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]

 

 

On Wednesday, 12 March, the bourgeois press reported that: “The pensioners’ protest in front of Congress ended once again with the Federal Police firing tear gas and beating people with batons. It was the third consecutive crackdown: it has become a habit for the security forces. Despite the oppressive heat and chaos caused by power cuts in the city of Buenos Aires, hundreds of protesters responded to the call issued every Wednesday by groups such as Jubilados Insurgentes, the Union of Retired Workers in Struggle (UTJEL) and the Plenary of Retired Workers. This time they were joined by left-wing parties, the Association of State Workers (ATE) and even ‘self-organised fans’ of ‘Chacarita Juniors’” [1]

Economic crisis, austerity measures and the conditions of pensioners

The ICC maintains, unlike the left wing of capital and its far left hangers on, that the causes of austerity measures, wage cuts and attacks on the living conditions of workers (and former workers) are not the fault of this or that left-wing or right-wing government, but are due to the global economic crisis, accelerated by the decomposition of capitalism, which causes states, regardless of their ruling clique, to unleash cuts and austerity programmes that are applied like a club on the backs of the working class in order to protect the profit rate of their respective bourgeoisies. As we already stated in 2022:

“This crisis is shaping up to be a longer and deeper crisis than that of 1929. This is because the irruption of the effects of decomposition on the economy tends to cause havoc with the functioning of production, creating constant bottlenecks and blockages in a situation of growing unemployment - combined, paradoxically, with labour shortages in some areas. Above all, it is expressed in the outbreak of inflation, following various successive rescue plans hastily deployed by states in the face of the pandemic and the war, and thus caused and fuelled by a headlong rush into debt” [2]

When Javier Milei took office on 10 December 2023, he arrived at the Casa Rosada saying: “There is no alternative to austerity and there is no alternative to electro-shock.”

This brutal austerity plan is leaving thousands of families without food and thousands of workers unemployed. It will also plunge a large mass of pensioners into poverty. The Decree of Necessity and Urgency (DNU), among its most important points, establishes deregulation of trade, industry and services throughout the country.

This involves:

•  deregulating prices such as those for private security firms, which have risen by 100%, and eliminating transport subsidies, causing price increases of between 65% and 150% for users. In addition, it led to a 270% increase in electricity rates.
• The reduction in the size of the state, the closure of government offices and ministries, which has resulted in layoffs in the public sector with more than 75,000 jobs eliminated and more expected.
• The brutal reduction in public works, causing the collapse of the construction industry and leading to more layoffs in this sector.
• The devaluation of the peso by more than 50%, causing prices of goods and services to skyrocket by more than 100%, devastating the purchasing power of wage earners and even more so among the majority of pensioners. The minimum wage barely covers a third of the basket of basic consumer goods. In Argentina, a traditional livestock economy, the proletariat can no longer afford to eat red meat, which has been replaced by chicken or noodles.

All of this has caused poverty to soar, although it was already on the rise under the Kirchner and Peronist governments, rising from 49.5% in December 2023 to 57.4% in January 2024.

“There is a huge mountain of poor or near-poor people, a tiny middle class and a privileged few. This is the new income configuration in Argentina, which was not caused by Javier Milei's government, but which has accelerated in Milei's year in office.” (Statements to the EFE news agency by economist Alfredo Serrano Mantilla, Executive Director of the Latin American Strategic Centre for Geopolitics (CELAG).

These brutal blows to the backs of workers, the unemployed and the non-exploiting population have terrible consequences for Argentine retirees and pensioners. The austerity measures have meant a cut of more than 38% in the budget for the unemployed, a measure justified under the pretext of ‘raising cash’ to pay... 14 billion dollars in debt adjustment!

There are around 7.5 million former wage earners in Argentina. Sixty-three per cent receive a pittance of approximately 280,000 pesos (approximately 340 dollars) in retirement benefits. The rest live on less than 400,000 pesos, when the basic basket of goods costs over 1.2 million pesos. Many elderly people wander desperately around the nearly 230 soup kitchens in Greater Buenos Aires. However, the bourgeois state's welfare system is unable to cope. In addition, three of the 7.5 million pensioners have been left out of the free medicine programme, which is serious considering that medicine prices rose by 119% in 2024. All this has led former workers, fed up with the attacks, to say ‘Enough of starving us!’ and to unite to fight in the streets.

Struggle and repression by the populist government

It was in this context of attacks on the living conditions of this sector of the working class that the violent repression of 12 March took place. On that day, as on every Wednesday, pensioners gathered to protest in front of Congress. On the same date, the CGT, forced by events, had called a march of ‘solidarity’ with the pensioners, which was joined by other organisations of the left of capital (Trotskyists of all stripes such as PTS-Frente de Izquierda, Polo Obrero. There were also collectives and citizen organisations) and, above all, the ‘barras bravas’ (football hooligans) of Argentina's main teams, such as Boca, River and Rosario Central, because a few days earlier a pensioner wearing a Chacarita team shirt had been beaten up by the police and they were there to ‘collect the debt’ and confront the cops

The interior minister in charge of repression, Patricia Bullrich, had already warned against the ‘disorder and violence of piqueteros and barras bravas’ and had sworn not to let them pass. Police contingents armed to the teeth and using quasi-military tactics unleashed a fierce repression as soon as the march towards Congress began. The football supporters in particular responded to the beatings, rubber bullets and tear gas with stones and the burning of police vehicles and rubbish bins. The worst of the repression was suffered by a pensioner who ended up with a broken skull after being pushed and beaten by a police officer, and a cameraman who was hit directly in the face by a bomb. In total, the day left 50 injured and more than 100 detained.

Assessment of the pensioners' struggle

The policy of austerity, wage and pension cuts, and cuts to health and services by Milei and his government, are part of the bourgeoisie's offensive to keep the rotten capitalist order standing. At the root of this is the global economic crisis, accelerated by decomposition, which leads any clique that comes to power to implement measures that attack the living conditions of the working class. The workers are being made to pay for the crisis to defend the interests of the national capital.

The struggle of pensioners and their demands are class-based, as they are a form of resistance to the measures imposed on the working class by the bourgeoisie and its state. Therefore, the struggle of pensioners in Argentina is also our struggle. It is a struggle of retired workers to resist the permanent attacks on their living conditions unleashed by the bourgeois state in the context of the global economic crisis and austerity policies. And they have not been alone. They have marched accompanied by some young workers, adults, even children (some of them children and grandchildren of these former workers) who have taken to the streets to fight side by side with them. Throughout the mobilisation, the pensioners called on other young workers to join the mobilisation with banners and slogans, such as one that read: “One day you will be old and you will also go out and fight like us today”. Therefore, the struggle of the pensioners and unemployed in Argentina is also that of the working class as a whole.

Despite this combativity, the movement has shown serious weaknesses. For example, the retired workers find it difficult to recognise themselves as exploited, as part of the same class, and in this sense to unite their struggles with other sectors of the working class who are also suffering brutal attacks from the populist government. We have already outlined in a previous article the wave of strikes that since 2022-24 have made this territory the one with the most struggles in all of Latin America last year[3]. We have already spoken of the harsh blows that workers and pensioners have been receiving from the Milei government, but which had already begun with the Peronist-Kirchnerist left-wing governments. However, the pensioners' movement has not attempted to connect with the active workers who are fighting (teachers, customs workers and railway workers, who were preparing strikes at the time but which have been carefully isolated, each in their own corner), and most of the union leader have instead fuelled the illusion that the union is the only possible ‘fighting’ organisation for workers. In this regard, it is illustrative that a leader of the left wing of capital (Myriam Bregman, a well-known Trotskyist of the PTS organisation and a former MP representing the United Left Front) claimed that pensioners were complaining because the CGT had not come to support them and were demanding that it call a national strike.

The football fans who went to the pensioners' demonstration expressed themselves as fans and not as workers, not as a class but as part of another institution of bourgeois society: the football team, like the ‘hooligans’ and ‘ultras’ of European teams whose aim is to demonstrate their unconditional support for a particular team. The methods used by the latter are not those of the proletarian tradition of struggle, but rather a lumpen practice which is totally alien to the working class, demanding revenge and unleashing blind, nihilistic violence of revenge and blind violence, such as burning cars and smashing windows and shopfronts, a situation reminiscent of the vandalism of the piqueteros in the ‘corralito’ riots at the beginning of the century in Buenos Aires and other cities. All of these are merely desperate expressions of the ‘no future’ typical of the petty bourgeoisie and not of the working class[4].

That is why, in the midst of the demonstration, slogans such as “Milei, you are the dictatorship”, “the fatherland is not for sale”, or the already hackneyed “que se vayan todos” (‘they must all go’) and similar slogans could be heard; slogans which, instead of calling for all workers to mobilise in defence of their living conditions against the attacks of capitalism, divert their anger onto a bourgeois terrain, trapping them in the struggle to defend democracy against dictatorship or autocracy, and in the dead-end of nationalism. All of this is an obstacle to the development of class consciousness.  

The trade unions and organisations of the left wing of capital, from the Peronist CGT to the Trotskyist and citizens’ organisations, played their dirty role of dividing the workers in order to weaken their struggle. Reluctantly, and to ‘look good,’ they called a march supposedly in solidarity with pensioners and then a 36-hour national strike on 9 April, but in reality they were only seeking to recuperate the anger and exasperation that is so widespread within the working class, shared by all sectors – pensioners, unemployed and those still in work. The unions and the left are trying to take advantage of the confusions in the movement and to build a false inter-classist unity based on a common denominator: opposition to Milei and his government or around openly bourgeois demands. Peronists, unions, left parties and far-left organisations are all working hand in hand to keep the workers divided, each in their own sector or sociological category, each with their own demands: unemployed on the one hand, those in work on the other, pensioners somewhere else. The other ‘citizens’ organisations’, from feminists and defenders of this or that minority like LGTB+ to the ‘radical’ football supporters, have all played their part in sabotaging the self-organisation of the workers and the extension of struggles, appealing to the ‘people’ or the ‘citizens’ to take revenge on Milei at the next elections; or, for the more ’radical’, calling for ‘political abstentionism’ on this occasion, in order to prevent the development of consciousness about the need for workers to fight together on their own class terrain against the attacks of this dying capitalist system which has nothing to offer the exploited except more exploitation and poverty.

Tr

[1] https://www.pagina12.com.ar/808576-un-clasico-de-los-miercoles-palos-y-gases-para-los-jubilados [15]. This is a Spanish language press agency specialising in economic information for companies.

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

 

 

 

 

 

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.

 

On 28 April last, a giant blackout hit the whole of the Iberian peninsula, suddenly cutting off electricity and paralysing activity for almost eight hours; creating chaos and havoc on the underground, trams and trains as signals broke down; trapping people inside lifts, causing flights to be cancelled at airports; closing shops and creating a real hardship for the whole population

An additional phenomenon...

This spectacular episode is an illustration not only of the fragility of the most powerful states in terms of energy, but also one more symptom of an accumulation of scourges and disasters that are hitting a world that is itself increasingly disordered and chaotic. While this event is ‘unprecedented’ in Spain and Portugal, it is clearly not unique, and we could point out that many other giant power cuts have taken place in different parts of the world before. This was the case, for example, in India in 2012, one of the biggest to date, as was the blackout in parts of the north-east and mid-west of the United States, stretching as far as Ontario, in August 2003.

Although sometimes linked to climatic hazards, such as violent storms, electricity supply problems have often been caused by the failure of outdated or poorly maintained networks suffering from a lack of funding. The deep economic crisis, the lack of investment and growing social unrest, imperialist tensions between states, can only create the conditions for future power cuts with unpredictable but potentially dramatic consequences. Energy, as we can see from the current war between Russia and Ukraine, has become more of a strategic than a commercial issue, a weapon of war in itself[1].

At the time of writing, the causes of the huge blackout in Spain and Portugal (which also partially and temporarily affected France, in the Basque country) have not yet been established. Although network connections have been optimised to regulate electricity distribution, the blackout on the peninsula remains ‘unexplained’ by the authorities. There is no doubt that a cyber attack, even if the hypothesis was quickly ruled out, was a credible possibility given the current deterioration in geopolitical tensions.

In reality, beyond our ignorance of the causes and the need for caution, the ‘technical’ reason for the blackout is less important than outlining a political interpretation of what happened. Taken on its own, the phenomenon of this sudden ‘blackout’ can find a specific explanation. The question that seems most relevant to us is rather to underline the context in which the event occurred, as a phenomenon that sheds light on a system at the end of its tether.

... in the decomposition of capitalism

As with other phenomena that can occur and result in real tragedies, such a blackout must be understood in a context where accidents and disasters are accumulating, and where their rate of appearance, intensity and scale have been steadily increasing for more than thirty years. This is a global situation that Marx could not, of course, have imagined in his time, but which he was nonetheless able to anticipate by revealing the historical dynamics of the capitalist mode of production. In perceiving the internal contradictions of the system and the seeds of its crisis and future decadence, as with any mode of production and exploitation that has become obsolete, Marx noted that capitalism is special in that it gives rise to “an epidemic that, in all earlier epochs, would have seemed an absurdity”[2]. Of course, the point here is not to attribute the blackout to a purely economic cause. What we want to say here is that the obsolescence of capitalism, a system which has been in decline for over a hundred years because of its chronic economic crisis and, above all, the absence of any prospect other than misery and destruction, is plunging the whole of society into convulsions that are now those of its final phase, its decomposition.

Indeed, “the phase of decomposition appears as the result of an accumulation of all the characteristics of a moribund system, completing the 75-year death agony of a historically condemned mode of production”[3]. With an economic and social crisis plunging proletarians and populations into poverty, heightened war tensions, the multiplication of disasters linked to climate change, industrial accidents and phenomena such as shortages, this power cut remains a symptom which, like others, can only increase dramatically.

That's what we've been pointing out in our articles for over thirty years, when these phenomena were less frequent and more spread out in time and space, allowing the bourgeoisie to better put across its own particular explanations in order to isolate individual cases and exonerate the system as a whole. So, for example, when it came to floods or droughts, the media simply referred to ‘natural disasters’. But as the number of phenomena increased, notably the Covid-19 global disaster, the media were obliged to invoke more clearly the ‘irresponsibility’ of ‘mankind’ or of this or that individual.

These days, apart from laying blame and looking for scapegoats, the bourgeoisie can always come up with a whole host of explanations, as it will probably be able to do at the end of its current investigation into this recent blackout. What it will never be able to tell us, however, is that its system is bankrupt and can only generate new tragedies. The blindness of the bourgeoisie is a reflection of its cynicism and greed, its accelerating descent into barbarity that only the proletariat will be able to overcome by making its revolution.

