The images of Zelensky being humiliated by Trump in the Oval Office of the White House, mocked for his tie-less uniform, asked to say thank you, then ordered to shut up, have raised a wave of outrage across the world.

That relations between the different parts of the ruling class are characterised by domination, oppression and intimidation is nothing new. However, they usually keep their gangster ways behind the scenes, away from the cameras and prying ears, whereas Trump makes a spectacle of them for all to see.

But the reason for the shockwave is actually elsewhere, much deeper than the simple vulgarity displayed in broad daylight. This event has thrown in the face of the world the images of a major historical upheaval, what the media have called "the great reversal of alliances." Behind this abandonment of Ukraine by the United States lies nothing less than a break with Europe and a rapprochement with Russia. The structure of the world since 1945 is being swept away.

The reaction in Europe was immediate. From Paris to London, summits followed one another; an 800 billion euro plan to ‘rearm Europe’ was voted through; France, Germany and the United Kingdom loudly and clearly affirmed the need to develop a war economy in the face of the new Russian threat, now that American military protection seems to have lapsed.

Since then, in every country in the world, there has been a succession of speeches warning of the need to accept new sacrifices, because according to all the bourgeoisies, across all borders, we will have to arm ourselves more to protect the peace (sic!). India, for example, has just announced a major project to develop its military industry in order to face up to Chinese ambitions throughout Asia.

“Capitalism carries war within it, just as a cloud carries a storm," said Jean Jaurès from the podium one evening in July 1914, on the eve of the First World War. This same prospect of war is on everyone's mind today. For the working class, the near future is increasingly frightening. What new catastrophe is approaching? The invasion of Europe by Russia? A military confrontation between the United States and China, or between India and China, or between Israel and Iran? A Third World War?

The role of revolutionary minorities is precisely to succeed in discerning, amid the noise and fury, amid the daily lies, the incessant manipulation and propaganda, the reality of the historical development in progress. Because yes, the future promises to be most difficult for the working class! We must prepare for it. But no, it is not the Third World War that threatens, nor even the invasion of Europe. It is a barbarism that is less frontal and general, more devious and creeping, but just as dangerous and murderous.

On 9 November 1989, the Berlin Wall fell, heralding the end of the USSR, which was officially recognised on 25 December 1991. To understand the current dynamic, we need to start with this historic event.

The end of the blocs, the explosion of the ‘every man for himself’ mentality, the rise of China

With the collapse of the Eastern bloc, the Western bloc lost its raison d'être, and the USA’s mortal enemy for more than fifty years, Russia, was considerably weakened. The bourgeoisie of the world's leading power immediately grasped the new historical situation that was opening up: the world divided into two imperialist blocs was over, the discipline that was necessary to maintain the cohesion of each bloc was over, the submission of America's allies to protect themselves from the appetites of the Russian ogre was over. The time had come for fragile alliances, for changing sides depending on the circumstances of each conflict, for the explosion of the ‘every man for himself’ mentality. Europe in particular, which since the end of the Second World War had been at the centre of the East-West battle, found itself freed from this stranglehold. As for the most solid and ambitious nations, the place of Russia, the number 2, the great adversary of America, was up for grabs.

The American bourgeoisie therefore reacted immediately: “We find ourselves today at an exceptional and extraordinary moment... a rare opportunity to move towards a historic period of cooperation... a new world order can emerge: a new era, less threatened by terror, stronger in the pursuit of justice and more secure in the quest for peace.” These words of US President George H. W. Bush during his address to Congress on 11 September 1990 have remained engraved in our memories. At the same time, Tomahawks launched from American aircraft carriers and Abrams tanks were crushing Iraq in the name of a ‘new world order’, ‘cooperation’, ‘justice’ and ‘peace’.

With this first Gulf War, which caused nearly 500,000 deaths, the United States had a dual objective: to carry out a real demonstration of military force to dampen the growing imperialist ardour of all the other nations, in particular their former allies in the Western bloc, and to force them all to participate in the intervention in Iraq, to obey the US godfather.

The result? In 1991, war broke out in Yugoslavia, with France, Great Britain and Russia supporting Serbia, the United States choosing Bosnia and Germany Slovenia and Croatia. Germany, which was seeking to find a direct route to the Mediterranean, was already displaying its new ambitions. In 1994, the war in Rwanda broke out, with France on the side of the Hutus and their genocide, and the United States on the side of the Tutsis and their recapture of power.

These five years, 1990-1994, alone summarise the whole imperialist dynamic that was to follow and that we have been experiencing for more than three decades now. The ‘Anti-terrorist’ operation in Afghanistan, second Gulf War, interventions in Libya, Yemen, Syria... the result is always the same:

- first, a demonstration of American force, whose military power is unrivalled;

- then, endless chaos, an inability to regulate and stabilise the defeated region;

- finally, an exacerbation of imperialist tensions at the global level, with each nation increasingly challenging the hegemony that the United States wants to continue to impose.

The United States, the world's leading power, has also become the leading generator of the ‘new world disorder’.

As for the objective of preventing another great power from emerging and challenging them, the United States has been successful up to a point:

- Against Russia, by establishing more and more military forces on the lands of former Russian satellites;

- Against Japan, by waging a veritable targeted trade war against it and reducing it to economic stagnation for more than thirty-five years. In 1989, Lawrence Summers, then US Secretary of the Treasury, declared: “Japan represents a greater threat to the United States than the USSR”;

- Against Germany, which was allowed to develop its economy but had to restrict its military ambitions.

However, a new power has managed to rise despite everything: China. The ‘factory of the world’, a true global economic powerhouse, which the United States also needs, China's imperialist appetites are becoming increasingly sharp, to the point of claiming to be capable of one day taking the place of the world's leading power.

That is why, as early as 2011, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton announced the adoption by the United States of the “strategic pivot to Asia”, a vision placing “Asia at the heart of American policy”, taking the form of a military, economic and diplomatic commitment by the United States with the aim of increasing its presence and influence in the Indo-Pacific region. The following year, Barack Obama confirmed this reorientation of American forces towards Asia under the name of “rebalancing the world”.

The Chinese response was not long in coming. In 2013, it officially displayed its new global imperialist ambitions. In 2013, President Xi Jinping announced the “project of the century”: the construction of a “New Silk Road”, a series of maritime and rail links between China, [1] Europe and Africa, passing through Kazakhstan, Russia, Belarus, Poland, Germany, France, the United Kingdom, Djibouti and Somaliland. This project encompasses more than 68 countries representing 4.4 billion inhabitants and 40% of the world's GDP!

The war in Ukraine: weaken Russia, target China, coerce Europe

By attempting to invade Ukraine on 22 February 2022, Russia fell into a trap. The United States deliberately pushed Russia into this war by planning to expand the presence of NATO forces on Ukrainian territory, on the Russian border, which they knew would be completely intolerable for the Kremlin. The objective? To drag Russia into a quagmire, a dead end. No war of occupation since 1945 has been successful, regardless of the invader. The United States knows something about this from the war in Vietnam.

This was a long-planned scheme. One after the other, all the presidents since 1990, Bush senior, Clinton, Bush Junior, Obama, Trump, Biden, have pursued the same goal of establishing NATO in the countries of Eastern Europe.

From 2022 until Trump's return, the United States sufficiently informed and armed Ukraine to ensure that the war would last, that the Russians would be neither vanquished nor victorious, that they would remain there, trapped, sacrificing the ‘life forces of the nation’ at the front and wearing out the entire economic fabric at the rear.

The United States has pulled off a three-pronged masterstroke here. Because it was basically China that was targeted by the manoeuvre, Russia being its main military ally. This war has also meant a halt to the progress of the ‘New Silk Road’. And the United States took the opportunity to weaken Europe, first and foremost Germany, which is heavily dependent on markets to the East and on Russian gas.

At the end of 2024, the American imperialist reorientation towards Asia as a new ‘pivot point’, initiated in 2011, thus began to have a serious impact on the world's equilibrium:

- According to the experts, China was to become the world's leading power in 2020, then 2030, then 2040, now 2050... when they don't simply go back on the advent of this prognosis. All the signals are indeed turning red for China: slowing economic growth, a property crisis, paralysis of the Silk Road construction sites... even the goal of catching up militarily with the United States is only moving further away with a ‘defence’ budget three times lower than its competitor, and this every year!

- Despite this underwhelming performance, China has nonetheless grown in power while Europe, a crucial ally of the United States against the USSR for more than fifty years, has lost some of its geostrategic importance, becoming above all a fierce economic competitor and a supporter of dissenting, even enemy, countries during armed conflicts. The speech given by the French minister De Villepin at the UN on 14 February 2003, in which he refused to be involved in the military intervention in Iraq, remains symbolic of those European countries that are increasingly standing up to the United States: “In this temple of the United Nations, we are the guardians of an ideal, we are the guardians of conscience. The heavy responsibility and immense honour that are ours must lead us to prioritise peaceful disarmament. And it is an old country, France, an old continent like mine, Europe, that is telling you this today”. The latest events at the beginning of 2025 definitively sealed the break, a break that will greatly accelerate global chaos.

The Trump acceleration

“Look, let's be honest, the European Union was formed to screw the United States”: here, twenty-two years later, in the words of Donald Trump, is the response of the American bourgeoisie to De Villepin and the French bourgeoisie.

The American president is a megalomaniac fool. The propaganda machine is taking advantage of this state of affairs, visible to all, to blame him for all the rot, barbarism and irrationality that are developing today. However, it is no coincidence that a megalomaniac fool has become the head of the world's leading power. Trump is the product of the madness and irrationality that are increasingly infecting the entire global capitalist system. In this respect, his presidency does not break with the policies pursued before him, it prolongs them, accelerates them, takes them to their peak. Trump's policy is just an unmasked caricature of the policy of the entire bourgeoisie to which he belongs.

Has Europe lost its geostrategic importance? Then Trump takes the consequences to the extreme. In his eyes, the old continent is nothing more than an economic competitor, so it's time to throw agreements and alliances in the bin, time to throw the nuclear shield in the bin, and long live customs barriers with extravagant tax increases. One of the aims of the end of American military protection is to force all the countries of Europe to waste part of their economic strength on developing their military strength.

Is China the main enemy to be defeated? So let's make Clinton and Obama's ‘pivot point’ work to the end: Russia must be wrenched away from China, even if it means sacrificing Ukraine; the Panama Canal must be controlled since China intends to use it for its ‘New Silk Road’; Greenland must be pre-empted since China has its eye on the Arctic. The North Pole is currently one of the planet's hot spots: Russia, China, Canada and the United States all aspire to dominate this area. China has also declared its intention to open a “new polar silk road”!

Thus, behind Trump's wildest statements lies the pursuit of the central objectives of the entire American bourgeoisie: to weaken China, to definitively prevent it from ever being able to claim the place of the world's leading power.

Trump's approach is simply much more aggressive, chaotic and irrational than that of his predecessors; he is the epitome of the aggressiveness, chaos and irrationality of the current historical period! This can sometimes lead to some success. On 7 February 2025, at the end of his meeting with the American Secretary of State Marco Rubio, the Panamanian President José Raul Mulino announced that he would not extend the cooperation with China. Beijing immediately declared that it “deeply regretted” this step. “China strongly opposes the use of pressure and coercion by the United States to undermine and undermine cooperation,” said Lin Jian, spokesman for the Chinese Foreign Ministry.

But, exceptions aside, Trump's way of doing things, a product of the world's chaos, is in turn becoming an active factor and accelerator of that same chaos.

Trump and his clique direct the economic and imperialist policy of the world's leading power in the same way they manage their business: they look for ‘great deals’ with no long-term plan – they have to pay off, ‘now and immediately’. The consequences are obviously catastrophic.

By abandoning Ukraine, Trump has told the world: the word of the American state is worthless, you cannot trust us. Moreover, Trump and his clique are not seeking to establish international alliances, but one-off bilateral agreements, valid ‘right now’. India, South Korea and Australia are now particularly worried and suspicious of their ‘American friend’. Canada is moving closer to Europe, whose commitments seem more reliable.

Even more seriously, by abandoning Europe, Trump has definitively severed the ties that remained after 1990. The consequences for Europe are not yet foreseeable, but whatever path is taken, it will prove harmful for the United States: either a strengthening of the cohesion of the main European powers against the United States, with increased trade war and a development of the European armed force, or an even more exacerbated rise of the ‘every man for himself’ within Europe, with a European Union that partially disintegrates, powers that strengthen their national war economy to be able to play their own cards wherever the opportunity arises. The most likely scenario is that the two dynamics will coexist, depending on the conflicts and corners of the globe at stake. But, in all these cases, the United States will face an imperialist world that will be even more hostile and less stable and less controllable.

And all for what? Trump and his clique are not even certain of winning Russia over. In fact, it is impossible. Trump has driven a wedge between China and Russia, who have already been distrusting each other for a long time. China occupies Russian land rich in minerals against the Kremlin's will. Russia went to war in Ukraine without Beijing's blessing. This has been the case with all imperialist ‘alliances of convenience’ since 1990: they are fragile and changeable. But Trump will never succeed in making Russia his ally. Putin will try to take everything he can from Trump's ‘great deal’, but nothing stable will come out of this ‘shaking up of alliances’.

Fundamentally, after the successive and constant failures of the American bourgeoisie to impose its order and limit the dynamic of every man for himself, Trump has acknowledged the impossibility of halting this reality by openly declaring the ‘war of each against all’ as the true ‘strategy’ of the new American administration.

After Trump... there is no going back

By abandoning Ukraine and Europe and turning towards Russia, Trump has destroyed the meagre foundations of the international order that had survived the fall of the USSR in 1990. And there will be no going back.

Obviously, given the level of amateurism and incompetence of the Trump clique, the current and future failures, the chaos that will develop at the global level, the foreseeable economic and imperialist setbacks for the United States, the American bourgeoisie will try to react and prepare for the post-Trump era. It is in the best interests of the American bourgeoisie to succeed in erasing the escapades and exaggerations of the Trump clique, to reconnect with the highly effective ‘soft power’, and to try to restore credibility to its word and its commitments. But in reality, there will be no going back. Because behind this acceleration of events lies the confirmation and manifestation of the historical impasse that the survival of capitalism represents for society: the next administration may change the form of its policy, not the substance; confidence in the solidity of the American word will not return; the destroyed alliances with Europe will not be re-established, the chaos in Ukraine will not stop, the relationship with Russia will not be pacified[1].

On the contrary, the future is ultimately one of war spreading to the Middle East, probably to Iran, Russia eyeing its neighbouring countries, Moldova for example, and rising tensions in Asia, around Taiwan, between China and India... The future is a global capitalism that is rotting on its feet, wallowing in barbarism, the law of the jungle, the proliferation of warlike conflicts... The future is a war economy that is developing in every country and demands that the working class work harder, work faster, earn less, get less education, receive less healthcare...

Yes, that is the future that capitalism holds in store! The only answer can only be class struggle. The threat of the spread of military barbarism can frighten, paralyse and make people want to be ‘protected’ by ‘their’ state. But that same state will mercilessly attack ‘its own’ workers to increase the pace and develop its war economy. This is the path that the class struggle will take in the years to come: the refusal to tighten their belts even further will lead to massive workers’ struggles, and the development of solidarity, awareness and self-organisation.

Since the “summer of anger” that erupted in the UK in 2022, this series of strikes that lasted several months in all sectors, the working class worldwide has regained the will to fight, to take to the streets, to come together, to discuss, to struggle together. Only this dynamic can offer humanity another future, one in which capitalism is overthrown, its wars, borders and exploitation brought to an end by the proletarian revolution for communism.

And it is up to the revolutionary minorities, to all those searching for real political clarity, to all those who aspire to a different perspective to this decadent and barbaric system, to come together, to discuss, to make the link between the war, the economic crisis and the attacks on the working class, to point out the need to fight as one, as a class.

Gracchus (24/03/2025)

[1] Russia is also fully aware that the American bourgeoisie is already preparing for the post-Trump era, and there is a strong likelihood that the next clique in power will be a product of the United States' historic anti-Russian tradition, making the current pseudo-agreements even more fragile. Russia remains wary of the US.

In recent articles written on the first days of Donald Trump’s second presidency of the United States, the ICC has already explained that the dangerous chaos and havoc he has unleashed on the world since he took up residence in the White House is not an individual aberration in an otherwise stable system, but the expression of the collapse of the capitalist system as a whole and of its strongest power. The unpredictable gangsterism of Trump’s administration reflects a social order in ruins. Moreover, the liberal democratic faction of the US bourgeoisie which is resisting the new presidency tooth and nail is just as much part of this collapse and in no sense a ‘lesser evil’ or alternative solution to the populist MAGA (Make America Great Again) movement that should be supported by the working class.

Whatever political form capitalism takes today, only war, crisis and pauperisation for the working class are on the agenda. The working class has to fight for its class interests against all sections of the ruling class. The resurgence of workers’ struggles to defend their wages and conditions as recently occurred at Boeing and the docks of the eastern seaboard of the US, along with the resurgence of combativity in Europe, are the only promise for the future.

In this article, we want to explain more why and how Trump was elected for a second term of office, why it is more extreme and dangerous than the first term, in order to show more clearly the suicidal fate of the bourgeois order that it characterises and the proletarian alternative to it.

Trump’s first administration, a summary

At the end of 2022, in the middle of Biden’s tenure in the White House, the ICC made this balance sheet of the first Trump presidency:

“The eruption of populism in the world's most powerful country, which was crowned by the triumph of Donald Trump in 2016, brought four years of contradictory and erratic decisions, denigration of international institutions and agreements, intensifying global chaos and leading to a weakening and discrediting of American power and further accelerating its historic decline.”

The Biden presidency which followed Trump’s first administration was not able to reverse this worsening situation:

“...no matter how much the Biden team proclaims it in their speeches, it's not a question of wishes, it's the characteristics of this final phase of capitalism that determine the tendencies it is obliged to follow, leading inexorably into the abyss if the proletariat cannot put an end to it through world communist revolution."[1]

The guiding principle of Trump’s first term and his election campaign - ‘America First’ - has continued into his second term. This guiding slogan means that America should only act in its own national interests to the detriment of others, both ‘allies’ and enemies, by using economic, political and military force. To the extent that it can make ‘deals’ - rather than treaties - with other countries (which can in any case be broken at any time according to the ‘philosophy’ behind this slogan) means the US making foreign governments ‘an offer they can’t refuse’ - according to the famous line from the gangster film The Godfather. As Marco Rubio, Trump’s appointment as US secretary of state, has apparently been telling foreign governments: the US is no longer going to be talking to them about global interests and global order, but only about its own interests. ‘Might is right’, however, is not a rallying cry for American leadership.

America First was the recognition by part of the US bourgeoisie that by 2016 the foreign policies it had been following up to then of being the world policeman in order to create a new world order after the collapse of the Russian bloc in 1989 had only led to a series of costly, unpopular and bloody failures.

The new policy reflected a final awareness that the Pax Americana [2] established after 1945 and which guaranteed the US world hegemony until the fall of the Berlin Wall, could not be re-established in any form. Worse, in Trump’s interpretation, the continuance of the Pax Americana - that is the reliance of its allies on the economic and military protection of the United States - meant that the US was now being ‘unfairly’ taken advantage of by these former members of its imperialist bloc.

Trump’s first term: the background

Operation Desert Storm, in 1990, was the massive use of military power by the US in the Persian Gulf aimed at countering the rise of world disorder in geo-politics after the dissolution of the USSR. It was particularly directed at the independent ambitions of its former major allies in Europe.

But only weeks after this horrific massacre, a new bloody conflict broke out in the former Yugoslavia. Germany, acting on its own, recognised the new republic of Slovenia. It was only with the bombing of Belgrade, and the Dayton Accords of 1995, that the US managed to assert its authority in the situation. Desert Storm had stimulated, not lessened the centrifugal tendencies of imperialism. Consequently, Islamic jihadism developed, Israel began to sabotage the Palestinian peace process painstakingly engineered by the US, and the genocide in Rwanda left a million corpses, where the complicit western powers acted for their different interests. The 1990s, despite US efforts, illustrated, not the formation of a new world order but the accentuation of each for himself in foreign policy, and thus the weakening of US leadership.

The US foreign policy of the ‘Neo-Conservatives’ led by George W Bush, who became president in 2000, led to even more catastrophic failures. After 2001 another massive military operation in the Middle East was launched with the US invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq in the name of the ‘war on terror’. But by 2011, when US withdrew from Iraq, none of the intended objectives had been achieved. Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction - an invented pretext for the invasion - turned out not to exist. Democracy and peace were not established in Iraq in place of dictatorship. There was no retreat of terrorism: on the contrary Al Qaeda was given a massive stimulus that caused bloody outrages in Western Europe. In the US itself the military adventures, which had been costly both in money and blood, were unpopular. Above all the war on terror failed to bring the European and other imperialist powers into line behind the US. France and Germany, unlike in 1990, opted out of the US invasions.

However, the return to ‘multilateralism’ in place of the ‘unilateralism’ of the Neo-Cons, during the presidency of Barack Obama (2009-2016) was not successful either in restoring US world leadership. It was in this period that China’s imperialist ambitions exploded, as exemplified by their geostrategic development of the New Silk Road after 2013. France and Britain pursued their own imperialist adventures in Libya, while Russia and Iran took advantage of the US semi-withdrawal from Syrian operations. Russia occupied Crimea and began its aggression in the Donbass region of Ukraine in 2014.

After the failure of the monstrous carnage of the Neo-Cons came the diplomatic failure of Obama’s policy of ‘cooperation’.

How could the US difficulties to maintain its hegemony get worse? The answer came in the form of President Donald Trump.

The consequences of Trump’s first presidency

In his first presidency Trump’s America First policy began to destroy the United States’ reputation as a reliable ally and as a world leader with a dependable policy and moral compass. Moreover, it was during his administration that serious differences emerged within the American ruling class over Trump’s vandalising foreign policy. Crucial divergences appeared in the US bourgeoisie over which imperialist power was an ally and who was an enemy in the USA’s struggle to retain its world supremacy.

Trump reneged on the Trans-Pacific Pact, the Paris Agreement on climate change and the Nuclear Treaty with Iran; the US became an outlier on economic and trade policy in the G7 and G20, thereby isolating itself from its main allies on these questions. At the same time the US refusal of direct engagement in the middle east fueled a free-for-all of regional imperialisms in that region: Iran, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Israel and Russia, Qatar, all tried separately to profit from the military vacuum and mayhem.

Trump’s diplomacy tended to exacerbate these tensions, such as his transfer of the US embassy in Israel to the controversial city of Jerusalem, upsetting his western allies and angering Arab leaders who still saw the US as an ‘honest broker’ in the region.

Nevertheless, in the recognition of China as the most likely contender to usurp US primacy, Trump’s administration accorded with the view of the rest of Washington. The ‘pivot’ to Asia already announced by Obama was to be increased, the global war on terror officially suspended, and a new era of ‘great power competition’ was ushered in according to the National Defence Strategy of February 2018. A vast decades-long programme to update the US nuclear arsenal and to ‘dominate space’ was announced.

However, on the need to reduce the military ambitions and capacities of Russia - and to weaken the potential of the latter to help China’s own global manoeuvres - there appeared a divergence between Trump’s ambiguous policy towards Moscow and that of the rival faction of the US bourgeoisie which had traditionally seen Russia as a historic enemy in regard to its threat to US hegemony in Western Europe.

At the same time, connected to the question of Russian policy, a different attitude toward the importance of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation, the former centrepiece alliance of the American bloc, emerged, particularly over the treaty’s obligation of all the members of NATO to come to the aid of any of the others who came under military attack (ie the US would protect them from Russian aggression). Trump put this crucial stipulation in doubt. The worrying implications this held for the abandonment of the allies of US in Western Europe was not lost in the chancelleries of London, Paris and Berlin.

These foreign policy differences were to emerge more clearly during the Biden administration which followed the first Trump presidency.

The Biden interregnum: 2020-2024

The replacement of Trump by Joe Biden in the White House supposedly heralded a return to normality in US policy in the sense that it was marked by the attempt to reforge old alliances and create treaties with other countries, to try and repair the damage caused by the reckless adventures of Trump. Biden declared: ‘America is back’. The announcement of a historic security pact between the US, UK and Australia in the Asia-Pacific in 2021, and the strengthening of the Quad Security Dialogue between the US, India, Japan and Australia, signalled, amongst other measures, the pursuit of creating a cordon sanitaire against the rise of Chinese imperialism in the Far East.

A global democratic crusade against ‘revisionist’ and ‘autocratic’ powers - Iran, Russia, North Korea and especially China - was invoked by the new administration.

The Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022 provided the means for Joe Biden to impose US military authority once more on the recalcitrant NATO powers in Europe, obliging them, particularly Germany, to augment defence budgets and provide support to Ukraine’s armed resistance. It has also helped to exhaust the military and economic power of Russia in a war of attrition, and display US world military superiority in terms of weaponry and logistics that it supplied to the Ukrainian military. Above all the US, by helping turn much of Ukraine into smoking ruins, has demonstrated to China the danger of seeing Russia as a potential ally and the perilous consequences of its own desire to annex territory such as Taiwan.

However, it was apparent to the world that the US bourgeoisie wasn’t entirely behind Biden’s policy towards Russia, as the Republican Party in Congress, still under the heel of Donald Trump, made clear its reluctance to provide the necessary billions of dollars of support to the Ukrainian war effort.

If the support given to Ukraine was a success for the reassertion of leadership by American imperialism, at least in the short term, its involvement in Israel’s war in Gaza after October 2023 tarnished this project. The US became caught between the necessity of supporting its main Israeli ally in the Middle East in the face of Iranian terrorist surrogates, and the reckless determination of Israeli to play its own game and renege on a peaceful solution to the Palestinian question, thereby accentuating the military chaos in the region.

The slaughter of tens of thousands of defenseless Palestinians in Gaza, courtesy of US munitions and dollars, completely belied the self-image of US moral righteousness that Biden promoted over the defence of Ukraine.

While the collapse of the Assad regime in Syria and the defeat of Hezbollah in Lebanon have inflicted a serious blow on the Iranian regime, the avowed enemy of the US, this hasn’t lessened the instability of the region, not least in Syria itself. On the contrary, the US has had to continue to deploy a sizeable part of its navy to the Eastern Mediterranean and the Persian Gulf, reinforce its contingents in Iraq and Syria, and contend with the dramatic opposition to US policy by Turkey and the Arab countries.

Above all the threat of further military convulsions in the Middle East means that the pivot to Asia, the main focus of the US, has been disrupted.

Trump’s second term: 2025-

We have described how the problems of navigating the imperialist chaos that developed after 1989 led to divisions within the American ruling class over the policy to be pursued, and charted the growth of the populist policy of America First against a more rational course that tried to preserve the alliances of the past. The re-election of Trump back to power even after the debacle of his first presidency is a sign that these internal divisions have not been mastered by the bourgeoisie and are now returning to seriously affect the ability of the US to pursue a coherent and consistent foreign policy, even to the extent of jeopardising its main concern to block or pre-empt the rise of China.

Added to the dangerous uncertainty of this boomerang effect of political chaos on imperialist policy is the fact that the USA’s margin of manoeuvre on the world imperialist stage has appreciably diminished since Trump’s first term, and his second term occurs while two major conflicts are raging in Eastern Europe and the Middle East.

We won’t go into the deeper causes of the political disarray within the American bourgeoisie and its state that Trump’s first actions have dramatically demonstrated, this will be explained in a further article.

But in less than a month Trump has indicated that the tendency for his America First policy to unravel the pax Americana that was the basis for US world supremacy after 1945 is going to accelerate much more rapidly and profoundly than it did in his first term, not least because the new president is intent on overcoming the safeguards that at that time limited his field of action in Washington by appointing his henchmen, whether competent or not, to the heads of state departments.

The main concern of the US bourgeoisie after 1989 - to prevent the end of its world domination in the free-for-all of the post-bloc world - has been turned on its head: the ‘war of each against all’ has become, in effect, the ‘strategy’ of the new administration. A strategy that will be more difficult to reverse by a new more intelligent administration than it was even after Trump’s first term.

The aim to take back control of Panama; the proposal to ‘buy’ Greenland; the barbaric proposal to ethnically cleanse Palestinians from the Gaza Strip and turn the latter into a Riviera; all these early pronouncements of the new president are as much directed against its former allies as its strategic enemies. In the case of the Gaza proposal, which would benefit its ally Israel in the removal of a two-state solution to Palestine, it would only inflame the opposition of other Arab powers plus Turkey and Iran. Britain, France and Germany have already declared against Trump’s proposal for Gaza.

But it’s the likelihood is that the US under Trump will force a peace deal on Ukraine that would probably cede 20% of its territory to Russia, to which the West European powers are already vehemently opposed, that will further break up the NATO alliance, previously the axis of US international domination. The new president is demanding that the stagnant European economies of NATO should more than double their expenditure on their military forces in order to defend themselves on their own, without the US.

A good deal of the soft power of American imperialism, that is its moral claim to hegemony, is being wiped out almost at a stroke: USAID, the biggest world agency of aid to the ‘global south’, has been ‘fed to the wood chipper’ by Elon Musk. The US has withdrawn from the World Health Organisation, and has even proposed proceedings against the International Criminal Court for its bias against the US and Israel.

The proposed protectionist trade war of the new US administration would also strike a massive blow at the remaining economic stability of international capitalism that has underpinned the military power of the US, and will undoubtedly rebound on the US economy itself in the form of even higher inflation, financial crises and the reduction of its own trade. The mass deportation of cheap immigrant labour from the United States would have self-defeating negative economic consequences for its economy as well as on social stability.

At the time of writing it is not possible to know whether the avalanche of proposals and decisions by the new president will be enacted or whether they are outlandish bargaining tools which will may lead to temporary agreements or reduced concessions. But the direction of the new policy is clear. The very uncertainty of the measures already has the effect of alarming and antagonising former and future potential allies and obliging them to act for themselves and seek support elsewhere. This in itself will open up more possibilities for the main enemies of the US. The proposed peace agreement in Ukraine is already benefiting Russia. The mercantilist trade war is a gift to China which can position itself as a better economic partner than the US.

Nevertheless, despite the long-term self-defeating policy of ‘America First’ the US will not cede military superiority to its main enemy China, which is still far from being able to confront the US directly on equal terms. And the new foreign policy is already creating powerful opposition within the US bourgeoisie itself.

The perspective is then a massive arms race and a further chaotic increase in imperialist tensions around the world, with great power conflicts moving towards the centres of world capitalism as well further inflaming its global strategic points.

Conclusion: Trump and the social question

Donald Trump’s MAGA movement came to power promising the electorate more jobs, higher wages and world peace, in place of the lowering of living standards and the ‘endless wars’ of the Biden administration.

Political populism is not an ideology of mobilising for war as fascism was.

In fact the growth and electoral successes of political populism over the last decade or so, of which Trump is the American expression, is essentially based on the growing failure of the alternation of the older established parties of liberal democracy in government to address the deep unpopularity of the dizzying growth of militarism on the one hand, and the pauperising effects of an irresolvable economic crisis on the living conditions of the mass of the population on the other.

But the populist promises of butter instead of guns have been and will be more and more contradicted by reality, and will come up against a working class which is beginning to rediscover its combativity and identity.

The working class, in contrast to the xenophobic ravings of political populism, has no country, no national interests and is in fact the only international class with common interests across borders and continents. Its struggle to defend its living conditions today, which is international in scope - the present struggles in Belgium provide another confirmation of class resistance in all countries - therefore provides the basis for an alternative pole of attraction to capitalism’s suicidal future of imperialist conflict between nations.

But in this class perspective the working class will also have to confront the anti-populist as well as the populist forces of the bourgeoisie which are proposing to the population a return to the democratic form of militarism and pauperisation. The working class must not get caught up in these false alternatives, nor follow the more radical forces which say liberal democracy is a lesser evil to that of populism. Instead, it must fight on its own class terrain.

The New York Times, which is the usually sober mouthpiece of the liberal American bourgeoisie, launched this radical mobilising call to the population to defend the bourgeois democratic state against the autocratic state of Trump in an editorial statement of February 8th 2025:

“Don’t get distracted. Don’t get overwhelmed. Don’t get paralyzed and pulled into the chaos that President Trump and his allies are purposely creating with the volume and speed of executive orders; the effort to dismantle the federal government; the performative attacks on immigrants, transgender people, and the very concept of diversity itself:  [2]the demands that other countries accept Americans as their new overlords: and the dizzying sense that the White House could do or say anything at any moment. All of this is intended to keep the country on its back heel so President Trump can blaze ahead in his drive for maximum executive power, so no one can stop the audacious, ill-conceived and frequently illegal agenda being advanced by his administration. For goodness sake, don’t tune out.”[3]

This is only a confirmation that the whole bourgeoisie is using its own serious divisions to divide the working class into choosing one form of capitalist war and crisis against another in order to make it forget its own class interests.

The working class must not be pulled into the internal or external wars of the ruling class, but fight for itself.

Como

 

[1] The United States: superpower in the decadence of capitalism and today epicentre of social decomposition (Part 1) [3], International Review 169, 2023

The war in Ukraine is today the clearest expression of global imperialist chaos involving at various levels the great imperialist powers, the countries of Western Europe and others such as North Korea and Iran. Many bourgeois experts, as well as all the groups in the proletarian political milieu except for the ICC, see this situation as a step on the road to World War III. In their view we are currently witnessing the coalescence of two rival imperialist blocs centred on the two most powerful world players: the United States and China. In contrast to this analysis, the ICC considers that the situation expresses the inability of the two great world powers to impose themselves at the head of two disciplined imperialist blocs. The global leadership of the greatest power today, the United States, is increasingly contested, while China has not been able to aggregate even the beginnings of an imperialist bloc. Moreover, the United States is weakened politically by the growing divisions between the Republicans and Democrats - with the Republican leader quickly confirming, before and after his re-election, his ineptitude not only as a commander on the world stage but as an organizer of even the country's most basic affairs. An example of the ‘subtlety’ of his character is his threat to annex Greenland even though the United States already exerts effective control of the territory through its military base in the north.

The fact that the proletariat in its largest concentrations is neither defeated nor ready to be sent off for a Third World War does not contradict, as is clearly demonstrated by the reality in Ukraine and elsewhere, the reality of smaller wars involving even central countries of capitalism.

A product of the decomposition of capitalism, the present global chaos carries with it serious threats to the survival of humanity. Indeed, the gangrene of militarism and war is evident across the world today, from the Baltic Sea to the Red, and from East Asia to the Sahel. The Cold War nightmare of nuclear annihilation is revived in Moscow's threats of nuclear escalation and the possibility of Western troops being sent to the Ukrainian front. We do not face the threat of a Third World War, but of the proliferation of multiple wars intensifying in an uncontrolled manner, in Ukraine and throughout the world. Three years after the beginning Russia's ‘special operation’ in Ukraine, a decisive conclusion seems as far away as ever – with only a bloody and destructive stalemate, governed by an unrelenting scorched earth policy, prevailing.

A war of decomposition which can only bring death and destruction to the belligerents

During the global expansion of capitalism in the 19th century war could be a means of consolidating capitalist nations - as was the case for Germany during the Franco-Prussian War of 1871, or of contributing by force to the expansion of the world market – as in the case of the colonial wars which opened up new markets for the most developed nations and thus promoted the development of productive forces. In the 20th century, these wars gave way to colossal imperialist confrontations for the redivision of the world, with the First World War in 1914 marking the entry of capitalism into its phase of decadence. In decadence, permanent war between the various imperialist rivals has lost all economic rationality, becoming capitalism’s way of life. The horror and destruction of the First World War was  repeated and amplified in the Second, with each rival imperialism seeking to secure their global geostrategic position through alliances behind one or another imperialist leader: “Faced with a total economic impasse, with the failure of the most brutal economic ‘remedies', the only choice open to the bourgeoisie is that of a forward flight with other means - themselves increasingly illusory - which can only be military means." [1]. Such has been the evolution of war over the last two centuries.

But with the fall of the USSR the discipline of the imperialist blocs established after the last world war has been broken. We are now witnessing a rivalry of each against all, with each power seeking to assert their interests at the expense of all others, whatever the cost. Endless wars are being waged (Libya, Syria, Sahel, Ukraine, Middle East), bringing only massacres and economic devastation and ecological destruction. The current massacre in Gaza, a city now in ruins and with much of its population exterminated, is a blatant example of this, as is the war in Ukraine. A scorched earth policy prevails and “Après moi le déluge”[2].

Putin launched his ‘special operation’ in Ukraine in 2022 - after occupying Crimea and parts of the Donbas in 2014 - in an attempt to preserve Russia’s status as a global imperialist power against the encroachment of NATO to its very doorstep, with Ukrainian integration threatened next, following Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic in 1999 and Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania in 2004.

In order to entice Russia into a war that could bring its already fragile economy and military power to its knees, thus neutralising its imperialist pretensions as a potential ally of China - the United States' main global adversary - the Biden administration had made it clear that there would be no possibility of American troops being deployed to defend Ukrainian land. In his farewell speech on January 13th to the State Department, Joe Biden gave himself a pat on the back for this trap set for Russia: “compared to four years ago […] our adversaries and competitors are weaker […] Iran, Russia, China and North Korea  are now collaborating; this more a sign of weakness than strength” [3].

And indeed, Russia's position has been considerably weakened by the war - a blatant refutation of the outlandish theories according to which the protagonists of the war can all benefit from possible ‘win-win’ effects: unrealistic imperialist expansion, a better geostrategic position, economic gains, control of energy sources... none of this can be found in the smoking ruins of eastern Ukraine for either party.

On the borders of the former USSR, there are other signs of Russia's loss of influence over its ‘satellites’. In Georgia, which has been a candidate for admission to the European Union since 2022, the victory of the pro-Russian Georgian Dream party (sic) was denounced as a fraud and triggered a Georgiamaidan (modelled on the Ukrainian Euromaidan in 2014) against Russia's attempt to regain influence in the country. Of similar significance are the demonstrations against Russian investments in the Georgian breakaway region of Abkhazia, culminating in the storming of the region’s parliament[4]. These retreats in the Caucasus region are compounded by Armenia's withdrawal from the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict in favour of an agreement with rival Azerbaijan - which has recently been cooled by the ‘collateral damage’ of the shooting down of a civilian airliner by Russian missiles[5].

But the weakening of Russia's geostrategic position has also led to an expansion of imperialist war thousands of kilometres away from Ukraine, in Syria. Moscow was, along with Hezbollah and Iran, the main supporter of the terrorist Assad regime which, in return, supported Russian intervention in Africa[6] and allowed the establishment of air and naval bases in Syria – granting important access to the Mediterranean. But Russia was forced to abandon its support for the Assad regime - in Trump's words “because the Russians were too weak and too overwhelmed to help the regime in Syria because ‘they are too busy with Ukraine’”[7]. Such a decline in the authority of the imperialist godfather, even if Russia can maintain its military bases in Syria or negotiate new relations with Libya, will certainly have an impact on the Kremlin's credibility with the African states it is trying to win over.

