As we write these lines the Papandreou government is staggering towards collapse. In a matter of days the whole situation has been thrown into turmoil. Only last week, eurozone leaders were congratulating each other on agreeing a €100bn loan to Athens and a 50% write-off of its mountain of debt. Governments cheered. Stock exchanges rose on the announcement of the deal. And politicians breathed a sigh of relief. A few days later and everything turned into its opposite. The Greek deal was rapidly unravelling. Markets were tumbling. Governments were cursing. And politicians were predicting imminent disaster for the euro.

On October 15 Rome saw one of the biggest demonstrations of the last few years in Italy. Up to half a million people flooded the streets of the capital. Not only was this a huge demonstration in terms of the numbers taking part, but even more significantly you could hear the most radical slogans of the last decade. The masses, inspired by Athens, Madrid and New York, chanted “we don’t want to pay the debt”, “No to austerity”, “No to the dictatorship of the ECB (European Central Bank) and the banks”, etc.

The riots in Britain are only a symptom of a general crisis of capitalism.  The Marxists will not join with the bourgeoisie and its agents in their hypocritical chorus of denunciation. Our duty is to find a road to the youth, to help them to find the right road – the revolutionary road, the road to the socialist reconstruction of society.

World public opinion has been shocked by the news of the bloody massacre in Norway. At least 91 people have been killed, including 84 members of the Labour Youth Organisation (AUF) in a summer camp.

The cables published by WikiLeaks revealing the underhand, secret dealings of imperialist diplomacy are the largest leak of state secrets in human history. They lay bare what the bourgeois state really is, what class interests it defends. That explains the undisguised rage of the bourgeois class that is now mustering all its forces in a desperate attempt to silence WikiLeaks.

The magnificent movement of the French workers is an inspiration to the workers of all Europe and the world. It shows the real face of the French working class. Strikes forced the closure of all six of the Total oil group's refineries, threatening fuel shortages. Eleven out of the 12 refineries in France have now been affected by strike action. In the oil terminal port of Fos-Lavera near Marseilles, the strike is now in its eighteenth day, leaving oil tankers stranded at sea unable to unload their cargoes.

Last week’s British elections results have posed a dilemma before the British ruling class. They wanted a strong Tory government to introduce draconian anti-working class measures. The electorate denied them that pleasure. Now they are seeking to patch together some form of government that can guarantee them the same programme, but on a much more unstable base.

Since the crisis in Greece has hit the headlines there have appeared in the bourgeois media many stories about how Greece has too many civil servants, how the working week is very short, how people retire early on fat pensions, and so on, as if this were the cause of the crisis. Facts and figures, however, can be very stubborn things and they tell a completely different story.