"Europe militarises and announces the largest troop deployment since the Cold War", "Russia's war against Ukraine has shattered peace and seriously altered our security environment", such are the threatening headlines of the Madrid summit. Russia, but also China, are openly singled out as "enemies of democracy".  The Madrid Summit has been a clear warmongering exercise. And words are matched by decisions. They talk of spending 200 billion euros on armaments, of deploying up to 300,000 troops in Eastern European countries in the arc from the Baltic to the Black Sea. They threaten China. They defy Putin. It is a summit for imperialist war.

NATO: an instrument of US imperialism

 In 1949, in the context of the imperialist confrontation between the US and the Russian bloc, the United States founded NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organisation) as a key tool against the enemy bloc. It was a military and political alliance that enabled the USA to control its allies, whose armies, secret services, intelligence cells and armaments increasingly depended on American devices, patents, supplies and protocols. Any of the military bases of an allied country can be used by NATO, i.e. by the USA.

With the collapse of the Russian bloc in 1989, the countries formerly under US tutelage tried to break away from its control. The American bloc disintegrated and today there are no imperialist blocs. However, this did not bring about a "new world order" of peace, democracy and prosperity, as promised by the then US president Bush Senior. On the contrary, what we have seen in the last 30 years has been a proliferation of increasingly chaotic and bloody wars (Iraq, Afghanistan, former Yugoslavia, Syria, Libya, Yemen etc.) which, among many other ravages, have led to the largest exodus of refugees in history: 26 million in 2017, 86 million in 2020; and in May 2022 the 100 million mark was exceeded[1] .

The war in Ukraine and 52 other conflicts are currently engulfing the world in bloodshed. As we said in Militarism and Decomposition, written in 1990, “in the new historical period we have entered, and which the Gulf events have confirmed, the world appears as a vast free-for-all, where the tendency of ‘every man for himself’ will operate to the full, and where the alliances between states will be far from having the stability that characterized the imperialist blocs, but will be dominated by the immediate needs of the mo­ment. A world of bloody chaos, where the American policeman will try to maintain a mini­mum of order by the increasingly massive and brutal use of military force. "[2] .

The United States did not dissolve NATO, but continued to use it as a means of controlling its former allies. For example, Germany has 20 US military bases on its territory and its army is closely dependent on NATO hardware and software.

In February 1990, then US Secretary of State James Baker promised Russian President Gorbachev that "if the United States maintains its presence in Germany in the framework of NATO, not an inch of NATO's existing military jurisdiction will be extended eastward".[3]

Between capitalists and even more so between states, the most sacred agreements are a dead letter after a few minutes. The United States did the opposite of what it promised. Since the mid-1990s, it has extended NATO to the countries of the former Russian orbit: Poland, the Baltic states, the Czech Republic, Romania, Hungary, etc.

In this expansion there was mutual interest on both sides. By incorporating the former Russian satellites, the United States was driving a wedge between Germany and Russia, keeping both under political and military pressure. For their part, the former Soviet countries have gained a powerful sponsor to defend themselves against the imperialist ambitions of their two big neighbours and, protected by the NATO umbrella, to indulge their own imperialist appetites.

NATO and the war in Ukraine

This strategy of "eastward expansion" has clashed with the interests of Russia which, having recovered to some extent from the huge debacle of 1989, thanks to Putin's iron hand, is trying to play a global role on the imperialist chessboard, getting involved in the war in Syria and in several wars in Africa, establishing alliances with Venezuela, Iran, Nicaragua etc.

In this policy of seeking lost imperialist glory, it has come up against the iron curtain imposed by the US on its western flank. In particular, attempts to bring Ukraine and Georgia into NATO have been a red line that Russia could not tolerate. It thus responded with its brutal "special military operations”.

In 2008, Russia set a trap for Georgia by taking it to war and imposing two "independent" republics that are a Russian wedge into Georgian territory: South Ossetia and Abkhazia.

In 2014 it repeated the operation with regard to Ukraine by occupying Crimea and proclaiming two 'people's' republics in the Donbass that act as a military subcontractor to the Russian godfather.

The current explosion of barbaric warfare in Ukraine has its roots in this imperialist struggle between Russia and the US, although, as we have explained, the US has set a trap for the Kremlin: for months it announced the invasion of Ukraine while saying that the US would not intervene. It was a repeat of the same trap the US set for Iraq in 1990 when it implied that Saddam had the green light to invade Kuwait. Putin has taken the bait and pounced on Ukraine.

