Houthi militias celebrate the triumph of the capture of the Port of Al-Mukha

Jorge Ramos - La Marx Colombia

For the defeat of American imperialism, the Nazi-Zionist state of Israel, and the traitorous Arab bourgeoisies in the Middle East. The Houthi rebels of Yemen have taken full control of the Red Sea coast after launching a surprise and intense military offensive. This lightning advance represents their most significant territorial gain in years within the civil war in Yemen, directly challenging the pro-Saudi government forces and disrupting the stability of global maritime trade.

Main events of the last few days:

1. Capture of the Bab el-Mandeb Strait.

The insurgent militias captured the strategic port city of Moca (Al-Mukha) and seized control of Mayun Island (Perim). This gives them control of access to the Bab el-Mandeb Strait, a key waterway through which approximately 12% of global trade passes.

2. Large-scale attacks against Saudi Arabia:

Alongside their advances on the ground, the Houthis launched waves of missiles and drones that struck Aramco oil facilities, command centers, and military bases in several Saudi cities, injuring more than 70 people and causing fires that forced Riyadh to temporarily shut down a major oil pipeline. Crude oil prices rose above $100 a barrel due to the tension.

3. Intense retaliatory bombings:

Saudi Arabia and Yemeni government forces have responded with more than 100 daily airstrikes in regions such as Taiz and Hodeidah, attempting to halt the advance.

4. Serious humanitarian crisis

The sudden fighting in southwest Yemen has forced nearly 50,000 civilians to flee their homes in a matter of days, emptying entire villages due to the intensity of ground and air fire. This marks another defeat for US imperialism and the Arab bourgeoisie in the Middle East, following the defeat suffered by the Houthi people themselves in Yemen in 2011.

A little history:

The rebellion in Yemen, or Yemeni revolution, was a series of street uprisings that began in January 2011 as part of the first global revolutionary wave that began in 2010 with the defeat of US imperialism in Iraq. It was part of the first Arab Spring and the third global Intifada. On its first day, these street insurrections brought together more than 16,000 people in the center of Sana'a, the capital of Yemen, and ultimately toppled the government. The protesters demanded that Ali Abdullah Saleh, dictator of the unified country since 1990 and of the north since 1978, not run for reelection. There were also violent protests in the south of the country.

The protesters compared their president to the ousted Tunisian president Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, citing government corruption and Yemen's dire economy. Some 16,000 protesters took to the streets of Sana'a on January 27, including about 10,000 students at Sana'a University. Yemen is the poorest nation in the Arab world and has become a haven for Islamist militants linked to al-Qaeda. The protesters rejected the government's announced political reform proposals, arguing they were not comprehensive enough to ensure that Saleh or his son Ahmed would not remain in power indefinitely.

Our characterization of the global situation is confirmed.

Although, as we have stated several times, we do not trust the leadership of fundamentalist Islamism because of its defense of capitalism and its history of betrayals in agreements with North American imperialism and the Nazi-Zionist state of Israel with the complicity of the sinister Arab bourgeoisies, we celebrate this new triumph of the heroic masses of the Houthi people, as part of the third global revolutionary wave, which combines the 2nd Arab Spring with the 3rd global Intifada. If you want to read more about the Third Intifada and the Houthi struggle, click here.

These outcomes in the different historical processes of the class struggle in the 21st century demonstrate that, contrary to what the majority leadership of the workers and the poor from the post-World War II era until the fall of the Berlin Wall and Stalinism, along with the Popular Front ex-Trotskyist organizations—that is, 99% of the left—claim, far from there being a rise of fascism and the far right, a powerful revolutionary mass movement continues unabated worldwide. This movement has partially defeated US imperialism and Zionism and has the weak Trump administration under siege in its own country with the massive mobilizations of the No King movement and the expulsion of the brutal and murderous ICE immigration and customs police.

In developing and updating Lenin's theory of imperialism, we also consider that it is not true that the bloc of capitalist countries with medium economic development due to imperialist investments, called BRICS, which for us is a grouping of sub-metropolises of American imperialism, constitutes a threat to the hegemony of American imperialism through China and Russia, whose false support for semi-colonial countries for the dispute of markets puts humanity at risk of a Third World War.

The business and security meetings between Trump and a gang of Wall Street capitalists in Beijing with Xi Jinping, and Trump's meetings in Alaska with Putin, among other agreements to exploit the world's workers and strip them of their remaining social gains and strengthen their ruling class security, demonstrate that the fate of global capitalism, amidst its contradictions, is determined by revolution and counter-revolution, and not by fascism and bourgeois democracy, as Stalinism, social democracy, Maoism, Castro-Chavismo, and the ex-guerrillas (FSLN and FMLN, etc.) and ex-Trotskyists, grouped in the Progressive International, an imperialist version of the Second International of Kautsky, Bernstein, Bebel, and Ebert, argue.

Therefore, we consider it a priority task for Marxists to contribute to the regrouping of revolutionaries in the midst of this planetary political revolution that overwhelms the treacherous leaderships of the workers and popular sectors, who hinder and lead the revolutionary mass struggles into the rotten swamp of the electoral farce of bourgeois democracy to manage the crisis of capitalism, or to the "pacifist and humanitarian" "national agreements of peace and democracy" with their Stalinist policy of popular front, that is, of alliance with the "democratic bourgeoisie and imperialism".

We open a fraternal space for debate with activists, the masses, and the vanguard of revolutionary struggles to exchange interpretations, actions, and resources to recover the historical memory of revolutionary Marxism and update it in the current global situation of capitalist collapse and crisis of revolutionary political leadership. To support the struggles of the Houthis, the Palestinian people, and the peoples of the Middle East, join The Marx International!

Long live the triumph of the Houthi masses!

Down with imperialism, the Nazi-Zionist state of Israel, and the traitorous Arab bourgeoisies!

For the regrouping of the revolutionaries!

THE MARX INTERNATIONAL