Russia is currently spending around 145 billion dollars on defence, the highest figure since the collapse of the USSR. In 2025 this expenditure is expected to increase by 25% to 6% of GDP. War already accounts for a third of the Russian state budget. Putin boasts about his arsenal and missiles - challenging the United States with the launch of a new hypersonic missile, the ‘Orechnik’ - and never misses an opportunity to remind people of his stockpile of nuclear weapons, which has led to speculation that he could use them as a deterrent by dropping an atomic bomb in the Black Sea. Such threats reflect the embarrassments of Russian conventional military power. It is estimated that the Kremlin has already used 50% of its military capacity in the war in Ukraine without having achieved any of its objectives. Furthermore, “most of the equipment Russia is sending to the front comes from Cold War arsenals, which, although large, have been considerably reduced”[8]. And much of this equipment requires Western technology.

One of Russia’s main problems is recruiting cannon fodder from the population, a difficulty Ukraine is facing as well for that matter. Reports indicate a daily loss of 1,500 soldiers on the front line for the Russian army. Putin has even had to call on more than 10,000 North Korean soldiers. While in Moscow and other major Russian cities the war initially went unnoticed, their inhabitants now live in fear of drone strikes and forced conscription.

Russia’s economic situation

The war in Ukraine has certainly led to an increase in production and low unemployment rates. But the war economy is consuming the resources of the entire country and already amounts to twice what is allocated for social spending. However, insofar as the purpose of war production is destruction, i.e. the sterilisation of capital that cannot be reinvested or reused, the apparent economic advantages do not pull up the economy as a whole, but rather plunge it further into crisis.

In fact, for this year, growth forecasts are barely 0.5 to 1.5%, close to recession, leaving the population facing bleak economic prospects: “The civil economy is faltering. The construction sector is a case in point: due to falling demand and soaring costs (the price of building materials rose by 64% between 2021 and 2024), the pace of new housing construction has slowed considerably. Other sectors in difficulty include freight transport, exacerbated by the slowdown in the rail network; road transport, with rising fuel prices and a shortage of drivers; mineral extraction; and agriculture, once the pride of Mr Putin's government. Overall, exports are no longer a source of growth. Domestic consumption continues, but the outlook is clouded by rising prices. Officially, inflation in Russia in 2024 stood at 9.52%”[9].

And none of this can be compensated for by any supposed economic gain from the occupation of eastern Ukraine. First of all, the country has no great wealth to offer. The ‘crown jewels’ of the Ukrainian economy - notably electricity production, agriculture, rare earth deposits and tourism - have been destroyed by the war: “Even if the war ended tomorrow, it would take years to repair the damage and return to pre-war levels”[10], say the thermal power plant engineers themselves. The bombing of nuclear power stations nearly caused a catastrophe more devastating than Chernobyl and demonstrated the precarious state of the plants. As for the soil, when it is not directly littered with mines or flooded by the destruction of dams, it is highly polluted[11] - with the same being true of the Black Sea.

A destructive war that can only lead to ruin for the contending parties, and massacres for the population

Despite the prospect of a truce announced by the new Trump administration, the war can only continue and worsen. Between the 2014 occupation of Crimea and the 2022 launch of the Russian invasion, there have been hundreds of negotiations and ceasefire agreements without any break in the spiral of irrational destruction. Russia itself is threatening to collapse in the long term. Moreover, for Putin, ending the war without having won it would mean his own end and a country plunged into chaos, just as continuing it means only more ruin and death. The same applies for Zelensky and the Ukrainian ruling class. Faced with the threat of the country being divided between Russia and Poland/Hungary, the war is for them a necessity of survival, even while its continuation means the desertification and depopulation of the country.

In Ukraine the war has had devastating consequences[12], leading to an exhausted economy weighed down with heavy military spending. It survives almost entirely thanks to Western financial and military aid. A dependency paid for with increasing hardship for a demoralised and exhausted population (there have been more than 100,000 desertions according to Zelensky, with as many as 400,000 according to Trump) which is asked to make more and more sacrifices every year. In April 2024 the Ukrainian army lowered the age for forced conscription from 27 to 25 and when Zelensky appealed to the ‘solidarity’ of Western democracies to better arm his troops, they demanded (statements by Rutte, NATO Secretary General, or US Secretary of State Blinken) that he lower the conscription age to 18. Blood for steel!

But the implications of this war go beyond the two immediate belligerents.

The war in Ukraine is stimulating militarism and chaos in the countries of the European Union

The ultimate motivation for the Ukrainian trap, as we have seen, lies in the confrontation between the United States and China. But it has also created complications for the European ‘allies’ of the United States. With a major military conflict on their doorstep, NATO countries were temporary drawn behind the American godfather - but also into infighting amongst themselves.

Germany first and foremost, reluctantly drawn into a common front with the Americans, has suffered the full brunt of the war even without being a direct belligerent. It has been forced to rebuild its diplomacy after decades of ‘Ostpolitik’ (opening up to the East) not only with Russia but also with Hungary, Slovakia and others who it pampered economically in its imperialist expansion following German reunification in 1990, and which today support Putin's regime[13]. The war in Ukraine has had disastrous consequences for the German economy, with a rise in energy supply costs weakening its industrial competitiveness, deepening its recession, triggering inflation and exacerbating social discontent. But above all, Germany has been burdened by the direct costs of the war. Germany took the lion's share of the financial aid provided by the European institutions to the Zelensky regime – making the second largest contribution in terms of military aid[14]. And it did so reluctantly, as evidenced by the tensions within, and the eventual collapse of, the coalition government when Chancellor Scholz abandoned his plan to reduce military aid from €7.5 billion to €4 billion by 2025.

And despite all this waste in a war that is a veritable abyss, the fact remains that Germany is unable to strengthen its imperialist position. Indeed, while the conflict in Ukraine has reinforced its image as a major economic power (it is still the world's fourth largest economy), it remains a real military dwarf. The German bourgeoisie is struggling to react to this situation. Just three days after Russian troops entered Ukraine in February 2022, Chancellor Scholz announced a special €100 billion fund for defence spending in parliament, in what the politicians themselves called “the turning point”. Since then, he has embarked on a frantic race to develop Germany's own armaments industry and draw up strategic plans that would enable German troops “not to limit themselves to national defence, but to be operational [...] in any scenario, in any part of the world”[15].

The strengthening of German militarism is a clear expression of the development of ‘every man for himself’ - one of the main characteristics of capitalist decomposition - following the dislocation of the frameworks which had maintained discipline following the Second World War. Faced with the war in Ukraine Germany and France are apparently on the same side but ultimately have contradictory interests. Even Macron, who tried at the beginning of the war to maintain a special channel of communication with Putin, chose to be among the first to offer the possibility of using Ukrainian missiles on Russian territory, and to send French soldiers to the frontline in the event of a ‘ceasefire’. This is what Macron proposed to Zelensky and Trump at the recent summit under the blessed domes of Notre-Dame. Along with the UK, the Nordic and Baltic countries, France is among the most intransigent on the conditions to be imposed on Putin for ‘peace’.

This rise in militarism is affecting every country, from the smallest to the largest, and it will be accelerated by the intensification of imperialist chaos. Trump's call for NATO countries to increase their defence budgets to 5% of GDP is hardly original - in fact, they have already increased defence spending significantly since the Wales summit in 2014[16]. The NATO Secretary General has stated that “They think strong defence is not the way to peace. Well, they are wrong”[17]. And the next NATO summit, to be held in The Hague in June, is expected to raise the target to 3%.

The ‘danger’ of the Russian bear, which has shown all its clumsiness and weakness in the war against Ukraine, is inspiring increased arms expenditure amongst its neighbours, even while a recent Greenpeace study shows that NATO countries, excluding the United States[18], already spend, between them, almost ten times more on defence than Russia. The trigger for the arms race is precisely the fact that NATO is no longer what it used to be. And this is leading the major powers to be caught in the crossfire: either give in to Trump's pressure (by increasing the contribution to the NATO budget), or bear the ‘security’ expenses alone. The result: more economic crisis, more conflict, more militarism and more chaos.

The same trend towards fragmentation that can be observed on the imperialist level can also be seen within many states, with the emergence of powerful populist political formations which act against the interests of national capital as a whole. We saw it in Great Britain with Brexit, we see it in Germany with the AfD, and we see it at its peak in the United States with the election of Trump.

And now... Trump

As we have explained in our press, the recently re-elected American president is not an anomaly, but an expression of the historical period[19]: the final stage of decadence, that of capitalist decomposition, characterised by the global tendency towards fragmentation and ‘every man for himself’ within the capitalist class. The expression of this tendency towards dislocation is seen in the decline of American leadership, a consequence of the disappearance of the discipline of the imperialist blocs that had ‘ordered’ the world following the Second World War.

Faced with the decline of its hegemony, the United States has attempted to react[20] with the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and now, as we can see, indirectly with the war in Ukraine. But these attempts to ‘reorganise’ the world (in the interests of the United States, of course) have resulted only in more chaos, more indiscipline, more conflict and more bloodshed. By trying to put out the fires of protest from its rivals, the United States has in fact become the primary and most prolific of the pyromaniacs. This has not prevented the United States from losing its authority, as evidenced by the recent situation in the Middle East, where powers such as Israel or Turkey (the latter also being one of NATO's most powerful members) are playing their own cards in Palestine and Syria.

Trump is not of a different nature to Biden and Obama. His core strategic objective is the same: to prevent the rise of China, the main challenger to American hegemony[21]. Where there are divisions within the American bourgeoisie is on how to handle the war in Ukraine. Biden chose to invest a lot of resources in economically and militarily exhausting Russia, thus depriving China of a potential strategic ally, both in terms of military capacity and geographical extension. On the other hand, Trump does not see the mutual collapse of Russia and Ukraine as strengthening the position of the United States in the world, but rather as a source of destabilisation that diverts American economic and military resources from the main confrontation with China.

That is why he boasted for months that he would end the war in Ukraine the day after his inauguration. Of course, he never went into specifics on how he would go about it. But what is clear is that any peace plan would in reality only plant the seeds for new and more deadly wars. Even an immediate ‘freeze’ of the conflict would be perceived by the belligerents as an unacceptable humiliation. Russia would have to give up part of Donbass and Odessa. Ukraine would have to accept the ruin of its economy and the loss of territories, without any compensation and with no guarantees that hostilities would not soon.

More than a desire for peace, it is the imperialist interests in each nation that prevail. Russia refuses to accept any plan involving Ukrainian integration into NATO. Zelensky, for his part, is calling for a ‘peacekeeping force’ of 200,000 men on the line of contact. But recent experiences of ‘peacekeeping forces’ in the Sahel countries (where France, the United States and Spain ended up giving way to the pressure of the guerrillas armed by the Russians) or in Lebanon (where UNIFIL simply looked the other way in the face of the Israeli invasion), show precisely that the mythology of ‘blue helmets’ as guarantors of peace agreements belongs to a past of discipline and ‘order’ in international relations which has been rendered obsolete by the advance of capitalist decomposition. In reality, what the United States is planning to do is to drag its NATO allies, and especially the European countries, into the Ukrainian quagmire[22] under the protection, in the most gangster sense of the term, of the technological resources and authority of the US army. The current wars offer no perspective of the establishment of strong coalitions behind one or another belligerent which could make it possible to avoid the prospect of new conflicts. On the contrary, they are wars of irreconcilable positions that generate new conflicts, new scenarios of chaos and massacre.

Capitalism is incapable of stopping war. Only world revolution offers an alternative for humanity

The scenario towards which we are headed is neither one of peace nor World War III. The future that capitalism offers us is generalised chaos, the proliferation of tensions and conflicts on every continent. Militarism and war are increasingly encroaching on all spheres of social life - from trade wars of economic blackmail, to disinformation warfare in cyberspace, to devastation which is being wrought upon the natural world, and above all to the increasing attacks on the living conditions of the population, especially the proletariat in the large concentrations of Europe and America, in order to feed the war machine. When the illustrious Mark Rutte was asked where he intended to find the billions of euros needed to increase military spending, his answer could not have been more arrogant and explicit: “The aim is to prepare the population for cuts to pensions, healthcare and social systems in order to increase the defence budget to 3% of the GDP of each country”[23].

The main victim of this whirlwind of chaos, wars, militarism, environmental disasters and disease is the global working class. As the main supplier of cannon fodder for the armies of the countries directly at war, but also as the main victim of the sacrifices, austerity and misery demanded by the maintenance of militarism. In the article we published on the second anniversary of the war in Ukraine[24], we emphasised: “The bourgeoisie has demanded enormous sacrifices to fuel the war machine in Ukraine. In the face of the crisis and despite the propaganda, the proletariat rose up against the economic consequences of this conflict, against inflation and austerity. Admittedly, the working class still finds it difficult to make the link between militarism and the economic crisis, but it has indeed refused to make sacrifices: in the United Kingdom with a year of mobilisations, in France against pension reform, in the United States against inflation and job insecurity.”.

This climate of resistance in the face of the progressive deterioration of living conditions continues to express itself, as we have seen recently in the strikes in Canada, the United States, Italy and more recently in Belgium[25], where resistance to cuts was expressed even before the implementation of the new austerity plans. Of course, this break with the passivity of previous years does not imply that the proletariat as a whole has become aware of the link between the deterioration of its living conditions and war, or of its ability to prevent the ruin towards which capitalism is inexorably drawing humanity.

It is also true that, at the level of numerically very small but politically very important minorities, reflection is developing on the prospects that capitalism can offer and on the development of a revolutionary alternative by the proletariat. We have already seen this in - despite all its limitations - the Prague Week of Action[26]. But we also see it, for example, in the frank and fruitful debates that are taking place in our public meetings, which are seeing growing levels of participation. It is with the weapons of its struggle, its unity and its consciousness that the proletariat can bring down capitalism. Today, we are certainly witnessing capitalism move further along its path towards destruction - but we can alco see a slow and difficult development towards that other future, that of revolution.

 

Hic Rhodes/Valerio.

30.01.2025

[1] “War, militarism and imperialist blocs in the decadence of capitalism”, Part 2, International Review 53.

[2] Although the origin of this expression is uncertain, the phrase is associated with Louis XV who, aware of the mediocre political legacy he was leaving to his successor, did not care, so that the phrase is interpreted as “whatever happens, even if it's the end of the world, I don't care”.

[3] Extract from Le Monde, 15 January 2025.

[4] “Even longtime Russian satellites have become a headache for Putin. Take the small but spectacular case of Abkhazia, the breakaway region of Georgia: in November, faced with a plan that would have given Russia even greater influence over their economy, Abkhazians stormed their parliament and brought down their government.” “The Cold War Putin Wants”, Andrei Kolesnikov, in Foreign Affairs 23 January 2025.

[5] “Armenia, once Russia’s ‘strategic partner’ in the Caucasus—a country that was under Moscow’s protection and strongly dependent on Russia in several economic sectors—has been forsaken in the ashes of its recent war with Azerbaijan: in the fall of 2023, Russia could do little more than stand out of the way, as well-armed Azerbaijani forces seized the Armenian enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh and, seemingly overnight, expelled more than 100,000 Armenian Karabakhis. Now, Armenia is concluding a Charter of Strategic Partnership with the United States and seeking to join the European Union.” “The Cold War Putin Wants, Andrei Kolesnikov”, in Foreign Affairs 23 January 2025.

[6] “Russia provided [...] material and diplomatic support that enabled military officers to seize power by force in Mali in 2021, Burkina Faso in 2022, and Niger in 2023 [...] it also sends weapons to Sudan, prolonging the country's civil war and the resulting humanitarian crisis, and has provided support to the Houthi militias in Yemen”. “Putin's Point of No Return”, Andrea Kendall-Taylor and Michael Kofman, in Foreign Affairs, 18 December 2024

[7] “America Needs a Maximum Pressure Strategy in Ukraine”, Alina Polyakova, in Foreign Affairs, 31 December 2024

[8] “Ukraine's Security Now Depends on Europe”, Elie Tenenbaum and Leo Litra, Foreign Affairs, 3 December 2024

[9] “95% of all foreign components found in Russian weapons on the Ukrainian battlefield come from Western countries”, “The Russian Economy Remains the Putin's Greatest Weakness”, Theodore Bunzel and Elina Ribakova, Foreign Affairs, 9 December 2024.

[10] See the articles in International Review 171 and 172.

[11] See the article in International Review 172.

[12] See International Review 170 for the Report on imperialist tensions.

[13] ibid

[14] By February 2024, the United States had provided 43 billion euros and Germany 10 billion (twice as much as Great Britain and almost four times as much as France).

[15] Speech by NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte on 12 December to the heads of the NATO Military Committee.

[16] The very ‘pacifist’ Spanish government has increased its military budget by 67% over the last decade.

[17] “To prevent war, NATO must spend more”. A conversation with NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte. carnegieendowment.org 12.12.2024

[18] Christopher Steinmetz, Herbert Wulf: “Wann ist genug genug? Ein Vergleich der militärischen Potenziale der Nato und. Russlands". Published by Greenpeace. See also ‘Think big and do big.’ Quoted in Le Temps de la mentalité de guerre.

[19] See “Trump's triumph in the United States: A giant step forward in the decomposition of capitalism!” [4], ICConline, November 2024, where we explain why he is also an active factor in the accentuation of this self-destructive process.

[20] “Our primary objective is to prevent the emergence of a new rival” (Extract from a secret 1992 document of the US Department of Defence attributed to Paul Wolfowitz - neocon Under Secretary of Defence from 2001 to 2005 - published by the New York Times and of course denied by all administration officials). In "La géopolitique de Donald Trump", Le Monde Diplomatique, January 2025.

[21] See the “Report on Imperialist Tensions” in International Review 170.

[22] "The European coalition's military deployment would require a major land component of at least four or five multinational combat brigades combined under a permanent command structure. The troops would be stationed in eastern Ukraine and would need to be combat-ready, mobile and adaptable to Ukrainian conditions. A strong air component including combat air patrols, airborne radar to detect aircraft or missiles, ground-based air defences and rapid reaction capabilities would be needed to prevent Russian bombing and air raids. Some of these systems could be operated from air bases outside Ukraine. Finally, a maritime component could help secure overseas lines of communication, but under the Montreux Convention, which governs passage through the Bosphorus and Dardanelles Straits, Turkey would first have to allow a limited number of Western warships into the Black Sea.” (“Ukraine's security now depends on Europe”, Elie Tenenbaum and Leo Litra in Foreign Affairs, 3 December 2024). In other words, Russia's occupation of Donbas would ultimately have led to an occupation by European countries... By NATO.

[23] “The time of the war mentality” on https://www.german-foreign-policy.com/fr/news/detail/9801 [5]

[24] See 'After Ukraine, the Middle East: capitalism’s only future is barbarism and chaos!', World Revolution 399

[25] See 'Prague Action Week: Some lessons, and some replies to slander', ICConline.

[26] See 'An international debate to understand the global situation and prepare for the future', ICConline.

 

Part 2: The background of an undefeated proletariat

In the first part of this article, our aim was to show that the current revival of class struggle, the ‘break’ or ‘rupture’ with decades of retreat, is not only a response to the dramatic aggravation of the world economic crisis, but has deeper roots in the process we call ‘the subterranean maturation of consciousness’, a semi-concealed process of reflection, discussion, disillusionment with false promises which breaks out to the surface at certain key moments. The second element which supports the idea that we are witnessing a profound development within the world proletariat is the idea – which, like the notion of subterranean maturation, is more or less unique to the ICC – that the main battalions of the working class have not suffered a historical defeat comparable to the one it experienced with the failure of the 1917-23 revolutionary wave. And this despite the growing difficulties posed to the class in the terminal phase of capitalist decadence, the phase of decomposition.

Our rejection of what is without doubt a central plank of the dominant ideology – according to which, any idea that working class can offer a historic alternative to capitalism is totally obsolete and discredited– is based on the marxist method, and in particular the method developed by the Italian and French Communist Left during the 1930s and 40s. In 1933, the year that Nazism came to power in Germany, the Italian Left in exile began publishing its review Bilan – so named because it understood that its central task was to carry out a serious ‘balance sheet’ of the defeat of the revolutionary wave and the victory of the counter-revolution. This meant questioning the erroneous assumptions that had led to the opportunist degeneration of the Communist Parties, and developing the programmatic and organisational bases for the new parties that would arise in a pre-revolutionary situation. The task of the hour were thus the tasks of a fraction, in opposition to the current around Trotsky which was perpetually looking to the formation of a new International on the same opportunist foundations that had led to the demise of the Third International.  And part of the quest to develop the programme of the future on the foundations of the lessons of the past, meant not to betray fundamental internationalist principles faced with the enormous pressures of the counter-revolution, which now had a free hand to march the working class towards a new world war. It was thus able to resist the call to line up behind the ‘anti-fascist’ wing of the ruling class in the war in Spain (1936-39) and to reject calls to support ‘oppressed nations’ in the imperialist conflicts in China, Ethiopia, and elsewhere; conflicts which, like the war in Spain, so many stepping stones to the new world war.

The Italian Communist Left was not invulnerable to the pressure of the dominant ideology. Towards the end of the 30s, it was gripped by the revisionist theory of the war economy, which argued that the conflicts which were in fact laying the ground work for a new imperialist carve-up were instead aimed at preventing the danger of a new revolutionary outbreak. This false argument resulted in the total disorientation of the majority of the Italian Fraction when the imperialist war actually broke out; while towards the end of the war, without any serious reflection on the global situation of proletariat, the revival of class movements in Italy led to a rush to proclaim a new party in Italy alone (the Partito Comunista Internazionalista), and this on a deeply opportunist basis that brought together very heterogenous elements without a clear process of programmatic clarification.

Faced with this slide into opportunism, the comrades who were to form the Gauche Communiste de France were able to understand that the counter-revolution still held sway – above all after the bourgeoisie had shown its ability to crush the pockets of proletarian resistance which appeared at the end of the war; and thus the GCF severely criticised the opportunist mistakes of the PCInt (ambiguities about the partisan groups in Italy, participation in bourgeois elections, etc). For the GCF, the question of whether the proletariat was still suffering from a profound defeat, or whether it was recovering its class autonomy in massive struggles, was a decisive element in the way they grasped their role. 

The end of the counter-revolution

The ’tradition’ of the GCF - which broke up in 1952, the same year as the PCInt split into its ‘Bordigist’ and ‘Damenist’ wings – was taken up by the group Internacialismo in Venezuela, animated by Mark Chirik, who had fought against revisionism in the Italian Fraction and had been a founder member of the GCF. Already in 1967, perceiving the first signs of a return of the open economic crisis, and of a certain number of workers’ struggles in various countries, Internacialismo predicted a new period of class struggles: the end of the counter-revolution and the opening of a new historic course[1]. And their prediction was soon confirmed by the events of May-June 1968 in France, followed by a whole series of massive class movements around the world, movements which demonstrated a tendency to break from the established organs of control over the class (left parties and unions) and also revealed a definite political dimension which nourished the appearance of a new generation of young people seeking for class positions and showed the potential for the regroupment of revolutionary forces on an international scale.

This rupture with the counter-revolution was no mere flash in the pan. It created an underlying historical situation which has not been erased, even if has passed through various stages and many difficulties. Between 1968 and 1989, we saw three major international waves of class struggle in which some significant advances were made at the level of understanding the methods of struggle, illustrated in particular by the mass strikes in Poland in 1980, which gave rise to independent forms of class organisation at the level of an entire country. And the impact of these movements was not only felt through open and massive struggles but through the increased social weight of the proletariat in the relationship between the classes.  In contrast to the 1930s, this balance of forces in the eighties acted as barrier to the preparations for a third world war, which had been put back on the agenda by the return of the open economic crisis and the existence of ready-formed imperialist blocs disputing for global hegemony.

The impact of decomposition

But if the ruling class found the road to world war blocked, this didn’t mean that the bourgeoisie was no longer on the offensive, that it had been disarmed in the face of the working class. The 1980s saw a realignment of bourgeois political forces, characterised by governments of the right launching brutal attacks on workers’ jobs and wages, while the left in opposition was there to channel, control and derail the reactions to these attacks by the working class. This capitalist counter-offensive inflicted a number of important defeats on sectors of the working class in the main capitalist centres, perhaps most notably the miners in Britain: the crushing of their resistance to the more or less complete closure of the coal industry served to open the door to a wider policy of de-industralisation and ‘relocation’ which broke up some of the main centres of working class militancy. Still the class struggle continued in the period 1983-88, in particular with important movements in Belgium, France and Italy in 1986-7, and there was no head-on defeat of the key battalions of the proletariat such as we had seen in the 1920s and 30s. But neither were the struggles of the 80s able to rise to the political level demanded by the gravity of the world situation, and thus we arrived at the ‘stalemate’ which precipitated the process of capitalist decomposition. The collapse of the eastern bloc in 1989-91 marked a whole new phase in decadence, bringing with it enormous difficulties for the class. The deafening ideological campaigns about the victory of capitalism and the so-called death of communism, the atomisation and despair that were severely exacerbated by the decomposition of society, and the bourgeoisie’s conscious dismantling of traditional industrial centres with the aim of breaking these old hubs of workers’ resistance - all this combined to erode the class identity of the proletariat, its sense of being a distinct force in society with its own interests to defend.

In this new phase of the decadence of capitalism, the notion of a historic course was no longer valid, even if the ICC took a long time to fully grasp this[2].But already in our Theses on Decomposition in 1990 we had understood that the advancing putrefaction of capitalism could overwhelm the proletariat even without a frontal defeat, since the continuation of its defensive struggles, which had barred the road to world war, was not sufficient to halt the threat of the destruction of humanity through a combination of local wars, ecological disasters and the break-up of social bonds.

Although the decades that followed the collapse of the eastern bloc can be described as one of retreat by the working class, this did not mean a complete disappearance of the class struggle. Thus, for example, we saw a new generation of proletarians engage in significant movements like the struggle against the CPE in France in 2006 and the Indignados movement in Spain 2011. But although these struggles gave rise to genuine forms of self-organisation (general assemblies) and acted as a focus for serious debate about the future of society, their fundamental weakness was that a majority of those involved in them didn’t see themselves as part of the working class but rather as ‘citizens’ fighting for their rights, and thus vulnerable to various ‘democratic’ political mystifications.

This underlines the significance of the new rupture of 2022, which began with the widespread strikes in Britain, since it heralds the return of the class as a class, i.e. the beginnings of a recovery of class identity. Some argue that these strikes were actually a step back from previous movements such as the Indignados, since they have shown little sign of giving rise to general assemblies or directly stimulating political debate about wider issues. But this is to ignore the fact that after so many years of passivity, ‘the first victory of the struggle is the struggle itself’: the fact that the proletariat is not lying down in the face of a continuing erosion of its conditions, and begins once again to see itself as a class. The Theses on Decomposition insisted that, rather than the more direct expressions of decomposition such as climate change or the gangsterisation of society, it would be the deepening of the economic crisis that provided the best conditions for the revival of class combats; the movements we have seen since 2022 have already confirmed this, and we are heading for situation in which the economic crisis will be the worst in capitalism’s history, exacerbated not only by the central economic contradictions of capital (overproduction and the falling rate of profit) but also by the growth of militarism, the spread of ecological catastrophes and the increasingly irrational policies of the ruling class.  

In particular, the increasingly overt attempt to impose a war economy in the central countries of capitalism will be a vital issue in the politicisation of workers’ resistance. This has already been presaged by two important developments: first, the fact that the 2022 breakthrough took place precisely at a point in which the outbreak of the war in Ukraine was accompanied by big campaigns about the need to support Ukraine and to prepare for sacrifices in order to resist future Russian aggression; second, the development of minorities politicised by the threat of war and looking for an internationalist response. These reactions on the question of war do not come from out of the blue: they are further evidence that the new phase of the class struggle draws its historic strength from the reality of an undefeated proletariat.

We repeat: the danger of decomposition overwhelming the proletariat has not gone away, and indeed grows as the ‘whirlwind effect’ of interacting capitalist disasters gains pace, piling destruction upon destruction. But the struggles after 2022 show that the class can still respond and that there are two poles in the situation, a kind of race against time[3] between the acceleration of decomposition and the development of the class struggle onto a higher level; a development in which all the questions raised by decomposition can be integrated into a communist project which can offer a way out of economic crisis, perpetual war, the destruction of nature and the rotting of social life. The more clearly revolutionary organisations of today understand what is at stake in the present world situation, the more effectively they will be able to play their role of elaborating this perspective for the future.

Amos

 

Part 1: The question of 'subterranean maturation'

The ICC maintains that the wave of strikes in the UK in 2022 marked the beginning of a “rupture” or break with several decades of resignation and apathy and a growing loss of class identity. It was the first of a number of working class movements around the world, primarily in response to worsening living standards and working conditions[1]. Crucial to our analysis of a new phase in the international class struggle are two fundamental observations:

• this new phase was not merely a reaction to immediate attacks on workers’ conditions, one that could be measured in terms of the number of strikes and struggles at a particular moment, but has a more profound historical dimension. It is the fruit of a long process of the “subterranean maturation” of class consciousness which has been moving forward despite the enormous pressures exerted by the accelerating decomposition of capitalist society.
• the fact that the proletariat remains undefeated, meaning that it has not suffered a major defeat comparable to the one it experienced with the failure of the revolutionary wave of 1917-23. In a third part we will show that the present dynamic of the class struggle, while having  as a principal basis the unleashing of economic attacks by the bourgeoisie, is also fuelled by the struggle itself. Here we draw support from an article by Lenin on the strikes which shook Russia at the end of the 19th century.  

These arguments have met with a rather widespread scepticism in the proletarian political camp. If we take the example of the Internationalist Communist Tendency (ICT), although they initially acknowledged and welcomed some of the struggles that came to the surface after 2022, we have criticised the fact that they failed to see the international and historic significance of this movement[2], and more recently, seem to have either forgotten about it (as evidenced in the lack of any published balance sheet of the movement) or have written it off as just another flash in the pan – as we noted in some of their recent public meetings. Meanwhile, a parasitic website dedicated to ‘research’, Controverses, has devoted a full article[3] to refuting our notion of the rupture, thus providing a ‘theoretical’ justification for the scepticism of others.

It is noteworthy that the author of this article has now lined up with the majority of those who are (or merely claim to be) part of the left communist tradition, and now dismisses the very concept of subterranean maturation. Not only that: in an article on the main developments in the class struggle in the last 200 years[4], he embraces the idea that we are still living in the counter-revolution which descended on the working class with the defeat of the 1917-23 revolutionary wave. In this view, what the ICC insists was the historical reawakening of the world proletariat after 1968 and the end of the counter-revolution, was at best a mere “parenthesis” in a global chronicle of defeat.

This view is broadly shared by the various Bordigist groups and the ICT, whose forerunners saw little more in the events of May-June 68 in France or the ‘Hot Autumn’ in Italy the year after than a rash of student unrest.

In the next two articles, rather than entering into detail about the struggles of the last two years, we want to focus on two key theoretical planks for understanding our notion of the rupture: first, the reality of the subterranean maturation of consciousness, and secondly the undefeated nature of the world proletariat. An article by Lenin on strikes compliments and completes the series.

The marxist basis of the concept of subterranean maturation

Let’s briefly recall the circumstances in which the ICC first took up the question of subterranean maturation in its own ranks. In 1984, in response to an analysis of the class struggle which revealed a serious concession to the idea that class consciousness can only develop through the open, massive struggle of the workers, and in particular a text which explicitly rejected the notion of subterranean maturation, our comrade Marc Chirik wrote a text whose arguments were affirmed by the majority of the organisation, with the exception of the group which was eventually to desert the ICC at its 6th Congress and form the “External Fraction of the ICC” (its descendants are now part of Internationalist Perspective)[5].  Marc pointed out that such a view tends towards councilism because it sees consciousness not as an active factor in the struggle but purely as something determined by objective circumstances - a form of vulgar materialism; and it thus severely underestimated the role of minorities who are able to deepen class consciousness even during phases where the extent of class consciousness across the proletariat may have diminished. This councilist approach evidently has little use for an organisation of revolutionaries which is able, because it is based on the historic acquisitions of the class struggle, to steer its course through phases of retreat or defeat in the wider class movement; but it also dismisses the more general tendency within the class to reflect on its experience, to discuss, to pose questions about the major themes of the dominant ideology, and so on. Such a process may indeed be called “subterranean” because it takes place in restricted circles of the class or even inside the minds of individual workers who may give voice to all kinds of contradictory ideas, but it is no less a reality for all that. As Marx wrote in Capital[6],  “All science would be superfluous if the outward appearance and the essence of things directly coincided”: it is in fact a specific task of the marxist minority to see beyond appearances and try to discern the deeper developments going on within their class.

When the ICC published documents relating to this internal debate, the Communist Workers Organisation welcomed what it perceived as an attempt by the ICC to settle accounts with the councilist resides which still had a weight within the organisation[7]. But in the substantive issued raised by the debate, it actually sided, somewhat ironically, with the councilist view, since they too rejected the notion of subterranean maturation as non-marxist, as a form of “political Jungianism”[8]. We say ironically because at that stage the CWO had embraced a version of class consciousness being brought to the class from the ‘outside’ by ‘the party’, constituted by elements of the bourgeois intelligentsia– the idealist thesis of Kautsky which Lenin adopted in What is to be Done but later admitted “bent the stick too far” in a polemic with the proto-councilists of his day, the Economist trend in Russia. But the irony dissipates when we consider that vulgar materialism and idealism can often exist side by side[9]. For both councilists and the CWO in their article, once the open struggles dies down, the class is no more than a mass of atomised individuals. The only difference is that for the CWO, this sterile cycle could only be broken through the intervention of the party.

In our reply[10], we insisted that the notion of the subterranean maturation of consciousness was not at an innovation of the ICC, but is a direct descendant of Marx’s notion of the revolution as the Old Mole which burrows under the surface for long periods only to burst to the surface in certain given conditions. And in particular we cited a very lucid passage on this process from Trotsky in his masterly study of precisely this process – The History of the Russian Revolution, where he wrote: "In a revolution we look first of all at the direct interference of the masses in the dest­inies of society. We seek to uncover behind the events changes in the collective conscious­ness...This can seem puzzling only to one who looks upon the insurrection of the masses as ‘spontaneous' - that is, as a herd-mutiny art­ificially made use of by leaders. In reality the mere existence of privations is not enough to cause an insurrection, if it were, the masses would always be in revolt...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."

By the same token, the international wave of struggles that began in May 1968 in France did not come from nowhere (even if it initially surprised the bourgeoisie who had started to think that the working class had become “embourgeoisiefied” by the “consumer society”). It 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). This process had also expressed itself here and there in strike movements like the wildcats in the USA and Western Europe in the mid-60s.

The same goes for the rupture of 2022, which also came in the wake of a number of strikes in the US, France, etc, many of which had been interrupted by the Covid lock-down. But what happened after 2022 revealed more clearly what had been gestating within the working class for some years:

• The widespread slogan “enough is enough” expressed a long-nurtured feeling that all the promises doled out in the period that followed the “financial crisis” of 2008 – promises that a period of “austerity” was needed before prosperity could be resumed -had proved to be lies, and that it was high time workers began raising their own demands. It was all the more significant in that the movement in Britain emerged after decades of stagnation and resignation that followed the defeats of the 1980s, in particular the defeat of the miners in 1985.
•  The slogans “we are all in the same boat” and “the working class is back” expressed a tendency for the working class to regain a sense of itself as a class with its own collective existence and distinct interests, despite decades of atomisation imposed by the general decomposition of capitalist society, assisted by the deliberate dismantling of many traditional centres of working class militancy (mines, steel, etc). In the struggles in France against “pension reforms”, and elsewhere, frequent references to the movement in Britain which had “kicked off” the class revival testified to the stirrings of an awareness that this class identity does not stop at national borders, despite the enormous weight of nationalism and populism.
• Again in the movement in France, the slogan “You give us 64[11], we’ll give you 68” expressed a definite memory of the significance of the mass strikes of 68 (a phenomenon we had previously noted in the student assemblies in the anti-CPE movement of 2006, where there was a powerful desire to learn from what happened in 68).
• Just as the process of subterranean maturation prior to 1968 was to give birth to a new generation of politicised elements attempting to rediscover the real history of the revolutionary movement (and thus to the recovery of the tradition of the communist left), so in the current period we are seeing the international development of minorities tending towards internationalist and communist positions. The fact that the majority of these elements and their efforts to come together have been engendered less by the immediate class struggle than by the question of war is evidence that the current class movements express something more than concerns about deteriorating living standards. We have noted the importance of the fact that the struggles of the rupture broke out precisely at a moment when the workers of western Europe were being asked to accept living costs and wage freezes in the name of supporting the “defence of Ukraine” against the tyrant Putin. And again, some minorities within the demonstrations against the pension reforms in France were explicit about rejecting sacrifices in the name of building up a war economy.
• A further sign of the process of maturation can also be seen in the efforts of the bourgeoisie’s political apparatus to radicalise the messages addressed to the working class. The success of Trumpism in the USA can in large part be attributed to its capacity to take advantage of real concerns of the US working class about rising prices and the effect of military spending on living conditions. And on the opposite wing of the political spectrum we have seen the appointment of more radical union leaders, as in Britain, and a definite move to the left on the part of the Trotskyists, with groups  like Revolution Permanente in France or the Revolutionary Communist Party  in Britain shifting their focus from identity politics to talking about communism, internationalism and the necessity for the proletarian revolution – the aim being above all to “mop up” young elements who are asking serious questions about the direction that capitalist society is taken.

We could continue with these examples. They will no doubt be countered by arguments which seek to prove that the working class has actually forgotten more than it learned from the wave of struggles after 1968 – notably, as demonstrated by the fact that there has been little attempt to challenge the union control of the current strikes and to develop forms of self-organisation. But for us, the broad tendencies initiated by the “break” of 2022 are only at their beginning. Their historic potential can only be understood by seeing them as the first fruits of a long process of germination.  We will return to this in the second part of the article.

Amos

January 15, 2025.

At the end of 1899, Lenin wrote an article entitled ‘On Strikes’, relating to the strikes that were developing at the time in Russia[1] Although more than a century has passed since this article was written, making it inevitable that some of the ideas it contains are outdated or redundant due to historical development, others not only retain their full validity but are also of definite interest considering the potential dynamic of the class struggle in the current period. This is particularly the case for the part of the article that replies to the question ‘What is the role of strikes?’ which we are reproducing below.