The US has used the war in Ukraine to tighten NATO's grip on its former allies. They, especially Germany and France, want to get rid of this annoying alliance that prevents them from pursuing their own imperialist ambitions. Macron spoke of a "brain-dead" NATO. He has had to swallow his words, at least for a while. The US has restored NATO's strength and Biden has proclaimed in Madrid that "Vladimir Putin was seeking the finlandisation of Europe. What he's going to get is a NATOisation of Europe".

At the Madrid summit, the United States will make full use of "support for Ukraine", the defence of the Ukrainian David crushed by the Russian Goliath, to tie up its "European allies". Zelensky, in a new Internet intervention, once again reproached Germany and France for raising the pretext of "not humiliating Russia" in order to exchange "peace for territory". The NATO summit reaffirms the US policy of dragging Russia into the bloody quagmire of a long war that is currently stalled in the Donbass with an enormous human and productive cost: according to Zelensky between 60 and 100 Ukrainian soldiers die every day; he says nothing of the civilian dead, while Russia is losing 150 soldiers every day. One of the most serious consequences of this war is that it has paralysed the transport of wheat to African and Asian countries, causing famines that, according to the UN, are affecting 197 million people.

One of the goals of the summit is that the contingent of NATO troops deployed in the border arc with the Russian Bear from the Black Sea to the Baltic should be expanded from 40,000 to 300,000! The United States is to station 100,000 troops, Germany has promised to deploy 20,000, France has installed 1,000 in Romania. In the same vein, NATO is opening a gigantic military base in Poland, the United States is sending two destroyers to Spain and is setting up a missile defence shield at the Rota base.

If we compare the Madrid summit with previous NATO summits, we see a clear escalation of warmongering: "The response of the allies to this new context will be to mobilise more troops, more weapons, more ammunition on their eastern flank, to flex their muscles against Moscow". The hypocritical language of peace has been left in the drawer and replaced by  war chants. Reinforcing the whole atmosphere, the accession of Finland and Sweden to NATO, countries historically disguised as "neutrals", adds even more fuel to the warlike fire. It is beyond doubt that all these decisions, both public and secret, are part of a dynamic of warmongering confrontation and will contribute to new imperialist tensions which are the seeds of new wars.

Riding the strong momentum of militarisation in Eastern Europe, Poland and the Baltic states are constantly calling for more weapons, more troops, brazenly displaying their own ambitions. "Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki on Monday announced the construction of hundreds of public shooting ranges across the country and a new law on access to firearms to ‘train society’ in national defence. He said that ‘if Russia ever thinks of attacking Poland, let them know that 40 million Poles are ready to defend it with weapons in hand’[4] .

Another of the points addressed by the Summit is the "technological modernisation" of weapons, defence systems, cyber-warfare means, etc. This involves huge investments that will be paid for by the member states and, above all, will increase technological dependence on the USA.

In this context, the renewal of NATO's "Strategic Concept" further reinforces the warmongering atmosphere that has been imposed in Madrid and symbolically translated into the police occupation of the city by more than 10,000 uniformed officers. For the first time in NATO's history China is directly pointed at: the Strategic Concept "heralds a new era in transatlantic security marked by the actions of ‘authoritarian actors who challenge democratic interests, values and way of life’, leading to the conclusion that China "seeks to subvert the rules-based international order, including in the space, cyber and maritime domains". Moving from words to deeds, Australia, New Zealand, Japan and South Korea, China's Pacific rivals, have been invited to Madrid. The message could not be clearer.

The main threat to US imperialist world leadership comes from China. The Asian giant has deployed an economic-imperialist strategy, the Silk Road[5] , to challenge US dominance. The trap the US has set for Russia is ultimately aimed at China. Caught in a long and grinding war in Ukraine, Russia has become more of a burden than an asset to China. China has been very reluctant to support its Russian ally. On the other hand, the Ukrainian war destabilises China's Silk Road both economically and militarily.

The blacklisting of China in NATO's Strategic Concept is yet another step in the escalation of warlike tensions in the world. With this strategic move, the United States is developing a policy of "encircling China": on the one hand, in the Pacific, the US has formed an alliance with China's rivals (Australia, Japan, South Korea, the Philippines, Vietnam); on the other hand, it is severely weakening China's Russian ally; finally, plans to expand the Silk Road are being destabilised by the war in Ukraine.

