New ICC publications for the month for March / 2017

New publications this month

World Revolution no.376, Feb/March/April 2017

Tuesday, February 28, 2017 - 18:26

Articles published this month

A reply to Link: The ICC as a Fraction

Saturday, March 18, 2017 - 12:21

The first part of our reply to Link’s ICC forum posts was on the ICC’s 40 year balance sheet of its existence. This second part concentrates on the problem of the Fraction and the article in the International Review ‘The ICC as a Fraction’.

ICC public forum, London 15 April: The Trump election and the crumbling of capitalist world order

Saturday, March 18, 2017 - 12:03

Date: Saturday 15 April 2017, 2pm-6pm
Place: Lucas Arms, 245A Grays Inn Rd, Kings Cross, London WC1X 8QY

In the face of the decline of the US, and also of growing class, racial, religious and ethnic divisions, Trump wants to unite the capitalist nation behind its ruling class in the name of a new Americanism. The United States, according to Trump, has become the main victim of the rest of the world. He claims that, while the US has been exhausting itself and its resources maintaining world order, all the rest have been profiting from this order at the expense of “God’s own country”. The Trumpistas are thinking here not only of the Europeans or the East Asians who have been flooding the American market with their products. One of the main “exploiters” of the United States, according to Trump, is Mexico, which he accuses of exporting its surplus population into the American social welfare system, while at the same time developing its own industry to such an extent that its automobile production is overtaking that of its northern neighbour.

This amounts to a new and virulent form of nationalism, reminiscent of “underdog” German nationalism after World War I and the Treaty of Versailles. The orientation of this form of nationalism is no longer to justify the imposing of a world order by America. Its orientation is to itself put in question the existing world order ...

Rosa Luxemburg: the Bolsheviks represent the honor of the revolution

Saturday, March 4, 2017 - 22:38

“During the lifetime of great revolutionaries, the oppressing classes constantly hounded them, received their theories with the most savage malice, the most furious hatred and the most unscrupulous campaigns of lies and slander. After their death, attempts are made to convert them into harmless icons, to canonize them, so to say, and to hallow their names to a certain extent for the “consolation” of the oppressed classes and with the object of duping the latter, while at the same time robbing the revolutionary theory of its substance, blunting its revolutionary edge and vulgarizing it.” (Lenin).

Of no revolutionary has this been more true than of Rosa Luxemburg. The heirs of her assassins – the social-democrats of every hue – would like to turn her into an icon of democracy against the dictatorial Bolsheviks. This, the first chapter of her work on the Russian Revolution, is a scathing rebuttal to such attempts to rewrite history: as she says in her conclusion, "All the revolutionary honor and capacity which western Social-Democracy lacked was represented by the Bolsheviks"