International Communist Current

When the world is facing the trial of the Covid-19 pandemic, we in the ICC have also been through the painful experience of the passing away of our comrade Kishan on 26th March, 2020. This is a great loss for the ICC and its section in India, and we will miss him greatly. Kishan made an important contribution to the life of the ICC and was a comrade with a great fighting spirit till his last breath.

Given its lack of preparedness to deal with a global pandemic, the bourgeoisie has had little choice but to resort to the mediaeval policy of quarantining the population, which has paid a heavy price in terms of impoverishment and social atomisation.  

August 8th and subsequent weekends saw thousands of UK health workers protest against poor pay and the failure to protect them against Covid-19. Similar anger has been displayed by proletarians in cities around the world...

Forty years ago, in the summer of 1980, the working class in Poland made the whole world tremble. A massive strike movement was spreading across the country: several hundred thousand workers launched wildcat strikes in the different towns; it shook the ruling class in Poland and those in other countries.

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.

The discussion texts we are publishing here are the product of an internal debate within the ICC regarding the significance and direction of the historical phase in the life of decadent capitalism which was definitively opened up by the collapse of the Russian imperialist bloc in 1989: the phase of decomposition, the terminal phase of capitalist decadence.  

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.

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. 

"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