But equally significant in the imperialist escalation is the inclusion of the "southern flank", i.e. Africa, in NATO's "Strategic Concept". Here Spain is betting high because it affects its own interests (Sahara, Morocco, defence of the enclaves of Ceuta and Melilla, protection against migratory waves, etc.).  However, the ultimate goal is to block Russian and Chinese expansion in Africa. Russia employs its Wagner mercenaries in the various African conflicts while China weaves a web of military and trade agreements: for example, it has secured a military base in Djibouti.

The root of war is capitalism

The summit gives a boost to the warlike confrontation that is currently gripping the world. And in this confrontation, the leading role of the United States and the strength of its political-military arm, NATO, are strengthened.

However, this success is temporary. Since the collapse of the Russian bloc, we have shown that the US's ability to impose its "world order" is deteriorating. In a world where each nation state goes its own way without respecting any discipline, where increasingly destructive local conflicts proliferate, where the imperialist ambitions of all states are unleashed in full force, the only means the American gendarme has to stop the chaos is militarism, war, the proliferation of armaments. However, these displays of force do not stop the chaos, but only exacerbate it. "As soon as the United States boasts of its military superiority, all its rivals cringe, but the retreat is tactical and momentary. The more the US strives to assert its imperialist dominance, brutally reminding them who is the strongest, the more determined the questioners of the American order are to dispute it, because their ability to retain their rank in the imperialist order is a matter of life and death".[6]

This analysis is crucial if we are to dismantle the trap set by the far-left groups of capital and even government ministers linked to Podemos, who blame the warlike tension on NATO and even allow themselves a "neutral" stance: neither Putin nor NATO.

NATO is an instrument of imperialist confrontation, but it is neither the cause of wars nor of this confrontation. Its reinforcement and its militaristic boasts will not bring peace and democracy, as the Atlanticist leaders promise with less and less conviction, but neither are they the only cause of the barbaric warfare that is covering the world in blood. All states, whether pro-NATO or anti-NATO, are agents of war, all participate in the planet's slide into a spiral of chaotic conflict.

When they talk about "NATO no, bases out", these leftist groups serve war and imperialism. They want us to go to war in the name of national defence, rejecting the "multinationalism" of NATO.  Melenchon in France opposes NATO by proposing that France "arm itself to the teeth as a peacekeeping force". In this ultra-militarist design he goes so far as to propose the restoration of military service!

The proletariat must reject war and militarism, whether they are made "inside NATO" or deployed "outside NATO". These extreme left warmongers who "oppose NATO" inject the poison of National Defence. They want us to kill and murder in defence of Spain and accept inflation, redundancies, blows to our living conditions in order "to be able to send arms to Ukraine". A Trotskyist group calling for the "Disarmament of NATO" proposes that "the European workers must give the broadest internationalist solidarity, sending supplies and international workers' militias, as in the 1930s in the Spanish Civil War"[7] . With such "anti-NATO" arguments these servants of capital propose what the USA and NATO want: that the workers involve ourselves in the imperialist slaughter in Ukraine, that we sacrifice ourselves on the economic front and become cannon fodder on the military front.

Opero and Smolny 30-06-22

The previous article in this series on the struggle of the workers’ movement against slavery and racism analysed the position of the News and Letters Committees (N&L) on the Civil Rights Movement. It concluded that the group remained very unclear about the bourgeois character of that movement and finally failed to expose it as such. In its attempt to lift the colour line, it blurred the class line, the fundamental contradiction between the working class and the bourgeoisie. Such a position undermines the foundation on which the proletariat develops its struggle as an autonomous force. The Civil Rights Movement was thus not the road to the revolution of the proletariat as News and Letters Committees suggested, but a means of channelling anger about the “race question” into the dead-end of reforming the existing state.

This article intends to take a closer look at the positions of N&L on the violent riots in the big cities in the U.S. in the second half of the 1960s and to respond to the view, put forward by the International Communist Party (Communist Programme) and Bordiga himself, that “this sudden tearing away of the veil of legal fictions and democratic hypocrisy [is] a harbinger of victory”[1].

