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Marxism Alive has just turned 5 years old and has been edited in Spanish, Portuguese, French, Russian and English. At present we are preparing its number 12. It is not common nowadays that a theoretic-political magazine should last for such a long time. This has only been possible because thousands of social fighters and left-wing activists have read it, have criticised or have spread it.

That means it responds to the needs of explaining the world events of class struggle with Marxists tools. Faced with a considerable sector of the left prostrating themselves to the bourgeois "democracy", there are more and more activists who are in search of a Marxist explanation that may guide them in their revolutionary activity.

Just as we said in its Nr1, Marxism Alive was "in the service of the debate emerging on the world left, that - ever since the fall of the Berlin Wall - has been questioning the entire Marxism and it basic postulates. In these last years, we have seen that the evolution of this questioning advanced by qualitative leaps: an ample sector of the left has gone over to with arms and supplies over to the "democratic" bourgeois trenches.

The great contradiction is that, while the world working class has had a leading role in revolutions and heroic processes of struggle and segments of social fighters and revolutionary activists accrue draw nearer to Marxism, a major part of the world left, including "Trotskyists", have forsaken class struggle, and the combat for the dictatorship of proletariat, in exchange for comfortable seats in the parliament and juicy posts in ministries.

Once more, day after day, Marxism, Leninism and Trotskyism are increasingly more visible in the world class struggle and, at the end of the day, this is what ensures the existence of a magazine of this type. We are proud to say that, within our modest possibilities, we have become a tool for the defence of Marxism. Not an "academic" kind of Marxism, but the one that is closely linked to the main events of the world class struggle.

We have joined this discussion not as neutrals but in defence of very simple principles, today abandoned by most of the world left, such as not to be part of bourgeois governments ( Brazil ) or oppose the invasion of imperialist troops in such countries as Afghanistan , Iraq or Haiti . Along all these years we have analysed and discussed the main revolutionary processes of armed resistance against imperialism that took place in that period: Ecuador, Palestine, Afghanistan, Argentina, Brazil, Bolivia, Iraq, Venezuela.

Also general topics were tackled of great importance for the construction of a world revolutionary alternative: imperialist recolonisation, the role of the UNO, the women's issue, a way out for the peasants struggle, capitalist restoration in Russia, China and Cuba, the proletariat as a social subject of the revolution in the times of "globalisation", the discussion with the theory-programme of the "citizenship", the bourgeois nationalism, the relationship between workers' power and the demand for a Constituent Assembly. We responded from our point of view to such key questions as what has happened to the unrecognisable world left or how to confront the Popular Front governments.

Marxism Alive has endeavoured to fulfil its mission: to offer the world proletariat and the revolutionary Marxist advance-guard a tool that can help towards the shared comprehension of world events, to work out a programme of action, stemming out of the defence and the updating of Marxism in the heat of class struggle. In our understanding, Marxist theory is a guide for action. To be fighting that battle and to be offering a socialist and revolutionary alternative, no matter how modest, is our great achievement and we pledge to give it continuity.

Along the pages of Marxism Alive many opinions, discussions and different points of view have been expressed. But we would like to hear more criticism, more letters to the editors, more opinions addressed to the magazine by the readers. This is a fundamental thing for us for, as Trotsky put it, in the magazine Clave, edited in Mexico in the 1930s: The constant communication between the editors and the readers is the fundamental requisite for the magazine to have a correct orientation and to be closely linked to the class struggle of the proletariat."