International Communist Current

The huge exploision in Beirut

The catastrophe in Beirut shows the criminal negligence not just of the ruling class in Lebanon, but of an entire social order.

Police take the knee - but still beat-up demonstrators

The anger at the cold-blooded police murder of George Floyd is real, and it has been shared by white people as well as black, by Latinos, Asians, and among the young in particular. But we live in a society which is dominated materially and ideologically by a ruling class, the bourgeoisie or capitalist class. And anger in itself, however justified, is not enough to challenge the system that lies behind police violence, or to avoid the many traps laid by the bourgeoisie. The protests were not started by the ruling class. But it has already succeeded in pulling them onto its own bourgeois political terrain. 

An account of the discussions at our public meetings on the "Yellow Vests" movement in France. The issues raised in these meetings have a wider significance than this particular movement, since the working class today is being called on to participate in a whole series of protests which are either of an interclassist character, like that of the "Yellow Vests", or which are posed on a directly bourgeois terrain, like the "democratic" protests in Hong Kong or the Black Lives Matter demonstrations.

A close sympathiser of the ICC makes an appeal to the organisations of the proletarian political milieu to take up their responsibility in response to the dangerous manoeuvres of an adventurer.

"It is not the consciousness of men that determines their being, but, on the contrary, their social being that determines their consciousness” as Marx famously said. Today, the reality of most people’s ‘being’ across the globe is deteriorating in a dangerous and bewildering manner: wars, economic hardship; environmental degradation, enforced migration and this year, in addition, a new virus. These material conditions of growing chaos and confusion – plus the apparent absence of a credible alternative – are the soil nourishing the proliferation of ‘conspiracy theories’.

The article below, published in 2012, complements the new article "The fuel for conspiracy theories is the decomposition of capitalism" which looks at the proliferation of conspiracy theories about the origin or role of the Covid-19 crisis. It is striking how in the intervening period, the acceleration of capitalist decomposition, and particularly the rise of populist parties and governments, has brought these distorted visions into the mainstream. But it remains as necessary as ever for marxists to show why such approaches are a significant barrier to understanding the real workings of this system.

Syrian mercenaries, backed by Turkey, arrive in war-torn Libya

After the "Arab Spring" was over in Libya, where a part of the population rose up against the bloody and corrupt regime of Gaddifi, the western powers (in the name of the "humanitarian protection of the civilian population" that the ex-dictator had brutally repressed) declared war on the Libyan leader. After massacring numerous civilians under a barrage of bombs and liquidating Gaddafi, they left the country in the hand of multiple bloody groups who are still fighting over control of the moribund Libyan state.

A debate with a group of comrades in Alicante, Spain, about the significance of the present pandemic.

Capitalism is responsible for the looming ecological disaster it has created in the Arctic - and now seeks to exploit the melting of the ice caps for its own strategic and economic interests

The Covid-19 crisis and the lockdown have not made the class struggle disappear: we have already referred to workers’ strikes demanding proper safety equipment and working conditions in a number of countries, and we will be coming back to this in future articles. There is no denying however that the lock-down creates particularly difficult conditions for the development of the open, massive struggle. But we also know that we are going to be faced with unprecedented attacks on our living standards, and we have to prepare our response. This necessarily entails drawing the lessons of previous struggles, and this is the aim of the article we publish here, written by our section in France, which examines the important strikes of railway workers, health workers and others last autumn and winter.

We are publishing this article because of the paramount importance of gaining a deeper understanding of the rise of Chinese capitalism in the last three decades, and more specifically of the aims of its “New Silk Road” project. It should be noted that it was written some time before the current Covid-19 pandemic, which will certainly have a significant impact on the global imperialist pecking order. It also puts forward a number of elements – such as the sections on the “Mackinder Doctrine” and on the development of the “credit economy” in Stalinist regimes – which are currently under discussion in the ICC. We therefore offer it as the contribution of an individual comrade.

A close sympathiser of the ICC responds to an attack on our organisation by the so-called "International Group of the Communist Left"

Anyone who claims to belong to the communist left has the responsibility to know and to make known the history of this component of the workers’ movement, its origins in reaction to the degeneration of the parties of the Communist International, and the different branches which compose it (the Italian left, the German-Dutch left etc). It is above all important to draw out very precisely the historic contours of the communist left and the differences which separate it from other left currents of the past, notably the Trotskyist current. This is the object of the present article.

150 years ago, in the early 1860s, the workers’ movement internationally was still in its infancy, and its different components had not yet acquired much experience in setting up and defending political organisations. At the same time the working class in Germany was going to be faced with one of the most difficult political challenges, that of confronting the activities of political adventurers, as the following article explains.

After years of weakness, the social movement against pension reform shows a re-awakening of the combativity of the proletariat in France. Despite all its difficulties the working class has begun to raise its head.

Local militias, supported by regional and international imperialist powers, have turned Libya into a chaotic war zone and a veritable slave market for refugees

greatest lie in history: Stalinism equals communism

Thirty years ago, the fall of the Berlin Wall demonstrated the bankruptcy of the reviled Stalinist regimes. Lyingly labelled ‘the death of communism’, this event was in reality the symbol of the implosion of the Eastern Bloc, a pivotal moment in the decomposition of capitalism. But its thirtieth anniversary has seen the bourgeoisie regurgitate the same lies today as yesterday. The working class has to permanently reject and fight back against this ideological assault.

Protesters wave the national flag in Lebanon

We are currently seeing a wave of popular movements against the endless sacrifices demanded by capitalism and implemented by governments which are often gangrened by corruption, discredited and hated by the population. Such movements have taken place in Chile, Ecuador, Haiti, Iraq, Iran, Algeria and Lebanon. But while the working class is present in these "popular revolts", it's never as an antagonistic class to capital but one drowned within the population. Far from favouring a future riposte from the working class and, with it, the only viable perspective of a struggle against the capitalist system, these popular, inter-classist revolts serve to reinforce the idea of "no future", which can only obscure such a perspective. They strengthen the difficulties experienced by the working class in mounting its own response to the more and more intolerable conditions that are the result of the bankruptcy of capitalism. 

Today, if you walk the streets of the towns and cities of Britain it seems that a permanent feature of city centres are desperate people, young and old, squatting in shop doorways begging for change...