Why is this text by Lenin of interest in the current period?

The strikes of the late 1890s mentioned by Lenin are part of a dynamic of struggle in Russia and Europe that would lead to the mass strike of 1905 in Russia with the emergence of the soviets. For Russia alone, the following are recorded particularly for this period: the general strike of the textile workers of Saint Petersburg in 1896 and 1897; the Batoum strike in the Caucasus in March 1902; the massive general strike in December 1904 in the Caucasus, in Baku.

Lenin's text highlights the following characteristics of these struggles, which can largely be transposed politically to the current period:

• It is the workers who produce or set in motion the means of production that are indispensable to the life of society, which gives the strike a means of pressure against the bosses;
• Strikes are a necessity, not only as a means of defending the living conditions of the working class, but also as a time to challenge an exploitative society;
• strikes teach workers to unite;
• The struggle for demands, through collective action, allows the working class to become aware of its strength, gives it confidence in its collective action and, therefore, the ability to make the bourgeoisie back down;
• Strikes have a moral influence on all workers who ‘cease to be slaves’;
• Despite the privations, sacrifices and repression, the struggle itself is the first victory of the strike because it gains self-esteem and the esteem of one's comrades-in-arms; it thus prepares for battles, no longer only against a boss, but against the class of bosses for another society, socialism.
• The struggle to defend the immediate interests of the working class contributes powerfully to the politicisation of the workers by making them aware that the capitalist class as a whole is the enemy of the working class as a whole, and that the latter can only rely on its collective strength.
• Moving from isolated strikes to the struggle of the working class as a whole leads to an awareness of the need for the emancipation of all workers.
• In this movement, which is increasingly a political struggle, the need for a working-class party is emerging.

Today, more than twelve decades after the 1890s, the working class must once again go through the school of struggle for the basic defence of its living conditions, whereas in the past it had ‘historic’ experiences of struggle during the first world revolutionary wave of 1917-23.

The problem is that the defeat of this revolutionary wave was followed by a global counter-revolution, lasting almost half a century, which momentarily erased the memory of the achievements of its historical experience among the masses.

Subsequently, initiated by the eruption of massive strikes and the great mobilisations of 1968 in France, a new dynamic of international class struggle ended this period of counter-revolution, thus opening the way for class confrontations. But 20 years later, the new dynamic eventually came up against the limits imposed by the working class's difficulties in further politicising its struggle. Neither of the two antagonistic classes was then in a position to impose its solution to the crisis of capitalism: world war for the bourgeoisie, revolution for the proletariat. This resulted in a stalemate between the classes and the onset of the phase of decomposition of capitalism, involving increased difficulties for the proletariat.[2]

However, the proletariat did not suffer a decisive defeat, and faced with ever more massive economic attacks, it finally emerged from its previous quasi-passivity to revive the development of its struggles in the main industrialised countries, the first expression of which was the wave of struggles in the United Kingdom in the summer of 2022. Thus, “These struggles are not simply a reaction to immediate attacks on working conditions but have a deeper historical dimension. They are the result of a long process of “underground maturation” of class consciousness that has progressed despite the enormous pressures exerted by the accelerated decomposition of capitalist society”[3].

It is precisely in this new situation, where the working class must reconnect with its methods of struggle, that the lessons learnt by Lenin, more than 120 years ago, constitute valuable indicators for the working class today[4]. They come to hammer home the point that the main gain of the struggle is the struggle itself, which is of the utmost importance in a situation where it is by pushing the struggle to its extremes in defence of its living conditions that the proletariat will be able to develop its consciousness of the necessity to overthrow the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie. Indeed, “we are heading for a situation in which the economic crisis will be the most serious in the history of capitalism, exacerbated not only by the central economic contradictions of capital (overproduction and falling rates of profit), but also by the growth of militarism, the spread of ecological disasters and the increasingly irrational policies of the ruling class”[5].
 

What is the role of strikes (or walkouts) in the struggle of the working class?
(extract from Lenin's article “On strikes”[6]

To answer this question, we must first take a closer look at the strikes. The wages of a worker are determined, as we have seen, by an agreement between the employer and the worker, and if, under these circumstances, the individual worker is completely powerless, it is obvious that workers must fight jointly for their demands, that they are compelled to organise strikes either to prevent the employers from reducing wages or to obtain higher wages. It is a fact that in every country with a capitalist system there are strikes of workers. Everywhere, in all the European countries and in America, the workers feel themselves powerless when they are disunited; they can only offer resistance to the employers jointly, either by striking or threatening to strike. As capitalism develops, as big factories are more rapidly opened, as the petty capitalists are more and more ousted by the big capitalists, the more urgent becomes the need for the joint resistance of the workers, because unemployment increases, competition sharpens between the capitalists who strive to produce their wares at the cheapest rate (to do which they have to pay the workers as little as possible), and the fluctuations of industry become more pronounced and crises[7] more violent. When industry prospers, the factory owners make big profits but do not think of sharing them with the workers; but when a crisis breaks out, the factory owners try to push the losses on to the workers. The necessity for strikes in capitalist society has been recognised to such an extent by everybody in the European countries that the law in those countries does not forbid the organisation of strikes; only in Russia barbarous laws against strikes still remain in force (we shall speak on another occasion of these laws and their application).

However, strikes, which arise out of the very nature of capitalist society, signify the beginning of the working-class struggle against that system of society. When the rich capitalists are confronted by individual, propertyless workers, this signifies the utter enslavement of the workers. But when those propertyless workers unite, the situation changes. There is no wealth that can be of benefit to the capitalists if they cannot find workers willing to apply their labour-power to the instruments and materials belonging to the capitalists and produce new wealth. As long as workers have to deal with capitalists on an individual basis they remain veritable slaves who must work continuously to profit another in order to obtain a crust of bread, who must forever remain docile and inarticulate hired servants. But when the workers state their demands jointly and refuse to submit to the money-bags, they cease to be slaves, they become human beings, they begin to demand that their labour should not only serve to enrich a handful of idlers, but should also enable those who work to live like human beings. The slaves begin to put forward the demand to become masters, not to work and live as the landlords and capitalists want  them to, but as the working people themselves want to. Strikes, therefore, always instil fear into the capitalists, because they begin to undermine their supremacy. “All wheels will stop, if your strong arm wills it,” a German workers’ song says of the working class. And so it is in reality: the factories, the landlords’ land, the machines, the railways, etc., etc., are all like wheels in a giant machine - the machine that extracts various products, transforms them as required and delivers them to their destination.

The whole of this machine is set in motion by the worker who tills the soil, extracts ores, makes commodities in the factories, builds houses, workshops, and railways. When the workers refuse to work, the entire machine threatens to stop. Every strike reminds the capitalists that it is the workers and not they who are the real masters, the workers who are more and more loudly proclaiming their rights. Every strike reminds the workers that their position is not hopeless, that they are not alone. See what a tremendous effect strikes have both on the strikers themselves and on the workers at neighbouring or nearby factories or at factories in the same industry. In normal, peaceful times the worker does his job without a murmur, does not contradict the employer, and does not discuss his condition. In times of strikes he states his demands in a loud voice, he reminds the employers of all their abuses, he claims his rights, he does not think of himself and his wages alone, he thinks of all his workmates who have downed tools together with him and who stand up for the workers’ cause, fearing no privations. Every strike means many privations for the working people, terrible privations that can be compared only to the calamities of war - hungry families, loss of wages, often arrests, banishment from the towns where they have their homes and their employment.

Despite all these sufferings, the workers despise those who desert their fellow workers and make deals with the employers. Despite all these sufferings, brought on by strikes, the workers of neighbouring factories gain renewed courage when they see that their comrades have engaged themselves in struggle. “People who endure so much hardship to break the resistance of one single bourgeois will also know how to break the power of the whole bourgeoisie,”[8] said one great teacher of socialism, Engels, speaking of the strikes of the English workers. It is often enough for one factory to strike, for strikes to begin immediately in a large number of factories. What a great moral influence strikes have, how they affect workers who see that their comrades have ceased to be slaves and, if only for the time being, have become people on an equal footing with the rich!

Every strike brings thoughts of socialism very forcibly to the worker’s mind, thoughts of the struggle of the entire working class for emancipation from the oppression of capital. It has often happened that before a big strike the workers of a certain factory or a certain branch of industry or of a certain town knew hardly anything and scarcely ever thought about socialism; but after the strike, study circles and associations become much more widespread among them and more and more workers become socialists.

A strike teaches workers to understand what the strength of the employers and what the strength of the workers is based on; it teaches them not to think of their own employer alone and not of their own immediate workmates alone but of all the employers, the whole class of capitalists and the whole class of workers. When a factory owner who has amassed millions from the toil of several generations of workers refuses to grant a modest increase in wages or even tries to reduce wages to a still lower level and, if the workers offer resistance, throws thousands of hungry families out into the street, it becomes quite clear to the workers that the capitalist class as a whole is the enemy of the whole working class and that the workers can depend only on themselves and their united action. It often happens that a factory owner does his best to deceive the workers, to pose as a benefactor, and conceal his exploitation of the workers by some petty sops or lying promises. A strike always demolishes this deception at one blow by showing the workers that their ‘benefactor’ is a wolf in sheep’s clothing.

A strike, moreover, opens the eyes of the workers to the nature, not only of the capitalists, but of the government and the laws as well. Just as the factory owners try to pose as benefactors of the workers, the government officials and their lackeys try to assure the workers that the tsar and the tsarist government are equally solicitous of both the factory owners and the workers, as justice requires. The worker does not know the laws, he has no contact with government officials, especially with those in the higher posts, and, as a consequence, often believes all this. Then comes a strike. The public prosecutor, the factory inspector, the police, and frequently troops, appear at the factory. The workers learn that they have violated the law: the employers are permitted by law to assemble and openly discuss ways of reducing workers’ wages, but workers are declared criminals if they come to a joint agreement!

Workers are driven out of their homes; the police close the shops from which the workers might obtain food on credit; an effort is made to incite the soldiers against the workers even when the workers conduct themselves quietly and peacefully. Soldiers are even ordered to fire on the workers and when they kill unarmed workers by shooting the fleeing crowd in the back, the Tsar himself sends the troops an expression of his gratitude (in this way the Tsar thanked the troops who had killed striking workers in Yaroslavl in 1895). It becomes clear to every worker that the Tsarist government is his worst enemy, since it defends the capitalists and binds the workers hand and foot. The workers begin to understand that laws are made in the interests of the rich alone; that government officials protect those interests; that the working people are gagged and not allowed to make known their needs; that the working class must win for itself the right to strike, the right to publish workers’ newspapers, the right to participate in a national assembly that enacts laws and supervises their fulfilment. The government itself knows full well that strikes open the eyes of the workers and for this reason it has such a fear of strikes and does everything to stop them as quickly as possible.

One German Minister of the Interior[9], one who was notorious for the persistent persecution of socialists and class-conscious workers, not without reason, stated before the people’s representatives: “Behind every strike lurks the hydra of revolution.” Every strike strengthens and develops in the workers the understanding that the government is their enemy and that the working class must prepare itself to struggle against the government for the people’s rights.

Strikes, therefore, teach the workers to unite; they show them that they can struggle against the capitalists only when they are united; strikes teach the workers to think of the struggle of the whole working class against the whole class of factory owners and against the arbitrary, police government. This is the reason that socialists call strikes “a school of war”, a school in which the workers learn to make war on their enemies for the liberation of the whole people, of all who labour, from the yoke of government officials and from the yoke of capital. “A school of war” is, however, not war itself. When strikes are widespread among the workers, some of the workers (including some socialists) begin to believe that the working class can confine itself to strikes, strike funds, or strike associations alone; that by strikes alone the working class can achieve a considerable improvement in its conditions or even its emancipation. When they see what power there is in a united working class and even in small strikes, some think that the working class has only to organise a general strike throughout the whole country for the workers to get everything they want from the capitalists and the government. This idea was also expressed by the workers of other countries when the working-class movement was in its early stages and the workers were still very inexperienced. It is a mistaken idea.

Strikes are one of the ways in which the working class struggles for its emancipation, but they are not the only way; and if the workers do not turn their attention to other means of conducting the struggle, they will slow down the growth and the successes of the working class. It is true that funds are needed to maintain the workers during strikes, if strikes are to be successful. Such workers’ funds (usually funds of workers in separate branches of industry, separate trades or workshops) are maintained in all countries; but here in Russia this is especially difficult, because the police keep track of them, seize the money, and arrest the workers. The workers, of course, are able to hide from the police; naturally, the organisation of such funds is valuable, and we do not want to advise workers against setting them up. But it must not be supposed that workers’ funds, when prohibited by law, will attract large numbers of contributors, and so long as the membership in such organisations is small, workers’ funds will not prove of great use. Furthermore, even in those countries where workers’ unions exist openly and have huge funds at their disposal, the working class can still not confine itself to strikes as a means of struggle. All that is necessary is a hitch in the affairs of industry (a crisis, such as the one that is approaching in Russia today) and the factory owners will even deliberately cause strikes, because it is to their advantage to cease work for a time and to deplete the workers’ funds.

The workers, therefore, cannot, under any circumstances, confine themselves to strike actions and strike associations. Secondly, strikes can only be successful where workers are sufficiently class-conscious, where they are able to select an opportune moment for striking, where they know how to put forward their demands, and where they have connections with socialists and are able to procure leaflets and pamphlets through them. There are still very few such workers in Russia, and every effort must be exerted to increase their number in order to make the working-class cause known to the masses of workers and to acquaint them with socialism and the working-class struggle. This is a task that the socialists and class-conscious workers must undertake jointly by organising a socialist working-class party for this purpose. Thirdly, strikes, as we have seen, show the workers that the government is their enemy and that a struggle against the government must be carried on. Actually, it is strikes that have gradually taught the working class of all countries to struggle against the governments for workers’ rights and for the rights of the people as a whole. As we have said, only a socialist workers’ party can carry on this struggle by spreading among the workers a true conception of the government and of the working-class cause. On another occasion we shall discuss specifically how strikes are conducted in Russia and how class-conscious workers should avail themselves of them.

Here we must point out that strikes are, as we said above, “a school of war” and not the war itself, that strikes are only one means of struggle, only one aspect of the working-class movement. From isolated strikes the workers can and must go over, as indeed they are actually doing in all countries, to a struggle of the entire working class for the emancipation of all who labour. When all class-conscious workers become socialists, i.e., when they strive for this emancipation, when they unite throughout the whole country in order to spread socialism among the workers, in order to teach the workers all the means of struggle against their enemies, when they build up a socialist workers’ party that struggles for the emancipation of the people as a whole from the yoke of government and for the emancipation of all working people from the yoke of capital, only then will the working class become an integral part of that great movement of the workers of all countries that unites all workers and raises the red banner inscribed with the words: “Workers of all countries, unite!”

 

Notes:

Preface

Since October 7 2023, the barbarism of war in the Middle East has descended to unprecedented levels. Before this date, there had been numerous attacks by nationalist terrorists against the population of Israel, but nothing compares to the ferocity and scale of the atrocities perpetrated by Hamas on October 7. And while the Israeli armed forces have in the past carried out numerous brutal reprisals against the population of Gaza, nothing compares to the systematic destruction of homes, hospitals, schools and other vital infrastructure throughout Gaza, and to the horrifying numbers of dead and wounded resulting from Israel’s campaign of revenge for October 7 -  a campaign which is more and more openly assuming the form of the ethnic cleansing of the whole area, a project now overtly supported by the Trump administration in the US. And not only has the conflict between Israel and Hamas spread to the decimation of Hizbollah in Lebanon, to attacks on the Houthis in Yemen and military operations against Iran itself, the region is also convulsed by parallel conflicts which seem no less intractable: between the Turks and Kurds in Syria, for example, or between Saudi Arabia and Iran and its Houthi agents for control of Yemen. The Middle East, one of the main cradles of civilisation, has emerged as a harbinger of its future destruction.

In the article More than a century of conflict in Israel/Palestine [19]  in International Review 172, we provided a historical overview of the ‘Israel-Palestine’ conflict against the background of the wider imperialist struggles for control of the Middle East. In the two articles that follow, we will focus on the ideological justifications that are used by the warring imperialist camps to justify this “spiral of atrocities”. Thus, the state of Israel never ceases to appeal to the memory of previous waves of anti-Jewish persecutions, and above all the Nazi Holocaust, in order to present the Zionist colonisation of Palestine as a legitimate movement of national liberation, and above all to justify its murderous offensives as being no more than the defence of the Jewish people against a future Holocaust. Meanwhile, Palestinian nationalism and its leftist supporters portray the October 7 massacre of Israeli and other civilians as a legitimate act of resistance against decades of oppression and displacement that go back to the foundation of the Israeli state. And in its slogan “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free”,  Palestinian nationalism offers a sinister mirror image of the demand of the Zionist right for the establishment of a greater Israel: in the dark utopia envisioned by the first slogan, the land will be free of Jews, while the project of a Greater Israel is to be achieved by the mass displacement of the Arab populations of Gaza and the West Bank.

These ideologies are not merely passive reflections of the ‘material’ needs of war: they actively serve to mobilise the populations of the region, and across the world, behind the different belligerent camps.  Their analysis and demystification is thus a necessary task for those who raise the standard of internationalist opposition to all imperialist wars. And our intention is to produce further contributions that expose the roots of other ideologies that play a similar role in the region, such as Islamism and Kurdish nationalism.

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Part One: Anti-Semitism and the origins of Zionism

The bourgeois revolution against feudalism in the Europe of the late 18th and early 19th century generally took the form of struggles for national unification or independence against the petty kingdoms and larger empires dominated by decaying monarchies and aristocracies. The demand for national self-determination (for example for Poland against the Tsarist empire) could thus contain a clearly progressive element which was strongly supported by Marx and Engels, for example in the Communist Manifesto. Not because they saw this demand as the concretisation of an abstract ‘right’ of all national or ethnic groups, but because it could accelerate the political changes required for the development of bourgeois relations of production in a period when capitalism had not yet completed its historical mission. However, in the wake of the Paris Commune of 1871, the first example of the seizure of power by the proletariat, Marx had already begun to question whether there could be any more truly national wars, at least in the centres of the world capitalist system. This was because the ruling classes of Prussia and France had shown that, faced with the proletarian revolution, national bourgeoisies were ready to sink their differences in order to stifle the danger from the exploited class, and so used the ‘defence of the nation’ as a pretext for crushing the proletariat. By the time of the First World War, marking capitalism’s entry into its epoch of decline, Rosa Luxemburg, writing in the Junius Pamphlet, had concluded that national liberation struggles had completely lost any progressive content, entangled as they were in the machinations of competing imperialist powers. Not only that: the small nations had themselves become imperialist, and the ‘oppressed’ nation of yesterday had become the oppressors of even smaller nations, subjecting them to the same policies of plunder, expulsion and massacre that they themselves had experienced. The history of Zionism has entirely confirmed Rosa Luxemburg’s analysis. It had become a significant national movement in response to the ‘return’ of anti-Semitism in the latter part of the 19th century; and thus, no less than this new wave of anti-Semitism, it was essentially a product of a capitalist society that was already approaching its decadence. As we shall show in the articles that follow, it has demonstrated again and again that it is a “false Messiah”[1], which like all nationalisms has not only always acted as a player in wider imperialist games, but has consistently instrumentalised the horrific oppression and slaughter of Jewish populations in Europe and the Middle East to justify the expulsion and massacre of the ‘native’ population of Palestine.

But Luxemburg’s rejection of all forms of nationalism is equally confirmed by the history of the various expressions of ‘anti-Zionism’. Whether it wears the green flag of Jihadism or the red flag of capitalism’s left wing, this supposedly ‘anti-imperialist’ ideology is equally as reactionary as Zionism itself, serving to dragoon its followers into the war-fronts of capital, behind other imperialist powers which have no solution to the terrible plight of the Palestinian population. We will return to this in the second part of the article.

The resurgence of anti-Semitism in western Europe in the late 19th century

The Arbeiter-Zeitung, No. 19, May 9, 1890 published the following letter by Engels, originally written to a member of the German Social Democratic Party, Isidor Ehrenfreund. It was part of a more general recognition by the marxist wing of the workers’ movement that it was necessary to combat the rise of anti-Semitism, which was having an impact on the working class, and even parts of its political avant-garde, the Social Democratic Parties[2].

“But whether you might not be doing more harm than good with your anti-Semitism is something I would ask you to consider. For anti-Semitism betokens a retarded culture, which is why it is found only in Prussia and Austria, and in Russia too. Anyone dabbling in anti-Semitism, either in England or in America, would simply be ridiculed, while in Paris the only impression created by M. Drumont’s writings – wittier by far than those of the German anti-Semites – was that of a somewhat ineffectual flash in the pan.

Moreover, now that he is standing for the Municipal Council he has actually had to declare himself an opponent of Christian no less than of Jewish capital. And M. Drumont would be read even were he to take the opposite view.

In Prussia it is the lesser nobility, the Junkers with an income of 10,000 marks and outgoings of 20,000, and hence subject to usury, who indulge in anti-Semitism, while both in Prussia and Austria a vociferous chorus is provided by those whom competition from big capital has ruined – the petty bourgeoisie, skilled craftsmen and small shop-keepers. But in as much as capital, whether Semitic or Aryan, circumcised or baptised, is destroying these classes of society which are reactionary through and through, it is only doing what pertains to its office, and doing it well; it is helping to impel the retarded Prussians and Austrians forward until they eventually attain the present-day level at which all the old social distinctions resolve themselves in the one great antithesis – capitalists and wage-labourers. Only in places where this has not yet happened, where there is no strong capitalist class and hence no strong class of wage-labourers, where capital is not yet strong enough to gain control of national production as a whole, so that its activities are mainly confined to the Stock Exchange – in other words, where production is still in the hands of the farmers, landowners, craftsmen and suchlike classes surviving from the Middle Ages – there, and there alone, is capital mainly Jewish, and there alone is anti-Semitism rife.

In North America not a single Jew is to be found among the millionaires whose wealth can, in some cases, scarcely be expressed in terms of our paltry marks, gulden or francs and, by comparison with these Americans, the Rothschilds are veritable paupers. And even in England, Rothschild is a man of modest means when set, for example, against the Duke of Westminster. Even in our own Rhineland from which, with the help of the French, we drove the aristocracy 95 years ago and where we have established modern industry, one may look in vain for Jews.

Hence anti-Semitism is merely the reaction of declining medieval social strata against a modern society consisting essentially of capitalists and wage-labourers, so that all it serves are reactionary ends under a purportedly socialist cloak; it is a degenerate form of feudal socialism and we can have nothing to do with that. The very fact of its existence in a region is proof that there is not yet enough capital there. Capital and wage-labour are today indivisible. The stronger capital and hence the wage-earning class becomes, the closer will be the demise of capitalist domination. So what I would wish for us Germans, amongst whom I also count the Viennese, is that the capitalist economy should develop at a truly spanking pace rather than slowly decline into stagnation.

In addition, the anti-Semite presents the facts in an entirely false light. He doesn’t even know the Jews he decries, otherwise he would be aware that, thanks to anti-Semitism in eastern Europe, and to the Spanish Inquisition in Turkey, there are here in England and in America thousands upon thousands of Jewish proletarians; and it is precisely, these Jewish workers who are the worst exploited and the most poverty-stricken. In England during the past twelve months we have had three strikes by Jewish workers. Are we then expected to engage in anti-Semitism in our struggle against capital?

Furthermore, we are far too deeply indebted to the Jews. Leaving aside Heine and Börne, Marx was a full-blooded Jew; Lassalle was a Jew. Many of our best people are Jews. My friend Victor Adler, who is now atoning in a Viennese prison for his devotion to the cause of the proletariat, Eduard Bernstein, editor of the London Sozialdemokrat, Paul Singer, one of our best men in the Reichstag – people whom I am proud to call my friends, and all of them Jewish! After all, I myself was dubbed a Jew by the Gartenlaube and, indeed, if given the choice, I'd as lief be a Jew as a ‘Herr von'!”

This was not the first time that the workers’ movement, and above all its petty bourgeois fringes, had been infected by what August Bebel once termed “the socialism of imbeciles” - essentially, the diversion of an embryonic anti-capitalism into the scapegoating of Jews, and in particular of “Jewish finance”, seen as the unique source of the miseries engendered by capitalist society. Proudhon’s anti-Semitism was vicious and overt[3], and that of Bakunin was not far behind. And indeed, even Marx and Engels themselves were not entirely immune from the disease. Marx’s On the Jewish Question in 1843 was written explicitly in favour of political emancipation for the Jews in Germany against the sophistries of Bruno Bauer, while also pointing to the limitations of a purely political emancipation within the boundaries of bourgeois society[4].  And yet at the same time the essay contained some concessions to anti-Semitic motifs which have been used by the enemies of marxism ever since; and the private correspondence of Marx and Engels, especially on the subject of Ferdinand Lassalle, contain a number of ‘jokes’ about his Jewishness (and even his ‘negroid’ features) which can – at best - only inspire a feeling of embarrassment. And in some of his earlier public writings Engels seems more or less unconscious of some of the anti-Semitic slurs in publications with which he was collaborating actively[5]. We will take up some of the issues posed by these scars in a future article.

However, by the time Engels wrote the letter to Ehrenfreund, his understanding of the whole question had been through a fundamental evolution. There were a number of factors behind this evolution, some of them reflected in the letter.

First, Engels had been through a series of political battles, in the period of the First International and after, in which opponents of the marxist current had not hesitated to use anti-Semitic attacks against Marx himself – Bakunin in particular, who located Marx’s ‘authoritarianism’ in the observation that he was both a Jew and German[6]. And in Germany, Eugene Dühring, whose purported ‘alternative system’ to the marxist theoretical framework prompted Engels’ famous polemic Anti-Dühring, expressed a profound hatred of the Jews, which in later writings anticipated the Nazis by calling for their literal extermination[7]. Thus Engels was able to see that the “socialism of imbeciles” was more than a product of stupidity or of theoretical error – it was a weapon against the revolutionary current he was seeking to develop. Thus, he ends the letter with a clear expression of solidarity against the racist attacks published in the anti-Semitic press on the many revolutionaries who had come from a Jewish background.

At the same time, as Engels explains in the letter, the late 19th century had seen the emergence of a Jewish proletariat in the cities of western Europe “thanks to anti-Semitism in eastern Europe”. In other words, the growing impoverishment of Jews in the Russian Empire, and the growing resort to pogroms by a decaying Tsarist regime, had driven hundreds of thousands of Jews to seek refuge in western Europe and the USA, the majority of them coming with little but the clothes on their backs, and having no alternative but to join the ranks of the proletariat, especially in the garment industries. This influx was, like today’s ‘flood’ of refugees from Africa and the Middle East towards Western Europe, or from Latin America towards the USA, a key element in the rise of racist parties, but for Engels there was not a moment’s hesitation about supporting the struggles of these immigrant proletarians, who, as the letter said, had shown their militant spirit in a series of strikes (and we could add, through a rather high level of politicisation). Indeed Engels, in association with Marx’s daughter Eleonor, had gained first-hand experience of the strike movements of Jewish workers in the East End of London. It was thus perfectly evident that revolutionaries could under no circumstances “engage in anti-Semitism in our struggle against capital”.

The main weakness of the letter is the idea that anti-Semitism was essentially linked to the persistence of feudal relations and that the further development of capitalism would undermine its foundations, and even make it laughable.

Of course, it was true that anti-Semitism had deep roots in pre-capitalist social formations. It stretched at least as far back as ancient Greece and Rome, fuelled by the persistent tendency of the population of Israel to rebel against the political and religious diktats of the Greek and Roman empires. And it played an even more important role in feudalism The central ideology of feudal Europe, Catholic Christianity, was based on the stigmatisation of the Jews as the killers of Christ, an accursed people forever scheming to bring misfortunes on the Christians – whether through the poisoning of wells, the spreading of plague, or the sacrifice of Christian children in their Passover rituals. The development of the myth of the world Jewish conspiracy, which was given wings after the publication of the Okhrana forgery Protocols of the Elders of Zion in the early years of the 20th century, undoubtedly had its roots in these dark mediaeval mythologies. 

Moreover, at the material level, this persistent hatred of the Jews must be understood in connection to the economic role imposed on Jews in the feudal system, above all as usurers – a practice formally forbidden to Christians. While this role made them useful adjuncts of the feudal monarchs (who often presented themselves as ‘protectors of the Jews’), it also exposed them to periodic massacres which conveniently brought with them the wiping out of kingly or aristocratic debts – and eventually, to expulsion from many western European countries as the slow emergence of capitalism produced a ‘native’ financial elite which needed to eliminate competition from Jewish finance[8].

 It was also true that the main audience for anti-Semitism were the remnants of classes doomed by the advance of capital – the declining aristocracy, the petty bourgeoisie and so on. These were to a large extent the strata being appealed to by the new breed of anti-Semitic demagogues - Dühring and Marr in Germany (the latter credited with the invention of the term anti-Semitism - as a badge to be worn with pride), Drumont in France, Karl Lueger who became the mayor of Vienna, in 1897, etc. And finally, Engels was right in pointing out that the advance of the bourgeois revolution in Europe had, earlier on in the century, brought with it a certain advance in the political emancipation of the Jews. But Engels’ view that the “capitalist economy should develop at a truly spanking pace” and thus consign to the dustbin of history all the decaying feudal remnants, and with them all forms of “feudal socialism” such as anti-Semitism, underestimated the degree to which capital was rushing towards its own period of decay. Indeed, this is already hinted at in the letter, where Engels says that the stronger capitalism becomes, the “closer will be the demise of capitalist domination”.  And in other writings Engels had developed the most profound insights into the shape this demise would take:

• at the economic level, the very conquest of the globe and the drive to integrate all its pre-capitalist regions into the orbit of capitalist social relations would open the floodgates of world overproduction, and this perspective was already being outlined by the end of the ten-year cycle of “boom and bust” and the onset of the “long depression” of the 1880s. It should be added that the impact of the depression also contributed to the rise of anti-Semitic agitation in Europe, which often focused on blaming the ‘Jewish money kings’ for the economic ills now becoming apparent.[9]

• at the military level, Engels was well aware that this conquest of the globe, the hunt for colonies, would not be a peaceful process, and in one of his most remarkable predictions foresaw that inter-imperialist competition would ultimately lead to a devastating European war[10]. Imperialism also provided a more ‘modern’ form of racism, using a deformed Darwinism to justify the domination of the ‘White Race’ over the ‘lesser breeds’, among whom the Jews were seen as a particularly malevolent force.
• At the level of the organisation of capital, Engels could already see that the state was assuming a central role in the management of the national economies, a tendency which was to reach its full fruition in the period of capitalist decline[11].

Thus far from consigning anti-Semitism to the dustbin of history, the further development of world capital, its accelerating race towards an era of historic crisis, would give a new lease of life to anti—Jewish racism and persecution, above all in the wake of the defeat of the proletarian revolutions of 1917-23.

Thus,

• In the 1905 revolution in Russia – already a harbinger of the approaching epoch of proletarian revolution – the pogrom was adopted by the Tsarist regime as direct method of crushing the revolution and creating divisions within the working class. This counter-revolutionary strategy was used on an even bigger scale by the White armies in Russia as a weapon against the revolution. Hence the intransigent opposition of Lenin and the Bolsheviks to any form of anti-Semitism, poison for the workers’ struggle.  In Germany, defeat in World war One was explained by the legend of the “stab in the back” by a cabal of marxists and Jews, giving a major impetus to the growth of fascist groups and parties, above all Hitler’s National Socialist Workers’ Party. Needless to say, these gangs were intimately linked to the military formations which, at the behest of the Social Democratic government, had carried out the brutal repression of workers’ revolts in Berlin, Munich, and elsewhere. In other European countries during the 1920s, such as Poland and Hungary, the defeat of the revolution was consolidated by anti-Semitic legislation which prefigured what was to come in Germany under the Nazis.
• The world economic crisis of the 1930s, the product of impersonal capitalist contradictions that are rarely visible and hard to comprehend, was also exploited to the hilt by the fascist and Nazi parties to offer a ‘simpler’ explanation, with an easily identifiable scapegoat: the rich Jewish financier, allied with the bloody-handed Bolshevik in a sinister conspiracy against Aryan civilisation.

In the full glare of these horrifying developments, a young member of the Trotskyist movement, Avram Leon, trying in Nazi-occupied Belgium to develop a few insights by Marx into a historical understanding of the Jewish Question[12],  was to conclude that this was a question that decadent capitalism would be totally unable to solve.  This was no less true of the so-called ‘socialist’ regimes in the USSR and its bloc. Under Stalin’s reign, anti-Semitic campaigns were often used to settle scores within the bureaucracy and provide a scapegoat for the miseries of the Stalinist system. The “doctor’s plot” of 1953 is particularly notorious, with its echoes of the old story of Jews as secret poisoners. Meanwhile the Stalinist version of ‘Jewish self-determination’ took the form of the “autonomous region” of Birobidzhan in Siberia, which Trotsky rightly labelled a “bureaucratic farce”. These persecutions, often under the banner of ‘anti-Zionism’, continued in the post-Stalin period, leading to mass emigration of Russian Jews to Israel.

If the upsurge of modern anti-Semitism, and the reinvention of utterly reactionary mythologies inherited from feudalism, was a sign of capitalism’s approaching senility, the same is true of modern Zionism, which emerged in the 1890s as a direct reaction to the anti-Jewish tide.

Dreyfus, Herzl, and the evolution of Zionism

As we pointed out in the introduction to this article, Zionism was the product of a more general development of nationalism in the 19th century, the ideological reflection of the rising bourgeoisie and its replacement of feudal fragmentation by more unified nation states. The unification of Italy and emancipation from Austrian hegemony was one of the heroic achievements of this period which had a definite impact on the first theoreticians of Zionism (Moses Hess for example - see below). But the Jews did not conform to the main trends in bourgeois nationalism, since they lacked a unified territory and even a common language. This was one of the factors which prevented Zionism from having a mass appeal until it was driven forward by the rising anti-Semitism of the late 19th century.

Zionist ideology also drew on the long-standing ‘peculiarities’ of the Jewish populations, whose separate existence was structured both by the specific economic role carried out by Jews in the feudal economy but also by powerful political and ideological factors: on the one hand, the state-enforced ghettoisation of the Jews and their exclusion from key areas of feudal society; on the other hand, the Jews’ own  view of themselves as the “Chosen People”, who could only be a “light unto the nations” by remaining distinct from them, at least until the coming of the Messiah and the Kingdom of God on Earth; these ideas were framed, of course, by the mythology of exile and promised return to Zion which permeates the Biblical background to Jewish history.

 For centuries, however, while many orthodox Jews from the “Diaspora” made individual pilgrimages to the land of Israel, the main teaching of the rabbis was that the rebuilding of the Temple and the formation of a Jewish state could only be achieved through the coming of the Messiah. Some orthodox Jewish sects, such as Neturei Karta, still hold to such ideas today and are fiercely anti-Zionist, even those living in Israel.

The development of secularism in the course of the 19th century made it possible for a non-religious form of the “Return” to gain adherence among the Jewish populations. But the dominant result of the decline of orthodox Judaism and its replacement by more modern ideologies such as liberalism and rationalism was that the Jews in the advanced capitalist countries had begun losing their unique characteristics and assimilating into bourgeois society. Some marxists, notably Kautsky[13], even saw in the process of assimilation the possibility of solving the problem of anti-Semitism within the confines of capitalism[14]. However, the revival of anti-Semitism in the latter part of the century was to call such assumptions into question and at the same time give a decisive push to the capacity of modern political Zionism to offer another alternative to the persecution of the Jews and the realisation of the national aspirations of the Jewish bourgeoisie.

The title of ‘founding father’ of this brand of Zionism is usually given to Theodor Herzl, who convened the first Zionist Congress in 1897. But there had been precursors. In 1882, Leon Pinsker, a Jewish doctor living in Odessa in the Russian Empire had published Self-Emancipation. A Warning Addressed to His Brethren. By a Russian Jew, advocating Jewish emigration to Palestine. Pinsker had been an assimilationist until his belief in the possibility of Jews finding safety and dignity in ‘gentile’ society was shattered by witnessing a brutal pogrom in Odessa in 1881.

Perhaps more curious was the evolution of Moses Hess, who in the early 1840s had been a comrade of Marx and Engels and indeed played a significant role in their own transition from radical democracy to communism, and in their recognition of the revolutionary character of the proletariat. But by the time the Communist Manifesto was produced their paths had diverged, and Marx and Engels were placing Hess among the “German” or “True” Socialists. Certainly, by the 1860s, Hess had embarked on a very different direction. Again, probably influenced by the first signs of anti-Semitic reaction against the formal emancipation of the Jews in Germany, Hess turned more and more to the idea that national and even racial conflicts were of no less importance than class struggle as social determinants, and in his book Rome and Jerusalem, the Last National Question (1862) he advocated an early form of Zionism which dreamed of establishing a Jewish socialist commonwealth in Palestine. Significantly, Hess had already understood that such a project would need the backing of one of the world’s great powers, and for him this task would fall to Republican France.

 Like Pinsker, Herzl was a more or less assimilated Jew, a lawyer from Austria who had witnessed first-hand the new dawn of Judeophobia and the election of Karl Lueger as mayor of the city.  But it was probably the Dreyfus Affair in France which had the biggest impact on Herzl, convincing him that there could be no solution to the persecution of the Jews until they had their own state. In 1894, Republican France, where the revolution had granted civil rights to Jews, was the scene of a trumped-up trial for treason of a Jewish officer, Alfred Dreyfus, who was sentenced to life imprisonment and banished to the Devil’s Island penal colony in French Guyana, where he spent the next five years in very harsh conditions. Subsequent evidence that Dreyfus had been framed was suppressed by the army, and the affair produced a sharp split in French society, pitting the Catholic right, the army and the followers of Drumont against the Dreyfusards, whose leading figures included Emile Zola and Georges Clemenceau. Eventually (but not until 1906) Dreyfus was exonerated, but the divisions within the French bourgeoisie did not disappear, returning to the surface with the rise of fascism in the 1930s and in the Petainist “National Revolution” after France fell to Nazi Germany in 1941.

Herzl’s Zionism was entirely secular, even if it drew on the ancient Biblical motifs of exile and return to the Promised Land, which as the majority of Zionists recognised, had much more ideological power than other potential “homelands” under discussion at the time (Uganda, South America, Australia, etc) .

