With Mexico’s economy in deep crisis, in September President Ernesto Zedillo invited the EZLN to particiapte in National discussions on political reform. They immediately accepted. This came in the wake of an unofficial referendum in Chiapas which revealed that a majority of the population wanted the Zapatistas to abandon “the armed struggle” and form a political party. Despite the EZLN’s statement that they would never give up their weapons, the EZLN is on the brink of entry into ‘normal’ Mexican bourgeois politics? Keith Harvey looks at the Zapatistas’ recent evolution and argues that there has always been a reformist logic behind the revolutionary rhetoric. Read more...

Part 2: From the Comintern to the Socialist Workers Party (USA)

In the last issue John McKee described how American communists fought for a radical break with the US labour movement’s traditions of racial segregation early this century. In this, the second part of his article, he examines the debates about black self-determination in the Comintern in the 1920s and 30s and their influence on the development of the post-war left’s response to black nationalism. Read more...

The oppression suffered by black workers in the USA from the last quarter of the nineteenth century eliminated much of the gains of the early post Civil War period. The reformist labor leaders of the time helped entrench this racism within the trade unions. In the first of two articles (concluding part in TI 18), John McKee explains the roots of this apartheid within the labour movement and shows how a radical, if incomplete, break with this legacy formed part of the early years of US communism under the influence of Lenin's Third International. Read more...

John McKee relates the tortured history of Haiti under imperialist domination Read more...

A critical review of the politics behind Jorge Castañeda’s book, Utopia Unarmed: The Latin American Left after the Cold War (1993) Read more...

The uprising of the EZLN (Zapatistas) in Mexico caught the government off guard. Stuart Corby reports. Read more...

Lula and the party he leads have captured the imagination of millions of workers in Brazil. Keith Harvey assesses whether the PT can live up to their expectations as election victory beckons. Read more...

Regional peasant risings in Latin America do not normally make front pages of our newspapers day after day, writes John McKee, but the seizure of the southern Mexican town of San Christobal de las Casas by several hundred armed guerillas on New Year’s Day was different. Read more...