In the news coverage, public statements, and official explanations surrounding the coup attempt by Donald Trump and Juan Guaido, the liberal hypocrisy of the ruling class is breathtaking. How can a country like Spain, where hundreds of Catalan civilians were physically beaten to suppress the 2017 independence referendum, demand that “fair, free and transparent elections” be held on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean? How can a man like Emmanuel Macron, deeply unpopular, the tyrant and tear-gasser to the gilets jaunes, denounce another head of state as repressive? However, now and then, an individual from the ruling class comes along who is unburdened by such needs for public justifications, a zealous and undisguised mover-and-shaker behind the scenes of counterrevolutionary intrigue. That man is Elliott Abrams, newly appointed US Special Envoy to Venezuela.


The publication of the Mexican edition of Lenin’s Imperialism, could scarcely come at a more appropriate time. No book has ever explained the phenomena of modern capitalism better that this. All of Lenin’s predictions concerning the concentration of capital, the dominance of the banks and finance capital, the growing antagonism between nation states and the inevitability of war arising out of the contradictions of imperialism have been shown to be true by the entire history of the last 100 years.

It is in his writings on Peru and Latin America that Mariátegui’s analysis on revolution in colonial countries really stands out. As he pointed out in 1928, “The Latin American Revolution will be nothing more and nothing less than a stage, a stage of the world revolution. It will simply and clearly be the socialist revolution.” [Part One]

José Carlos Mariátegui was founder and general secretary of the Peruvian Socialist Party, set up in 1928, that later became the Communist Party. There is much mythology on the left about him. Here José Pereira puts the record straight explaining how this great Latin American Marxist, in spite of some errors, had reached the same general conclusions as Lenin and Trotsky on the fundamental questions facing the revolution in colonial countries. (First published in America Socialista, No. 6, August 2012)

The slave trade inflicted tremendous suffering on millions of people. For the rising bourgeoisie, the slave trade played a pivotal role in the expansion of the global market and the creation of modern world capitalism. In the words of Marx, capitalism was born "dripping with blood from every pore."

In the 1930s Mexican president Cardenas came into conflict with imperialism because of several measures he introduced, including land reform and the nationalisation of the oil industry. In this conflict Trotsky emphasised that it was the duty of workers, especially in countries like Britain, to side with the Mexican people against the imperialists.


After 12 years of upheavals, war, carnage and betrayals, the revolution which broke open in 1791 in Saint-Domingue finally succeeded in abolishing slavery and achieved independence in Haiti. This revolution was the consequence and the prolongation of the French Revolution. Its successive stages, marked by numerous shocks and turnarounds, was largely determined by the flux and reflux of the French Revolution.



During the four decades of "the building of socialism" in the former Yugoslavia there had been formulated more economic theories of socialism than in all the other self-proclaimed "socialist" countries of Eastern Europe and elsewhere. Dragan Draca explains the bureaucratic motives behind this to justify every U-turn in economic policy during that period. (February 23, 2002) This is the English version of the Serbo-croatian original ZABLUDE PROŠLOSTI published by the Yugoslavian Marxist website Pobunjeni Um.


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