WH, 30 April 2025

 

The more time passes, the more atrocities accumulate, the more words fail to describe the open-air death camp that is Gaza. After the carnage carried out by Hamas on 7 October 2023, the Israeli response has exceeded all levels of barbarism. Most of the more than 50,000 deaths caused by the IDF's bombings and raids are civilians, children, defenceless proletarians. The Israeli army deliberately targets groups of civilians and vital infrastructure, including health facilities, forcing the population to migrate from one end of the gigantic prison that is Gaza to the other, abandoning everything they own in a desperate attempt to stay alive. As master of the enclave's borders, Israel cynically starves the population by restricting water and food supplies, prevents the entry of medicines and medical equipment essential for treating tens of thousands of wounded people, and methodically destroys everything that has been built there in an orgy of violence.

The ‘great Western democracies’ are issuing a string of horrified statements in response to the atrocities. They are using increasingly harsh words against the Israeli government, but are taking no action, such as stopping arms and ammunition deliveries, to stop the bloodshed. These are nothing but cries of outrage, and for good reason! From the massacres in Iraq, Afghanistan and Vietnam to the phosphorus bombing of the German cities of Dresden and Hamburg and the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Western countries, like all countries in the world, have never shied away from the most atrocious massacres to further their sordid interests. The anniversary of 8 May 1945, celebrated with great pomp and circumstance as the " victory over Nazi barbarism", expresses all the hypocrisy of the leaders of these democratic powers who are willing to accept the ongoing genocide, always ready to resort to lies and amnesia to hide the fact that their own hands are stained with the blood of the victims of colonial massacres and two world wars.

Behind the genocide in Gaza: the barbarism of capitalism

This barbarism unleashed by both sides, even if they are asymmetrical, can be seen at work all over the world: in Syria and Lebanon, Sudan and Yemen, India and Pakistan, Ukraine and Congo. Admittedly, the massacres in Gaza have their roots in 75 years of confrontation between the Israeli and Palestinian bourgeoisies and imperialist meddling in the Middle East, but they are based on a common origin shared by all conflicts, clearly stated by Rosa Luxemburg and Lenin at the beginning of the 20th century: with the entry of capitalism into its phase of historical decline, the era of “imperialism, the highest stage of capitalism” began. All capitalist states must now defend their interests at the direct expense of their international competitors. No state can escape this logic. Since no state can give up defending its place in the global market, all means are permitted, even the most despicable, barbaric and repugnant. The current period, the final phase of the system's decomposition, is only accentuating the escalation of barbarism. Thirty-five years ago, in our Theses on Decomposition, we already wrote that we are more and more seeing “the development of terrorism, or the seizure of hostages, as methods of warfare between states, to the detriment of the ‘laws’ that capitalism established in the past to ‘regulate’ the conflicts between different ruling class factions”. In Gaza, Hamas is using hostages as human shields to try to stem the Israeli military response, while the Israeli army is using the two million inhabitants of the Gaza Strip as bargaining chips with its Palestinian enemy. Each side is using threats against civilians in its struggle against its enemy.

Due to the growing political fragmentation of the bourgeois factions, a policy geared towards the coherent defence of the interests of the state is becoming increasingly difficult, if not impossible. This phenomenon, which exists in all countries, is reflected in a general policy of every man for himself pursued by a large part of the bourgeois political apparatus[1]. This every man for himself attitude is reflected in Israel by the fact that, in his desperate struggle for political survival, Netanyahu has become an uncontrolled projectile for the American godfather, at the head of a government that includes irresponsible extreme right-wing Zionist factions that no longer hide their intention to implement a ‘final solution’ to the Palestinian problem, a government that no longer even pretends to take into consideration the lives of hostages held by Hamas or those of Palestinian civilians, in the West Bank as in Gaza. All that remains is a nihilistic rush towards barbarism, which can only end in the physical elimination, through massacre or exile, of all Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza. This is fundamentally the same logic as that of Hamas, that of all ruling classes, all of whom are the embodiment of repression and militarism: hostages, dead or alive, have never prevented the people of Gaza from suffering atrocious reprisals, nor Hamas from committing crimes and exercising its own repression against Palestinians demonstrating to stop the carnage!

This is clearly the future that capitalism has in store for us: the mass slaughter of civilians in wars that spare no one, the appetite for pure revenge, the extermination of political opponents and enemy factions, the total destruction of entire cities, hospitals and schools, the development of totally irrational ideologies based on religion, conspiracy theories and mistrust of everyone and everything. The end result is the destruction of all organised life for the whole of humanity, and we can already see that this cancer eating away at capitalism has metastasised all over the planet.

The only alternative to this destructive dynamic is the development of the proletarian struggle against the human, economic, social and cultural sacrifices imposed by this decaying society. The proletariat is the only class whose perspective is diametrically opposed to that of the bourgeoisie. More than ever, the only future for humanity lies in the hands of the working class, the only revolutionary class under capitalism. It alone, through its struggle that knows no borders, is capable of defending a potentially redeeming principle: that of proletarian internationalism. In Gaza as elsewhere, in the face of increasingly numerous and bloody imperialist confrontations, there is no camp, no belligerent to support.

HD, 25 May 2025

 

 

The ICC has recently published a Manifesto on the ecological crisis, responding to the question “Is it possible to stop the destruction of the planet” from the point of view of the working class and the future of humanity. All the ‘solutions’ to the ecological crisis proposed by the ruling class are futile... 

Capitalism is a system based on the exploitation of both the working class and of nature. From its beginning it has based itself on ravaging and destroying the natural environment, but today it is showing that its very survival is incompatible with the survival of humanity and of nature. Capitalism has been an obsolete, decadent form of society for over a hundred years. This long decline has now reached a terminal phase, a dead-end in which war, crises of overproduction and ecological destruction are acting on each other to produce a terrible whirlwind of destruction. But there is an alternative to the nightmare being realised by capitalism: the international struggle of the exploited class for the overthrow of capitalism and the construction of a communist society.

To discuss these important issues we are holding an international online public meeting on Saturday 21 June at 14:00-17:00 (BST).  The working language will be English. To participate in this meeting contact [email protected] [8].

The Manifesto has been produced in paper format for distribution at meetings and demonstrations. It can also be found at ICC Online: Manifesto on the ecological crisis [50].

Latest: given the dramatic developments in the international situation (protests in the US, bombing of Iran....) some time will be set aside to discuss these events

The celebrations for the 80th anniversary of “Victory in Europe” on May 8th, from London to Moscow, are always military parades, lest anyone think that World War 2 (like the one in 1914-18) was a war to end all wars…

No, we are told that the price of freedom is eternal vigilance; therefore, we must be armed to the teeth and always be ready to enlist for the national cause.

We are also told that May 1945 was the victory of democracy over fascism, freedom over tyranny and mass murder. It wasn’t yet Victory in Japan though: the democratic allies still had some of their own mass murdering to do in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which was to a great extent a warning to yesterday’s ally, soon to be a new totalitarian enemy, the USSR.  Thus World War 2 was immediately succeeded by preparations for World War 3: a “Cold War” which wasn’t so cold for the millions burned and massacred by endless proxy wars between the two imperialist blocs set up in the wake of the war (this was the real nature of the bloody conflicts in China, Korea, Vietnam, Africa, Middle East over the next four decades).

The “Cold War” ended with the collapse of the “eastern bloc”, of course; but, deprived of a unifying enemy, the western alliance also began to unravel right away. Some of its formal institutions, like NATO, still survive. But the new regime in the White House aims to “tell it like it is”: as Lord Palmerston once put it, there are no permanent friends or enemies: only permanent national interests. So it’s now “America First” and Trump and Co. are busy dismantling the last vestiges of the post-war world order.

In line with the recently launched propaganda war against Europe, Trump wants to rename “Victory in Europe day” “Victory Day for World War 2”, while “Armistice Day” is to become “Victory Day for World War 1”. Trump downplays the contribution of the European powers  in defeating Nazi Germany,  insisting that “We won both wars, nobody was close to us in terms of strength, bravery or military brilliance,” It’s yet another calculated kick in the teeth for the European powers, those “freeloaders”, who  could only be saved by the  benevolence of the Americans in both world wars (Trump doesn’t mention that US assistance wasn’t exactly free: the British, for example, didn’t finish paying its war debts to the US until 2006, and, more importantly, were obliged to give up their empire to make way for  the new world hegemony of the USA).

For those who reject rituals in honour of the nation state, who still adhere to the maxim that the workers have no country, it makes no difference who claims to have made the biggest contribution to the inter-imperialist butchery of the two world wars or the Cold War. For the working class, 1945 did not mark a victory, but perhaps the lowest point in a profound historic defeat. In 1917-18 workers’ revolutions in Russia, Germany and elsewhere put a stop to the war, and for a brief interlude held out the prospect of a world without competing and warring nation states. But the revolution was defeated by the combined efforts of social democracy, fascism and Stalinism.  

By contrast World War 2 ended with both imperialist camps crushing the least threat of working class opposition to the war. Following the mass strikes in the north of Italy, where slogans against the war were voiced, in 1943 the threat was sufficient for Mussolini to be deposed by his fellow fascists, and for Churchill to pause his army’s advance from the South of Italy to “let the Italians stew in their own juice”, which meant allowing Hitler’s forces to carry out the necessary repression against the workers.

Not long afterwards, “the Red Army, which had called for the Poles to rise up against the Nazis, deliberately held its forces on the outskirts of Warsaw during the uprising of August 1944” [1] This manoeuvre led to the massacre of 15,000 insurgents and more than 200,000 Polish civilians, mostly from mass executions. In the end the whole city was razed to the ground.

The proletariat in Germany itself was decimated by the massive Allied -terror bombing strategy, including the use of incendiary bombs from which no escape was possible. The bombing of Hamburg, Dresden and Berlin in particular was meant to snuff out any danger of proletarian revolt in that country.

Today, the divorce between the US and Europe, and the continuing slaughter in Ukraine, are accompanied by new demands from our rulers to be ready to offer life and labour in the interests of national defence. But they are also aware that they need to keep drumming this into our heads precisely because the working class today has shown itself far less willing to make sacrifices which can never be in its own interests; above all, it has shown it in the great international strike waves launched in May-June 1968 in France and Italy in 1969, culminating in Poland in 1980, and in the less spectacular but still profoundly significant class movements which began with the “Summer of Discontent” in Britain in 2022 and are coming into shape around the world today.

Our only victory will be the overturning of world capitalism!

Amos

 

 

In 1905, in Russia, a wave of spontaneous strikes erupted on an unprecedented scale with a spectacular outburst of workers' anger and a heightened class consciousness that heralded a new form of struggle for the proletariat: the mass strike. This upsurge of the masses was a source of inspiration for the revolutionaries of the time, like Rosa Luxemburg, Trotsky and Lenin who drew essential lessons for the class struggle from it, in their fierce fight with the reformists.

At a time when the working class had still not regained consciousness of its strength, when it woefully lacked confidence in its abilities and political potential, the 1905 revolution bore witness to its real historical power and its essential creativity: "The sudden general rising of the proletariat in January under the powerful impetus of the St. Petersburg events was outwardly a political act of the revolutionary declaration of war on absolutism. But this first general direct action reacted inwardly all the more powerfully as it for the first time awoke class feeling and class-consciousness in millions upon millions as if by an electric shock. And this awakening of class feeling expressed itself forthwith in the circumstances that the proletarian mass, counted by millions, quite suddenly and sharply came to realise how intolerable was that social and economic existence which they had patiently endured for decades in the chains of capitalism,” (Rosa Luxemburg, The Mass strike, the political party and the trade unions).

This historical experience, although mostly forgotten, remains a reference of the first order for the world proletariat, for its struggles and its revolutionary future. And this is what Lenin had already seen, when, as one of the rare people to have grasped the meaning and significance of the emergence of the first workers' councils in history, he wrote that it was the “finally found form of the dictatorship of the proletariat”. This was no more and no less than a modus operandi for the class struggle initiated at the high point of capitalism, and which would become the modus operandi throughout its phase of decline, right up to the proletarian revolution of the future. An in-depth understanding of the significance of the events of 1905, the prelude to the Red October of 1917, was indeed one of the preconditions for the seizure of power in Russia.

Today, the lack of a wider perspective for the great mass of workers, who are now returning to the struggle after more than three decades of inactivity, tends to limit their actions to their immediate circumstances. In this sense, highlighting the experience of the great struggles of the workers' movement, such as the events of 1905 in Russia, remains vital to the ongoing process of reflection, and to the to the  maturation of its consciousness, in order to connect it once more to a whole historical heritage. 1905 was not like a thunderstorm bursting out from a clear blue sky! The event could only have arisen as a result of a whole body of previous experience, in particular a whole process of subterranean maturation, of political assimilation, of slow and long reflection that followed major struggles, particularly in St Petersburg and elsewhere during the 1890s.

Today, even if the context is radically different, there is also an in-depth reflection tending to develop within the working class. After 1968 and during the various waves of struggles that followed, particularly those of the 1980s, a decisive breakthrough was needed, and unfortunately not taken: the politicisation of struggles. Today, it is in the terribly more difficult context of decomposition that the proletariat is once again engaging in a reflection that must be successful in raising its level of consciousness and its commitment, without which capitalism will engulf the whole of humanity in barbarism and destruction.

The mass strike in 1905 was not an isolated phenomenon. It was accompanied by struggles all over Europe. Today, a new generation of proletarians is also taking up the struggle all over the world, particularly since the strikes of the “Summer of Discontent” in Great Britain in 2022. This generation belongs to the long chain of fighters that has links to the first struggles of our class, with the capability of developing its consciousness and raising it to a higher level. This non-linear process, with phases of development, the ebb and flow, has characterised the struggle since the dawn of the workers' movement. By republishing the International Review's series of articles on the 1905 revolution, we hope to contribute to these efforts, which are currently being led by the working class. We want to encourage the process of in-depth maturation, on a difficult, slow and bumpy road, in the attempt to reconnect with the communist perspective, with the revolutionary struggle against a capitalist world that history has condemned.

