ICC introduction

We are publishing below extracts of a contribution from a close contact in India. We think that his denunciation of the powers waging the current conflicts in Ukraine and the Middle East shows a clear internationalist position and is fundamentally different from the pseudo-internationalism of the leftists. The text was written as a basis for discussion and some parts, in which the comrade polemicises with Indian leftists, are not taken up in these extracts. We however think that it is an important contribution for further reflection on the internationalist position of the Communist Left in the face of the war. We should also point out that we do not agree with all of his formulations about Lenin’s weaknesses on national liberation and state capitalism, for example, and also on the definition of marxism as a “science”, rather than as a scientific method. But we will return to these points in another text.

 

General statement on imperialism

Amidst the general backdrop of the two major wars in the world now, Russo-Ukraine and Israel-Palestine, there is growing talk on imperialism and colonialism as well as neo-colonialism. A whole slew of bourgeois intelligentsia has come out to represent either side’s position in the war. The leftists, liberal and conservative academics have taken various differing positions on the conflict. Those belonging to various “isms” of so-called scientific thinking have too taken their positions. Some offer calls for subaltern internationalism yet in their own analysis fail to see the role of world capital and accumulation thereof as well resort to some amount of self-determination and have not yet shaken off the irregular strategy of national liberation.

“Evidently, for a just world order to exist, the share of the world economy must depend on the actual proportion of a country’s population. A violation of this principle amounts to the common people of developing countries being reduced to a subservient position in, both, complex and simple value extraction / transfer. While majority of people in such countries are compelled to labour more and more in return for less and less from the economy, the economic elites of the same countries – albeit at times in a subordinate role – converge with the global alliance of economic elites. Typically, when the rate of profit in these developing economies decline, their economic elites tend to financialize their wealth in dollars, which together harms their local economy.”[1]

The above statement is indicative of the general position even leftists tend to take. While it is certainly admissible that the labouring class of the so-called global south are amongst the most exploited, this analysis does not engage with the true internationalist nature of the communist movement and does not understand the real concept of imperialism. One might even say that it is haunted by a spectre of self-determination.

A further example would be:

“Indeed, a close reading of the subtext of the Israel-Palestine conflict reveals precisely how the ‘war on terror’ serves as a smokescreen for the convergence of U.S. imperialism, Israeli elites, and Arab elites with respect to beating back the revolutionary nationalism in the region.”[2]

Nationalism of any form, whether revolutionary or democratic, serves only to further divide the working classes. A very ill-conceived way of looking at class struggle, such as the idea that revolutionary socialism can principally only arise in the most backward countries and self-determination and national liberation can help pit the working class of each country against the bourgeoisie of each country, does not understand capitalism in the context of imperialism.

Prashad writes: “Why does Hamas attack Israel? Because a political grammar has been imposed on the relationship between the Palestinians and the Israelis by the nature of the Israeli occupation. Indeed, any time there is a modest development for talks - often brokered by Qatar - between Hamas and the Israeli government, those talks are silenced by the sound of Israeli fighter jets.”[3]

This is a very mundane view of the events in Gaza. He presents the Palestinians as the infallible people and Hamas as their political voice while the Israelis are an occupying colonial force. This childish malady of the enemy of my enemy is my friend has been the dominating style of many a liberal and leftists. Terms such as nationalism, self-determination and liberating struggle are clear indicators that they have not truly understood the meaning of capitalism and how imperialism functions as a stage, the highest one, of capitalism. Imperialism is, in its roots, a result of the accumulation of capital.

Again, now we must come back to a critique of the leftists and liberals who are a latently retrogressive force. No leftist or liberal has truly escaped this spectre of national liberation which, one could say, speaks to their lack of understanding of capitalism and imperialism.

First considering the leftist position for it makes a call to subaltern internationalism which veils a larger goal of revolutionary nationalism. The usage of terms by both leftists and liberals such as “Neo-Colonialism” “Islamophobia” and “Jewish colonisation” do nothing but engage in mysticism and counterrevolutionary phrase-mongering.

Their goal of national liberation in Palestine is very much apparent in their writing.

“Likewise, the strategy of partition was a potent tool of British imperialists, which was clearly compatible with the doctrine of ‘divida et impera’ (divide and rule). The strategy of partition was a prominent, tried-and-tested strategy of the ruling elites of the British imperialist era. Prime Minister Lloyd George, for example, had partitioned Ireland in December 1921. As the Second British Empire proved difficult to hold on to post the end of World War II, India too was partitioned. With the loss of India, the Oriental end-point of the Second British Empire was immediately re-established on the Persian Gulf, with the Palestinian region rising in importance. This was more so, given that imperial control over neighbouring Egypt proved difficult, especially as Egyptian nationalism grew and eventually precipitated the toppling of the monarchy in order to establish the Egyptian republic in 1952. Given this, Palestine was the obvious alternative for the strategic control of the Suez Canal that connects European trade with Asia.”[4]

I.

The acquisition of new territories can be said to form a part of imperialism; however one must understand that imperialism is a specific phenomenon that is an essential and final step of capitalist mode of production. Such an argument as using imperialism in a bourgeois sense thereby labelling even Rome an imperial power is akin to stating that alienation and exploitation are unique only to capitalism. This romantic-utopic view of imperialism is highly improper. Imperialism is, instead, a stage in capitalist mode of production since it arises out of a specific crisis of capitalism: A crisis of markets, acquisition and fall of profit.

The imperialist phase of capitalist accumulation comprises the industrialisation and capitalist emancipation of the hinterland where capital formerly realised its surplus value. Characteristics of this phase are lending abroad, railroad construction, revolutions and wars.[5] This offers us an insight into the functioning of imperialism, as a product of capitalism, rooted firmly in the latent contradictions of capitalism. Unlike bourgeois reactionaries who often portray conquests as an inevitability or the norm, those who understand Marxism as a science are able to offer a more holistic understanding, such as the understanding provided by Luxemburg.

Lenin’s role too cannot be discounted in providing a deeper analysis of imperialism. In his role in the analysis of banks in part II of his text, “Imperialism, the highest stage of capitalism”, Lenin writes: “The principal and primary function of banks is to serve as middle-men in the making of payments. In doing so they transform inactive money capital into active, that is, into capital yielding a profit […] The big enterprises, and the banks in particular, not only absorb the small ones, but also ‘annex’ them, subordinate them, bring them into their ‘own’ group or concern by acquiring ‘holdings’ in their capital, by purchasing or exchanging shares, by a system of credits, etc., etc.”

Lenin’s analysis and further polemics against various bourgeois economists and social democrats such as Hobson (former) and Kautsky (latter) should be held in good respect. From Lenin’s statement (amongst other things), the overall schema of imperialism can be ascertained: the need to capitalise surplus value and to maintain stable profits by acquiring new resources and markets as well as cheaper labour is the driving force for capitalists to seek out newer territory and what distinguishes capitals’ pursuit of new territory from feudal pursuit of new territory. The underlying and perhaps principal contradiction of capitalism is the tendency of the rate of profit to fall. To maintain and grow the capitalisation of surplus value, larger capitalists have to expand their markets into all other regions making imperialism a stage in capitalist development.

II.

While the above stands true, one must also understand that capitalism and the imperial stage is also subject to change. In this case, the role of the state is essential. The ultimate condition of production is the reproduction of the conditions of production.[6] A single capitalist not only has to continue production but must also continue the reproduction of his raw materials which other capitalists do, and their own reproduction is performed by other capitalists. In doing so, this reproduction of the forces of production is endless and will consume the entire world thereby leading to no place in our world being free of capitalism. This speaks to the integration of the world capitalist market and the creation of world capital. One does need to go deep into ideologies of the state and its apparatuses. What is more important is, “What is the purpose of the state and its apparatuses”? The state serves to enable the reproduction of the productive forces of capitalism and to ensure the reproduction of the entire mode of production itself. In doing so, it sometimes negotiates with trade unions and offers piecemeal reforms. However, today, the state’s role in the economy is much greater. Many call this socialist when in reality they are state capitalist.

It is in this analysis of state capitalism where we can find Lenin’s greatest drawback. Instead of the state acting as a puppet of the capitalists, these capitalists are subordinated by the state to ensure reproduction of productive forces and the mode of production as a whole. To condense an elaborate argument, the subordination of national capital by the state as well as the internal contradictions of capitalism that leads to need to expand across the world has led to the emergence of imperialism and state capitalism as its most driving form.

The defects of Lenin’s theory and soviet imperialism can be readily seen. In his thesis on “The socialist revolution and the right of nations to self-determination”, Lenin says “the semi colonial countries, such as China, Persia and Turkey, and all the colonies, which have a combined population of 1000 million, the bourgeois democratic movements have either hardly begun or have a long way to go. Socialists must not only demand the unconditional and immediate liberation of the colonies without compensation - and this demand in its political expression signifies nothing else than the recognition of the right to self-determination.”

It is very much clear that Lenin supports the wars of national liberation and the question of a popular frontesque alliance escapes him. Even in the case of wars of national liberation, the national bourgeois are already cowed by the imperialist world capital or they themselves became imperialist in nature.

 

Raghav / November 2024

Trump is back at the head of the American state, four years after his electoral defeat by Biden. This represents a resounding failure for the more 'responsible' faction of the US bourgeoisie despite all the efforts made since 2020 by parts of it to isolate Trump and his camp, with the involvement of the Biden administration, the Democratic Party, part of the Republican Party and part of the American intelligentsia. In fact, the recent electoral victory against Harris, even clearer than the previous one against Hilary Clinton in 2016, is by no means fortuitous but is typically the product of the decomposition of capitalist society, of which Trumpism is an offshoot. Since Trump had already clearly demonstrated his power to cause harm at the head of state during his first term in office, and his delirious irresponsibility during the assault on the Capitol in Washington which he encouraged in the face of Biden's election, all this illustrates the impasse in which American capitalism and its bourgeoisie find themselves, unable to curb the hold of populism during Biden's 4 years in office. So much so that it has grown even stronger, resulting in a Trump 2.0 even more delirious than Trump1.

The populist agenda: a social and economic aberration

Trump's programme expresses a radicalisation of populism, notably through his most outlandish electoral promises, and this is an aberration from the point of view of the management of national capital: deportation by the army of millions of illegal immigrants; dismissal of hundreds of thousands of civil servants, including in particular those who, in the performance of their duties, had been led to take a stand against Trump, notably for his role in the assault on the Capitol following Biden's election.

To renew the administration, Trump is selecting candidates for key posts at the head of strategic departments and agencies on the basis of two decisive criteria that do not take into account the candidates' competence: being a Trump loyalist and being ready to join an offensive against the federal state. Among Trump's proposals, the most strategic - since it concerns the head of the Pentagon - and emblematic of the ‘radical break’ promised during his election campaign, is a former military officer and Fox News presenter Pete Hegseth who, moreover, has been accused of sexual assault and excessive alcohol consumption. This method, which guarantees the greatest incompetence in strategic positions to defend the interests of American capital, is a very good indicator of where Trump 2.0 is taking America.

Once again we see that populist politics, when not supervised at the head of the state by other factions of the bourgeoisie, more responsible with regard to the management of national capital, has always proved detrimental to the interests of the latter. This was illustrated, for example, by the disastrous management of the Covid crisis by Trump in the United States and by Bolsonaro in Brazil. And what can come out of the Trump/Musk tandem at the top of the American state? Both undoubtedly share the most foul values of populism, just as they are profoundly in agreement on a number of issues such as the need for a deep purge in the administration, but both are indifferent to the serious dysfunctions of the state apparatus that may result. What's more, behind their agreement there are different motivations that will sooner or later constitute a factor of rivalry and fragility at the top of the state: Trump deliberately wants to take revenge on institutions that have been hostile to him, while Musk wants to improve the profitability of American capital by streamlining the administration. The same disagreement also exists over legal immigration, which Trump wants to block completely, unlike Musk, who wants to make an exception for foreign engineers.

The global consequences of Trump's policies in office

They are predictable in terms of the direction they will take, as announced in his election campaign. They are unpredictable in terms of the final decisions.

What might have seemed inconceivable at any other time and in any other part of the world, with the exception of a few banana republics, has happened in the world's leading power, some time before Trump's second inauguration. The future new president began dreaming aloud of an extra star on the American flag, corresponding in effect to the annexation of neighbouring Canada! Even if this is just a ‘populist joke’, it takes on a whole new colouring when Trump also threatens to take back the Panama Canal (ceded to Panama by Carter in 1979) by force if necessary, on the pretext that China is exerting increasing influence over this crucial sea route. The same goes for Greenland (belonging to Denmark), which Trump is considering annexing because it is necessary for US security. No one can say whether or not this will be followed up, but it has certainly caused a wave of panic in the chancelleries of Europe. Similarly, some of them will certainly have been seized with a certain amount of dread at Musk's harassment of British Prime Minister Keir Starmer, accusing him in particular of complicity with paedophile networks.

A new migration crisis?

If Trump succeeds in deporting hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants to the US by force of arms, there is a great risk of provoking a new migration crisis, like the hundreds of thousands of people fleeing war in other parts of the world. The forced arrival of these masses of deportees in Latin American countries will condemn them to languish in abject poverty - which some of them had tried to escape - vulnerable to persecution and blackmail by the police, gangs, etc., and will constitute a risk of destabilisation of the destination countries.

A further boost to the economic crisis

The world is facing the prospect of a historic global economic recession, at least as severe as that of the 1930s. Neither Trump nor any other representative of the bourgeoisie is responsible for this as such; it is the insurmountable contradictions of the capitalist mode of production that are at work. But far from deferring or mitigating the effects of the crisis, the pursuit and amplification of the ‘America First’ and ‘Make America Great Again’ doctrines only serve to precipitate them, notably through a series of measures already taken by the Biden administration aimed at dismantling all the international bodies responsible for supporting world trade. More generally, the aim of US policy is to concentrate the world's capital and modern industries on its territory, to the detriment of the rest of the world, a growing part of which is destined to look more and more like an industrial wasteland. Such a policy is not unique to a populist administration, but what distinguishes the latter is the irrational violence of its protectionist measures. The world's major economic powers in Europe and Asia are well aware of this situation and are preparing to organise themselves as best they can to face up to a new stage in the trade war announced by Trump. In any case, we can expect the consequences of the trade war and the crisis to be felt, which will inevitably result in a considerable attack on the living conditions of the working class and the impoverishment of the general population.

A further trump card in favour ... of worsening the climate crisis

Trump's commitment to climate change can be gauged from his recent stance on the fires in Los Angeles, publicly blaming the state's governor for them. This shameless avoidance of the root of the problem bodes ill for the future climate impact of the second Trump presidency.

Worsening imperialist tensions

Since the collapse of the Eastern bloc, the United States, the world's policeman, has proved to be the world's biggest chaos-maker. There is no reason why this should change, as it is a condition of its continued global leadership. The world's two main current hotbeds of war, in Ukraine and the Middle East, will serve as illustrations of Trump's defence of America's imperialist interests.

In Ukraine

The war in Ukraine is a continuation of the old policy of encircling Russia, spearheaded by NATO. It is Russia's response to the efforts of US imperialism to bring Georgia and Ukraine into NATO. After Biden's assurance that the United States would not intervene in the event of a Russian invasion of that country, Russia fell into the trap and, after three years of massacres and barbarism, the war in Ukraine has effectively achieved what American imperialism wanted, namely the military and economic exhaustion of Russia in order to deprive China of a possible ally with a powerful nuclear arsenal in a future confrontation with the United States. But today Ukraine finds itself in a situation which, on the ground, is no better, if not worse, than that of Russia, and which can only deteriorate all the faster as US support, through the supply of military equipment, is set to disappear, since Trump has always disagreed with such support. Moreover, Trump has constantly boasted that, if elected, he would ‘end the conflict in two days’, by which he means working out an agreement with both sides. This now seems highly unlikely. If Ukraine collapses and Russia falters, won't the European Union have to intervene to freeze the status quo by protecting a dying Ukraine vulnerable to a Russian last stand? And how? With what countries and what resources? The outcome is unknown and unpredictable.

With this in mind, and also in view of Trump's very likely reiteration of his plan to force the European Union to bear the cost of its own defence, by increasing its contribution to NATO and the military budgets of all its member countries, the latter will have no choice but to bow out of supporting Ukraine.

The situation in the Middle East offers greater visibility. It is very likely that Trump will continue his policy of unconditional support for Israel's imperialist activities; it is even possible that he will openly encourage some of them, particularly those aimed at destroying Iran's military power.

Tensions with China can only increase, as this country is the most likely to threaten the global leadership of the United States. The US will continue to do everything in its power to weaken China by maintaining increasing military pressure on it and hindering its trade with other industrialised countries.

Faced with the attacks of the bourgeoisie, faced with war, faced with the false alternatives of populism/anti-populism, fascism/anti-fascism, there is only one choice: class struggle.

