Since the summer of 2022 the intervention of revolutionaries in the struggle of the working class has become a more concrete prospect because, after three to four decades of a deep retreat of the combativity and the consciousness in the class, the proletariat has finally raised its head again. This resurgence of the struggles, which started with the “Summer of Discontent” in the UK, was followed by strikes, demonstrations and workers’ protests in various other countries, including the USA[1].

The International Communist Party, which publishes Il Partito Comunista, one of the organisations of the Communist Left, has written about its intervention in some of the workers’ struggles in the past year in the US, among which was a strike of 600 municipal workers at the water treatment plant in Portland Oregon that started on Friday 3 February 2023. This strike was greeted with expressions of solidarity from other municipal workers, some of whom also joined the picket lines. During this strike Il Partito published one article and distributed three leaflets in which it denounced capitalism as a dictatorial system of exploitation and drew the lesson that: “It is only through the uniting of arms above sectors and borders that the working class can truly struggle to end its exploitative condition under capitalism”[2].

In the present conditions of an international and historically significant resurgence of the struggles after decades of disorientation and fragmentation, to engage in the struggle is in itself already a victory.  That’s why it is certainly important to signal that, as Il Partito did, in response to intimidation, criminalisation and threats by the bourgeoisie, the municipal workers in Portland were able to develop their unity and solidarity[3].

But revolutionaries cannot stop there. In the intervention with the press, leaflets or otherwise they have to put forward concrete perspectives such as calling for workers to extend the struggle beyond their own sector, by sending delegations to other workplaces and offices. As one of our recent articles underlines, already today workers should “fight together, acting in a unified way and avoiding getting bogged down in local struggles, within one's own company or sector”[4].

But to do so, to strengthen the struggle, the main question revolutionaries must state clearly to the workers is who is on the side of the workers and who is against them. And on this question, the IPC diffuses a mystifying fog.

 

Opportunism on the trade union question …

For the Communist Left, trade unionism as such, and thus not only the union leadership but also the rank and file structures of the unions, have become a weapon of the bourgeoisie against the working class. Trade unionism, which is by definition an ideology that keeps the struggle within the confines of the economic laws of capitalism, has become anachronistic in the century of wars and revolutions, as the revolutionaries of the First World War and the revolutionary wave that began in 1917 clearly demonstrated. The new conditions of the present era require that the struggles go beyond the particularity of the workplace, the region and the nation and take on a massive and political character. While unions are no longer of any use for workers’ struggles, they have been taken over by the bourgeoisie and used to counter the tendency towards the extension and self-organisation of struggles. In such a period, defending the trade unionist method of struggle as an authentic means of promoting the combativity of the working class is nothing less than a concession to bourgeois ideology, a form of opportunism.

Faced with the problem of the forms of organisation needed for the defence of the living conditions of the working class, whether it calls them class unions, networks or coordinations, Il Partito defends an opportunist position that it justifies as follows: it acknowledges that, “since the end of the nineteenth century, the progressive submission of the trade unions to bourgeois ideology, to the nation and to the capitalist states”[5] has been a real tendency. But it does not explain how it is possible that all trade unions were integrated in the bourgeois state in the first decades of the 20th century. For Il Partito this seems to be pure coincidence, since it does not argue that the objective conditions have fundamentally changed since then. In contrast, it claims that the economic attacks on the workers “will lead to the rebirth of new trade unions freed from bourgeois conditioning” and “directed by the communist party”. These unions will even be “a powerful and indispensable instrument for the revolutionary overthrow of bourgeois power”[6].

In other words: after the betrayal of the old unions, new working class unions will emerge and, in good Bordigist tradition, it is assumed that, directed by a proper revolutionary party, they will fulfil a revolutionary role. But here it is necessary to wake Il Partito out of its dream, for the conditions of the working class struggle have completely changed since the beginning of the 20th century. This means that the struggle can no longer “be prepared in advance on the organisational level [for] the proletarian struggle tends to go beyond the strictly economic category and becomes a so­cial struggle, directly confronting the state, politicising itself and demanding the mass par­ticipation of the class. (…) The success of a strike no longer depends on financial funds collected by the workers, but fundamentally on their abi­lity to extend the struggle”[7].

And because of this new content, trade unions no longer meet the needs of the proletarian struggle, and even being directed by a revolutionary party would not change this fact. The attempt of Il Partito to defend the existence of permanent organs of struggle, during open expressions of struggle as well as in periods of absence of any struggle, will inevitably lead to failure. A rebirth of unions as real working class organisations is only possible in the imagination of Il Partito, for whom the role of the party in the struggle is not only decisive, but even seems able to summon the supernatural power to adapt the unions to the real needs of the workers’ struggle.

 

… leads workers onto the wrong track

The first leaflet that was distributed at a demonstration on Saturday 28 January was called “Portland municipal workers: Fighting for freedom to strike”, a “freedom” attacked by the proclamation of the state of emergency by the municipality.

With the demand for the “freedom to strike” this leaflet immediately put the workers on the wrong track. In the 19th century, when the unions were still unitary organisations of the working class whose role was to improve working and living conditions inside capitalism, such a demand was undoubtedly valid. But today, when the unions have become part of the capitalist state, workers have nothing to gain from supporting a campaign to defend the right to strike. For such a struggle is in reality a fight for the rights of the union to control the workers’ struggles. The working class doesn’t need to fight for the legalisation of its own strikes, because in the conditions of totalitarian state capitalism any strike likely to create a real balance of power against the bourgeoisie is by definition illegal. The purpose of this campaign for the freedom to strike is mainly to guarantee that the struggles remain confined within the narrow legal limits of bourgeois politics and trade union control. When the bourgeoisie grants the right to strike its purpose is only to reduce the workers’ struggle to ineffectual protest in order to put pressure on one of the “negotiating partners".

After the strike of the municipal workers in Portland the comrades of Il Partito, in the spring of this year, “promoted, together with other trade union militants, a coordination they have called the Class Struggle Action Network (CSAN), aimed at uniting workers’ struggles”[8]. This CSAN intervened for instance in the nurses’ strike in late June. But what is actually the nature of the CSAN? What might be the perspective of such a Network, “aimed at uniting workers’ struggles”? 