- 1905:When the working class in Russia demonstrated its revolutionary nature [51], published by ICConline, July 2025

 - 100 years ago: the 1905 revolution in Russia [52], published in International Review n°120

 - 1905: The soviets open a new period in the history of the class struggle [53], published in  International Review n°122

 - 100 years ago: the Russian revolution of 1905 and the Soviet of workers' deputies [54], published in  International Review n°123
 - The debate in the revolutionary vanguard on the implication of the 1905 revolution [55],  published in  International Review n°125

ICC

On the 80th anniversary of the end of World War 2, we are republishing below two articles from L'Etincelle, the newspaper of the French Fraction of the Communist Left. In 1945, amid nationalist hysteria, when Europe was being ‘liberated’ from Nazism by the Allied forces, a handful of revolutionary militants kept the flame of proletarian internationalism alive by denouncing the imperialist war and all the sides in conflict: the barbarism of Nazism was not a product of ‘human folly’ but of decadent capitalism; the Allies, with their massive bombings and nuclear bombs, were no less barbaric than their adversaries; militarism remained, as it does today, the way of life of decadent capitalism.

Risking their lives, the comrades put up posters, threw leaflets onto trains leaving for the front, and issued appeals to all soldiers and workers, calling on them to show their class solidarity across frontiers, to cease fire and lay down their arms, and to unite against global capitalism.

The Manifesto distributed by the French Fraction of the Communist Left in January 1945 follows on from an extract from a report on the international situation written by the French Fraction’s successor, the Gauche Communiste de France . We first published these texts in our International Review no. 59.

50 years ago: The real causes of the Second World War [56]

The other article by L'Etincelle, dated June 1945, was first published in English in World Revolution 281

Buchenwald, Maidaneck: Macabre demagoguery [57]

We are also republishing an article from our International Review (number 66) which focuses on the many crimes of the democratic allies during the course of this war.

Let Us Remember: The massacres and crimes of the 'Great Democracies' [58]

Presentation of the leaflet on Trump's attack on immigrant workers and the responses

Faced with the round-ups of undocumented immigrants and the deployment of military forces in Los Angeles against those protesting against this new ‘exploit’ of Trump, one of our close supporters living in the United States took the initiative to write a leaflet that he proposed to distribute to those around him. The ICC fully encouraged this initiative. We believe that the document finally drafted by this comrade fully corresponds to the ICC's analysis of these events and to the necessary denunciation of the sordid game being played by the various forces of the bourgeoisie in this situation: both the cynical brutality of the police and military repression and the hypocrisy of those who denounce it in the name of ‘defending democracy’. This document provides a very valid analysis of the historical causes of the Trump administration's policy, a policy that is part of the growing chaos into which a rotten global capitalism is sinking deeper and deeper. The document also clearly highlights that the persecution of immigrants is an attack on the entire proletariat and that only this class can provide an immediate and historic response by mobilising on its own ground against the growing barbarism of the capitalist system. It is for all these reasons that we endorse this document and consider it a first statement by our organisation on the social confrontations currently taking place in Los Angeles and many other cities in the United States. The document rightly points out the current weakness of the proletariat in the United States. This is a reality, but the many strikes and mobilisations that have taken place since 2022 (massive strikes in the automotive sector in 2023; at Boeing factories and among dockworkers in around 40 ports on the East Coast in 2024, etc.)prove that the working class of this country has the capacity to wage large-scale struggles and, when the time comes, to join the struggle of the world proletariat for its emancipation.

ICC

Against Trump’s xenophobic assaults on the working class and the cries to “defend democracy”:

The working class must develop its own struggle!

 

Since assuming office in January, Donald Trump has massively escalated a campaign of terror against some of the most precarious workers in the United States, threatening to rip people away from their families and communities under the pretext of a lack of proper documentation. And he accompanies this with his trademark revolting rhetoric: a constant deluge of lies, conspiracy theories and xenophobia flows from the White House, stoking divisions in the working class whilst ICE agents menace those among us least able to fight back. Divide and rule is the name of his game. But if, as the cliché goes, the US is a “nation of immigrants,” we can add that migration has always been the condition of the working class. Workers have, since the dawn of capitalism, been forced to move from place to place according to the whims of capital - or, as is increasingly the case today, to flee the devastating wars and instability of a system rotting on its feet. So we must be absolutely clear: Trump’s campaign of terror against undocumented workers is nothing less than a direct attack on the US working class – a class of immigrants! According to the historic watchword of the workers’ movement in this country: An injury to one is an injury to all!

Trump’s proposed budget brings a withering assault on the working class

As Trump tries crudely to turn US workers against one another, his proposed budget would take a chainsaw to the class: almost $1 trillion in cuts to medicaid over the next ten years along with similar attacks on SNAP, federal student loans and federal employee pensions. And all this while allocating at least another $350 billion for the military and immigration enforcement.

And the reality is that it will not stop here. Faced with a deepening economic crisis and an ever-weakening position on the world stage, the US bourgeoisie – no matter which party is in charge - can only respond with biting attacks on the working class and increasingly irrational attempts to maintain the global reach and influence of US imperialism. Whether in Europe, the South China Sea, the Middle East or Africa, the future can only bring more and more demands for the class to sacrifice its living standards in the interests of our class enemies.

Defence of democracy and xenophobic populism – twin poisons for the working class

For the more ‘rational’ elements of the US bourgeoisie, Trump’s erratic and unpredictable international maneuverings - which are shaking up alliances once fundamental US imperialist strategy - are a serious concern. The fact that he has been able to secure much greater support from the military and intelligence services threatens two bulwarks against his influence during his first term. Above all however, Trump’s authoritarian tendencies provide the perfect opportunity to suffocate in the noxious fumes of the call to “defend democracy” any independent working class response to his vicious assaults.

On the international level, democracy has long been the cry of US imperialism as justification for any and all adventures – from the First World War to Iraq and Ukraine. And of course, the same Israeli regime that targets hospitals, universities and children in its genocidal campaign in Gaza declares itself the “only democracy in the Middle East” – with the US backing it as such. Similarly, the US portrays its military interventions as having a humanitarian purpose – for instance to protect the rights of Kurds in Iraq, or women in Afghanistan. But for the liberal bourgeoisie this all goes out the window when it comes to the actions of the US or an ally like Israel. Domestically, despite all the false indignation of the Democratic Party, Obama and Biden are only just behind Trump in numbers of people deported – for this faction of the bourgeoisie too, it is important to ensure the constant terrorization of this sector of the population so that it remains most easily exploitable. Hence the Los Angeles mayor exclaiming first of all about the impact of mass deportations on the local economy. Finally, today the Democrats campaign for a “defense of democracy” against the authoritarianism of Trump.

This campaign is tailor-made to ensure that any opposition to Trump’s brutal cuts and militarized immigration enforcement is expressed only by workers as individual citizen voters taking sides in internal conflicts of the ruling class – and not as a class acting independently from, and militantly opposed to, all bourgeois parties. It is illustrative that those leading the charge for the Democrats against Trump are individuals like Gavin Newsom – who seeks the presidency for himself – and those of the ‘socialist’ left wing of the party who claim to ‘represent’ the working class. Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and others of their ilk - including those organizations who place themselves even further left: the DSA, PSL, CPUSA, RCA etc., which may claim to oppose this system but in reality present programs for its management and draw workers towards their dead end and sterile actions - are only at the forefront of the drive to smother workers’ struggle in the crib.

The working class should not forget that at the end of the day, although Trump is maybe the most repulsive representative of the bourgeoisie, what even the most left wing elements of the ruling class fear the most is their class enemy. And when the time comes, history shows that they will stand alongside their class brothers and shoot to kill for the sake of this dying system.

Trump is the product of a system rotten to the core

It is more than one hundred years since capitalism fulfilled its goal of dividing up the entire world into national markets and entered into its phase of decline. Ever since then, expansion for one national bourgeoisie can only come at the expense of another. Near constant imperialist war has been the consequence. But after a century of decline, this system and its ruling class are growing increasingly senile. The vile rhetoric of xenophobic nationalism, the demonization of immigrants, racial minorities, gay and trans people – long held tactics of a class determined to survive at all costs by dividing up its class enemy – have taken root with a vengeance across the world. And alongside them the most irrational conspiracy theories have found traction among even the leading representatives of the bourgeoisie. Finally, the world stage, once well policed by the US and USSR, has become highly chaotic. Thus the phenomena that are maybe most apparent in the US are not limited to it. The rise of Trumpist populism is not a blip or the result of the actions of a particularly repulsive individual – Trump is above all the product of a system in decline and a representative of a class unable to offer any perspective for humanity.

Only the working class has an answer!

The present wave of demonstrations sweeping this country have so far taken place on the terrain of the defense of democracy, or with the framing of the specific defense of the Hispanic population – as if the whole working class is not under attack! If things stay how they are, we can only expect the movement to peter out, with all energies funneled towards the political campaigns of the Democratic Party and the organizations of the far-left of the bourgeoisie.

Only the working class, united against all national, racial and gender divisions, is capable of bringing this barbaric system down. That is why, against the crushing attacks of the Trump administration, in the face of this campaign to line up behind the Democrats or their left wing accomplices in order to ‘defend democracy’ against him, and in light of the credible threat that capitalism will – through imperialist war, ecological destruction or social disintegration – destroy humanity, the only way forward is a united response of the working class independent from all bourgeois influences. The working class must fight back on its own terrain - beginning with the struggle for its basic economic interests and the expression of international solidarity with all sections of the class. It has been many years since the class in the US truly flexed its muscles and it will take a long time for it to find its feet. That is why it is essential that individuals who understand this burning necessity today must come together wherever possible, discuss the issues at hand, and integrate the lessons of past combats in order to prepare for these struggles of the future.

For the international development of the class struggle against all false divisions!

Against this rotten system that can only kill and destroy: the working class has another world to offer!

A sympathizer of the International Communist Current (ICC)

June 13th 2025

For information on upcoming online and in person public meetings to discuss these points and more, see the ICC website: en.internationalism.org From the rest of the world use: [email protected] [8]

 

 

On 7 May, apparently in response to an attack that had killed 28 people in Kashmir a few weeks earlier, the Indian army launched an initial attack on Pakistani territory aimed at destroying the bases of the organisations accused of carrying out the attack. The following three days saw a succession of counter-attacks and new waves of bombardments between India and Pakistan, marking the most intense confrontation between the two countries for decades. A new anguish gripped the world's population, adding to the ravages of the war in Ukraine (almost a million soldiers dead and wounded), the appalling massacres in Gaza, and a myriad of conflicts, each more barbaric than the last, in Sudan (more than 9 million displaced), Yemen, Congo, Syria, etc. A new eruption of barbarity in a world plagued by war and carnage!

This military confrontation is all the more devastating in that it involves two overpopulated, over-militarised nations (1.2 million soldiers for India, 500,000 for Pakistan) with lethal arsenals including nuclear weapons on both sides. It is taking place in a region of the world of crucial strategic importance, where the United States is trying to ‘clip the wings’ of its main challenger, China. But even more than the ‘explosive charge’ contained in this conflict, it is the context in which it is taking place that is the most dangerous: that of accelerating imperialist chaos, the rise of warmongering and irrationality, and the accentuation of the tendency towards ‘every man for himself’[1].

A conflict intensified by the explosion of ‘every man for himself’

Pakistan and India certainly have a long history of confrontation, linked to the dissolution of British India, when the two states were born in a bloodbath (war of 1947-1948, millions displaced and 1 million dead). Since then, there has been a succession of wars and skirmishes: in 1965 when Pakistan wanted to precipitate the independence of Kashmir from India, in 1971 when India pushed for the independence of East Pakistan (now Bangladesh), in 1999 during the ‘Kargil war’, in 2001 with the assault on the Indian parliament by a Pakistan-sponsored terrorist group, etc.

Initially, the confrontations took place within the framework of the iron discipline imposed by the antagonistic imperialist blocs of the Cold War, the Western bloc and the bloc dominated by the USSR. Since the 1990s, however, we have seen the crumbling of this bloc discipline, with each national bourgeoisie resolving its conflicts with other national bourgeoisies on its own, resorting to increasingly bloody and irrational, and therefore potentially highly dangerous, conflicts. This is particularly true of the current conflict between India and Pakistan:

- Since the early 1990s, India and Pakistan have been developing their nuclear arsenals, with each country now possessing around 170 nuclear warheads.

- In the 21st century, communal and religious tensions have intensified. Bloody massacres perpetrated by radical Pakistani Islamist groups have multiplied against Indian civilians and soldiers (2001 in India, 2019 and 2025 in Kashmir). Modi's nationalist and populist Indian government revoked Kashmir's constitutional autonomy and placed it under the direct authority of the central government. This has resulted in fierce repression of the Kashmiris and heavy pressure on the Muslim minority in India.

- In the recent clashes, unlike previous conflicts which were largely confined to the disputed region of Kashmir, Indian retaliation hit three air bases in the heart of Pakistan (Nur Khan near Rawalpindi, Murid and Rafiqui). Unlike previous bombings of areas harbouring Islamist militias operating in Kashmir, this time they targeted vital centres of the Pakistani army (Nur Khan is home to the Pakistani army headquarters and the nuclear response control centre), using drones, fighter jets and cruise missiles.

The risk of escalation to a level of catastrophic destruction is therefore obvious, as one geostrategic expert in the region points out: “As armies attack a greater number of targets with an ever-expanding arsenal of new weapons, the possibility of catastrophe soars. Whatever the rationality of the Indian and Pakistani leaders, the risk of miscalculation or misunderstanding, in the absence of reliable crisis communication channels, makes any future outbreak of violence more dangerous”[2].

In the current phase of accelerating capitalist decomposition, war is becoming increasingly irrational and barbaric, as the Modi government's intention to use natural resources as a weapon of war further demonstrates: “India has taken the unprecedented step of unilaterally suspending the Indus Treaty, an agreement negotiated by the World Bank in 1960 to manage the flow of water essential for hydropower, irrigation and agriculture in Pakistan. The treaty had withstood several wars and militarised conflicts between the two countries, but not any more”. [3]

In the end, all parties involved will be the losers without any economic or strategic gain or advantage, while the most irresponsible bourgeois factions are strengthened: this war further strengthens the Pakistani generals, who talk of military victory and call for an increasingly aggressive response towards India, while brutally repressing any protest movement. The same is true in India, where Modi is using the conflict with Pakistan as an alibi to revive nationalist hysteria and anti-Muslim propaganda. This situation is not unique. It is the same as what we see with Putin in Russia or with the megalomaniac delusions of the Netanyahu faction in Israel.

