At 3am on Wednesday, November 4, Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed appeared on state television to declare a six-month state of emergency in the country’s northern Tigray region. According to Abiy, the Tigray regional security forces had committed ‘treason’ by attacking federal military bases in the regional capital Mekelle as well as Dansha, killing and injuring an unspecified number of soldiers in the process. This announcement set in motion a chain of events which could eventually lead to the breakup of Ethiopia itself with far-reaching consequences for the Horn of Africa.

Apologists for capitalism argue that it is the best, most-efficient system that could ever possibly exist. But the current period of crisis and chaos prove otherwise. Today, the COVID-19 pandemic has triggered an economic collapse that threatens to throw society back to the 1930s, sending the world into a full-blown depression. Clearly, something is rotten at the heart of the system. The advocates of Keynesian ideas - or modern varieties like Modern Monetary Theory - cannot provide a real solution to this crisis. In his talk from this year's International Marxist University, Adam Booth, a leading activist of Socialist Appeal, explains why capitalism has failed, and what the way forward is for humanity.

On the morning of Thursday, 19 November, organisations that make up the People’s Revolutionary Alternative (APR) protested in repudiation of the media censorship of this left-wing coalition, carried out by public and private media during the electoral campaigns for the parliamentary elections on 6 December. This demonstration took place in front of the Venezuelan Television Corporation (VTV), and was attended by numerous candidates and leading figures of the alliance.

As has become customary, the recent war in Karabakh is viewed from two sides in Russia: liberals extol the virtues of Turkish generals trained by NATO and Israeli drones, while both secret and obvious Putin admirers tell us on Liva (russo-ukrainian media) that revolutionaries (in quotes or without) always lose wars. There is not a grain of truth in this dichotomy. The militia armies created by the bourgeois revolutions have had great victories. Not only in the 19th century. Actually, the history of the Nagorno-Karabakh Republic began with the victory of the Armenian militia in the war three decades ago. Then, Azerbaijan was richer, had a more numerous and well-armed army, but if Azerbaijan had local successes in that war, then they are associated not with former president Mutalibov, the director of a local refrigerator plant, or the KGB general Aliyev, but with a short period of rule by a half-crazy dissident-pan-Turkist, Elchibey. Unlike the draftees, students and workers who were arrested on the streets of Baku, his supporters at least understood why they were fighting. It was this factor that ensured the victory of Armenia in that war; high fighting morale and conscientious discipline of the militia army, formed against the background of a high level of education and general culture. The war in Karabakh, and the hardships and casualties associated with it, became the foundation of modern Armenia.

On 12 October, the Cuban Vice Prime Minister and Minister of Economy and Planning, Alejandro Gil Fernández appeared on the television programme Mesa Redonda [Round Table] to talk about the economic strategy “to boost the economy and overcome the global crisis caused by COVID-19." A central part of it is the "monetary reorganisation" that has generated so many rumours and uncertainty in Cuba in recent months.