The eruption of the urban riots

Between 1962 and 1973 at least 525 American cities were affected by rioting[2], with especially intense conflagrations occurring in the “Long Hot Summer” of 1967 and, a year later, in the aftermath of the assassination of Martin Luther King in Memphis, Tennessee. In the summer of 1967, 159 riots erupted across the US and set the whole country ablaze. The most destructive riots of this summer took place in July, in Newark, New Jersey, and Detroit, Michigan. By September 1967, 83 people were dead, thousands injured, tens of millions of dollars in property had been destroyed and entire neighbourhoods were burned. Several contemporary newspapers headlines described the riots as the work of “urban guerrillas”.

Against the background of the riots in the 1960s, the Civil Rights Movement gave way to more “militant” organisations such as the Black Panther Party (BPP) and Nation of Islam, at that point led by Malcom X. In contrast to the former, these new organisations no longer recoiled from the use of violence, arguing that black people should use “any means necessary” to obtain their rights. This does not mean that they incited or were in charge of the riots in the black suburbs of the big cities, but they certainly did not distance themselves from the violence used in these the riots. Spokesman of the BBP proudly claimed the right of black people to revolt and use violence, since they were “the victim of intolerable conditions”. At one point even Martin Luther King, apostle of “non-violent resistance”, expressed his understanding for the riots.

In the early 1960s, the situation of the vast majority of black people in the big cities of the US was miserable. African Americans constituted just over 10 per cent of the U.S. population but 46 per cent of them were unemployed. Some black neighbourhoods had 50 to 70 per cent youth unemployment. In the black neighbourhoods housing was poor, amenities were few and living conditions were squalid. Landlords let the apartment buildings deteriorate and turn into slums. Those born in these slums had almost no possibilities to break out of this cycle of misery. Ghetto schools did not provide a solid educational foundation for good jobs. In 1959 the median income of black males was still 58 percent of the median for all men.

Bordiga’s article of 1965 for Communist Programme (ICP) gave a good picture of the living conditions of the black people in the slums of the big cities. “The slave who escaped to the North would come to realise that, no less than before, he was in an inferior position, because he was paid less, because he was deprived of professional qualifications, because he was isolated (…) in appalling ghettos of misery, disease, insecurity, isolating him behind invisible walls of prejudice and police regulations, in which unemployment which bourgeois hypocrisy calls ‘technological’.”[3]  

No wonder that joblessness, poverty, segregation, and housing problems provoked many of the urban riots in the 1960s.

News and Letters’ analysis of these riots

In 1953 C.L.R James had been expelled from the U.S. for political reasons. But his voice had not been completely silenced. In the 1960s he stayed in contact with the group Facing Reality which published a paper called Speak Out. It was rather confused on several issues such as Black Power, Third Worldism, Maoism and student protests, which was not conducive to the cohesion of the group. At the end of the 1960s the group decided to dissolve itself. Martin Glaberman wrote one very short article on the riots in Watts (Los Angeles), in which he supported “the mobility that is horizontal rather than vertical, social rather than personal [and] the instant mobilisation of a working-class community in a serious struggle”.[4]

In those turbulent years, N&L was the other remaining proletarian political organisation in the U.S. In the August-September 1965 issue N&L published an editorial in which it expressed its admiration for the black “revolt” in Watts. “The revolt was both spontaneous and conscious of itself.”  It showed “the self-discovery of their own creativity; the confidence in mass power”. “The black masses have already laid the groundwork for this [social revolution], and shown themselves in the vanguard in these crucial ways.” [5]

In the same year the Situationist International also expressed its sympathy with the riot in Watts and wrote that such a revolt “calls everything into question because it is a human protest against a dehumanised life. Looting is a natural response to the unnatural and inhuman society of commodity abundance. It instantly undermines the commodity as such, and it also exposes what the commodity ultimately implies: the army, the police and the other specialised detachments of the state's monopoly of armed violence.”[6]  

This conception of the potentially revolutionary nature of the riots was shared in the publications of the Bordigist groups[7] in Europe.