Whether the Indian government underestimated Pakistan's capacity to react (increasingly and better armed by China) or whether it wanted to make a show of force to assert its military capabilities in the face of Pakistan, China and the Americans is a matter of conjecture. What we can predict without any doubt, however, is that this macabre game of imperialist ambitions will intensify and that the fragile ceasefire ‘negotiated’ by the US administration (an intervention denied by India) will not withstand the dominant trend towards war and chaos into which capitalism is sinking. For it is not the ruling scoundrels in India and Pakistan who are ultimately responsible for the proliferation and aggravation of imperialist massacres: the primary cause of the massacres underway and still to come is the rotting capitalist ‘order’.

Down with the nationalist campaigns!

The Indian and Pakistani bourgeoisies are calling on workers to rally to the national flag in defence of ‘the outraged honour of the fatherland’. What criminal hypocrisy!

In the war in Ukraine, all the belligerents are sacrificing hundreds of thousands of human beings for the conquest of a few miserable kilometers of land ravaged by fighting. In the Middle East, all the warring factions are using terror to reduce a whole region to ruins and massacre the population in the most barbaric ways.

In Pakistan itself, entire regions are being rendered uninhabitable by internal armed conflicts and massive flooding, while ethnic and religious conflicts are tearing India apart. As capitalism, under the effect of its own contradictions, sinks ineluctably into chaos, all the factions of the exploiting class throughout the world have nothing left to offer but the sacrifice of proletarians to their sordid and barbaric imperialist ambitions. And with the prospect of a confrontation between the atomic powers of India and Pakistan, as well as threats against Iran's nuclear programme or the bombing of the Zaporiya nuclear power station, the risk of a major nuclear accident has considerably increased.

There is only one alternative: the development of proletarian internationalism, the refusal to fight against our class brothers and sisters. All the workers of the world have the same interest. We are the main victims of war, sent to the front as cannon fodder or as hostages overexploited to the point of exhaustion to pay for an arms build-up that is increasing throughout the world.

The proletariat does not yet have the strength to prevent the proliferation of wars, but it can acquire it through its struggles against the capitalist attacks on its living conditions. Such a struggle is taking place in many countries and in these struggles, workers are tending to recognise themselves as a single class. They are gradually realising that they all have the same enemies: the exploiters, whatever their colour, religion or nationality.

 

Valerio, 31 May 2025

 

For several days now, Israel has been waging another deadly offensive against Iran – an offensive that has been met by a deluge of missiles from the Islamic Republic which, despite Israel's military superiority, has caused a great deal of damage and a number of casualties. For the moment, the fog of war propaganda makes it impossible to assess the scale of the massacre, but a real fire storm is raining down from both sides: while Iran is aiming indiscriminately at the cities of the Israeli state and a few symbolic sites,  the IDF seems to have mainly targeted the Iranian nuclear installations likely to produce atomic weapons, but also scientific personnel and those in charge of the nuclear programme, as well as the military and religious leaders likely to oversee the response. This ‘self-defence’ operation (according to Trump) has caused at least several hundred civilian casualties in Iran. The aim of decapitating the Iranian strike force and breaking up its response speaks volumes about Israel's desire to go much further than it did in April 2024 when the IDF targeted the Iranian consulate in Damascus to eliminate several military leaders, and the following September with the assassination of Hezbollah secretary-general Hassan Nasrallah. Netanyahu's government barely conceals its desire to see the collapse of the Mullahs' regime and to plunge its great regional rival into chaos.

Until now, Iran has tried to respond to provocations without really being able to impact Israel directly, but has been increasing the pressure through the terrorist organisations it sponsors (Houthis, Hezbollah, etc.) and by supporting Russia in the Ukrainian conflict. Faced with the risk of destabilisation, or even the collapse of their regime, the “Revolutionary Guards” have no choice but to opt for a headlong flight into chaos and barbarism. Even if it’s unable to defeat the Israeli state, the Islamic Republic undoubtedly has the means to drag the entire region down with it.

The real culprit in wars is capitalism!

This conflict is not an ‘isolated incident’, nor is it the product of the murderous ‘madness’ of the Israeli far right or the ‘fanaticism’ of the Mullahs: it is the expression of a capitalist system at the end of its tether. After each conflict, each massacre, the press and politicians accuse this or that state, this or that leader: ‘it's Putin's madness’,  ‘it's Netanyahu's messianic delusions’, ‘No, the  barbarity of Hamas’, ‘American imperialism’, ‘France's neo-colonialism’, ‘Chinese expansionism’... Admittedly, all these states, large or small, all these leaders, left or right, extremist or ’democratic’, demonstrate boundless barbarity and chilling cynicism. But they are all acting within a system in crisis and without a future, where the competition of each against all is pushing every nation to intervene on the international stage with increasing savagery. Today, with this new open war, we can only note that there has been a very serious additional step, the acceleration of the dynamics of militarism and chaos. A chaos that is increasingly corroding the world, with conflicts that are becoming entrenched, a plunge into endless quagmires, resulting in heaps of dead bodies and large-scale destruction. In the Middle East, Ukraine, Africa and elsewhere, uncontrollable conflicts are multiplying and widening, with no hope of lasting peace, and no belligerent able to impose ‘order’ or even profit from such massacres. In Ukraine, the belligerents are absurdly sacrificing tens of thousands of lives for a square meter of ruins, hoping to appear in a position of strength during hypothetical negotiations. In Sudan, the ‘forgotten’ war remains as devastating as ever, with over 150,000 dead and more than 13 million displaced in just two years. The temporary ceasefire between India and Pakistan following the violent confrontations of recent weeks does little to reassure anyone about the danger of tensions between these two nuclear powers. In Yemen, the war waged by the Houthi rebels on their own soil and in the Red Sea, and the Israeli, Saudi and American responses, have resulted in tens of thousands of deaths and a huge humanitarian disaster. The uncontrollable destabilisation of entire regions, which can also be seen in Lebanon, Syria, Libya, throughout sub-Saharan Africa and in the gang wars in Haiti, is getting worse by the day.

The Middle East is caught up in a downward spiral where more and more players are entering the arena to try to impose their sordid interests: on the rotten soil of the historic Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the Hamas attack of October 2023 (at the very least supported by Iran, if not directly piloted by it) has spawned a series of conflicts setting more and more countries in the region ablaze: Lebanon, Yemen, a timely attack by Islamist rebels in Syria, operations by Turkey on its border... And now it's Iran's turn, hitherto active behind the scenes, to enter the scene for good!

The IDF has (potentially) succeeded in decapitating Iran's nuclear programme; and many chancelleries, starting with Washington, are congratulating themselves on the success of Operation Rising Lion. But this absurd barbarity of war will ultimately benefit no-one! Israel has pulled off a coup, but at what price? Not only is Netanyahu's irresponsible scorched-earth policy accelerating Israel's discredit and isolation on the international stage, it is also exposing his country to an even more chaotic environment. Iran is obliged to retaliate, even if this exposes it to a militarily superior enemy. This is a very serious situation that could even lead to the military and political collapse of a country that shares borders with Iraq, Kuwait, Pakistan and Afghanistan. With its oil reserves and control over the strategic Strait of Hormuz, Iran is also a major global economic player. And the Islamic Republic will not hesitate to play with all the risks of extending and intensifying the chaos if it feels in danger. What's more, other imperialist sharks such as Turkey, Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states are not to be outdone, and are also in the front row in this powder keg, trying not to calm the situation but to undermine one competitor or another. Pandora's Box continues to spit out its noxious contents! The war can only drag on and escalate the confrontation to a much higher level, even if Netanyahu's desire to see the collapse of the Mullahs' regime is achieved quickly.

Faced with imperialist war, the only side to choose is the camp of the proletarian revolution!

Pacifist ‘goodwill’ will do nothing: capitalism is war! The bourgeoisie is incapable of stopping this infernal machine. Only the proletarian revolution, by overthrowing the power of the bourgeoisie everywhere on the planet, can free humanity from this increasingly deadly and omnipresent threat.

But the road to revolution is still long, very long indeed. As we have shown in our press since 2022, the proletariat is now regaining its fighting spirit and gradually beginning to recover its strength and class identity. Very small minorities within it are seeking to return to revolutionary positions. But although the proletariat holds the keys to history, it does not yet have the strength or the consciousness to oppose war as a class, to oppose the barbaric war of capitalism with its own perspective of the revolutionary transformation of society.

The bourgeoisie is perfectly aware of these weaknesses and is mobilising its whole ideological arsenal to prevent the maturing of class consciousness. Proletarians the world over must learn to be wary of the rhetoric of the bourgeoisie, in particular its left and extreme left wing(Trotskyists, in particular), designed to legitimise, in a supposedly critical way, the policy of one imperialist camp or the other. This is the meaning of the subtle distinction made by certain varieties of Trotskyism between aggressors and aggressed: “Iran has every right to retaliate against Israel - and we must oppose Israel's brutal attack on the Iranian people”[1]. The same deliberate mystification is reflected in the calls for the leaders of other countries to sever ties with Israel: "Down with Israel's aggression against Iran! [...] Macron, enough hypocrisy! Break all diplomatic, military, economic and commercial ties with Israel immediately"[2]. Behind their supposedly revolutionary language, all these professional mystifiers have been selling us their ideological junk for months with the ‘defence of the Palestinian people’, i.e. support for Palestinian nationalism led by Hamas, a bourgeois clique of the worst kind largely supported and financed by Iran. Now that the Mullahs have to confront Israel more directly, the Trotskyists are plunging a little deeper into the mire (if that were still possible) by calling on the working class to support the Islamic Republic (sorry!... ‘the Iranian people’)!

Faced with the rotting dynamics of capitalism, all nations, whether powerful or weak, have nothing left to offer but war and misery. Whether in the name of ‘international law’, ‘national liberation struggles’ or the ‘fight against imperialism’, all these bourgeois states and parties, which seek to make people believe that a solution of ‘peace’ exists within capitalism, which urge support for the so-called ‘victims of aggression’, are among the most dangerous enemies of the working class whose only aim is to divert it from its historic struggle.

For today, it is through the struggle of the working class against the generalised degradation of its living and working conditions, a consequence of the historic crisis of capitalism and the considerable increase in military budgets, that the working class will be able to develop and politicise its struggle for the overthrow of capitalism and the establishment of a society without nations, without war and without exploitation.

Stopio, 17 June 2025

[1] “Key questions about Israel’s escalation of war in Iran”, Socialist Workers Party (June 2025).

ICC Introduction

We are publishing two contributions from participants in our 5 April 2025 international online public meeting of the ICC, and on the April 26 meeting in London on the same question, on tensions within the American bourgeoisie, both of which aim to continue and deepen the debate initiated at the meetings.

The contribution of MH shows that he agrees with the ICC on a number of points: the different manifestations of decomposition, such as the progressive disintegration of capitalist society, the development of political populism, the erosion of the ability of the bourgeoisie to control the political and social situation, the  re-election of Trump as a powerful factor in the acceleration of capitalism’s trajectory towards full barbarism, and the false bourgeois alternatives of anti-populism, anti-fascism and the defence of democracy.

The comrade has the merit of rightly criticising the formulation “crushing defeat for the American bourgeoisie” in the article “Neither populism nor bourgeois democracy ... The only real alternative is the worldwide development of class struggle against all factions of the bourgeoisie”.  This prompted the ICC to change the phrase to “resounding failure for the more 'responsible' faction of the US bourgeoisie".

This said, in his contribution the comrade emphasises in particular “the effects of the capitalist counter-offensive launched at the start of the 1980s” or that “the American bourgeoisie under Trump has launched a wave of attacks on working class conditions”. What does the comrade want to demonstrate with this? That the bourgeoisie is still firmly in the saddle and that the populist policy does not substantially affect its capacity to maintain power as a ruling class? Or that the proletarian struggle, despite signs of recovery, is still very weak?

Baboon criticises the contribution of MH at the meeting for tending “to underestimate the threat of populism, the tendency to the loss of control of the political apparatus” in the US. And Baboon is right, because the essential question in the life of the US bourgeoisie is indeed the loss of control over its political game, expressed in a revolt against the political elite, in populism more and more dominating and even winning national elections, in a general tendency to look for scapegoats, in the demand for the legalisation of violence against certain minorities, etc.

MH also says that he is not in agreement with the ICC, which tends “to overemphasise the weakness of the bourgeoisie vis-à-vis the working class today”. He writes that in order to make a correct analysis of the strength or weakness of the bourgeoisie we should start from “the key question for marxists [which] is:  how weak or strong is the bourgeoisie relative to the proletariat, ie. what is the balance of power between the classes?”

But the comrade is mistaken here, because when the ICC speaks about a weakening of the bourgeoisie it doesn’t say that its dominance as a ruling class is at stake. When the ICC says that there is a weakening of the bourgeoisie it doesn’t mean a weakness in relation to the proletariat but a weakness in its ability to respond to the needs for the management of its own political system, linked to the rotting of capitalism. In this case the argument does not hold, for even if the working class is weak, this does not exclude the bourgeoisie facing major difficulties in the control of its political apparatus. Moreover, historical experience has shown that even when weakened, the ruling class can effectively gang up against the proletarian struggle, as we saw, for example, during the repression of the Paris Commune in 1871. Thus, a weakness of the bourgeoisie does not necessarily or automatically imply a strengthening of the proletariat.

The conception of the balance of power between the classes is not the same question as the impact of the period of decomposition on the phenomenon of the loss of control by the bourgeoisie, and in this case it leads the comrade to the wrong conclusion that the latter is still strong enough to play out its Machiavellian skills and to “make use of the Trump faction to advance its interests”.  

In his reply Baboon shows why this is not the case, by giving examples of the existing disarray in the ruling class in the US, which does certainly not point to a “use of the Trump fraction to advance its interests”. The possibility of the US bourgeoisie to make use of Trump’s policy is very limited and certainly secondary to the dominant general erosion of its means to exercise its power. As Baboon puts it, “The bewilderment and confusion of the ruling class has been all the more profound” in the US bourgeoisie.

On the international level the US leadership has been in decline for years, not able to counter the growing chaos in the world. This is precisely the reason why Trump has decided to drastically change the US foreign policy, in order to “Make America Great Again”. But Trump will certainly not be able to redress the authority of the US in the world, on the contrary.

On the national level the Trump administration is heading towards a conflict with more and more parts of the state institutions (the educational world, some governors, universities, trade unions, jurisdiction, etc.) while “uncertainty over Trump's tariffs paralyzes U.S. businesses” (New York Times), and twelve U.S. states filed a lawsuit in the U.S. Court of International Trade, seeking to stop Trump’s tariffs.

