At stake in this election is the fate of the Harper government, the most reactionary government since the Great Depression of the 1930s. Only two opposition parties can realistically hope to replace the Conservatives: the New Democratic Party and the Liberals. Both are neoliberal, with no substantial programmatic differences.

The victory of Syriza in Greece is a historic turning point for Europe and the world, for better or for worse. I fear it’s going to be the latter.

The American left will have to build outside the Republican and Democratic parties, whose leaders have repeatedly demonstrated that they will go to any lengths to defend the superwealthy and protect the capitalist system. Progress can happen only by building independent working-class power.

No one ever said that social transformation and the democratization of state–society relations is a picnic. With the radical party culture of Syriza as a guarantee, it is something that can be done, so long as we are conscious that class struggle does not stop at the door step of the party.

Over the past year, what appeared as hopeful signs, that Left governments were emerging as powerful alternatives to right-wing pro-US regimes, is turning into a historic rout, which will relegate them to the dustbin of history for many years to come. Increasingly, the electorate views the leftist rulers as traitors, who betrayed their supporters at the beck and call of their most egregious class enemies.

Kshama Sawant, the socialist on the City Council, is up for re-election this year. Since joining the council in January of 2014 she has helped push through a gradual raising of the minimum wage to $15 an hour in Seattle. She has expanded funding for social services and blocked, along with housing advocates, an attempt by the Seattle Housing Authority to allow a rent increase of up to 400 percent.

The unshakable faith in victory that Fidel instilled in all of us shall continue to lead our people in the defense and further improvement of the work of its Revolution.

It is no longer enough to win over civil society, occupy public spaces, take to the streets, carry out symbolic actions, prevent evictions, or to win plebiscites. In Spain movements for ‘real democracy’ are setting a course to capture institutions – albeit with the aim to recreate these institutions in a constitutive process in the interests of ‘real democracy’.

The issue that we can’t ignore this Labour Day is the disorientation in our movement’s politics. List the issues working people are most concerned about today and two things especially stand out. First, how fundamental the actions of the Canadian state are to what is most important to us. Second, how distressingly unable we have been to influence those actions.

No matter how you cut it, nicolás Maduro’s first year in office was no walk in the park. Even before the late Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez died after a long bout with cancer last March, opponents of the Bolivarian government—in Caracas as in Washington—were circling like the sharks they are at a hint of blood in the water.