The confrontation between the bourgeois factions in Venezuela - between Chavismo and the opposition parties - has undergone a qualitative leap since the beginning of 2019. It takes place in a context of an unprecedented worsening of the economic and social crisis, the most evident sign of which is the increase in poverty experienced by a large part of the population. But it is part of a scenario marked by worsening rivalries between the great powers - some giving their open support to the regime of Nicolás Maduro, others to the proclaimed interim president Juan Guaidó. The US threat, as voiced by senior officials and Donald Trump himself, does not exclude a US military intervention, using "humanitarian aid" as a justification. Support for Nicolás Maduro has come mainly from countries such as Russia and China, the main allies of Chavismo. However, rather than a direct military confrontation between the great powers, the potential danger lies in the use of the population and workers as cannon fodder in a war between bandits.
South America
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Crisis in Venezuela: Neither Guaidio nor Maduro! The Workers Must Not Support any of the Rival Bourgeois Factions!
Published by ICConlineTuesday, 19 February, 2019 - 15:07
May 68
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Fifty years ago, May 68: The difficult evolution of the proletarian political milieu (part 1)
Published by International ReviewThursday, 14 February, 2019 - 21:32
In the two previous articles in this series, we have looked at the historic significance of the reawakening of the class struggle after decades of counter-revolution. In this article we want to look specifically at the evolution of the proletarian political milieu since 1968.
Europe
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Brexit Crisis: Ruling class divisions won’t help the working class
Published by ICConlineSunday, 27 January, 2019 - 11:15It would be a great mistake to think that the disarray in the ruling class in the face of populism is helpful to the working class. Right now there is a historically low level of strikes and the proletariat is finding it very difficult even to recognise itself as a class. It risks falling for and being divided along the lines of the various ideologies put forward by the ruling class. None of these ideologies, for Brexit or Remain, for referendums or parliament, have anything to offer the working class.
Public Meeting
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100 years since the foundation of the Communist International
Published by ICConlineSunday, 27 January, 2019 - 11:32
International Communist Current Public Meeting
100 years since the foundation of the Communist International
Saturday March 9, 2019, 2pm-6pm
May Day Rooms
88 Fleet Street, London, EC4Y 1DH
Nearest tube: St Pauls
France
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Correspondence: can the “Yellow Vest” movement open the way to the class struggle?
Published by ICConlineTuesday, 22 January, 2019 - 10:20
We are publishing here large extracts from a reader who, while welcoming the overall approach of the leaflet on the Yellow Vest movement distributed by our section in France also criticises certain of our positions, in particular the idea that nothing good for the proletariat can come out of this inter-classist movement. These questions touch on extremely important aspects of the proletarian struggle: what is the working class, its struggle, its perspective.
Ecological Crisis
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Massive demonstrations of high school students against the degradation of the climate: capitalism is a threat to humanity!
Published by: ICConlineFriday, 8 February, 2019 - 09:41
For the last two months, the question of the ecological catastrophe threatening our planet has been at the centre of attention in Belgium. With the march on 2 December 2019, which brought together 75,000 people in Brussels, this mobilisation around climate change has taken on an unprecedented breadth.
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Copenhagen Summit: Save the planet? No, they can't!
Published by: International ReviewMonday, 5 April, 2010 - 20:232009: "Copenhagen ends in failure" (Guardian, UK) "Fiasco in Copenhagen", "Grotesque conclusion", "Worse than useless" (Financial Times, UK), "A worthless summit" (The Asian Age, India), "A cold shower", "The worst agreement in history" (Liberation, France)... The international press is nearly unanimous that this supposedly historic summit was a catastrophe.
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Capitalism is poisoning the earth
Published by: International ReviewThursday, 15 June, 2006 - 22:29It has become blindingly obvious that the longer it continues, the closer capitalist civilisation is taking us towards an ecological catastrophe of planetary proportions.
Britain
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Report on the National Situation: January 2019
Published by: ICConlineSunday, 27 January, 2019 - 15:05This report on the national situation in the UK was adopted by a recent general meeting. Its aim is to examine the historical background to the present political mess afflicting the British bourgeoisie.
History of the Workers' Movement
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Lenin, Luxemburg, Liebknecht
Published by: ICConlineSunday, 27 January, 2019 - 13:43In order to mark the passing of 100 years since the murder of Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht in the wake of the workers’ uprising in Berlin, January1919, we are re-issuing two articles. The first, “Lenin, Luxemburg, Liebknecht, written in 1946 by the Gauche Communiste de France, was first published in English in World Revolution 228, in February 1989, but is only now being put online; the second article was written in 2015 response to the annual parades in Berlin, where the left wing of capital tries to claim Rosa and Karl as their forebears. But as the title of the second article puts it, “Rosa Luxemburg belongs to the proletarian revolution, not the social democrats”. Not only that: both articles remind us that it was precisely the social democrats, the real ancestors of today’s “left”, who were primarily responsible for these murders, part of the job of crushing the threat of proletarian revolution. The revolution of the future must never forget who its most dangerous enemies are.