All in all, despite some points of agreement with the ICC’s position, MH still underestimates the degree of irrationality that has taken hold of the US bourgeoisie and which is expressed by various measures taken by Donald Trump. Whether in domestic or foreign policy, his approach lacks any consistency and is completely unpredictable, which only increases uncertainty and instability.

The ICC

 

Contribution by MH

A response to disagreements at recent ICC meetings

At recent ICC online meetings some disagreements have been expressed about the extent to which Trump‘s re-election represents a ‘defeat’ for the American bourgeoisie, and what this tells us about the balance of power between the classes today.

At the January meeting, while agreeing with the overall perspectives, I criticised an ICC article that described Trump’s re-election as a “crushing defeat for the American bourgeoisie.” An ICC sympathiser, ‘Baboon’, disagreed, insisting that Trump’s re-election was indeed a “crushing defeat”, and expanded on this view in comments after the March meeting:

“There’s no Machiavellianism here, no strategy or plan from the bourgeoisie as has been suggested in previous meetings and particularly by MH. 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…”.

Just to be clear, I have never argued that Trump’s re-election was all the result of a Machiavellian plot by the American bourgeoisie, and I don’t think anyone else has either. I stated my own position quite clearly at the January meeting:

“The election of Trump is above all a step in capitalism’s regression into barbarism and it will be used by the American bourgeoisie as part of its continued and increasingly desperate attempt to brutally reassert its global hegemony.

“The growth of political populism today is a proof of the fact that the bourgeoisie has no more realistic options to manage the worsening crisis of its system (…) Populism is an expression of the decomposition of the bourgeois democratic process and of the mystifications around it. Fundamentally this is because, in the absence of a successful proletarian revolution, capitalism’s descent or epoch of decadence has now lasted for more than more than 100 years, and its open crisis for more than 50 years.

“More specifically it is an expression of the destruction of social cohesion, which was deliberately used by the bourgeoisie as a weapon against the working class as part of its counter-offensive from the 1980s (…) Today we are seeing the progressive disintegration of capitalist society, with the growth of authoritarian and even proto-fascist tendencies in the advanced capitalist countries.”

The ability of the bourgeoisie to control the political and social situation is eroding in front of our eyes – even in the most advanced centres of the system; the basic point I was trying to make in my interventions was that the bourgeoisie is still the ruling class, and as such still holds the initiative, which is why Trump’s re-election cannot be described as a “crushing defeat for the American bourgeoisie.”

Perhaps we need to remind ourselves what it means to say the bourgeoisie is a Machiavellian class? Above it is pragmatic; faced with a problem or threat, it will do what it has always done; adapt and manoeuvre, and attempt to direct and control change in such a way as to preserve its hegemony. Today, unable to prevent the rise of political populism due to the decay of its own system, the US bourgeoisie is forced to make use of the Trump faction to advance its interests, while attempting to put into place longer-term political options.

Baboon criticises me for underestimating the political weakness of the bourgeoisie (although he admits this weakness cannot be exploited by the proletariat). This seems a rather odd accusation to make; surely the worst mistake we can make today is to underestimate the strength of the bourgeoisie or the lengths it is prepared to go to preserve its power and privileges? The key question for marxists is: how weak or strong is the bourgeoisie relative to the proletariat; ie. what is the balance of power between the classes? And, as the ICC itself stated at its 23rd Congress, “in the balance of forces between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, it is always the ruling class that is on the offensive, except in a revolutionary situation”.

In this context, we need to highlight the fact that the American bourgeoisie under Trump has launched a wave of attacks on working class conditions, including the mass firing of federal workers, giving more powers to employers and tightening labour discipline; nor should we ignore the effects of the deliberately provoked climate of fear and repression aimed particularly at immigrant workers (which makes little sense from a capitalist perspective); the promotion and strengthening of racist and far right tendencies and ideologies, and the scapegoating of minorities, which can only make it harder for the proletariat to develop its class solidarity and fight back, while at the same time the bourgeoisie actively peddles its false alternatives of anti-populism, anti-fascism and the defence of democracy…

So where does Baboon’s emphasis on the political weakness of the bourgeoisie today come from? The ICC defends the position that political populism is a product of what it calls ‘decomposition’, which is based on the idea that a “stalemate between the classes” has existed since 1989. Is there something about the logic of this position that apparently leads its defenders to overemphasise the weakness of the bourgeoisie vis-à-vis the working class today? The problem for me is that the ICC’s analysis of a ‘stalemate’ either does not recognise, or underestimates the effects of, the capitalist counter-offensive launched at the start of the 1980s and the serious defeat experienced by the working class as a direct result; and the role of the breakdown of attempts at national autarky in creating a temporary breathing space for the capitalist system from the 1990s.

The ICC does appear to recognise there are issues here, because after my criticism at the March meeting it amended the article in question to read that Trump’s re-election represents a "resounding failure for the more 'responsible' faction of the US bourgeoisie". And in its own introduction to Baboon’s comments, while “fully agreeing” with the comrade’s contribution (!), it does at least warn that “the American bourgeoisie is not merely a victim of decomposition.”   

Today, despite signs of a recovery of class struggle, the proletariat remains in a very difficult and dangerous situation – I think we’re all agreed on that. Due to the weight of the bourgeoisie in the world’s most powerful capitalist state, Trump’s re-election is a powerful factor in the acceleration of capitalism’s trajectory towards full barbarism, which only underlines the fact that time is not on the side of the proletariat. The disagreement here is about the balance of power between the classes in this period – and the method we use to assess it. This discussion should continue, on the basis of views actually expressed.

MH, April 2025

 

Contribution by Baboon

ICC Meeting April 26: Response to the positions of MH on Trump and decomposition

I’d like to make some points around the Trump presidency and the question of decomposition from the positions of a comrade, MH, expressed at the above-mentioned meeting.

Is Trump being used by the bourgeoisie or is his election an expression of the latter’s loss of control?

For the second time in a couple of months comrade MH publicly welcomed what he called the ICC’s modification of its position on the consequences of the Trump presidency. Fundamentally, the ICC sees the latter as an expression of the rise of populism, the loss of control of the bourgeoisie and, because of the central position of US imperialism, a major blow to the global economic, military and social order of capitalism; i.e. a further dramatic twist in its decomposition. I think that MH agrees with the concept of capitalism’s final stage of decomposition but his understanding of the ICC’s position leaves some confusion. For MH the American ruling class, through its innate Machiavellianism, is using the Trump faction in order to reinforce its own position. This immediately tends to underestimate the threat of populism, the tendency to the loss of control of the political apparatus, the weakening of the US state and the further overturning and shattering of the world order therefrom. According to MH the idea of the ICC that Trump’s election was a disaster for the ruling class and capitalist order, has been “modified later to a blow to the intelligent faction”[1]. I don’t really see how this helps MH’s argument but the clear point here is that the ICC has not modified or altered its position one iota. Rather than expressing the “continuity” of Trump with the policies of the ruling class, as some elements of the Communist Left suggest, the ICC insists on the break with “order” that is even more significant and from the same dynamics – capitalist decomposition – that brought down the Eastern Bloc in 1989/90. The greater significance here lies in the weight of the global consequences from the undermining of US imperialism.

Generally speaking the ruling class underestimated Trump and did not believe that his second term would see him pursue his programme which was clearly laid-out in his adoption of the Heritage Foundation’s populist “Project 2025”[2] I clearly remember the disorientation and denial of the ruling class in reaction to the implosion of Russian imperialism in 1989 (until it manoeuvred to turn this into a major weapon against the working class with its campaign around the “death of communism”). Commensurate with the greater consequences to world order from the Trump election, the bewilderment and confusion of the ruling class has been all the more profound.  Typical of this is the Left political commentator Ian Dunt (“I” newspaper, 29.4.25) who initially thought Trump 2 would be just like his first term of office, but is now labelling him a “fascist”  and “imperialist” after initially describing him as an “isolationist”. And like his cohort and the rest of the left, Dunt campaigns for the need to “stand by democracy” in order to thwart Trumpism and the threat of fascism.

“Project 2025”, a programme of economic and political libertarian lunacy, was initially championed by British Prime Minister Liz Truss in her 44-day tenure in September/October 2022. It took dramatic action from the World Bank, the IMF, the Federal Reserve, the Bank of England and the US State Department – what the populists call “the deep state” - to unceremoniously oust her and her clique from power. But Trump is not Truss and although these august organisations have tried to rein in Trump through various mechanisms – and have had some success – Trump controls the State Department and these organs[3] that have served capitalism throughout decadence well have undoubtedly been weakened along with many other institutions for the management of capitalism’s decline.

Trump and his programme does not represent a coherent political response by the bourgeoisie and the latter is not using Trump as his deranged policies have overturned the world order and significantly deepened political and economic chaos at the global level. The (ICC) meeting pointed to the analysis of the Wall Street Journal and its criticism of the Trump regime and we can add other criticisms from respected economists. We haven’t heard much from the intelligence services and we won’t, but these various services must be tearing their hair out. These organs are not just spies but the absolute guardians of national defence, national integrity and national interest. They need solid agreements, protocols and pacts which are clear frameworks to work in including for the sharing of sensitive information. But, like the weakening, undermining and dismantling of the economic structures and bodies built up over decadence in order to cope with the permanent crisis of capitalism, the weakening of the frameworks for the intelligence services represents further problems for the bourgeoisie. These factors also express how the decomposition of capitalism affects and weighs on the structures of state capitalism.

Trump’s continual processes with the US courts, win or lose, will also feed and maintain the “anti-Trump”, “anti-Fascist” movement globally, which is trying to con the working class with their support for nationalism (Canada for example) and democracy supported by the left-wing of capitalism[4].

 

Baboon. 30.4.25

 

ICC footnotes:

The ICC fully supports this statement and appeals for its widest possible discussion and distribution.

 

While the flames of war raged on all fronts, Trump launched his election campaign with great fanfare, dressed in the guise of a peace-seeker. He promised to end the war in Ukraine within 24 hours, resolve the Gaza massacre, and present himself as a champion of peace. He even claimed he was worthy of the Nobel Peace Prize. However, Trump’s return to power did not bring an end to the wars; on the contrary, it escalated military tensions. The war in Ukraine continues unabated, Gaza has become the site of a full-scale genocide, and, simultaneously, military tensions in Africa, conflict between India and Pakistan, and an all-out war between Israel and Iran have all flared up. Today, war is no longer merely a military occurrence; more and more, it reflects the nature of capitalism in its barbaric age and the way of life that flows from it.

The war between Iran and Israel is not the result of decisions made by warmongering leaders but it is the expression of the capitalist system today. Regardless of the political façade a state adopts—be it democratic or dictatorial, peace-seeking or openly militaristic—they all share one fundamental trait: sacrificing the working class as cannon fodder in imperialist wars. Without exception, they are all war criminals.

Contrary to the deceptive narrative of the “democratic” gangsters—who claim that Israel’s “precision” strikes are merely aimed at neutralising Iran’s nuclear programme or eliminating political and military commanders of the Islamic Republic—the reality is quite different. In practice, both sides have targeted civilian infrastructure, including factories, refineries, residential areas, workplaces, and even hospitals. The truth is this: both parties are complicit in committing war crimes.

All the gangster Democrats, led by the criminal Trump, speak with the language of bandits and even boast about their crimes. Trump himself proudly declares: “The United States makes the best and most lethal military equipment anywhere in the world, BY FAR, and that Israel has a lot of it, with much more to come – And they know how to use it.”

During the First World War, Rosa Luxemburg believed that in order to normalise war crimes, actual violence must be accompanied by a kind of savagery in thoughts and feelings—such that not only does a bloodbath become accepted as normal, but it is also regarded as a source of pride. Today, the criminal Trump clearly embodies this historical analysis. He proudly spoke of the greater lethality and destructiveness of American military equipment and emphasised that Friday was a “great day” for Israel because “great American equipment” was used. This warmonger openly stated that he has no concerns about the outbreak of a regional war following Israel’s attacks. In other words, he not only welcomes war but also sees it as a stage to demonstrate America’s technological power and superiority.

Unfortunately, the Israeli working class, compared to their class brothers and sisters in Iran, has been far more deeply influenced by nationalism and toxic religion, which has allowed the Israeli bourgeoisie to easily mobilise the working class for war. In contrast, despite all setbacks, the Iranian working class is in a far stronger position in terms of struggle compared to their counterparts in Israel—especially considering that one of the most militant proletarian battalions in the Middle East belongs to Iran, with a proud record of historic battles. This war could have a negative and destructive impact on the Iranian working class and hinder not only the continuation but also the advancement of their struggles to higher levels.

Capitalism imposes imperialist wars on humanity because it does not face a serious and organised class-based response from the global working class. But this does not eliminate, on the contrary, the responsibility of internationalists and particularly of the communist left to face this reality: to consistently defend proletarian internationalism, to expose the imperialist nature of these wars, and to clarify their material and class foundations in front of the working class.

It must be declared loudly and clearly: all of these conflicts are against the interests of the working class. It must be stated plainly that the consequences of the war between Iran and Israel will not be confined to the Middle East, for capitalism is a global system, and its destructive impact will weigh heavily on the shoulders of workers across the world. Most importantly, it must be emphasised that the real enemy is at home—whether in Tehran, Tel Aviv, Washington, London, Berlin, Paris, or anywhere else where capital, the state, and the military are aligned against the working class.

History has shown that the only force capable of ending the bourgeoisie’s machinery of slaughter—war—is the working class. It was the threat of revolution in Germany during the First World War that compelled the bourgeoisie to sign the armistice. This has always been the case: war criminals retreat only in the shadow of proletarian threat, merely to prepare themselves for the class war against the proletariat. Although the global working class is not currently in such a position, the development of the class struggle can open up that horizon for the proletariat.

War has become a way of life for capitalism in the age of imperialism. Capitalism cannot offer a future; it merely spreads brutality and barbarism to ever more regions. It is an illusion to expect warmongers to bring an end to war. The peace offered by warmongers can only ever be an interlude within a war-driven capitalism. From within capitalist peace, only the flames of future wars can emerge.

Only the class war of the workers can offer an alternative to the barbarism of capitalism—because the proletariat has no nation to defend, and its struggle must transcend national borders and develop on an international scale. Only the global working class, by turning the capitalist war into a war against capitalism and ultimately overthrowing it on a global level, can eliminate the material basis of imperialist wars and bring lasting peace to humanity.