In 1965 Bordiga wrote in Communist Programme that “something profoundly new emerged from this burning episode of anger, not vaguely popular but proletarian in nature”.(…) “The Black who shouted: ‘Our war is here, not in Vietnam’, has expressed an idea no different from that of the men who ‘stormed the heavens’ during the Paris Commune and that of the Petrograd gravediggers of the myths of order, the national interest, civilizing wars.”[8]

Two years later Communist Programme described the riots in similar terms: “We revolutionary Marxists remove from the terrible black anger the racial characters in which it is confined by black leaders, bourgeois and petty bourgeois, and welcome it as the revolt of a part of the proletariat.” “We hail the Black outburst of fury as a genuine riot of the American proletariat.”[9]

In 1967 Il Programma Comunista published an article that started with the phrase “The heroic rebellion of America’s black proletarians is destined to unfold […], it marks a watershed in the history of exploited ‘coloured’ people.”“And this is a wildfire spreading not only from one city to another but, far more importantly, from black proletarians to white proletarians who stand alongside them”[10]

On the non-proletarian nature of the urban riots

Can the claim that the riots were proletarian in nature be substantiated?

Let’s first look at the riots in Watts, to which N&L devoted an article written by Raya Dunayevskaya. Although it did not claim that the revolt was exclusively proletarian, it was certainly considered a class question. For this reason, the article consequently spoke about a revolt instead of a riot. Since N&L still defended a conception of workers’ unionism, one might have expected that it would also have come up with some kind of rank and file activity, but any reference to such activity or organisation was absent from the article. It did not even refer to the need for the working class to create organised structures for the defence of its living conditions.

The article did not (or did not want not to) take a position on the completely uncontrolled outburst of anger and the resulting chaos that characterised the riots or on the crowds who attacked motorists with rocks and bricks, pulled white drivers out of their cars to beat them up. Instead, Raya Dunayevskaya wrote that the rioters “gained their strength, not because they were isolated, but because they acted collectively. It was a disciplined strength”.[11]

The same issue of N&L also published an Eyewitness Report of the riots. This report confirmed the completely aimless nature of the events: it turned out to be nothing else than “a small war for limited objectives”, such as “the destruction of the police force” and of “white business”[12].

When important working class reactions take place one of the most important means of the bourgeoisie to derail these reactions is the trade union. But in the articles of N&L there is not a single word about the role of the trade unions or about rank and file unionism. Why were they not used by the bourgeoisie to contain the violent actions of what N&L sees as proletarian actions? The articles doesn’t give an answer, but with the absence of organised proletarian expressions, such as general assemblies, struggle committees, flying pickets, etc. it is clear that there was nothing for the trade unions to derail and no task for these state organs to assume. So there is good reason to dispel the myth that the riots were proletarian in nature.

Two years later, after riots in Newark and Detroit, N&L presented us a similar rosy picture while stores were vandalised, cars were set on fire, and homes were ransacked again.

In the article on the riots in Detroit N&L wrote that these set a newer stage, because of the appearance, for the first time in years, of white and black solidarity inside and outside the workplace. But the article did not tell us how this solidarity was expressed in the practice of the struggle. And the same issue of N&L also makes no mention of expressions of proletarian solidarity. In an article on the riots in the same city Il Programma, which also hailed the solidarity between the black and the white workers during the Detroit riots, was at least honest in its statement that it had “no news, however, as to how, where, when this solidarity was expressed”.[13]

It is only in 1973 that the author of the article in N&L becomes more concrete on what this solidarity really entailed. “When the wrath of the blacks exploded in Detroit the repossession, as well as the sniping later, was integrated: ‘It was just like Negroes and whites were shopping together, only they weren’t paying for anything’.”[14]So, the fact that many white people participated in the looting together with black people, just taking advantage of the unrest to break into the store fronts, would be an expression of proletarian solidarity? It can only be concluded that proletarian solidarity between the white and black workers, fermenting into a kind of organisational association, was completely absent in the riots. 

In the same article N&L also wrote that “three forces - workers, youth, women - coalesced in the urban revolts”[15] but ignores the fact that these workers, youth and women were probably all black people, for the “revolts” in Detroit took place in a black neighbourhood and was mainly undertaken by black people and only attracted some white people to claim their share in the looting of stores. Moreover N&L did not recognize that the riots were dominated by a lumpenproletarian mood, that they were heavily influenced by marginalised elements forced to live by petty crime. These groups were not motivated by class consciousness but by blind hatred, not orientated towards the future like the proletariat, but towards immediate destruction. The interests of such groups were the opposite of the working class. N&L did not raise the demand that these elements should renounce activities such as looting, random arson, etc. and join the struggle of the proletariat, the revolutionary class.

