Public meetings

The ICC's next Public Forum in London will focus on some of the most important developments in the world situation in the last few months: the 'debt crisis', social revolts, the war in Libya and the riots in the UK. All welcome. 

With the dearth of media attention given the revolts in Tunisia, Algeria, and Egypt, and later much of the rest of the Arabic-speaking world, Internationalism felt it important to hold a public forum on the perspectives for these revolts. On March 19, a short presentation was given, followed by a couple hours of open discussion about the history of the events, the similarities and differences between each national situation, as well as similarities with the anti-austerity movements in Europe and the workers’ movement historically.

The bookshop Gondolkodo Antikvàrium in Budapest has begun a series of public debates on the perspectives for the class struggle, and on 5th November invited the ICC to introduce a discussion on “The world economic crisis and the perspectives for the class struggle”. We report briefly here on the issues raised during the meeting. 

 

This past summer the ICC held a number of public forums across the US, which provided the opportunity for comrades from the ICC to meet a wide range of people and discuss a variety of issues with them.

We are publishing here two short reports on recent meetings in London and Manchester which showed some small steps forward in developing collective discussion and activity among genuinely internationalist groups and tendencies.

At every big election the media tell us how important it is that everyone exercises their democratic rights and votes. There are supposed to be clear choices between very different parties.

On June 25, a public meeting took place in the city of Santiago-the second most important city in the Dominican Republic-organized by the Internationalist Discussion Nucleus of the Dominican Republic (Núcleo de Discusión Internacionalista de la República Dominicana, NDIRD). This is NDIRD's second public meeting, to which the ICC was invited to give a presentation on the theme of "The Crisis and Decadence of Capitalism."

This article has already been published online, here .

ICC held a public meeting at the Industrial city of Kanpur in UP on 21st Dec 2008.

During the summer of 2008, the ICC held two well-attended public meetings on the west coast, one in Los Angeles (July 19^th) and in San Francisco-Oakland (July 26^th). Both forums were only possible thanks to the local help of comrades sympathetic towards the ICC, who provided the meeting places and arranged local publicity. We are extremely thankful for this help. Both discussions were on "May ‘68 and the Resurgence of the Working Class Struggles Worldwide."

The ICC had a stall and hosted a meeting at the ‘May 68 and all that' event at Conway Hall in May. The event was a very mixed affair. There was a strong presence of those we refer to as leftists - political tendencies that talk about socialism and revolution but actually defend the interests of capitalism. This was evident in a couple of the meetings we attended.

Discussion is the lifeblood of the workers' movement as it tries to clarify the questions thrown up by the class struggle and in the fight for communism. It obviously takes many forms. For example, we always encourage people to write to us, at as great a length as is necessary, if there are issues that really need to be spelt out and given proper consideration.

The ICC has just published a new book. Communism, not a nice idea but a material necessity. It’s the first volume of a collection of articles that we started publishing as a series in the early 1990s. At that time, and for some time after, you couldn’t move without coming across another book, article or TV programme on the ‘death of communism’. As communists we had two important things to explain...

 

This article has already been published on this site here:

http://en.internationalism.org/node/2042

“Communism? Ah yes, like Russia used to be. The state controls the whole economy.

The presentation was on the title: Only the class struggle can stop the war drive. The presentation focused on the two dynamics.

Bush’s rejection of the Iraq study group’s recommendations has to be seen within the framework of the impasse of US imperialism. Since the collapse of the old blocs the, so-called, “new world order” is really disorder and chaos. The US has launched an offensive to protect its dominant position. It is becoming more and more isolated and has become bogged down in the Iraqi quagmire. The US has to pull itself out and reassert itself. We are faced with the future prospect of a confrontation between Iran and the USA.

The topic for discussion was “The working class is a class of immigrants” and the presentation was along the lines of the lead article from the Dec/Jan 2007 issue of World Revolution. Present were three members of the ICC, two of our sympathisers and a member of the Anarchist Federation (AF). The early part of the discussion took up the question of religion and its effects on the working class.

The discussion at our November public forum in London, ‘What is communism and how do we get there?’ focused on mostly the second part of the question. Communism depends on the organisation and activity of the working class, so what are the signs that this is developing? Two comrades at the meeting didn’t share our perspective...

In early July we held the London public forum on the war in Spain 70 years ago. This is a report of the discussions that took place during the meeting.

On Saturday 8 July the ICC will be holding a public meeting in London (2pm, Conway Hall, Red Lion Square, Holborn, WC1). The meeting will be on the war in Spain, which began 70 years ago, with Franco’s attempted coup on July 19 1936.

The ICC recently held a number of public interventions in Brazil... Such an intervention in Brazil constitutes a first for the ICC; it was only possible thanks to the sterling initiatives of sympathisers there and to the collaboration with the Brazilian proletarian group by the name of “Workers Opposition” who were the organisers of the public meetings.

During October and November the ICC's section in France held meetings on the theme ‘Proletarian revolution is the sole perspective for the future of humanity’ in Tours, Marseille, Nantes, Toulouse, Paris and Lyons. Inevitably the burning question of the riots was the central preoccupation: how should we view the desperate violence of the young in the suburbs? This article reports on the discussion at the meeting in Toulouse.

Mass poverty within present day society is not accidental: capitalism creates poverty as an inevitable byproduct of its system of exploitation of the working class.  The extraction of surplus value leads to the grotesque polarisation of wealth and want at two opposite poles of society.  It also leads to economic crisis and imperialist war...

In October the ICC held a public meeting in Calcutta attended by a large number of people from a diverse milieu. Their participation was testimony to the ICC's success in pushing for discussion and reflection. The debate that unfolded in the meeting took this process of clarification further.

WR public forums on the question of 'War and proletarian consciousness'

The victory of ‘our’ imperialism is always a moment of terrible danger for proletarian consciousness. In 1918, the patriotic euphoria of victory was used to neutralise the massive discontent of the workers in Britain and France who had endured four years of butchery. And above all it was used to separate these sections of the proletariat from their class brothers in Russia and Germany - and thus, to isolate and ultimately destroy the main outposts of the proletarian revolution. The defeat of fascism in 1945 has been used ever since not only to justify the second imperialist holocaust, but also to bludgeon our minds with the idea that ‘democracy’ is the best of all possible worlds.