International Communist Current

Racial tensions in the United States are related to the role played by the slave system in the development of primitive accumulation in that country. Slavery existed throughout the Americas and the Caribbean (Brazil, Spanish colonies, the Caribbean islands) but in no other developed country has this system conditioned social relations and the obstacles to working class unity as much as in the US. At another level of development and importance, the case of South Africa has some similarities.

Since we wrote about the elements that were to found the Anarchist Communist Group (ACG) in February 2018, this organisation has gone through a process of defining its course and determining its programme. Its main objective was to turn away from the domination of identity politics, as had developed in the Anarchist Federation and in the anarchist milieu in general, and to return to the class struggle as the fundamental basis of its activities. After the group was founded it made some steps, as it said, “to break with the swamp of traditional anarchism” and in the direction of class positions. This article shows the limitations of that break. 

We are publishing an article written by our comrades in France which shows that the bourgeoisie’s negligent and irresponsible response to the Covid-19 pandemic is not limited to populist government’s like those in Britain and the US. It is followed by an article that highlights the similarity of government action on both sides of the Channel. This article was written by a sympathiser but is fully in line with our position on this question.

The proletariat will only be able to free humanity from the increasingly suffocating chains of world capitalism if its struggle is inspired and fertilised by the critical historical continuity of its communist organisations, that thread that runs from the Communist League in 1848 to the current organisations that identify with the tradition of the communist left. Deprived of this compass, the workers’ reaction against the barbarity and misery imposed by capitalism will be condemned to blind, desperate actions, which may lead to a definitive chain of defeats....

This statement by the Korea-based group Internationalist Communist Perspective was written before the elections in South Korea, which took place on 15 April 2020 and ended in a landslide victory for the current president Moon Jae-in, to a large extent because of the country’s relatively effective response to the Covid-19 outbreak. According to the comrades this text was the only voice raised against participating in the elections.

Because of the Covid-19 and the lock-down, it is not possible to distribute a paper version of World Revolution at the moment. But we have produced a PDF of WR 386 in A4 which makes it easier for readers to print off copies for their own use. Subscriptions to the paper press will be held in suspense until the next paper is produced, although subscribers to the International Review should now be receiving International Review 164 in the mail, containing the reports and resolutions from the 23rd ICC Congress.

This new volume in the series on communism will look at the some of the major problems posed to the revolutionary project of the working class  by capitalism's entry into the last stage of its decadence, the phase of decomposition: social atomisation and loss of class identity, uncontrolled urbanisation and destruction of the natural environment, and so on. In doing so it will revisit some of the questions posed in the past about the social and economic measures needed to carry through a communist transformation. 

Refugees from the war in Syria are being used as pawns by the rival imperialist powers responsible for the slaughter.

What was the significance of the recent strike movement in France, principally involving railway workers, health workers and other parts of the public sector? This was a movement which was undoubtedly a response to a direct attack on workers’ living conditions – the so-called “Pension Reforms” demanded by the Macron government. It was centred on the workplaces where the working class is most obviously a living social force, but at the same time, there was a very strong push towards solidarity between the different sectors.

Behind the space race between the USA and the USSR lay the military rivalry between the two imperialist blocs. In today's period of "every man for himself", there is no let up in the militarisation of space.

The movement against pension reform in France was from start to finish under the control of the unions. They called the strike, they chose and organised the days of action, they led the rare general assemblies. And it was the unions who led the movement to defeat. And for two years the unions worked together with the government ... to prepare and manage to pass this reform!

We are publishing a number of documents emanating from the 23rd ICC Congress: reports that were discussed and ratified (or extracts from them) and resolutions that were adopted. This now includes an article on the overall work of the Congress and the report on the historic course with a short introduction. We add to this collection a report aimed at updating our analysis of decomposition which was ratified by the 22nd ICC Congress and which provides a framework for some of the reports to the 23rd Congress.

Militants of the GCF, Paris 1945: left to right, Chirik, Bricanier, Mousso and Evrard

This article, continuing our long-running series on the communist goals of the workers' movement, looks at the contribution of Marc Chirik, a comrade of the Italian Fraction , the Gauche Communiste de France and the ICC, to the debate on the post-revolutionary state and the problems of the period of transition from capitalism to communism.

An underlying problem with anarchism is its lack of a class analysis - a kind of original sin of anarchism, which has always tended to express the standpoint of the petty bourgeoisie or other intermediate strata rather than that of the working class. Extinction Rebellion – like the trade unions or the Labour party – is a bourgeois organisation, linked directly to the capitalist state, and thus incapable of being “transformed” into something that serves the class struggle. Its function – like the New Green Deal or the Youth for Climate campaign - is to recuperate genuine concerns about the future of the planet and to steer them away from questioning capitalism.

There is no question that the present system is dragging humanity towards an environmental catastrophe. The wave of protests organised by Youth for Climate, Extinction Rebellion, the Green parties and the parties of the left are presented as a way forward. But those who are currently following their lead should ask themselves: why are these protests being so widely supported by those who manage and defend the present system? Why is Greta invited to speak to parliaments, governments, the United Nations?

We are publishing a contribution from a sympathizer in the US which aims at exposing the empty but dangerous ideology about ‘the elite’ which is being used more and more by different factions of the capitalist class today.