This CSAN has not emerged in reaction to a particular need of the workers to take the struggle into their own hands, to send massive delegations to other workers, to organise general assemblies open to all workers or to draw lessons in order to prepare new struggles. No, nothing of that kind; the Network has been created completely outside the concrete dynamic of the struggle by the comrades of Il Partito “inspired by the same principles and methods on which the Coordinamento Lavoratorie Lavoratrici Autoconvocati was formed in Italy” [9] in the mid-1980s. And on the website of this Network[10] one can read, not by accident, an article by Il Partito, which makes clear that the aim is to work “Towards the Rebirth of the Working Class Trade Union [1]”.

As we argued above, trade unions are today instruments of the bourgeois state and any rebirth as working class organisations is impossible. Thus, Il Partito’s policy can only lock combative workers into a totally vain and discouraging struggle.   In this context CSAN will suffer the same fate as any artificially created organ: either to remain an appendix of Il Partito[11] or to become a radical expression of bourgeois trade unionism. But most likely it will disappear after Il Partito has tried to keep it artificially alive. Then it can bury this stillborn child in silence, without the need to draw further lessons from this experience.

In the strike of the municipal workers “comrades participated in the picket lines, helping the workers to strengthen them”[12]. The report of the intervention in the nurses’ strike only speaks of the intervention of the CSAN organising “participants for picket-line solidarity”. This gives the impression that there was no intervention of Il Partito, distinct and separate from the Network. Thus the comrades of Il Partito participated on an individual basis in the picket lines in February as well as in June. But why? Because workers cannot take on this task? Or were the comrades participating as delegates from other workplaces? The answer to these questions is not present in the articles of Il Partito. Fundamentally, behind Il Partito’s intervention, we must point out a great ambiguity about the role of the revolutionary vanguard of the class.

 

The responsibility of revolutionaries

In the first place, the task of the political organisation of the class is not to help the class to strengthen the picket line, to collect money in order to financially support a strike, or to fulfil other practical tasks for the striking workers. The workers are quite capable of doing these things on their own, without anyone taking their place. A communist organisation has another task, which is not technical, or material, but essentially political. The working class struggle needs to be strengthened by the organised political intervention of the revolutionary organisation.

In line with this orientation, that of being an active political factor in the development of the consciousness and autonomous action of the working class, communist organisations must put forward an analysis of the conditions of the class struggle, lucidly and with a clear method, while being able to denounce and fight against these enemies of the working class – the trade unions. Il Partito, which irresponsibly justifies the possibility of rehabilitating trade unionism or fighting through the unions, despite decades of the limitation and sabotage of struggles by these organs, can in this way only weaken the workers’ class combat. Not only does this kind of opportunism sow confusion, it can only lead workers into a dead-end.

 

Dennis, 2023-11-15

 

 

 

 

Our comrade Miguel has died. He was born in 1944 and from a very young age he rebelled against capitalism, this society of barbarism and exploitation. He understood the need to fight for a new society, but at the same time he had many doubts about what was happening in the USSR, presented as the "Socialist Fatherland", and its supposed "communism". At that time other "alternatives" were also fashionable. One of them was Tito's Yugoslavia, a "non-aligned" country[1] that presented itself as "self-managed socialism". He emigrated there, studied and worked there, and soon realised that there was nothing socialist about it, that it was just another of the many variants of state capitalism. From this disappointing experience was born his conviction that none of the "Meccas of socialism" (Russia, Yugoslavia, Albania, China, Cuba etc.) were communism nor were they "in transition towards it", they were all capitalist states where exploitation reigned with the same force as in the officially capitalist countries.

Back in Spain he worked in a very important company, Standard Eléctrica. He was a conscious and combative worker, who actively participated in the many strikes that shook Spain at that time, as part of the historical revival of the proletariat whose most advanced expression was the great strike of May 68 in France. This was the period (1972-76) when the Franco dictatorship was unable to cope with the huge wave of struggles and the bourgeoisie was considering the famous "transition", moving from Franco's dictatorship to the democratic dictatorship. The capitalist state discarded Francoism and its national Catholicism as useless junk and surrounded itself with democratic weaponry to better confront the working class: "workers" unions, elections, "liberties" ...

Soon the comrade came to a second conviction: the unions, both the old vertical union of Francoism and the "workers unions" (CCOO, UGT et al) were organs of the bourgeois state, unconditional servants of capital, ready to sabotage strikes, divide workers, divert them into dead ends. A member of the UGT, he finally tore up his membership card after intervening in an assembly.

That period also provided him with another conclusive experience: as a member of one of the numerous Trotskyist groups (the Communist League) he suffered leftism first hand, the sort that was responsible, with its radical workerist language, for recuperating militants who have broken with the CP or with the trade unions and are looking for an authentic proletarian internationalist alternative. They criticised the USSR, only to defend it as a "degenerated workers state"; they claimed to be "against imperialist war", but supported the war in Vietnam and other imperialist wars in the name of "national liberation"; they criticised the unions, but demanded participation in them to "win them for the class"; they criticised elections, but called for a vote to "get a PC-PSOE workers government"; they spoke of "democracy in the organisation", but this was a nest of vipers where the different gangs fought to the death for its control, resorting to manoeuvres, slander and all imaginable nastiness.

Neither the nightmare of Yugoslavian "self-managing socialism", nor trade union sabotage, nor the trap of leftism, kept the comrade from the search for truly communist positions. In this search he contacted the ICC and undertook a series of very exhaustive discussions, drawing lessons from all the experiences he had been through, finally deciding to join in 1980.

Since then he has been a militant faithful to the cause of the proletariat, who always reflected and intervened in meetings trying to contribute to the collective clarification of our positions. He always made himself available for the activities of the organisation. Forced for work reasons to move to new cities, his first concern was to maintain his militant activity at all levels, both discussion and analysis, as well as intervention in struggles, the distribution of the press etc.

He was above all very active in the struggles of the class, participating as a worker in numerous struggles (Telefonica, Standard), also in struggles such as Delphi, SEAT, in meetings of the unemployed etc. He did not hesitate to intervene in workers assemblies, confronting union manoeuvres, proposing measures to strengthen the assembly and to seek the extension of the struggle to break its isolation. In the same way, he went to meetings where there might be discussions of interest for revolutionary clarification where he did not hesitate to intervene in a clear and courageous way defending the positions of the ICC.

He also made a great contribution to the distribution of the press. He regularly put our publications in bookstores, libraries, tirelessly looking for new outlets. At demonstrations, assemblies, rallies, etc., he was the first to sell the ICC press with enthusiasm and an exemplary persistence.

He was always available for the activities of the organisation and enthusiastically collected revolutionary books and other publications, and on all subjects of interest in the revolutionary struggle of the working class. The archive that he built up is a treasury for the transmission of the traditions and positions of communist organisations.

