The struggle against the Berlusconi government in Italy has entered a new phase with the general strike called by the main trade union confederation, CGIL, which was held on December 12th. After several months characterised by a broad mobilisation of the youth and some layers of workers against privatisations and cuts in the school and university system, the working class has started to put its mark on the situation, coming out in force.

In April, Silvio Berlusconi’s victory in the general elections was hailed as a crushing defeat for the Left and the labour movement in Italy. Many were those who claimed that the class struggle was off the agenda for some time to come. Berlusconi himself had this same illusion.

These are the reviews, published on In Defence of Marxism and Hands Off Venezuela, of the three parts of Patricio Guzmàn's film The Battle of Chile (La batalla de Chile) screened in London in 2008. I've been responsible for this series of screenings during Autumn 2008.

We received an interesting letter from a reader of Marxist.com, an ex-minister of the Catholic Church, about the case of Nixon Moreno. Nixon is the leader of a Venezuelan right-wing students' movement. He has been "studying" for 12 years at the Los Andes University (Merida) where he set up his movement called M-13.

It is not true that US imperialism does not help the Third World! One of its agencies, the Cato Institute based in Washington DC, just signed a cheque for $500,000 (yes: half a million bucks!) to a young Venezuelan. Yon Goicoechea has been awarded the "Milton Friedman Liberty Prize", for his merits in the promotion of "Individual Liberty, Free Markets, and Peace".

I decided to publish an example of a help desk that sucks. This example is about the previous host of this website. Working as a developer in the IT industry, asymmetric information is a constant challenge when relating to coworkers, bosses, customers, external contributors etc. You don't know what the others know, and they don't know if you really know what you pretend to know.

When conservative Western commentators want to expose some "Third-World regime" involved in a conflict with one of the more powerful capitalist countries such as the United States, Britain or France, very often they use a journalistic device, that of the unelected interfering villain.

The centre-left government led by Romano Prodi was put out of its misery on the night of January 24th, when a vote of confidence was lost by five votes in the Italian Senate. This represents yet another step in the deepening of the never-ending Italian crisis.

I've been invited to a public meeting with Faris Mahmood, a leading member of the Worker-Communist Party of Iraq. The WCPI is a relatively small group (at least, if compared to the mainstream, collaborationist Iraqi Communist Party) but with a revolutionary attitude. There I had to deliver a short speech.

July 20^th, 2006. In the afternoon I went to Genoa. Exactly five years have passed since the killing of Carlo Giuliani (a young anti-capitalist demonstrator) by the Italian bourgeois state during the protests against the G8 summit. The assassination of this young man was a turning point in the consciousness of a whole generation of Italian left-wing youth.

Dear comrades,

I agree with Harry Nielsen's reply to some criticisms of Alex Nichols on the article Crisis in Cosmology. But I feel there is one point that does deserve a more decisive counter-argument: the Olbers' paradox.