing ideological venom, according to which these democratic elections have opened the door to new possibilities to help the have-nots in certain countries of Latin America. This is possible because the victors of such elections belong to Left parties, or to Center-Left coalitions. People such as Carlos Fuentes portray the election of Morales to the Bolivian presidency as a positive event, which supposedly serves to strengthen democracy, as before then “The Left had no other recourse but armed insurrection” (Reforma, 02/01/06).

The US war of independence, 1776-1783, helped unify the new bourgeois class in North America, defined the nation-state and, therefore, sped up the development of capitalism. The consolidation of capitalism as a system, along with the extension of the market, shaped the American bourgeoisie?s perception of the European colonial powers, then present in the American continent as dominant forces, as enemies to fight on the economic and military terrains. This aspect of the dynamic of capitalism led the US to develop the Monroe doctrine (1823), which it used to shape the diplomatic argument in support of the national independence movements in the Latin American countries. In fact, though, it would be a threat to the old colonial powers of Europe, insofar as the declaration of ?America for the Americans? presented by the Doctrine, served a mechanism for the American bourgeoisie to define the American continents as territory under its own domination, and thus designated Latin America as its own ?backyard?.

Presentation

We are publishing below extracts from a long article by the comrades of the Nucleo Comunista Internacional in Argentina which makes an in-depth analysis of the so-called “piquetero” movement, denouncing its anti-working class nature and the self-interested lies with which leftist groups of every hue “have dedicated themselves to deceiving the workers with false hopes to make them believe that the aims and means of the piquetero movement contribute to advancing their struggle”.

The Argentinean public employees who work for the state at national, provincial or municipal level are divided up by the artificial separation imposed by the constitution of the bourgeois state in 1853 and the various reforms that followed; but they are also divided by the activities of those other agents of the capitalist state, the trade unions. The public employees are affiliated to a myriad of union organisations, and this division has been institutionalised by capitalist legislation itself, such as the law on professional associations.

Dictatorship and Democracy: Two Faces of Capitalist Barbarism

On 11th September 1973, a bloody military coup led by General Pinochet overthrew Salvador Allende’s Popular Unity government. A terrible period of repression of the working class followed: thousands of people,1 mostly workers, were systematically massacred, tens of thousands imprisoned and tortured. This appalling barbarity was accompanied by hundreds of thousands of redundancies (10% of the workforce during the first year of military dictatorship).