He remained a militant until the end. Suffering from a painful illness, he asked all the comrades who visited him what the discussions had been, he asked us to read him the international texts of the organisation, he listened avidly to everything we read to him. He was, quite simply, A COMMUNIST MILITANT OF THE PROLETARIAT. We write these lines with much sadness, but we do it determined and encouraged by his militancy, ready to continue fighting and to win young people who, nowadays, will be confronted with the traps he had to overcome and will be looking for the answers he found and that motivated his whole life.

ICC 27-9-23

"Horror", "massacres", "terrorism", "terror", "war crimes", "humanitarian catastrophe", "genocide"... the words splashed across the front pages of the international press speak volumes about the scale of the barbarity in Gaza.

On 7 October, Hamas killed 1,400 Israelis, hunting down old men, women and children in their homes. Since then, the State of Israel has been taking revenge and killing en masse. The deluge of bombs raining down day and night on Gaza has already caused the death of more than 10,000 Palestinians, including 4,800 children. In the midst of ruined buildings, the survivors are deprived of everything: water, electricity, food and medicines. At this very moment, two and a half million Gazans are threatened with starvation and epidemics, 400,000 of them are prisoners in Gaza City, and every day hundreds fall, torn apart by missiles, crushed by tanks, executed by bullets.

Death is everywhere in Gaza, just as it is in Ukraine. Let's not forget the destruction of Marioupol by the Russian army, the exodus of people, the trench warfare that buries people alive. To date, almost 500,000 people are thought to have died. Half on each side. A whole generation of Russians and Ukrainians is now being sacrificed on the altar of the national interest, in the name of defending the homeland. And there's more to come: at the end of September, in Nagorno-Karabakh, 100,000 people were forced to flee in the face of the Azerbaijani army and the threat of genocide. In Yemen, the conflict that nobody talks about has claimed more than 200,000 victims and reduced 2.3 million children to malnutrition. The same horror of war is being waged in Ethiopia, Myanmar, Haiti, Syria, Afghanistan, Mali, Niger, Burkina Faso, Somalia, Congo, Mozambique... And the confrontation is brewing between Serbia and Kosovo.

Who is responsible for all this barbarity? How far can war spread? And, above all, what force can oppose it?

All states are war criminals

At the time of writing, all nations are calling on Israel to "moderate" or "suspend" its offensive. Russia is demanding a ceasefire, having attacked Ukraine with the same ferocity a year and a half ago, and having massacred 300,000 civilians in Chechnya in 1999 in the name of the same "fight against terrorism". China says it wants peace, but it is exterminating the Uighur population and threatening the inhabitants of Taiwan with an even greater deluge of fire. Saudi Arabia and its Arab allies want an end to the Israeli offensive while they decimate the population of Yemen. Turkey opposes the attack on Gaza while dreaming of exterminating the Kurds. As for the major democracies, after supporting "Israel's right to defend itself", they are now calling for "a humanitarian truce" and "respect for international law", having demonstrated their expertise in mass slaughter with remarkable regularity since 1914.

This is the primary argument of the State of Israel: "the annihilation of Gaza is legitimate": the same was said about the nuclear bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the carpet-bombing of Dresden and Hamburg. The United States waged the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq with the same arguments and the same methods as Israel today! All states are war criminals! Big or small, dominated or powerful, apparently warmongering or moderate, all of them are in reality taking part in imperialist war in the world arena, and all of them regard the working class as cannon fodder.

It is these hypocritical and deceitful voices that would now have us believe in their drive for peace and their solution: the recognition of Israel and Palestine as two independent and autonomous states. The Palestinian Authority, Hamas and Fatah are foreshadowing what this state would be like: like all the others, it would exploit the workers; like all the others, it would repress the masses; like all the others, it would go to war. There are already 195 "independent and autonomous" states on the planet: together, they spend over 2,000 billion dollars a year on "defence"! And by 2024, these budgets are set to explode.

Current wars: a scorched earth policy

So why has the UN just declared: "We need an immediate humanitarian ceasefire. It's been thirty days. Enough is enough. It has to stop now"? Obviously, Palestine's allies want an end to the Israeli offensive. As for Israel's allies, those "great democracies" that claim to respect "international law", they cannot let the Israeli army do what it wants without saying anything. The IDF’s massacres are all too visible. Especially since the “democracies” are providing military support to Ukraine against "Russian aggression" and its "war crimes". The barbarity of the two "aggressions" must not be allowed to appear too similar.

But there is an even deeper reason: everyone is trying to limit the spread of chaos, because everyone can be affected, everyone has something to lose if this conflict spreads too far. The Hamas attack and Israel's response have one thing in common: the scorched earth policy. Yesterday's terrorist massacre and today's carpet bombing can lead to no real and lasting victory. This war is plunging the Middle East into an era of destabilisation and confrontation.

If Israel continues to raze Gaza to the ground and bury its inhabitants under the rubble, there is a risk that the West Bank will also catch fire, that Hezbollah will drag Lebanon into the war, and that Iran will end up getting too involved. The spread of chaos throughout the region would not only be a blow to American influence, but also to the global ambitions of China, whose precious Silk Road passes through the region.

The threat of a third world war is on everyone's lips. Journalists are openly debating it on television. In reality, the current situation is far more pernicious. There are no two blocs, neatly arranged and disciplined, confronting each other, as there were in 1914-18 and 1939-45, or throughout the Cold War. While the economic and warlike competition between China and the United States is increasingly brutal and oppressive, the other nations are not bowing to the orders of one or other of these two behemoths; they are playing their own game, in disorder, unpredictability and cacophony. Russia attacked Ukraine against Chinese advice. Israel is crushing Gaza against American advice. These two conflicts epitomise the danger that threatens all humanity with death: the multiplication of wars whose sole aim is to destabilise or destroy the adversary; an endless chain of irrational and nihilistic exactions; every man for himself, synonymous with uncontrollable chaos.

For a third world war, the proletarians of Western Europe, North America and East Asia would have to be prepared to sacrifice their lives in the name of the Fatherland, to take up arms and kill each other for the flag and national interests, which is absolutely not the case today. But what is in the process of developing does not need this support, this enlistment of the masses. Since the early 2000s, ever wider swathes of the planet have been plunged into violence and chaos: Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya, Lebanon, Ukraine, Israel and Palestine... This gangrene is spreading little by little, country by country, region by region. This is the only possible future for capitalism, this decadent and rotting system of exploitation.