As a product of the decomposition of the capitalist mode of production, populism is in turn an aggravating factor of this decomposition. Thus, the world situation will evolve towards an aggravation of the decomposition of capitalism, towards even more chaos, more war, towards a drastic worsening of the living conditions of the working class as a consequence of the crisis and the war. The attacks on working class conditions encourage defensive struggles, opening up the possibility of an increasingly united and conscious response. Nevertheless, the conditions in which this struggle will develop present mortal dangers which the working class must avoid:

- The very context of decomposition - in particular with the ‘every man for himself’ attitude and the absence of perspectives - is an obstacle to the development of a united and conscious practice and project;

- The working class will always be called upon by the different factions of the bourgeoisie to position itself in favour of democracy against populism, just as it was in the past to support the camp of democracy against that of fascism.

The working class would have everything to lose by succumbing to despair, to the feeling of ‘no future’ ..... The only terrain of struggle which is specific to the working class and which has a future is that of the defence of its economic class interests in response to the attacks of capitalism in crisis. This is the only basis for the politicisation of its struggles and therefore holds out the prospect of the overthrow of capitalism.

Sylunken (10/01/2025)

 

ICC introduction

We publish here a contribution from comrade Baboon on the international public forum held by the ICC on the significance of the election of Trump in the USA. The comrade agrees with our general analysis of what this means in terms of the acceleration of capitalist decomposition, and also rightly warns against efforts to calibrate the level of class struggle by examining votes cast for this or that bourgeois politician. The extract that follows focuses on the question of the “rupture” in the class struggle and broadly agrees with much of the ICC’s position on this. However, he expresses some disagreements about the moment at which this rupture took place and so his contribution is followed by our response on this point.

 

My aim below is to try to discern some tendencies to the workers’ struggles coming from the five years with some reference to the 1980’s, which these struggles (culminating in 2022) are connected to and have gone beyond.

An international wave of class struggle builds from 2017

An ICC comrade from France at the meeting disagreed with an emphasis on “Britain 2022”, saying that it was “one movement among many”. She was both right and wrong in my opinion. The “rupture of ’22” in Britain has its roots in significant workers’ struggles that began around half-a-decade before. During this five year period the weight of decomposition was visibly increasing with the coming together of the elements of the “whirlwind” effect so the emphasis from the ICC was that of the weight of decomposition on the struggle and the difficulties of the latter to escape from this. But, fortunately, the working class had its own ideas. There is no doubt that this was an international wave of struggle unfolding which, in my opinion, was to turn out more significant than the 1980’s. Eventually, the role of the proletariat in Britain was particularly important in this wave and its culmination in 2022 should not be underestimated. It was fully part of an international wave but the role of the British proletariat became exceptional.

In 2017, Trump was elected for the first time and by 2018, the proletariat in the US and Canada were engaging in significant strikes – not as an immediate response to Trump, but in relation to the increasing attacks that regimes of all kinds had to unleash on the workers. Throughout 2019, large, militant strikes were increasing across the globe. There was nothing spectacular about these strikes but they did show the persistence and strength of class struggle in the face of great difficulties, particularly in the United States. The year ended with one of the most significant strikes in the history of Britain/Ireland with action by nurses and health workers evaporating the sectarian division in Northern Ireland with mass engagements from other workers. It was where the slogan “Enough is enough” was born. It was the most important strike in the UK for over 3 decades and one of the most important strikes in Northern Ireland ever. As far as I can see WR made no comment on this strike – why was that the case?.

Despite the justified fears that the Covid-19 pandemic would put the lid on the class struggle – again – the working class had other ideas. Strikes began in Britain at the beginning of the pandemic in 2020. In very difficult circumstances a minority of workers, mainly in low-paid, service industries (the bigger industries being underwritten by state subsidies), went on strikes across the country, often explicitly against the unions. You can’t strike against a virus – that would be pointless. But what you can strike against – if you’re not crushed – is the working conditions imposed by the ruling class as a result of the pandemic. And this is what a significant minority of workers did in Britain throughout with strikes rumbling up and down the country all year. And to prove that this was no fluke, by late summer similar strikes among similar layers of the working class had broken out in North and South America, Italy, France, Spain and parts of Asia (all references of international struggle, their locations and dates, are taken from recent articles on the class struggle in the International Reviews).

In 2021, strikes were continuing everywhere and a significant strike in Britain was the return of the lorry drivers to the proletarian cause. The lorry drivers were the first major sector of the working class to be defeated – deliberately crushed as a proletarian force - by the Thatcher regime in its quest to take on and defeat the “enemy within”. It’s not a paradox that the strikes in this sector in ’21 saw the strengthening of the unions because the unions were already strengthening in the face of the rising struggles. While the unions were strengthening – they had been brought in as levers of the state during the pandemic by the Tory government – the lorry drivers continued to spread their struggles in ’21 as part of the class movement. This was a remarkable resurrection of the lorry drivers as a proletarian force given their reduction by Thatcher to “Gilet Jaunes”-type elements of the petty-bourgeoisie.

Britain 2022: the best solidarity with the struggle is to join it!

It was a job to keep up with the workers’ struggles in Britain, 2022; in continuity with the struggles of the 1970’s and 80’s, but in conditions where it was far more difficult to engage in struggle than that earlier period (decomposition, populism, Trump/Johnson/Truss, massive and divisive ideological campaigns around race and sex, xenophobia and the spread of imperialist barbarism), the proletariat in Britain threw itself into one of the most intense and relentless periods of class struggle it had ever engaged in. This movement, this “rupture” demonstrated, along the way, the necessity for revolutionaries to maintain their confidence in the working class. Not the blind kind but that based on marxism with the proletariat as a potential revolutionary force. Despite all the limitations and the weaknesses of these struggles – lack of workers’ assemblies, little evidence of self-organisation, which are essential elements to take the struggle forward – these strikes, despite the union divisions, saw the workers fighting as a class with a unity of purpose providing a divergent perspective to the global descent into capitalist barbarism. The strikes of ’22 in Britain, following those of the previous two years did not produce any “spectacular” results in the sense of the unions being overwhelmed or of clear tendencies to self-organisation – workers’ committees and the like. So is it a mistake, an exaggeration to say that they went beyond the 1980’s, where both those elements were expressed? In a sense it was a largely “unconscious” struggle, but unconscious development – subterranean maturation - precedes consciousness in a revolutionary class. The difference between the two periods (1970’s – 80’s and the early 2020’s) has to be taken into account, particularly the difficulties facing attempts to fight in the latter. One of the tenets of the class struggle that the ICC has always insisted upon is that the greatest expression of solidarity towards the class struggle that workers can make is to join the struggle themselves – in ’22, that happened in spades and it was relentless, month after month. The working class showed an awareness regarding its responsibilities and obligations as a revolutionary class. It was fight or go under. There is something “political” about this.

Votes for strikes were very often almost unanimous (90 – 97%); at least several small but important sectors of the class that had never been on strike in their history joined the struggle with enthusiasm; strikes would be settled with all the workers’ demands met and two weeks later the same workers were out on strike again. This happened in several industries. There are elements here (“elements” I stress) that belong to the mass strike or Trotsky’s vivid and analytical descriptions of the strikes of 1905 in Russia. The trade unions were not breached and there was little direct association between workers of different industries but there were no “set-piece” set-up strategies from the bourgeoisie to trap the workers and it was unable to put a check on the movement as workers continued to join the struggle for their own interests.

The struggles in Britain in 2022 were not immediate reactions to any attacks but part of a strong, international wave of struggles that began 5 years beforehand, the dynamic and conclusion of which was that “we have to fight”. The emergence of this international wave, in the most difficult of circumstances, demonstrated that the memory of the class struggle exists outside of open struggle in periods of apparent “quiet” and that it reaffirmed itself in such a dramatic way is testament to the intrinsic historic and revolutionary nature of the working class.

The working class has to develop its own struggles; short-cuts and scams lead to confusion and weakness

The working class has to develop its own struggles or it is beaten. Short-cuts and scams, like the IBRP’s “transmission belts” and anti-war committees can only sow confusion within the class because they are attempts to substitute class consciousness for empty schemas. More importantly, these antics underestimate the real content of revolutionary intervention which has to based upon the greatest political clarity and a constantly defined position on the “lines of march” of the communist perspective. Consciousness can’t be injected into the working class. Bringing consciousness from the outside underestimates the necessary relations of ends and means to the communist perspective, while underestimating the role of revolutionaries and its relationship with the proletariat.

I defend the idea of an international strike wave that began in the depths of decomposition from around 2017 on; I also defend the particular role played the proletariat in Britain within and from this international wave in defending the historical and revolutionary nature of the working class.

Baboon. 22.11.24

 

ICC response

We welcome the contribution of the comrade, particularly because it globally endorses the position of the ICC on the rupture in the class struggle. The comrade affirms that the recent struggles are in general no longer “immediate reactions to any attacks” and that “there is something ‘political’ about this”. Important also is his statement that the movement “was a largely ‘unconscious’ struggle, but unconscious development – subterranean maturation - precedes consciousness in a revolutionary class”. Although it would be more precise to say that subterranean maturation is a process of coming to consciousness rather than being entirely ‘unconscious’,  this confirmation of the analysis of the ICC is all the more important since he ICC is the only organisation of the communist left that defends this notion of subterranean maturation and is therefore able to develop an intervention that, in the words of the comrade, “has to based upon the greatest political clarity and a constantly defined position on the ‘lines of march’ of the communist perspective”[1].

Having said this, there is however one point in his contribution that is different from the position of the ICC and that is about the moment the rupture clearly started. According to the comrade the rupture already “has its roots in significant workers’ struggles that began around half-a-decade before” the wave of struggles in the UK.

The struggles at the beginning of 2020 in France; ‘Striketober’ in the autumn 2021 in the United States and even the more isolated strikes during the pandemic, such as those of healthcare workers in different countries and lorry drivers in the UK, were clear expressions of workers’ combativity. These struggles showed the maturing conditions in the class, but they were not yet the rupture, the real turning point. They ran into obstacles such as the outbreak of the pandemic, the war in Ukraine, which each time threw the workers’ struggle back. Until the summer of 2022.

Should we now say in retrospect that the various struggles the comrade mentions in his contribution were already preliminary steps to the rupture? Yes and no.

Yes, because in retrospect we can establish that some of them were not only valuable experiences for the workers – for example the attempt to go beyond divisions between Catholic and Protestant workers in the struggle in Northern Ireland - but even necessary steps, contributing to the build-up of the conditions for the rupture. No, because they were not yet able “to rise to the occasion”, to offer an adequate reaction to the challenge of the period. They all remained isolated, in their own corporation (such as the struggle of the healthcare workers) or at least within the boundaries of the country (in France at the beginning of 2020). And none of them had the international resonance necessary to be considered as the start of a new phase in the struggle of the working class.

The significance of May ’68 in France was due to the fact that the radiation of the struggles went far beyond the French context alone. The level of the mass struggle of May ’68 was not only a response to the economic attacks on the workers in France, but also a response to a whole historical situation. It was the struggle that put an end to the counter-revolutionary conditions. May ’68 “was the fruit of a long process of disengagement from bourgeois institutions and ideological themes (such as trade unions and the so-called workers’ parties, the myths of democracy and “real socialism” in the east, etc), accompanied by worsening material conditions (the first signs of a new open economic crisis).”[2]

The struggles which started in Great Britain in the summer of 2022, had a similar significance. Like in 1968, a new generation of workers had emerged, less affected by the campaign about the death of communism and the disappearance of the working class. The recovery of workers’ combativity, exemplified by the struggle in the UK, was on such a scale and was so impressive that it could not be explained by national circumstances alone. It was actually a manifestation of the change of the state of mind in the whole international working class, which had shaken off passivity, timidity and disorientation. The struggle itself had become the first victory: “the greatest expression of solidarity towards the class struggle that workers can make is to join the struggle themselves”, as the comrade writes in his contribution.

Since 2022 workers’ struggles are no longer a simple response to this or that immediate attack, even if such reactions are never excluded. As we have already seen in the slogan “enough is enough”, but even in the fight against something like “the cost of living crisis” (against inflation, energy bills, housing costs, etc.), a fundamental characteristic of the rupture was the tendency to go beyond the immediate defence against the economic attacks. A particular feature of the current struggles is that they carry within them the tendency to reject the solution offered by the limitations of capitalism.

In and through the struggle workers begin to recognise themselves as part of the same class, the famous class identity: “we are all in the same boat”. Even if we have not seen examples of direct extension of the struggles beyond the sector, there have also been clear expressions of solidarity as was seen by the statement “we are all fighting for each other”. There have been expressions of solidarity between workers of different companies and sectors, between precarious younger workers and older workers and even embryonic international expressions of solidarity.

The rupture and its characteristics are indeed the outcome of a process of subterranean maturation of consciousness which “exists outside of open struggle in periods of apparent ‘quiet’”, as the comrades writes. But after the class struggle was beaten back heavily by democratic campaigns following the collapse of Stalinism in Eastern Europe, this process is still in a relatively embryonic stage, “the broad tendencies initiated by the ‘break’ of 2022 are only at their beginning”[3].

So, it should not surprise us that we have seen very few forms of self-organisation or attempts to break out of the unions in the current struggles.

Regarding the strike in Northern Ireland, the comrade is right that the slogan “enough is enough” was raised in this strike, which may have been an indication that something was changing in this particular sector of the working class. But it did not fundamentally change the nature of that strike. The slogan was raised in the context of an essentially corporatist strike with demands for a fair pay and for the quality of the care for the patients.

But the signification of the slogan “enough is enough”, as was put forward in the strike wave of 2022-23, is that it goes beyond particular working conditions of a certain sector of the class. The slogan expresses a mood that transcends the immediate and particular conditions of this or that sector of the class, and contains an appeal to fight for more general interests. The slogan is the expression of the potential dynamic towards the unification of the struggles of the different sectors of the working class.

The rupture is essentially an international phenomenon, echoing in the class struggles in the whole world. The struggle in the spring of 2023 in France and later that year in the United States, confirmed the rupture and the characteristics of the new period.  "As well as fighting against the deterioration in its living and working conditions, the working class is engaged in a much broader reflection on this system and its future.” (‘Strikes and demonstrations in the United States, Spain, Greece, France... How can we develop and unite our struggles? [3]’, World Revolution no. 398, autumn 2023).

 

According to Amsterdam Mayor Femke Halsema's initial assessment, Maccabi Tel Aviv supporters were not known for causing trouble. The National Coordinator for Counter-terrorism and Security (NCTV) stressed that with regards to this Israeli football club, there was “no concrete threat to the home supporters, its players or the match.” However, at the time the riots broke out there were barely 1,000 police officers available to prevent possible clashes of Israeli supporters with the Dutch citizens. It was clear that, the bourgeoisie had made a “misjudgment.”

It should take no time at all for anyone who makes the effort to find out that the supporters of this football club are no wimps. They are notorious for their provocations and brawls with their opponents and, contrary to the bourgeoisie's proclamations, have resorted to violence a number of times, including outside Israel. Moreover, Maccabi supporters are notorious for their anti-Arab rhetoric. Every Arab football player, even in their own club, is targeted and “Death to Arabs,” is a slogan they often chant.

So the inevitable happened. In the run-up to the match between Ajax and Maccabi Tel Aviv on 7 November, these supporters went on the rampage. It was as if they were in the West Bank, intent on teaching the Palestinian inhabitants a lesson. They chanted racist slogans, abused onlookers and, armed with sticks, attacked random passersby. Furthermore, they destroyed property, ripped down Palestinian and Dutch flags and set them on fire. A few even tried to enter a house to remove a Palestinian flag from the wall. In other words anything but a typical crowd of football supporters. This in turn led to violent reactions from Muslim youth. After the match, a number of the Maccabi hooligans were indeed chased, threatened, assaulted and even thrown into the cold water of Amsterdam's canals. And no doubt innocent victims were caught up in the process.

It is inconceivable that the Netherlands bourgeoisie did not know about the reputation of the Macccabi fans. So why did they choose to keep quiet about it and let crowds of these people flood into the city? What led the NCTV in particular to declare that there were no particular risks associated with the arrival of a thousand Maccabi hooligans? We can only guess. What we can observe, however, is that both the ruling and opposition parties were only too happy to use the riots to publicise their populist politics.

The populist exploitation of the riots

The populist parties had already decided in advance who should be to blame for the disturbances in Amsterdam: it was the Muslim youth, supposedly driven by deep-seated anti-Semitism. Politicians of the ruling parties made exaggerated claims to justify it, speaking of a hunt for Jews, even a pogrom, comparing these attacks to those of the Nazi Stormtroopers.

A main characteristic of populism is to always look for a scapegoat. For the populist parties PVV, BBB and NSC[1] (and also for the VVD), the youth with an Islamic background in particular, “the multicultural scum” as Wilders calls them, were the real instigators of the violence in Amsterdam and should therefore be removed from “our” society.

Furthermore, the solutions proposed by populism, even by bourgeois standards, are completely unrealistic. Proposals such as deporting the 'scum' and closing the borders to newcomers, as well as closing mosques and banning the Koran, testify to a very simplistic response to the complex problems that capitalism has created.