Above all, Herzl understood the need to sell his utopia to the rich and powerful of the day. Thus, he went cap in hand not only to the Jewish bourgeoisie, some of whom had already been financing Jewish emigration to Palestine and elsewhere, but also to rulers such as the Ottoman Sultan and the German Kaiser; in 1903 he even had an audience with the notoriously anti-Semitic Interior Minister Plehve in Russia, who had been involved in provoking the horrific Kishinev pogrom that same year. Plehve told Herzl that the Zionists could operate freely in Russia as long as they stuck to encouraging Jews to leave for Palestine. After all, had not the Tsar's minister Pobedonostsev [20] stated that the aim of his government with regard to the Jews was that "One third will die out, one third will leave the country and one third will be completely dissolved in the surrounding population”? And here were the Zionists offering to put the “leaving the country” clause into effect…. This mutuality of interests between Zionism and the most extreme forms of anti-Semitism was thus woven into the movement from its inception and would re-occur throughout its history.  And Herzl was categorial in his belief that fighting anti-Semitism was a waste of time – not least because, at some level, he considered that the anti-Semites were right in seeing Jews as an alien body in their midst[15].

“In Paris, then, I gained a freer attitude towards anti-Semitism, which I now begin to understand historically and to make allowances for. Above all I recognise the emptiness and futility of efforts to ‘combat anti-Semitism’” Diaries, Vol 1 p 6, May-June 1895.

Thus, from the beginning:

• Anti-Semitism was a central factor in the rise and development of a significant Zionist movement, but it was based on the belief that it was impossible to overcome Jew-hatred until the Jews had their own state, or at least their own “national homeland”.
• Zionism therefore proposed not to focus its energies on fighting anti-Semitism in the “Diaspora”, and even advocated cooperation with its main proponents.
• From the beginning, the Zionist project required the support of the dominant imperialist powers, as would become even clearer in 1917 when Britain issued the Balfour Declaration. This was a prefiguration of what was to become the reality of all national movements in the epoch of capitalism’s decadence: they could only advance by tying themselves to one or other of the imperialist powers that dominate the planet in this epoch.

The quest for backing by the imperialist powers was entirely logical in that Zionism was born in the period when imperialism was still very much engaged in the acquisition of new colonies in the peripheral regions of the globe, and it saw itself as an attempt to create a colony in an area that was either declared uninhabited (the “land without people for a people without land” slogan of dubious origin) or inhabited by backward tribes who could only benefit from a new civilising mission by a more advanced western population[16]. Herzl himself wrote a kind of utopian novel called Alt-Neuland, in which the Palestinian landowners sell some of their land to Jews, invest in modern agricultural machinery and thus raise the living standards of the Palestinian peasants. Problem solved!

“Workers of Zion”: the impossible fusion of marxism and Zionism

Herzl’s political Zionism was clearly a bourgeois phenomenon, an expression of nationalism at a time when capitalism was approaching its era of decline and thus the progressive character of national movements was coming to an end. And yet, particularly in Russia, other forms of Jewish separatism were penetrating the workers’ movement during the same period, in the shape of Bundism on the one hand, and “Socialist Zionism” on the other. This was a consequence of the material and ideological segregation of the Jewish working class under Tsarism.

“The structure of the Jewish working class corresponded to a weak organic composition of capital inside the Pale of Settlement, which implied a concentration in the final stages of production. The cultural specificities of the Jewish proletariat, linked in the first place to its religion and language, were reinforced by structural separation from the Russian proletariat. The concentration of Jewish workers in a kind of socioeconomic ghetto was the material origin of the birth of a specific Jewish workers movement”[17].

The Bund - General Jewish Labour Bund in Russia and Poland – was founded in 1897 as an explicitly socialist party and played a significant role in the development of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party, of which it saw itself as a part. It rejected religious and Zionist ideology and stood for a form of “national cultural autonomy” for the Jewish masses within Russia and Poland, as part of a wider socialist programme. It also aimed to be the sole representative of Jewish workers in Russia, and it was this aspect of its politics which was most severely criticised by Lenin, since it implied a federalist vision, a kind of “party within the party” that would undermine the effort to build a centralised revolutionary organisation across the Empire[18]. This divergence led to a split at the Second Congress of the RSDLP in 1903, although it was not the end of cooperation and even attempts at reunification in the years that followed. The Bund’s workers were often at the forefront of the 1905 revolution in Russia. But the capacity of Jewish and non-Jewish workers to unite in the soviets and fight alongside each other – including in the defence of Jewish districts against pogroms – already pointed beyond all forms of separatism and towards the future unification of the entire proletariat, both in their general, unitary organisations and their political vanguard.

As regards “Socialist Zionism”, we have already mentioned the views of Moses Hess. Within Russia, there was the group around Nachman Syrkin, the Zionist Socialist Workers’ Party, whose positions were close to those of the Socialist Revolutionaries. Syrkin was one of the first advocates of collective settlements - the kibbutzim – in Palestine. But it was the Poale Zion (Workers of Zion) group around Ber Borochov which made the attempt to justify Zionism using marxist theoretical concepts. According to Borochov, the Jewish question could only be resolved once the Jewish populations of the globe had a “normal” class structure, doing away with the “inverted pyramid” in which the intermediate strata had a preponderant weight; and this could only be achieved through the “conquest of labour” in Palestine. This project was to be embodied in the idea of “Jewish Labour Only” in the new agricultural and industrial settlements, which, unlike other forms of colonialism, would not be directly founded on the exploitation of the native workforce. Thus, eventually, a Jewish proletariat would confront a Jewish bourgeoisie and be ready to move on to the socialist revolution in Palestine. This was in essence a form of Menshevism, a “theory of stages” in which every nation first had to go through a bourgeois phase in order to lay down the conditions for a proletarian revolution – when in reality the world was fast approaching a new epoch in which the only revolution on the agenda of history was the world-wide, proletarian revolution, even if numerous regions had not yet entered the bourgeois stage of development. Furthermore, the policy of Jewish Labour Only became, in reality, the springboard of a new form of colonialism in which the native population was to be progressively expropriated and expelled. And in fact, when Borochov considered the existing Arab population of Palestine at all, he displayed the same colonialist attitude as the mainstream Zionists. “The natives of Palestine will assimilate economically and culturally with whoever brings order into the country and undertakes the development of the forces of production of Palestine”[19].

Borochovism was thus a complete dead-end, and this was expressed in the eventual fate of Poale Zion. Although its left wing had demonstrated its proletarian character in 1914-20, opposing the imperialist war and supporting the workers’ revolution in Russia, and even applying, unsuccessfully, to join the Comintern in its early years, the reality of life in Palestine led to irreconcilable divisions, with the majority of the left breaking from Zionism and forming the Palestine Communist Party in 1923[20]. The right wing (which included the future Prime Minister of Israel David Ben Gurion) went towards social democracy and was to play a leading role in the management of the proto-state Yishuv before 1948, and the State of Israel after the “War of Independence”.

In the early 70s, Borochovism, having more or less disappeared, enjoyed a kind of revival – as an instrument of Israeli state propaganda. Faced with a new generation of Jewish youth in the west who were critical of Israel’s policies, above all after the 1967 war and the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, the left Zionist parties which had their ancestral origins in Poale Zion put their energies into winning over these young Jews lured by the anti-Zionism of the “New Left”, with the bait being the assurance that you can be a marxist and Zionist at the same time, and that Zionism was a national liberation movement as equally valid as the Vietnamese or Palestinian liberation movements. 

In this part of the article, we have argued quite the opposite: that Zionism, born in a period in which ‘national liberation’ was becoming increasingly impossible, could not avoid attaching itself to the dominant imperialist powers of the day. In the second part, we will show not only that its whole history was marked by this reality, but also that it inevitably spawned its own imperialist projects. But we will also argue, in contrast to the left wing of capital which presents Zionism as some kind of unique evil, that this was to be the fate of all nationalist projects in the epoch of capitalist decadence, and that the anti-Zionist nationalisms which it also engendered have been no exception to this general rule.

 Amos, February 2025

 

Preamble

On 29 August 1953 (remember this date) in Trieste, Amadeo Bordiga (1889-1970) presented a report to the inter-regional meeting of his group, which had just split from the Internationalist Communist Party (PCIste) and was temporarily retaining the same name. The minutes of this meeting, which would later be published under the title Facteurs de race et de nation dans la théorie marxiste (Factors of race and nation in marxist theory), include an enthusiastic passage about the Congress of the Peoples of the East, which was held in Baku in September 1920, shortly after the Second Congress of the Communist International: “It was the president of the Proletarian International, Zinoviev (whose appearance was, however, anything but warlike), who read the final manifesto of the Congress; and the coloured men responded to his call with a single cry, brandishing their swords and sabres. The Communist International invites the peoples of the East to overthrow the Western oppressors by force of arms; it cries out to them: 'Brothers! We call you to holy war, to holy war first of all against English imperialism!'[1]”

Seven years later, on 12 November 1960, a new general meeting of the same political group, which had now taken the name International Communist Party (ICP), opened in Bologna, a meeting that fully confirmed this orientation on colonial movements. The minutes of this meeting, pompously entitled “The incandescent awakening of coloured peoples in the Marxist vision”, read as follows: “From a Marxist perspective, colonial movements occupy a position other than that of passive, mechanical agents of proletarian recovery. Depending on the historical period and the concrete balance of forces, proletarian strategy can allow the proletariat of the metropoles to take the initiative in the worldwide movement right from the start of the crisis, or it can allow the action of the masses in the 'backward' countries to launch the agitation of the proletariat in the 'developed countries'. But, in both cases, what is important is the link that must be made, and this is where the difficulty lies.”[2]

After a first congress, which had represented a huge step forward, the second congress of the Communist International was marked by a series of programmatic regressions. The Congress of the Peoples of the East confirmed the opportunist drift into which the International had entered. Isolated following the failure of the first attempt at revolution in Germany, surrounded by White armies supported by strong contingents from all the most developed bourgeois nations, the Russian Revolution was in a dangerous situation. The Russian proletariat needed a lifeline. What Lenin initially saw as confusion over the national question, which had given rise to a whole debate within the workers' movement - in particular with Rosa Luxemburg - became a strong opportunist stance among the Bolsheviks in 1920, caused by the isolation of the Russian revolution. It is the nature of opportunism to look for a shortcut, an illusory solution to a fundamental political problem. From this point of view, the Congress of the Peoples of the East in Baku, with its call for a "holy war", is the symbol of a worsening of the process of degeneration of the Russian Revolution.

Subsequent events proved the catastrophic nature of support for national liberation struggles. In Finland, Turkey, Ukraine, China, the Baltic countries and the Caucasus, everywhere the Bolsheviks' calls for national self-determination led to the fostering of nationalism, the strengthening of the local bourgeoisie and the massacre of communist minorities[3].

As we can see, this position was taken up by the Bordigist current when it was founded in the 1950s. The search for a shortcut here is a product of impatience, one of the main factors of opportunism. In the midst of a period of counter-revolution - we were in a period of reconstruction after the Second World War - the Bordigists believed they could find a trigger for the world proletarian revolution in the armed struggles on the periphery of capitalism. They confused decolonisation and the resulting confrontations between the two imperialist blocs of East and West with the national bourgeois revolutions of the period of capitalism's ascendancy. They then plunged into the worst ambiguities, such as the defence of democratic rights, and the worst aberrations, such as the apology for the massacres perpetrated by the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, considered a manifestation of "Jacobin radicalism", or like their participation in the Stalinist and Trotskyist choirs of the Mandel variant to salute Che Guevara, the living symbol of the "democratic anti-imperialist revolution", cowardly murdered by "Yankee imperialism and its pro-American lackeys"[4].

Blinded by opportunism, awaiting this difficult "transition", the Bordigists purely and simply ignored the historical revival of the class struggle at the end of the 1960s and continued to focus on the so-called anti-imperialist struggles. Consequentially, they failed to realise that all their militant recruits from the peripheral countries were in fact adhering to the nationalist positions of Maoism. This powder keg exploded in 1982 and reduced the PCInt from being the main force numerically of the Communist Left internationally to a tiny nucleus of a few militants.

Why the ICP’s position is divisive within the working class

The ICP made a brief response to our article dealing with the catastrophic application of the Bordigist position on national liberation struggles to the dramatic situation existing in Palestine; an article that appeared in Révolution Internationale no. 501 (May-August 2024)[5]. Indeed, we read in Le Prolétaire No. 553 (May-July 2024) that “the ICC [defends a] bookish conception of a pure revolution pitting only bourgeois and proletarians”. It is quite true that we try to remain faithful to marxist principles and to all the works in which these principles are defended by communist militants. It is also true that we defend the fundamental framework of the confrontation between the two historical classes of society, the proletariat and the bourgeoisie, on which the future of humanity depends. We have just seen that this is not quite the case with the Bordigists, for whom the world is no longer essentially divided into classes but into colours, from which an “incandescent awakening” is expected.

Wearing the coloured and distorting glasses of national oppression, the ICP is fascinated by the desperate revolt of the Palestinians crushed for decades by imperialism. It believes it can find a subversive force, an example for workers' struggles around the world, or even a path to proletarianisation for the mass of the jobless, reduced to misery by a capitalism that has become senile. In doing so, it loses sight of the internationalist basic position of the communists who call for the fraternisation of the workers enlisted in the imperialist war. It rejects the only means of achieving this fraternisation, this union of Israeli and Palestinian proletarians: the break with the prison of nationalism. It even encourages this nationalism by demanding the "Right to self-determination”: "Calling for the union of Palestinian and Israeli (Jewish) proletarians under these conditions without taking into account the national oppression of the former can only sound like an empty phrase: this union will never be possible as long as Israeli proletarians do not disassociate themselves from the national oppression exercised in their name by 'their' state, as long as they do not recognise the Palestinians' right to self-determination.”

The result of this strategy of the ICP is not the radicalisation of the struggle or the unity of the proletariat, but rather their division. All over the world, the bourgeoisie is taking advantage of this windfall and is eager to widen the division between proletarians who declare themselves pro-Palestinian and those who declare themselves anti-Palestinian, to exacerbate the nationalism that feeds on each other, in a context where the global working class does not yet have the strength to directly oppose today's regional imperialist wars but rather suffers their negative impact with a feeling of astonishment, powerlessness and fatalism.

The damage caused by this policy among politicised elements, particularly those from peripheral countries, has been enormous. For example, at a ICP meeting in the 1980s, one of its supporters responded to our intervention defending the principle of internationalism: “If we are given weapons, it would be very stupid to refuse them!” This clearly shows a terrible ignorance of the nature of imperialism, which can only lead to disaster. And this was the case in the face of all the major events of the post-war period. In 1949 in China and in 1962 in Algeria [6], the policy of the ICP encouraged the enlisting of inexperienced proletarians into the armed struggle behind a faction of the local bourgeoisie which, in order to crush its rival factions, was forced to ally itself with one or other of the bourgeoisies of the major Western or Soviet countries. All these military conflicts and guerrilla wars, by their imperialist nature, led to the crushing of the young proletariat in these regions.

Immediately after the Second World War, particularly during decolonisation, the leaders of the two imperialist blocs, the USSR [7] and the United States, claiming never to have colonised any country, were intent on imposing their order after dividing the world between them, while the United States assigned the role of policeman in their former colonies to their second-string players. To break this bloody spiral, only the expansion of the struggle of the proletariat of the central countries was able to weaken the pressure of imperialism on the proletariat of the peripheral countries. With the return of the economic crisis at the end of the 1960s, imperialist competition between the two blocs became even more bloody. The disappearance of the two blocs did not put an end to this imperialist competition between nations large and small; on the contrary, it took an even more barbaric turn, with the implementation of a scorched earth policy and the systematic massacre of the civilian population everywhere. The communists, for their part, must prepare the ground for the future union of the proletarians of the whole world by calling for a break with imperialist war and with nationalism, as Lenin did in the face of the social-chauvinists in 1914.

It is quite true that the ICP does not have a "bookish conception of revolution", but it does in the sense that it wipes its feet on the works of marxism. For example, the Manifesto of the Communist Party, which reads: “The workers have no country. One cannot take from them what they have not got.”

 

We have engaged in numerous polemics with the ICP, on a theoretical level by examining the marxist approach to the national question[8], or on a historical level by dissecting the lessons of proletarian defeats[9]. In this article, we propose to examine how the trajectory of the ICP explains how it allowed itself to be trapped by a position on the national question that has become obsolete. The trap was set in two stages: in 1943 and 1944-1945 with the opportunist formation of the Partito Comunista Internazionalista[10] from which the ICP emerged, and in 1952 with the liquidation of the legacy of the Italian Fraction of the Communist Left during the constitution of the ICP

1943, break with the Left Fraction of the Communist Party of Italy

Bordiga took the first step towards abandoning the work of the fraction by withdrawing from political life when the Left had just lost the leadership of the Communist Party of Italy. At the end of 1926, after having seen his house ransacked by the fascists, he was arrested and sentenced to three years of exile, first in Ustica and then in Ponza. There are some traces of his political activity in prison, when he spoke out with a minority of communist prisoners against the anti-Trotsky campaign. In March 1930, he was expelled by the Stalinist leadership of the CP, which had taken refuge in Paris. He then withdrew from political life to devote himself to his profession as an architectural engineer. He declared in a conversation in 1936: “I am happy to live outside the petty and insignificant events of militant politics, news in brief, everyday events. None of this interests me”[11]. He did not reappear until 1944, more than 15 years later, in southern Italy, in a Fraction of Italian socialists and communists.

In doing so, he severed ties with other left-wing militants who, hunted down by the police of Mussolini and Stalin, mostly went into exile, mainly in France and Belgium[12]. They were determined to continue the fight against the opportunistic drift of the Communist International. In 1928, they formed the Left Fraction of the Communist Party of Italy. Their great strength was to clarify and explore two essential questions: the retreat and defeat of the revolutionary wave, that is to say the opening of a period of counter-revolution that paved the way for a new world war, and the nature of the tasks of revolutionary organisations in such a situation, that is to say the work of a fraction as Marx and Lenin had carried out against opportunism in other unfavourable periods of the workers' movement.

The main task of the Fraction was to draw lessons from the revolutionary wave of the 1920s, to determine which positions had been validated by historical experience and which had been mistakes or had lost their validity with the evolution of capitalism. Unlike Trotsky's Left Opposition, which fully supported the first four congresses of the CI, the Italian Left rejected some of the positions adopted at the 3rd and 4th congresses, particularly the tactic of the "United Front’. If the party, after the break-up of the International, continued on its degenerating course and ended up moving over to the side of the bourgeoisie, this did not mean that the situation was ripe for the emergence of a new party. The Fraction had to continue its work to create the conditions for the future party, and this could only re-emerge under two conditions: that the Fraction had completed its work of assessment by drawing up a new programmatic framework corresponding to the new situation, and that a situation would arise not only of a break with the counter-revolution, but of a new period leading towards revolution, as had already been established in the Theses of Rome (1922)[13].

Throughout this period, the Fraction carried out a remarkable programme of work and, together with a number of Dutch left-wing communists, it was the only organisation that maintained an uncompromising class position in the face of the Spanish Civil War, which had been a dress rehearsal for the Second world war. However, the weight of the counter-revolution grew heavier with time and the Fraction itself entered a period of degeneration. Under the leadership of Vercesi, its main theoretician and organiser, it began to develop a new theory according to which local wars no longer represented preparations for a new world slaughter but were intended to prevent, through the massacre of workers, the growing proletarian threat. The world was therefore, for Vercesi, on the eve of a new revolutionary wave. Despite the struggle of a minority against this new orientation, the Fraction found itself completely disoriented at the outbreak of the Second World War. It was in total disarray, apart from the minority that managed to reconstitute the Fraction in 1941, mainly in Marseille.

When major workers' strikes broke out in northern Italy in 1942-43[14], leading to the fall of Mussolini, the reconstituted Fraction believed that, in accordance with its long-standing position, “the course of the transformation of the Fraction into a party in Italy is open” (Conference of August 1943). However, at the Conference of May 1945, having learnt of the constitution in Italy of the Partito Comunista Internazionalista with the prestigious figures of Onorato Damen and Amadeo Bordiga, the Fraction decided on its own dissolution and the individual entry of its members into the PCIste. It was the final blow. The weakened Fraction collapsed despite the warnings of Marc Chirik[15], who asked the Fraction to first verify the programmatic basis of this new party, about which it had no documentation.

The formation of the PCIste in 1943 was justified by the resurgence of class struggles in Northern Italy and was based on the mistaken idea that these were were the first of a new revolutionary wave that would emerge from the war as was the case during the First World War. As soon as it became clear that this prospect would not materialise, the PCIint should have retreated to work as a Fraction, continuing the work of the Italian Left in exile and preparing to work against the tide in the hostile environment of counter-revolution[16]. However, the PCIint did the complete opposite and embarked on an opportunist shift, recruiting from Trotskyite and Stalinist circles, without being too particular, to justify, against all odds, the formation of the party. Everything was done to adapt to the growing illusions of a declining working class.

For example, the PCInt had been very clear from the start about the resistance as a moment in the imperialist war and as a nationalist trap. But it soon moved towards the work of agitation aimed at partisan groups with the illusion of transforming them “into organs of proletarian self-defence, ready to intervene in the revolutionary struggle for power” (Manifesto distributed in June 1944). It even went so far as to take part in the elections in 1946, after having previously considered itself a member of the Abstentionist Fraction. This opportunist policy of the PCInt is even more blatant with regard to the groups in the south of Italy. The "Fraction of the left of the communists and socialists" formed in Naples around Bordiga and Pistone practised entryism into the Stalinist PCI until the beginning of 1945, and was particularly vague on the question of the political nature of the USSR. The PCIint opened its doors to it, blinded by the presence of Bordiga, as well as to elements of the POC (Parti ouvrier communiste) which had for a time constituted the Italian section of the Trotskyist Fourth International. All this without verification, without in-depth discussion with these elements, without critical examination.

The PCInt had in its ranks a number of militants from the Fraction who had returned to Italy at the beginning of the war. It had therefore been influenced by the Fraction's positions, as the first issues of Prometeo show. But at the Turin Conference at the end of 1945, the PCInt adopted the draft programme that Bordiga - who was still not a member of the party - had just sent to it, a programme that totally ignored these positions. This was symbolic of the break with the organisational framework developed by the Fraction in exile. Maintaining party work in a counter-revolutionary period meant opening the doors wide to opportunism, it meant making lucidity impossible when the dominant ideology penetrated the organisation. This is the common point that unites on the one hand the Damen current and, on the other hand, the Bordigism that would emerge a few years later.

1952, a break with the programmatic framework formulated by the Left Fraction

Such a disparate gathering could not last. The split occurred as early as 1952, a split that marked the birth of the Bordigist current. After having been one of the initiators of the break with the framework of the work of Fraction, Bordiga took a further step, that of breaking with the programmatic framework itself formulated by the Fraction of the Italian Left in exile. In the new party, which soon took the name of International Communist Party (ICP), the three years 1951, 1952 and 1953 were years of revisionist fever. The aim is clear: "It was no longer just a question of reconnecting the scattered threads of a Marxist opposition to Stalinism, but of rebuilding it from scratch, starting again, on all fronts, from zero[17].’ That is to say, by sweeping away all the contributions of the three Internationals and the Communist Left of the 1920s and 1930s. Therefore:

1. Bordiga first of all began by rejecting the theory of decadence defended by the Third International. Capitalism was constantly expanding and it became possible to discover some youthful capitalisms here and there.

2. Bordiga discovered that the proletariat is incapable of developing its consciousness before the seizure of power. Until then, it is only within the party that consciousness is an active factor, which he called "turning praxis on its head". It was to throw in the bin yet another fundamental work of Marxism, Trotsky's History of the Russian Revolution[18].

3. Of course, the negation of consciousness within the proletariat made it possible to transfer to the party - and only to the party - the revolutionary tasks incumbent upon the mass of the proletariat organised in the workers' councils. According to this substitutionist vision, the Party organises and technically directs the entire class. It is monolithic, unique and hierarchical, like a pyramid with the party's central committee at the top[19].

4. Together with the Party, the State became the revolutionary organ par excellence of the dictatorship of the proletariat. It bases its power on red terror[20]. On these two issues, Bordiga scuttled two of the main advances made by the Left Fraction of the PCI. It was not only the continuity with the programmatic work of the Left that was broken, but the entire continuity of the marxist movement. It was a rejection of the method of analysing the main experiences of the proletariat as inaugurated by Marx and Engels, for example at the time of the Paris Commune, which had enabled them to conclude: "The least that can be said is that the state is an evil inherited by the victorious proletariat after its struggle for class supremacy whose worst sides the victorious proletariat, just like the Commune, cannot avoid having to lop off at once, as much as possible until such a time as a generation reared in new, free social conditions is able to throw the entire lumber of the state onto the scrap heap"[21].

5. To cap it all, Bordiga decreed the invariance of marxism at a meeting in Milan in September 1952 (a fateful year for the PCInt!). While the communist programme and the marxist theory that underpins it are a cumulative process, learning lessons from revolutions and counter-revolutions, with the proletariat gaining experience and the communists deepening their theoretical understanding of them, Bordiga turns it into a dead dogma, a catechism. This is how Bordiga claims to fight against revisionists and modernisers, by donning both costumes himself, that of the revisionist and that of the priest: "Although the theoretical heritage of the revolutionary working class is no longer a revelation, a myth, an idealistic ideology as was the case for previous classes, but a positive “science”, it nevertheless needs a stable formulation of its principles and rules of action, which plays the role and has the decisive effectiveness that dogmas, catechisms, tables, constitutions, guidebooks such as the Vedas, the Talmud, the Bible, the Koran or the Declaration of Human Rights have had in the past.[22]’

Once this work of systematically destroying the heritage of the working class was completed[23], the ICP was forced to bitterly note that the ICC remains today the sole heir to the programmatic positions developed by the Italian Fraction in the 1930s. It was forced to recognise this publicly in an article devoted - very belatedly - to the history of the ‘Left Fraction Abroad’, as it calls it, and even goes so far as to recognise a break in the theoretical continuity of the Italian Left: "On the question of war, on the question of the global crisis of capitalism, on the colonial question, on all these issues, the Fraction from 1935 onwards began to move towards positions which, we are sorry to say, are those professed today by the International Communist Current. […] We must indeed say openly, without the slightest intention of suing the comrades - as is part of our tradition - that the Party that was born in 1952 does not relate to the theoretical heritage of the Fraction[24].”

An orphan of the workers' movement and caught up in an idealistic, even mystical, spiral, the PCInt attempted to restore a kind of political continuity based on individual continuity, i.e. on the concept of the "brilliant leader”, a concept already criticised by the Gauche Communiste de France (GCF) in 1947[25]. This idealistic concept is still in force in today's ICP as the following illustration shows. In the same article that we have just quoted, it explains learnedly to us the causes of the split of 1952. In order to constitute the true Party, the "brilliant leader" had to finish reflecting: “In that period, which in Italy was the year 1952 - it is of course possible to wonder whether it could have come about in 1950 rather than in 1952, but in reality it is of no importance - the reconstitution of the party was possible, because then and only then was it possible to take stock. Amadeo [Bordiga] himself could not have accomplished this work ten years earlier. We were able to show that in Amadeo's thinking some things were not yet clear in 1945, but had become so by 1952.”[26]

The Communist Left and the national question

But let us return to our starting point, the national question, by explaining the method of the Communist Left. Through this quote from Bilan, the organ of the Italian Fraction, we can easily measure the gulf that separates it from the ossified method of the Bordigist current:

“Our era is dominated by a past of revolutionary growth and by the dark defeats that the proletariat has just suffered throughout the world. Marxist thought, which gravitates around these two axes, finds it difficult to reject useless trappings and outdated formulas, to free itself from the 'hold of the dead', in order to progress in the elaboration of the new material necessary for the battles of tomorrow. The revolutionary ebb rather determines a reduction of thought, a return to images of a past 'where we have conquered’; and thus the proletariat, the class of the future, is transformed into a class without hope that consoles its weakness with declamations, a mysticism of empty formulas, while the grip of capitalist repression tightens ever more.

It must be proclaimed once again that the essence of Marxism is not the adulation of proletarian leaders or formulas, but a living and constantly progressing exploration, just as capitalist society progresses ever further in the direction of imprisoning the revolt of the forces of production. Not to complete the doctrinal contribution of the earlier phases of the proletarian struggle is to render the workers powerless in the face of the new weapons of capitalism. But this contribution is certainly not given by the sum of contingent positions, of isolated phrases, of all the writings and speeches of those whose genius expressed the degree reached by the consciousness of the masses in a given historical period, but rather by the substance of their work which was fertilised by the painful experience of the workers. If in each historical period the proletariat climbs a new rung, if this progression is recorded in the fundamental writings of our masters, it is no less true that the sum of the hypotheses, diagrams and probabilities put forward in the face of still embryonic problems must be subjected to the most severe criticism by those who, seeing these same phenomena unfold, can build theories not on the ‘probable’ but on the cement of new experiences. Moreover, each period has its limitations, a kind of domain of hypotheses which, to be valid, must still be verified by events. But even when social phenomena present themselves before our eyes, Marxists sometimes want to borrow arguments for their interventions from the old arsenal of historical facts.

But Marxism is not a bible, it is a dialectical method; its strength lies in its dynamism, in its permanent tendency towards an elevation of the formulations acquired by the proletariat marching towards revolution. When revolutionary turmoil ruthlessly sweeps away reminiscences, when it brings about profound contrasts between proletarian positions and the course of events, the marxist does not implore history to adopt its outdated formulas, to regress: he understands that positions of principle previously elaborated must be taken further, that the past must be left to the dead. And it is Marx rejecting his 1848 formulas on the progressive role of the bourgeoisie, it is Lenin trampling underfoot, in October 1917, his September hypotheses on the peaceful course of the revolution, on the expropriation with buyout of the banks; both to go well beyond these positions: to face the real tasks of their time. [...]

As far as we are concerned, we will have no fear of demonstrating that Lenin's formulation, with regard to the problem of national minorities, has been overtaken by events and that his position applied in the post-war period has proved to be in contradiction with the fundamental elements that its author had given it: to help the world revolution to blossom.

From a general point of view, Lenin was perfectly right during the war to highlight the need to weaken the main capitalist states by all means, as their fall would certainly have accelerated the course of the world revolution. Supporting the oppressed peoples meant, for him, determining movements of bourgeois revolt from which the workers could have benefited. All this would have been perfect on one condition: that the overall situation of capitalism, the era of imperialism, still allowed for progressive national wars, common struggles of the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. As for the second aspect of the problem raised by Lenin, the right of self-determination of peoples, the Russian revolution proved that if the proletarian revolution does not coincide with its proclamation, it represents only a means of channelling revolutionary effervescence, a weapon of repression that all imperialisms knew how to wield in 1919, from Wilson to the representatives of French, Italian and English imperialism.”[27]

The limits of the self-criticism of 1989

Throughout the process that led to the formation of the ICC in 1975, it was essential to take up the legacy of the Communist Left that had been abandoned as a result of the organic break. It was the ICC's main task to re-establish this political continuity after the break in the link between successive communist organisations. Thanks to the militant action and comments of the French Communist Left and Internacionalismo, and the revival of the class at the end of the 1960s, it became possible to synthesise the contributions of the different currents of the Communist Left into a coherent whole based on the framework of decadence. In this work, the contribution of the Italian Left was central and, as we have seen above, the ICP recognises with an honesty that does it credit that the main lessons of the revolutionary wave and the counter-revolution elaborated by the Fraction that published Bilan in French are defended today by the ICC. On the other hand, the ICP is very timidly trying to learn the lessons of its internal crisis caused by this opportunist position defended on the national question.

Starting with Prolétaire no. 401 of May-June 1989, i.e. 7 years after its devastating internal crisis, the ICP recognises that "the complexity of the situation and the evolution of the Palestinian Resistance caused a certain amount of uncertainty and false positions within the party; This was the case, for example, with the hope that the nuclei of the future proletarian vanguard in the region would emerge from organisations on the left of the PLO. The crisis that struck the party from the early 1980s onwards was triggered precisely by the 'Palestinian question'. Among these false positions, it cites the demand for a “mini-Palestinian state that would be a ghetto for Palestinian proletarians” and goes so far as to proclaim - what sacrilege! - “Palestine will not win; it is the proletarian revolution that will win!”

But we soon have to face the facts, the limits of this self-criticism quickly become apparent. We learn, for example, that "the 'the factor of Arab nationalism' has since the Second World War exhausted all potential for historical progress in the vast area stretching from the Middle East to the Atlantic and covering North Africa”. This means that the PCInt remains a prisoner of its theory of geo-historical areas, that is to say, of the idea that there are areas here and there in the world where capitalism is still in its infancy, despite the work of R. Luxemburg and Lenin on imperialism showing the completion of the world market since 1914. From that moment on, capitalism has been in a senile state throughout the world and the task of the proletariat is the same everywhere: to destroy capitalism and establish new relations of production. This is where this ambiguity about geo-historical areas leads, reintroducing national interests into the struggle of the proletariat: “According to Marxism, the correct approach, especially for areas where the bourgeois revolution is no longer on the agenda (where there can therefore no longer be dual revolutions), but where the national question has not been resolved, is to include the latter and the national struggle in the revolutionary class struggle. The objective of the revolutionary class struggle is to conquer political power, not to establish a national state, but the state of the dictatorship of the proletariat, the instrument of the international proletarian revolution.” The moral of the story: the revolutionary class struggle can be waged by incorporating the national question into its method and objectives, which means necessarily making concessions to the national question!

The grand statements about "the international proletarian revolution” cannot save the ICP’s position on the national question. In order to remain coherent, it is constantly obliged to reintroduce the struggle for democratic rights and the demand for national self-determination. In doing so, it provokes a chauvinistic defensive reaction among Israeli proletarians while stunning Palestinian proletarians with speeches tinged with nationalism (opportunism again): “To break with their bourgeoisie, Jewish Israeli proletarians must disassociate themselves from the national oppression of the Palestinians. There is no worse misfortune for a people than to subjugate another, said Marx about English oppression of Ireland. To escape their situation, which is unfortunate from the point of view of the class struggle, Israeli Jewish proletarians will have to take up the dual ground of the struggle against discrimination against Palestinian and Arab proletarians in their living and working conditions (i.e. against the confessionalism of the Israeli state), and the defence of the right to self-determination of the Palestinian people, i.e. the right of all Palestinians to establish their state in Palestine .”[28]

Thus the ICP still does not see that our period is not the same as Marx's. It will never be able to clarify its problem until it recognises that in the era of imperialism (or capitalist decadence) the old bourgeois democratic programme was buried along with the national programme, that the nation can no longer serve as a framework for the development of the productive forces. As Rosa Luxemburg said: "Certainly, the national phrase has remained, but its real content and function have been transformed into their opposite. It now only serves to mask imperialist aspirations as best it can, unless it is used as a battle cry in imperialist conflicts, the only and ultimate ideological means of winning over the masses and getting them to play their role as cannon fodder in imperialist wars."[29]

When the proletariat embarks on a new course towards revolution, it will still be confronted for some time with the pitfalls of democratism and nationalism. At that point, the presence of a Communist Party, which will have long since proven its clarity of programme on these two questions, will be decisive in orienting the proletariat towards insurrection. But the political framework at the basis of the PCInt platform is obsolete on the national question and on many other points. The reason for this is to be found in the break made in the continuity of the work of the Communist Left of Italy. Having broken this continuity with the past, the PCInt is no longer in a position to build the future, that is to say to contribute to the formation of the future world party, a party that is non-sectarian, non-hierarchical, non-monolithic, non-substitutionist, but a leading party, not in the sense of a technical leadership of the class but of a political leadership, of an orientation militantly defended within the class, an orientation based on the final communist goal and on a complete analysis of the historical situation.

The significance of the variations on the national question among the Bordigist groups

The PCI, whose positions we have just examined, is only one of the expressions of the current Bordigist diaspora. After the explosion of 1982, the few surviving French militants approached those in Italy who published Il Comunista to reconstitute a new PCI claiming to continue the work of the previous one. It would be tedious to count the number of PCIs scattered across several continents, all claiming to be followers of Bordigism as developed from 1952 onwards. We will only mention the other branch that had remained in Italy around Bruno Maffi (1909-2003) and which publishes Il Programa Comunista in Italian and the Cahiers Internationalistes in French.

Among all these groups, including their splits and their exclusions, several have questioned the validity of the original position of the PCI concerning the national question which seems to be invalidated by the facts. They then rediscovered that "the workers have no country’ and that the task of the proletariat was the same everywhere, to overthrow the bourgeoisie and seize power. But the reasons for this change of position had to be explained. All the PCIs then had a ready-made answer up their sleeve: "The end of the cycle of anti-colonial bourgeois revolutions in Asia and Africa", as proclaimed in a leaflet from September 2024 by the Madrid group El Comunista.

But this proclamation changed nothing in substance. We saw what happened to the self-criticism of 1989. The struggle against national oppression was an untouchable dogma. There had already been a long series of general meetings of the PCI at the end of the 1970s which was to establish “The end of the bourgeois revolutionary phase in the 'Third World',” as was announced by the title of the article in Programme communiste No. 83 (1980). This was the premise of the false self-criticism of 1989, as there is no questioning of fundamental aspects such as the so-called bourgeois nature of the Chinese 'revolution’ of 1949 and the Algerian 'revolution' of 1962, nor of the alleged 'double revolution' of 1917 in Russia. This article asserts that the end of bourgeois revolutions came in 1975, that is to say 61 years after the real beginning of the period of capitalism's decline, as was emphasised by the First Congress of the Communist International. This change in the historical situation was said to be due to the withdrawal of the Americans from Vietnam and the end of the revolutionary period of the Chinese bourgeoisie, which, as we know, preferred to ally itself with the 'great American Satan'. A hell of a discovery when you consider that the Chinese Maoist bourgeoisie had long been the spearhead of the Stalinist counter-revolution!

The attitude of the PCInt is reminiscent of the strategy of the most skillful bourgeois factions in history: "Change everything so that nothing changes.” Judge for yourself: “It is now a question of broadly identifying the phase in which the proletariat, which already links the realisation of these reforms, which are more favourable to the masses, to its own revolution, finds itself practically alone in advancing history and thus becomes the heir to the bourgeois tasks not yet realised”[30]. Chased out the door, the bourgeois revolution comes back in through the window. This is why the Cahiers internationalistes can calmly assert once again that the expropriation of Palestinian peasants since the creation of the Israeli state in 1948 evokes the period of primitive accumulation of capitalism: “The history of this dispossession resembles that of the English peasants of which Marx spoke: 'the history of this dispossession is written in the annals of humanity in letters of fire and blood'”.