To put an end to war, capitalism must be overthrown

So what can we do? The workers of every country must have no illusions about a supposedly possible peace, about any solution from the "international community", the UN, or any other den of thieves. Capitalism is war. Since 1914, it has practically never stopped, affecting one part of the world and then another. The historical period before us will see this deadly dynamic spread and amplify, with increasingly unfathomable barbarity.

The workers of every country must therefore refuse to be carried away, they must refuse to take sides with one bourgeois camp or another, in the East, in the Middle East, and everywhere else. They must refuse to be fooled by the rhetoric that asks them to show "solidarity" with "the Ukrainian people under attack", with "Russia under threat", with "the martyred Palestinian masses", with "the terrorised Israelis"... In all wars, on both sides of the borders, the state always leads people into believing that there is a struggle between good and evil, between barbarism and civilisation. In reality, all these wars are always a confrontation between competing nations, between rival bourgeoisies. They are always conflicts in which the exploited die for the benefit of their exploiters.

The solidarity of the workers therefore does not go to the "Palestinians" as it does not go to the "Israelis", the "Ukrainians", or the "Russians", because among all these nationalities there are exploiters and exploited. It goes to the workers and unemployed of Israel and Palestine, of Russia and Ukraine, just as it goes to the workers of every other country in the world. It is not by demonstrating "for peace", it is not by choosing to support one side against the other that we can show real solidarity with the victims of war, the civilian populations and the soldiers of both sides, proletarians in uniform transformed into cannon fodder, into indoctrinated and fanaticized child-soldiers. The only solidarity consists in denouncing ALL the capitalist states; ALL the parties that call on us to rally behind this or that national flag, this or that war cause; ALL those who delude us with the illusion of peace and "good relations" between peoples.

This solidarity means above all developing our fight against the capitalist system that is responsible for all wars, a fight against the national bourgeoisies and their state.

History has shown that the only force that can put an end to capitalist war is the exploited class, the proletariat, the direct enemy of the bourgeois class. This was the case when the workers of Russia overthrew the bourgeois state in October 1917 and the workers and soldiers of Germany revolted in November 1918: these great movements of struggle by the proletariat forced the governments to sign the armistice. This is what put an end to the First World War: the strength of the revolutionary proletariat! The working class will have to win real and definitive peace everywhere by overthrowing capitalism on a world scale.

This long road lies ahead of us. Today, it means developing struggles on a class terrain, against the increasingly harsh economic attacks levelled at us by a system plunged into an insurmountable crisis. Because by refusing the deterioration in our living and working conditions, by refusing the perpetual sacrifices made in the name of balancing the budget, the competitiveness of the national economy or the war effort, we are beginning to stand up against the heart of capitalism: the exploitation of man by man.

In these struggles, we stand together, we develop our solidarity, we debate and become aware of our strength when we are united and organised. In its class struggles, the proletariat carries within it a world which is the exact opposite of capitalism: on the one hand, the division into nations engaged in economic and warlike competition to the point of mutual destruction; on the other, a potential unity of all the exploited of the world. The proletariat has begun to walk this long road, to take a few steps: during the "summer of discontent" in the United Kingdom in 2022, during the social movement against pension reform in France in early 2023, during the historic strikes in the health and automobile sectors in the United States in recent weeks. This international dynamic marks the historic return of workers' combativeness, the growing refusal to accept the permanent deterioration in living and working conditions, and the tendency to show solidarity between sectors and between generations as workers in struggle. In the future, movements will have to make the link between the economic crisis and war, between the sacrifices demanded and the development of arms budgets and policies, between all the scourges that obsolete global capitalism carries with it, between the economic, war and climate crises that feed on each other.

Against nationalism, against the wars our exploiters want to drag us into, the old watchwords of the workers' movement that appeared in the Communist Manifesto of 1848 are more relevant today than ever:

“The workers have no homeland!

Workers of all countries, unite!”

For the development of the class struggle of the international proletariat!

International Communist Current, 7 November 2023

On 22 and 29 September, the Internationalist Communist Tendency held two public meetings, in Paris and Saint-Nazaire respectively. The ICC has always considered that discussion, debate and confrontation of positions is a fundamental task and responsibility of the groups of the Communist Left. That's why we took part in these two meetings, mobilising a large number of supporters to help ensure that the debate was as rich as possible.

But if the reports on these meetings published on the ICT website are to be believed[1], our attitude may have been motivated by a completely different intention.
In the Paris public meeting, "the meeting, which could have delved much further into all the aspects of the current situation and its practical consequences, was derailed somewhat by the comrades of the ICC". The Saint-Nazaire meeting was even worse: “the ICC’s intervention was coordinated in its aim of distorting the discussion, which was derailed in favour of their outright and delusional accusations against our positions. Despite our refusal to follow them down this path, the militants spoiled the debate by brandishing all sorts of unverifiable details completely devoid of any context, which were a thousand miles from the concerns of other attendees. "

In other words, the ICC is alleged to have hatched a deliberate plan to sabotage the proceedings of public meetings of an organisation of the Communist Left. These accusations, thrown around publicly and without the slightest argument, are fraught with consequences. So let's be a little more consistent and honest than the ICT and start by rectifying the many lies in these two reports.

I - Hijacking the discussion or fighting for a confrontation of positions?
At the Paris meeting, after listening for nearly an hour to the presidium's presentation (supplemented by two interventions from Battaglia Comunista and the Internationalist Workers' Group, two groups affiliated to the ICT), the ICC took part in the discussion. Our first intervention attempted to demonstrate that:

 - Contrary to the analysis developed in the presentation, imperialist war in the period of capitalist decadence is absolutely not a solution to the economic crisis. On the contrary, it only aggravates it and plunges humanity into a spiral of destruction and chaos. It is becoming increasingly irrational from the point of view of capitalism.

- Contrary also to the idea also developed in the presentation, we do not subscribe to the analysis of a tendency towards the formation of blocs prefiguring the course towards a third world war. Rather, we believe that the tendency for imperialist states to play each other off against each other can only lead to a proliferation of warlike conflicts, generating ever more chaos and destruction and potentially bringing about the end of humanity even in the absence of a world war.