Workers have no country!

Down with the imperialist war!

Long live the war between the classes!

Intransigent defence of internationalism everywhere!

Internationalist Voice

19 June 2025

 

https://www.internationalistvoice.org [61]

 

 

 

“The largest B-2 strike in history”. The words chosen by General Dan Caine, Chief of Staff of the US Armed Forces, to describe the bombing of several Iranian nuclear sites on the night of 21-22 June, show the historic significance of the event. One hundred and twenty-five aircraft were in the air, a submarine and several ships were mobilised, and 75 precision missiles and 14 GBU-57 “bunker-buster” bombs were dropped in a matter of hours. With their Operation Midnight Hammer, the United States has made a dramatic return to war.

It is not yet possible to assess the extent of the damage and the number of casualties in Iran and Israel since the fighting began on 13 June, but the firepower is abundant and destructive. As this leaflet goes to press, we are learning that after Iranian strikes on US military bases, the belligerents have announced a “ceasefire” while missiles were still raining down on both sides.

The Middle East is plunging into barbarism and chaos

According to the war propaganda, the bombing of Iran is a huge success: the mullahs' regime has been permanently weakened and could even disappear, Israel and America have put an end to the nuclear threat, and they will impose peace and security in the Middle East.

All of this is nothing but lies! The Middle East will continue to descend into chaos, chaos that will impact the entire planet. Unable to respond directly, the Islamic Republic, with its back against the wall, will not hesitate to sow barbarism wherever it can, to activate all the armed groups under its control, and even to make massive use of terrorism. The threats Iran is making against the strategic Strait of Hormuz alone symbolise the fact that the global economic crisis will worsen and, with it, inflation.

And if the mullahs' regime of terror does not survive, the aftermath will be just as terrible as their reign: the country will be divided between warlords, there will be a cycle of revenge between the various factions, terrorist groups even more armed and dangerous than Daesh will spring up, and there will be mass exoduses of the population.

This is not an apocalyptic prophecy, but a lesson learned from all the wars of the last twenty years. In 2003, the US invasion of Iraq, which was supposed to deal a fatal blow to the “Axis of Evil” and impose a Pax Americana on the region, turned the country into a field of ruins where armed groups and mafia cliques fought each other non-stop. In 2011, neighbouring Syria descended into civil war, involving armed terrorist groups such as Daesh, regional powers such as Turkey, Iran and Israel, and global powers such as the United States and Russia. In 2014, Yemen joined the macabre dance. The result: hundreds of thousands of deaths and a devastated country. In 2021, Afghanistan fell back into the hands of the Taliban after twenty years of war waged by the United States to... overthrow the Taliban.

At the end of 2023, Hamas launched a terrorist attack of rare barbarity against Israel, in which a large number of civilians were killed. The Israeli army responded with unbridled brutality, launching a campaign of mass destruction in the Gaza Strip that quickly turned into outright genocide. In the months that followed, the chaos spread at an unimaginable pace: facing Hamas' allies, Netanyahu launched a deadly offensive on all fronts in Lebanon, Syria and now Iran. Fundamentally, the same dynamic is at work in Ukraine, Sudan, Mali and the Democratic Republic of Congo. The capitalist world is sinking into war-torn chaos: as in Gaza and Lebanon in recent months, any ‘ceasefires’ in Iran will be temporary and precarious, agreed upon to better prepare for the next massacres. The ‘twelve-day war’ (the official name given to this latest episode of the war in Iran) has been going on for almost fifty years and has just worsened considerably for decades to come...

A war with catastrophic global repercussions

The war with Iran will weaken the United States' main adversaries: Russia, which needs Iranian drones in Ukraine, but also China, which needs Iranian oil and access to the Middle East for its ‘New Silk Road’. As for Operation Midnight Hammer, it once again demonstrates the undisputed superiority of the US Army, capable of intervening massively on the other side of the planet and sweeping away all its enemies. These strikes are an explicit message to China, just as the atomic bombs on Japan in 1945 were primarily a warning to Russia.

But this show of force is only a temporary victory that will not resolve any conflicts or calm any of the other imperialist sharks. On the contrary, tensions will rise everywhere, and every state, large or small, every bourgeois clique, will try to take advantage of the chaos to defend its sordid interests, which will further increase global disorder. China, above all, will not take this lying down and will eventually flex its muscles too, in Taiwan or elsewhere.

Once again, these are the lessons we learn from history. Since the fall of the USSR in 1991, the United States has been the sole superpower. There are no longer any blocs within which allied countries must respect a certain form of discipline and order. On the contrary, each country plays its own card, each alliance is increasingly fragile and circumstantial, making the situation more and more chaotic and uncontrollable. The United States immediately understood this new historical dynamic. That is why it launched the Gulf War in 1991, a veritable show of force to send a message to everyone: ‘We are the strongest, you must obey us.’ Bush Sr.'s announcement of a ‘New World Order’ meant nothing less. And yet, two years later, in 1993, France supported Serbia, Germany supported Croatia, and the United States supported Bosnia in a war that would ultimately tear Yugoslavia apart.

The lesson is clear and has remained unchanged for thirty-five years: the more opposition to American supremacy grows, the harder the United States must strike... and the harder it strikes, the more it fuels opposition and every man for himself across the globe. On a regional scale, the same is true for Israel. In other words, with the war in Iran, the development of chaos and disorder through war will accelerate even further. Asia will become the hotspot of global imperialist tensions, caught between China's growing ambitions and the increasingly massive military presence of the United States. The American bourgeoisie knows that this is where it must now concentrate most of its armed forces.

“No King”, “Free Palestine”, “Stop Genocide”: the only future for capitalism is war!

Faced with these unspeakable horrors, faced with large-scale massacres, many people want to react, to shout their anger, to come together, to say “stop”. And this is indeed necessary because if we let it happen, if we do not react, capitalism will drag all of humanity into a huge mass grave, a series of scattered, uncontrollable and increasingly deadly conflicts. Many of those who are willing to react are now taking to the streets in various ‘anti-war’ movements: No Kings, Free Palestine, Stop Genocide, all of which are supported by the forces of the capitalist left.

But the slogans put forward by the left, including those which appear to be most radical, are traps that always come down to attributing the causes of war to this or that leader, to Netanyahu, Hamas, Trump, Putin or Khamenei, and ultimately to choosing one side against another. With their hypocritical rhetoric ‘for peace’, ‘for the defence of democracy’, ‘for the right of peoples to self-determination’, the forces that control capital seek to delude us into believing that capitalism could be less warlike, more humane, that all we need to do is elect the ‘right representatives’ and ‘put pressure on the leaders’ to establish world peace and ‘fairer’ relations between capitalist nations. All this ultimately amounts to exonerating the warlike dynamic into which the entire capitalist system, all nations, all bourgeois cliques are inexorably sinking.

Trump, Netanyahu and Khamenei are undoubtedly bloodthirsty leaders. But the problem we face is not this or that leader: it is capitalism. Regardless of which bourgeois faction is in power, left or right, authoritarian or democratic, all countries are warmongers. This is because capitalism is sinking into a historic crisis that it cannot resolve: competition between nations is only intensifying, becoming more brutal and spiralling out of control. This is what the left is trying to hide. And this is the trap into which those who participate in these rallies fall, thinking they are fighting against war.

Denouncing all these movements as traps may surprise or even anger those who sincerely want to take action in the face of such widespread massacres: ‘So, you think there's nothing we can do?’ ‘You criticise, but something has to be done!’

Yes, something must be done, but what?

To end wars, capitalism must be overthrown

Workers in all countries must refuse to be carried away by nationalist rhetoric. They must refuse to take sides with one bourgeois camp or another, in the Middle East or anywhere else. They must refuse to be fooled by rhetoric that asks them to show ‘solidarity’ with one people or another in order to better indoctrinate them against another ‘people’. Expressions like ‘Martyred Palestinians’, ‘bombed Iranians’, ‘terrorised Israelis’ all serve to lock people into choosing one nation over another. In all wars, on both sides of the border, states always recruit people by making them believe in a struggle between good and evil, between barbarism and civilisation. Lies! Wars are always a clash between competing nations, between rival bourgeoisies. They are always conflicts in which the exploited die for the benefit of their exploiters.

‘Iranians’, ‘Israelis’ or ‘Palestinians’, among all these nationalities there are exploiters and exploited. The solidarity of the proletariat is therefore not with the ‘peoples’, it must be with the exploited of Iran, Israel or Palestine, just as it is with the workers of all other countries of the world. We can’t bring real solidarity to the victims of war by demonstrating for an illusory peaceful capitalism, by choosing to support one camp which is said to be under attack or weaker against another which is said to be the aggressor or stronger. The only solidarity is to denounce all capitalist states, all parties that call for people to rally behind this or that national flag, this or that militaristic cause!

This solidarity requires, above all, the development of our struggles against the capitalist system which is responsible for all wars, a struggle against the national bourgeoisies and their states.

History has shown that the only force that can put an end to capitalist war is the exploited class, the proletariat, the direct enemy of the bourgeois class. This was the case when the workers of Russia overthrew the bourgeois state in October 1917 and when the workers and soldiers of Germany revolted in November 1918: these great movements of struggle by the proletariat forced the governments to sign the armistice.

It was the strength of the revolutionary proletariat that ended the First World War! Real and lasting peace everywhere can only be won by the working class overthrowing capitalism on a global scale.

This long road lies ahead of us, and today it passes through the development of struggles against the increasingly harsh economic attacks being unleashed on us by a system plunged into an insurmountable crisis. By refusing the deterioration of our living and working conditions, by refusing perpetual sacrifices in the name of the competitiveness of the national economy or building up the war effort, we are beginning to stand up against the heart of capitalism: the exploitation of man by man. In these struggles, we stand together, we develop our solidarity, we debate and we become aware of our strength when we are united and organised.

The proletariat began to walk this long road during the ”Summer of Discontent” in the United Kingdom in 2022, during the social movement against pension reform in France in early 2023, during the strikes in the health and automobile sectors in the United States in 2024, and in the strikes and demonstrations that have been going on for months and are continuing even now in Belgium. This international dynamic marks the historic return of workers' militancy, the growing refusal to accept the permanent deterioration of living and working conditions, and the tendency to unite across sectors and generations as workers in struggle, regardless of nationality, ethnic origin or religion.

Some will criticise revolutionaries by claiming: ‘In the face of war, you propose to do nothing, to postpone indefinitely the fight against the massacres taking place before our eyes!’ Today, the struggles of the proletariat do not yet have the strength to stand up directly against war; this is a reality. But there are two possible paths: either we participate in the so-called ‘peace now’ movements and allow ourselves to be disarmed in the struggle for a ‘fairer’, ‘more democratic’ capitalism, and thus buy into the ideologies that contribute to the general development of imperialism by pushing us to support the nation, the camp, the clique described as ‘less bad’ or ‘more progressive’. Or we can patiently participate, through struggles on our class terrain, in rebuilding our solidarity and our identity, working towards a historic movement that is the only one capable of uprooting the roots of war and poverty, nations and exploitation: capitalism. Yes, this struggle is long! Yes, it will require great confidence in the future, an ability to resist the fear and despair that the bourgeoisie wants to instil in us. But it is the only way forward!

To participate in this movement, we must come together, discuss, organise, write and distribute leaflets, defend genuine proletarian internationalism and the revolutionary struggle. Against nationalism, against the wars our exploiters want to drag us into, the old slogans of the workers' movement, those of the Communist Manifesto of 1848, are today more relevant than ever:

"Workers have no country!

Workers of all countries, unite!”

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

International Communist Current, 24 June 2025

 

The massive bombing by the United States on the night of 21 to 22 June of military targets in Iran constitutes a new stage in the escalation of tensions and the chaos of war, of desolation and relentless barbarism in the region.

Faced with the wide range of different forms of support for one imperialist camp against another, which will dominate the media and social scene, the proletarians of all countries must reject any so-called ‘solution’ to the conflict that aims to chain them to support this or that country, this or that bourgeois faction. Revolutionaries must fight for the only principle worth defending: proletarian internationalism. The only struggle that can deliver humanity from the barbarism of war is the class struggle, for the overthrow of this system undermined by crisis and the needs of the war economy.

Given the gravity of these developments, we will be holding an extra online international public meeting on Saturday 28 June, 2pm to 5pm, UK time. We will make language pads available, so that there should be no obstacles for the participation in whatever language. 

If you want to attend the meeting, please email us: [email protected] [8]

 

For the working class, a class whose consciousness is a vitally important weapon[1], learning from its own experience is of immense importance. Every time it reacts on its own terrain, on a broad scale, united and in solidarity and above all with a revolutionary impetus, it gives rise to important lessons for the future, lessons the class must understand and make use of in future struggles.

This was the case with the Paris Commune of 1871, after which Marx and Engels realised that the working class, in seizing power, could not use the bourgeois state to transform society towards communism. It had to destroy this state and construct a new way of organising society, with elected officials, instantly revocable.

This was also the case with the revolution in Russia in 1905, this year being its 120th anniversary. In this case, there was an even more valuable lesson learnt with the emergence of the mass strike and the creation of its organs of power: the workers' councils (soviets in Russian), which Lenin described as the “finally discovered form of the dictatorship of the proletariat”.

It is to this experience that we want to devote this article, to see how it can help us to understand the current dynamic of class struggle, which the ICC has described as a historic ‘rupture’ with that of the past decades.

January 1905

Before looking at the dynamics of the Russian Revolution of 1905, we need to briefly recall the international and historical context in which this revolution gained momentum. The last decades of the 19th century were characterised by the economic development that was clearly evident throughout Europe. It was against this backdrop that Tsarist Russia, a country whose economy was still marked by considerable backwardness, became the ideal location for the export of large amounts of capital to set up medium and large-scale industries. In the space of a few decades, the economy underwent a profound transformation. In Russia at the end of the 19th century, the growth of capitalism led to a high concentration of Russian workers located in a few large industrial regions. This greatly fostered the search for solidarity and the spreading of its struggle. It was these structural features of the economy which explained the revolutionary vitality of a young proletariat immersed in a deeply backward country where the peasant economy was predominant.