The introduction of the theory of geo-historical areas by the PCI is in total contradiction with marxism. For the latter, reality must be approached in its entirety, in its totality. And it is from this totality that its different parts can be analysed. The same is true of the capitalist mode of production. Starting from the point of view of total capital is the dialectical method that Marx claimed a thousand times in his work. Let's take just one example from Theories on Surplus Value: “It is only foreign trade, the transformation of the market into a world market, that turns money into world money and abstract labour into social labour. Abstract wealth, value, money - and hence abstract labour - develop to the extent that concrete labour evolves in the direction of a totality of different modes of labour that encompasses the world market. Capitalist production is based on value, that is to say on the development as social labour of the labour contained in the product. But this only takes place on the basis of foreign trade and the world market. It is therefore both the condition and the result of capitalist production”.[31]

A real clarification of the national question, which gives the PCInt so much trouble, means that the following questions in particular should be addressed:

– The emergence of a highly developed capitalism is one of the material conditions indispensable to the realisation of communism. But, first of all, its own specific contradictions make it impossible to extend such a capitalist development to the whole world. Furthermore, capitalism remains an economy of scarcity because it is a paralysed system due to the wage relationship and competition. It creates the seeds of communism, but not communism itself. In this way, the economic measures that the proletariat can take will have to be oriented towards communism but will remain limited, at first, until the international power of the workers' councils is assured. This is all the more so since the decomposition of capitalism will have led to much destruction, including during the revolutionary civil war. This limitation is inevitable, both in developed countries and in countries on the periphery of capitalism, and has nothing to do with bourgeois demands as the PCInt claims.

Marx and Engels were the first to challenge the notion of "permanent revolution" defended in the Address of the Central Committee of the Communist League of March 1850[32]. It is 1848 and no longer 1789, the proletarian threat has completely cooled the revolutionary pretensions of the bourgeoisie. The hypothesis of the "permanent revolution"[33], also proved to be wrong, and that of the "dual revolution" invented by the Bordigists a caricature.[34] As the magazine Bilan quoted above shows, the Italian Fraction had perfectly understood that the historical tasks of one class cannot be assumed by another class, but the Bordigists did not.

– There are no anti-imperialist struggles, as the Maoists claim, there are only inter-imperialist conflicts. The anti-colonial struggles ended with decolonisation. Colonial subjugation has been transformed into imperialist subjugation, which the most developed bourgeois powers impose on weaker countries in their bloody competition for control of the planet's strategic zones. All this in a context where imperialism, militarisation, state capitalism, chaos and war have become the way of life for all nations, large or small.

The tasks of the proletariat are now the same everywhere: to take power and establish the dictatorship of the proletariat through its struggle as a class, its international unification and the generalisation of the revolution. This dynamic, in which the World Communist Party is called upon to play a decisive role, relies on the ability of the proletariat to draw behind it,

For over 35 years now, the ICC has put forward an analysis of the present period in the life of capitalism, which we have described as “the final phase of the period of decadence”, the period “when decomposition becomes a factor, if not the decisive factor, in the evolution of society”. This analysis, to which we have devoted numerous articles and congress reports, has met with outright hostility from the proletarian political milieu, without this hostility being based on a serious refutation of our arguments. Most of the time, this analysis was dismissed with a shrug of the shoulders and a tone of mockery.

In this sense, the “Counter-Theses on Decomposition” written by Tibor, a comrade belonging to the Communist Left, are to be commended. Indeed, the comrade has produced a real effort to argue his disagreements with the ICC's analysis addressing many of the arguments put forward in our Theses.[1]

Admittedly, the comrade also allowed himself to be dragged along by the approach of many of our detractors, pronouncing categorical judgments about our analyses that were poorly argued. For example, he declared our Theses to be nothing less than “dangerous”; for him, the “non-dialectical analysis” of decomposition represents a real drift, an “obvious dead end” that “disarms the proletariat”. These “inconsistent” elucidations are the result of a “visibly defective analytical method”: “this ICC theory suffers from four main pitfalls: its schematic dogmatism, its revisionism, its idealism and its impressionism”. It would therefore be “of the utmost importance for the proletariat to reject, on the basis of scientific examination, and not on the basis of a priori or prejudice, the erroneous position that decomposition is a new historical phase”[2] ... Here we are, ready for anything!

That said, comrade Tibor, unlike those who have so far been content to brush aside the theory of decomposition with a lazy wave of the hand,[3] attempts, beyond his somewhat peremptory assessments, to clarify his divergences by confronting them with the ICC's positions. It is, in fact, the responsibility of all revolutionaries, especially those organisations that claim to defend the historic interests of the working class, to clarify the conditions of its struggle and to criticise analyses they deem erroneous. The proletariat and its vanguard minorities need a global framework for understanding the situation, without which they are doomed to be buffeted by events and unable to play their role as a compass for the working class.

Throughout his text, the comrade has drawn on numerous documents from the workers' movement and the Marxist approach: “One of the necessities of dialectics is to consider observed phenomena as a whole, as subject to permanent interaction. Rather than isolating a phenomenon to observe it in the abstract, the dialectical method implies understanding it through its relations with other phenomena, and refuses to abstract it from the environment in which it evolves”. Here, too, we must salute his willingness to anchor his criticism and reflection not in vague prejudices, but in the history of the workers' movement.

In turn, we shall examine the arguments and method of these “Counter-Theses”, and see whether they contribute, as they set out to do, “to the clarification of the main political problems of our time”.

 

Is the analysis of decomposition in continuity with marxism?

Comrade Tibor says it loud and clear: the analysis of decomposition is “revisionist”. “This theory is used [by the ICC] to break with the essential facts of revolutionary Marxism”. Does the ICC's “visibly flawed” analysis really represent a revisionist innovation?

Before answering this question, it's worth noting that comrade Tibor gives us a lesson in semantics. He considers that the terms “decadence”, “obsolescence” or “decay” of capitalism “should only be used as synonyms for one and the same reality”, and that “decomposition” is nothing other than “another synonym for capitalist decline”.

We won't be so arrogant as to reproduce here the dictionary definitions of these terms, to show that they are not identical, but since the comrade wants to lead us into this territory, we must make one clarification: the terms decadence, decline and obsolescence can indeed be considered close, but those of decomposition and rotting, which are also close, are far removed from the former and relate rather to notions of disintegration or putrefaction. For this reason, our 1990 theses make a clear distinction between the terms decay and decomposition: “... it would be wrong to identify decay and decomposition. If we cannot conceive of the existence of the decomposition phase outside the period of decadence, we can perfectly well account for the existence of decadence without the latter manifesting itself through the appearance of a decomposition phase.”

But beyond these linguistic clarifications, what about our “revisionism”?

For Tibor, the “dislocation of the social body, the rotting of its economic, political and ideological structures, etc.” [...], these elements have never before been described by anyone as phenomena of decomposition”. Well, comrade, that statement is wrong!

Before he became a ‘renegade’, Karl Kautsky described certain phenomena of the decadence of the Roman Empire as “decomposition”. He said: “the age in which Christianity arose was a time of utter decomposition of traditional forms of production and government. Correspondingly, there was a total breakdown of traditional ways of thinking”[4]. And he didn't confine himself to this mode of production, since he developed the same idea towards feudalism and its decline: “A similar individual search and groping for new ways of thinking and new social organisations marked the age of liberalism that followed the breakup of feudal organisations without putting new social organisations at once in their stead”.

Engels himself speaks of decomposition, distinguishing the period of the decadence of the feudal system from the phenomena of decomposition within it: “So it was that feudalism all over Western Europe was in full decline during the fifteenth century. Everywhere cities, with their anti-feudal interests [...] had, through money, in part established their social – and here and there even their political – ascendancy over the feudal lords. Even in the countryside [...] the old feudal ties began to decompose under the influence of money”.

We put the question to Comrade Tibor: does he think that Kautsky (when he was a Marxist) and Engels were merely “playing with words”, as he accuses the ICC of doing?

The decadence of modes of production has never been a mechanical process, with no qualitative evolution: the increasing disintegration of the imperial state, repeated coups d'état, increasingly uncontrollable epidemics, the gradual abandonment of the empire’s borders, the plundering campaigns of the Germanic tribes, and all that Kautsky refers to as the decomposition of “traditional forms of production and the state [and] of thought”, are indeed phenomena of the decay of the organisational forms of slave society, and of the fact that the decadence of a mode of production, like its ascendancy, undergoes an evolution and several phases. Better still, he very explicitly identified the decomposition of feudalism with the period when “liberalism [...] had not yet had time to set up another mode of organization”, thus signifying the possibility of a momentary stalemate in the social situation.

Of course, the revolutionaries of the past couldn't clearly distinguish between the period of decadence and the phenomena of decomposition, because they couldn't yet see that the accumulation and aggravation of these phenomena would lead to a specific and ultimate phase of capitalism's decadence, the phase of decomposition. Above all, unlike capitalism, in which the revolutionary class cannot transform society without first overthrowing the political domination of the bourgeoisie, the development of new relations of production within them prevented the decomposition of the old forms of organisation from becoming a central factor in the social situation. Under feudal domination, for example, the bourgeoisie offered a new perspective and economic dynamism: the development of capitalist social relations thus prevented the disintegration of feudalism from permeating all parts of society and dragging it towards the abyss.

From this point of view, to speak of a “phase of decomposition” rather than “phenomena of decomposition” is indeed a “novelty”. But is this a mortal sin from the point of view of marxism?

Marxism is a method, a scientific approach and, as such, can never be fixed in an unchanging dogma. The entire political struggle of Marx and Engels bears witness to their constant concern to develop, enrich and even revise positions that proved insufficient or outdated in the face of an ever-changing reality. Thus, the experience of the Paris Commune profoundly changed their vision of revolution and the seizure of power, just as the revolution of 1848 had enabled them to understand that the objective conditions for the overthrow of capitalism had not yet been met.

It was also on the basis of this living method that revolutionaries like Lenin and Luxemburg were able to identify the entry of capitalism into a new period of its life, that of its decadence. They placed at the heart of their analysis the notion of imperialism, which had become the permanent way of life of capitalism, even though this concept had not been theorised by either Marx or Engels.

From the 1920s onwards, the Communist Left, drawing on the methods of Marx, Lenin and Luxemburg, also worked critically on the new problems posed by the Russian Revolution and the period of decadence: the dictatorship of the proletariat, the state in the period of transition, trade unions, the national question... On the surface, the positions developed by the Communist Left contradicted those of Marx and Engels. But the lessons learned by the Communist Left, while constituting “novelties” never expressed “by anyone before”, represent a precious heritage fully in keeping with the tradition of marxism.

If the comrade is looking for genuinely “revisionist” innovations, we invite him to make the implacable critique, “following a scientific examination”, of “the invariance of Marxism since 1848”, a theory elaborated by Bordiga, taken up by the Bordigist current (like the ICC, belonging to the Communist Left) and which permeates his “counter-theses” from top to bottom. Contrary to the sclerotic vision of “invariance”, marxism is not a “finished art” whose exegesis revolutionaries need only perform in the manner of theologians.

 

A confused vision of decadence

The theoretical framework of decomposition is entirely based on the marxist approach. The prospect of capitalism's inner disintegration, at the heart of the theory of decadence, is one of the “novelties” outlined by the First Congress of the Communist International (CI), which identified the system's entry into its period of decadence: “A new epoch is born! The epoch of the dissolution of capitalism, of its inner disintegration. The epoch of the communist revolution of the proletariat”. The “socialism or barbarism” alternative was explicit: “Human culture has been destroyed and humanity is threatened with complete annihilation. [...]. The final outcome of the capitalist mode of production is chaos. This chaos can only be overcome by the productive and most numerous class – the working class”. In its Manifesto, the CI goes on to state: “At the present time this impoverishment, no longer only of a social but also of a physiological and biological kind, rises before us in all its shocking reality.” It was equally clear that the “inner collapse|” was not a conjunctural phenomenon linked to the world war, but a permanent, irreversible tendency of decadent capitalism: “Is all toiling mankind to become the bond slaves of victorious world cliques who [are] everywhere and always shackling the proletariat – with the sole object of maintaining their own rule? Or shall the working class of Europe and of the advanced countries in other parts of the world take in hand the disrupted and ruined economy in order to assure its regeneration upon socialist principles?”. World history has since fully confirmed this decisive turning point in the life of capitalist society, and in particular the barbarity represented by the Second World War. The now permanent crisis of the global economy, the endless spiral of military convulsions, the uncontrollable collapse of ecosystems... Capitalism today offers the image of a world without perspective, of an interminable agony of destruction, misery and barbarism.

Tibor rightly recognizes the need to look at history dynamically, not photographically, even reproaching us for a “lack of dialectical understanding of what a dynamic of putrefaction is”. He also supports the theory of decadence and the reality of its evolution: “Capitalism is a system that is rotting on its feet, and it is doing so more rapidly and pronouncedly as this period of decadence drags on”.

But, despite his good intentions, the principles of dialectical materialism that he accuses the ICC of failing to apply are constantly overlooked in his text. The profoundly historical vision of the CI, far from a “catastrophism” with “psychological roots”, is, in fact, light-years away from the comrade's vapid demonstrations when he asserts that “there is no such thing as a permanent crisis of the capitalist economy”. He writes that “capitalism, by the very logic of accumulation, cannot therefore experience a phase of definitive economic decline”, and goes on to assert that “there is no such thing as a final crisis”, that “through the recurrent devaluation of constant capital in the context of crises, capitalism is able to survive its crises”, or even that “capitalism, by its cyclical nature, experiences successively periods of prosperity followed by periods of crisis, potentially eternally”.

And on what does the comrade base these assertions? On texts by Marx describing the capitalist economy in its ascendant period! As if nothing ever changed, as if social and economic conditions were forever fixed and “potentially eternally”, as he puts it, as if changing circumstances didn't require marxists to question their now obsolete analyses. And it's the ICC “that sins” through “its schematic dogmatism” and “its revisionism”?

Is decadence merely a succession of “potentially eternally” cyclical crises, typical of the 19th century, or does it represent the insurmountable historical crisis of capitalism, as predicted by the Third International? Reading Tibor's somewhat contradictory writings, we are entitled to wonder what, exactly, is his vision of decadence?

Without going as far as the clarity of Rosa Luxemburg's analysis, does this comrade, who claims the legacy of Lenin, even agree with the Platform of the Third International?

Let's not beat around the bush: the comrade, while acknowledging the reality of decadence, clearly doesn't understand its foundations, any more than he understands the evolution of history in general. In fact, the comrade fails to perceive the qualitative difference between the cyclical crises of capitalism's ascendancy and the chronic, permanent crisis of overproduction of decadence.

Worse still, his arguments also call into question the material basis for the proletariat's seizure of power, and hence the possibility of overthrowing capitalism. On what material basis, in a system capable of prospering “eternally”, could the proletariat develop its revolutionary struggle? A mystery... In this respect, it's hardly surprising that, since the publication of his text, Tibor has turned his back on the theory of decadence, becoming a militant in a Bordigist organisation that rejects this analysis outright. “Invariance”, which is an aberrant distortion of marxism, has led Bordigists to reject the notion of decadence, even though this concept is present from the very origins of historical materialism. It is, moreover, these same “innovations” that today lead this current to reject the concept of the decomposition of capitalism.

 

An approach typical of vulgar materialism

In addition to its “schematic dogmatism” and “revisionism”, the ICC is said to be plagued by two other sins: “its idealism and impressionism”. Tibor justifies this condemnation with his master argument, the one that structures his “Counter-Theses”: “All the ‘essential characteristics of decomposition’ put forward by the ICC in its seventh thesis are either false, or in no way novel and constitutive of a new period”. And the comrade goes on to list at length the “material facts” and “empirical evidence” that are hardly “more convincing” to demonstrate that wars, famines, slums, corruption and plane crashes existed long before the period of decomposition, sometimes even worse... It obviously hasn't occurred to Tibor that his astounding revelations are not so, and that perhaps, through his “Counter-Theses”, he is above all demonstrating a profound misunderstanding of both the framework of decomposition and the marxist method.

The “Counter-Theses” quite rightly assert that “One of the necessities of dialectics is to consider observed phenomena as a whole, as subject to permanent interaction. Rather than isolating a phenomenon in order to observe it in abstracto, the dialectical method involves understanding it through its relations with other phenomena, and refuses to abstract it from the environment in which it evolves”. For him, the history of capitalism is merely a succession of “different economic phases”: “In its progressive phase, capitalism successively adopted the forms of mercantilism, manufacture, Manchester capitalism and trustified capitalism. In its phase of decline, it successively adopted the forms of trustified capitalism and state capitalism (first of the Keynesian type, then of the neo-liberal type)”. In this sense, it's worth pointing out that, in the comrade's eyes, state capitalism is reduced to a mere “economic phase”, far removed from the dominant trend of decadent capitalism embracing all aspects of social life, far beyond the economic sphere alone. But Tibor cannot conceive of this, convinced as he is that the “dialectical method” consists in reducing everything to the “economic underpinnings of the contradictions of modern capitalism”.

Contrary to this schematic vision, Engels explained in his letter to Joseph Bloch (September 21-22, 1890) that “according to the Materialist Conception of History, the factor which is in the last instance decisive in history is the production and reproduction of actual life. More than this neither Marx nor myself ever claimed. If now someone has distorted the meaning in such a way that the economic factor is the only decisive one, this man has changed the above proposition into an abstract, absurd phrase which says nothing. The economic situation is the base, but the different parts of the structure-the political forms of the class struggle and its results, [...] forms of law and even the reflections of all these real struggles in the brains of the participants, political theories, juridical, philosophical, religious opinions, and their further development into dogmatic systems - all this exercises also its influence on the development of the historical struggles and in cases determines their form. It is under the mutual influence of all these factors that, rejecting the infinitesimal number of accidental occurrences (that is, things and happenings whose intimate sense is so far removed and of so little probability that we can consider them non-existent, and can ignore them), that the economical movement is ultimately carried out. Otherwise the application of the theory to any period of history would be easier than the solution of any simple equation.”

In this context, the criticism we levelled at the Bordigist current in our last ‘Report on Decomposition’[5] also applies to Comrade Tibor's text, which forgot along the way the pillar of the Marxist approach, namely the dialectical evolution of human societies according to the unity of opposites: “For marxism the superstructure of social formations, that is their political, juridical and ideological organisation, arises on the basis of the given economic infrastructure and is determined by the latter. This much the epigones [of Bordiga] have understood. However the fact that this superstructure can act as cause - if not the principle one - as well as effect, is lost on them. Engels, towards the end of his life had to insist on this very point in a series of letters in the 1890s addressing the vulgar materialism of the epigones of the time. His correspondence is absolutely essential reading for those who deny today that the decomposition of the capitalist superstructure can have a catastrophic effect on the economic fundamentals of the system.”

In fact, Tibor projects onto our analysis of decomposition his own schematic approach typical of vulgar materialism: as he views the history of capitalism through the filter of a narrow economism, in the form of eternal production cycles that would only increase in size, of catastrophes whose evolution would only ever be quantitative and from which all social life would mechanically flow, he perceives our framework of decomposition completely distorted in terms of the accumulation of empirical phenomena. And in his logic, it's enough to note that these phenomena existed before the decomposition phase to invalidate its foundations.

Moreover, Tibor's analysis never explains what change in the period of decadence could have produced the major, unprecedented event represented by the implosion of the Eastern bloc. For him, “claiming that it is decomposition that explains the fall of the Eastern Bloc, we must show here the greatest bad faith or the greatest ignorance of history. If the Soviet bloc imploded, because of its contradictions, it was as a result of the strategy pursued by the American ruling class, which consisted in pushing its weaker adversary into a militaristic headlong rush that could only exhaust this colossus with feet of clay”. But where did the ICC deny that American pressure was not a decisive factor in the collapse of the “Soviet” bloc? On the other hand, Tibor completely misses the central question: how do you explain a bloc collapsing of its own accord for the first time in the history of decadence? According to the comrade, it's a simple accident of history.

The comrade's less-than-rigorous approach leads him to utter such enormities as: “The fact that decomposition may have arisen on a non-economic basis should be enough to call into question such an analysis. Even though decadence arises on an immediately economic basis, monopolies, financial capitalism, capitalist unification of the world, productive forces having reached the limit of their historical progressivism ... we must wait several decades for decomposition to take an economic form. Here we recognise an empiricist and impressionist method far removed from Marxism, putting itself at the mercy of events rather than analysing the economic underpinnings of the contradictions of modern capitalism”. Since the ‘Theses on Decomposition’ no ICC text has defended such an idea! In issue 61 of the International Review, we even wrote: “the prime cause behind the bloc's decomposition is the utter economic and political bankruptcy of its dominant power faced with the inexorable aggravation of the world capitalist crisis”. But Tibor sees an anomaly in our recent analyses of the “eruption of the effects of decomposition on the economic level”. The dialectical edge of the “Counter-Theses” are clearly somewhat blunted, unable as they are to conceive that decomposition can arise on the basis of the economic contradictions of capitalism while feeding these same contradictions...

This distortion of the ICC's positions under the weight of his own vulgar materialistic vision is confirmed in the confusion maintained by the “Counter-Theses” between “phenomena of decomposition” and “phase of decomposition”, two related but quite distinct elements. The ICC has not been sufficiently blinded by its “schematic dogmatism” to ignore the fact the Second World War has, until now, generated destruction beyond comparison with the conflicts of the period of decomposition, nor that corruption has been eating away at the bourgeoisie for centuries, nor that the Spanish flu and even the Black Death were more deadly than the Covid-19 pandemic! Nor have we claimed that “the essential characteristics of decomposition” arose with the phase of decomposition. But just as the phenomenon of imperialism existed at the end of the period of ascendancy before becoming the way of life of decadent capitalism, so too did the phenomena of decomposition exist before the phase of decomposition.

And since the proletariat has still not abolished capitalism, the elements of decomposition, whose existence Tibor at least partially acknowledges, have only accumulated and amplified on all levels of social life: the economy, on the one hand, but also political life, morality, culture and so on. This process is not unique to the phase of decomposition, as witnessed by the irrational madness of Nazism during the Second World War and the cold cynicism of the Allies in justifying the systematic destruction of Germany and Japan when these countries were already defeated. This is what the Gauche Communiste de France described in 1947: “The bourgeoisie is faced with its own decomposition and its own manifestations. Every solution it tries to bring about precipitates the clash of contradictions, it always tries to cover up the slightest evil, it patches up here, and stops a leak there, all the while knowing that the storm is gaining more force”[6]. What we mean by “phase of decomposition” is not the sudden appearance of the phenomena of putrefaction following the collapse of the Eastern bloc, nor their mere accumulation, but the entry of capitalism into a new and final phase of its decadence, in which decomposition has become a central factor in the evolution of society.

Our understanding of this final phase in the life of capitalism is based not so much on the very real accumulation of phenomena as on a historical analysis of the balance of forces between the two fundamental classes of society.[7] At no point does comrade Tibor raise the problem of the absence of perspective, which lies at the heart of our analysis of decomposition, as if it were at best secondary, at worst totally inconsistent.

However, if in a class society, individuals are not necessarily aware of the conditions that determine their existence, this does not mean that society can function without a perspective to guide it. From this point of view, although the Second World War represented a pinnacle of barbarism, the bourgeoisie and its states, through the logic of the imperialist blocs, nevertheless framed society with an iron fist, mobilizing the working class in bloody confrontation and the perspective of reconstruction. Even in the 1930s, there was the prospect of world war, catastrophic though it was, to mobilise society.

On the other hand, since the opening of the phase of decomposition, barbarism has had nothing “organised” about it: indiscipline, anarchy and “every man for himself” dominate international relations, political life and the whole of social existence, getting worse all the time. It was this approach, and not a phenomenological (or “impressionist” one as the comrade calls it), that enabled the ICC to identify, through the break-up of the Eastern bloc, the end of the policy of blocs that had hitherto structured imperialist relations, making capitalism's march towards a new world conflict highly improbable.

This same approach enabled us to analyse how the collapse of Stalinism would deal a huge blow to class consciousness and the revolutionary perspective, without the class having been defeated.

It is because neither of the two fundamental classes is, for the moment, in a position to provide its decisive response to the crisis of capitalism (war or revolution) that the phenomena of decomposition have become central to the evolution of the situation, have acquired a dynamic of their own, feeding off each other in a growing and uncontrollable way.

The framework of decomposition is based, to sum it up in one formula, on an elementary principle of dialectics that the “Counter-theses” ignore: “the transformation of quantity into quality”. Likewise, against the impasses of narrow economism, our analysis takes into account the determining character of subjective factors as a material force, which, far from being a “non-dialectical analysis”, constitutes a truly materialist approach. In his Anti-Dühring, Engels criticised reasoning that focuses solely on the economic dimension of capitalism's crisis, totally ignoring its political and historical dimensions. Tibor never ceases to invoke the “dialectic”, but has he understood its meaning and implications? Nothing is less certain.

 

Who “disarms the proletariat”?

Tibor's strongest criticism of our analysis is that it is not only wrong, but also “dangerous”, in that it disarms the proletariat. And he continues: “It's interesting to see how the ICC underestimates the danger of world war. It is presented as easily preventable by proletarian action”. What does the ICC actually say? In thesis 11, we write: “’communist revolution or the destruction of humanity’ was the formulation imposed after World War II by the appearance of nuclear weapons. Today, with the disappearance of the Eastern bloc, this terrifying prospect remains entirely valid. But today, we have to clarify the fact that the destruction of humanity may come about as a result of either imperialist world war, or the decomposition of society”. In International Review (1990), we state: “Even if world war is no longer a threat to humanity at present, and perhaps for good, it may be replaced by the decomposition of society. This is all the more true in that, while the outbreak of world war requires the proletariat's adherence to the bourgeoisie's ideals, which is hardly on the agenda for its decisive battalions, decomposition has no need at all of this adherence to destroy humanity”. Current events tragically confirm this analysis, as we recently pointed out in a leaflet on the war in Gaza: “Capitalism is war. Since 1914, it has practically never stopped, affecting one part of the world and then another. The historical period before us will see this deadly dynamic spread and amplify, with increasingly unfathomable barbarity”.

We could multiply the examples ad infinitum, as each of our publications and public meetings warns with the utmost constancy of the major danger represented by the deepening military chaos that could end up annihilating humanity if the proletariat doesn't overthrow capitalism soon enough. Tibor, on the other hand, does not perceive this danger; he sees threats only in a hypothetical and distant world war. And even when the ICC points out that a third world war could result in the end of the human race (because of nuclear weapons, among other things), Tibor sees it as fertile ground for revolution, as was the case in 1917. Worse still, with his vision of “eternal” capitalism, he even opens the door to the idea that a new world war could represent a “solution to the crisis” by triggering a new cycle of accumulation! Nothing changes, nothing evolves, just apply the patterns of the past.

That the working class could be unable to defend the revolutionary perspective while not allowing itself to be drawn into world war seems inconceivable to the comrade. The passage from the “Counter Theses” on class struggle in the 1970s-1980s is very confused,[8] but it does at least seem to recognise that the early 1970s marked a development in the struggle, before a setback from 1975 onwards. It will not have escaped the comrade's notice that, even during what he calls this “parenthesis on a historical scale”, the working class was never able to develop its revolutionary struggle. And yet, during this same period, the American bourgeoisie found itself confronted with a refusal to embrace the Vietnam War, pacifist demonstrations, totally demotivated troops and so on. The working class did not revolt on its class terrain, but the bourgeoisie was never able to fully mobilise society for the war, to the point of having to humiliatingly withdraw its troops from Vietnam. The headlong rush to war has continued ever since: Star Wars, the USSR's war in Afghanistan, two wars in Iraq, then a new occupation, this time by the US, of Afghanistan, and so on. Far from the highway to war that characterised the 1930s, several decades of conflict never led to a global conflagration. Why not? The “counter-theses” fail to perceive this reality and the very concrete, materialist impact of the balance of forces between classes and the question of perspective.

Tibor would also like to see a supposed underestimation of the danger of war in that “the rest of the thesis is devoted to proving the impossibility of a reconstitution of the blocs”. Here again, the comrade is, to say the least, approximate. The ICC never spoke of the impossibility of imperialist blocs in the phase of decomposition, nor that the historical context of their formation was behind us. On the contrary, we have shown that growing counter-tendencies stand in the way of their reformation. In the Theses on Decomposition, we write that “the formation of a new economic, political and military structure regrouping these different states presupposes a discipline amongst them, which the phenomenon of decomposition will make more and more problematic”.

This has been confirmed by the evolution of the world situation: more than three decades of unstable alliances and growing chaos have so far confirmed the “extremely peremptory” assertions of the ICC. The comrade even agrees that today there are no constituted blocs. So why is he insinuating what the ICC doesn't say? Because, although “idealism” and “abstraction” are repugnant to him, the comrade speculates on the future: the formation of new blocs could occur, world war could arise... The marxist method is not made up of laboratory speculations testing in a test-tube what is theoretically possible and what is not! Revolutionaries are responsible for the political orientation of their class, and to do this they base their analyses on present reality and the dynamics it contains. The current dynamic of “every man for himself” is stronger than ever, and has acquired a new quality, despite the religious dogma of “invariance”. And what this dynamic tells us is the growing inability of the bourgeoisie to reconstitute a new world “order” in disciplined imperialist blocs. The historic divorce between the United States and its “allies” that we've been witnessing since Donald Trump took office is a spectacular illustration of this. Current conflicts in the Middle East also bear staggering witness to this: confrontations of unprecedented savagery are spreading across the region in a scorched-earth logic that precludes, for all belligerents, any hope of re-establishing order in the region. War today therefore takes the form of a multiplication of uncontrollable and extremely chaotic conflicts, rather than an “organised” conflict between two rival blocs. But this in no way invalidates the threat, admittedly more difficult to discern, that these conflicts pose to humanity.

In the very first pages of The Communist Manifesto, Marx wrote: “Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guildmaster and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight, a fight that each time ended, either in a revolutionary reconstitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes”. What could “the common ruin of the contending classes” mean today? Nothing other than the end of humanity if the proletariat is no longer able to defend its revolutionary alternative. Without the affirmation of such a perspective, the completion of the process of decomposition can only lead, in the long term, to the generalisation of conflicts and the destruction of the social fabric, not to mention the technological and climatic risks. This is why the proletariat needs a living, militant marxist method, not its sclerotic, non-historical, “invariant” avatar.

If we have entitled this response to Comrade Tibor “‘Counter-theses’ or ‘counter-sense’ on decomposition?” it's because his refutation of the ICC analysis is fundamentally based on misinterpretation:

• misinterpretation of words when he considers the terms decomposition and decadence to be “synonyms”;
• misinterpretation of what the ICC is really saying, as we have shown, with supporting quotes;
• misinterpretation of marxist method.

In particular, the comrade lays claim to the dialectical method, and we welcome this concern. Although he manifests a certain vulgar materialist vision opposed by Engels in his time, he presents us with a certain number of elements of dialectics with which we are in complete agreement. The problem is that when it comes to moving from theory to practice, he forgets what he's written before. He stresses the eminently dynamic nature of capitalism's life, its perpetual change, but a large part of his demonstration can be summed up by the phrase “there's nothing new under the sun”. He takes into account both the existence of several phases in the decadence of capitalism, and the fact that it is constantly worsening on all fronts, but he refuses to draw the consequence: for him, this worsening is merely quantitative, cannot lead to a new quality: the entry of the decadence of capitalism into a phase “where decomposition becomes a decisive, if not the decisive factor in social evolution.”, as stated in our 1990 Theses.

We know Comrade Tibor and his honesty well enough to believe that these misinterpretations do not stem from a deliberate desire to falsify our analyses or marxism. This is why we encourage the comrade, without wishing to offend him, to change his glasses when reading our documents or the classics of marxism.

Tibor's 'Counter-Theses' can be read here [45].

EG, March 2025

A pamphlet full of unfounded accusations against the ICC

In the jungle of internet sites that pride themselves on defending the positions and tradition of marxism, there is one, Controversies,[1] which recently devoted an entire PDF pamphlet of over 60 pages to a 360-degree attack on our organisation.[2] The accusations are extremely varied, covering virtually everything from political positions to internal functioning and behavior towards other groups. One of them, particularly defamatory, puts forward the idea of a “secret conspiracy by the ICC to sabotage the proletarian political milieu and anything that might cast a shadow over it.” In other words, C. Mcl - the pseudonym of the pamphlet's author - presents himself as the defender of the Communist Left and its founding values in the face of alleged attacks by the ICC.

Before responding to the accusations, we feel it necessary to introduce the author, who is none other than a former member of our organisation, C. Mcl. Since leaving in 2008, he has distinguished himself via his blog Controversies by a clearly hostile attitude of systematic denigration of the ICC, notably through the publication in 2010 of the article ‘It’s midnight in the Communist Left [47]’, which presents a “fanciful”, totally negative assessment of the contributions of the historic Communist Left, the proletarian political current formed in reaction to the degeneration of the Communist International and the betrayal of the Communist Parties in the 1930s. According to the same assessment, the Communist Left experience was a complete failure, and the contributions of Bilan and other expressions of this current[3] were useless. So, after fraudulently burying the history and tradition of the Communist Left under a heap of lies in a previous article, C. Mcl, again fraudulently, now presents himself as the defender of the Communist Left, with a tract based, as always, on lies and mystifications. Either C. Mcl is either completely unaware of his contradictions, or, like others before him, he has adopted the motto: “the bigger the lie, the more likely it is to get through!”

In fact, C. Mcl's approach is not original, as others before him have engaged in an enterprise of demolition or distortion of the values and contribution of the Communist Left. Thus, for example, it is reminiscent in content and purpose of the one carried out by another “illustrious” figure, Mr. Gaizka, who invented, in the service of his personal aims, a Spanish Communist Left[4] of which he was the heir and defender. In both cases, there is this shared objective: to gain acceptance in the camp of the Communist Left by means of a Trojan horse, like the fake Spanish Communist Left[5] or through the “political disqualification” of the ICC, within a common project to negate the Communist Left itself.

As we shall also see below, Controversies' aim with this first pamphlet (a second is in progress) goes far beyond a simple polemic, insofar as the ICC's behavior is said to evoke “mafia-like gangsterism,” so that our “conceptions and practices must be denounced and firmly banished,” and that:

• “it is high time, once and for all, to put an end to the internal struggles provoked daily in the proletarian political milieu by the ICC's actions against it.”
• “Yes, for the first time within the Communist Left, we are confronted with a secret conspiracy on the part of the ICC designed to sabotage the proletarian political milieu and anything that might overshadow it.”[6]

This conclusion of Controversies takes up one by one, against our organisation, the infamies that the ICC has already denounced in the parasitic milieu, drawing on the political approach of the General Council of the International Workingmen’s Association against the practices of Bakunin and his followers.[7]

We cannot - nor do we wish to - respond to all the nonsense in this pamphlet. We will therefore deliberately focus on two themes:

1. The way in which the ICC's characterisation of the current historical phase of the decomposition of capitalism within the period of decadence is rubbished and discarded;
2. The accusation that our organisation is discrediting and destroying the Communist Left.

Why is C. Mcl targeting these two issues?

• - The “decadence of capitalism” constitutes the backbone of our political platform, giving it a unique coherence in the proletarian political milieu. To demolish decadence, or even to relativise its importance, is not only to attack the ICC but the entire tradition of the Communist Left, because it weakens the foundations of primary political positions in this period of capitalist decadence:

- the criticism of trade unions as inevitably serving the state;
- the critique of national liberation as in no way at the service of class struggle, but as a fatal obstacle to it.

To reject the concept of the decadence of capitalism and its worsening in the phase of decomposition is to rob ourselves of an understanding of the present historical period, which is different from the ascendant phase of which Marx was a contemporary.

• Similarly, when it comes to the party, the conception of its role and its construction cannot be posed without taking into account the specific historical period in question in the life of capitalism. And reference to the Communist Left, cut off from the historical period, becomes a sterile abstraction from which no lessons can be drawn. This fundamental current of the workers' movement thus ceases to be a source of orientation and inspiration, becoming a gimmick in the hands of academicism and blogging sites like Controversies.

For a certain audience and its mentors, discrediting and destroying the Communist Left is such an obvious necessity that there's no need to justify it. This is the philosophy behind C. Mcl's article, with its slanderous attacks and accusations.

Mr. C. Mcl's strange approach to analysing the historical period

The characterisation of the present historical period as one of the decadence of capitalism is not an invention of the ICC, but a conclusion reached by the Third International. As it states in its ‘Manifesto’, the Communist International came into being at a time when capitalism had clearly demonstrated its obsolescence. Humanity was now entering “the era of wars and revolutions”. The Internationalistst Communist Tendency (ICT), another important component of today's Communist Left, also defends the analysis of the decadence of capitalism, but in our view incoherently. As for the Bordigists, if today they are rather unconvinced by this approach due to an erroneous defense of the invariance[8] of Marxism, it should be remembered that Bordiga himself was its defender in 1921.[9]

1. In the face of C. Mcl's “critiques”, what are the arguments in favor of the analysis of decadence?

These appear in a series of articles we produced in the late 1980s, precisely in response to critical positions that denied the analysis of the decadence of capitalism. Here are a few particularly significant passages:

• “… when revolutionaries have the task of demonstrating the capitalist mode of production’s historical bankruptcy and socialism’s necessity and immediacy, there are political groups picking over the ‘fantastic growth rates of the reconstruction period’, abandoning the marxist conception of succeeding modes of production by rejecting the notion of decadence, and straining themselves to prove that ‘...capitalism grows endlessly, beyond all limits’. It is hardly surprising that with this kind of foundation, and without any coherent analysis of the period, these groups defend a perspective that is unfavourable for the working class, and essentially academic as far as the activity of revolutionary minorities is concerned.”[10]

And to continue:

• “However, like previous modes of production, capitalism also has its period of decadence which began in this century’s second decade, and which is characterised by the brake imposed on the development of the productive forces by its now outdated fundamental social law of production – wage labour – which is eventually expressed in a lack of solvent markets relative to the needs of accumulation.”[11]

Adding that:

• “The decadence of a mode of production cannot be measured simply in the light of statistics. The phenomenon can only be grasped through a whole series of quantitative, but also qualitative and superstructural aspects: our critics pretend not to know this, so as to avoid having to say anything about it, being happy enough to brandish the figures whose value we have just demonstrated."[12]

Finally, we recall the arguments developed in response to the EFICC,[13] which at the time challenged the idea that the development of state capitalism was closely linked to the decadence of capitalism:

• “For EFICC this is no longer true. It is the transition from formal to real domination that explains the development of state capitalism. If this were the case, we should statistically observe a continuous progression of the state's share of the economy, since this shift in domination takes place over an entire period and, what's more, this progression should begin during the ascending phase. This is clearly not the case. The statistics we have published show a clear break in 1914. In the ascendant phase, the state's share of the economy is LOW and CONSTANT (hovering around 12%), whereas it rises during the decadence to reach an average today of around 50% of GNP. This confirms our thesis of the indissoluble link between the development of state capitalism and decadence, and categorically invalidates that of EFICC.” [14]

In these same articles, for example, the assessment was as follows:

• “At the end of this series of articles, you'd have to be as blind as our critics not to see the break in capitalism's way of life brought about by the First World War. All the long-term statistical series published in the article demonstrate this rupture: world industrial production, world trade, prices, state intervention, terms of trade and armaments. Only the analysis of decadence and its explanation by the global saturation of markets makes it possible to understand this rupture.”[15]

These are just some of the arguments we can provide, taking them from three of our articles written at the time by a staunch defender of the analysis of capitalism's decadence. But, if we look up who the author of these articles is, we have the incredible surprise of discovering that all three are signed by C. Mcl who actually wrote them when he was still a militant in our organisation. It therefore seems to us that Mr. C. Mcl, before lashing out at the organisation in which he was active for 33 years, from 1975 to 2008, without ever questioning either the decadence or the analysis of the new period of decomposition, should first take responsibility for himself and respond to his own contradictions.