Finally, populism is not averse to conspiracy theories either. The PVV regards Islam as “a totalitarian, intolerant and violent political ideology of conquest disguised as a religion. The goal of Islam is the establishment of an Islamic world empire”[2]. In doing so, this party deliberately ignores the fact that Islam, either religiously or politically, does not form a united whole, but has different strands and is also clearly subservient to the interests of nation states.

Whipping up these extreme reactions was designed to unleash a real smear campaign against a particular section of the Dutch population, a campaign that had to underline once again that the mass expulsion and deportation of migrants to a country like Uganda, which is a focus of the Schoof government's policy, is more than justified.

The fuss surrounding the riots before and after the football game served the populist coalition well for more than one reason:

 - It deflected attention from the shambles that is the Schoof government:

- It diverted attention from the new migration policy which, with the abolition of the bed-bath-bread measure, the overruling of the dispersal law, the drastic cuts in the Immigration and Naturalisation Service (INS) and the Central Agency for the Reception of Asylum Seekers (CRA), is only leading to greater chaos. The new government's policy of drastically slowing down the influx of asylum seekers is a failure because the introduction of an emergency law, which should have given it special powers, is not supported by the House of Representatives. To prove that it is nevertheless capable of actually acting against mass immigration, one day after the riots in Amsterdam, it made the decision to introduce border controls, following the example of Germany and France.

- With this campaign around the riots, the government also wants to divert attention from the €2.2 billion cuts in the budgets for higher education and the care of the elderly that will be implemented in the coming period. This also provides it with an opportunity to limit the right to demonstrate, not only regarding protests on the bourgeois terrain but especially for those workers facing attacks on their livelihoods.

Populism and anti-populism have both polarised around the riots to cover up their basic agreements

It was not only the Schoof government that fuelled polarisation around the Amsterdam riots. By publishing amateur footage of the provocations by Maccabi supporters, the left-wing opposition condoned the retaliatory actions of immigrant youths driven by nationalistic and religious feelings of revenge, and condemned the fascist-like behavior of Israeli soccer supporters. Thus the polarisation surrounding the riots and the war stirring up tempers was complete, and the left could therefore play its part in stifling any working class opposition to the Schoof government's austerity measures. In Utrecht, for example, a planned demonstration by university staff against the austerity plans in Higher Education was cancelled “for fear of further riots.”

However, it is important that the workers of the Netherlands are not distracted by the sham divisions that the bourgeoisie tries to impose on them. They have no interest in choosing for or against Jews, for or against Muslims, for or against immigrants. The only interest for the working class is the struggle for the defence of its working and living conditions, its wages, which are severely squeezed as a result of the destabilisation of the world economy by the wars and planetary chaos.

In the first months of 2023, simultaneously with the strike movement in Britain and France, a small wave of strikes was already underway in the Netherlands, a simultaneous occurrence of strikes “of the municipal workers, workers at social workshops[3], staff at various retail chains, the Über taxi drivers, some bus and coach company drivers, hospital workers, those in the beverage industry, workers at the Netherlands Post, at Douwe Egberts, and the potato processing company Aviko.”[4]. Such struggles are important because in every strike against the effects of the economic crisis lies the seeds of the international unification of workers' struggles, which is the only force that can end populism, racism, xenophobia, Zionism and anti-Semitism, by overthrowing

 

ICC international online public meeting

Saturday January 25, 2pm to 5pm UK time

The election of Trump will accelerate capitalism’s decomposition

The election of Trump is a clear product of the advancing decomposition of capitalism, but it will also be an active factor in the acceleration of this process, bringing with it sharpening conflicts within the US ruling class, heighted imperialist tensions, a new dive into the economic crisis and further proof of capitalism’s inability to deal with the crisis of the natural environment.

Above all, it signals further brutal attacks on the international working class:

• At the economic level, through rising inflation and unemployment
• At the political level, both through the divisions fired by populism and the campaigns for ‘democracy’ against the threat of the far right.

The discussion will thus aim to deepen understanding of the concrete perspectives for capitalism and for the working class in the coming period.

The ICC is thus following up the international online public meeting it held in October (see An international debate to understand the global situation and prepare for the future [7]) with a second meeting on the significance of Trump’s victory. The format will be the same as the October meeting, offering translations into English, French and Spanish.

If you want to take part, write to us at [email protected] [8]

A dispute arose a few months ago between the two French Trotskyist groups, Révolution Permanente (RP), an offshoot of the NPA (Nouveau Parti Anticapitaliste), and Lutte Ouvrière (LO), concerning the Palestinian question. The argument centred above all on what each of these organisations considers to be the clearest internationalist position in the face of the barbarity of the Middle East conflict, with RP criticising LO for pitting the State of Israel and Hamas against each other and refusing to “come down on one side or the other”.

Even if these two Trotskyist groups claim to defend proletarian internationalism and the communist revolutionary perspective, the reality is quite different since as leading members of the extreme left of capital, they are still the most relentless defenders of Palestinian nationalism in a more or less insidious way, always backing one imperialist camp against the others behind devious verbiage.

In such military conflicts where the working class is used as cannon fodder and massacred in its thousands as a result of being politically hijacked in the countries involved, their approach is always to conduct all the verbal exchanges in a supposed debate of clarification, which is nothing but a bourgeois discourse in which both want to be the most radical ‘champion’ of the defence of the national interests of the Palestinian people. And this is all in the name of the ‘right of peoples to self-determination’, in the name of the ‘right of the oppressed to respond to the imperialist oppressor’, principles seen as emancipatory and springboards for a supposed revolutionary perspective: “it is a political mistake to equate the nationalism of the oppressors and that of the oppressed. It amounts to failing to understand that the national, anti-imperialist and/or anti-colonial sentiment of an oppressed people has a progressive and liberating content (even if it is limited)” (RP, September 2023).

Despite their fine speeches and their falsified references to Marx, Lenin and even Trotsky, there is nothing at all proletarian about the nationalist terrain and, in the declining phase of the capitalist system, the ‘progressive content’ of the warlike adventures of ‘an oppressed people’ has always turned out to be reactionary and barbaric in practice. The constant confused and vacillating language is nothing other than the contribution of these organisations, in all their more or less radical forms, to the barbarity of war itself, with the call to choose one imperialist camp against another!

The Trotskyists' shoddy 'internationalism'

This dispute was triggered by RP, who criticised LO for having a ‘Bordigist position’, seen as the result of having a globally invariant political position, incapable of analysing the actual evolution of the imperialist balance of forces: the positions might be “right” in general but “do not take the current situation into account”. RP defends the idea that there are internationalist principles, of course, but that there are different dimensions to it, and it must be defended within the framework of a “reality principle”, a policy of the lesser evil, adapted to the circumstances!

However, this reference to Bordigism[1] is not insignificant. It seeks to link Trotskyist ideology, however critical, to an authentic historical internationalist tradition of the workers' movement which did not betray the proletariat during the Spanish Civil War or the Second World War. This is in contrast to the Trotskyists who wallowed in anti-fascism and sank into supporting the Allied imperialist camp behind the Russian Stalinist state. The objective of this quarrelling is clearly poisonous! It is nothing more than a deception designed to misrepresent the real defence of internationalist principles by existing groups of the Communist Left, such as the Bordigist current or the ICC.

Whatever criticisms, however important, that the ICC may level at the Bordigist current and the groups which make it up, this current has remained in the camp of the proletariat and that of the Communist Left since it denounced the imperialist character of the Second World War, refusing to choose between the barbarity of the anti-fascist camp or that of the Axis powers.

RP and LO make grand internationalist declarations: “revolutionary organisations seek to analyse the opposing sides in conflicts and where the interests of the international proletariat ultimately lie in a given armed confrontation, and which outcome would be the more favourable or, conversely, be opposed to the revolutionary perspective” (RP, November 2024). But their nationalist agenda is never far away. For Révolution Permanente: “To make a strong political stand without then taking sides in a military conflict is tantamount to burying your head in the sand”. “In the case of a conflict between an imperialist belligerent [...] and colonised peoples or semi-colonial countries [...] under the yoke of imperialism, revolutionaries are in the ‘military camp’ of the latter”. “Whether we like it or not, Hamas is not Daesh and, in military terms, it is the main organisation of Palestinian national resistance to the State of Israel”...

It is in the name of the revolutionary perspective that these recruiting sergeants have the nerve to defend the most shameless policy of mass murder: “This headlong rush into an ever more destructive war could create an opening for the popular masses of the region to enter the stage on a social, political and military terrain, depending on the different scenarios, and could change the dynamics of the conflict [...]. Any victory or advance by the Palestinian camp could open the way for a revolutionary development in the region”.

Such warlike and nationalistic raving has lead LO to distance itself a little more from its own defence of the Palestinian cause by criticising RP's ‘abandonment of internationalism’. But it doesn't matter: the nationalist logic still oozes out of every pore.  RP regrets having to remind LO that during the 1973 war LO clearly did take sides. It's true that LO's apparent and counterfeit radicalism on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is nothing but window dressing, given that on other occasions LO has never hesitated to defend openly nationalist positions (Cambodia, Vietnam, Cuba, Iraq...).

It is hence a reflex for LO to restate its slimy message after having worked the ambiguities to perfection: “As revolutionary communists, we stand in solidarity with the Palestinians, the Lebanese and all the peoples who are victims of the violence of imperialism and the Israeli state which acts as its armed force in the Middle East. In the war it is waging, we hope for the military defeat of the Israeli state” (LO, September 2024). So there you have it! However radical the rhetoric of Lutte Ouvrière or Révolution Permanente, their internationalism is a bluff, an authentically bourgeois deception!

But far from us making fun of this bluster, these sometimes tortuous speeches to justify the unjustifiable, we continue to believe that they represent above all a major trap in the politicisation of those who are trying to understand what wars really represent in today's imperialist chaos and how to oppose them. For the Trotskyists, it's clear: one way or another, you must take part and take sides: “We have therefore chosen a side, but it is first and foremost a political side: we are in unconditional solidarity with the Palestinian people in the face of the oppression they are suffering” (LO, September 2024).

That's the whole point of their intervention: to respond to and spoil any clear understanding in the working class regarding the massacres by Hamas and the IDF. In the end, RP and LO shared the dirty work: while RP waded into a ‘critical’ support for the barbarians of Hamas, LO assumed a more underhanded support by saying it “flew the red flag, that of the international working class and not the Palestinian national flag, unlike RP”. Unanimously, these two organisations regretted that the pro-Palestinian demonstrations “have only involved a very small fraction of young people, particularly in France where they have never reached a level of mobilisation comparable to that in the United States” (LO, September 2024).

These mobilisations are a trap designed to exploit the difficulty of the working class and its younger generation to understand the seriousness of the situation of decomposition and the chaos of capitalism that lies behind the military conflicts. But the lack of mobilisation behind the Palestinian nationalist flags is also a sign that the young working class generation in the central countries, for all its confusion, is not ready to be mobilised behind the rhetoric of the war-mongers and be drawn into the ever more bloody and irrational butchery that in no way serves its interests, clearly much to the displeasure of Trotskyism...

Stopio, 5 January 2025

The cards are on the table: the federal and regional governments each want to impose tens of billions of savings within the scope of their respective powers in order to make the Belgian economy more competitive and profitable. All sectors of the working class will be strongly affected by this broad austerity programme.

While workers in private companies are being made redundant on a massive scale, the automatic indexing of salaries and benefits continues to be challenged, overtime and night work bonuses are being reduced, labour flexibility is being increased, access to unemployment benefits is being restricted, pensions and health insurance are being drastically cut, the total number of civil servants is being reduced, the tenure of teaching staff is being jeopardised, etc.

And this at a time when working conditions are becoming increasingly unbearable everywhere: underemployment, faster pace of work, blurring of the boundary between professional and private life, inflationary price increases, reduction of all kinds of subsidies, growing environmental disasters, depression, burnout. Enough is enough!

We should refuse to pay for the crisis of capitalism!

The government claims that there is no choice. In the logic of every ruling class, it is necessary to increase competitiveness to face the decline in economic growth and the trade war accentuated by Trump's protectionist economic policies, but also by the growing cost of military spending linked to imperialist tensions and wars. In every country, the ruling classes are trying to pass on to the workers the consequences of their own crisis of overproduction, i.e. commodities that they can no longer sell at a sufficient profit on the available markets. Labour must be made cheaper. Once again, the focus is not on the well-being or the needs of the workers, but on the profitable sale of goods and services. We need to reject this destructive and suicidal logic of the bourgeoisie.

We are not alone in reacting! In 2022-23, in Great Britain, tens of thousands of workers from companies in different sectors were fighting for almost a year. In 2023, in France, workers participated en masse in 14 ‘days of action’ against the government's attacks on pensions. In Belgium itself, from the first ‘leaks’ concerning the planned measures, the strength and dynamism of the mobilisations during the cross-sector demonstration on 13 January or the teachers' demonstration on 27 January resulted in a massive turnout of more than 30,000 demonstrators, far more than was ‘expected’ or rather hoped for by the unions. Protesters gathered in Brussels from all regions, and the movement spread to sectors other than education and rail, contrary to the unions' original intention. The mobilisation thus showed that the discontent goes beyond a particular measure or a specific ‘reform’: it expresses the will to resist the intention of the employers and the government to make the working class pay for the crisis.

Enough is enough! We must refuse to passively endure this avalanche of attacks on our living conditions. Our first victory is the struggle itself. But to truly counter these attacks, we must wage the battle as widely as possible in a unified manner, beyond the company, sector or region in which we work. All workers are “in the same boat. All these groups are not separate movements but a collective group: workers and employees, unionised and non-unionised, immigrants and natives’, as a teacher on strike in Los Angeles said in March 2023.

Our strength lies in the unification of struggles in a single movement

Against all manoeuvres and divisions

The bourgeoisie has understood all too well that its plans would provoke reactions in large parts of the class. It is mainly the unions who have the job of controlling and diverting this expected resistance. They have seen the workers' concern and discontent grow from week to week and are pre-emptively occupying the field to prevent discontent from manifesting itself in ‘uncontrolled’ actions.

Proven tactics are being used again: isolating and dividing the different sectors when the measures affect everyone. A demonstration solely for health and social care staff in November; then on 13 December a day of action in protest against the ‘European austerity measures’. For the day of action on 13 January, a strike against the ‘pension reform’ was announced only on the railways. It was only much later, under social pressure, that the unions decided that education would also participate and later, other sectors joined in. In Wallonia, the unions organised separate strike days for teachers in the French-speaking areas on 27 and 28 January, thus avoiding massive participation in Brussels on 13 January. The demonstration on 13 February is about the ‘defence of public services’, as if private sector workers or the unemployed did not need defending! In short, the aim is to plan a series of futile days of action, as they did in France, or to try each time to limit the mobilisations by concentrating them on certain sectors, as they did in the UK, or on particular aspects of the austerity plans. The aim is to finally exhaust the will to fight and pave the way for far-reaching concessions to the austerity measures under the fallacious argument that ‘sacrifices are inevitable, provided they are fairly distributed’.

To avoid the traps set by the unions, these saboteurs of the struggles in the service of the ruling class, and to develop the response, it is important to mobilise in large numbers, but that is not enough: we must also take our struggles into our own hands. To do this, we must:

- create places for discussion and decision-making, such as sovereign general assemblies open to all, and unite behind unifying demands;

- overcome regional divisions, those between public and private sector workers and the unemployed;

- counter every tendency to divide struggles, by sending massive delegations to other workers to join the struggle;

- refuse to pay for the crisis and the wars of capitalism.

It is this dynamic of solidarity, expansion and unity that has shaken the bourgeoisie throughout history.

International Communist Current

10.02.2025

Come and discuss it at the public meeting on Saturday 1 March in Brussels: rue du Fort 35, 1060 Saint-Gilles from 2 to 6 p.m.

 

World imperialist competition today is dominated by the tendency towards ‘every man for himself’, by an increasingly irrational and chaotic dynamic. These are fundamental characteristics of the terminal phase of decadent capitalism, the phase of decomposition.

In such conditions “it is easier for each power to stir up trouble for its adversaries, to sabotage the alliances that threaten it, than to develop for their own part solid alliances, and to assure stability on their own ground. Such a situation evidently favors the game of secondary powers, to the extent that it is always easier to stir up trouble than to maintain order.” (‘Resolution on the international situation’, International Review no. 82)

For nearly three decades, Rwanda has presented its regime to the world as a beacon of development and stability while systematically undermining the stability and territorial integrity of Congo, by supporting consecutive military gangs such as the M23 militia which controls large parts of the country.

Turkey, a member of NATO, is constantly at odds with this alliance, opposing Western sanctions against Russia and supporting Hamas in the Israel-Palestine conflict. In Syria, it exacerbates the chaotic conditions there by attacking the Kurdish forces which are supported by the USA. In Libya, it directly opposes the forces supported by Russia.

India, whose imperialist policies we cover in this article, in turn extends its relative power by stirring up trouble in the region. For a number of years it has been actively supporting armed ‘liberation’ forces and, until 2021, even the Taliban against the Pakistani government. Today, it supports ISKCON, a religious organisation of the Hindu minority, against the new course of the Bangladeshi regime which, after 53 years, has re-established political ties with Pakistan.