In January 1905, two workers at the Putilov factories in Petersburg were sacked. A wave of solidarity strikes was launched, and a petition for political freedoms, the right to education, the 8-hour day, opposition to taxes, etc., was drawn up to be taken to the Tsar in a mass demonstration. "Thousands of workers - not Social-Democrats, but loyal God-fearing subjects - led by the priest Gapon, streamed from all parts of the capital to its centre, to the square in front of the Winter Palace, to submit a petition to the tsar. The workers carried icons. In a letter to the Tsar, their then leader, Gapon, had guaranteed his personal safety and asked him to appear before the people."[2]

It all came to a head when, on arriving at the Winter Palace with their request to the Tsar, the workers were attacked by the troops who "attacked the crowd with drawn swords. They fired on the unarmed workers, who on their bended knees implored the Cossacks to allow them to go to the Tsar. Over one thousand were killed and over two thousand wounded on that day, according to police reports. The indignation of the workers was indescribable.”[3]

It was this profound indignation of the workers of Petersburg towards the man they called ‘Little Father’, who had responded to their plea with deadly weapons, that gave rise the revolutionary struggles of January. A very rapid change of mood of the proletariat occurred in this period: "A tremendous wave of strikes swept the country from end to end, convulsing the entire body of the nation […] The movement involved something like a million men and women. For almost two months, without any plan, in many cases without advancing any claims, stopping and starting, obedient only to the instinct of solidarity, the strike ruled the land.”[4]

This act of going on strike without any specific demands and in broad solidarity, was both an expression of and an active factor in the maturation, within the Russan proletariat of the time, of the consciousness of being a class and of the need as such to confront its class enemy. The January general strike was followed by a period of continuing struggles for economic demands that came and went across the country. This period was less spectacular but just as important. Bloody clashes broke out in Warsaw, barricades were erected in Lodz and the sailors of the battleship Potemkin in the Black Sea mutinied. This whole period paved the way for the second major period of the revolution.

October 1905

"This second great action of the proletariat already bears a character essentially different from that of the first one in January. The element of political consciousness already plays a much bigger role. Here also, to be sure, the immediate occasion for the outbreak of the mass strike was a subordinate and apparently accidental thing: the conflict of the railwaymen with the management over the pension fund. But the general rising of the industrial proletariat which followed upon it was conducted in accordance with clear political ideas. The prologue of the January strike was a procession to the Tsar to ask for political freedom: the watchword of the October strike ran away with the constitutional comedy of Tsarism! And thanks to the immediate success of the general strike, to the Tsar’s manifesto of October 30, the movement does not flow back on itself, as in January but rushes over outwardly in the eager activity of newly acquired political freedom. Demonstrations, meetings, a young press, public discussions".[5]

A qualitative change occurred in October with the formation of the Petersburg Soviet, which was to become a landmark in the history of the international workers' movement. Following the extension of the typographers' strike to the railways and telegraphs, the workers took the decision in a general assembly to form the Soviet which was to become the nerve centre of the revolution: “The Soviet came into being as a response to an objective need - a need born of the course of events. It was an organisation which was authoritative and yet had no traditions; which could immediately involve a scattered mass of hundreds of thousands of people”.[6]

December 1905

"The fermentation after the brief constitutional period and the gruesome awakening finally leads in December to the outbreak of the third general mass strike throughout the empire. This time its course and its outcome are altogether different from those in the two earlier cases. Political action does not change into economic action as in January, but it no longer achieves a rapid victory as in October. The attempts of the Tsarist camarilla with real political freedom are no longer made, and revolutionary action therewith, for the first time, and along its whole length, knocked against the strong wall of the physical violence of absolutism".[7]

The capitalist bourgeoisie, frightened by the movement of the proletariat, lined up behind the Tsar. The government did not apply the liberal laws it had just granted. The leaders of the Petrograd Soviet were arrested but the struggle continued in Moscow: "The climax of the 1905 Revolution came in the December uprising in Moscow. For nine days a small number of rebels, of organised and armed workers - there were not more than eight thousand - fought against the Tsar’s government, which dared not trust the Moscow garrison. In fact, it had to keep it locked up, and was able to quell the rebellion only by bringing in the Semenovsky Regiment from St. Petersburg.”[8]

So what was the dynamic at work in 1905? That of the mass strike, of that “ocean of phenomena” (Luxemburg) made up of strikes, demonstrations, solidarity, discussions, economic and political demands, in a word all the expressions that characterise the struggle of the working class, manifesting themselves at the same time as the product of a maturation of the consciousness of the workers, a maturation that took place during the events themselves, but also, and above all, the fruit of a subterranean maturation, of an accumulation of experiences and of a deep reflection that at a certain moment became very pertinent. In fact, the events of 1905 did not come out of nowhere, but were the product of the accumulation of a succession of experiences and reflections that had shaken Russia since the end of the nineteenth century. As Rosa Luxemburg stated, "The January mass strike was without doubt carried through under the immediate influence of the gigantic general strike, which in December 1904 broke out in the Caucasus, in Baku, and for a long time kept the whole of Russia in suspense. The events of December in Baku were on their part only the last and powerful ramification of those tremendous mass strikes which, like a periodic earthquake, shook the whole of south Russia, and whose prologue was the mass strike in Batum in the Caucasus in March 1902. This first mass strike movement in the continuous series of present revolutionary eruptions is finally separated by five or six years from the great general strike of the textile workers in St. Petersburg in 1896 and 1897.

The “rupture”, a product of subterranean maturation

This concept of the subterranean maturation of consciousness is found difficult to accept by a large proportion of groups in the proletarian political milieu, but also by a certain number of our contacts or sympathisers. Yet it has its roots in the writings of Marx[9], while Luxemburg referred to the “old mole”, and Lenin did so too,[10] While Trotsky, does not use quite the same vocabulary as the ICC to describe the phenomenon of ‘subterranean maturation’ of consciousness within the proletariat, he makes this very clear in his History of the Russian Revolution and the following passage illustrates this perfectly: "The immediate causes of the events of a revolution are changes in the state-of-mind of the conflicting classes. […]Changes in the collective consciousness have naturally a semi-concealed character. Only when they have attained a certain degree of intensity do the new moods and ideas break to the surface in the form of mass activities".

But, above all, the essence of the processes of subterranean maturation is confirmed in all the important moments in the struggle of the working class. We saw it in 1905, we saw it again in 1917 in Russia, where the October revolution was preceded by strikes against the war, and we have also seen it at work at historic moments closer to home. It was evident in 1980 in Poland with the strike movement that saw “the re-emergance” of the mass strike on the historical stage. The Polish workers had already taken part in important periods of struggle in 1970 and 1976, struggles that had suffered a brutal and bloody repression at the hands of the Stalinist regime. So, armed with these experiences, which contributed to a real subterranean maturation of consciousness, the workers were able in 1980 to launch themselves into a powerful and immediate struggle, whose organisational links and co-ordinating groups across the country provided the basis for the mass strike. Faced with this situation, the authorities were paralysed and were forced to negotiate and grant concessions before then responding with repression when the struggle had subsided.[11]

It is in the tradition of all these experiences of the workers' movement that we interpreted the strikes in Britain in 2022 as the result of a new maturation of class consciousness, not as a random flash in the pan, but as the product of a deep reflection that we see continuing with the return of working class struggle after decades of apathy and lethargy. We have referred to these movements as a ‘rupture’ to emphasise this as a phenomenon of historical and international significance. The major struggles that followed this first manifestation and resurgence of workers' combativity, in France, the United States, elsewhere in the world and most recently in Belgium, confirm that the strikes in Britain were not a local and passing phenomenon but the result of this subterranean maturation that was finally coming to the surface. The various characteristics of the movements that have taken place over the last three years provide confirmation of our analysis:

- The widespread slogan “enough is enough” expressed the long-held feeling that all the promises made in the aftermath of the 2008 ‘financial crisis’ had turned out to be lies and that it was high time workers started making their own demands;

- The slogans ‘we're all in the same boat’ and ‘the working class is back’ expressed a tendency in the working class (still embryonic but real) to rediscover the feeling of being a class with its own collective existence and distinct interests, despite decades of atomisation inflicted by the generalised decomposition of capitalist society and aided by the deliberate  destruction of many traditional industrial sites that employed an experienced working class (mines, steel, etc.).

- In the French movement against the raising of pensionable age to 64, the powerful slogan “you say 64, we give you 68”expressed the reigniting of a collective memory, the memory of the importance of the mass strikes of 1968.

- The international development of minorities tending towards internationalist and communist positions where the majority of these elements and their efforts to unite are less the product of the immediate class struggle and more about raising questions about war, which is proof that the current class movements express something more than just immediate concerns about falling living standards. They express, often in a still confused way, concern about the future offered to us by this system of production, capitalism.

- Finally, further evidence that there is a process of maturation is reflected in the efforts of the bourgeoisie to impose its leadership and sew confusion within the working class through the unions and leftist organisations.  By conveying radical messages to the working class, it aims to subvert its thinking and strengthen its own control.

We are only at the very beginning of this renewal of combativity, of the resumption of the struggles of the class on its own terrain, of an accumulation of new experiences which could lead the class into radicalising its struggles to the point of giving them a more political character, that would call into question the system as such and not just the extent of its attacks and their immediate effects.

This will be a long, difficult process, full of obstacles, because we are no longer in the same situation as 1905 in Russia, when in the space of a year the class could go from a simple petition to the Tsar to an openly insurrectionary phase. The present situation is that of the decomposition of capitalism, the final historical phase of capitalism which is demonstrated not only in the putrefaction of the whole political life of the bourgeoisie, but which also weighs on the working class through phenomena whose effects are ideologically exploited by the ruling class to severely and insidiously undermine workers' consciousness:

“- solidarity and collective action are faced with the atomisation of ‘look out for number one’;

- the need for organisation confronts social decomposition, the disintegration of the relationships which form the basis for all social life;

- the proletariat’s confidence in the future and in its own strength is constantly sapped by the all-pervasive despair and nihilism within society;

- consciousness, lucidity, coherent and unified thought, the taste for theory, have a hard time making headway in the midst of the flight into illusions, drugs, sects, mysticism, the rejection or destruction of thought which are characteristic of our epoch.”[12]

So, we must not be impatient, expecting a confirmation of this process at every moment. Revolutionaries have to intervene inside the class with clarity by taking a long-term view of the struggle and above all in helping minorities to understand what are the stakes of the situation and the alternative and inevitable consequences: either the bourgeoisie's threat to humanity's survival or the possibility for the working class to impose its perspective, that of a society without classes, without exploitation, without war, without the destruction of the planet, in short, a truly communist society.

Helis, 22 June 2025

Since 6 June, the Trump administration has decided to dramatically intensify the anti-migrant policy of the US bourgeoisie by organising real manhunts against undocumented immigrants, concentrated in particular in California in the region of Los Angeles, the country's second largest city, where many workers of Latin American origin live.

The migrant raids: an attack on the entire working class

As we pointed out in a leaflet written by a sympathiser close to the ICC[1], this provocation, carried out with extreme brutality, is an attack on the entire proletariat. It is our class brothers and sisters, most of the time exploited in difficult conditions, that the police hunt down and suppress. These raids by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to hunt down, arrest, detain and expel migrants by military force, picking them up at their place of work (building sites, factories, shops, etc.) were very reminiscent of the round-ups of people of Jewish or Gypsy origin in Europe during the Second World War, in order to deport them.

This provoked reactions of solidarity, indignation and disgust in a large part of the population, but more particularly among the exploited who mobilised, including spontaneously, and sometimes succeeded in preventing arrests, as at Paramount in the working class suburbs of Los Angeles.

Mobilising as citizens reduces us to impotence

But these initial reflexes of solidarity were immediately exploited and used by the bourgeoisie, as happened in 2020 after the Minneapolis police murder of George Floyd. Then, the bourgeoisie totally hijacked these stirrings of solidarity and funnelled them behind protest marches led by the anti-racist Black Lives Matter movement to demand more justice and equality, or even the abolition of the police... pleas to the capitalist state, spearhead of exploitation and the defence of the bourgeois order!

In the same way today, the ‘defence committees’ (those of the Los Angeles Rapid Response Network, in particular), made up of trade unions and several organisations and associations of the left of capital, were immediately able to channel the attempts to respond on the rotten terrain of ‘defence of the rule of law’, ‘citizen solidarity’, ‘anti-Trumpism’... in other words the same democratic mystifications which inevitably lead to disarming the proletariat, defusing its struggles, by making people believe that it would be possible to make capitalism more just and human. Nowhere were the mobilisations expressed in defence of the interests of the working class, unlike, for example, what happened in 1917 in Russia when the violent repression of demonstrations on International Women's Day had been the starting point for the extension of strike movements which served as the detonator for the revolutionary wave. Similarly, in February 1941, in the middle of the war, when conditions were extremely difficult, workers in Amsterdam went on strike against the deportation of Jews. Between 22 March and 13 May 1968, the ferocious repression of students also mobilised the working class, driven by instinctive impulses of solidarity.

Today, on the other hand, since the proletariat is not yet capable of responding to repression on its class terrain, the bourgeoisie can easily lead it into an impasse and reduce it to impotence. It was not as a class that the proletarians of Los Angeles mobilised, but as indignant individuals, and even as citizens. In this context, it was impossible for the workers involved in these mobilisations to extend the struggle to the proletariat as a whole in order to build up a real class balance of power against the repression.

This can only lead to a climate of terror, exacerbating tensions between communities and fuelling divisions between proletarians by encouraging the emergence of impotent popular riots, like the numerous race riots in the United States in the past, and like those in California in 1992 after the acquittal of the police officers responsible for the violence inflicted on taxi driver Rodney King the previous year. All that ensued were either hopeless clashes and confrontations with the police and totally pointless traffic blockades, or desperate actions, scenes of looting, vandalism or car fires... In short, mosquito bites on the thick leather hide of the bourgeoisie which justified a huge deployment of the repressive apparatus to maintain public order. It is precisely this ‘maintenance of law and order’ that has now been used by the government as a pretext to call in the army, sending in more than 4,000 reservists from the national guard and 700 marines, particularly feared and rightly described in the past as ‘dogs of war’ trained to kill and to cordon off the city.

