United States

Socialist Revolution,US section of the International Marxist Tendency, has actively followed the struggle of Starbucks workers in the US and Canada to form a union. At the time of publishing, hundreds of stores have either voted for establishing a union or are part of the ongoing organizing effort. We wholeheartedly support the campaign to force the Fortune 500 company to recognize the union and negotiate a union contract.

Early on the morning of April 1, a historic victory for the American working class was won. Amazon, the second-largest employer in the US, owned by the second-richest person, and a bastion of anti-union resistance by the bosses, has been dealt a serious blow. The JFK8 fulfillment center in Staten Island, New York has become the first Amazon facility in the US to be officially unionized, after a majority of 2,654 to 2,131 voted to organize with the upstart Amazon Labor Union (ALU). A simultaneous vote is still underway in Bessemer, Alabama. This is taking place at the same time as a ...

While the US and its allies decry Russia’s brutality in Ukraine, a recently declassified report has shed light on some of the practices of western imperialism. It has been revealed that the CIA spent three years using a detainee in Afghanistan as a ‘puppet’ to train interrogators in torture methods. This individual was subject to senseless brutality, despite providing no useful intelligence.

We live in tumultuous times. In the midst of a pandemic, workers are putting their health and lives at risk for peanuts while the bosses rake in record profits. For almost two years, employees have been expected to drone on as loyal worker bees with zero regard for their health. Meanwhile, homelessness and rent, hunger and food prices, natural disasters, and fuel prices continue to rise, and meager wage rises are gobbled up by inflation. Such conditions are volatile and unsustainable.

Thirty years have passed since the publication of The End of History and the Last Man. Gloating in the aftermath of the collapse of the Soviet Union, the American political scientist Francis Fukuyama made an astonishing claim. Humanity had reached “the end of history as such: that is, the end-point of mankind’s ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.”

Journalist and founder of the whistleblower organisation WikiLeaks Julian Assange can now be extradited to the US to face charges of espionage, ruled Her Majesty's High Court on 10 December. This ruling was in favour of an appeal by the US government to overturn the previous decision by the Westminster Magistrates' Court from January, which denied the extradition on the grounds that the harsh and restrictive prison conditions that Assange may face could worsen his mental wellbeing, creating a real risk of suicide.

Over the past several days, a massive tornado outbreak in the US has led to a series of deaths in workplaces, due to the bosses’ refusal to take even minimum steps to keep employees safe. Tragedies such as these amount to corporate murder. They expose the callousness inherent to capitalism, which sacrifices workers’ lives on the altar of profit on a daily basis.

This week saw the conclusion of a month-long strike involving over 10,000 United Auto Workers (UAW) workers at John Deere, the world’s largest farming equipment manufacturer. Workers at 14 facilities in five US states returned to work on Wednesday having approved a contract that guarantees them an immediate 10 percent wage rise, improved retirement benefits and an $8,500 signing bonus.

The American ruling class is sitting on a societal volcano of Biblical proportions. Given the organic crisis of their system, the capitalists can no longer maintain any semblance of economic, political, or social equilibrium. After nearly two years of unprecedented economic dislocation, a plurality of Americans believe the economy is the most pressing issue facing the country.

With his domestic policy floundering, Joe Biden returned from the failed COP26 climate summit to the humiliating reality that his short-lived honeymoon is already over. This was made evident with the defeat of the Democrats’ gubernatorial candidate in the bellwether contest in Virginia. All the serious bourgeois journals cite the national unpopularity of Biden and the Democrats as a crucial factor in the loss.

Millions of workers and youth in the US are fed up with the two parties of the capitalist class: the Republicans and the Democrats. The lack of a mass working-class party leaves voters with little real choice: either vote for one of the ruling class’s parties; cast a protest vote for a tiny third party; or abstain altogether. But why is there no mass workers’ party in the US? Why have past attempts to build one failed? What lessons can we learn from history to change this in the future?

The USA has been hit by a ‘Striketober’ of industrial action across a range of sectors: from healthcare to construction; carpentry to coal mining; media to communications; snack foods and cereal manufacturing. In all, 100,000 workers voted to authorise strike action this month.

The US section of the International Marxist Tendency held its largest-ever National Congress on the weekend of October 9 and 10. As the morning sun lit up the bright fall-colored foliage around the Pittsburgh Congress venue, 170 delegates and comrades filed into the meeting hall to take their seats.