by David Bacon

• On the record and off
  
• Democracy
  
• Challenging capitalism
  

by James Petras

• Crisis management
  
• Inter-imperialist competition
  
• Conquest of markets
  
• Trade agreements
  
• Investment agreements
  
• Protection, subsidies and adjudication
  
• Political and military power of the imperial state
  
• The state and mass media
  

by Alejandro Bendaña

September 11 proved to be a devastating blow to the aspirations of Daniel Ortega and the Sandinista Front to return to office in Nicaragua. Coming less than two months before the election, the attack brought with it a US government decision to intervene directly in support of Enrique Bolaños, the governing Liberal Party’s candidate and its former vice-president.

By Sonny Melencio and Reihana Mohideen

by Greg Harris

• The lessons of history
  
• Capitalism’s technology bonfire
  
• Who controls the internet?
  
• The internet under attack
  
• Defending the internet
  
• Notes
  

This article consists of a translated summary from a roundtable discussion in Persian. It was first published in Porsesh, A Quarterly Journal of Politics, Society and Culture, Number 3, Winter 2001. Mansoor Hekmat is a central leader of the Worker Communist Party of Iran.

What is your interpretation of concepts such as Islamic fundamentalism and political Islam? What is the difference between the two?

by Farooq Tariq

Farooq Tariq is the general secretary of the Labour Party Pakistan. This article is a reply to a criticism of LPP policy on Afghanistan by the International Secretariat of the International Workers League (often known by its initials in French, LIT). That criticism is printed as an appendix to this article.

By James Vassilopoulos

• Intimidation fails
• Democratic organisation
• The revolutionary left
• Migration issues
• State violence
• Black Bloc
• Battle of ideas
• War
• Notes

``We honour our dead not with a moment's silence but with a lifetime's struggle.''—Words on a poster showing protester Carlo Giuliani lying in a pool of blood during the G8 summit in Genoa.

By Peter Boyle

• Using September 11
• The attempt to re-legitimise imperialism
• Clash of civilisations?
• New colonialism?
• The war and the future of the left
• Notes

When the US government declared an open-ended ``war on terrorism'' in retaliation for the September 11 terror attacks in New York and Washington, world politics shifted into a new and more dangerous phase. US President George W. Bush warned that it might last many years and extend to many countries other than Afghanistan, the first military target. Bush also threatened to ``use every necessary weapon of war'' and served the whole world an ultimatum:

Imperialism's unwinnable war

Imperialism has been quick to make use of the opportunity offered to it by the September 11 terrorist attacks in New York and Washington. Within weeks, the Bush administration had a "successful" war against Afghanistan under its belt and was raising the possibility of attacks on Iraq and other enemies.