This is why, as we pointed out both in Paris and in Saint Nazaire, the ICT’s abstract and erroneous analysis of imperialist war leads it to profoundly underestimate the seriousness of the situation!
But the ICC's alleged sabotage did not stop there, since we subsequently drew attention "to fairly secondary points" and tried to "divert the discussion onto the trade union question". If, in fact, at the Paris meeting, the ICC  intervened to assert that the unions and trade unionism belonged to the bourgeois state, it was precisely in the face of the ambiguity contained in the remarks of the Battaglia Comunista representative deploring the fact that the unions were not combative enough and did not do what was necessary to develop struggles. It was therefore not surprising, as the report on the Paris meeting indicated, that the member of the CNT/AIT (a libertarian organisation which sees itself precisely as a federation of trade unions) was 100% in "political agreement" with the ICT's position.

Moreover, we saw the same complacency towards the unions a week later at the Saint-Nazaire meeting, since the ICT did not really distance itself from the position defended by the representative of the leftist group Lutte Ouvrière, calling precisely for work in the unions! One of the CWO's speakers even went so far as to say that "it makes sense to join the union if all your colleagues are in it", suggesting that it would sometimes be necessary to be present in these state bodies.

Faced with such concessions on a position that is so important for the working class, it was essential to recall and reaffirm loud and clear what constitutes one of the programmatic gains of the Communist Left, which the ICT is supposed to share but which it is incapable of defending!

In any case, this "parenthesis" on the unions did not prevent us from intervening on the more central questions raised in the discussion. That's why, in both meetings, we also took a stand on the role of the organisations of the Communist Left in the face of the imperialist war.

In these interventions we defended

1 - The validity of the Joint Declaration of the groups of the Communist Left against the imperialist war. This approach, in continuity with the struggle of the Bolsheviks at Zimmerwald, is a concrete policy aimed at forming part of a process towards the regroupment of revolutionary forces through the defence of the principles and methods of the revolutionary movement[2] .

2 - The artificial and above all dangerous character of the policy of a "united front" with anarchist and leftist (so-called internationalist) groups, defended by the ICT through the promotion of the No War But the Class War committees[3] .

3 - That by referring to "The call for a united proletarian front" launched by the Internationalist Communist Party (ICP) in 1944, the ICT is following the opportunist approach contained in this call, which was implicitly addressed to the bases of the old workers' parties (Socialist Party and Communist Party)[4] .

It is unfortunate that the ICT did not take all this seriously and was content to label us, without the slightest argument, as "idealists" just good at making "platonic declarations".

II - "Sectarian frenzy" or clear demarcation from leftism?
In the end, all the shameless accusations made in the balance sheets: the " delusional accusations" of its positions, the "distortion of the discussion", the “grotesque attitude of provocation and accusation", the "parasiting of the discussion", etc. above all demonstrate a real aversion to those who have been able to defend clearly and with determination the principles and tradition of the Communist Left.

Driven by the desire to gain ever more influence and the spirit of rivalry, the ICT is prepared, on the contrary, to flatter anyone and compromise itself for anything! This suicidal approach even leads it to blur the class boundary with leftist organisations such as LO, whose member present in Saint Nazaire was addressed as a "comrade". We are even accused of having attacked him personally, when all we did was denounce Lutte Ouvrière as a leftist group whose function is to hijack internationalism.

In reality, maximum openness to everything to the right and a categorical refusal to discuss with the left is a typical opportunist approach. The same hostility was shown by the Left Opposition and Trotsky in the 1930s towards the left wing of the Communist Party of Italy, which embodied the clearest position against the opportunist degeneration of the Communist International.

III - The defence of proletarian principles and behaviour

Finally, we are reproached for "bringing up old issues from more than twenty years ago". The ICT is certainly referring here to the statement we read 30 minutes before the end of the Paris meeting in which we denounced the presence of two individuals expelled from the ICC in the early 2000s for having published information that exposed our comrades to state repression, an activity we have denounced as snitching[5].

The latter have never denied their behaviour. One has even been a member of the ICT for several years and was part of the presidium. In fact, it is above all this questioning that infuriates the ICT and that it is trying, very hard to hide by reducing it to simple "old stories with little political content" and by accusing us of having used this to "parasite the discussion".

Until there is proof to the contrary, snitches have never had a place in the revolutionary camp. That's why we feel it was our responsibility to challenge the ICT on this issue, defending, once again, the highly political principles of the proletariat. Instead, all the ICT militants present at the meeting preferred to cover their ears and defend these individuals. At least we have confirmation that this organisation, which claims to be involved in the formation of the future party of revolutionaries, is prepared to accept anyone into its ranks, including people who behave like cops and thugs!

This is not the first time the ICT has made pacts with dubious elements. In 2004, the International Bureau for the Revolutionary Party (the forerunner of the ICT) published on its website the slanderous remarks made about the ICC by the notorious Citizen B and the "Circulo de Comunistas Internacionalistas", before quietly withdrawing them after realising that the statements were false[6]. However, the ICT never criticised this totally irresponsible move on its part and has therefore learned nothing from it.

IV - The ICT is unable to criticise past mistakes

Rather than face all these questions seriously, the ICT prefers to dodge them. Worse still, it urges us to put our disagreements aside and calls for a broad gathering and unity of all those who claim to be internationalists, whether near or far, without the slightest clarification of principles. This is an approach with which the workers' movement is familiar and which Bordiga denounced in 1926 to the Executive of the Communist International: “Experience has shown that opportunism always infiltrates our ranks under the guise of unity. It is in its interest to influence the largest possible mass, and it is therefore behind the screen of unity that it puts forward its most deceitful proposals."

It was with the same opportunist approach that the most distant ancestor of the ICT was founded in 1943, the Internationalist Communist Party (PCint), admitted into ranks, without a hint of criticism:
1- Elements of the minority of the Italian Fraction that had gone to fight alongside the Republicans during the Spanish War.

2- Vercesi and all those who, during the Second World War, had taken part in the Brussels Anti-Fascist Coalition Committee[7].

It is this very old political flaw that is the source of the ICT's opportunism today. As a result, its refusal to confront it head-on and its inability to criticise its own past condemns it to repeat the same mistakes over and over again.

In the reports of the two meetings, the ICT calls on the ICC to pull itself together, and even urges us to apologise for any negative attitude we may have adopted during the discussions. Come on comrades, don't be ridiculous.

We think that during these two meetings we have demonstrated our responsibility to work towards the confrontation of political positions and to defend the positions and principles of the Communist Left. Unfortunately, we can't say the same for the ICT, whose evasion and refusal to debate, its compromise with leftist elements and its acceptance of the behaviour of cops and thugs are all symptoms of the disease that is eating away at this organisation and leading it inexorably towards oblivion! As Lenin said, "A defender of internationalism who is not at the same time a very consistent and determined opponent of opportunism is a phantom, nothing more."

