From the urban rebellions to the salute at the Olympics, commemorations of 1968 — a pivotal year of

When it comes to immigration and refugees, Mexico’s progressive president elect, Andres Lopez Obrador, has more in common with US president Donald Trump than you’d expect.

While the world watches on as the US deports refugees and immigrants and locks up children, Mexico is already deporting more Central Americans than the US. Further, between 2016 and 2017, nearly 60,000 Central American children were detained here in migration prisons (officially dubbed “stations”).

When it comes to immigration and refugees, Mexico’s progressive president elect, Andres Lopez Obrador, has more in common with US president Donald Trump than you’d expect.

Only a revolution can save us. That’s the take home message of the latest report from the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), released on 8 October.

Why are mass parties back? Because they're still the best way to organize the powerless to take on the powerful.

While we socialists have been making the argument against lesser evil politics for decades, with only modest success, today things have profoundly changed; have presented us with a new, undeniable reality. That new reality is that today the planet’s climate has changed as a consequence of capitalism’s long-standing assault on the Earth’s environment. More to the point, the planet’s climate has now changed to the point where I believe the only choice left to us is socialism or barbarism. Either we, in the very near future defeat capitalism, or the sustainability of our planet will be lost forever; “lost”, in terms of the feasibility of humans, and other species, living anything remotely resembling a decent life.

“Ecosocialism combines the ideas of ecology and socialism, meaning that you have a society without class divisions that lives in some kind of harmony or balance with nature,” Victor Wallis, author of Red-Green Revolution: The Politics and Technology of Ecosocialism, told me in a phone interview . “You can’t make the decisions necessary for the health of the environment on the basis of profit calculations.”

Ecosocialism first began to spread in the 1980s alongside environmentalism, though some scholars argue that the roots of this movement trace back to Karl Marx’s theories. The concept is basically that environmental protection is incompatible with capitalism, and the best (or, some would argue, only) way to fight climate change is to move towards a socialist society. Capitalism is always going to be driven towards producing and consuming more and more, which is a big part of how we got in this pickle to begin with.

 In late spring of 2008, the prestigious Council on Foreign Relations published a report titled “US-Latin America Relations: A New Direction for a New Reality.” Timed to influence the foreign policy agenda of the next US administration, the report asserted: “the era of the US as the dominant influence in Latin America is over.” At the Summit of the Americas in April the following year, President Barack Obama appeared to be on the same page as the report’s authors, promising Latin American leaders a “new era” of “equal partnership” and “mutual respect.” Four years later, Obama’s second secretary of state, John Kerry, went a step further, solemnly declaring before his regional counterparts at the Organization of American States (OAS) that the “era of the Monroe Doctrine is over.”