Rosa Luxemburg
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Rosa Luxemburg belongs to the proletarian revolution, not to the social democrats!
Published by: ICConlineSunday, 24 May, 2015 - 09:55
Today on blogs and forums, in bookshops and kiosks, throughout Europe and in the world, a new nauseous campaign has resurfaced in order to again distort the image of the militant Rosa Luxemburg. Thus, from television programmes, Rosa Luxemburg again appears under the sole traits of a “woman” and a “pacifist”. The very-well known and acclaimed paper, Le Monde, published an article in September 2013, written by a certain Jean-Marc Daniel, a professor of ESCP Europe, with the very evocative title: “Rosa Luxemburg, marxist-pacifist”. This association of the words “marxist” and “pacifist” is gob-smacking: for the ruling class the “real marxist” is one who abdicates from the class war, renounces the insurrection and the overthrow of capitalism.
Economic Crisis
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Ten years after the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers: how the bourgeoisie tries to hide the breakdown of capitalism
Published by: ICConlineThursday, 20 December, 2018 - 08:48
In 2008, the financial crisis which hit the United States hard, with several banks failing one after the other, suddenly plunged millions of proletarians into misery. Among the main symbolic characters of the banking sector, Lehman Brothers, one of the great pillars of the American economic system, quickly fell into bankruptcy, provoking panic throughout the entire international banking system of which it was one of the star players. Today, when the threat of new financial storm appears again on the horizon, the media have a launched a devious propaganda around the ten-year anniversary of the collapse of Lehman Brothers.
Obituary
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Our comrade Elisabeth has left us
Published by: ICConlineWednesday, 28 November, 2018 - 15:33Our comrade Elisabeth has left us at the age of 77. She died from breathing difficulties which provoked a cardiac arrest, on the night of Saturday/Sunday 18 November.
Leftism
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The hidden legacy of the left of capital (part one): A false vision of the working class
Published by: ICConlineMonday, 26 November, 2018 - 16:39The 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.
ICC Public Meetings on May '68
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Did May 68 really mark the end of almost 50 years of counter-revolution?
Published by: International ReviewMonday, 26 November, 2018 - 13:33The ICC held public meetings in a number of cities across several countries to coincide with the 50th 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...
Contribution to a history of the workers’ movement in South Africa (iv)
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From the election of president Nelson Mandela in 1994 to 2014
Published by: International ReviewTuesday, 13 November, 2018 - 11:21
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.
Communism on the agenda
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Castoriadis, Munis and the problem of breaking with Trotskyism Second part: On the content of the communist revolution
Published by: International ReviewWednesday, 1 August, 2018 - 20:54In 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.
Praxis
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Karl Marx: a revolutionary militant
Published by: ICConlineMonday, 16 July, 2018 - 16:23
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...
Middle East
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The coming elections in Israel: a class perspective
Published by: ICConlineThursday, 3 January, 2019 - 14:22
In the increasingly poisonous atmosphere of conflict and crisis in the Middle East, the ICC welcomes the appearance of the following article which is one of the rare expressions of a genuinely internationalist standpoint emanating from inside Israel. The author takes up the marxist position that all national struggles and slogans in the epoch of capitalist decline have become reactionary, and does not hesitate to argue that the only way out of the trap created by imperialism in Israel-Palestine is the unification of Israeli and Palestinian workers on a class basis, leading towards a proletarian revolution against all bourgeois states.
International Situation
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Trump, the Middle East and the convulsions of US imperialism
Published by: ICConlineSunday, 27 January, 2019 - 11:45Recent expressions of US foreign policy, particularly but not only in the Middle East, show the impact of populism, exemplified in the Trump presidency, and the consequent strengthening global tendencies of every man for himself, unpredictability, chaos and open divisions within the ruling class.
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China’s Silk Road to imperialist domination
Published by: ICConlineFriday, 7 September, 2018 - 10:51
The following article is one of several through which we plan to deal with the rise of China and its consequences for imperialist relations worldwide. For reasons of space we will focus in this article on the New Silk Road. In future we look in more detail at Chinese ambitions in Africa and Latin America and examine its overall rivalry with the US.