ICC, 31 October 2023

 

"We knew that the world would never be the same again. Some people laughed, others cried, but most remained silent. I was reminded of the line from the Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad Gita; Vishnu tries to persuade the Prince to do his duty and, in order to impress him, assumes his many-armed form and says: 'Now I have become Death, the destroyer of worlds'. I suppose we've all thought that, in one way or another".

These were the words of Robert Oppenheimer in 1965 as he recounted his feelings when he witnessed the first nuclear test in the New Mexico desert in July 1945.

Christopher Nolan's film explores the conscience of this scientist, known as "the father of the atomic bomb".

It is true that Robert Oppenheimer was overwhelmed by the monstrosity of what he had greatly contributed to, namely the development of a killing machine that far surpassed anything that had existed before. This new atomic weapon killed 210,000 people on 6 and 9 August 1945 in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, not to mention the incalculable number of deaths that followed as a result of the serious effects of the radiation, which lasted for many years afterwards.

So yes, in the midst of the war, there was ideological justification for the American government. Nazi Germany was conducting research into a powerful and destructive weapon and the defence of the "free world", of democracy, justified doing everything possible to fight Nazism, to develop weapons powerful enough to destroy this enemy of civilisation that was engaged in exterminating the Jews. Oppenheimer was Jewish and was susceptible to this propaganda.

Given the go-ahead to manufacture the bomb, Oppenheimer and his team of scientists completed their work. Then, on the eve of the Potsdam Conference in July 1945, conclusive tests were carried out in the middle of the desert in the southern United States. But at that time, in 1945, why, with Germany now defeated, proceed with this military programme? The pretext of defending civilisation against Nazi barbarism no longer existed.

Oppenheimer was a highly contradictory character and was convinced that he was working for world peace by having built a death machine that surpassed anything that had been built up to that point, so that future wars could be avoided through the power of deterrence.
The aim of Truman, the American president who ordered the nuclear holocaust, and his accomplice Winston Churchill, was quite different.

In stark contrast to all the lies that have been spread since 1945 about the supposed victory of democracy as a synonym for peace [1], and with the butchery of the Second World War barely ended, the new course of imperialist confrontation engulfing the planet in blood was already underway. Yalta [2] was an attempt to manage the major imperialist divide between the great victor of 1945, the United States, and its Russian challenger. From being a minor economic power, Russia was able, thanks to the Second World War, to acquire a global  imperialist status, which would clearly present a threat to the American superpower. From the spring of 1945, the USSR used its military might to establish a bloc in Eastern Europe. Yalta merely sanctioned the balance of power between the main imperialist sharks who had emerged victorious from the greatest carnage in history. What was created by one set of balance of forces could be undone by another. Thus, in the summer of 1945, the real issue facing the American state was not to make Japan capitulate as quickly as possible, as we are taught in school textbooks, but to oppose and contain the imperialist offensive of the "great Russian ally"!

Christopher Nolan's film shows how a brilliant researcher, passionate about culture and humanism, finds himself at the centre of historical events that are beyond his control,  in which he is both an actor and a victim. But the film also makes much of the context of the early years of the Cold War, the era of McCarthy-ism, the hunting down of 'subversive' elements, those 'communists' with ties to Stalin's USSR. Oppenheimer himself became a victim of this [3] though he was subsequently rehabilitated by J.F. Kennedy in 1962.

In the current context of war in Ukraine and the manoeuvring of American imperialism against Russia, this film seems to be prescient. Given the current barbarism inflicted by Russia in Ukraine, is it the case that the American and British policy at the end of the Second World War was justified?

The film industry has long been widely used for state propaganda purposes. Even before the Second World War, the US government asked Walt Disney to take his cartoon mouse to South America to counter the rise of Nazi propaganda.

One of the conditions of the Marshall Plan in 1947 was that those European countries involved should distribute American films widely to the cinemas. Once again, the aim was to counter the growing influence of the USSR in the aftermath of the war by projecting a freedom-loving democratic image for the United States.

The ideological battle between the two blocs was equated to the struggle between "democracy" and "communist" dictatorship. Each time, the Western democracies claimed to be fighting against a system fundamentally different from their own, fighting against "dictatorships" [4]. This is not at all the case; the politics of the two sides are rooted in the same capitalist system!

The idyllic and naive vision of "democracy" is a myth. "Democracy" is the ideological screen used to mask the dictatorship of capital in its developed central heartlands. There is no fundamental difference in nature between the various models that capitalist propaganda opposes one against the other for the purposes of its ideological campaigns of mystification. All the supposedly different systems which have served as a foil for democratic propaganda since the beginning of the century are expressions of the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie and of capitalism.

As Oppenheimer said in 1945, the world will never be the same again. Capitalism is war. Since the end of the Second World War, while there was no Third World War, the competition between the American and Russian blocs continued as a "Cold War", in the sense that it never took the form of open conflict. Instead, it was waged through a series of proxy wars between local states and various "national liberation movements" doing their dirty work, and with the two superpowers providing the weapons, intelligence, strategic support and ideological justification.

Since the collapse of the Eastern bloc in the late 1980s, despite the rhetoric at the time, no so-called "new world order" came about. On the contrary, the world is facing an acceleration of barbarism and chaos. The war in Ukraine and now the conflict in the Middle East are the latest manifestations of war, with all that this means in terms of massive destruction and massacres of entire defenceless populations.

Capitalism is dragging human society into an endless abyss of chaos and barbarism. More than ever before, the only alternative is communism or the destruction of humanity!

CT

 

________________________________________

 

[1] See our article Hiroshima and Nagasaki: The Lies of the Bourgeoisie [18], International Review 83

 [2] The Yalta Conference was a meeting of the main leaders of the Soviet Union (Joseph Stalin), the United Kingdom (Winston Churchill) and the United States (Franklin D. Roosevelt). The aims of the Yalta conference were:

- to adopt a common strategy to hasten the end of the Second World War;

- to settle the fate of Europe after the defeat of the Third Reich; and

- to guarantee the stability of the new world order after victory.

[3] He was accused of having had links in his youth with the American "Communist" Party (he was more of a Democrat, supporting Roosevelt). The real reason for accusing him of being a Soviet agent was his refusal to use his great scientific skills to build the H-bomb.