Turkey and India are prime examples of secondary powers that have put a spanner in the works of the efforts of Biden’s USA to develop a coherent alliance against Russia and China.

Western media characterise India as a rising world player: “India is quietly laying claim to economic superpower status” (The Guardian); “India: From snake charmers to global superpower” (Deutsche Welle); “India needs to assert its superpower arrival” (Asia Times in Hong Kong); “Why India will become a superpower” (The Financial Times). In the meantime, India’s growing influence and so-called responsibility to the world is also acknowledged by the G7. The county has already participated several times as a guest at the G7. But in this article we will argue that the conditions for India to become a primary world power on the model of China do not exist, and that India’s main role will be to exacerbate the global tendency towards fragmentation and disorder, above all in its own Asian ‘neighbourhood’.

Indian imperialism and its ideological cover

In the West India is generally not portrayed as a belligerent nation, and the leftist organisations don’t call it an imperialist power. And the facts seem to prove them right: in the 2000s India rejected participation in military interventions such as in Iraq in and Afghanistan, and also rejected requests for military assistance from Sri Lanka, the Maldives and Nepal. Furthermore, its response to provocations by China at its border has always been rather restrained. "We have never moved forward with the feeling of expansionism", as Modi said during an address in the Parliament of Guyana[1].

On the other hand, throughout the short history of India as an independent nation, Hindu nationalists have always dreamed of a Greater India. They aspire to rebuild the Akhand Bharat (Undivided India) and Hindu Rashtra (Hindu Nation), a nation matching the size and glory of the Vedic Golden Age between 1200–600 B.C. India’s right-wing factions view South Asia as their backyard and the Indian Ocean as their own sea. In particular, the paramilitary Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) and the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) openly propagate the “political rearrangement” of all contiguous states, with a reunited India as the motherland.

This ultra-nationalist ideology received a particular boost with the coming to power of Modi in 2014, glorifying a return to the so-called good old times when Hindu culture was still dominant in the region. Some examples:

• New school textbooks in which a picture is presented of India as a Hindu-only country, as though this should have existed throughout history.
• A mural in the new parliament in New Delhi depicts the map of Undivided India, spanning from Afghanistan to Myanmar and from Bhutan to the Maldives, and even extending to parts of China and Iran.

The same ultra-nationalist ideology also underlies the change in foreign policy from non-alignment to ‘multi-alignment’. The slogan of the populist government is: “there are neither permanent friends nor permanent enemies but only permanent national interests”. This idea gives India a free hand to pursue its expansionist policy outside the major military conflicts, without being compelled to take sides in any military conflict or open war between so-called ‘friendly’ nations, such as in the present war between Russia and Ukraine.

The imperialist appetite of India is aimed in particular at the increase of its sphere of influence in the immediate region and at turning the neighbouring countries into obedient vassal states via the so-called “Neighbourhood First Policy”. This policy brings India regularly into a deep involvement in the internal affairs and diplomacy of these countries, first of all Pakistan[2], cultivating support for pro-India forces by manipulating political parties and religious groups, and opposing and sabotaging the activities of the bourgeois factions who represent opposing aims.

 Growth of Indian militarism

It seems to have been forgotten, or has even been consciously swept under the carpet, but since its independence India has performed different military operations in the region: in 1961 it conquered the Portuguese colonies Goa, Daman, and Diu; in 1971 its military forces supported the independence of Bangladesh, and in 1988 it intervened in the Maldives. It has also intervened in the ‘civil war’ in Sri Lanka as a ‘peacekeeping force’, ending up in open military confrontations with the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE).

In 1989, the Indian army invaded Jammu Kashmir after an armed uprising by local militias, which it managed to suppress after a three-year fight. Since then, India has occupied the region in a very similar manner to the occupation of the West Bank by Israeli IDF. Subsequently India has also militarily intervened numerous times under the umbrella of ‘peacekeeping’ missions of the UN, where it of course defended nothing but its own imperialist interests.

India is engaged in a frenzied process of militarisation. It is a nuclear power with more than 150 atomic warheads, which it constantly builds up in order to gain parity in destructive power with its most feared nearby enemies. “India currently operates eight different nuclear-capable systems: two aircraft, five land-based ballistic missiles, and one sea-based ballistic missile. At least five more systems are in development”. In order to defend its status as regional power “the expected expansion of India’s nuclear forces is increasingly focused on a militarily superior China”[3]

Finally, India has made important steps in the use of ‘space’ as a domain for defending its imperialist interests. It has steadily increased its presence with new military satellites. The successful first ASAT test in March 2019, aimed at disabling a satellite in space, gave a significant flip to Indian capabilities. Last year India conducted its first-ever military space exercise, “Antariksha Abhyas 2024”, destined to improve and integrate India's space capability into military operations.

India as a destabilising factor in the region

India is the biggest player in South Asia and it has much to gain from maintaining stability in the region, since only this will permit it to extend its grip on this part of the world. But the deepening of the world economic crisis and its devastating effects on the social situation in the weaker countries, as well as the incapacity of the bourgeoisie of these countries to offer any viable perspective for their own population, is constantly accelerating the tendency towards ‘every man for himself”, internally and towards the outside. Even weaker countries such as Bangladesh, Nepal, Maldives, and Sri Lanka are more and more prone to pursue their own imperialist policies. These conditions make it far more difficult for India to maintain order in what the ultra-nationalists in India consider as their backyard.

And this centrifugal tendency is reinforced by the irrational Hindutva[4] policy of the Indian regime. India’s neighbouring countries are fundamentally opposed to the inherent violent and divisive nature of Hindu fundamentalism that goes along with any Indian dominance. Wherever this ideology gains ground, internal tensions, communal violence and instability increase. India’s intention to impose this ideology pushes these countries further away and sometimes even into the arms of China. This opposition is not limited to Muslim-dominated countries such as Bangladesh, but comes even from ‘Hindu’ countries such as Nepal.

In addition, India has also stepped up its terrorist activities in recent years. Accusations of terrorism are used by the Indian regime to justify the use of precisely this instrument. “If any terrorist from a neighbouring country tries to disturb India or carry out terrorist activities here, he will be given a fitting reply. If he escapes to Pakistan we will go to Pakistan and kill him there”, Rajnath Singh, India’s defence minister said[5]. This policy resulted in 20 killings in Pakistan since 2020. This government assassinates more enemies beyond its own borders than any previous Indian government.

All these factors demonstrate the contradictions the imperialist policy of India is facing today. While it has every interest in regional stability, its attempt to impose the Hindutva ideology is itself a factor of instability in the region. Since India has boosted its state terrorist activities, the neighbouring countries’ suspicion of India’spolitical intentions has only increased

 The encirclement of India by China

In a 2012 article on the situation in South-East Asia we wrote that “India is faced on its western, northern, southern and eastern side and all along its shores by increased pressure from China. The Indian army is locked down in a permanent defence of its land borders”[6]. This is still true today: the main imperialist interests of India are not spread across the whole world, but are located in the South Asian region, close to its own borders. And there it confronts its principal enemies: Pakistan, and above all China, which has been developing a general offensive throughout the region.

Ten years ago, China started the New Silk Road project, alias Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). One of its purposes was to lay the groundwork for what might one day serve as a network of military and naval bases, in particular on the western, northern, southern and eastern side of India. As part of this network China also began constructing a “String of Pearls” in the Indian Ocean, which would complete the encirclement of India. With this in mind, China has sought to build close ties with countries on India’s periphery, like Bangladesh, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Nepal, Bhutan and the Maldives.

The construction of the BRI, although severely hampered by the growing chaos in the world, expressing itself in the omnipresence of armed conflicts, has still made some advances in the past years, especially in Kyrgyzstan, Bangladesh and Pakistan. And this had its repercussions on the political situation in the region. In Nepal it has led to pro-China politicians being elected, and in Bangladesh to an anti-India government. In Sri Lanka (a participant in the BRI) and the Maldives the fight for influence is currently open; both China and India are still competing to gain the upper hand.

Over the years India’s primary focus has been the creation of a counter-weight to China, cultivating strategic ties with both the US and Russia, and maintaining, as well as it can, a grip on the regional geopolitical framework. But, because of its inferiority on the military, economic and technological levels, India’s response to the offensive of China has always been restrained. Only after the violent clashes with China at its border (in Galwan Valley in the Ladakh region), in 2020, did India reinforce its military presence by deploying an additional 40,000 troops, artillery, tanks, and aircraft to the border, and occupying strategic mountain passes. In 2021 and 2022 it succeeded in pushing back Chinese military intrusions. Nonetheless, China seems to have made some strategic advances in this region without provoking any further military confrontations with India.

China’s expansionist policy pushes India more and more into the arms of the U.S. Since 2017 it has been part of the Indo-Pacific Quad – a grouping of India, Australia, Japan and the U.S. – and a couple of years later also the U.S.-led Indo-Pacific Strategy. These are two of the major examples of India’s response to the Chinese strategic offensive. Furthermore, it has announced that it will receive American support for upgrading its intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance technologies and logistics capabilities. A more recent development is the announcement of an operational deployment of the Indian Navy to the South China Sea, emphasising defence cooperation with countries like Singapore, the Philippines and Vietnam. The start of the war in Ukraine and the ensuing rapprochement between Russia and China only reinforced this closer cooperation with the U.S., without completely cutting ties with Russia, which remains an important trading partner for India, including the purchase of military equipment.

Recently tensions have increased in the Indian Ocean and the Bay of Bengal, when China was ramping up its activities, thereby increasing the number of naval vessels conducting surveillance. Chinese “assertiveness” was answered by the Quad, which developed a multinational military exercise over three weeks in October 2024 in the Bay of Bengal, in order “to demonstrate to China the combined ability” of the four participating nations.

 India, the new world power?

In the period of decomposition, with its centrifugal tendencies and the incapacity of the leading powers to constitute real military blocs, secondary powers become more and more assertive in defending their own imperialist ambitions. And India wants to demonstrate that it is an economic and military power that needs to be taken into account. In Modi’s populist India, which projects the image of an emerging world power, the western imperialist nations find a useful counter-weight to the main threat in the East. These nations, and their media, boost this image of India as a world power and have a hand in building up its war economy faced with the expansionist policy of China.

This does not mean that India will ever become a world power like China. The rise of China to world power status is an exception, and due to specific circumstances, in particular the new conditions created by the collapse of the two military blocs that had existed since the end of the Second World War. The ensuing circumstances, the push towards opening up “new spheres for capital investment, including the exploitation of a huge new fund of labour power reared outside of directly capitalist social relations”[7], and which permitted the ‘miracle’ of China’s emergence as a second world power, no longer exist today.

It's true that there are still considerable areas of pre-capitalist economy in India, which under different circumstances could be capitalised to reinforce India’s economic growth, and there are many capitalists hungry to invest in this kind of development. As Bill Gates put it, “There is no better place to have an impact than India. That is why I believe India is a solid investment for anyone who cares about development”[8]. His Gates Foundation has thus invested over 1.3 billion dollars in India in recent decades, mainly under the heading of ‘philanthropy’ and improving the quality of health.

But the deepening of the world economic crisis, the acceleration and inter-action of all the crises of a decomposing world system – military, ecological, social – are constantly undermining the conditions for the kind of profitable economic development that India would require as a foundation of its great power ambitions. Thus, India will not be able to play a role equivalent to China's in the 1990s and 2000s. Furthermore, the existing superpowers will do all they can to prevent India from achieving a comparable status.  India will not abandon imperialist ambitions to conquer a bigger place in the international imperialist arena, but as we have seen these efforts will tend to rebound on India by exacerbating the chaos and conflict in its own ‘backyard’.

Resist the hymns of Hindu nationalism!

In the decadent period of capitalism, as Rosa Luxemburg explained in her Junius Pamphlet in 1915, all nations are imperialist and have no choice but to prepare for war and whip up patriotic sentiments. The bourgeoisie in India stirs up Hindu nationalism, a supremacist ideology, which prepares the population for the creation of a Greater India along the lines of the Holy Roman Empire, with New Delhi in the role of Rome and Modi as the Holy Father. This revanchist view of a Hindu nation can only mean the submission of the neighbouring countries to Indian expansionist whims, which means war.

Whether faced with open military confrontations or covert state terror, it is the population, in particular the working class, which will have to pay the price. If it is not by the massive destruction of human life and infrastructure then at least by the implementation of higher taxes and lower wages, and through the overall subjugation to the needs of the war economy and the militarisation of more and more sectors of society.

It is not possible to stop this ongoing war drive by pacifist demonstrations, or by exemplary actions like sabotaging military businesses and installations. Only the working class holds the key to blocking this tendency through the refusal to pay for the costs of the war economy and eventually through an open, collective struggle against capitalism itself. But this cannot be the task of the working class in India alone. It will demand a break with all forms of nationalist ideology and a recognition of the necessity for the unity of the struggle of the workers, not only in Asia but across the world.

Dennis, March 2025

International Online Public Meeting

Saturday 5 April 2025, 2pm to 5pm, UK time

The historic significance of the break between the US and Europe

The acceleration of events since the advent of Trump 2.0 in the US continues.

• We are witnessing the last stages of the break-up of the ‘world order’ inaugurated by the imperialist war of 1939-45. When the Russian imperialist bloc collapsed at the beginning of the 1990s, the ICC predicted that the western bloc would also unravel. This process was immediately signalled by the conflicts between the US and its former allies over the war in ex-Yugoslavia and confirmed by deep divisions over the invasion of Iraq in 2003. But now the divorce between the US and the European powers has become definitive.
• This is not leading us towards a world of peace and reconciliation. Far from it. Capitalism’s drive to war is intensifying, but it is taking a chaotic form which is all the more dangerous because of the absence of any bloc discipline. Humanity’s very future is threatened by a whirlwind of imperialist war, ecological destruction and social disintegration.
• The growth of militarism can only mean further attacks on the living standards of the working class, already under the lash of decades of economic crisis. The politicians, especially in western Europe, are quite open about this and have decided to implement gigantic armaments programmes: it’s “guns or butter” all over again.

This is why the ICC is holding a third international online public meeting focused on the current world situation. It is essential that all those who understand the necessity to rid the world of a decaying capitalist system recognise exactly what the working class is up against. We thus encourage all those engaged in the search for “the truth of this world” and the way to overcome capitalism to attend this meeting and take part in the debate.

If you want to attend, please write to us at [email protected] [8]

 

 

The question of health and access to necessary health care is of primary concern to the working class. The crumbling provision of state healthcare in Britain is having a dramatic impact on the living conditions of the working class. There are 7.48 million active and retired workers waiting for treatment. 2.84 million workers are long-term sick. The ability to access family doctors is becoming increasingly difficult due to a shortage of General Practitioners. Overworked ambulance crews can take hours to respond to emergency calls, because too many ambulances are waiting for hours to unload patients into Emergency Departments. Patients are unable to be discharged from hospital because of collapsing social care.

The visceral depth of this situation is made clear by an RCN (Royal College of Nurses) Report on Corridor Care in Emergency Departments. The 450 pages of the report are composed of profoundly shocking testimony by health workers.

“A group of patients (6 patients) were cared for in an escalation bay. This space is not suitable for hospital beds, only for trolleys. Patients were elderly - 80+ years old - and frail with multiple co-morbidities, had no chairs, bedside table or lockers, no call bells in place. The room escalation bay was used to be for patients who goes for surgical procedures therefore this room had air conditioning and unable to turn up the heat. The room is freezing cold and blowing cold air to the patients. No nurse in charge present, run by bank or agency nursing staff. In this escalation area, multiple priority calls happened, falls and other incidents. Absolutely unsafe and poor quality of care to patients”.

A paramedic summed up just how desperate the situation is becoming, “As a nurse it is heartbreaking to provide care in corridors and storage rooms where there is no humanity for anyone involved. Families are being given sad news in corridors and also sometimes not even being allowed into see their families due to lack of space in departments. I worked throughout Covid-19 and although it was a horrendous experience this lack of care in the broken system is worse. People are dying as a result of ambulances being held at hospitals and calls are eventually being responded to almost 2 days after 999 has been called.

This has to end, now!”

This situation is causing many deaths. The Royal College of Emergency Medicine estimated that patients having to wait for more than 12 hours in the Emergency Department before being admitted to a ward for continuation of care caused about 14,000 extra deaths in 2023. This is 21 times more deaths in a year than the 645 deaths of British soldiers during the Iraq and Afghan wars.

These figures do not include those deaths caused by delayed ambulances or by waiting to be seen in Emergency Departments. Nor the long-term impact on health caused by delayed treatment for strokes, heart attacks, and other illnesses.

Workers, and the majority of the population are starting to fear becoming ill, particularly if there is an emergency, because they know that they may not get the necessary treatment in time or not at all.