2. How is it possible that C. Mcl, in revising his analysis of decadence, could have reached such opposing conclusions?

Why, when he “revises” his earlier conclusions published in the International Review of the ICC, does C. Mcl base himself on a different set of data? And above all, how does he justify such a change in the data in question, when they are supposed to reflect the same reality? C. Mcl doesn't feel the need to justify this. Worse still, he does not cite the source of the new data now used, contenting himself with an insolent and provocative tone to accompany the presentation of his new results and conclusions, remaining as silent as a tomb about his new sources.

Intrigued by the mystery thus maintained by C. Mcl, we carried out a few searches and finally discovered that his latest publications on this theme are based entirely on data from an English website, World in Data,[16] based in Oxford and funded by Bill Gates. This site sets out to highlight the positive aspects of capitalism, which is supposed to solve world poverty. But this company’s findings are far from definitive, since there are numerous sites and blogs on the web pointing out that these statistics are completely distorted. In other words, C. Mcl and Controversies are allying themselves with Bill Gates by using unreliable statistics to “artificially” promote the longevity of capitalism and bury the thesis of its decadence.

3. What method does C. Mcl use to develop his analyses of the historical situation?

In his animated attempt to demonstrate “the total political bankruptcy of our organisation”, C. Mcl and his blog Controversies know no limits and have acquired a certain expertise in the art of confusing our positions by distorting and falsifying them. But, as this apparently isn't enough, C. Mcl does the same to the positions of Marx and Engels.

On page 13 of his booklet, for example, C. Mcl challenges our analysis that the collapse of the Berlin Wall and the ensuing bourgeois propaganda about the defeat of communism, the disappearance of the working class and the end of history, have led to a collapse of fighting spirit and a decline in class consciousness. We quote C. Mcl:

•  “...the ICC's recognition of a post-1989 ebb in struggles is totally erroneous for three good reasons:

a) Firstly, because this decline dates back to 1974-75, i.e. fifteen years earlier.

b) Secondly, it's impossible for the cause of the downturn to lie in the collapse of the Eastern bloc, since the downturn was already at its lowest point in 1989 (graph 4.1).

c) Finally, the impact of the fall of the Berlin Wall had no influence on the intensity of social conflict (graph 4.1). At most, we can detect a cyclical micro-crisis ... but this is recovered in the following two years. On the other hand, this collapse has an impact on consciousness as an additional factor in the disorientation and loss of class identity”.

Let's unpack this quote from C. Mcl:

• - Firstly, it suggests that, for the ICC, the problem of setbacks is characterized in terms of strike days. It can then, by means of an ad-hoc statistic on the number of strikes, invalidate the idea of a decline from the 1990s onwards. This can be misleading for those unfamiliar with our analysis of the decline in working-class consciousness;

• - Secondly, he pretends that the ICC essentially understands the decline as a question of diminished working-class combativeness, not of consciousness. This is false, as evidenced by this passage from our ‘Theses on the economic and political crisis in the eastern countries [48]’ (International Review no 60), written at the beginning of October 1989, i.e. more than a month before the start of the disintegration of the USSR: “An event of this magnitude will reverberate, and has already begun to reverberate, on the consciousness of the working class, and all the more so as it concerns an ideology and a political system presented for more than half a century by all sectors of the bourgeoisie as ‘socialist’ and ‘working-class’ ... We must therefore expect a momentary decline in proletarian consciousness, the manifestations of which can already be seen - particularly with the return in force of the trade unions. While the relentless and increasingly brutal attacks that capitalism will inevitably unleash on the workers will force them to lead the fight, this will not initially result in a greater capacity for the class to advance in its awareness. In particular, reformist ideology will weigh heavily on the struggles of the coming period, greatly favoring the action of the unions.”

Obviously, we can't speak of error, exaggeration or even bias when we see the way C. Mcl.'s attempt to undermine the ICC's credibility by resorting to such easily verifiable untruths, since the ICC was in fact the only organisation in the proletarian milieu to point out that the collapse of the Eastern bloc meant greater difficulties for the proletariat. This was simply a blatant lie.

But nothing stops C. Mcl in his quest for the craziest means to serve his designs of demolition, especially when it comes to the phase of capitalism’s decomposition. Boldly, he calls on the Communist Manifesto to come to his aid by invoking this passage relating (according to him) to the decomposition within the societies of the past, resulting in the destruction of the two classes in struggle: “Free man and slave, patrician and plebeian, baron and serf, sworn master and journeyman, in a word oppressors and oppressed, in constant opposition, waged an uninterrupted war, sometimes open, sometimes concealed, a war which always ended either in a revolutionary transformation of the whole society, or in the mutual ruin of the contending classes.” (Emphasis in the original text).

Since the Manifesto does not mention the possibility of a phase of social decomposition under capitalism, as it does for earlier societies, C. Mcl concedes that such a phenomenon may exist under capitalism, but only to a very limited extent. The explanation is very interesting: “... if such a 'blockage' of the balance of power between classes can exist for a few years in capitalism, it is inconceivable in the medium and long term because the imperatives required by the accumulation of capital leave no room for this possibility under penalty of... economic blockage this time!" (emphasis added)

C. Mcl. shamelessly avoids the legitimate explanation for Marx's failure to speak of the decomposition of capitalism. This rests not, as C. Mcl. says, in the fact that it could only be a temporary phenomenon, but in the obvious fact that this was impossible for him, as it was for every marxist, no matter how profound, for the following two reasons:

• on the one hand, 140 years separate the writing of the Manifesto of 1848 and the opening of the phase of decomposition;
• on the other hand, the phase of decomposition was not an obligatory phase within decadence, but the product at a given moment of it, of the inability of the two antagonistic classes to bring their own solution to the crisis.

This anecdote brings us to the subject of C. Mcl's ability to bring reality into his schemes, even when it is too far removed from them. We do not know if he has thus succeeded in fooling his "followers," if indeed he has any.

Is the ICC discrediting and destroying the Communist Left?

This is what C. Mcl defends, developing his indictment along three lines:

• The internal debate within the ICC;
• The ICC's anti-war policy;
• The ICC's policy towards the proletarian political milieu (PPM), accusing our organiszation of a drift into Bordigist-style monolithism.

1. On our internal debates and reporting to the outside world

To support the comical thesis of ICC's bordigo-monolithic drift, C. Mcl begins by attempting to ridicule our method of debate:

“‘The starting point for a debate is first and foremost the framework shared by the organiszation, adopted and specified by the various reports of its international congresses’ ... in other words, the perimeter of a debate in the ICC is strictly limited to being able to quibble over the dots and commas of framework texts and resolutions. Apart from that, any contribution calling this framework into question or posing another framework is rejected, as it can only be ‘An insidious way of casting doubt on the organization's analysis [...] a fallacious mode of argumentation’”.

The problem is that C. Mcl, having abandoned the ICC, has also completely abandoned the marxist scientific method, which dictates that any step towards truth must be accomplished through the most profound critique of the past, of previous positions. This is the meaning of defining, as the starting point for analysis, the common framework formulated by the organisation. Without this approach, any development would end in chaos and be completely unproductive.

C. Mcl also criticises us for not sufficiently developing our internal debate, for publishing very few texts expressing our differences to the outside world, and for postponing the publication of these texts indefinitely. What C. Mcl fails to mention in this respect is that:

1. since the beginning of its existence, the organisation has been equipped with highly effective tools for internal debate, such as internal bulletins, which C. Mcl has misused to write this misleading pamphlet;
2. the ICC publishes a political report after each of its congresses, in which all the critical elements developed within the organisation are reported;
3. the publication of divergent texts outside the organisation is intended, where appropriate, to make known to the working class elements of internal debate which may be of interest to it; this publication does not therefore respond to a right of militants, but to the political need of the organisation to present its elements of debate to the working class with the greatest clarity;
4. from our birth as an organisation to the present day, contributions to debate have been published externally, including those written by C. Mcl, on the occasion of the debate on the meaning of the “30 Glorious Years”.

Contrary to the accusations levelled against us by C. Mcl, we are an organisation which, with conviction and responsibility, communicates problems, divergences and - when they arise - crisis situations to the outside world, but in a political way that is understandable and capable of stimulating our readers. On the other hand, it's clear that those who follow our internal life for the sole purpose of spying through the keyhole, believing themselves to be watching a reality show, may be disappointed that not everything is reported to the outside world. We don't regret this at all.

2. Is the joint declaration an ICC bluff?

C. Mcl's second anti-ICC indictment concerns our ‘Appeal to the groups of the Communist Left’ for a Joint Declaration (JD)[17] against the war in Ukraine. In addition to complaining about the limited number of groups to which we sent our appeals,[18] C. Mcl elaborates a whole theory according to which our appeal was a complete failure because:

1. the Korean ICP, after adhering to the Joint Declaration, distanced itself from it by opting for the NWBCW (No War but the Class War) initiative;
2. the IOD (Istituto Onorato Damen) demonstrated its lack of adherence to the Joint Declaration by not endorsing the Appeal that followed;
3. IV (Internationalist Voice) itself had no value, being in fact no more than a Swedish sub-section of the ICC.

For C. Mcl, the aim was to show that the JD initiative was nothing but a bluff, and that it had brought together no group other than the ICC itself: “... what a flop! So what's left of the ICC's political milieu? Its only hidden section-bis in Sweden: Internationalist Voice! This is the reason for the ICC's current diatribe: isolated and lonely, all that's left is a scorched-earth policy aimed at destroying everything that's being done outside the ICC in the revolutionary milieu”[19]

Once again, the attitude of Controversies is the opposite of the responsible and militant attitude which should be that of groups of the Communist Left in the face of war: rather than criticising other groups for their refusal to join (Bordigists and Damenists) and the hesitations of those who had initially joined (ICP and IOD), it lambasts the ICC for trying to build a common response to the whole of the Communist Left!!!!

3. Is the ICC pursuing a hidden policy of destroying the PPM?

The latest line of attack against the ICC is the accusation of wanting to destroy the Proletarian Political Milieu (PPM), the grievance against us appearing to be our oft-expressed position, particularly towards the Internationalist Communist Tendency (ICT) (but also towards the Bordigists) that they are not up to the responsibilities required by the current historical situation because of their visceral opportunism (of which sectarianism is an expression, particularly as far as the Bordigists are concerned): “... the ICC's policy towards its dissidents, the ICT and the proletarian political milieu is unprecedented and totally alien to the workers' movement, more akin to that pursued by Bakunin to 'discredit’ and ‘wipe out’ the IWA [International Workingmen’s Association]. It shames the Communist Left and must be denounced and banished."[20]

In support of his accusations, C. Mcl exhibits a series of quotations stolen from our internal documents and presented in a light that completely distorts their context and target, such as:

• “It is necessary for the organisation [the ICC] to be as clear and homogeneous as possible about the aim of our policy towards the IBRP [ICT]: what is important is to discredit ... the IBRP... so that it disappears politically. If this policy leads to its physical disappearance, so much the better."[21]

This accusation of wanting to destroy other groups of the PPM, of “sabotaging the proletarian political milieu and anything that might overshadow it”, is not new and is very reminiscent of the one we've already had to refute against another Argentine character we've reported in our press under the name of Citizen B, who, in 2004, took the trouble to write an entire ‘Declaracion del Círculo de Comunistas Internacionalistas: contra la nauseabunda metodologia de la Corriente Comunista Internacional’[22] and numerous other articles containing a series of extremely serious accusations against the ICC.

This dishonest slander was unfortunately supported at the time by the group known today as the ICT, then, called the IBRP, (International Bureau International Bureau for the Revolutionary Party). The declaration and all the other articles expressing accusations invented by the self-proclaimed group led by citizen B were regularly published on the IBRP website, and our protests and warnings to the IBRP itself, about the lies contained in these articles and the danger represented by citizen B went unheeded. That is until an ICC delegation went to Argentina and met the group on whose behalf Citizen B had written the various articles of denunciation and which was completely unaware that it had been so ignominiously used. It was only after we had published a statement from this group denying and denouncing Citizen B's actions that the IBRP had to backtrack on the articles against us which it had published and which, one after the other, discreetly disappeared from the site, albeit without any explanation from the IBRP -now ICT.

It was therefore on the basis of this unforgivable behavior that our organization took the responsibility of sending an ‘Open letter to the militants of the IBRP’ (December 2004) [49] in which we stated the following: “… we have always thought that it was in the interests of the working class to preserve an organisation like the IBRP. You do not have the same analysis as regards our own organisation as, having stated in your meeting with the IFICC in March 2002 that ‘if we come to the conclusion that the ICC has become 'invalid’ as an organisation, our aim would be to do all that is possible to push for its disappearance’ (IFICC Bulletin n°9), you have now in fact done all that is possible to attain this end ...

“Comrades, We tell you frankly: if the IBRP persists in its policy of using lies, slander and, worse still, of ‘allowing’ these to be used and abetting them by remaining silent when faced with the intrigues of grouplets, such as the ‘Circulo’ and the IFICC, of which they are the trade mark and raison d'être, then it will have demonstrated that it too has become an obstacle to the development of consciousness in the proletariat. It will have become an obstacle, not so much because of the damage that it can do to our organisation (recent events have shown that we are able to defend ourselves, even if you think that ‘the ICC is in the process of disintegration’), but because of the damage and the dishonour that this kind of behaviour can inflict on the memory of the Italian Communist Left and thus on its invaluable contribution. In fact, in this case it would be preferable if the IBRP disappeared and ‘our aim would be to do all that is possible to push for its disappearance’ as you so excellently put it. It is of course clear that to attain this end, we would use only weapons belonging to the working class and it goes without saying that we would never permit the use of lies or slander.”

This is our true position, which C. Mcl has so maliciously tried to falsify, by obscuring the entire history that underlies it.

What is truly disgraceful is the totally immoral behavior of C. Mcl, steeped in petty-bourgeois ideology, which unleashes the vilest accusations against an organisation like ours that seeks to keep alive the values of the Communist Left and the workers' movement in general, against opportunistic excesses and alliances with the various snitches and parasites circulating in the political milieu. In different circumstances, our organisation has often taken the responsibility of warning other organisations of the numerous pitfalls to which they are prey, but we have never failed to express our revolutionary solidarity with them and our recognition of their belonging to the political lineage we have in common. Our aim is not to destroy other organisations, but to prevent them from destroying themselves by becoming enemies of the working class.

What are Controversies and the individual C. Mcl?

To conclude this article, we might ask: exactly who is this individual who has launched such a virulent attack on our organisation? As previously mentioned, C. Mcl is a former ICC militant who also had the audacity to present himself[23] in the same pamphlet:

• “As a militant in the International Communist Current since 1975, I owe it my training, but also the legacy of its political and organisational inconsistencies. Outside its ranks in the fall of 2008, it took me several years to make a critical assessment of it, the first elements of which I present here.”

As he reports, C. Mcl had been a member of our organisation for no less than 33 years, during which time he never questioned any of the key points of our platform! Until 2008, i.e. for most of his political life, he endorsed and defended the ICC's positions on decadence, decomposition, policy towards the proletarian political milieu, denunciation of parasitism, etc., and was a member of the ICC's international central organ. But after 2008, why did he change his mind? A brief reminder is in order.

After the first years of the 21st century, the organisation realised that, while the framework for analysing the historical period of capitalism's decline remained valid, certain aspects needed to be clarified. In particular, the economic development of countries like China needed to be explained.[24]

On the other hand, the argument used in our pamphlet on decadence that the global economic recovery of capitalism after the Second World War was due to the reconstruction process, a position shared by all other groups in the political milieu, was no longer convincing, as it contradicted the framework of analysis of the capitalist mode of production that we defend. This led to a debate within the organisation, with the participation of former militant C. Mcl and which saw the production of five articles of debate published to the outside  in the International Review (n°136 [50], 138 [51], 141 [52]) under the title “ICC internal debate on economics”. Prior to the opening of this debate in the press, C. Mcl had been appointed to update our pamphlet on decadence, but when in the debate he began to develop positions in contradiction with the foundations of our platform and marxism, while defending the idea that they were perfectly compatible,[25] it was not possible to leave it to this comrade to update a new pamphlet on decadence.

This decision by the organisation was probably never fully accepted by C. Mcl. The man who considered himself the expert on the subject, out of wounded pride, began to protest, making it a personal matter and developing an increasingly hostile attitude. He began to accuse the organisation of all possible evils and no longer even respected its rules of functioning. In the end, C. Mcl left the organisation without continuing to defend his differences. As can be seen once again, it's not the ICC that's obstructing debate, but rather behaviors within it that are totally alien to revolutionary militancy.

Once out of the organisation, C. Mcl went completely off the rails politically. The position he had developed on economics led him to finally reject the marxist position, adopting an economist approach and associating himself with academic elements, such as Jacques Gouverneur, with whom he wrote a book Capitalisme et crises économiques, in which he rejects the catastrophic vision of marxism.

Another example is given by an obituary[26] published in Controversies and signed by Philippe Bourrinet,[27] another element also furiously hostile to the ICC. The obituary is devoted to a certain Lafif Lakhdar, “Arab intellectual, writer, philosopher and rationalist, activist in Algeria, the Middle East and France. Nicknamed the ‘Arab Spinoza’. Died in Paris on July 26, 2013”. Naturally, the expectation of those about to read an obituary on a site subtitled “Forum for the Internationalist Communist Left”, is to learn of the existence of a revolutionary militant who participated in Communist Left organisations, or at least in proletarian and non-counter-revolutionary groups. Instead, we learn from the same obituary that:

1. “along with other Marxist or Marxist-leaning intellectuals, he was - like Michel Raptis (Pablo) - one of Ben Bella's advisors.”
2. In October 2004, he and several liberal Arab writers co-directed a Manifesto published on the Internet (www.elaph.com; [53] www.metransparent.com [54]) calling on the UN to create an international tribunal to prosecute terrorists, organizations or institutions inciting terrorism.”
3. With philosopher Mohammed Arkoun (1928-2010), he has been involved since 2009 in UNESCO's Aladin program, an ‘“educational and cultural program’” launched under the patronage of UNESCO, Jacques Chirac and Simone Veil"[28].

In short, who was this obituary for? Someone who served the Algerian president, who sent a letter-manifesto to the UN, that “den of brigands” (as Lenin put it) to put all terrorists on trial, and who was finally stuffed by UNESCO into a programme promoted by Chirac!!!! As we can see, it's easy to understand where the suicidal choice to declare the Communist Left dead actually leads: to absolute nothingness, if not to the enemy camp.

We have no problem with C. Mcl wanting to be an academic. What we cannot tolerate, however, is that someone who likes to play the marxologist, and who has clearly abandoned all reference to the tradition of the Communist Left and even to marxism, should accuse others of destroying the Communist Left when he himself has participated in its destruction by claiming, among other things, that it was “midnight in the Communist Left”; that someone like him, who has knowingly manipulated quotations from the ICC, the Marx-Engels Communist Manifesto, Rosa Luxemburg and the Gauche Communiste de France (cf. § 2. 3) can allow himself to turn the same accusation against the ICC[29]; that an individual who is only a blogger should try to present himself as something serious and solid, with an organisation called “Controversies” which is only a front site, and be able to challenge the history, structure and militant activity of an organisation like ours, but also of all the other groups of the Communist Left which, however weak and guilty of opportunism they may be, are nonetheless a reality in the proletarian camp, and not a buffoonery like Controversies.

 

Ezechiele, 20 November, 2024

In the first part of this article (ICConline, July 2024 [67]), we showed that the self-styled “Lenin of ecology”, Andreas Malm, is in fact defending a completely bourgeois conception of this question, and in reality serves as an agent of state capitalism, which he aims to propagate to the working class. In this second part, we will show how much his approach is based on a fundamental distortion of the marxist vision of the capitalist mode of production and its relationship with nature.

At first glance, Malm claims to be a marxist, which provides him with a seemingly radical posture, but he then proceeds to completely distort marxist theory. The shameless use of double-speak, typical of the Trotskyist current, which says one thing to defend its opposite in reality, as well as other falsifications, allows him the extraordinary sleight-of-hand of both eliminating the responsibility of the capitalist system for the gravity of the ecological crisis and obscuring the only perspective which could allow humanity to emerge from this nightmare: communism, which is the historical project of the exploited class, the proletariat, the gravedigger of capitalism.

In this section, we show why and how capitalism is incapable of solving the ecological crisis, why and how the revolutionary class of our time, the proletariat, alone holds the key, and why the social question and the ecological question can only be solved at the same time by destroying capitalist relations of production and replacing the capitalist system with a society free of exploitation, communism.

 

I) The Trotskyist distortion of marxism

Denying the capitalist mode of production's responsibility for the climate crisis

Malm seems to rely on marxism. He states that: “Capitalism is a specific process that unfolds as a universal appropriation of biophysical resources, because capital itself has a unique, unquenchable thirst for surplus value derived from human labor by means of material substrates. Capital, one might say, is supra-ecological, a biophysical omnivore with its own social DNA.” [1]

Similarly, he refers to Marx himself: “Volume III of Capital shows how capitalist property relations ‘cause an irremediable hiatus in the complex equilibrium of the social metabolism composed by the natural laws of life’; the theory of metabolic rift -of hiatus- allows us to explain a great many phenomena, from imbalances in the nitrogen cycle to climate change.” [2]

But it soon becomes clear that this is just a pretense. Indeed, as the pages turn, a shift occurs. It becomes clear that Malm's anti-capitalism is not aimed at capitalism as a whole, but is reduced to questioning certain of its components - particularly the fossil fuel production sector, oil and gas, which he blames for global warming. In the end, he never incriminates the capitalist system as such in the ecological disaster (which he reduces to global warming). By targeting only certain sectors of the bourgeoisie or certain states (those that dominate the planet), and by denouncing as the central problem only the “business as usual” attitude of the ruling class in the face of the climate emergency, he in fact absolves capitalism as a mode of production of responsibility for the climate crisis.

Thus, Malm castigates the outrageous cynicism and lack of concern for the planet and humanity of Exxon boss Rex Tillerson, who declares: “My philosophy is to make money. If I can drill and make money, that's what I want to do.” But here, by focusing on Tillerson alone, Malm conceals (knowingly for a self-styled marxist!) that Tillerson's ‘philosophy’ is in fact that of the ENTIRE ruling class! The illusionist Malm throws a veil over the exploitative nature and unbridled pursuit of maximum profit inherent in capitalism as a whole. [3] Ascending the heights of hypocrisy and dissimulation, and in typical Trotskyist fashion, Malm admits (and ultimately defends!) the existence of an “admissible” capitalist exploitation of nature!

Furthermore, Malm also agrees with: “the two reports published for COP21 [which] underlined the extent to which CO2 emissions are inseparable from such a polarity. The richest 10% of humanity is responsible for half of current consumption-related emissions, while the poorest half is responsible for 10%. The per capita carbon footprint of the richest 1% is 175 times that of the poorest 10%: the per capita emissions of the richest 1% in the USA, Luxembourg or Saudi Arabia are 2,000 times greater than those of the poorest inhabitants of Honduras, Mozambique or Rwanda.” [4] Malm concludes that: “if there is a global logic of the capitalist mode of production with which rising temperatures will be articulated, it is undoubtedly that of uneven and combined development. Capital develops by drawing other relations into its orbit, while it continues to accumulate, people caught up in external but integrated relations - think of the herders of northeastern Syria - who derive little or no benefit, and may not even come close to wage labor. Some amass resources while others, outside the extortion machine but in its orbit struggle for a chance to produce them”. [5]

To sum up, according to Malm, the world is simply divided between 'rich' and 'poor', between 'beneficiaries' and 'victims' of the system according to an 'unequal' geographical distribution between a rich North and a poor South. In other words, this is the commonplace of the dominant bourgeois ideology, which runs from UN reports to the entire bourgeois media, via... the columns of the Trotskyist press! Malm's position is even identical to that of the Chinese government, for whom “the climate crisis is the result of a highly unequal model of economic development that has spread over the last two centuries, enabling today's rich countries to achieve the income levels they have, in part because they failed to take into account the environmental damage that today threatens the lives and lifestyles of others.” [6] An approach based on China's defense of the concept of “common but differentiated responsibility” requiring global climate governance to respect the development needs of the poorest countries: Malm is now an apostle of Chinese imperialism!

Unless you consider the People's Republic of China as an expression of the proletarian and marxist avant-garde, this gives you an idea of the validity of what Malm wants to pass off as marxism!

This concordance of views between the official ideology of the Chinese state and Malm owes nothing to chance. The conception of a capitalist world divided between ‘dominated’ and ‘dominators’, where the scourges that plague society are attributable solely to the big imperialists who ‘victimize’ the small, is in line with Trotskyist thinking. It constantly draws a distinction between different states, of which only the big ones are imperialist. As if there were a fundamental difference between the big underworld bosses who dominate the scene and the neighborhood pimps; in practice, the only difference is in the means at their disposal!

The ever-increasing concentration of capital by its very nature conditions an imbalance within the capitalist world and has as its corollary and consequence the existence of marginalised peripheries. This is a permanent historical fact of capitalism, written in its genes. It is concretised in the existence of states capable of exercising global hegemony, while others are deprived of it. The bewitching Malm hypnotises the audience by focusing on the appearance and surface of things, in order to create the illusion that, in the end, a solution exists within each national state, provided it is better managed and seeks greater ‘harmony’ between nations!

In this way, Malm succeeds in removing from the field of reflection the key points which alone can really provide a solid basis from which to correctly pose the question of the effects of the capitalist mode of production on nature:

• the reality that capital is a social relation that transcends the borders of each national state and exists on a global scale; whose main “polarization” (to use his own smoky terminology) is expressed in the fundamental and irreducible antagonism between the two main social classes that make up capitalist society, the proletariat and the bourgeoisie. As Marx points out: “just as production based on capital produces universal industry … on the one hand, so does it on the other produce a system of universal exploitation of natural and human qualities.” [7]
• At the same time, Malm overlooks the fact that: “In order to produce, they enter into definite connections and relations to one another, and only within these social connections and relations does their influence upon nature operate – i.e., does production take place.” [8] Put another way, it is through the intercession of different forms of social organisation throughout history that the relationship between humankind and nature is established. To understand the origins of today's ecological-climate crisis, we need to consider the existence of the capitalist mode of production and its effects on nature.

For Malm, the working class is no longer the subject of history

The other level on which Malm rejects marxism is that of the alternative to the capitalist system. For Malm, in the central countries of capitalism, it is the individual who must act through sabotage to influence the policies of the capitalist state: “In a scientifically founded reality, Ende Gelände [9] is the type of action whose number and scope would have to be multiplied by a thousand. Within the advanced capitalist countries and in the most developed areas of the rest of the world, there is no shortage of suitable targets: just look around for the nearest coal-fired power station, the oil pipeline, the SUV, the airport and the expanding suburban shopping mall... This is the terrain on which a revolutionary climate movement would have to rise in a powerful and ever-accelerating wave.” [10] In other words, Malm is simply proposing a more radical version of a citizen's movement, one that is no longer content simply to take action on a legal terrain, and will not refrain from going beyond it to take action against the barons or sectors of capitalism identified as responsible for global warming, by attacking their companies or the products they put on the market.

More generally, to fight against the “drivers of the climate crisis”, Malm multiplies references to various social movements in history (apartheid, abolition of slavery... without bothering about their class nature! ) into a magma in which it's impossible to recognise the specific social force we can rely on to find a way out of the nightmarish situation caused by capitalism: “Insofar as current capitalism is totally saturated with fossil energy, virtually everyone who takes part in a social movement under its reign is objectively fighting global warming, whether they care about it or not, whether they suffer its consequences or not. The Brazilians protesting against the rising cost of bus fares and demanding free transport are in fact raising the banner of the fifth measure in the program set out above, while the Ogonis evicting Shell are dealing with the first. [11] Similarly, European car workers fighting for their jobs, in keeping with the type of union consciousness they have always possessed, have an interest in reconverting their factories to the production of the technologies needed for the energy transition - wind turbines, buses - rather than seeing them disappear for a low-wage destination. All struggles are struggles against fossil fuel capital: subjects just need to become aware of it.” [12]

Malm's bloated claim of updating marxism to face the realities of climate change by establishing new “polarisations” that govern the capitalist world, and which replace the fundamental antagonism between the two main classes of capitalist society - the exploited class (the proletariat) and the exploiting class (the bourgeoisie) - has only one aim: to deny the revolutionary nature of the proletariat. Dedicated to demonstrating that communism can in no way represent a realistic, credible alternative to environmental catastrophe, and that the proletariat's struggle is incapable of playing any role whatsoever against the climate crisis, Malm simply glosses over the existence, role and revolutionary perspective of the working class. If he refers here and there to the proletariat or its history, it's only as an exploited class or as a simple sociological category of capitalist society, drowned in the undifferentiated whole of the people. In sum, he reserves for it a role as an irrelevant extra or dilutes it in composite interclass movements, which actually constitute a mortal danger for its ability to act as an autonomous class with interests distinct from those of other social categories.

Here again, Malm makes his contribution to bourgeois campaigns to prolong the proletariat's difficulties in recognising itself as the driving force behind the transformation of society, as the revolutionary class of our time, which the advent of capitalism has historically raised up as its gravedigger.

 

II) The capitalist mode of production and nature

Malm's bourgeois falsifications of the nature of capitalism and its responsibility for environmental destruction oblige us to re-establish some fundamental acquisitions of marxism that Malm denies, obscures or abandons (according to the various needs dictated by the ideological role he plays for the benefit of the bourgeois state). First and foremost, the Communist Manifesto itself.

The global character of the capitalist mode of production

Malm sees capitalism only as the sum of its individual components, and denies that beyond the reality of a capitalist world by definition marked by competition and division between nations lies the unity of the capitalist system as a mode of production, as well as the universal terrain of its existence and domination.

As the Manifesto says: “The need of a constantly expanding market for its products chases the bourgeoisie over the entire surface of the globe. It must nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connections everywhere. The bourgeoisie has through its exploitation of the world market given a cosmopolitan character to production and consumption in every country ... it has drawn from under the feet of industry the national ground on which it stood. All old-established national industries have been destroyed or are daily being destroyed. They are dislodged by new Industries ... by industries that no longer work up indigenous raw material, but raw material drawn from the remotest zones; industries whose products are consumed, not only at home, but in every quarter of the globe. In place of the old wants, satisfied by the production of the country, we find new wants, requiring for their satisfaction the products of distant lands and climes. In place of the old local and national seclusion and self-sufficiency, we have intercourse in every direction, universal inter-dependence of nations.” [13]

And as Rosa Luxembourg points out, this has meant that: “From the very beginning, the forms and laws of capitalist production aim to comprise the entire globe as a store of productive forces. Capital, impelled to appropriate productive forces for purposes of exploitation, ransacks the whole world, it procures its means of production from all corners of the earth, seizing them, if necessary by force, from all levels of civilization.”

To satisfy its insatiable need for profit: “it becomes necessary for capital progressively to dispose ever more fully of the whole globe, to acquire an unlimited choice of means of production, with regard to both quality and quantity. The process of accumulation, elastic and spasmodic as it is, requires inevitably free access to ever new areas of raw materials. ... Since capitalist production can develop fully only with complete access to all territories and climes, it can no more confine itself to the natural resources and productive forces of the temperate zone than it can manage with white labour alone. Capital needs other races to exploit territories where the white man cannot work. It must be able to mobilise world labour power without restriction in order to utilise all productive forces of the globe…” [14] [68]  

Contrary to Malm's assertion, this is the starting point for any reflection that seeks to establish capital's responsibility for the ecological crisis: not the narrow, local framework of the nation and its state, but the international and global level.

Capital's destructive effects on nature and the workforce.

In the historical phase of the ascendancy of its system: “The bourgeoisie, during its rule of scarce one hundred years, has created more massive and more colossal productive forces than have all preceding generations together.” [15] As such, it has played a historically progressive role. But the development of productive forces in mud and blood by the capitalist system of production is founded, both socially and environmentally, on devastation, with the most frightening consequences.

For the exploited class: “The first few decades of unrestricted operation of large-scale industry produced such a devastating effect on the health and living conditions of the mass of working people, with tremendous mortality, disease, physical crippling, mental desperation, epidemic disease and unfitness for military service, that the very survival of society seemed deeply threatened.” [16]

As with nature. In the Americas, for example: “...tobacco cultivation exhausted the land so quickly (after only three or four harvests) that in the 18th century production had to be moved from Maryland to the Appalachians. The transformation of the Caribbean into a sugar monoculture led to deforestation, erosion and soil exhaustion. Sugar cane plantations introduced malaria to the American tropics. ... As for the fabulous silver mines of Mexico and Peru, they were exhausted within a few decades, leaving intensely polluted environments. ... We could also mention the virtual disappearance of the beaver, the American bison or the bowhead whale at the end of the 19th century, in connection with industrialisation, as bison leather provided excellent transmission belts and whale oil an excellent lubricant for the mechanics of the industrial revolution." [17] Elsewhere in the world, the same causes had the same effects: “The gutta percha tree disappeared from Singapore in 1856, then from many Malaysian islands. At the end of the 19th century, the rubber rush took hold of the Amazon, causing massacres of Indians and deforestation. At the beginning of the 20th century, rubber trees were transferred from Brazil to Malaysia, Sri Lanka, Sumatra and then Liberia, where British and American companies (Hoppum, Goodyear, Firestone...) established huge plantations. The latter laid waste to several million hectares of land. The latter are destroying several million hectares of forest, depleting the soil and introducing malaria.” [18]

In Capital, Marx denounces the fact that “capitalist progress”, which means nothing other than the generalised plundering of both worker and soil, leads to the ruin of natural resources, the land and the working class. Drawing on the scientific work of his time, he argues that the effects of capitalist exploitation and accumulation are equally destructive for the planet and for the labor power of the proletariat: “In modern agriculture, as in the urban industries, the increased productiveness and quantity of the labour set in motion are bought at the cost of laying waste and consuming by disease labour-power itself. Moreover, all progress in capitalistic agriculture is a progress in the art, not only of robbing the labourer, but of robbing the soil; all progress in increasing the fertility of the soil for a given time, is a progress towards ruining the lasting sources of that fertility. The more a country starts its development on the foundation of modern industry, like the United States, for example, the more rapid is this process of destruction. Capitalist production, therefore, develops technology, and the combining together of various processes into a social whole, only by sapping the original sources of all wealth - the soil and the labourer." [19] From the outset, capitalism has asserted itself as the destroyer of both nature AND the labour power of the proletariat.

The destruction of nature at its peak in the decadence of capitalism

The main manifestation of the capitalist system's entry into decadence, once the world market has been 'unified', is war and capitalism's permanent state of war, with profoundly ecocidal consequences. If “the two world wars, the Cold War confrontations and the decolonisations caused ecological destruction on a planetary scale ... the preparation of conflicts, and in particular the development, testing and production of armaments, produced effects no less massive. ... But these direct impacts are far from summing up the importance of the war phenomenon in the relationship between human collectives and their environments.” [20].

“The wars of the twentieth century were also decisive in shaping the political, technical, economic and cultural logics that governed the exploitation and conservation of resources, on the scale of nations but also of the planet as a whole ... The effects of the two world wars on economies and ecosystems ... were decisive in globalizing and intensifying ... extractions on a planetary scale, and catalyzing increased control of these resources by state powers (in the North) and Western firms (in the South) ...The Second World War was a decisive break. ... [It] catalyzed the emergence of major extractive activity, crystallized during the conflict and perpetuated ... after the war. ...) [The] large-scale reconfiguration of economies of exploitation, transport and ‘use’” concerns “a wide range of materials elevated to the rank of ‘strategic resources', from wood to rubber to fossil fuels ... The supply imperative of a war economy leads to duplication of productive infrastructures and, ultimately, to industrial overcapacity.” [21]

As the ICC has pointed out, in this period: “capital’s ruthless destruction of the environment takes on a different scale and quality .... This is the epoch in which all the capitalist nations are forced to compete with each other over a saturated world market; an epoch therefore, of a permanent war economy, with a disproportionate growth of heavy industry; an epoch characterised by the irrational, wasteful duplication of industrial complexes in each national unit, by the desperate pillaging of natural resources by each nation as it tries to survive in the pitiless rat-race of the world market. ... The rise of megacities, ... the development of forms of agriculture that have been no less ecologically damaging than most forms of industry.” [22]

The “great acceleration” of the ecological crisis in recent decades is one of the manifestations of the historical crisis of the capitalist mode of production in its period of decadence, pushed to its climax in its ultimate phase of decomposition. Its severity now represents a direct threat to the survival of human society. Above all, the ecological consequences of decaying capitalism are interwoven and combined with the other major phenomena of the dislocation of capitalist society - economic crisis and imperialist war - interacting and multiplying their effects in a devastating spiral whose combined repercussions are far greater than the sum of their individual parts.

Capitalism's irremediable incompatibility with nature

As early as the middle of the 19th century, Marx was already highlighting the fact that capital, driven by the need to accumulate more and more, affects the very natural basis of production, dangerously unbalancing the interaction between humankind and nature by causing an irremediable breakdown in its metabolism. “Capitalist production, by collecting the population in great centres, and causing an ever-increasing preponderance of town population, on the one hand concentrates the historical motive power of society; on the other hand, it disturbs the circulation of matter between man and the soil, i.e., prevents the return to the soil of its elements consumed by man in the form of food and clothing; it therefore violates the conditions necessary to lasting fertility of the soil.”[23]. “Large landed property reduces the agricultural population to a constantly falling minimum, and confronts it with a constantly growing industrial population crowded together in large cities. It thereby creates conditions which cause an irreparable break in the coherence of social interchange prescribed by the natural laws of life. As a result, the vitality of the soil is squandered, and this prodigality is carried by commerce far beyond the borders of a particular state. Large-scale industry and large-scale mechanised agriculture work together.” [24] Marx could already discern that capitalism was compromising the future of subsequent generations and, potentially, endangering the future of mankind. As we have seen, these predictions have been amply confirmed after more than a century of capitalism's decadence.

