International Communist Current

We are publishing here a response to the analysis drafted by Emma Goldman (1869-1940) in the first years after the October 1917 revolution. After her expulsion from the United States in January 1920 she spent two years in Russia, then published three books: “I consider then, and still consider, that the Russian problem is entirely too complex to speak lightly of it”, she wrote in the introduction to her first book. We are responding to Emma Goldman because she was a central figure of the revolutionary workers’ movement in the United States at the time of the First World War. Because of her determination to defend a clearly internationalist position against the war she was nicknamed “Emma the Red - America's Most Dangerous Woman” by the American ruling class. But there are other reasons to examine Goldman's positions in more detail...

The first part of a series looking at the detrimental political and organisational impact that parties of the extreme left of capital - including Socialist and Communist parties, Trotskyism, Maoism, official anarchism and the so-called "New Left" of Syriza or Podemos - exert on the proletariat's revolutionary organisations. 

The ICC held public meetings in a number of cities across several countries to coincide with the 50^th anniversary of May 1968. The idea that May 68 had signalled the development of a wave of struggles internationally was generally of no surprise to those present. But paradoxically, it was still not considered the case that May 68 marked the end of the long period of counter-revolution that resulted from the defeat of the first world revolutionary wave and which, at the same time, opened a new course towards class confrontations between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat...

In this article, we aim to show how the ANC’s project of rescuing and defending capitalist social relations in South Africa was implemented methodically by its successive leaders, in the first place by Nelson Mandela.

In the previous part of this series, we re-published the article ‘Welcome to Socialisme ou Barbarie’ written by the Gauche Communiste de France in 1948. The article took up a clear position on the nature of the Trotskyist movement, which had abandoned its proletarian credentials by participating in the second imperialist world war. In this new article, we will seek to show how right the GCF were to be cautious in their welcome to SouB, and how difficult it is for those who have grown up in the corrupt milieu of Trotskyism to make a really profound break with its fundamental ideas and attitudes.

Korea, Syria, Iran, Palestine... It’s easy to succumb to panic in a world that looks increasingly out of control – and then to slip into complacency when our immediate fears are not realised or the killing fields slip down the news agendas. But in order to understand the real dangers posed by the present system and its wars, it’s necessary to step back, to consider where we are in the unfolding of events on a historical and world-wide scale. 

In The State and Revolution, Lenin wrote:“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.”

During the life of Marx, the bourgeoisie did everything to prevent him from operating by demonising him and persecuting him through the apparatus of the police. After his death they did everything to distort his fight to destroy capitalism and open up the future to communism...

The election of Donald Trump as president of the USA, which closely followed the unexpected result of the EU referendum in the UK, has created a wave of unease, fear, but also questioning across the world. How could our rulers, those who are supposedly in charge of the present world order, allow such things to happen – turns of events that seem to go against the “rational” interests of the capitalist class? How did it come about that a chancer, a narcissist thug and hustler is now at the head of the world’s most powerful state? And more important: what does this tell us about where the entire world is headed.

Since its origins, the workers’ movement has seen itself as international and internationalist.”Workers have no country”; “workers of the world, unite!”. These are the two key ideas of the Communist Manifesto of 1848. It's by basing ourselves on this approach that we have analysed, in our press, the experiences of struggles of the class in different parts of the world, and we think that it's important to make known those which have taken place in Argentina.