The class division in health

This class division of health care is part of the social war and murder Engels denounced in 1844:

“When one individual inflicts bodily injury upon another such injury that death results, we call the deed manslaughter; when the assailant knew in advance that the injury would be fatal, we call his deed murder. But when society places hundreds of proletarians in such a position that they inevitably meet a too early and an unnatural death, one which is quite as much a death by violence as that by the sword or bullet; when it deprives thousands of the necessaries of life, places them under conditions in which they cannot live – forces them, through the strong arm of the law, to remain in such conditions until that death ensues which is the inevitable consequence – knows that these thousands of victims must perish, and yet permits these conditions to remain, its deed is murder just as surely as the deed of the single individual; disguised, malicious murder, murder against which none can defend himself, which does not seem what it is, because no man sees the murderer, because the death of the victim seems a natural one, since the offence is more one of omission than of commission. But murder it remains”[1].

The same capitalist laws of accumulation are still driving capitalism’s social war. There may not be starving so many people on the streets, but the drive to maintain profits is still murdering large numbers of workers.

Engels demonstrated that the law of accumulation demands that the proletariat is forced deeper into relative poverty in order for the ruling class to accumulate capital. The levels of poverty amongst the working class are ruining workers’ health. In 2023 1 in 5 adults lived in poverty -14.3 million people. Of these, 8.1 were adults of working age, 4.3 million children and 1.9 million pensioners. Of these 14.3 million 3.8 are classified as destitute, including one million children[2].

The level of social murder inflicted by this social war is astonishing. The public health expert Michael Marmot has calculated that between 2011 and 2019 more than 1 million people died prematurely because they did not have the same life expectancy as the top 10% of society. The vast majority of them were from the working class. Marmot also estimated that 148,000 were socially murdered by the austerity measures of the 2010s[3].

The difference in life expectancy between the least and most deprived areas in Britain is 19 years. 3 times more people will die before the age of 60-64 in the most deprived areas than in those in the most affluent. The people in the most deprived areas have 1.5 times more long-term health conditions such as COPD, diabetes, etc[4].

5000 workers a year are dying from asbestos-related deaths a year in the UK[5]. These deaths arose because the “widespread use of asbestos containing products in the past – particularly in the post WWII building industry – led to a large increase in asbestos-related disease in Great Britain over the last few decades” [6]. The ruling class knew that asbestos caused asbestosis before WW2, but this didn’t stop workers from dying a horrible death.

The attack on healthcare

The rapidly deteriorating state of health care is caused by decades of lack of sufficient funds for NHS, the increasing ill-health caused by growing levels of poverty, murderous rates of exploitation for those at work and the lack of a proper community care. The local authorities that fund social care have had their funding cut by about 60% since 2010. This means less care workers to look after those in need of care in the community. Many care and residential homes are closing due to lack of funding. The result is that 2 out of 3 delayed hospital discharges are due to lack of social care.

The ruling class is aware of the deep crisis in health care: the RCN report is just one of a long stream of reports about the untenable situation in health care and points to one of the manifestations of the profound contradictions of the capitalist system.

In December 2023 over 1.4 million active job postings remained unfilled nationwide and several sectors of the UK economy were in need of workers. To solve this problem the bourgeoisie, even though its priority is to drastically reduce immigration after Brexit, gave the employers permission to recruit tens of thousands of foreign workers to fill the vacancies. At the same time 2.84 million long-term sick workers, most of whom certainly want to return to work, are denied appropriate treatment.

There is nothing they can do about it. It is not a question of moving funding from defence spending or other spending to pay for health. The state has to cut back its spending in order to try and reduce state deficits. It has to prioritise arms spending because the capitalist state is an imperialist state. The ruling class has to defend its national interest by seeking to make the economy more competitive economically and militarily.

The Elective Reform Plan, presented by the Labour government on 6 January this year, demands a stronger competition and an increase in productivity of the NHS which is already facing deep financial deficits and must cut services with another £7 billion. Such a plan expresses more a concern for figures and statistics than for the provision of proper health care. This government is as uninterested in the quality of healthcare as the Tories or any other faction of the ruling class. Those who still might have illusions in the Labour Party may be cured of this belief by its wholehearted commitment to ramping up the war economy. 

The capitalist state is the commander-in-chief of the social war, not a neutral body that has the best interests of the working class at heart. Its purpose is to ensure the most rigorous exploitation of the proletariat and to repress any resistance against the effects of exploitation. As for those too old, too ill or not able to find work, its aim is to drive them back to work, more or less by starving them. Social Security payments are just enough to avoid starvation. The NHS is part of this system of exploitation.

Defence of workers’ health

This pitiless war on the working class’s health and lives is going to get much worse. This deterioration is being driven by the worsening crisis of the world economy, by raging trade wars, with the necessity for British imperialism to significantly step up arms spending. The ruling class is already starting to talk about the working class having to accept attacks on health, education, and social security to pay for more arms.

The struggles of workers in Britain, France, the US and Belgium, since 2022, have shown that the proletariat is not ready to lie down and accept sacrifices. In 2022 the strikes in Britain took place during the first year of the war in Ukraine, and amid talk of the need for more military spending. Today the media hysteria about Trump’s whims and defending Europe against Russia is even louder. The only way to hold back these attacks is for the working class to demonstrate its strength and determination to defend its interests and for all workers, including those working in the health sector and those enduring the deterioration of health provision, to come together in a common struggle against capital and its state.

 

Ernie, April 2025

We publish here a contribution of a sympathiser of the ICC about the discussion at the online contact meeting of Sunday 2 March.

We fully agree with the contribution of the comrade as he emphasises for instance that today the depth in the political crisis of the bourgeoisie in in the USA is unprecedented. After the election of Trump, as he writes, “USA and its upper elements resemble a rogue state with elements of a regime like North Korea”

Just one point we want to clarify.

The comrade writes that, in the current situation in the US, any form of a political choice seems to be absent, since the bourgeoisie has to “submit itself to the dynamic of the tendencies laid down by the decomposition of its system”. However, we think that the American bourgeoisie is not merely a victim of  decomposition. Even if the response of the Trump clan with “America First”, “Make America Great Again”, etc. is completely irrational, it is and remains an attempt to defend its interests as a faction of the American ruling class against the decline of US leadership in the world. And there will be reactions within the US ruling class to the Trump faction’s policies as their disastrous implications become more and more evident. For example, we are now seeing big anti-Trump rallies being organised by Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and others on the left wing of the Democratic party

.

Meeting on Sunday March 2.

1.

In order to understand Trump 2’s consequences on the world we have to be clear why Trump has been elected as President of the United States.

The reason is that the bourgeoisie have no alternative, no choice in the matter overall – it has to follow, submit itself to the dynamic of the tendencies laid down by the decomposition of its system. It cannot escape from them no matter what or whatever elements exist among itself including the so-called “grown-ups”. The bourgeoisie is in thrall to its system and thus its system’s decay and decomposition is a reflection of a class with no future. The consequences, if it’s not clear how this will pan out, are profound. The post-45 consensus is, as the ICC has laid out for some time now, finished. What takes its place is more chaos and even more centrifugal tendencies. Agreements, pact and protocols are increasingly worthless as chaos and irrationality takes hold.

There’s no Machiavellianism here, no strategy or plan from the bourgeoisie as has been suggested in previous meetings and particularly by MH[1]. Machiavelli is out of the window and instead of the strengthening of the state (state capitalism is the direct descendent of Machiavelli), we see the disembowelment of the most powerful state, its pillaging, as the mighty USA and its upper elements resemble a rogue state with elements of a regime like North Korea (with whom the US voted  last week against Europe!). And one of the great strengths of Machiavelli was his giant nail in the coffin of feudalism with his separation of religion from bourgeois politics. Look at the USA today in this respect (along with India, the Middle East, etc).

The depth of this political crisis is underestimated by the clockwork analysis of the CWO/ICT[2]. It was initially wary to mention Trump’s election and when it did. In “Trump and the New Golden Age”, it emphasises the continuity between Trump, the only difference being “the character of Trump”. That position of continuity was defended by MH in his intervention at the meeting on Sunday where he welcomed the ICC’s position which he suggested supported the continuity of Trump’s election rather than the disaster that it was.  In a further article of the ICT, “As regimes fall...”, dated mid-February, it states: “imperialist camps are re-aligning and ironing out some creases” – yes, that what it says, “ironing out some creases”! The march to world war is ticking away for the ICT. The war between the USA and Russia has long been heralded by the ICT; in Trump’s first term, his hit on the Iranian general Soleimani was seen by the ICT as a precursor to war with Russia when in fact Trump had done Russia a favour (which it later acknowledged).

The rigid and mistaken analysis of the ICT and the position of MH underestimate the enormous upheaval in international relations, the political weakness of the bourgeoisie (that the working class cannot exploit – on the contrary) that has happened with Trump 2. While banging the drum about WW3, the ICT underestimates the real dangers to the class struggle.

2.

Since the rupture the working class has continued to fight with examples from Belgium and the USA where anti-Trumpism is a particular danger to the working class. But nowhere in the western metropoles of capitalism is the working class ready to be mobilised for war. After the betrayal of Social Democracy[3], the class was hoodwinked into war and marched off willingly from towns, cities and villages. In a situation of a profound defeat for the working class, we saw workers mobilised and volunteering to fight for democracy and against fascism in WW2. Not today. Populism is not the expression of a deliberate policy of the bourgeoisie, a ploy to contain the working class as some have suggested. It is instead an expression of the loss of control by the bourgeoisie. It is also an expression of the continuing stand-off of the two major classes and by no means a strategy for containing the working class and mobilising it for war. The British government, as mentioned by the ICC during the meeting, has taken an intelligent approach to its confrontation with the working class by not adopting a frontal attack – as in Belgium – but allowing above inflation pay rises, sick pay rises for lower paid workers and various “workers’ rights” programmes. But this can’t last as inflation rises everywhere with the majority of workers living from paycheque to paycheque.

The ICT position of a march to WW3 underestimates the unbeaten nature of the working class alongside the real dangers coming from decomposition that threaten it.

In previous discussions there were some elements that said the working class should fight this or that element of decomposition (war, ecology, etc.) but the class needs to fight on its own terrain which brings it directly against the needs of the war economy. Therein lays the basis for an offensive from an undefeated working class.

Baboon. 3.3.25

 

 

 

 

 

The competing states and their leaders, whether they are presented as ‘authoritarian’ or ‘democratic’, are seeking to impose sacrifices on the proletariat everywhere in the name of the ‘indispensable’ war economy’

Whether it is Putin's Russia, Xi Jinping's China, Trump's United States or Von der Leyen's European Union, “the time has come for rearmament”! The new German Chancellor says: “From now on, the following rule must apply to our defence: whatever the cost!” President Macron wants to “strengthen our armies as quickly as possible”, as does British Prime Minister Keir Starmer, who has announced military spending “unprecedented since the end of the Cold War.”

Intense warmongering and militaristic propaganda

To impose these colossal sums, in the midst of an economic and financial crisis, against a backdrop of staggering public deficits, the most effective strategy remains manipulation through fear: “Who can believe that today's Russia will stop at Ukraine?” (Macron). Should we not at all costs “deter tyrants like Vladimir Putin?” (Starmer).

In reality, in this obsolete capitalist system, all states are imperialist, small or large, aggressors as well as the aggressed, all defending only the cold-blooded interests of the national capital. All are gangsters, greedy monsters wallowing in a sea of blood, who, when they are not drinking the blood of civilians are preparing the future carnage which they have calculatingly decided upon. And as always, these warmongers take the usual precautions to cynically justify the monstrosity of their barbaric enterprises, always in the name of ‘peace’ and ‘values’! Isn't Putin himself fighting ‘Nazis’? Doesn't the French Minister of the Economy, Eric Lombard, defend a democratic ‘economy of peace’ in order to buy his instruments of death?

Everywhere, the working class is subjected to this intense propaganda, to the media steamroller that tries to persuade us with nauseating speeches that military spending is ‘necessary’ and that arms production must ‘inevitably increase’. All for reasons presented everywhere as ‘ethical’! Polls then flourish, designed to gauge, manipulate and feed the same discourse seeking to persuade us that it is necessary to ‘defend one's homeland’!

But to claim that war and the militarisation of society are a ‘necessary evil’, something obvious, against which nothing can be done unless we want to risk even greater massacres, is an odious lie. Militarisation and war are always the fruits of the barbaric decisions of the ruling class and the very expression of the impasse into which the decomposing capitalist system is sinking more and more. The world wars of the past, like the abominable massacres in the Gaza Strip or in Ukraine today, are not the product of the ‘madness’ of this or that leader, but the expression of the historical dead-end reached by the capitalist system, of its inability to offer anything other than to drag the working class and all of humanity into ever more vast, apocalyptic spirals of destruction. What lies behind all the fine talk of ‘peace’ is nothing less than the transformation of ever larger areas into fields of ruins, into new Ukraines, Syrias or Palestines![1]

More anti-working class attacks

All this belligerent agitation in turn fuels the same arms race, and everywhere the rulers are asking the working class to foot the bill. The planned military budgets in Europe already exceed 2% of current GDP. The European plan ‘ReArm Europe’ envisages releasing 800 billion euros for the purchase of weapons of war. Germany alone plans to commit 1000 billion euros to its defence. The military programming law 2024-2030 in France provides for a sum of 413 billion!

The exploited are starting to feel the effects of all this in terms of attacks on their living conditions. By hammering home the message that we can no longer count on the ‘dividends of peace’, the bourgeoisie is paving the way for the acceptance of sacrifices in the service of mass murder. Blowing hot and cold, coating speeches with a language of ‘truth’, the prospects is one of massive attacks on the social level: health, pensions, education... For NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte, “this cannot wait... Countries are investing up to a quarter of their GDP in pensions, health systems or social security. We need a small fraction of that money to strengthen our defence.” What he is careful not to say is that this “small fraction”, taken from systems already bled dry, can only further impoverish millions of people. This is a cynical euphemism that in reality means the axing of social budgets, social security, unemployment or health insurance.

The growth of the war economy is also presented to us as a source of ‘industrial relocation’ to ‘promote employment’. This is also a sinister hypocrisy that aims to justify an intensification of arms production that will only come at the price of a headlong rush into debt, a plunge into global recession, but also an intensification of exploitation and a general deterioration of the living conditions of the proletariat. While arms companies may well reap substantial profits along the way, the economy, from the point of view of global capital, will be weighed down by an immense waste of resources; capital will be sterilised in unproductive arms stocks. At best, these weapons can only rust; at worst, they can kill and destroy, generalising the policy of ‘scorched earth’! In short, this means a greatly increased devaluation of capital, which already generates inflation, attacks and poverty!

Class struggle is a vital necessity

This nightmarish situation must not be accepted by the working class. We, as a class, can only denounce all the preparations for war and all the speeches aimed at mobilising the proletariat and the population behind the ‘nation’ for ‘peace’ and the defence of alleged ‘democratic values’. The working class must be wary of and fight against its false friends on the left and the far left in particular, who are multiplying the most devious speeches. They pile up obstacles to the development of working class consciousness by proposing false alternatives that are ideological traps: either through pacifist mobilisations, thus covering up the responsibility of capitalism, or by openly advocating support for one military camp against the other, justifying the massacre in the name of the ‘lesser evil’. [2] In both cases, the main principles of these ideological poisons are the division of the working class and the defence of capital, and always in the name of ‘democracy’! The traps of ‘defending democracy’ are all the more dangerous as they exploit a real feeling of anger in reaction to the various attacks, such as the numerous demonstrations on 5 April in the United States, channelled into an anti-Trumpist or anti-Musk mobilisations. These same traps are being set with calls to support a series of popular protest movements in many countries such as Turkey, Serbia and South Korea. The aim is to push workers towards the ballot box or bourgeois opposition parties by making them believe that it would be possible to organise capitalist society in a more humane and just way, which is a gross lie: capitalism can no longer be ‘progressive’. Worn down to the bone, it has nothing left to offer! It is indeed bankrupt and increasingly destructive.

The miasma of its decomposition and the social fragmentation it engenders are themselves used for these ideological ends by the ruling class in an attempt to chloroform, to obscure the search for the only viable and possible perspective, the one bequeathed by the experience of the workers’ movement and the class struggle: the perspective of communism.

Clearly, the bourgeoisie is trying to mask the fact that militarisation necessarily goes hand in hand with attacks on the working class. And it is precisely on its own class terrain, in the dynamic of workers' struggles against current and future attacks, that the proletariat will be able to develop its strength and its awareness of the bankruptcy of capitalism. The only way to offer the prospect of a viable alternative society is therefore to refuse and reject the bourgeoisie’s ideological campaigns outright, to fight against the logic imposed against the bloodthirsty monster that is capitalism.

WH, 5 April 2025

[1] China's military manoeuvres and provocations around Taiwan in early April, in response to Trump's irrational decisions and recent provocations over tariffs and his imperialist intentions, are a brutal testament to this.

[2]This is what leads leftists, for example, to openly support the Hamas massacres in Gaza in the name of ‘anti-colonialism’.

 

A newly-published Manifesto looking at various aspects of the worsening ecological crisis, their root causes, capitalism's inability to do anything but make matters worse and the only solution available to humanity - the communist revolution: what it is, what it is not and which social force can enact it.