[4] Bourgeois Organization: The Lie of the 'Democratic' State [19], International Review 76

 

On 7 October, with a hail of rockets, a horde of Islamists unleashed terror on Israeli towns neighbouring the Gaza Strip. In the name of "just revenge" against "the crimes of the occupation", in the name of "Muslims the world over" against the "Zionist regime", Hamas and its allies sent thousands of fanatical "fighters" to commit the worst atrocities against defenceless civilians, women, the elderly and even children. Hamas' savagery knew no bounds: murder, rape, torture, kidnappings, targeted schools, innocent people chased from their homes, thousands hurt...

No sooner had the vile atrocities of Hamas been repelled than the Israel Defence Forces (IDF) unleashed its full murderous might on the Gaza Strip in the name of the fight for "light" against "darkness". At the time of writing, the Israeli air force is relentlessly bombing the overcrowded enclave over which Hamas reigns, indiscriminately wiping out civilians and terrorists alike, while the IDF has just cut the Gaza Strip in two and encircled its capital. By "raining hellfire on Hamas", Netanyahu's government is indiscriminately razing homes to the ground and taking thousands of innocent victims to their graves, including thousands of children.

A totally irrational conflict

The attack of Hamas stunned the whole world. Israel, a State whose bourgeoisie cultivates in its population day after day, year after year, a fortress mentality, a state with intelligence services, Mossad and Shin Bet, among the most renowned in the world, a state that has long been an ally of the United States and its arsenal of surveillance... Israel apparently saw nothing coming: neither suspicious Hamas exercises, nor the concentration of thousands of rockets and men. Nor did the Israeli State heed the many warnings, particularly those from neighbouring Egypt.

There are several possible explanations for this surprise:

- Netanyahu and his clique are so divided and stupid, marked by the weight of populism and the worst religious delusions, focused on defending their small immediate interests and obsessed by control of the West Bank and the "reconquest of the promised land", that they may have underestimated the imminence of the attack by concentrating IDF forces in this region.

- Opposed by parts of the Israeli bourgeoisie, the army and the secret services, it is also possible that Netanyahu deliberately ignored the warnings in an attempt to regain control of the political situation in Israel by attempting "national unity". Just as it is entirely possible that part of the state apparatus failed to inform the government of the imminent attack in order to weaken it further.

What is certain, in any case, is that before 7 October, Netanyahu did everything he could to strengthen the power and resources of Hamas insofar as this organisation was, like him and the whole of the Israeli right, totally opposed to the 1993 Oslo Accords[1] which envisaged Palestinian autonomy. It was "Bibi" himself who claimed responsibility for this policy: “Anyone who wants to combat the establishment of a Palestinian state has to support the strengthening of Hamas and transferring money to Hamas. This is part of our strategy". These words were spoken by Netanyahu on 11 March 2019 to Likud MPs (reported by the major Israeli daily Haaretz on 9 October).

For the moment, it is difficult to determine the causes of this fiasco on the part of the Israeli security forces. But each of the two hypotheses, like the dynamic into which the Middle East is sinking, reveals the growing chaos that reigns in the political apparatus of the Israeli bourgeoisie: the instability of government coalitions, massive corruption, trials for fraud, legislative wheeling and dealing, controversial judicial reform that poorly conceals the settling of scores within the state apparatus, the supremacist ravings of the ultra-orthodox... All this against a backdrop of rising inflation and a real explosion in poverty.

As for the so-called Hamas "resistance", the very presence of this organisation, which competes with a PLO rotten to the core, at the head of the Gaza Strip is a caricature of the chaos and irrationality into which the Palestinian bourgeoisie has plunged. When Hamas is not bloodily suppressing demonstrations against the soaring cost of living, as it did in March 2019 (which gives a good indication of the fate of the "Palestinian people" once they are "liberated" from "Zionist colonialism"...), when its mafia-like leaders are not gorging themselves on international aid (Hamas is one of the richest terrorist organisations on the planet), when it is not fomenting terrorist attacks, this bloodthirsty group is preaching a most obscurantist, racist and delusional ideology.

The state of Israel and Hamas, at different times and with different means, have followed the lowest of policies that have led to today's massacres. In the end, this will not benefit either of the two belligerents, but will spread destruction and barbarism even further.

Accelerating global chaos

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is clearly not a strictly local one. Less than two years after the outbreak of war in Ukraine, at a time when a whole series of conflicts are being rekindled in the Balkans, the Caucasus and the Sahel, this bloody conflagration is not just another episode in a conflict that has been going on for decades. On the contrary, it represents a significant new stage in the acceleration of global chaos.

In the near future, the possibility that Israel will be forced to wage a war on three fronts against Hamas, Hezbollah and Iran cannot be ruled out. An extension of the conflict would have major global repercussions, starting with a huge influx of refugees from Gaza and the West Bank and destabilising the countries neighbouring Israel. It would also have particularly devastating immediate consequences for the global economy as a whole, given the importance of the Middle East in oil production.

The spread of the conflict to Europe, with a series of deadly attacks, should also not be underestimated. An attack claimed by Islamic State has already been carried out in Belgium. A teacher was also brutally murdered in France on 13 October by a young Islamist, less than a week after the Hamas offensive.

But it is not enough to wait for the conflict to spread to gauge its immediate international dimension.[2] The scale of the Hamas attack and the level of preparation it required leave little doubt about the involvement of Iran, which is clearly ready to set the whole region ablaze in defence of its immediate strategic interests and in an attempt to break out of its isolation. The Islamic Republic has set a real trap for Netanyahu. It is also the reason why Teheran and its allies have stepped up their provocations, with Hezbollah and the Houthis (Yemen) firing missiles at Israeli positions. Russia has also undoubtedly played a role in the Hamas offensive, which it hopes will weaken US and European support for Ukraine.

Even if the violence does not spread to the whole of the Middle East in the immediate future, the dynamic of destabilisation is inescapable. In this respect, the situation can only worry China: not only would it weaken its oil supplies, but it would also represent a considerable obstacle to the construction of its "Silk Roads" with their gigantic port, rail and oil infrastructures. However, China, which finds itself in an ambivalent position here, could also contribute to the chaos by ending up openly supporting Iran, in the hope of easing American pressure in the Pacific.

This conflict shows the extent to which each state is increasingly applying a "scorched earth" policy to defend its interests, seeking not to gain influence or conquer interests, but to sow chaos and destruction among its rivals.