Why is this so?

Capitalism did not inaugurate the plundering of nature. But unlike previous modes of production, which were more limited in geographical scope and local impact on the environment, this plundering changes scale with capitalism. It takes on a planetary dimension and a predatory character that is qualitatively new in human history. “For the first time, nature becomes purely an object for humankind, purely a matter of utility; ceases to be recognized as a power for itself; and the theoretical discovery of its autonomous laws appears merely as a ruse so as to subjugate it under human needs, whether as an object of consumption or as a means of production.” [25]

For capitalism, which enshrines the reign of the commodity, and presents itself as a system of universal commodity production, driven solely by the frenzied pursuit of maximum profit, EVERYTHING becomes a commodity, EVERYTHING is for sale. Thus, since modern times, with the construction of the global market: “industrialisation involves the transfer of control over nature into the hands of a handful of major capitalists;" [26] “a growing number of natural objects have been transformed into commodities, meaning above all that they have been appropriated, disrupting environments as well as economic and social relations. ... The appropriation of natural entities, the privatisation of living beings, has major environmental, economic and social consequences. All kinds of natural beings become property and commodities ... The objects of nature, in fact, are not spontaneously commodities: commodities are the result of a construction, an appropriation (sometimes violent) coupled with a transformation that makes it possible to make the object conform to market exchanges." [27]

Capitalism sees the Earth and nature only as a “free gift” (Marx), a reservoir of resources “providentially” placed at its disposal, from which it can draw without limit, to make it one of the sources of its profits. “In today's economic order, nature does not serve humanity, but capital. It is not the clothing, food or cultural needs of humanity that govern production, but capital's appetite for profit, for gold. Natural resources are exploited as if reserves were infinite and inexhaustible. The harmful consequences of deforestation for agriculture and the destruction of useful animals and plants expose the finite character of available reserves and the failure of this type of economy. Roosevelt recognises this failure when he wants to call an international conference to review the state of still available natural resources and to take measures to stop them being wasted.” [28]

It is therefore not only from the exploitation of the main commodity, the labor power of the proletariat, that capitalism derives its wealth, but also from the exploitation of nature. “Labour is not the source of all wealth. Nature is just as much the source of use values (and it is surely of such that material wealth consists!) as labor, which itself is only the manifestation of a force of nature, human labor power ... And insofar as man from the beginning behaves toward nature, the primary source of all instruments and subjects of labor, as an owner, treats her as belonging to him, his labor becomes the source of use values, therefore also of wealth.”[29]

The cause of the climate crisis lies not in 'human activities' in general or in certain sectors of capitalism's economic activity, but in the existence of the capitalist mode of production itself. It is because capitalism derives its wealth from two sources: the exploitation of nature and the exploitation of the labor power of the proletariat, both transformed into commodities, that it has no solution to the ecological crisis. It can only exploit both to the point of exhaustion and destruction. This is why the social question and the ecological question go hand in hand, and can only be solved at the same time and by the proletariat, the only class with an interest in abolishing all forms of exploitation.

 

III) Communism, the only prospect for humanity

This is precisely what Malm denies, as usual, peremptorily and without any real argumentation, when he declares that: “In a warmer capitalist world, the extortion machine can do no more than extract the same amount of surplus value by squeezing out every last drop of sweat from the workers. But beyond a locally determined tipping point, this may simply no longer be possible. Is a victorious workers' revolution waiting in the wings? Probably not. ... Extraction of surplus value probably remains the central extortion machine, but the explosive effects of climate change are not transmitted directly along this axis.” [30]. For him, the climate crisis and the social question belong to completely separate spheres with no connection or relationship between them. And since the proletariat's struggle does not develop specifically against the effects of the ecological crisis, but on the terrain of the conditions imposed on it by capitalism, Malm concludes that nature and ecology do not fall within the scope of the proletariat’s struggle for emancipation on a historical scale, and that it is not capable of integrating the ecological question, the relationship between humankind and nature, into its revolutionary perspective.

Scientists and environmental specialists generally identify production based on commodity exchange, the “commodification” and over-exploitation of nature, and the system of private property as the central factors responsible for the ecological crisis, and stress the need for a solution on a universal scale. The diagnoses they put forward undoubtedly condemn the capitalist mode of production and point indisputably in the direction of the communist social project carried by the proletariat. But what do they do in practice? Blindly, or as more or less willing accomplices of the ruling class, all they do is propose dead-ends or aberrations with no prospects by way of a solution: they ask the state to improve laws and regulations, better regulate; or they may claim to draw inspiration from the (idealised!) relationship with nature of primitive societies or they may advocate a return to small-scale, individual, parcel-based farming, call for producing locally, etc. In any case, they all converge in seeking solutions within the conditions of present-day society, while ignoring and blacking out the prospect of communism, which is precisely the ONLY social project that proposes to rid the world of commodity exchange and exploitation, which they all see as the root cause of the climate crisis. Here again, Malm is no exception, [31] joining the chorus of bourgeois campaigns with his Trotskyist background.

Only the proletariat can abolish exploitation and the reign of the commodity

Capitalism has simultaneously created the premises of material abundance - revealed in the existence of crises of overproduction which point to the possibility of overcoming exploitation - and the social forms necessary for the economic transformation of society: the proletariat, the class destined to become capital’s gravedigger.

The generalisation of the commodity by the capitalist mode of production has, first and foremost, affected the labour power employed by human beings in their productive activity. The proletariat, the class that produces all goods, deprived of the means of production, has no other commodity to sell on the market except its labour power – a sale to those who own these means of production, the capitalist class. Only those subject to collective exploitation, to the sale of their labor power, can have an interest in revolting against capitalist commodity relations. Since the abolition of exploitation is essentially synonymous with the abolition of wage-labour, only the class that suffers this specific form of exploitation, the product of the development of these relations of production, is capable of providing itself with a perspective for overcoming them.

Hence the fact that: “Of all the classes that stand face to face with the bourgeoisie today, the proletariat alone is a really revolutionary class. The other classes decay and finally disappear in the face of Modern Industry; the proletariat is its special and essential product. The lower middle class, the small manufacturer, the shopkeeper, the artisan, the peasant, all these fight against the bourgeoisie, to save from extinction their existence as fractions of the middle class. They are therefore not revolutionary, but conservative. Nay more, they are reactionary, for they try to roll back the wheel of history.” [32].

“Our epoch … possesses, however, this distinct feature: it has simplified class antagonisms. Society as a whole is more and more splitting up into two great hostile camps, into two great classes directly facing each other – Bourgeoisie and Proletariat.” [33]. It is from the specific place occupied by the proletariat within the capitalist relations of production that it derives the ability to assert itself as a social force capable of developing a consciousness and a practice capable of “revolutionising the existing world, of practically attacking and changing existing things.” [34]. The proletariat's struggle against the effects of exploitation and the conditions imposed on it by capitalism can only truly succeed if it sets as its goal the abolition of exploitation itself and the establishment of communism. This is why “Communism is for us not a state of affairs which is to be established, an ideal to which reality [will] have to adjust itself. We call communism the real movement which abolishes the present state of things. The conditions of this movement result from the premises now in existence.” (35)

The material foundations of communism as a solution to the ecological question

The buying and selling of produced wealth can only disappear if society's wealth is appropriated collectively. “The appropriation [by the proletariat of all the means of production] can only be achieved by a union which is in turn necessarily universal, because of the character of the proletariat itself, and by a revolution which will overthrow, on the one hand, the power of the previous mode of production and exchange and the power of the previous social structure, and which will develop, on the other hand, the universal character of the proletariat and the energy which is necessary for it to carry through this appropriation, a revolution in which the proletariat will also strip itself of all that remains of its previous social position.” [36] With the seizure of the means of production by society, the collective appropriation by society of the wealth it produces, commodity production is eliminated, and with it, exploitation in all its forms.

The abolition of commodity exchange presupposes the abolition of its very foundation: private property, which means the end of the right to possess and appropriate nature: “...Land, being the prime raw material for all human labor and the basis of human existence, must be made the property of society, together with the means of production and distribution. At an advanced stage of development society will again take possession of what it owned in primeval days. At a certain stage of development all human races had common ownership of land. Only by the rise and development of private property and the forms of rulership connected with it, has common property been abolished and usurped as private property, as we have seen, not without severe struggles. The robbery of the land and its transformation into private property formed the first cause of oppression. This oppression has passed through all stages, from slavery to ‘free’ wage-labor of the twentieth century, until, after a development of thousands of years, the oppressed again convert the soil into common property.” [37] The end of private property means the end of the monopoly exercised by a few capitalists “over determined parts of the earth's surface [38], [and] as exclusive spheres of their private will to the exclusion of all others.”[39] [69]

“With the seizing of the means of production by society production of commodities is done away with ... Anarchy in social production is replaced by systematic, definite organisation. The struggle for individual existence disappears. Then for the first time man, in a certain sense, is finally marked off from the rest of the animal kingdom, and emerges from mere animal conditions of existence into really human ones. The whole sphere of the conditions of life which environ man, and which have hitherto ruled man, now comes under the dominion and control of man who for the first time becomes the real, conscious lord of nature because he has now become master of his own social organisation. ... Only from that time will man himself, with full consciousness, make his own history – only from that time will the social causes set in movement by him have, in the main and in a constantly growing measure, the results intended by him.”[40]

The communist mode of production revolutionises mankind's relationship with nature

This new stage in the history of humankind, a veritable leap from the reign of necessity to freedom, from the government of men to the administration of things, ushers in a new era: communism will first have to tackle the priority of feeding, clothing and caring for the whole of humanity, as well as beginning to repair the damage caused by the ravages of capitalist production on the environment. The generalisation of the condition of producer to all members of society, and the liberation of productive forces from the limitations and constraints of capitalist production and profit-making, will lead to an explosion of creativity and productivity on a scale unimaginable under current social conditions. By instituting a new and higher relationship between humankind and nature, it will be the beginning of a unified world humanity, conscious of itself and in harmony with nature: “Freedom in this field can only consist in socialised man, the associated producers, rationally regulating their interchange with Nature, bringing it under their common control, instead of being ruled by it as by the blind forces of Nature; and achieving this with the least expenditure of energy and under conditions most favourable to, and worthy of, their human nature.” [41]

The development of the communist mode of production will introduce a totally different type of equipment for the soil and subsoil; it will aim for a better distribution of human beings across the globe and the elimination of the opposition between town and country.

With a view to “systematically establish (the metabolism between man and the earth) in regulatory law of social production,” [42] communism cannot do otherwise than reappropriate and critically integrate the best contributions of past societies, starting with a better understanding of the more harmonious relationship between humankind and nature that prevailed during the long period of primitive communism, while integrating and transforming all the scientific and technological advances developed by capitalism. [43]

Communism puts an end to the predatory and plundering relationship that has featured in class societies, replacing it with “conscious rational cultivation of the soil as eternal communal property, an inalienable condition for the existence and reproduction of a chain of successive generations.” [44]

In conclusion, against all the bourgeois falsifiers such as Malm [45], we reaffirm, with Marx, that by placing the satisfaction of human needs at the center of its mode of production, by overturning the relationships between human beings as well as those of the whole human race to nature, “Communism” represents the “the genuine resolution of the conflict between man and nature and between man and man.” [46] It is the only door that leads to the future of humanity.

Faced with the urgency of climate change, the urgency of communist revolution

Communism has been the order of the day since the capitalist mode of production entered its period of decadence at the turn of the twentieth century, when bourgeois relations of production, which had become too narrow, collided definitively with the development of productive forces they could no longer contain.

Unlike the revolutionary classes of the past, all of which created new systems of exploitation and were able to develop their new relations of production within the old, now obsolete relations of production, before finally sweeping them away, the proletariat, the first class in history to be both exploited and revolutionary, lacking any material support within capitalist relations of production, must first break the political power of the ruling class in order to establish itself as the ruling class. Since it only has its consciousness and capacity for organisation as weapons of combat, only once the destruction of the bourgeois state -of all states- has been achieved, and the seizure of revolutionary power on a global scale has been secured, can it advance its project for a new society, inaugurating the communist transformation of the world.

In the current historical situation of decomposition, the ultimate phase in the decadence of capitalism, and faced with the spiral of destruction it has set in motion and which threatens the future of civilization, and even the survival of humanity, time is no longer on the side of the working class. But it alone, as the revolutionary class of our age, holds the key to emerging from this nightmarish situation. It retains all its potential to bring its historic project to fruition. The only alternative, the only valid one, for those seeking a way out of capitalist calamities is, without panicking in the face of the immediate situation, to work determinedly to bring about the conditions for the advent of communism, to hasten the process leading to this act of world liberation, by joining the struggle of the oppressed class in its effort to develop awareness of its action and its movement towards the fulfillment of its historic mission.

 

Scott

 

[1] [70] Andreas Malm, L’anthropocène contre l’histoire, Editions La Fabrique, 2017, page 137.

[2] [71] Andreas Malm, Avis de Tempête, Nature et culture dans un monde qui se réchauffe, Editions La Fabrique, 2023, p.155 (Edition en anglais: Andreas Malm, The Progress of This Storm, Verso, 2017).

[3] “Capital eschews no profit, or very small profit, just as Nature was formerly said to abhor a vacuum. With adequate profit, capital is very bold. A certain 10 per cent will ensure its employment anywhere; 20 per cent certain will produce eagerness; 50 per cent., positive audacity; 100 per cent will make it ready to trample on all human laws; 300 per cent., and there is not a crime at which it will scruple.” TJ. Dunning, quoted by Karl Marx, Capital, Volume I, footnote to page 538. https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/download/pdf/Capital-Volume-I.pdf [72]

[4] [73] Andreas Malm, Avis de Tempête, Nature et culture dans un monde qui se réchauffe, Editions La Fabrique, 2023, p.164-65 (Edition en anglais: Andreas Malm, The Progress of This Storm, Verso, 2017).

[5] [74] Andreas Malm, L’anthropocène contre l’histoire, Editions La Fabrique, 2017, p.190-91.

[6] [75] Sha Zukang, “Foreword”, in Promoting Development and Saving the Planet, page VII, quoted by C. Bonneuil, J.B. Fressoz, L’événement Anthropocène – La Terre, l’histoire et nous, Seuil, 2013, p.252; This approach was championed by Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi at the 2019 Climate Action Summit and by Chinese Premier Li Kequiang at the 2019 Global Commission on Adaptation.

[7] [76] Karl Marx, New York Daily Tribune, 1853. Outlines of the Critique of Political Economy (Rough Draft of 1857-58) [First Instalment], III. Chapter on Capital, Section Two, ‘Circulation Process of Capital’ (Collective Works no. 28, page 336). https://www.hekmatist.com/Marx%20Engles/Marx%20&%20Engels%20Collected%20Works%20Volume%2028_%20Ka%20-%20Karl%20Marx.pdf [77]

[8] Marx, Wage Labour and Capital, 1847. https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/download/pdf/wage-labour-capital.pdf [78]

[9] [79] “Ende Gelände (In English: "here and no further") is a civil disobedience movement occupying coal mines in Germany to raise awareness for climate justice.” (Wikipédia)

[10] [80] Andreas Malm, L’anthropocène contre l’histoire, Editions La Fabrique, 2017, page 210.

[11] [81] See the points of Malm's 'green transition programme', in part one of this article, section headed "A thoroughly bourgeois method"

[12] [82] Andreas Malm, L’anthropocène contre l’histoire, Editions La Fabrique, 2017, p.206.

[13] [83] Marx-Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party, 1947. https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/download/pdf/Manifesto.pdf [84]

[14] [85] Rosa Luxemburg, Accumulation of Capital, III : The historical conditions of Accumulation, 26: ‘The Reproduction of Capital and its Social Setting’. https://www.marxists.org/archive/luxemburg/1913/accumulation-capital/accumulation.pdf [86]

[15] [83] Marx-Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party, 1947. https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/download/pdf/Manifesto.pdf [84]

[16] [87] R. Luxemburg, Introduction to Political Economy, 1907. https://tilde.town/~xat/rt/pdf/luxemburg_1925_political_economy.pdf [88]

[17] [89] C. Bonneuil, J.B. Fressoz, L’événement Anthropocène – La Terre, l’histoire et nous, Seuil, 2013, p.260.

[18] [90] Ibid, p.267.

[19] [91] Karl Marx, Capital, Volume I, Part 4: ‘Production of Relative Surplus Value’, Section 10: ‘Modern Industry and Agriculture’. https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/download/pdf/Capital-Volume-I.pdf [72]

[20] [92] J.B. Fressoz, F. Graber, F. Locher, G. Quenet, Introduction à l’histoire environnementale, Ed. La Découverte, 2014, page 92-93.

[21] [93] Ibid, p.96-97.

[22] [94] Capitalism is poisoning the earth [95], International Review n°63 (1990).

[23] [96] Karl Marx, Capital, Volume I, Part 4, Chapter 15, Section 10,: ‘Modern Industry and Agriculture’ https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/download/pdf/Capital-Volume-... [72]

[24] [97] Karl Marx, Capital, Volume III, Chapter XLVII ‘Genesis of Capitalist Ground Rent’, ‘V. Métayage And Peasant Proprietorship Of Land Parcels.’ https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/download/pdf/Capital-Volume-III.pdf [98]

[25] [99] Karl Marx, Grundrisse, ‘Transition from the process of the production of capital into the process of circulation’, page 336. https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/download/pdf/grundrisse.pdf [100]

[26] [101] .B. Fressoz, F. Graber, F. Locher, G. Quenet, Introduction à l’histoire environnementale, Ed. La Découverte, 2014, page 61

[27] [102] Ibid, page 56-57.

[28] [103] Anton Pannekoek, ‘Destruction of Nature’, 10 juillet 1909. https://www.marxists.org/archive/pannekoe/1909/nature.htm [104]

[29] [105]. Karl Marx, Critique of the Gotha Programme, https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/download/Marx_Critque_of_the_Gotha_Programme.pdf [106]

[30] [107] Andreas Malm, L’anthropocène contre l’histoire, Editions La Fabrique, 2017, page 190-91.

[31] [108] Similar elucidations can be found in another ‘genius thinker’ of ‘critical ecology’, Fabian Scheidler, who is also praised by many: “You don't design a new society on a drawing board in the same way as you do a new interior, a machine or a factory. New forms of social organisation are the result of persistent conflicts and processes of convergence between different groups. What emerges in the end can never, in principle, be the result of a single plan, but only the consequence of many plans, contradictory or convergent. (...) Major system changes are not the result of a slow, gradual transition from one mode of organisation to another, nor of a deliberate break with the past on the model of the October Revolution in Russia. (...) What there is effectively is no master plan for building a new system to replace the previous one. Not only is there no such plan, but there are not many people left who think one is needed.” (F. Scheidler, La Fin de la mégamachine. Sur les traces d'une civilisation en voie d'effondrement, Chapitre 11 ‘Possibilités, sortir de la mégamachine’, Ed. Seuil, 2020, page 445-50).

[32] Marx-Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party, 1947. Ibid. “The peasants, although they are exploited in all sorts of ways, and can sometimes wage very violent struggles to limit their exploitation, can never direct these struggles towards the abolition of private property because they themselves are small owners, or, living alongside the latter, aspire to become like them. And, even when the peasants do set up collective structures to increase their income through an improvement in productivity or the sale of their products, it usually takes the form of cooperatives, which don't call into question private property or commodity exchange. To sum up, the classes and strata which appear as vestiges of the past (peasants, artisans, liberal professions, etc) and who only survive because capitalism, even if it totally dominates the world economy, is incapable of transforming all the producers into wage laborers - these classes cannot be the bearers of a revolutionary project. On the contrary, the only perspective they can dream about is the return to a mythical 'golden age' of the past: the dynamic of their specific struggles can only be reactionary.” Quoted in ‘Who can change the world? (Part 1): The proletariat is the Revolutionary Class [109]’, International Review no. 73)

[33] [110] [32] Marx-Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party, 1947.

[34] [111] Marx-Engels, German Ideology, 1946. https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/download/Marx_The_German_Ideology.pdf [112]

[35] [113] Marx-Engels, German Ideology, 1946. Ibid

[36] [114] Marx-Engels, German Ideology,1946. ibid

[37] [115] August Bebel, Woman and Socialism, Chapter XXII ‘Socialism and Agriculture, 1. Abolition of the Private Ownership of Land’. https://www.marxists.org/archive/bebel/1879/woman-socialism/ch22.htm [116]

[38] “As soon as these have reached a point where they must shed their skin, the material source of the title, justified economically and historically and arising from the process which creates social life, falls by the wayside, along with all transactions based upon it. From the standpoint of a higher economic form of society, private ownership of the globe by single individuals will appear quite as absurd as private ownership of one man by another. Even a whole society, a nation, or even all simultaneously existing societies taken together, are not the owners of the globe. They are only its possessors, its usufructuaries, and, like boni patres familias, they must hand it down to succeeding generations in an improved condition.” (Karl Marx, Capital – Volume III, Chapter 46. ‘Building Site Rent. Rent in Mining.Price of Land’) https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/download/pdf/Capital-Volume-III.pdf [98]

[39] Karl Marx, Capital, Volume III, Part VI. Transformation of Surplus-Profit into Ground-Rent, Chapter 37. Introduction.https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/download/pdf/Capital-Volume-III.pdf [98]

[40] [117] F. Engels, Anti-Dühring, Part III: ‘Socialism, II. Theoretical.’ https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/download/pdf/anti_duhring.pdf [118]

[41] Karl Marx, Capital, Volume III, Part VII. ‘Revenues and their Sources’, Chapter 48. ‘The Trinity Formula’.https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/download/pdf/Capital-Volume-III.pdf [98]

[42] Marx, Capital, Volume I, ‘The development of capitalist production’, section IV, ‘production of relative surplus-value’, Chapter XV. https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/download/pdf/Capital-Volume-I.pdf [72]

[43] [119] “After the mighty advances made by the natural sciences in the present century, we are more than ever in a position to realise and hence to control even the more remote natural consequences of at least our day-to-day production activities. But the more this progresses the more will men not only feel but also know their oneness with nature, …” (Friedrich Engels, Dialects of Nature, The Part Played by Labor in the Transition from Ape to Man [120]) https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/sw/progress-publishers/sw-v3.pdf [121].)

[44] [122] K. Marx, Le Capital - Livre III, Chapter XLVII ‘Genesis of Capitalist Ground Rent’, ‘V. Métayage And Peasant Proprietorship Of Land Parcels’. ibid

[45] [123] Or à la Scheidler.

[46] [124] Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, ‘Private Property and Communism’. https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1844/manuscripts/comm.htm [125]

 

Faced with the gravity of the climate crisis and its consequences, more and more voices are being raised to incriminate the capitalist system, a clear indication that the mystification according to which it is Man - the human species in general - that is at the origin of the crisis is no longer enough to counteract and sterilise the reflection underway within the proletariat on this issue. In the manufacture and permanent adaptation of bourgeois ideology, the nebulous academic-university catch-all term the Anthropocene is now succeeded by the fog of a new title – the Capitalocene. In particular, the theories of Andreas Malm[1] (a lecturer in human geography at the University of Lund in Sweden and a member of the Trotskyist organisation the Fourth International - Unified Secretariat) occupy a privileged place in it and are being promoted with great publicity and wide international repercussions.

In his book How to Blow Up a Pipeline: Learning to Fight in a World on Fire (2021, Verso Books), Andreas Malm notes that "no amount of rhetoric will ever move the ruling classes to action ". Andreas Malm calls on the [environmental]movement to move beyond pacifism and take violent action not against people but against the infrastructure of fossil fuel capitalism". His "key idea, summarised in L'Anthropocène contre l'histoire (2017): it is not humanity that has become a geological force - that is the meaning of the word 'anthropocene' coined by the Dutch Nobel Prize winner in chemistry Paul Crutzen in 2002 - but the economy and fossil capitalism that were born in England with James Watt's steam engine, hence Andreas Malm's preference for the word 'Capitalocene'. The Swede seeks to reconcile marxism and environmentalism. (...) he links ecology to marxism, often discredited in environmentalist circles for its productivism: he justifies the transition to violent action in a galaxy dominated by pacifism; and he does not deny the State as an ally in the ecological transition within a kind of war communism that he theorised in The Bat and Capital (2020)"[2].
 

Alternately denounced as "public enemy No. 1"[3] or praised as a "fundamental thinker" and "one of the most original on the subject of climate change", he is seen as the "new guru of radical ecologists". Bourgeois propaganda has not hesitated to declare him the "Lenin of ecology", no less!
 

Yet there is a striking contrast in the way in which the "Lenin of ecology" is treated by the ruling class: whereas Lenin - and with him the revolutionaries of the past - to whom Malm is compared or to whom he refers, have been vilified, slandered, censured, forced into exile, pursued by the police of all possible variants of the different political regimes of capitalism, bourgeois democracy first and foremost, Malm is well known. His books have been translated into more than a dozen languages and are readily available to a wide readership. For those who don't read books, they have been relayed by a major Hollywood production (featuring a group of young people who decide to blow up an oil pipeline in Texas), How to blow up a pipeline, widely distributed worldwide. How can we explain this worldwide publicity offered by the ruling class to its supposed enemy, to anyone who claims to be fighting its system? What is the reason for this solicitude for Malm on the part of the ruling class?
 

The answers to these questions, and the secret of this bourgeois enthusiasm for Malm, can be found in Malm's own writings (from 2009 onwards in his book Fossil Capital), summarised and condensed in a few sentences that could almost pass unnoticed under the heap of his writings, but which reveal and unmask the quintessence of his approach: for him, climate change "tightens the screws on marxists like everyone else. Any argument along the lines of ‘one solution – revolution’ or, less succinctly, ‘socialist property relations are necessary to combat climate change’ is now indefensible. The experience of the last two centuries shows that socialism is an appallingly difficult condition to achieve; any proposal to build it on a global scale before 2020 and then start cutting emissions would be not only laughable, but irresponsible. (...) If the temporality of climate change obliges revolutionaries to a little pragmatism, it obliges others to start thinking about revolutionary measures"[4].
 

The fight for communism would therefore no longer be relevant, but outdated, rendered obsolete by the climate emergency. With this crude sleight of hand, Malm is simply defending and theorising the very vulgar "we're all in the same boat", dear to bourgeois ideology and at the heart of the mystification of national unity and peace between the classes! By denying the validity of the perspective of proletarian revolution and communism, which he regards as inappropriate and incapable of providing a solution to the problems facing humanity in the current historical situation (including the question of ecological devastation), Malm, on his knees, proclaims his allegiance to the ruling class.
 

His visceral and avowed anti-socialism is the measure of the validity of his 'marxism': detached from the fight for communism, references to Marx, Trotsky or Lenin are nothing more than a collection of empty formulas full of amalgams and falsifications! The bourgeoisie was quick to see the advantage it could draw from Malm's 'marxism', emasculated of its revolutionary purpose! This is what has earned him the recognition and solicitude of the ruling class, as well as the pride of place it reserves for him in its official campaigns!
 

A thoroughly bourgeois method
Faced with the threat of global warming, which he identifies as the No. 1 political priority for humanity, Malm claims, with the help of a whole theory (Fossil Capital) which has the colour and appearance of historical materialism and the pretence of updating and advancing marxism, to hold THE solution for tackling its 'motor', which can be reduced to the following simple assertion: to combat global warming we need to eliminate once and for all the greenhouse gas emissions that are responsible for it. This means taking the radical step of eradicating the fossil fuel sector from capitalist production and "shutting down this activity for good"[5]. And the problem will be solved!
 

This 'decarbonise everything' approach to saving the planet's ecology has been denounced by some ecologists and scientists (even though they themselves are unable to provide real alternatives) as an aberration, "an example of contemporary narrow-mindedness, which leads to the oft-repeated error (...) of systematically underestimating the multiplicity of interactions that characterise natural and social systems. "[6]. Malm's own position has been criticised: "We could dismantle all the oil pipelines, all the coal mines and all the SUVs" and discover that we are still doomed to extinction "because we would still have to tackle "soil degradation, freshwater depletion, ocean dysbiosis, habitat destruction, pesticides and other synthetic chemicals", each problem being ‘comparable in scale and severity to climate collapse’. We are not dealing here with fossil capital alone, but with 'all capital'"[7].
 

As a good bourgeois ideologue on ecology, Malm completely embodies the typically capitalist approach of tackling each problem arising in capitalist society separately from the others (by proposing a supposed 'solution' for each one) and treating them independently of what lies at their root: the capitalist system as a whole and its historical crisis. This approach and method are far removed from historical materialism and have nothing to do with Marxism.
 

At a time when humanity and the world proletariat are faced with the accelerating decomposition of the capitalist system, when the combined effects of the economic crisis, the ecological/climate crisis and imperialist war are adding up, interacting and multiplying in a devastating spiral, and when among these different factors, war (as a deliberate decision by the ruling class) forms the decisive accelerating element in the aggravation of chaos and economic crisis, all this is concealed by Malm[8]!
 

There is no trace in his writings of the economic crisis of capitalism, or of the catastrophic repercussions on society and the environment of the organisation of the whole of society with a view to the permanent preparation for war since the entry of the capitalist system into decadence. And yet the return of 'high-intensity' warfare between states is in itself (and there are many other fundamental reasons why Capital is unable to find a solution to the ecological crisis) a powerful reason for abandoning 'ecological transition' measures and the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions. Indeed: " No war without oil. Without oil, it is impossible to wage war (...) Giving up the possibility of obtaining supplies of abundant and inexpensive oil is quite simply tantamount to disarmament. Transport technologies [which do not require oil, hydrogen and electricity] are totally unsuited to armies. Battery-powered electric tanks pose so many technical and logistical problems that they have to be regarded as impossible, as does everything that runs on land (armoured vehicles, artillery, engineering vehicles, light all-terrain vehicles, trucks). The internal combustion engine and its fuel are so efficient and flexible that it would be suicidal to replace them. "[9]
 

Keen to convince us that there is a solution to the climate crisis within capitalism, Malm proposes a ten-point "ecological transition programme": "1°) impose a moratorium on all new coal, oil or natural gas extraction facilities 2°) close all power stations powered by these fuels 3°) produce 100% of electricity from non-fossil sources, mainly wind and solar power 4°) put an end to the development of air, sea and land transport; convert land and sea transport to electricity and wind power ; ration air transport to ensure fair distribution until it can be totally replaced by other means of transport 5°) develop public transport networks at all levels, from metros to intercontinental high-speed trains 6°) limit the transport of food by boat and plane and systematically promote local supplies 7°) put an end to the destruction of tropical forests and launch major reforestation programmes 8°)insulate old buildings and require new ones to produce their own energy without emitting carbon dioxide. 9°) dismantle the meat industry and direct human protein needs towards plant sources 10°) direct public investment towards the development of the most efficient renewable and sustainable energy technologies, and carbon dioxide elimination technologies." [10]
 

Everything that Malm has the nerve to present as the equivalent of Marx's Communist Manifesto, destined to take over from it and succeed it, is absolutely indistinguishable from what Western governments defend (in words) and claim to want to implement!
 

Malm is simply posing as a defender (but a 'critical' defender!) of the decarbonisation measures taken by Western governments. He is thus following in the footsteps of the IPCC, which a decade ago[11] ushered in a new phase in policies to combat global warming by presenting the use of geoengineering[12] as inevitable. For the IPCC, the bourgeois states and governments, it is now a matter of relying on high-tech 'innovation' to 'compensate' for the catastrophic effects on nature of capitalism and its contradictions[13]. “While Andreas Malm criticises geoengineering, he does not discredit it completely, believing that it will be difficult to do without certain tools capable of capturing carbon "[14] . These tools are often described as "negative emission technologies", i.e.  “the euphemism used to designate geoengineering techniques for eliminating carbon dioxide without frightening people")[15]. While "waiting for better" (and he may be waiting a long time), Malm, an emergency doctor, supports the "means at hand", the increasing recourse to the magic potions of the bourgeois state and its mad doctors to "cure the Planet", which only exponentially worsen the situation instead of alleviating it, and generate new calamities with increasingly unpredictable and destructive consequences for humankind, the working class and the natural environment on which society depends.
 

For Malm, the state of emergency justifies state capitalism.
According to Malm, given the urgency of the situation in terms of global warming, and the fact that we can no longer count on the proletariat's capacity to equip itself with revolutionary organs to challenge the capitalist order, we have to make do with what we have on hand to put out the fire. As a resolute opponent of communism, for him it is the capitalist state, state decisions and political action on the terrain of the state which form the alpha and omega of his political vision and limit his horizon. In his view, unless we are demonstrating “irresponsibility as delirious as it is criminal”, we must recognise the need to "abandon the classical programme of demolishing the state (...) - one aspect of Leninism among others which seem to merit an obituary”[16] and concentrate on the only tool left at our disposal, the bourgeois state[17]. The "Lenin of ecology" rejects and abandons one of Lenin's most important contributions to the revolutionary movement: the restoration and clarification of the marxist position on the state. This is as far as one can go in questioning and abandoning marxism!
 

While criticising this "very imperfect tool" and as "there is almost no chance of a capitalist state doing anything (...) on its own initiative. It would have to be forced to do so, using the whole panoply of means of popular pressure at our disposal, from electoral campaigns to mass sabotage”[18].  "For if a state could take control of trade flows, track down wildlife traffickers, nationalise fossil fuel companies, organise the capture [of CO2] from the air, plan the economy to reduce emissions by ten per cent a year or so, and do all the other things that need to be done, we would be well on the way out of the emergency."[19].
 

He calls for "popular pressure to be brought to bear on it, [changing] the balance of power that it condenses, forcing the apparatuses to break away from the hitch and start moving by employing all the methods already quickly mentioned"[20]. " Decisions and decrees from the State are needed - or in other words, the State must be wrested from the hands of all the Tillersons and Fridolins of this world so that a transition programme of the type sketched out above can be implemented. "[21] It is therefore a question of "[ jumping] at the slightest opportunity to move the State in this direction, to break with business-as-usual as clearly as necessary and to bring under public control the sectors of the economy that are working towards disaster"[22].
 

Malm disguises the impossibility and complete inability of the capitalist system as a whole to provide a solution to the ecological question, by passing off this impotence as a problem of state inertia, held hostage by the selfish interests of the barons of the fossil fuel sector.
 

What he proposes is to make full use of the mechanisms of the bourgeois-democratic state, backing them up with a healthy dose of 'civil disobedience' for a good cause: Malm is making his contribution to the attempts of all the Western states to get the increasingly abstentionist masses to return to the ballot box and the ballot paper. And in so doing, he maintains the illusions about bourgeois democracy by inviting all those who are concerned about the future of the planet to make it the framework for their actions!
 

At the same time, Malm argues that in order to deal with the causes of the chronic emergency, state coercion is "necessary and urgent" and requires "a new hierarchy of tasks for the repressive apparatuses of states throughout the world."[23] In order to justify and legitimise the need for more active state violence and repression at the ecological level, he takes as his model and source of inspiration the drastic measures of state control and militarisation of vast sectors of society taken by the Soviet state during War Communism in Russia of 1918-21 in the face of imperialist military intervention, civil war and famine. In the same vein, Malm recalls the enormous sacrifices made by Russian workers and peasants to justify, even today, the demand for "a form of necessary renunciation" and the impossibility "of evading the ban on the consumption of wild animals, the cessation of mass aviation, the gradual abandonment of meat and other things synonymous with the good life."[24] In the final analysis, this theme is in unison with the bourgeois campaigns advocating 'sobriety' on the pretext of defending the planet in order to impose attacks on the living conditions of the exploited class, made indispensable by the economic crisis.
 

In the name of defending the planet, the exploited must act as citizens, complying with the demands and submitting to the interests of the great orchestrator which, in Malm's mind, is the state in the fight against global warming.
 

With a suitcase full of state capitalist measures under his arm, Malm touts his turnkey programme for the bourgeois state. "The call for the nationalisation of fossil fuel companies and their transformation into direct air capture equipment should be the central demand for the transition in the coming years"[25]. "This begins with the nationalisation of all private companies that extract, transform and distribute fossil fuels. The rampaging pack that is ExxonMobil, BP, Shell, RWE, Lundin Energy and all the others will have to be brought under control, and the surest way to do that is to bring these companies back into the public fold, either by acquisition or by confiscation without compensation - which seems more defensible."[26].

"They need to be nationalised (...) not just to get rid of these companies (...) but to turn them into companies providing a carbon removal service. Turn them into a public service for restoring the climate"[27].
 

Malm is thus openly posing as a manager of the state and capital and would have us believe that the bourgeois state in the hands of determined political forces can force capitalism to implement the solution of abandoning fossil fuels!
 

To lend credence to his ‘solution', Malm develops a completely mystifying vision of the nature of the bourgeois state as being above classes, an arbiter of the general interest, able to act for the common good of society as a whole. This is an old refrain of bourgeois ideology that has been repeated for decades, particularly by the political forces of the capitalist left (beginning with the Social Democrats, then the Stalinists and, following them, the Trotskyists).
 

Contrary to what Malm implies, the state is not 'neutral', nor is it the place where the exploited class can exercise and enforce its will. On the contrary! As the expression of a society divided into antagonistic classes, the state is the exclusive instrument in the hands of the ruling class for maintaining its domination and guaranteeing its class interests; it is by definition the tool for defending its system and imposing its logic.

Nor is the state an organ of 'rationalisation' or 'regulation' of the contradictions of capitalism to which it could provide a 'solution'. The omnipresent and growing control of the state over the whole of social life for more than a century does not correspond to the implementation of viable solutions to the contradictions of the capitalist system (social, economic and imperialist), which have been increasingly exacerbated in the period of its decadence.
 

The tentacular development of the state is, on the contrary, the expression of these contradictions and of the inability of the bourgeois world to overcome them, of the historic impasse of this mode of production.

In the present historical situation, after more than a century of decadence, the accumulation of contradictions at the root of the capitalist system, and of their effects, is reflected in the growing tendency of the ruling class to lose control over its system, which is falling apart and rotting on its feet. Far from acting as a brake on this tendency, the state is itself more and more openly proving to be a vehicle for the destructive irrationality which characterises and dominates the capitalist system as a whole. The state and its actions are themselves becoming an increasingly obvious factor in aggravating the historical crisis of the capitalist system in the final phase of its existence, the phase of decomposition.
 

There is therefore nothing to be expected from action on the part of the state, and all illusions in this respect must be firmly rejected.
 