On the re-election of Trump as US president

 

We have received correspondence from a comrade round the question of the advent of Trump 2.0, partly following a public meeting, and partly in response to an article. We start with some extracts, then follow with a response from the ICC on some of the questions raised, about populism, class consciousness, and the state of the class struggle.

***********

Following the public meeting

I think the ICC underestimates the importance of the rise of the far right.

You are, of course, right, that the election of Trump will make things far worse in some respects but your position on the “rationality” of the Trump faction is based on an assumption that things won’t get worse anyway.

The prospects of capitalism get grimmer by the day and the consensus of how to respond to this that exists within the bourgeoisie is breaking down. Mass deportations and ever more draconian immigration controls are inevitable policies for the central countries. As social and environmental breakdown continue to worsen, mass migration will increase exponentially.

If the ICC is correct in its analysis concerning the trajectory of the class struggle, then there will be increased confrontations with the working class as well which will inevitably take on a physical aspect. As bourgeois democracy is increasingly ineffective in containing these struggles, physical repression becomes the only option left. The question for the bourgeoisie is whether the verbiage of the liberal democratic state – “human rights”, “rule of law”, etc. – becomes more of a hindrance than a help in enacting necessary policies.

This is not just a US phenomenon. The far-right, in various forms, is gaining ground in most if not all of the central countries. The debates within the Tory party about UK membership of the ECHR, while presented as madness by the liberal wing of the media, are not simply the reactionary ravings of “swivel-eyed loons”. Whatever the surface ideological froth, they are rooted in a real material problem that the bourgeoisie is beginning to recognise the current structures of the state are not equipped to deal with.

The “loss of control” that the ICC points to concerning the bourgeoisie and its political apparatus is the product of irreconcilable contradictions at the material level of social management. To put it another way, the bourgeoisie are in deep shit and simply can no longer agree about what to do…

Comrades took exception to the weight I placed on the significance of the election result with regard to the consciousness of the working class.

Certainly elections are not the only phenomena we should assess in terms of analysing the balance of class forces; but the idea that they are meaningless is also wrong.

On the contrary, they are of great significance at any number of levels. Even assuming that the bourgeoisie have a preferred outcome (and the evidence suggests they don’t at the moment), with the election of Trump the bourgeoisie in the US has not the preferred outcome. Why not, for Trumpism isn’t a random anomaly after all the election then becomes a test of the level of ideological control the ruling class can exert over the mass of the population.

The ICC stated in the meeting that “Irresolvable economic crisis will oblige the working class to react. Not take where the class is in consciousness at any one time as an indication of what it is and what it is obliged to do.”

This, of course, is true in a historical sense; the revolutionary potential of the proletariat is not judged by this or that moment. But the topic of the meeting was not the general revolutionary potential of the working class, but the impact of the US election on the balance of class forces. The latter is, by definition, a temporal phenomenon that can only be assessed by the information we have to hand at the moment. The fact that the working class made a revolution in 1917 is of little help in establishing whether it will make one tomorrow.

If we want to understand where the working class is now, we really do have to understand its consciousness at the present moment. The only way to do this is to analyse the information we have available – the frequency of strikes and protest, their combativity and political content and … how the working class votes in elections.

Elections are not some irrelevant sideshow in the life of capitalist society. Leaving aside their importance for resolving bourgeois political conflicts, they are the principle means by which the non-bourgeois classes engage in political activity. This is likely to remain the case until the working class is ready to make its revolution, up and to including the point of dual power.

Acknowledgement of the importance of elections for assessing the immediate psychological consciousness of the class, in no way contradicts the fundamental lessons learned by the communist left with regard to democracy:

• That parliamentary elections offer no opportunity to push working class interests – the choices offered at election time whether real or imaginary, are all bourgeois choices. No election result will ever change the situation of the working class.
• Participation in bourgeois elections by revolutionaries is objectively counter-revolutionary. Such participation only preserves the illusion that elections can somehow be an arena for proletarian activity. Worse, it carries the danger of sucking proletarian forces into the state machine and thus neutralising their revolutionary potential.

If nothing else, elections offer us a chance to see how aware the working class is of the real function of the electoral apparatus: measuring turnout, who was voted for, etc.

In the initial stages of a rebirth of class struggle from a very low base, such as the current period, we might well expect to see an increase in working class participation in elections. This will be the first “port of call” for newly politicised workers, just as such workers will join unions and left-wing political parties. This is an inevitable stage of the development of proletarian consciousness. Indeed, it is this capture of initial proletarian consciousness by leftist parties and unions that is an essential part of their function for capitalism.

While our understanding of the unions and the left as a structure that impedes both class struggle and class consciousness is correct, this sometimes prevents us from seeing that these structures are themselves arenas of class struggle…

I also think that the ICC is overly wedded to its position on “the rupture”. It is true that there has been an upsurge in class struggle over the last few years but I think the ICC has been far too quick to leap on this and assume that this presages a long-term change in the fortunes of the class struggle.

There have been several of these false dawns before: I remember the enthusiasm the organisation had for the French and Spanish movements of the mid-2000s. Assuming these movements really did represent something deeper than their immediate results, this was quickly shipwrecked on the shores of the Financial Crisis. This was the most significant economic crisis since the 1930s and yet the working class, despite some very encouraging struggles prior to this, was unable to respond to the moment.

When a response did come, it took the form of the populist Occupy movement. This contradictory movement was characterised by heterogeneous ideologies, albeit with an openness amongst some to class positions, and a divorce from economic struggles of the class. In addition to the usual anti-capitalist ideologies, the movement became saturated with petit-bourgeois slogans about “fractional reserve banking”, the various sovereign citizen movements, in which we can see precursors of the degenerated conspiracy theories that are growing like a cancer in society today.

This gives the lie to the previous statement that the “Irresolvable economic crisis will oblige the working class to react.” The working class is not obliged to do anything as it has sadly proved over the last few decades. Maintaining this position, in the face of all the evidence since at least 1990, borders on religious conviction rather than a material analysis of the historical period.

This is not to say it can’t or won’t happen. I agree with the ICC when it says that the working class is undefeated, in so far as this means it maintains its revolutionary potential, not simply abstractly (as the paraphrase from the Holy Family quoted above indicates) but also in the current period: the historic situation is open and the class can still make a revolution.

But potential is not actuality and there are enormous barriers to that potential being actualised. And to say, even best case scenario, that the working class is at the “centre of the social situation” as one ICC comrade did in the meeting, borders on the delusional.

The working class has been able to launch a defensive struggle in recent years, in SOME sectors in SOME countries. While it is true that this is the most significant such activity in recent years, the idea that it is anywhere near what the objective situation requires is naïve to say the least…

After the Trump 2.0 article

One point of disagreement. I am unconvinced that "Political populism is not an ideology of mobilising for war as fascism was."

Of course, it depends on whether we are talking about practicalities or ideology. Although Nazism was in practice was dedicated to rearmament and war right from the start, its rhetoric at the beginning was based very much on job creation. Although most Nazi "work creation" schemes were actually inherited from the previous government and quietly shelved (against a great deal of opposition from the gauleiters) in favour of rearmament.

Even after 3 years of the Nazi regime, "All evidence of public opinion suggests that whatever their resentment at the outcome of World War I, the German population was deeply afraid of a European war and would have welcomed a settlement on the basis of the status quo as of 1936." - Tooze, Wages of Destruction, p.205.

And much to the frustration of ideologues like Goebbels, Nazi ideology never penetrated particularly deeply into the population and in particular the working class. Repression eventually managed to crush the public dissent that was common in the early days, but adherence to the regime was largely one of passive resignation rather than active participation.

DG

 

ICC reply                                   

We thank comrade DG for his written contributions following the debate that took place at an ICC virtual public meeting which addressed the consequences of Trump’s return as US president, both at the level of imperialist conflicts and that of working class struggle. The comrade broadly agrees with the analysis of the ICC on the imperialist conflicts, on the non-defeated working class, and on the growing difficulties for the working class with the election of Trump, but has also expressed some serious disagreements on the potential for the development of the class struggle, which will be the main subject for our reply

Elections against the working class

Comrade DG devotes much of his text to dealing with elections which we should consider as some kind of barometer of the state of consciousness in the class. He writes: “If we want to understand where the working class is now, we really do have to understand its consciousness at the present moment” by means of “the frequency of strikes and protest, their combativity and political content and … how the working-class votes in elections”.

Here the comrade is victim of a sociological view on the working class. He equates the reflection and choices of individual, atomised workers with the conscious process of maturation of workers as a class. But democracy “turns the working class into a sum of individuals, of isolated, atomised, powerless ‘citizens’ and ‘voters’” [1]. And the electoral terrain is by definition the place where “we see atomised individuals, mystified and alone, confronted by the dismal future offered by capitalist society, and in many cases susceptible to the ‘simplistic and distorted’ explanations of populist politicians”[2].

Further the comrade tells us: “Certainly elections are not the only phenomena we should assess in terms of analysing the balance of class forces; but (…) they are of great significance at any number of levels.” The election of Trump for instance “becomes a test of the level of ideological control the ruling class can exert over the mass of the population”.

Here again we see that the comrade is not able to see a difference between the so-called consciousness of the workers, expressed in the ballot box, and the consciousness in the class prepared to defend its interests. Taking the elections as the measure for the development of the consciousness in the class, he might even come to the conclusion that the working class is characterised by complete submission to the dominant ideology.

But his view that we can take the result of the elections as a measurement of the bourgeoisie’s control over the working class is misleading. If Harris had been elected, there would be no less control over the working class.

One can even say that a Democratic administration has more means at its disposal to control the working class than a Republican administration. The first can cooperate with the trade unions and certain other leftist organisations. But all depends on the objective conditions of course: on a defeated or non-defeated working class. And in the present circumstances of a non-defeated working class, repression, which the comrade sees as “the only option left, as bourgeois democracy is increasingly ineffective in containing these struggles” does not work in the central countries of capitalism. And the more rational, intelligent factions of the bourgeoisie are quite aware of this.

Democracy is the greatest danger for the working class

“I think the ICC underestimates the importance of the rise of the far right. As bourgeois democracy is increasingly ineffective in containing these [workers’] struggles, physical repression becomes the only option left.”

To begin with the comrade makes no reference to the position of the ICC on the question of the far right and populism versus democracy, although we have written many articles on the subject.

In contradiction to what the comrade argues the ICC does not underestimate the importance of the rise of the far right. But (in contrast to the comrade?) it also knows that populism is not capable of unifying the bourgeoisie in the way that fascism did, it is instead a manifestation of the present inner disintegration of the bourgeoisie.

The comrade agrees with us that the working class is not defeated and (probably agrees with us) that the road is therefore not open to a new world war. Nevertheless, he tends to attribute to the far right of today more or less the same features as fascism in the 1930s: not immediately focused on rearmament but on job creation, not immediately able to mobilise the workers for war and finally taking refuge in massive repression: “Nazi ideology never penetrated particularly deeply into the population and in particular the working class”.  Only “repression eventually managed to crush the public dissent”. The formulation in the Trump 2.0 article (“Political populism is not an ideology of mobilising for war as fascism was”) gets over an important difference between populism and fascism, but, of course, it also needs to be emphasised that populism is still a war ideology, even if it is not capable of mobilising the working class of the central countries for world war..

Here we will not deal further with the question of fascism. But more important is the serious underestimation by the comrade of the ideological impact of democracy, which is one of the most important instruments of the bourgeoisie to poison consciousness in the class.

Without understanding the significance of campaigns for democracy, it is easy to fall into the trap which argues that the right is the greatest danger. The ICC does not deny that the right wing of the bourgeoisie is a great danger, but it is convinced that the democratic left is a much greater danger. And this position has been defended by the ICC for fifty years. To give some examples:

“The left and the trade unions and more generally democratic institutions (...) constitute the main danger against the working class and not fascism” [3]

“The greatest danger to the struggle of the working class today, and to its ability to carry through its task of destroying capitalism, is not ‘fascists’, real or supposed, but the ‘democratic’ traps of the ruling class” [4].

In fact, democracy hides in a much more insidious way the dictatorship of capitalism and the totalitarian domination of its state than the right wing can ever do.

Denial of the rupture and lack of confidence in the working class

Despite his affirmation that the working class still “maintains its revolutionary potential (...) and that the class can still make a revolution” the comrade really underestimates the actual development of the class struggle when he writes: “It is true that there has been an upsurge in class struggle over the last few years.” But “the ICC is overly wedded to its position on ‘the rupture’.

The widespread international working class response, following the pandemic and in the middle of the campaign for military support to Ukraine, seems for the comrade at best “a beginning to react defensively to the actions of the bourgeoisie in some circumstances.”

Here the comrade shows that he has not understood the rupture. What is that precisely? The ICC has given lengthy coverage to it in its press. We have explained this in various articles already. The comrade may not have read them thoroughly, because he doesn't refer to them.at all.

It is “a specific task of the Marxist minority to see beyond appearances and try to discern the deeper developments going on within their class”[5].

What the ICC has said is that the response of the British working class was not limited to the attacks of the British bourgeoisie. It went far beyond the framework of the British national situation. It was actually a response of the working class to the whole period of austerity policies since the collapse of the Eastern Bloc.

“Like May '68 (but in a different context), the current international movement marks a break with a long period of retreat, characterised by disorientation, by a reduction of class consciousness and by workers' struggles often being completely isolated from each other. The current wave shows not only a development of combativity but also a return of workers' confidence in their own strength as a class and a deepening reflection, even if we are only at the beginning of this process”[6].

“The expansion of this wave can only be understood as the result of a change in the workers' state of mind, as the result of a long process of subterranean maturation within the class, of disillusionment and disengagement with the main themes of bourgeois ideology”[7]. Even if “the present struggles are a direct response to the rising cost of living, they are also the product of three decades of maturation in the working class, of a new step in the loss of illusions in the capitalist system”[8].

By contrast, DG argues that while “the working class has been able to launch a defensive struggle in recent years, in SOME sectors in SOME countries. While it is true that this is the most significant such activity in recent years, the idea that it is anywhere near what the objective situation requires is naïve to say the least”,

But what does the comrade mean when he says “not anywhere what the objective situation requires”? If he means a world revolution, then he is right. The present struggles are far away from an international revolution. But what does this mean for the tasks of the revolutionaries? Workers are not ready to launch a world revolution or even the mass strike, but should we disavow these struggles, even if they are a first step towards more important struggles?

This could lead us to a position similar to the one defended by the Essen tendency in the KAPD, who rejected the struggle for higher wages, since it would only distract the class from the final goal: “the creation of revolutionary workers’ councils and revolutionary Factory Organizations (Workers’ Unions)”[9].

According to the comrade “But I think the ICC has been far too quick to leap on this [the upsurge of the class struggle] and assume that this presages a long-term change in the fortunes of the class struggle. There have been several of these false dawns before”

It is certainly true that the ICC has made mistakes, erroneous estimations in the past 20 years. In the report on the class struggle to the 21st ICC Congress, we looked at some examples of our overestimating the class struggle over the previous 40 years[10]. But in our view underestimating the significance of the present upsurge would be a mistake in some sense comparable to those who saw nothing new under the sun in the struggles after 1968. Moreover in the period characterised especially by nihilism and a lack of perspective the underestimation of the struggle is certainly a greater danger and would tend to disarm the proletariat even more.

The comrade also attributes the ICC the position that “the irresolvable economic crisis will oblige the working class to react” But this is not the position the ICC defends and the comrade should know his. The ICC does say that the economic crisis creates the most favourable conditions for the revival of the working class struggle: “Its class struggle against the attacks of capitalism in crisis. The latter represents much more favourable conditions for revolution than war”[11].

It is good that the comrade has written his contributions, as it gives us the opportunity to explain the position of the ICC on the different questions raised in our press and at our public meetings. But the contribution of the comrade also shows the difficulty for an individual militant to resist the weight of bourgeois ideology. At a time when the world’s media inundate us with news of trade wars and imperialist conflict, it is an essential task for revolutionaries to show where the working class has broken with years of passivity. When we’re constantly warned of the danger of the right wing of the bourgeoisie, it’s more and more necessary to identify the insidious dangers of the left, the supposed friend of the working class. Our public meetings and our press are important forums for discussion on these questions.

 

ICC, April 2025

 

The New World Disorder: What is to be done?

 

ICC public meeting, 26 April 2025, 2-5pm

Lucas Arms, 245A Grays Inn Rd, London WC1X 8QY

Nearest tube: Kings Cross

The election of Trump in the USA is clearly marking a new step in capitalism’s slide into decomposition and chaos. The historic divorce between the USA and Europe and the ‘Tariff War’ now underway are both products of, and active factors in, the tendency towards ‘every-man-for himself ‘ in international relations. They will both deepen the world economic crisis and intensify the drive towards militarism and war.

There is no question that this situation will compel the capitalists and their state to intensify the attacks on the working class, demanding sacrifices in the name of national defence, cutting wages, jobs and social benefits, while laying waste to more and more parts of the planet through war and ecological destruction. There is no doubt that workers will have to defend itself from these attacks, but there is also no doubt that the ruling class will lay many traps aimed at preventing a massive, united proletarian response – not least the false perspective of lining up to ‘defend democracy’ from the threat of the far right, “greedy billionaires” or power-hungry autocrats.  All those who are seriously asking the question “what is to be done” in response to these challenges have their place at this meeting.