This tendency towards strategic irrationality, short-sightedness, unstable alliances, and each against all is not an arbitrary policy of this or that state, nor the product of the sheer stupidity of this or that bourgeois faction in power. It is the consequence of the historical conditions, those of the decomposition of capitalism, in which all states confront each other.[3] With the outbreak of war in Ukraine, this historical tendency and the weight of militarism on society have profoundly worsened. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict confirms the extent to which imperialist war is now the main destabilising factor in capitalist society. The product of the contradictions of capitalism, the winds of war in turn feed the fire of these same contradictions, increasing, through the weight of militarism, the economic crisis, the environmental catastrophe, the dismemberment of society... This dynamic tends to rot all parts of society, to weaken all nations, starting with the first among them: the United States.

The irreversible weakening of American leadership

Western heads of state rushed to Israel's bedside, initially with some trepidation and doubts about how best to handle the situation. The French President, for once, made a fool of himself in a diplomatic stand-off, calling for the coalition created in 2014 against the Islamic State to be mobilised against Hamas, before pathetically backtracking in the evening.

By rushing to Tel Aviv and Israel's neighbours, the European powers are seeking to take advantage of the situation to regain a foothold in the region. But it was still Biden who set the tone by trying to put pressure on Israel to avoid too much bloodshed in Gaza. He also sent two aircraft carriers to the area to send a message of resolve to Hezbollah and Iran.

When the United States made its "strategic pivot" towards Asia under Obama (a policy pursued by Trump and Biden), it did not abandon its influence in the Middle East. Washington worked, notably through the Abraham Accords, to establish a system of alliances between Israel and several Arab countries, in particular Saudi Arabia, to contain Iran's imperialist aspirations, delegating responsibility for maintaining order to the Israeli state.

But this was without taking into account the growing instability of alliances and the deep-seated tendency to go it alone. The Israeli bourgeoisie has never ceased to put its own imperialist interests ahead of those of the United States. While Washington favours a two-state "solution", Netanyahu has increased the number of annexations in the West Bank, risking setting the region on fire, while counting on American military and diplomatic support if the conflict escalates. The United States now finds itself backed into a corner by Israel, forced to support Netanyahu's irresponsible policy.

Biden's reaction, shows how little confidence the US administration has in Netanyahu's clique and how worried it is about the prospect of a catastrophic conflagration in the Middle East. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict puts further pressure on US imperialist policy, which could prove calamitous if expanded. Washington would then have to assume a considerable military presence and support for Israel, which could only weigh heavily, not only on the US economy, but also on its support for Ukraine and, even more so, on its strategy to contain China's expansion.

The pro-Palestinian rhetoric of Turkey, an "incurable" member of NATO, will also contribute to weakening the United States in the region, just as the tensions between Israel and several Latin American countries will no doubt accentuate tensions with its North American sponsor. Washington is therefore trying to prevent the situation from getting out of hand... a perfectly illusory ambition in the long term, given the disastrous dynamic into which the Middle East is sinking.

The impact of the war on the working class

The images of the atrocities committed by Hamas and the IDF have travelled around the world and, everywhere, the bourgeoisie has called on us to choose sides. On all the television channels and in all the newspapers, on the left and on the right, foul war propaganda, often crude, sometimes more subtle, is unleashed, telling everyone to choose between "Palestinian resistance" and "Israeli democracy", as if there was no other choice but to support one or the other of these bloodthirsty bourgeois cliques.

Parts of the bourgeoisie, particularly in Europe and North America, are unleashing a ferocious campaign to legitimise the war and the atrocities of the Israeli army: “We defend the right of Israel to exist, to defend itself, and guarantee security for its people. And we perfectly understand that terrorism has to be fought" (Italian Prime Minister Meloni). Of course, the bourgeoisie will cover itself in humanitarian virtues as they hypocritically deplore the civilian casualties in the Gaza Strip. But rest assured, German Chancellor Scholz is certain: “Israel is a democratic state with very humanitarian principles that guide it and we can therefore be sure that the Israeli army will respect the rules of international law in what it does ".

The bourgeoisie can also rely on its left-wing parties to feed its dirty nationalist propaganda. Almost all of them advocate the defence of Palestine. Their rhetoric ranges from the supposed defence of the Palestinian people who have been bombed to shameless support for the barbarians of Hamas. Gigantic pro-Palestinian demonstrations have been organised in London and Berlin, exploiting the legitimate disgust aroused by the bombing of Gaza.

It is true that the working class is not today in a position to directly oppose the war and its horrors. But choosing one imperialist camp against another is a fatal trap. Because it means accepting the logic of war, which is "hatred, fractures and divisions between human beings, death for death's sake, the institutionalisation of torture, submission, power struggles, as the only logic of social evolution".[4] Because it means taking at face value the shameless lies that the bourgeoisie repeats at every conflict: "After this war, peace will return". Because, above all, it means siding with the interests of the bourgeoisie (defending national capital at all costs, even if it means driving humanity into the grave) and abandoning the fight for the only perspective really capable of putting an end to the murderous dynamic of capitalism: the fight to defend the historic interests of the proletariat, the fight for communism.

The vast majority of workers in Israel and Palestine have let themselves be drawn onto the terrain of nationalism and war. However, through the unprecedented series of struggles in many countries, in Britain, France and the United States in particular, the working class has shown that it is capable of fighting, if not against war and militarism themselves, then against the economic consequences of war, against the sacrifices demanded by the bourgeoisie to fuel its war economy. This is a fundamental stage in the development of combativeness and, ultimately, of class consciousness.[5] The war in the Middle East, with the deepening of the crisis and the additional armament requirements it will generate in the four corners of the planet, will only increase the objective conditions for this break.

But this war carries with it as yet unforeseeable dangers for the working class. If the massacres continue to worsen or spread, the feeling of powerlessness and the divisions within the working class are likely to constitute a significant obstacle to the development efforts towards combativity and reflection. As shown by the pro-Palestinian demonstrations, the conflict in the Middle East is likely to have a very negative impact on the working class, particularly in France, the United Kingdom and Germany, where the presence of large numbers of Jews and Muslims, combined with the inflammatory rhetoric of governments, makes the situation more than explosive.

The Israeli-Palestinian war is undoubtedly causing a feeling of powerlessness and serious divisions within the working class. But the immensity of the dangers and the task ahead must not lead us to fatalism. If today the ruling class is filling workers’ heads with nationalist and war propaganda, the crisis into which capitalism is sinking is also creating the conditions for massive struggles to erupt and for a process of reflection to emerge, first among revolutionary minorities and then within the working class as a whole.

EG, 6 November 2023