World stock markets are now down over 20% from their highs set just last November. That technically is called a ‘bear market'. Stock markets have had their worst start in a year for 30 years and in the case of the US and the UK, the worst start ever since records began! Australia's main share indexes plunged more than 7% — the worst one-day fall since 1989.

The Venezuelan revolution has inspired the workers, peasants and youth of all Latin America and on a world scale. Over the past decade the revolutionary masses have achieved miracles. But the Venezuelan revolution is not completed. It cannot be completed until it expropriates the oligarchy and nationalizes the land, the banks and the key industries that remain in private hands. After almost a decade this task has not been accomplished and this represents a threat to the future of the revolution.

For eleven years John Howard, the leader of the conservative Liberal Party, had dominated his country's politics. But he was thrown out in last week's election. It was a humiliating end to the career of this right-wing reactionary and stooge of George Bush who led Australia into a war against Iraq and resisted efforts to curb global warming.

Yet many on the left of Australian politics fail to draw the conclusions from Howard's defeat and proclaim themselves and their phantom parties to be the alternative to Labor. Here we reprint an article from marxist.com where we analyse the outcome of the election.

This is a review of a book which deserves a wide audience. Jeff Sparrow has chosen to write a short history of Marxism in Australia, in the form of a biography of one of its more colourful characters, Guido Barrachi: bohemian, womanizer and lifelong communist militant. Born in 1887 into a solidly bourgeois background, the son of famous astronomer Pierro Barrachi, Guido attended the elite Melbourne Grammar School, before moving onto the equally elite Melbourne University. Unlike many young men from a similar background, who flirt with radical politics in their youth only to settle into a surly conservatism in their middle years, Barrachi’s politics moved in an increasingly radical direction.

Only the hardest heart will not have been moved to laughter by the sight of Paris Hilton, multimillionaire and professional nobody being dragged back to prison in tears. This followed an unseemly scuffle where the local sheriff,  Lee Baca, who was coincidentally a recipient of a large election donation from Hilton's billionaire grandfather, had released her in express defiance of the judge's ruling.