Revolutionary organisations in particular are faced with a growing responsibility both to analyse the direction of world events and defend the needs of the class struggle faced with economic attacks, growing barbarism, and the illusions peddled by the ruling class. But these analyses and the way to develop a proletarian response need to be debated and defined more precisely, and this is the aim of our meeting.

 

In recent months, Trump has been constantly in the spotlight: not a day goes by without him making a statement that confounds the entire planet: his desire to annex Greenland or Panama, his public humiliation of Zelensky, his purge of the administration, the unceremonious dismissal of thousands of federal civil servants, the intimidation of journalists... In just a few weeks, his gangster-like behaviour and brutal exercise of power have made such headlines that the American and world press are now singing their most hypocritical democratic refrains in unison: the ‘greatest democracy in the world’ is supposedly turning into an ‘illiberal regime’ or even a ‘dictatorship’. The bourgeoisie is pushing the envelope very far, as he has already been publicly denounced as a ‘traitor’, a ‘despot’ and a ‘fascist’. Some are even drawing parallels between Trump and Mussolini!

Trump, a fascist?

The more Trump's ineptitude and brutality are exposed, the easier it is for the rest of the bourgeoisie, led by the Democrats, to blame the President and his band of incompetents for the economic and imperialist chaos and the attacks on the working class. The deafening campaign around his 'crazy decisions' and 'authoritarianism' is a classic strategy of the bourgeoisie to make people believe that chaos, barbaric destruction and massacres are the fault of 'irresponsible' or 'delusional' individuals (Trump or Putin today; Hitler, Mussolini or Stalin yesterday...) and not the expression of the historical bankruptcy of the capitalist system.

In reality, the election of Trump in the United States, like that of Milei in Argentina, and the rise of populism almost everywhere in the world, particularly in European countries, are merely the manifestation of the growing difficulty of the various national bourgeoisies to maintain control of their political apparatus under the pressure of rotting capitalism.

The situation today is very different from that of the 1930s. At the end of the First World War, an impressive revolutionary wave swept across Europe. In some countries in particular, Germany, Italy and Russia, the working class was particularly combative and even managed to seize political power in Russia. So much so that after seizing political power in the October Revolution of 1917 in Russia, it forced the warmongering bourgeoisies to end the war in order to confront their mortal enemy, not only in Russia, but also and above all in Germany. Unfortunately, this revolutionary wave ended in defeat and led to fierce repression by the bourgeoisie.

In Germany, where the working class suffered more than anywhere else (except Russia) from the consequences of a terrible physical and ideological defeat inflicted by social democracy, Nazism, like fascism in Italy in the 1920s, finally appeared to the German bourgeoisie as the most effective means of completing the crushing of the proletariat and rushing headlong into the extreme militarisation of production necessary for the march towards the Second World War.

In the ‘democratic’ countries, where the bourgeoisie had needed to maintain the weaponry of parliamentary and electoral mystification, it was also engaged in preparing the working class for war and making it accept all the necessary sacrifices,  presenting it with the need to oppose  the threat of fascism and defend democracy: this is the full anti-fascist ideology that traps the working class into supporting struggles that are not on its own terrain and lead it to lining up behind a so-called ‘lesser evil’: the ‘democratic’ bourgeoisie.

Anti-fascism is therefore, just like fascism, a consequence of the physical and ideological crushing of the proletariat. They are part of a period of counter-revolution that leaves the bourgeoisie free to lead the workers into world war.

Is the context comparable with today? Since the end of the counter-revolution, which manifested itself in the events of May 1968 in France and other struggles around the world (from Italy in 1969 to Poland in 1976 and 1980), the working class has not suffered any significant defeats opening the way to a period of counter-revolution. There have been moments of advances in consciousness, periods of stagnation and setbacks of varying degrees, but never a definitive defeat. No comparison can therefore be made with the 1930s, especially since today, breaking with a period of disarray and passivity, a slow revival of militancy and the development of class consciousness has been underway since the end of 2022, manifested in significant struggles on an international scale, in Britain, France and the United States

Populism and anti-fascist campaigns

Unlike fascism, which was a product of the crushing of the proletariat, the current populist wave is an expression of the phase of the decomposition of capitalism. It is no coincidence that populist parties have really developed and achieved such an impact since the beginning of the 21st century. Their development coincides with the expansion of the harmful effects of the decomposition of capitalist society. As the economic crisis intensifies, imperialist confrontations flare up, tensions between factions of the bourgeoisie are exacerbated, rivalries within it become increasingly uncontrollable and, as a result, there is a growing loss of control of the political apparatus. Populist cliques denounce the political elites and dominant factions that monopolise power and propagate thuggish policies that destabilise and that make more irrational the politics of individual states. Populism therefore expresses a reality that is radically different from that of fascism: while it destabilises the political apparatus of the bourgeoisie, it is quite incapable, in the face of a working class that resists attacks, of imposing the sacrifices necessary to prepare for war, let alone a world conflict.

This is why the bourgeoisie uses anti-fascist ideology, through its left-wing factions, to turn populism into a bogeyman, equating it with fascism. The left-wing parties thus aim to divert the momentum of the workers' struggle into an electoral dead end by positioning themselves as the true “bulwark” of democracy and equality, capable of providing an answer to the crisis of capitalism.

The identification of populism with fascism therefore serves above all to enable the left to launch an intense campaign denouncing Trump as the source of economic collapse and warmongering, thus obscuring the historic bankruptcy of the capitalist mode of production. It conceals the harsh truth that attacks on the working class can only multiply.

The trap of demonstrations in defence of the bourgeois state

It is with this in mind that Sanders, Ocasio-Cortez and Warren, the most ‘radical’ factions of the Democratic Party and the trade unions, have pushed workers to take to the streets en masse in many American cities, rallying them behind the movement organised around the slogan ‘Hands off!’ to denounce Trump's ‘autocracy’. These factions of the bourgeoisie took the lead and channelled the protest as growing working class anger emerged, not only against the dismissal of tens of thousands of civil servants but also against the savage cuts in all social budgets, including education and health services, and the spectacular rise in the cost of living. To make matters worse and further drown out the proletariat's response to these attacks, piecemeal demands were added and juxtaposed, from the LGBT movement to charitable organisations, all of a bourgeois ideological nature, under the banner of defending ‘citizens’ rights’ and ‘democracy.’

The ultimate aim was to divert the workers' combativity, to prevent the working class from mobilising on its own class terrain, where solidarity, collective reflection and the unity of the working class are built. This is also why the trade unions are calling on the dismissed civil servants to mobilise, alone and cut off from the rest of the working class, against Elon Musk, who has been set up as the ‘embodiment of evil’, the source of all ills. The ‘Hands off!’ movement has promised to amplify the ‘response’ on this rotten and prepared ideological terrain in the coming weeks, while Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez are stepping up their meetings and rallies.

In opposition to the campaigns to defend the democratic state, the American working class must lead the fight against layoffs in federal agencies and education, as well as in companies, against the reduced pensions indexed to collapsing stock market indices, against the reduction of social assistance and the dismantling of social security on its own class terrain, rejecting divisions between its different sectors. Faced with the intensification of the crisis, the ‘war effort’ and all the attacks imposed by the bourgeoisie, faced with the effects of decomposition, it is essential that the working class, in the United States as elsewhere, develop a united struggle against the attacks and sacrifices that the crisis and war are imposing on it. The capitalist system has nothing to offer it. The empty promises of the bourgeoisie are only there to better shackle it to further exploitation.

Camille, 21 April 2025

 

While NATO states on its website: “NATO condemns in the strongest terms Russia's war against Ukraine. The Alliance remains resolute in its commitment to support Ukraine and to help it exercise its fundamental right to self-defence,” Trump humiliates and berates the Ukrainian president in front of the world's media, even blaming him for the barbarism in Ukraine, while renewing ties and entering into negotiations with Putin's Russia. These provocative statements publicly and brutally highlighted the ideological and strategic break between Trump's America and the central axis of NATO policy. Furthermore, Trump cast doubt on the solidarity between NATO countries, the quintessence of the Atlantic Alliance: “If they don't pay, I'm not going to defend them”; “My biggest problem with NATO (...) is that if the United States had a problem and we called France or other countries that I won't name and said ‘We have a problem’, do you think they would come and help us, as they are supposed to do? I'm not so sure...” (France 24, 7.3.25). In a matter of weeks, Donald Trump torpedoed the Atlantic Alliance, politically demolishing the collective defence pact that had united the USA and Europe since 1949. America no longer intended to support its allies in the defence of Ukraine, nor did it even guarantee the unconditional solidarity of the United States in the event of an attack on one of its partners.

The definitive end of the imperialist relations established since 1945

These events have profound historical significance, as they mark the open collapse of the imperialist relations between the major powers that have been in place since 1945. In reality, they are the culmination of a whole process initiated by the collapse of the Eastern bloc at the end of 1989, which also marked the beginning of the period of decomposition. At the time, the ICC pointed out that the collapse of the Soviet bloc would be accompanied by the disintegration of the Western bloc: "The differ­ence, in the coming period, will be that these antagonisms which were previously contained and used by the two great imperialist blocs will now come to the fore. The disappearance of the Russian imperialist gendarme, and that to come of the American gendarme as far as its one-time "partners" are concerned, opens the door to the unleashing of a whole series of more local rivalries”. [1]

The disintegration has been gradual since then, with ups and downs, culminating today in the explicit manifestation of the transatlantic divorce. In their attempt to defend their status as the sole superpower governing the world, the United States initially exploited NATO to support them in their role as world policeman and enable them to keep their ‘partners’ of the Western bloc under control (1st Iraq War, 1991, Afghanistan, 2001), to integrate the Eastern European countries of the former Soviet bloc into their sphere of influence and, most recently, to support Ukraine against the Russian attack, which allowed Washington to counter the European countries' desire for independence at the same time. However, these ambitions emerged in the early 1990s with the manoeuvring of France, the United Kingdom and Germany during the war in the former Yugoslavia and became more pronounced with the refusal of the main European countries in 2003 to participate in the second Iraq war under Bush Jr. More generally, the empowerment of European countries (particularly Germany) has been expressed through a significant reduction in their military contributions to NATO and their broad energy and trade openness towards Russia and China.

Faced with its irreversible decline in the face of the explosion of ‘every man for himself’ and the emergence of China as a challenger, the world's leading power now intends to use its military, economic and political power to impose the defence of its interests, by brute force if necessary, on all other countries, both adversaries and allies. Behind Washington's abandonment of Ukraine, the questioning of transatlantic solidarity within NATO and the rapprochement with Russia, it is the very structure of the world since 1945 that is being swept away.

The irreversibility of the Transatlantic divorce

NATO Secretary General Rutte, like certain European military and political circles, still hopes that Trump's thunderous statements are essentially intended to raise the stakes in a ‘transactional’ negotiation on NATO funding, and that the drastic increase in military budgets decided by European countries will calm Trump's anti-European aggression. While the concrete form and speed of the divorce between the ‘long-standing allies’ remain difficult to predict, various factors confirm that the process is irreversible.

1. “But Trump has politically disarmed NATO, he has stripped it of what makes a collective defence alliance strong: reliability.”[2]. The absolute guarantee of military intervention in support of NATO and the American nuclear umbrella is no longer to be counted on. It’s quite to the contrary, as indicated in a recent Pentagon memo, the ‘Interim National Defense Strategic Guidance,’ based on guidelines from Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth, which the Washington Post (31 March 2025) was able to consult. It specifies that in the event of aggression, Europe will only be able to count on non-essential troop reinforcements against China. Furthermore, Trump continues to claim Greenland from Denmark, as well as the annexation of Canada, both of which are NATO partners. No wonder Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney concluded that the United States was no longer a reliable partner! Whatever the subsequent reversals, doubts have been sown about the indestructibility of the Transatlantic Alliance and American support for Europe.

2. The irreversibility of the divorce is also highlighted on an ideological level. The conclusion of the Transatlantic Pact and the founding of NATO after 1945 were ideologically justified by the defence of ‘Western democracy’. Trump's questioning of unwavering support for Ukraine in favour of a rapprochement with ‘dictator Putin’, and Vice President Vance’s attack at the Munich Forum on the concept of democracy defended by the European bourgeoisie, while the Trump administration continues to support populist and far-right parties in Europe, completely tear apart this common ideological cover. Trump is removing all ideological glue from the Atlantic Alliance.

3. A crucial ally of the United States against the USSR for more than fifty years, Europe has lost its geostrategic importance with the rise of China, becoming above all an economic competitor and a source of dissident countries, even enemies, in armed conflicts. “We are also here today to state clearly and unambiguously an unavoidable strategic reality: the United States can no longer be primarily focused on the security of Europe. The United States faces direct threats to our own homeland. We must — and are — prioritising the security of our own borders. (…) This will require our European allies to fully engage and take responsibility for their own conventional security on the continent."[3] Europe, and therefore the Transatlantic pact, is no longer a priority, or even a necessity, for American imperialism, and the Trump administration is expressing this without diplomatic embellishment.

4. Among European countries, differences are still emerging as to whether Transatlantic ties should be maintained: some, such as Italy's Meloni and Poland's Tusk, hope that substantial arms spending by European countries will preserve the essence of the alliance and calm the Trump administration's anti-European aggression; others, however, see the final breakdown of the Transatlantic link and are pushing for the development of an alternative policy to that of the United States. The latter will undoubtedly exploit the situation by increasing pressure to break up the ‘European pole’. Trump will therefore tend to develop a ‘transactional’ policy that is more favourable to certain countries, such as Poland, and less favourable to others, such as Germany.

5. “Listen, let's be honest, the European Union was designed to screw the United States” (statement by Trump, 26 February 2025). The proliferation of tariffs imposed by the United States on imports from European ‘allies’, accused by Trump of treating the United States much worse than certain ‘enemies’, as well as European ‘retaliation’, will only exacerbate tensions between the two sides of the Atlantic and constitute the economic aspect of the divorce. This trade war clearly illustrates how the European ‘partners’ of yesteryear are now seen as rivals to ‘America First’. The imposition of huge military investment on European countries due to the end of the American military umbrella is aimed in particular at forcing all EU countries to ‘waste’ part of their economic reserves on developing their military capabilities so that they lose their competitive edge vis-à-vis the United States. In addition, changes in customs tariffs are also a potential means of sowing discord between European countries.

The United States at the head of a war of all against all

The questioning of imperialist relations between major powers not only has significant historical significance, but will above all lead to a tremendous acceleration of every man for himself, irrationality and chaos at the global level.

The Trump administration's priority objective, in line with Biden's policy, is to use all economic and military means to prevent China from threatening the declining supremacy of the United States. To this end, Trump is seeking to detach Russia from China and, to do so, he is prepared to sacrifice Ukraine and the stability of Europe, and even the cohesion of the EU. However, while Russia can only welcome the rapprochement initiated by the United States, given its mistrust of China's growing economic stranglehold on Siberia, at the same time, it is wary of the fluctuating nature of Trump's decisions, hence the reluctance of the Putin faction to commit to ending the fighting on the basis of the ‘deal’ proposed by Washington. In fact, Trump is taking a gamble, without being certain of success and without concern for the consequences. In this sense, Trump is a caricature of how the bourgeoisie in decomposition develops its imperialist policy: ‘taking a gamble’ with a short-term vision, without worrying about the longer-term consequences.

One major consequence of the Transatlantic divorce is undoubtedly the widespread explosion of arms spending and, more generally, militarism in Europe. Meetings between major European countries are multiplying to increase military production and ensure support for Ukraine. Across Europe, increases in military budgets for the coming years are being announced: this is the case in Britain, France[4], Germany[5], and the EU is announcing support of 800 billion euros for the next 10 years. Germany has voted to reform its constitution to remove a clause that prohibits it from running public deficits so that it can borrow to increase military spending. However, differences are already emerging between states: there are nuances between France and Great Britain on the one hand and Italy and Poland on the other, for example, on what to do about Ukraine; similarly, what will be the attitude of the other European powers towards Germany, the EU's leading economic force, which also wants to become the EU's main power? In the Netherlands, the prime minister has been outvoted within his own majority on commitments to Ukraine, with populists arguing that money should first be spent on the Dutch people. If strategic rapprochement emerges with the United States and within the EU, the trend is towards the end of stable military alliances, a dynamic that exacerbates the ‘every man for himself’ mentality in the phase of decomposition and is already widely evident in various conflicts around the world.

By abandoning Ukraine, torpedoing the Transatlantic Pact, turning towards Russia, in short, by destroying the last foundations of the international order that had survived the fall of the USSR, the United States will face an imperialist world that will be even more hostile and less controllable, because nothing stable will come out of this ‘upheaval of alliances’ that can never produce lasting ones. In fact, Trump has told the world: the word of the US government is worthless, you cannot trust us. Clearly, he and his clique are not seeking to establish solid international alliances, but rather bilateral ‘deals’ that are valid ‘right now’. Thus, after the successive failures of the American bourgeoisie to impose its order and limit the every man for himself mentality, Trump has acknowledged the impossibility of halting this dynamic, but instead has placed himself at its head by declaring open war of each against all. This is the real vandalistic ‘strategy’ of the new American administration: “The world order has become a weapon used against us. It is once again up to us to create a free world out of chaos. This will require an America (...) that puts its own interests above all else.”[6] From now on, there will be no real turning back.

