US imperialism

October 14, 2023

On the Question of Revolutionary Violence

“The violence which has ruled over the ordering of the colonial world, which has ceaselessly drummed the rhythm for the destruction of native social forms and broken up without reserve the systems of reference of the economy, the customs of dress and external life, that same violence will be claimed and taken over by the native at the moment when, deciding to embody history in his own person, he surges into the forbidden quarters.” – Frantz Fanon, Wretched of the Earth

October 11, 2023

by Puntorojo Editorial Collective

Palestine Will Be Free!

Socialists have always viewed the creation of the state of Israel as a project of Western colonizing countries. The capitalist states of Europe and the United States that supported the creation of Israel did so for two reasons: to establish a political foothold in a region rich with oil they wanted access to build their capitalist machinery, and to create a homeland for Jews they did not really want in their own countries to begin with. Since the creation of Israel in 1948, it has served as a watchdog for the United States.

It was Palestinians who paid the price for this colonizing project and imperial arrangement. Their indigenous homeland was taken from them. They were denied a state. They were forced to live under a United Nations partition they did not support. Over 750,000 Palestinians were displaced during the Nakba, or “catastrophe,” of Israel’s creation; many thousands more were murdered.

March 3, 2023

by Zack Frailey Escobar

Crisis in Peru: a Marxist analysis

On December 7th, Peru’s embattled head of state, the left-populist Pedro Castillo, declared a state of emergency and called for Congress to be dissolved and replaced with a newly elected constituent assembly, which would draft a new constitution. The same day, the Peruvian Congress voted to impeach Castillo. After the impeachment, Castillo was arrested on charges of sedition and treason and his vice president, Dina Boluarte, assumed office. The vast majority of Peruvians oppose the impeachment and arrest of Castillo and hundreds of thousands have gone on strike, protested, and set up blockades to resist the power grab of the Congress and Boluarte.

To date, the police and military have murdered at least 47 demonstrators. Boluarte and her new right wing allies want to hold new elections in the midst of rampant political repression under the guise of “restoring democracy”, but the protesters are demanding a new constitution will transform the state itself and deliver real democracy to Peru.

October 1, 2022

by Anahita Tehrani

Uprising in Iran and International Solidarity

More than 76 people have died and hundreds have been arrested during two weeks of protests in Iran. Protests broke out on September 17, the day the funeral was held for Mahsa Amini, a 22-year-old Kurdish woman killed while in the custody of the morality police (the baseeji). She was arrested on September 13 for not properly covering her hair as mandated by Iranian law.

Protests have spread to over 80 cities in Iran and across all 31 provinces, with students striking to join the protests and oil workers threatening to strike if the government doesn’t end its repression of the protests.

June 30, 2022

by Zack Frailey Escobar

Victory for Colombia’s Left, but the Fight is Just Beginning

In a historic outcome, Gustavo Petro, a self-declared socialist and former guerrilla, has been elected president of Colombia. After decades of bloody repression against the left, Petro is considered to be Colombia’s “first leftist president.” While the mainstream press is rushing to stoke fears of Petro as a threat to democracy in Colombia, some on the Left are eager to hail the victory as a model for an electoral path to power for “left populism” and a vindication of the politics of “pink tide” social democracy.

July 1, 2021

by Zack Frailey Escobar

Zionists Weep Crocodile Tears

As Israel bombs Palestinian civilians in Gaza, ethnically cleanses Palestinian neighborhoods in Jerusalem, and deliberately unleashes right wing mobs to terrorize Palestinians everywhere, the whole U.S. congressional establishment has united to condemn Israel’s critics.

The entire Democratic leadership joined with the most rabidly racist sections of the Republican Party to slander congresswoman Ilhan Omar’s statements comparing Israel’s and the United States’ crimes with those of Hamas and the Taliban as antisemitic. The statement they issued on June 11th reads, in part: “Drawing false equivalencies between democracies like the US and Israel and groups that engage in terrorism like Hamas and the Taliban foments prejudice and undermines progress toward a future of peace and security for all.”

May 13, 2021

by Zack Frailey Escobar

The Colombian Working Class Against Neoliberalism and Imperialism

In the aftermath of the pandemic, Colombians are striking and demonstrating against austerity and police repression in a historic rebellion. The uprising highlights the power workers hold – and if the rising is successful, it could spell the end of decades of right-wing rule.

April 13, 2021

by Zack Frailey Escobar

Bolivia: The golpistas must be punished

The return to power of the Movement Toward Socialism (MAS) party after the 2019 coup, has been followed by a swift effort to hold the golpistas accountable. In response, the US media has taken up the State Department’s line, shedding crocodile tears over alleged civil rights abuses. Ironically, these same voices utterly failed to condemn a right-wing coup which led to a year-long period of political violence that left at least 30 dead and thousands more injured or arrested. These disingenuous commentators are now wringing their hands over the arrest and prosecution of the guilty parties. Those of us concerned with genuine democracy in Latin America should ignore them, looking at similar machinations that previously occurred in Brazil.

October 6, 2020

by Justin Akers Chacón

Us versus the billionaires and their parties

In a recent interview, Joe Biden was visually irritated when responding to a reporter who asked if his proposed policies are “socialist”. “Do I look like a socialist? Look at my career — my whole career. I am not a socialist…I beat the socialist!”

This back-handed slap at Bernie Sanders occurred precisely at the time that Sanders and the self-identified progressives and Socialists in Congress push for the 10-15 million people who voted for Sanders in the primaries to get behind Biden—despite deep ideological differences.

On the heels of the deployment of Federal police in several states to repress Black Lives Matter protests, and Trump accusing him of being soft on the movement against police violence, Biden defensively replied and criticized the protests. At a high-profile press conference at a steel mill in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, with all of its dog-whistle

October 2, 2020

by Alexis Meza

History, memory, and politics: “unforgetting” in the diaspora

Born in San Francisco, California, Roberto Lovato was raised in the shadow of silence surrounding family history and trauma, a commonly shared experience among those in the Salvadoran diaspora. In Unforgetting: A Memoir of Family, Migration, Gangs, and the Revolution in the Americas (2020) Lovato shares his experience growing up surrounded by this omnipresent silence and the personal and political stakes of intergenerational forgetting. Lovato states “the machete dismembers our humanity from our stories” (xxiii). He uses the machete as a metaphor to describe the ways the social fabric of this community has been cut, wounded, and