The trap of democratic campaigns set by the bourgeoisie

This climate has also left the way open for a fraction of the Democratic Party apparatus to distort these elementary reactions of solidarity and drag workers into a vast ideological campaign on the totally rotten terrain of the defence of bourgeois democracy and the rights of ‘citizens’, of respect for the laws and the American Constitution. This is what has been put forward in particular by the Governor of California, Gavin Newsom, who is already presenting himself as a potential candidate for the next presidential election by multiple declarations of opposition to Trump's policies, accusing the latter of ‘abuse of power’, of having carried out ‘illegal kidnappings’ without the approval of local authorities, of having ‘taken a turn towards authoritarianism’, of ‘behaving like a tyrant’ in order to ‘realise the crazy fantasy of a dictatorial president’, adding that ‘his behaviour threatens the very foundation of our democracy’[2]. The Democratic mayor of Los Angeles, Karen Bass, is not to be outdone in this hypocritical torrent of invective[3]. In addition, the California Attorney General has declared that he has initiated impeachment proceedings against Trump in the courts for ‘violating’ the US Constitution. This anti-Trump campaign has spread very quickly across the country, particularly to other major cities: San Francisco and Santa Ana in California, Dallas and Austin in Texas, but also Chicago, Minneapolis, Atlanta, Boston, New York, etc.

At the same time, this high-profile campaign in defence of democracy has given fresh impetus to anti-populist propaganda, a variant on the false opposition between fascism and anti-fascism[4], already put forward by the most ‘radical’ fringes of the Democratic Party behind Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and by the "Hands Off! movement a few months ago. This assimilation is also based on protests against Trump's ‘dictatorial’ methods in the United States, which have been widely relayed by extensive anti-Trump propaganda at international level. In reality, it corresponds to a gigantic ideological intoxication by designating Trump as the person responsible for all the ills, the better to exonerate capitalism and hinder the development of an awareness of the irremediable bankruptcy of an exploitative system in full putrefaction, of which populism and Trump are only a caricatured expression.

However, on the face of it, this ideological campaign has a certain credibility because there is a real mobilisation of certain American bourgeois factions against Trump's policy and they are worried about it for two essential reasons:

- on the one hand, these factions are aware of the dangers of this policy, which only generates more chaos, weakening the credibility and tarnishing the image of the United States internationally and, domestically, accentuating social divisions, even risking in the long term the creation of a climate of civil war;

- on the other hand, they are convinced (and rightly so) that this openly xenophobic policy will have catastrophic repercussions for the American economy by depriving it of a cheap labour force which, until now, has kept many companies and sectors afloat and the national economy growing. Employers in several sectors of the economy have expressed their concern about these raids. Trump himself finally acknowledged that his immigration policies were hurting farmers, hotels and restaurants. Shortly afterwards, he temporarily suspended the raids on these businesses.

Trump has continued to fan the flames of this campaign by going further and further into security overkill, threatening to intervene in other parts of the country, particularly in Chicago with the army, and to use the same means as in Los Angeles. It is also threatening to use the Insurrection Act, i.e. to introduce a state of emergency while going even further in its persecution of migrants.

At the same time, anti-migrant measures are tending to spread to populist-dominated parts of the country. The governor of Texas has declared a curfew. In addition, the conservative-dominated Supreme Court has just legalised the government's request to deport them to third countries. Against this backdrop, an uncontrolled escalation of tensions cannot be ruled out, as the situation is becoming increasingly unpredictable and irrational.

Boundless hypocrisy on the part of the bourgeoisie

The hypocrisy and cynicism of the ruling class can be seen everywhere:

- in the United States, where Trump's anti-migrant policy is simply following in the footsteps of his Democratic predecessors in government: it was under the Obama administration that measures to deport undocumented workers reached record levels and it was the Biden administration that served as a model for the brutality of the methods of repression, particularly in 2021 during the ferocious charges by mounted border guards and police on the approaches to the border with Mexico;

- in the rest of the world, particularly in Europe, which growing masses of refugees are seeking to reach by any means necessary. They are found in distress in the Mediterranean trying desperately to escape poverty and war in both Africa and the Middle East. Once again, it is in the name of respect for the law and the European Union's Schengen area agreements that these abominations are practised, regardless of the government in power: in Italy, Meloni has tightened anti-migrant legislation (increasing the number of detention centres, abolishing protection for asylum seekers, transferring them to Albania, encouraging them to sign contracts to return to their country of origin, etc.). In France, Macron, who is trying to present himself in the international arena as a champion of democratic rights, is at the same time putting his Interior Minister Retailleau in charge of the dirty work with methods that Trump would envy: in mid-June, for example, he mobilised more than 4,000 men (gendarmes, police, customs officers, the armed force known as ‘Sentinelle’) for a vast operation to control ‘illegal immigration’ in the name of ‘zero tolerance’ at the Gare du Nord in Paris and almost simultaneously at 450 other sites, while congratulating himself on having arrested and sent back more than 47,000 ‘illegal immigrants’ since the beginning of 2025. Similar operations have been launched in Germany. In Spain, under the respectable veneer of a ‘regularisation policy’ of Pedro Sanchez's social-democrat government, acts of barbarism are regularly recorded: for example, the bodies of migrants were recently discovered tied hand and foot off the Balearic Islands.

Nor has the bourgeoisie failed to use the fractions of migrants most susceptible to the poison of nationalism. For example, during the protests against Trump's anti-migrant policy, the media complacently and widely broadcast images of Mexican flags being waved by some demonstrators.

All these elements only confirm the trap set everywhere for the working class to lead it away from a response and a struggle on its own terrain by using its weaknesses and illusions to draw it into a false choice between impotent and desperate popular riots or rallying to the bourgeoisie's democratic campaigns.

The proletariat must firmly reject the xenophobic calls to violence by MAGA and others, as well as the appeals of other factions of the bourgeoisie to defend democracy on pain of being subjected to the yoke of the dictatorship of capital, which can only lead to ever greater misery and barbarism.

No illusions! Defending the interests of the working class means categorically refusing to give in to the siren songs of the bourgeoisie and its defence of democracy, which tries to mask the hideous face of the dictatorship of capitalism as well as the stench of its own rotting on its feet!

Despite the obstacles, the future belongs to the class struggle!

Despite all their weaknesses and difficulties, particularly in the United States, and despite all the obstacles and traps laid by their class enemy, the working class has demonstrated in recent years its ability to react to the constant and ever-increasing attacks of the bourgeoisie. It has thus shown that there is another pole in the evolution of the present situation, a pole opposed to the descent into misery, barbaric warfare and annihilation towards which this dying system is inexorably heading. In the bowels of society, the same cry of anger, ‘Enough is enough’, is ripening, and is being expressed openly in the workers' struggles, in a way that is still confused and contradictory, but which is proclaiming everywhere: "We will no longer accept to passively suffer the attacks and the accelerated deterioration in our living and working conditions that are inflicted on us every day!"[5]

This is what happened in the United States in the autumn of 2023 during the almost simultaneous strikes at the three major car manufacturers, and later at Boeing, against redundancy programmes and austerity.[6] But just as significantly, in the midst of the American election campaign at the end of 2024, workers were able to mobilise on their own class terrain, as in the hotel sector or during the strike by almost 50,000 dockers which lasted several days before the Biden administration put an end to it by rushing into negotiations. Over the last few months, in the ‘Trump 2’ era, when attacks and massive budget cuts have intensified, workers have shown their fighting spirit intact, particularly in the health sector: In January, more than 5,000 nurses, midwives and doctors called a 46-day strike in the Providence network in Oregon (the longest ever in the state's health sector); in February, it was the turn of nurses at the University Medical Centre in New Orleans to lead a 48-hour strike, followed by 800 others in Pennsylvania, which lasted 5 days. In March, California became one of the main hotbeds of social unrest: employees of the Santa Clara Valley transport company went on strike for 17 days, interrupted only by a court ruling, and shortly afterwards public hospital workers in the same region went on strike for 4 days. At the end of April, more than 50,000 workers in the Los Angeles district went on strike, covering several sectors (health, social services, cleaning and security staff, laboratory assistants, etc.) to protest against the new employment contract imposed on them.

This clearly shows that the rise in anger and the break with passivity at an international level that we have repeatedly emphasised since 2022, with the underlying change of mindset within the proletariat, are not a flash in the pan and are continuing. These struggles can only develop in the face of the crushing blows of the crisis and the attacks that capitalism has in store everywhere in the future.

It should also be clear from this situation that in the United States, as elsewhere, strikes and struggles against the effects of the crisis are the most favourable terrain for the development of class struggle and class consciousness. In this context and with this perspective of the future, which is still distant, where the class will have further developed its collective strength and recovered its class identity as well as its capacity to politicise its struggles, there is no doubt that it will also be able to respond to the repression of migrants directly on its own class terrain of mobilisation.

 

Wim, 26 June 2025

[1] Against Trump’s xenophobic assaults on the working class and the cries to “defend democracy” [67], ICConline, June 2025

ICC Introduction

We welcome the contribution by the comrade who attended our international online public meeting organised in response to the Israeli and US attacks on Iran. We agree with his overall assessment of the meeting and encourage others to respond to his points and make further contributions.

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Letter from Baboon

Firstly, the ICC should be saluted for organising this and other recent meetings, thus fulfilling its obligations as a revolutionary organisation to the full. The work involved in organising these international and on-line meetings is onerous, but it has been well worth the effort, particularly at this latest meeting which again involved dozens of comrades and interested parties from a number of countries. The discussion was wide-ranging and effective in looking at the questions of imperialism: the war on Iran, the Middle East more widely, the loss of control by the bourgeoisie, the question of the strengthening of centrifugal tendencies within the international situation and the position and perspectives for the working class. But there was also an overriding coherence in line with the lessons of the class struggle historically that made a strong link to the revolutionary period around the 3rd International and the important and essential clarifications made by revolutionaries at the time, clarifications that continue to underline the major lessons of internationalism and imperialism that are so important to defend today. “Internationalism brought to life” as the conclusion said of the meeting.

A comrade from outside the ICC, T, made his own important conclusion, calling the meeting part of the responsibility of the Communist Left (while noting the absence of other elements from it), calling it a “step forward” and one dimension of the class struggle. He also emphasised the undefeated nature of the working class in the present period and insisted on the necessity for revolutionary patience given the long haul that many comrades insisted upon; an essential element to which we can add, with Lenin, a sense of humour. The immediatism and opportunism of the Internationalist Communist Tendency’s scramble with its No War But The Class War is the opposite of the role of revolutionaries today.

On MH’s and Jaycee’s position on the US bourgeoisie

The position of MH is that the ICC’s position on the loss of control by the US bourgeoisie with the election of arch-populist Trump contradicts his view that the attack on Iran was “a desperate attempt to secure its (the USA’s) hegemony”; and that the ICC’s position on Trump’s irresponsibility, contradicted the fact that it was “a step towards full-blow barbarism”. But these positions can sit perfectly well with each other, i.e., they are not in opposition. Jaycee sort of supported MH’s position, adding that Trump was a TV cartoon character and tweeter. This position goes towards that of the ICT’s, which characterises the Trump element as a personality trait and generally ignores the question of the centrifugal tendencies of the bourgeoisie, the power of populism and the consequences it has for the international situation.

Trump 1 represented a loss of control by the main factions of US state capitalism but Trump was kept in check and the damage he could cause was limited. Trump 2 was an even greater loss of control, leading to Trump Unchained. The “second coming” of the populist MAGA movement to the reins of power in the highest citadel of imperialism sees the USA as the major contributor to the chaos, irrationality and barbarism across the globe and a major expression of decomposition (as populism is), adding to the “whirlwind effect”.

Trump’s (his lackeys have no say in this) contradictory and bizarre antics on the international stage show that he completely ignores his intelligence services, services which have been particularly hit by the DOGE chainsaw of Musk, weakening their links to the various committees and bodies of the State Department and the upper echelons of the political establishment.  At root this is an attack on the vital role that intelligence plays in the defence of the national interest. This is hardly the “Machiavellianism” proposed by MH elsewhere. For example, the fact that Trump’s position on the Middle East seems to be at least partially determined by Netanyahu’s special adviser, Ron Dermer, who has been ensconced in the White House recently, and who is constantly in touch with his boss.

Attacks are going to rain down on workers everywhere and not just those currently put in place by Trump. One of the main points of the meeting was that events – of the class struggle or capitalist barbarism – can’t be seen to elicit an immediate response from the working class; we’ve seen the errors of that in practice with the ICT’s NWBCW committees. While time is running out for humanity under the threats from capitalism, for the working class there is still a long way to go and there can be no doubt that it is reflecting on events and perspectives in a subterranean fashion.

Baboon, 4.7.25

 

There has been a big media furore in Britain about the rap group Bob Vylan leading a chant at the Glastonbury festival: “Death Death to the IDF”. The BBC livestreamed the event and have had to issue an apology for not cutting it off, since the slogan could be officially classified as “hate speech” or “incitement to violence”.

Revolutionaries, internationalists, aren’t concerned with the BBC’s legal issues, and we don’t doubt that the impending police “investigation” into Vylan and Kneecap’s sets is yet another expression of the increasingly repressive attitude of the British state.

But we are against the “death to the IDF” slogan because it is counter-revolutionary. It is accompanied by the waving of Palestinian flags and it can only mean that all soldiers of the Israeli army deserve death at the hands of the armed Palestinian nationalist gangs, proxies of Iranian imperialism. Contrast this to the slogans of the workers’ movement towards troops dragged into imperialist war: “turn the guns the other way”, “fraternisation”, “formation of workers’ and soldiers’ councils”. In short, turn imperialist war into proletarian revolution in both camps: the dismantling of all bourgeois armies and national states, the construction of a world without borders.

The principal problem facing proletarians in Israel and Palestine today is that over a century of mobilisation and indoctrination by both Zionism and Palestinian nationalism has made such slogans unrealisable without a major development of the class struggle on a world scale. But we can certainly denounce all those, even when they pose as socialists and revolutionaries, whose activities and slogans serve to spread the plague of nationalism. We can certainly work towards the development of a pole of internationalists willing to stand up for the real goals of the proletarian revolution. Such a stance means intransigent opposition to all states or factions engaged in the current imperialist war in the Middle East: the state of Israel and the USA on the one side, and Iran, Hamas and Hizbollah on the other. 

Bob Vylan’s chant was supposedly raised as a gesture of solidarity with the rap group Kneecap. We aren’t going to comment on the lyrical skills of Bob Vylan or Kneecap. But they suit each other politically, since Kneecap distinguishes itself by draping itself in Irish flags, raising chants in support of Hamas and Hezbollah, and bearing a name which reminds us of the most common form of repression against all forms of dissent in the areas ruled by the IRA: crippling their victims by shooting them in the knee. And this was always in fitting continuity with one of the founding counter-revolutionary actions of the IRA: the suppression of the workers’ strikes and embryonic councils that appeared in Ireland in 1921-22 as part of the world-wide revolutionary wave[1].

Amos, June 2025