For the working class, the Transatlantic divorce and the ‘upheaval of alliances’ fundamentally herald two things: a significant intensification of attacks on its living conditions, caused by the exacerbation of militarism, and the multiplication of horrific war confrontations, such as those that massacre thousands of people every month in Ukraine or Palestine. Faced with campaigns aimed at mobilising them in defence of the democratic state, faced with the war of each against all’ workers must instead maintain their unity on their class terrain in order to fight against the attacks of the various bourgeoisies.

R. Havanais / 20.4.2025

 

 

After the demonstration on 13 February, which brought together more than 100,000 protestors, the 24-hour general strike on 31 March confirmed once again that the indignation and anger against the federal government's austerity plans[1] are deeply felt by a growing number of workers in all sectors and regions of Belgium, and that combativity remains high. However, the sectoral and regional fragmentation imposed on the movement illustrates that the bourgeoisie has launched its counter-offensive through its unions, and this is in a context of trade war and exploding defence budgets that herald massive new attacks on the working class, in Belgium and around the world.

 

A break with passivity and disarray

This major wave of struggles in Belgium is not isolated, but represents a break with years of passive submission by workers to the attacks of the bourgeoisie, of atomisation, but also the subterranean maturation, the ongoing process of reflection. “The recovery of worker’s’ combativity in a number of countries is a major, historic event which does not only result from local circumstances and can’t be explained by purely national conditions. Carried forward by a new generation of workers, the breadth and simultaneity of these movements testify to a real change of spirit in the class and represents a break with the passivity and disorientation which has prevailed from the end of the 1980s up till now”[2].  The summer of discontent in the UK in 2022, the movement against pension reform in France in the winter of 2023, and the strikes in the United States, particularly in the car industry, at the end of the summer of 2023, remain the most spectacular manifestations of the development of workers' struggles around the world. The current movements in Belgium also illustrate the context in which workers' struggles will develop, particularly in the industrialised countries, with attacks on all fronts as a result of the accelerating economic crisis, interacting as if in a whirlwind with the expansion of militarism and chaos.

The programme of the new De Wever government provides for a total of almost €26 billion in budget cuts in order to reduce the State debt (105% of GNP). The government's programme includes deep cuts in social budgets, in particular savings on pensions (by penalising early retirement and attacking the pension schemes of civil servants and teachers), as well as limiting unemployment rights to a maximum of two years, which would result in the exclusion of 100,000 unemployed people this year. In addition, half a million long-term sick people risk losing their benefits because of ‘insufficient or uncooperative’ efforts to return to work. Payments for overtime and night work are also being drastically reduced. The ‘social partners’ are expected to propose a reform of the automatic indexation of wages and benefits (i.e. a cut!) by the end of 2026. What's more, less than two months after the announcement of this programme, Europe's generalised rearmament plans will mean that Belgium, which is lagging behind in terms of defence budgets, will see its budget almost double in the next few years.

Opposition to the measures was voiced as soon as the plans were first leaked. In order not to lose control of the situation, the unions decided to organise a first day of action on 13 December 2024, with the aim of diverting discontent towards the directives of the European Union. This first day brought together some 10,000 demonstrators. The manoeuvre did not succeed, however, and discontent continued to grow, as was shown by the second day of action on 13 January, when the unions again tried to restrict the mobilisation to ‘defending pensions in education’. In reality, participation reached around 30,000 demonstrators from a growing number of sectors and all regions of the country. On 27 January, a ‘historic’ regional sectoral demonstration by French-speaking teaching staff brought together 35,000 participants against the drastic cuts imposed by the regional government. The formation of the new federal government and the announcement of its austerity programme only fuelled the protest and the third day of action on 13 February, organised under the misleading slogan of ‘defending public services’, brought together over 100,000 demonstrators from all sectors who expressed their desire to break the sectoral and regional division of the movement organised by the unions. The demonstrators called for a global fight against the government's attacks.

 

The union counter-attack: controlling, fragmenting and exhausting workers' fighting spirit

Faced with the rise in workers' combativity and the push towards unity, the unions launched a counter-attack aimed at preventing any mass mobilisation against the full range of government plans: the feeling of belonging to a single class, of fighting together and in solidarity to build a balance of forces, had to be countered! At a time when solidarity in the struggle was becoming increasingly clear, the unions organised the fragmentation and division of movements between sectors, with specific demands, and between the unions themselves. Instead of joint demonstrations, scattered strikes lasting one or two days were organised in education, urban and regional transport and the railways, with a timetable spread over 6 months! A one-day general strike was declared six weeks later, on 31 March, without any call for demonstrations. The message was now to remain passively at home, with a multitude of small pickets of strikers centred on their company or sector, well separated from each other. The so-called ‘general’ strike has been used as a means of paralysing mobilisations and isolating workers, exhausting their fighting spirit and against any tendency towards unification.

The counter-offensive by the government and the unions is therefore attempting to exhaust the movement before the summer period. A call for a new ‘general strike’ has been launched for 29 April. The fact that sectors such as rail transport and education still have strikes and days of action planned for April, May and June underlines the fact that the unions are ‘pulling out all the stops’ in order to isolate the combative sectors and above all, in the end, to exhaust them in actions cut them off from the rest of the working class[3]. If, on 22 May (three months after the previous mobilisation!), a new national demonstration is announced by the unions, obviously around demands specific to the public and voluntary sectors, it is clearly with the hope of being able to see that combativity is on the wane and that discouragement is setting in.

The trade union offensive is all the more necessary as new attacks are looming on the horizon: ‘Look at the international context’ said the President of the Flemish Socialists (the ‘Vooruit’ party). The bourgeoisie has less and less room for manoeuvre to cope with the effects of economic war and growing militarism. The decision to significantly increase the defence budget from 1.3% to 2% of GDP this year is eloquent proof of this, and is only the first step towards a level of 3% of GDP, financed by even more brutal austerity measures. On the other hand, the massive investment in military budgets was seen as a provocation by many of those who mobilised against the 5.1 billion savings plans on unemployment and pensions.

The leftists are obviously trying to prevent the radicalisation of thinking and to bring it back within the ideological framework of the bourgeoisie: for example, Trotskyist groups are calling for a fight for a ‘real’ left-wing government and helping to strengthen democratic and pacifist campaigns. For its part, the populist left-wing Parti du Travail de Belgique (PTB/PvdA) is organising a march on 27 April under the slogan ‘Money for workers, not for armaments’. In so doing, it is fuelling the illusion that a ‘democratic’ choice within capitalism is possible.

The current context will therefore tend more and more to demand a more politicised level of struggle from the working class if it is to succeed in pushing back the bourgeoisie, as the situation in Belgium illustrates. Faced with a further worsening of the economic crisis, the pressure of militarism and the ever-present threat of barbaric war, we must resist the deceptive and misleading rhetoric of the bourgeoisie, which demands ever greater sacrifices from us. The economic crisis, ecological destruction, murderous wars, the massive flows of refugees thrown onto the paths of despair and death are the product of decomposing capitalism. Only solidarity and unity in the struggle against the attacks on our living conditions will enable us to develop demands that will unite the different sectors of the working class. A first step in this direction could be to use the trade union mobilisations to initiate the broadest possible discussion between workers on the general needs of the struggle, rather than passively listening to the rhetoric of those who are organising our division and impotence.

 

Lac, 15 April 2025.

 

The barbaric wars in Ukraine and the Middle East seem to go on endlessly, as do the many wars in Africa, in particular those in Congo and Sudan. Meanwhile, European powers are more or less abandoned by their former US “protector” and demand a significant increase in military spending for their ‘defence’, which will undoubtedly involve increasing attacks on workers’ living standards. Tensions between the US and China continue to sharpen. So the question of war and the struggle against it is posed more and more acutely for all those who aim to defend the international interests of the working class.

However, any attempt to develop a clear position against war today is immediately confronted by a number of obstacles.

On the one hand, there are the sheep in wolves clothing: the organisations of the ‘far left’ of capitalist politics who present themselves as authentic revolutionaries. Foremost among these are the Trotskyist oganisations, and a number of these have been moving even further to the left to soak up any real questioning about the nature of war today[1]. The leftist organisations of the bourgeoisie present themselves today as real defenders of internationalism. But their internationalism is only a cover for their downright chauvinist credentials. Thus some leftist groups (including anarchists) call for support for Ukraine as the ‘lesser evil’ in the fight against Putin’s Russia; others still consider Russia today as some kind of anti-imperialist force, and support its war against NATO, such as the World Socialist Web Site. But a more ‘radical’ Trotskyist group, the Revolutionary Communist Party (formerly International Marxist Tendency) seems to take an internationalist stand:  “We cannot support either side in this war, because it is a reactionary war on both sides. In the final analysis, it is a conflict between two groups of imperialists”.  But towards the war in the Middle East this internationalism of the RCP has completely disappeared: “From day one of this horrific conflict, we have participated in the solidarity movement for Palestinian liberation”. What leftists can never put forward is the conclusion already drawn by Rosa Luxemburg during the First World War: in the decadent period of capitalism, the era of “unbridled imperialism”, all nations and all wars are imperialist. Furthermore, all wars are links in the same chain of destruction: for example, those who support the military forces fighting for “Palestinian liberation” necessarily support the“Axis of Resistance” sustained by Iran, which in turn is a supplier of deadly drones to Russia in its attack on Ukraine.

But there is a whole landscape of political forces which inhabit an area we often refer to as the “swamp”, “that intermediate zone which brings together all those who oscillate between the camp of the proletariat and that of the bourgeoisie, who are constantly on the way to one camp or the other”[2].

Faced with the war in Ukraine, a number of groups, mostly from an anarchist background, defend an unambiguously internationalist position of opposition to both camps, strongly criticising those anarchist groups who have formed ‘autonomous units’ within the Ukrainian army. This internationalist position was the starting point for the Prague ‘anti-war’ conference which we attended last summer[3]. But as we also saw in Prague, anarchism is at odds with a coherent political framework based on the working class as the only historical subject capable of overthrowing capitalism and thus ending all wars. They are often tempted by the search for immediate results based on the activism of small groups (for example, attempt to obstruct or sabotage the production or supply of weapons). And in some cases, this kind of activism spills over into outright leftism, as in the case of the Anarchist Communist Group, which rejected both Israel and Hamas from the beginning of the war but at the same time publicised the activities of “Palestine Action”[4], an ‘action group’ which has clearly chosen its camp.  Revolutionaries need to intervene actively in this landscape, exposing its confusions and pushing forward to a higher level the clarity it has attained. But what about the ‘revolutionary milieu’ itself: the organisations of the only tradition which has maintained a consistent internationalism for the last century or more, the international communist left?

Imperialist war and the tasks of the communist left

 Like the proletariat as a whole, which Marx in the German Ideology termed “a class of civil society which is not a class of civil society”, revolutionary organisations are an “alien body” inside this system, a living expression of the communist future, and yet they live and breathe inside this system, and this means that they are never immune to inhaling the poison of the dominant ideology.

The disease that this ideology brings with it is known as opportunism – adapting to the underlying assumptions of this system (such as the idea that nations are something eternal and above the division of society into classes) and watering down principles in order to gain an immediate echo within the masses.

Bordigists and the national question

The penetration of opportunism into the existing milieu of the communist left is most obvious when we look at the response of the various Bordigist groups (International Communist Parties) to the war in the Middle East. Having taken a clear position on the Ukraine war, their statements on Gaza and the Palestinian question, like many groups in the swamp, are often highly ambiguous, tending towards support for the struggle of the “Palestinian masses” specifically against the Israeli occupation, or demanding that Israeli workers first mobilise in support of the Palestinians before they can join in a common class battle against the exploiters of in both camps. As we show in a new article in International Review 173, the Bordigists’ confusions on the national question have deep historical roots, reflecting a real difficulty in recognising that capitalism is no longer, and not anywhere, an ascendant system with possibilities of national or bourgeois revolutions as it was in the days of the Communist Manifesto[5].

Concessions to bourgeois ideology and practices, the distinguishing feature of the ‘right wing’ in the workers’ movement, have always been accompanied by sectarianism towards the ‘left wing’ of the movement, towards those whose adherence to principles and capacity to understand the profound changes in the situation of capitalism and the proletariat is an irritant to those who want to carry on with their opportunist schemes. This is clearly the case with the Bordigists, who have almost always made refusal to discuss with other currents of the revolutionary movement a new ‘eternal principle’, one which is totally at odds with the practice of the Italian Fraction of the Communist Left in the 1930s, who always argued that the confrontation of political positions was a vital need for the development and ultimate unification of the revolutionary movement.

When the Ukraine war broke out in 2022, the ICC called for a joint declaration in defence of internationalist principles by all the genuine groups of the communist left[6]. This was subsequently followed by other appeals (around the war in the Middle East, the bourgeois campaigns around the ‘defence of democracy’ against the populist right). With some exceptions, whose importance we don’t want to diminish, these appeals have been systematically rejected by the other groups.

The response (or in most cases, the non-response) of the Bordigists was to be expected, since it fits in with their classically sectarian idea that their various organisations have already achieved the exalted position of being the one and only class party. But we must also note that the Internationalist Communist Tendency, whose programmatic positions, especially on the national question, are much closer to ours than the Bordigists, also rejected our appeal, as their predecessors have done at other moments of acute imperialist conflict, such as the Russian invasion of Afghanistan, the war in ex-Yugoslavia, etc. A joint declaration of the communist left was rejected on various grounds: of being too general and ignoring important differences of analysis, because it was not sent to groups which we define as parasitic but which they want to accept as part of the communist left (eg the IGCL[7]), and above all because their main concern has been to bring together a wider range of internationalist groups and individuals. Hence their No War But the Class War initiative, forming groups on a reduced set of principles in order to carry out propaganda or agitation against imperialist war[8].

For us, this was a new case of sectarianism towards the left accompanied by an opportunist approach to the swamp – the NWBCW initiative was particularly aimed at the anarchist milieu, and prior to the Prague conference was offered as a way forward for all its very heterogeneous components, the majority of whom see opposition to war in completely activist manner. In fact, as we argued in an article looking back at the conference, one of the more positive elements to come out of this gathering was the tentative beginnings of political cooperation between the ICC and the Communist Workers' Organisation (the ICT's affiliate in the UK) in putting forward a critique of individual or small group activism based on a clear recognition that opposition to imperialist war can only grow out of the mass struggle of the proletariat in defence of its own class interests[9].

In our view, this fragile moment of unity between the forces of the communist left (which encountered real hostility on the part of some of the ‘organisers’ of the conference) was a vindication of the approach adopted by the left wing, in particular Lenin and the Bolsheviks, at the Zimmerwald and Kienthal conferences during the First World War. The Bolsheviks understood the need to participate in these conferences despite the fact that they brought together pacifists and centrists as well as consistent internationalists. The essential issue was to be present to put forward a rigorous critique of pacifism and centrism and to outline a real internationalist position (which at that moment was best expressed by the slogan “turn the imperialist war into a civil war”). The same conclusion can be applied to today: yes, we must go out and encounter all those who want to fight against imperialist war, gather together with them and discuss with them, but without making any concessions to the groups’ confused notion of organisation, their political incoherence and concessions to bourgeois and petty bourgeois ideology. To do this, a unified stance by the groups of the communist left is an essential point of departure.

This is not to deny that there are important disagreements among the groups of the communist left, such as whether the current war drive is seeing the reconstitution of imperialist blocs and heading towards a third world war, or whether the dominant tendency is towards an imperialist chaos which is no less dangerous. These are points for discussion which we will return to in a second article, which will focus on the significance of the ‘divorce’ between the USA and Europe. But what Prague showed is that the communist left is really the only current capable of addressing the problem of war from a class perspective. In our view, applying this perspective in today’s conditions leads to the conclusion that the possibility of a mass proletarian opposition to imperialist war will come predominantly from the workers’ struggles against the attacks on their living standards demanded by the economic crisis. The fact that these attacks are more and more being accompanied by calls for sacrifice in order to build up the war economy will certainly be a factor in enabling workers to draw the link between the struggle for economic demands and the question of imperialist war, and ultimately to politicise their struggles, but this remains a long-drawn out process which should not lead to impatient actions which tend to substitute for the necessary mass  struggle of the proletariat. After decades of retreat in the class struggle, the working class can only recover its sense of itself as a class – as a world force which has no homeland to defend – by going through the hard school of the defence of its living standards. The organisations of the communist left will certainly play a key part in the recovery of class identity, and ultimately of the perspective of revolution, but they can only do so as distinct political organisations based on a coherent platform, and not as loose ‘fronts’ which misleadingly appear to offer the possibility of more immediate success in opposing or even stopping war.

D'nA