History of the Workers' Movement
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1919: Foundation of the Communist International
Published by: International ReviewFriday, 14 August, 2009 - 13:18
March 2019 marks the centenary of the foundation of the Third, Communist International, one of the high points of the international revolutionary wave which swept the globe at the end of the First World War. We will be producing a new article to celebrate and analyse this historic event, but in the meantime we are drawing readers' attention to what we wrote in 1989, 70 years after the formation of the CI; this is an article which retains its relevance today.
Polemic
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Public meetings on the German revolution: Reply to the CWO on the question of the left fractions
Published by: ICConlineWednesday, 23 January, 2019 - 16:01
In November 2018 the two main groups of the communist left in Britain, the ICC and the Communist Workers Organisation, held meetings in London on the centenary of the German revolution. From both meetings it was evident that there is fundamental agreement on a number of key points arising from this experience. And yet there were also definite disagreements between our two organisations, which emerged at the CWO meeting and were further debated at the ICC meeting the following week, which was attended by a member of the CWO. This article looks at the principal differences that emerged.
France
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Police violence, riots, urban guerrillas, looting... The real cause of chaos and violence is capitalism!
Published by: ICConlineSaturday, 12 January, 2019 - 11:37The real, organised, systematic violence on the streets of France in recent weeks was that unleashed by the state which had encountered the anger of "the people" folowing years of austerity. But this "popular revolt" of all the "poor" of "working France" who can't "make ends meet" is not as such a proletarian movement, despite its sociological composition, as the following article explains.
Revolution in Germany
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100 years ago, revolution in Germany
Published by: International ReviewMonday, 12 November, 2018 - 18:08A hundred years ago we were at height of the world revolutionary wave – more precisely, the outbreak of the revolution in Germany, a year after the proletariat took power in Russia, in October 1917.
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100 years ago, the proletariat made the ruling class tremble
Published by: International ReviewMonday, 5 November, 2018 - 17:34
“100 Years ago, the proletariat made the ruling class tremble”. This title may sound odd today because this immense historical event has more or less been consigned to oblivion. The bourgeoisie has succeeded in erasing it from the memory of the working class. And yet in 1918, all eyes were on Germany – a source of hope for the proletariat, and of fear for the bourgeoisie.
The working class had just taken power in Russia. 1917. The Bolsheviks. The soviets. The insurrection...
Germany was the bolt on the door between East and West. A victorious revolution here would open the way to the revolutionary class struggle throughout the old continent of Europe. None of the bourgeoisies wanted to see this door unbolted. This is why the bourgeoisie was to direct all its hatred, and all its most sophisticated manoeuvres, against it. The revolution in Germany would determine the success or failure of the world revolution which had begun in Russia...
Protests in the Middle East
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Class struggle in Jordan’s war economy
Published by: ICConlineTuesday, 3 July, 2018 - 07:21
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...
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Internationalist Voice and protests in the Middle East
Published by: ICConlineTuesday, 13 November, 2018 - 15:27In August Internationalist Voice posted a position on the ICC's web forum on the wave of protests in the Middle East affecting the countries of Jordan, Iran and Iraq. Here is a response from a close sympathiser of the ICC.
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Iraq: marching against the war machine
Published by: ICConlineThursday, 2 August, 2018 - 12:36
In a region scarred by imperialist war and sectarian divisions, the recent social protests in Iran, Jordan and Iraq offer hope that there is another possibility: the united struggle of the exploited against capital and its brutal violence. This article, written by a close sympathiser, looks at the massive demonstrations that have swept through central and southern Iraq.
Starting on July 8, 2018, a number of spontaneous protests broke out in central and southern Iraq involving thousands of demonstrators. It spread through eight southern provinces very quickly and, about a fortnight later, onto the streets of Baghdad. These followed significant protests in Jordan and Iran on exactly the same issues. The movement in Iraq would have been aware of these protests and inspired by them given the basic similarities.
Health Service
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70 years of the NHS: Beware the capitalist state bearing gifts
Published by: ICConlineSunday, 9 September, 2018 - 09:14Seventy years of the National Health Service, founded in 1948, has been celebrated on TV, by a service at Westminster Abbey, and by numerous events in hospitals. The NHS is, in its own words, “our country’s most trusted and respected social institution” . Even those who protest at the way it is run do so because they are against “the assault on the NHS” (Socialist Worker 3/3/18). People love the NHS, and want to protect it. It all seems too good to be true, a national institution loved by all from the Countess of Wessex at the service in Westminster Abbey (even if royalty invariably use private hospitals) to the poorest in the land, and from right to extreme left of the political spectrum. This ideology, supported by all the bourgeoisie’s political forces, is based on many falsehoods...
