International Communist Current

An article from a close sympathiser showing that despite and even because of the omnipresence of war in the Middle East, the class struggle can still raise its head.

At the end of May this year a wave of strikes and protests by workers and unemployed in Jordan against tax increases, price rises and state corruption was widely reported in the media. In fact the movement by lower-paid workers against gas and electricity price increases began several months earlier in the provinces, building up to mass protests in the capital Amman...

The British Labour Party harbours antisemites, leading to what the Chakrabarti Report in June 2016 called an “occasionally toxic atmosphere”. Furthermore this is a longstanding and somewhat intractable feature of the party, continuing despite the recommendations of the report 2 years ago, despite Corbyn meeting with the Jewish Leadership Council and Board of Deputies in April, which they described as a missed opportunity, and despite the fact that is has caused problems in recent local elections in areas with a large Jewish population....

The existence of antisemitism is, however, not sufficient to account for the campaign about it. Whether the media make a scandal of something, or whether it is hushed up, often depends on the divisions in the ruling class and the need to put pressure on a politician or a government.

The two articles published in World Revolution 380 are part of a broader project aimed at re-examining the authentic legacy of the events of May-June 1968 in France. The article ‘Sinking into the economic crisis’ (see below) takes us back to a document written by the newly-formed group Révolution Internationale in 1969, a polemic against the Situationist thesis that the events were a response to a capitalist system that was “working well”. 

The second article in this issue, ‘Against the lies about May 68’, (see article above) also written by our comrades in France, takes up some of the principal distortions and outright lies being spread about the meaning of May '68.

In issue number two of Révolution Internationale, published in 1969, there is an article called ‘Understanding May’ written by Marc Chirik, who had returned from over a decade of exile in Venezuela to take an active part in the ‘Events’ of May 68 in France.

This article was a polemical response to the pamphlet ‘Enragés and Situationists in the Occupation Movement’ published by the Situationist International. While recognising that the SI had indeed played an active part in the movement of May-June, it punctured their almost unlimited pretentiousness and self-regard, which led them to the frankly subsitutionist conclusion that “the agitation unleashed in January 1968 by the four or five revolutionaries who were to constitute the enrages group was to lead, in five months, to the virtual liquidation of the state”. 

Raoul Peck’s film, which has recently been released in Britain, provides us with much to think about on the bicentenary of Marx’s birth, and we certainly recommend it to our readers. But as the following article shows, it still needs to be viewed with a critical eye… 

Under the heading ‘Readers’ Contributions’ we aim to encourage our readers and sympathisers to write texts and articles which can go into greater depth than is possible in our discussion forum, and so stimulate a longer term reflection. These articles, while being broadly based on proletarian politics, need not fully represent the positions of the ICC, or may deal with issues on which the ICC does not have a collective view. Here, a close sympathiser looks at recent discoveries of ‘Neaderthal art’  and the implications for a marxist understanding of ‘pre-history’.

“My goal is simple. It is a complete understanding of the universe, why it is as it is and why it exists at all”.

The celebrated cosmologist Stephen Hawking died on March 14 in Cambridge. He was one of the greatest specialists in black holes. Along with his theoretical discoveries he became known around the world for trying to make the scientific mysteries of the universe more accessible to the general public. 

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.

Faced with the torrent of “celebration” about how women (or some women) were given the vote in 1918, we are pleased to publish this short response by a comrade who has moved close to the views of left communism – and thus to the ideas of Sylvia Pankurst in 1918, who exposed the granting of the vote as a deception aimed at stemming the tide of revolution that had been provoked by the horrors of the First World War. ICC

ICC introduction

A number of comrades have been reflecting seriously on the importance of the October Revolution in Russia. The text that follows has been sent to us by a close sympathiser of the ICC in Belgium. The comrade had prepared this contribution for a previous meeting in September 2017 in Belgium on the topic of the October Revolution – we have already published a contribution by another sympathiser written at the same time (see Contribution to the discussion of the centenary of the Russian Revolution of 1917, November 2017).