Identifying (in the same article) imperialism and profiteering with “white people”, and slums and poverty with “black people” and considering blacks as the most exploited and oppressed part of capitalist society, all protests by the latter were seen, almost unconditionally, as a step on the road towards liberation. This dangerous confusion was the expression of Dunayevskaya’s long-standing glorification of the autonomous struggle of the black masses as a revolutionary vanguard. N&L’s insufficient break with the counter-revolutionary ideology of Trotskyism was a major obstacle to overcoming this confusion. Like Trotskyism she continued to defend the right of nations to self-determination in the imperialist epoch.

The deep ambiguity of N&L’s political analysis

The reality is that N&L remained very ambiguous about the struggle of black people and the responsibility of the working class in the struggle against racism.

In the article on the riots in Detroit N&L correctly denounced the hypocrisy of the ruling class, the indiscriminate violence against the black insurgents, and showed that the rebellion was a product of ghettoisation. But the same article leaves behind a big question: “can blind revolt become social revolution” when “white labor (…) solidarize itself with black labor” only?[16]A proletarian revolution, which is by definition social, rests on two pillars: organisation and consciousness. In the article the question of solidarity was still raised, but the words organisation and consciousness were conspicuous by their absence. So, it did not give any explanation of how an unconscious revolt can turn into a conscious proletarian revolution. Such a development is only possible as the outcome of a conscious process in which the aims and the means are developed step by step in and through the struggle itself. But since the riots showed no attempts to pursue such a process, the perspectives that N&L derived from these riots remained abstract, wrapped in pious wishes.

The riots forced the bourgeois state to openly show its oppressive face, but at the same time they were not and will not be a harbinger of victory, as Bordiga wanted us to believe in his article of 1965. Even N&L had to admit in an article of 1967 that “this form of rebellion does not overthrow capitalism, tear it up by its roots, and build something new as it destroys the old”[17]. Indeed, the riots don’t bring the overthrow of this bourgeois class rule any closer, and remain completely within the confines of capitalism, as with any partial, non-class-based struggle, be it around issues of climate, gender, or any other particular expression of capitalist alienation or destruction.

In the decades following the 1960s riots N&L would give in more and more to bourgeois ideology. A proletarian group cannot continue to assign a vanguard role to black people, compare the urban riots with a revolutionary uprising, welcome the wars in Africa as liberation movements, embrace humanism as a complement to marxism, without having negative consequences for its evolution. The accumulation of such views eventually makes a group succumb to the pressure of bourgeois ideology. The group still exists, but it is no longer part of the proletarian political milieu.

Anti-racism is the worst product of racism

Internationalism, the section of the ICC in the U.S., was the first publication in America that brought some clarification in the perspectives of the proletarian struggle against racism. In an article called: “Proletarian Perspective and Racism – Furor over Bakke” (Internationalism no. 15, 1978), it clearly emphasised that any struggle against racism is doomed to fail as long as it does not lead to the overthrow of capitalist rule itself. But even this article did not go to the roots of anti-racist positions as being a dangerous trap for the working class struggle. Bordiga once said that anti-fascism is the worst product of fascism. The same applies to anti-racism, since the anti-racist struggle leads to nothing else than defence of the capitalist state with a “human” face, where people of colour are allegedly no longer be oppressed and treated as second-class citizens.

Modern slavery - and this was new in human history - was built upon the alleged inferiority of people with a black skin: the colour of your skin brands you as a creature that can be possessed, dominated, violated or killed. Class relations in the U.S. have been permeated with these racial considerations since their inception. The idea of racial inferiority is deeply rooted in the soul of American society, and any abolition of that curse, certainly in the phase of decomposition of capitalism, is not to be expected under capitalist rule, as is shown by the growth of racism and xenophobia and even of armed supremacist groups in the “greatest democracy” in the world.

In the phase of decomposition people of all “colours”, whether black, white, red, yellow or brown, will increasingly be faced with the horror of capitalism in agony, which threatens to drag each and every one of us into its downfall. At this moment in history, the stakes are higher than ever. Any partial, non-proletarian struggle against particular forms of oppression can only exacerbate racial, sexual or other divisions within the working class; in contrast to this, it is the essential struggle of wage labour against capital which has the potential to overcome all such divisions and lay the foundations of a true human community.

 

Dennis, July 2022