It is in this context that Malm invites us to distinguish between the different parts that make up the state apparatus, some of which are more recommendable than others, and which, in classical Trotskyist mode, he presents (critically!) as progressive allies[28]: "This does not mean that the social-democratic formations do not have a role to play. On the contrary, they are perhaps our best hope, as we have seen in recent years. Nothing would have been better for the planet than a victory for Jeremy Corbyn in the United Kingdom in 2019 and Bernie Sanders in the United States in 2020. If they could have found themselves in charge of the two traditional bastions of capitalism, there would have been real opportunities to use the current crisis and those on the horizon to break with business-as-usual”.[29] No comment! This is yet another deception perpetrated by Malm to confuse working-class consciousness about the true nature of these bourgeois parties and to lure the population and workers back to the Socialist or Social Democratic parties (which have repeatedly proved their anti-working-class nature). This is yet another lie designed to conceal the fact that, in our time, all bourgeois parties are equally reactionary, and that there is no more to be expected from one than from the other!
 

On the questions of the state and its left forces, Malm at least has the merit of clarity. He reveals the basic logic common to the Trotskyist current as a whole: the defence of state capitalism!
 

Malm's political constructions are an integral part of the ideological campaigns of the ruling class in the direct service of its interests. Their aim is to provide them with the radical, supposedly anti-capitalist wrapping they need to sterilise the beginnings of reflection on capitalism's responsibility for the ecological disaster, and to divert it into the realm of the state and bourgeois democracy. Malm therefore deserves to be awarded the 'Order of Lenin' for Ecology, since:
 

- Malm's 'theories' prolong and continue the campaign against communism that has been underway since 1989, this time in the name of realism in the face of the climate crisis, which, because of its urgency, is changing the situation and rendering the fight for communism ineffective.
- By denying that the solution to the climate crisis requires the destruction of the bourgeois state and the capitalist social relations it guarantees, and the replacement of the capitalist system by a classless society, the word revolution, in Malm's mouth, changes meaning and now only means the development and management of the capitalist system.
- Whether it's a question of the means Malm advocates - encouraging civil disobedience and individual or mass sabotage against major greenhouse gas emitters (deflating the tyres of the richest people's SUVs, targeting a private jet airport or a cement factory, etc.), or their aim - putting pressure on the capitalist state to finally take the right decisions - they are really only intended to lock those who might be seduced by this rhetoric into the confines of the capitalist order. Leaving intact and preserving the exploitative social relations of the capitalist order, at the root of the ills that beset society, is all to the benefit of the ruling class: they are nothing but sterile dead-ends that guarantee the status quo and impotence.
 

In the next part of this article, we will look at why the social and ecological questions can only be resolved at the same time, and why only the proletariat has the solution.
 

Scott


[1] Since the 1990s, Andreas Malm has been "engaged in a sustained struggle against the colonisation of Palestine, against Islamophobia in Europe and against 'American imperialism'" (...) He wrote for the newspaper of a Swedish trade union, Arbetaren, from 2002 to 2009. From 2010, he writes for the newspaper Internationalen, the weekly of the Trotskyist party, the Swedish Socialist Party, which is part of the Fourth International - Unified Secretariat, and of which he is a member. He contributes to the American radical left-wing magazine Jacobin. He has been involved in the International Solidarity Movement in Sweden from the outset. He participates in civil disobedience groups against climate change." (Wikipedia)

After Senegal and South Africa, in a new series, we present a history of the workers' movement in Egypt. This new contribution pursues the same main aim as the previous ones: to provide evidence of the living reality of the history of the African labour movement through its struggles against the bourgeoisie (see Contribution to a history of the workers' movement in Africa (part 1): Pre-1914 [126], International Review, no. 145, 2nd quarter 2011).

The emergence of the working class in Egypt

As capitalism began to develop in Egypt, the proletariat made its presence felt in the country's first industrial concentrations. As author Jacques Couland points out:

“We know that Egypt was one of the first (in the region) to embrace capitalism. This, at least, is the general assessment of Muhammad Ali's experience in the first part of the 19th century. There would seem to have been a gap between the earliness of the first attempts to create new relations of production and the access to forms of organisation that reflected an awareness of the new social relations that ensued. Some authors trace the emergence of the Egyptian working class back to the state industrial monopolies created by Muhammad Ali. Arsenals, shipyards, spinning mills and weaving mills brought together some 30,000 workers in an Egypt that was already one of the most industrialised countries in the world, whose population was then estimated at less than three million. (...) Estimates are often contradictory, let us retain the most accurate one which marks the end of a phase. The urban workforce was estimated at 728,000 workers or 32% of the urban population (2,300,000 inhabitants); to this should be added 334,000 non-agricultural jobs in the countryside. Industry, crafts and construction employ 212,000 urban workers (29% of urban jobs) and 23,000 in the countryside. According to another estimate, the largest concentration is in the railroads, with some 20,000 workers, a quarter of whom are foreigners"[1].

The process that led to the emergence, then development, of the productive forces in Egypt in the second half of the 19th century saw the working class make up as much as a third of the urban population, notably as a consequence of the transfer of part of the cotton production from the United States to Egypt, at a time when the Civil War was disrupting the American economy. It seems that the formation of part of the working class in this country can be traced back to the state industrial monopolies under the former semi-feudal regime of Muhammad Ali.

The large workforce in construction (ports, railways, wharves, etc) and tobacco manufacturing included a significant proportion of European foreigners recruited directly by European industrial employers. This was later confirmed by the chronology of class confrontations between the bourgeoisie and the working class, in which a minority of workers of European origin, whether anarchists or socialists, played an important role in the politicisation and development of consciousness within the Egyptian working class.

Elements of precursors to the Egyptian labour movement

These were the result of the spread of capitalism, as the following quote indicates:

“Presenting a picture of the history of radicalism in early twentieth-century Egypt requires not limiting oneself to Arab networks or expressing oneself only in Arabic. Cairo and Alexandria were cosmopolitan, multi-ethnic and multilingual cities, and socialism and anarchism found many sympathisers among immigrant Mediterranean communities. One of the most active groups was a network of anarchists composed mainly (but not exclusively) of Italian workers and intellectuals, whose ‘HQ’ was Alexandria, but which had contacts and members in Cairo and elsewhere"[2].

In Egypt, there were also other non-anarchist currents in the workers' movement:

“For the record, since the turn of the century, there have been Armenian, Italian and Greek socialist groups, albeit isolated, with the appearance of Bolshevist tendencies in their midst around 1905. We know that it was in 1913 that Salamah Musa published a pamphlet entitled “Al-Ishtirakiya” (Socialism), which, despite theoretical hesitations, was similar to Fabianism. But Marxism also reached these shores. Research has brought to light an anonymous reader's article published in 1890 in “Al-Mu'ayyid” under the title ‘The Political Economy’ which shows a good knowledge of Marx's work. But if this milestone is worth mentioning only as a curiosity, the same cannot be said of the book by a young schoolteacher from Mansurah, Mustafa Hasanayni: ‘Tarikh al-Madhahib al-Ishtiraktyah’ (History of Socialist Principles), also published in 1913 (though only found in 1965); the documentation is more extensive and more precise (tables of the influence of the various socialist parties); the assimilation of Marxism more evident, as can be seen from the long-term programme proposed for Egypt”.

So, alongside the anarchist currents, there were other currents or individuals on the marxist left, some of whom were influenced by the Bolshevik Party. Many of them may well have been among those who decided to leave the SPE (Egyptian Socialist Party of Egypt) to form the ECP (Egyptian Communist Party) and join the Third International in 1922. Thus, in Egypt, the conditions were ripe for the participation of the Egyptian proletariat in the wave of revolutionary struggles of 1917-23.

It was in this context that Egyptian and immigrant workers of European origin took an active part in the first movements of struggle under the era of European-dominated industrial capitalism in Egypt.

First protest movements (1882-1914)

The first expression of struggle took place in a context where the particularly arduous working conditions of the emerging working class were conducive to the development of combativeness.

Wages were very low, and working hours could be as long as 17 hours a day. It was the dockworkers who first set the example, striking frequently between 1882 and 1900 for higher wages and improved living conditions, gradually followed by workers in other industries, so that strikes were a permanent feature of the 15 years leading up to the First World War. In addition to wages and working conditions, the workers fought for reforms in their favour, including the possibility of forming associations or unions to defend themselves.

In 1911, Cairo's railway workers were able, among other benefits, to set up their own union, the ‘Association of the Railway Depot Workers in Cairo’. Through its struggle, the Egyptian proletariat was able to wrest real reforms. Between 1882 and 1914, they had to learn the art of class struggle in the face of harsh working and living conditions imposed by the European capitalists who owned the means of production in Egypt and were also responsible for recruiting labour and organising work in the companies. This led to a practice of segregating Egyptian and European workers by granting “advantages” to the latter and not to the former, a deliberate strategic choice by the bosses to divide the struggles. Thus, the first strikes (in 1882 and 1896) were instigated by Egyptian workers. In 1899 and 1900, Italian workers also went on strike alone (without the Egyptians). However, the Egyptian proletariat, aware that it was being exploited, soon demonstrated its fighting spirit and, at times, its solidarity with workers of all nationalities, notably during the famous strike by cigarette factory workers, which brought together Egyptians and Europeans.

The first expression of open working-class struggle occurred in the same year (1882) as the occupation of Egypt by British imperialism. Some historians have seen it as an expression of resistance to English colonialism, in other words, a form of defense of the ‘Egyptian nation’ as a whole, uniting exploiting and exploited classes, with the working class allying itself with its (Egyptian) ‘progressive bourgeoisie’ against colonialism and reactionary forces to create a new nation. History has shown the limits of such a theory with the definitive entry of capitalism into decadence. In fact, the continuation of strike action has amply demonstrated that the working class is seeking above all to defend itself against the attacks of the capitalists who own the means of production, whatever their nationality. Nevertheless, as subsequent struggles illustrated, the Egyptian proletariat was unable to prevent the penetration of nationalist ideologies, particularly following the founding in 1907 of the Egyptian Watani (national) party, which clearly stated its determination to rely on the labour movement to strengthen its influence.

However, it was during this struggle that the Egyptian working class was able to develop its own identity, that of a class associated with exploited producers, whether or not they came from the same country, or from different cultures, including Italians, Greeks and others. In fact, the trajectory of the working class in Egypt is no different, in essence, from that of other fractions of the world proletariat, forced to sell their labour power in order to live, and to enter into collective struggle against the exploiting class.

British imperialism takes advantage of the 1914-18 war to break workers' strikes

The outbreak of war upset relations within the ruling class, in this case British imperialism and sections of the Egyptian bourgeoisie. As a colonial power, Great Britain decided to establish a protectorate in Egypt at the end of 1914, thereby imposing its authority and imperialist options on the fractions of the Egyptian national bourgeoisie. It thus decided to place parties and other social organisations (trade unions) under its strict control, notably the Watani Party, which had a strong presence in working-class circles and was particularly targeted by repression, eventually being dissolved and its main representatives imprisoned. This nationalist party had been created in 1907 in the wake of the major strike movements preceding the outbreak of the First World War, when the Egyptian proletariat fought hard against the rates of production imposed by companies, particularly those owned by European bosses.

This party, along with another nationalist current, the Wafd (‘Delegation’), played a central role in diverting proletarian struggles towards nationalist demands and perspectives, and in organising the workers. In other words, the party managed to disorientate many inexperienced workers with little class consciousness. In order to better attract workers, who were more or less influenced by socialist ideas, the party's leader did not hesitate to claim to be a ‘Labourist, thus moving closer to the right-wing of the Second International.

The working class took up the struggle once the slaughter of 1914-18 was over, but came up against the political apparatuses of the bourgeoisie.

The introduction of the state of war, with all its repressive measures, was designed to prevent or repress struggles. The Egyptian proletariat, like others around the world, was paralysed and dispersed. In spite of this, certain sectors of the workforce demonstrated their discontent in the midst of the war, notably cigarette factory workers in Alexandria who went on strike between August and October 1917, and those in Cairo in 1918. Of course, they were unsuccessful in the face of a particularly repressive environment. However, as soon as the war was over, the struggles began again. Between December 1918 and March 1919, numerous strikes took place in the railroads, cigarette factories, printing works and elsewhere. These strikes were organised by the fringes of the Watani Party.

But despite their desire for autonomy, the workers came up against both the repression of the colonial power and the undermining work of the nationalist parties, Watani and Wafd, which were very influential within the working class, and whose control they vied for. In fact, the working class was obliged, on the one hand, to fight to defend its own interests against British imperialism, which dominated the whole of society, and on the other hand, could not avoid ‘allying’ with the nationalists, themselves victims of the repression of the colonial power. This is illustrated by the following quote:

“The announcement of the arrest (on March 8) of the delegation (Wafd) set up to negotiate with the British led to a generalisation of workers' strikes and their participation with other sections of society in the major demonstrations that marked the last three weeks of March. The transport strike, backed-up by the actions of sabotage by the peasants, played an important role in hindering the movement of British troops. In the months that followed, the protest movement and the formation of unions continued. On August 18, 1919, a Conciliation and Arbitration Commission was set up, which encouraged the first collective labour contracts, but which once again insisted on the recourse to legal advisors. The preoccupation of the Watani Party (whose influence was waning) was to ensure that workers' interventions, through the Syndicate of Manual Industries, were limited to national demands, the installation of purchasing cooperatives being likely, in its view, to alleviate many difficulties. But the Wafd, which was asserting itself as a political force, had gauged the importance of the unions and was endeavoring to control them: ‘They are a powerful weapon not to be neglected’, thanks to their rapid capacity to mobilise in response to the call of the national movement. ‘(...) But if these competing forces are to be noted, what prevaied at the time are the trends in favour of organising workers on an autonomous basis. The center of this movement was in Alexandria, at the initiative of a mixed leadership of foreign and Egyptian socialists (Arab or naturalised, like Rosenthal) who had perceived the echo of the October 1917 Revolution.” (J. Couland, Ibid.) As we shall see later.

The echo and influence of the October 1917 Revolution on the Egyptian working class

The 1917 revolution undoubtedly had an impact on the Egyptian workers' movement, particularly among the most consciously politicised elements, who embarked on a process of rapprochement with the Communist International. This was against a backdrop of repeated strikes in the factories and struggles for control of the unions, pitting the genuinely proletarian fractions against Watani and Wafd.

“In February 1921, a General Confederation of Labour (GCL) with 3,000 members was finally formed around a federation of cigarette, tailor and printing unions, which had been in existence since 1920, and not without a few setbacks (followed in the same year by the founding of the Socialist Party of Egypt (SPE)). The GCL asserted itself as a member of the Red Trade Union International, while the SPE itself decided to join the Communist International in July 1922 and transformed itself into the Egyptian Communist Party (PCE) in January 1923. The split of a group of intellectuals, including Salamah Mussa, who contested this development, did not detract from the nationally Egyptian character of the CPE, whose membership was estimated at 1,500 in 1924.” (J. Couland, Ibid.)

The transformation of the SPE into the ECP and the GCL's accession to the Red International of Labour Unions were elements of clarification and decantation within the Egyptian labour movement. This led, on the one hand, to the installation of a majority of workers at the head of the GCL and ECP leadership and, on the other, to the reaffirmation of the right-wing fraction of the SPE, which took up reformist and nationalist positions in opposition to the Communist International. From then on, the battle was waged between internationalist revolutionary forces and reformist forces in the company of Egyptian national capital. Moreover, during the period of decantation, the nationalist Watani/Wafd parties decided to create their own trade unions in order to compete with and oppose head-on the unions affiliated to the Red International of Labour Unions. To the same end, they waged violent campaigns against Communist workers' organisations, as illustrated by Fahmi's statement to a group of workers: “We must beware of Communism, whose ‘principle’ is ‘the ruin (and) chaos of the world”. The Wafd party, in its brief presence in power in 1924, immediately went to war with the CPE and the GCL:

“The CGT, which is abandoning parliamentarian reformism, is very active. It led dozens of strikes, but not only in foreign plants; Egyptian plants were not spared. Factory occupations, which streetcar and railway workers had exemplified before the war, were frequent. Egyptian capitalists could not remain indifferent to this movement, whose organisation became even more clearly defined with the creation of Misr Bank in 1920 and the Federation of Industries in 1922. Neither could the Wafd, triumphantly swept to power by the electorate and installed in government on January 28, 1924, ignore these developments. The first step was to forcibly ban the congress convened for February 23 and 24, 1924 in Alexandria by the CPE. The second was to use factory occupations to try to break up both the GCL and the CPE. The evacuation of factories was achieved on February 25 at the Egoline oil company in Alexandria, and again, but with greater difficulty, on March 3 and 4 at the Abu Sheib factories in Alexandria. Nonetheless, from the beginning of March, this was the pretext for a wave of arrests of communist and trade union leaders, all Egyptian, as well as searches and seizures of documents. Between October 10, 1923 and March 1, 1924, the militants were accused of disseminating revolutionary ideas contrary to the Constitution, inciting crime and aggression against the bosses. Their trial took place in September 1924, and several of them received heavy sentences”. (J. Couland, Ibid.)

This repressive episode marked a turning point in the balance of power between the working class and the bourgeoisie, in favor of the latter, both inside and outside the country. In fact, in Egypt itself, the Egyptian proletariat's combativeness in reaction to the deterioration of its living conditions led it to unite against Watani /Wafd, on the one hand, and the entire Egyptian and British bourgeoisie, on the other, who were under attack from strikes during this period. Outside the country, the counter-revolution was already underway by 1924. From then on, the Egyptian working class was unable to rely on truly proletarian organisations, or on the Third International, and thus suffered defeat after defeat throughout the counter-revolutionary period, both under British colonial rule and under the Egyptian bourgeoisie, which became ‘independent’ in 1922.

The Third International and the Egyptian workers' movement in the 1920s

As we have seen, the emerging vanguard of the Egyptian working class, struggling in the face of very difficult living conditions, eventually drew closer to the international labour movement by joining the Communist International, breaking with the reformist and nationalist elements of the old party (SPE). At a time when the working class, faced with very difficult living conditions, was beginning to forge a class identity, the Third International was taking an opportunist course, particularly in its policy towards the new communist parties of the East and Middle East. The Baku Congress was a tragic illustration of this, marking a clear retreat from the spirit of proletarian internationalism and, as a result, a blatant advance in opportunism, as the following quotation illustrates:

“The fine speeches of the congress and the declarations of solidarity between the European proletariat and the peasants of the East, despite much that was correct about the need for soviets and revolution, were not enough to hide the opportunist course towards indiscriminate support for nationalist movements: ‘We appeal, comrades, to the warlike sentiments that animated the peoples of the East in the past, when these peoples, led by their great conquerors, advanced on Europe. We know, Comrades, that our enemies will say that we are appealing to the memory of Genghis Khan and the great conquering caliphs of Islam. But we are convinced that yesterday (at the congress) you pulled out your knives and revolvers, not to conquer, not to turn Europe into a graveyard. You brandished them, together with workers from all over the world, with the aim of creating a new civilisation, that of the free worker’ (Radek's words). The congress manifesto concludes with an injunction to the peoples of the East to join ‘the first real holy war, under the red banner of the Communist International’” (Communists and the National Question, Part 3: The Debate during the Revolutionary Wave and the Lessons for Today [127]. International Review no. 42).

This call from Baku for the whole of the East to ‘stand up as one’ under the banner of the International brought pan-Islamism, which had been thrown out the door at the Second Congress of the International, back in through the window, preceded by the ‘Treaty of Friendship and Fraternity’ signed in 1921 between the USSR and Turkey, while Mustapha Kemal's government was massacring Turkish communists (Communists and the National Question, Part 3: The Debate during the Revolutionary Wave and the Lessons for Today [127]., International Review no. 42).

The consequences were dramatic: “The results of all this opportunism were fatal for the workers’ movement. With the world revolution sinking into deeper and deeper defeat, and the proletariat in Russia exhausted and decimated by famine and civil war, the Communist International more and more became the foreign policy instrument of the Bolsheviks, who found themselves in the role of managers of Russian capital. From being a serious error within the workers’ movement, the policy of support for national liberation struggles was transformed by the late 1920s into the imperialist strategy of a capitalist power.” (Communists and the National Question, Part 3: The Debate during the Revolutionary Wave and the Lessons for Today [127]., International Review no. 42).

Indeed, in the years following the Baku Congress and throughout the 1930s, the Third International applied harmful and contradictory orientations towards the colonies, always inspired by the defense of the strategic interests of Russian imperialism. Clearly, following this congress, the general orientation was: “In the colonies and semi-colonies, the communist parties must orient themselves towards the dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry, which is transformed into the dictatorship of the working class. Communist parties must by all means inculcate in the masses the idea of organising peasant soviets”. (Theses of the VIth Congress of the Comintern 1928, quoted by René Gallissot in Les Tâches des communistes dans le Mouvement national [128], in La Correspondance internationale, no. 1, January 4, 1933.

“In view of the fact that the U.S.S.R. is the only fatherland of the international proletariat, the principal bulwark of its achievements and the most important factor for its international emancipation, the international proletariat must on its part facilitate the success of the work of socialist construction in the U.S.S.R., and defend it against the attacks of the capitalist Powers by all the means in its power.” The programme of the Communist International [129], Comintern Sixth Congress 1928)

“In various Arab countries, the working class has played and is already playing an ever-increasing role in the struggle for national liberation (Egypt, Palestine, Iraq, Algeria, Tunisia, etc.). In various countries, working-class trade union organisations are already being formed or are re-establishing themselves after their destruction, although for the most part they are in the hands of national-reformists. Workers' strikes and demonstrations, the active participation of the working masses in the struggle against imperialism, certain layers of the working class distancing themselves from the national-reformists, all this signals that the young Arab working class has entered the path of struggle to fulfill its historic role in the anti-imperialist and agrarian revolution, in the struggle for national unityC[3].

This opportunist course was none other than the Stalinist counter-revolution on the march in the East. It was in this context, in the aftermath of the Baku Congress, that the working class in Egypt had to fight to defend its class interests, its vanguard being massacred by the ruling nationalists of Wafd, without any reaction from the CI, which was already trapped by its policy of support for Eastern and Arab nationalist movements.

But Stalin was forced to change his line as many Arab nationalist parties escaped his control, turning increasingly towards rival imperialist powers (England, France). From then on, the CI denounced ‘national-reformism’ in the ranks of the Arab bourgeoisie, embodied in particular by the Wafd party. The latter was then denounced by the CI for ‘treason’, for having suppressed the slogan “(national) independence”!

In fact, this ‘directive’ from the Third International was addressed to the Egyptian CP and the ‘Red Syndicate’, ordering them to implement this ‘umpteenth new orientation’ in order to wrest control of the Egyptian unions from the ‘national’ traitors allied with ‘English imperialism’.

The intersecting impact of the nationalism relayed by the degenerating Communist International

This situation also confirms that the unions had become veritable instruments for the control of the working-class, in the service of the bourgeoisie. In other words, between the Baku Congress and the end of the Second World War, the Egyptian working class, though combative, was literally disoriented, tossed about and framed by the counter-revolutionary forces of Stalinism and Egyptian nationalism.

The degenerating C.I. now placed itself exclusively at the service of Russian imperialism, supporting and disseminating its imperialist projects and policies and slogans such as ‘class against class’, ‘four-class front’ and so on. The consequences of this orientation, and of Stalinist counter-revolution in general, weighed deeply and durably on the working class, in Egypt and throughout the world, adding to the poison of the nationalism of ‘national liberation’ struggles which infected working-class struggles for years. The Egyptian proletariat is highly illustrative of such a situation, its ranks having been infested since the mid-1920s by a large number of Stalinist agents charged with applying counter-revolutionary orientations. This same ‘doctrine’ was applied to the letter by the Egyptian Stalinists, who systematically described every strike movement of any size in a ‘foreign’ (European-run) company during the colonial period as a ‘national liberation’ (or ‘anti-imperialist’) struggle.

For their part, from the 1920s/1930s, Wafd and Watani, with their strategy of winning power, encouraged workers to strike above all against foreign companies established in Egypt, while trying to spare national companies, with varying degrees of success depending on the episode. More significant is the fact that some historians have not hesitated to equate the strike movements that took place at the same time as the nationalist uprisings against British occupation (1882, 1919 and 1922) with ‘national liberation’ struggles. In fact, the workers were first and foremost fighting against the deterioration of their working and living conditions, before their struggle was immediately diverted towards nationalist demands, not without resistance from some of them.

Since the creation of the first (recognised) trade union by railway workers in 1911, the bourgeoisie has always sought to (and often succeeded in) effectively controlling the working class to divert it from its terrain as an exploited and revolutionary class. Thus, in the immediate aftermath of its creation in 1907, the Watani party penetrated the ranks of the working class, gaining acceptance as a nationalist and ‘labour’ party by relying on the trade unions, before being joined in this endeavor by other bourgeois organisations (liberal, Islamist, Stalinist). Yet, despite the bourgeoisie's determination to prevent it from struggling on its own class terrain, the working class continued to fight, albeit with enormous difficulty. This is what we will see in the next part of this article.

Lassou (January 2025)

[1] Jacques Couland, ‘Regards sur l’histoire syndicale [128] et ouvrière égyptienne (1899-1952) [128]’, in René Gallissot, Mouvement ouvrier, communisme et nationalismes dans le monde arabe, Éditions ouvrières, Paris 1978.

[2] Ilham Khuri-Makdisi: ‘Intellectuels, militants et travailleurs: La construction de la gauche en Égypte, 1870-1914 [130]’, Cahiers d’histoire, Revue d’histoire critique, 105-106, 2008.

[3] ‘Les Tâches des communistes dans le Mouvement national’, dans La Correspondance internationale, n°1, 4 January 1933, published by René Gallissot, Ibid. Also published, under the name Annexe [128], on page 49, in René Gallissot, Mouvement ouvrier, communisme et nationalismes dans le monde arabe, Éditions ouvrières, Paris 1978.

 

In the first part of this article we argued that the Zionist movement was a false solution to the revival of anti-Semitism in the late 19th century. False because, in contrast to the proletarian riposte to  anti-Semitism and all forms of racism as advocated by revolutionaries like Lenin and Rosa Luxemburg, it was a bourgeois nationalist movement that arose at a moment in which world capitalism was heading rapidly towards the epoch of decadence in which the nation state, in Trotsky’s words in 1916, had “outgrown itself as a framework for the development of the productive forces…”[1] And as Rosa Luxemburg explained in her Junius Pamphlet (1915), the concrete outcome of this historic change was that, in the new period, the nation had become “but a cloak that covers imperialist desires”: new nations could only come into being as pawns of bigger imperialist powers, while they themselves were compelled to develop their own imperialist ambitions and to oppress those national groupings that stood in the way.  We showed that, from the beginning, Zionism could only become a serious political force by hitching its wagon to whichever imperialist power saw a benefit to themselves in the formation of a “Jewish national home” in Palestine, while Zionism’s colonial attitudes to the population already living there already opened the door to the policy of exclusion and ethnic cleansing which came to fruition in 1948 and is reaching its terrible climax in Gaza today.  In this second article we will trace the main stages in this process, but in doing so we will show that, just as Zionism has clearly revealed itself as a cloak for imperialist desires, the Arab nationalist response to Zionism, whether in its secular or religious forms, is no less caught up in the deadly trap of inter-imperialist competition.     

In the wake of the Balfour Declaration

Prior to the First World War the question of which imperialist power would be most interested in promoting the Zionist project remained open: Theodore Herzl’s initial search for a sponsor took him to the German Kaiser and his Ottoman allies. But the battle lines drawn up for the war made it clear that it would be Britain that had most to gain from the formation of a “little loyal Jewish Ulster” in the Middle East, even if the British were simultaneously making all kinds of promises about future independent statehood to the Arab leaders they needed to recruit in their struggle against the decaying Ottoman Empire, which had thrown in its lot with Germany and the Central Powers. The Zionist leader and accomplished diplomat Chaim Weizmann had become increasingly influential in the highest echelons of British government and his labours were rewarded by the publication of the (in)famous Balfour Declaration in November 1917. The Declaration stated that “His Majesty's Government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this object” while at the same time insisting that “it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine”.

The Balfour Declaration seemed to be a vindication of the methods of the mainstream of the Zionist movement, essentially supported by the Zionist left, which considered it necessary to follow this mainstream until the achievement of a Jewish homeland had ‘normalised’ class relations among the Jewish population.[2] For these currents, the agreement with British imperialism confirmed the necessity for developing diplomatic and political relations with the dominant powers of the region, while the gathering of the Jews in Palestine would be achieved largely with the financial support of Jewish capitalists in the Diaspora and of institutions such as the Jewish National Fund, the Palestine Jewish Colonisation Association, and the Jewish Colonial Trust. Land would be obtained through the piecemeal purchase of land from the absentee Arab landlords – a ‘peaceful’ and ‘legal’ way of expropriating the poor fellahin and paving the way to setting up Jewish towns and agricultural enterprises as nuclei of the future Jewish state.

But the war had also stimulated the growth of Arab nationalism, and by 1920 the first violent reactions to increased Jewish immigration and Britain’s announcement of its plan for a Jewish national home took shape in the so-called “Nabi Musa riots”[3] – essentially a pogrom against Jews in Jerusalem. These events in turn gave rise to a new “Revisionist” Zionism led by Vladimir Jabotinsky, who had taken up arms alongside the British forces in suppressing the riots. 

In our article More than a century of conflict in Israel/Palestine [19] (International Review 172) we pointed out that Jabotinsky represented a right-wing shift in Zionism which didn’t hesitate to align itself with the extremely anti-Semitic regime in Poland (one of a number of examples of collaboration between the anti-Semitic project of expelling the Jews from Europe and the Zionist willingness to channel these policies towards emigration to Palestine). Although Jabotinsky himself often derided Mussolini’s fascism, his movement undoubtedly sprang from a common root – the development of a particularly decadent and totalitarian form of nationalism whose growth was accelerated by the defeat of the proletarian revolution. This was illustrated by the emergence within Revisionism of the openly fascist Birionim faction and later on the Lehi group around Abraham Stern, who at the beginning of World War Two was prepared to enter into talks with the Nazi regime about forming an anti-British alliance[4]. Jabotinsky himself increasingly saw the British occupiers of Palestine after World War One as the main obstacle to the formation of a Jewish state.

Although Jabotinsky always maintained that the Arab population would be guaranteed equal rights in his plan for a Jewish state, it was the experience of the 1920 anti-Jewish riots which led him to abandon the Herzl/Weizmann dream of a peaceful process of Jewish immigration. Jabotinsky had always been opposed to the ideas of class struggle and socialism, and thus to the alternative dream of the Zionist left: a new kind of colonisation process that would somehow involve the development of a fraternal alliance between Jewish and Arab workers. In 1923, Jabotinsky published his essay The Iron Wall, which demanded a Jewish state not only on the West Bank of the Jordan, but also on the East Bank, which the British prohibited.  In his view, such a state could only be formed through military struggle: “Zionist colonisation must either stop, or else proceed regardless of the native population. Which means that it can proceed and develop only under the protection of a power that is independent of the native population – behind an iron wall, which the native population cannot breach”.

Although the left and centre Zionists strongly criticised Jabotinsky’s position, denouncing him as a fascist, what is so striking about The Iron Wall is that it precisely anticipates the real evolution of the entire Zionist movement,  from the liberal and left factions which dominated it in the first few decades after 1917 to the right which has tightened its grip over the state of Israel from the 1970s on: the recognition that a Jewish state could only be formed and maintained through the use of military force. The Zionist left, including its ‘marxist’ wing around Hashomer Hazair and Mapam, would in fact become the most essential component of the military apparatus of the pre-state Jewish Yishuv, the Haganah; the ‘socialist’ kibbutzim in particular would play a key role as military outposts and suppliers of elite troops for the Haganah. Even the term “Iron Wall” has a prescient ring about it with the building of the Security Wall (also known as the Apartheid Wall…) around Israel’s post-1967 borders in the early 2000s. And of course, even if Jabotinsky can sound like a liberal in comparison to his contemporary heirs on the Israeli far right, the advocates of a Greater Israel “from the river to the sea”, and the unapologetic resort to unrestrained military force, now openly combined with the call for the “relocation” of the Palestinian Arab population of Gaza and the West Bank, have more and more moved to the mainstream in Zionist politics.  This is testimony to Jabotinsky’s harsh realism but above all to the inevitably imperialist and militaristic character, not only of Zionism, but of all national movements in this epoch. 

1936: The dead-end of “anti-imperialist revolt” and the internationalist response

The defeat of the revolutionary wave in Russia and Europe spawned a new surge in anti-Semitism, especially in Germany with the infamous theory of the “stab in the back” by a cabal of communists and Jews, supposedly to blame for Germany’s military collapse. A number of European countries began to adopt anti-Semitic legislation, prefiguring the racial laws in Germany under the Nazis. Feeling increasingly threatened, there was a steady exodus of Jews from Europe, which accelerated considerably after the Nazi seizure of power in 1933. By no means all of the exiles went to Palestine, but there was a significant increase in Jewish immigration to the Yishuv. In turn, this exacerbated tensions between Jews and Arabs. The increased purchase of land from the Arab landlords or “effendi” by the Zionist institutions resulted in the dispossession of the already impoverished Arab peasants or fellahin; the impact of the world economic crisis in Palestine in the early 30s could only increase their economic woes. All these ingredients were to explode in 1929 in a new and more widespread outbreak of inter-communal violence, sparked off by disputes over access to the principal religious sites in Jerusalem, and taking the form of bloody anti-Jewish pogroms in Jerusalem, Hebron, Safed and elsewhere, but also of equally brutal counter-attacks by Jewish mobs. There were hundreds of murders on both sides. But these developments were merely a preface to the “Great Arab Revolt” of 1936.

Once again, events began with an outbreak of pogromist violence, this time sparked off by the murder of two Jews by an Islamic fundamentalist group, the Qassemites, and followed by indiscriminate reprisals against Arabs, including the bombing of public places by Jabotinsky’s Irgun, which had split off from the Haganah in 1931. These bloody terrorist actions were described by the Irgun as the policy of “active defence” of the Jewish population. But this time the Arab uprising was much more widespread than in 1929, taking the form of a general strike in Jerusalem and other urban centres and, later on, of guerilla warfare in the rural areas. However, even if profound economic and social misery fuelled the anger of the Arab masses, at no point did the general strike assume a proletarian character. This was not simply because it mobilised workers alongside shopkeepers and other small property owners, but above all because its demands were entirely framed by nationalism, calling for a halt to Jewish immigration and independence from the British. From the start, the leadership of the movement was in the hands of bourgeois nationalist parties, even though these parties, largely based on old clan rivalries, often clashed violently with each other over who should direct the movement (while other Palestinian factions sided with the British).  The reaction of the British authorities was extremely brutal, inflicting murderous forms of collective punishment on villages suspected of participating in the movement. The Haganah and specially appointed Jewish police squads acted alongside the British military in suppressing the revolt.  By the end of the uprising in March 1939, more than 5,000 Arabs, 400 Jews and 200 British had lost their lives.

The UK-based Socialist Workers Party describes the revolt as the “First Intifada” and claims it as an example of resistance against British imperialism, with a strong social-revolutionary element: 

“The revolt shifted to the countryside where through the winter of 1937 and into 1938 the rebels proceeded to take control, driving the British out. With the countryside in their hands, the rebels began moving into the towns and cities. By October 1938, they had control of Jaffa, Gaza, Bethlehem, Ramallah and the Old City of Jerusalem. This was a massive popular movement with local committees taking control of much of the country and ruling in the interests, not of the Palestinian rich, but of the ordinary people”[5]. 

But let’s not forget that the SWP, like many other Trotskyists, also saw the Hamas slaughter of October 7 as part of the ‘resistance’ against the oppression of the Palestinians[6]. In marked contrast to the SWP’s presentation of the 1936 movement,  Nathan Weinstock, in his authoritative book Zionism: False Messiah, expressed the view that in the end “the anti-imperialist struggle had been diverted into an inter-communal conflict and deformed with a venture in support of fascism. (The Mufti had grown closer and closer to the Nazis)”[7]. At this point Weinstock was a member of the Trotskyist 4th International.

Weinstock concludes from this that the “the evolution of the Arab revolt appears as a negative confirmation of the theory of permanent revolution”. In other words, in semi-colonial countries, “democratic” tasks such as national independence could no longer be led by a very feeble bourgeoisie but could only be implemented by the proletariat once it had established its own dictatorship. This theory, whose essential components were developed by Trotsky in the early 1900s, was in its origins a genuine attempt to resolve the dilemmas posed in a period in which the ascendant phase of capitalism was coming to an end but without it being totally clear that capitalism as a world system was about to enter its epoch of decline, thus rendering obsolete all the “democratic” tasks of the previous period. Thus, the primary task of the victorious proletariat in any one part of the world is not to push through the vestiges of a bourgeois revolution within its own borders but to help spread the revolution across the world as quickly as possible, or else face isolation and death.

The corollary of this is that, in the decadent period, in which the entire globe is dominated by imperialism, there are no more “anti-imperialist” movements, but only shifting alliances on an overarching inter-imperialist chessboard. Weinstock’s remark about the Mufti – the title of a high-ranking cleric in charge of the Muslim holy places in Jerusalem, in this case Amin Al Husseini, who was notoriously friendly with Hitler and his regime – points to a wider reality: that in opposing British imperialism Palestinian nationalism in the 1930s was compelled to ally itself with Britain’s main rivals, Germany and Italy. The Italian Fraction of the Communist Left, in an article written in response to the 1936 general strike, already pointed to the inter-imperialist rivalries at work in the region: “Nobody can deny that fascism has a great interest in fanning the flames. Italian imperialism has never hidden its designs towards the Near-East, that's to say its desire to substitute itself for the mandatory powers in Palestine and Syria”[8]. This pattern could only repeat itself in subsequent history. As our introduction to the Bilan article points out “Bilan shows that when Arab nationalism entered into open conflict with the British, this merely opened the door to the ambitions of Italian (and also German) imperialism; and from our vantage point, we can see that the Palestinian bourgeoisie would later turn to the Russian bloc, and then France and other European powers, in its conflicts with the USA”.

In 1936, faced with the capitulation of former internationalists to the pressure of anti-fascist ideology, the comrades of Bilan acknowledged the “isolation of our Fraction” that had been seriously intensified by the war in Spain. This isolation can also be applied to the problems posed by the conflicts in Palestine: the Bilan article is one of the very few contemporary internationalist statements about the situation there. However, it is worth mentioning the articles written by Walter Auerbach, who had been involved in a left communist circle in Germany which included Karl Korsch[9]. Auerbach fled Germany in 1934 and lived for a few years in Palestine before settling in the USA, where he worked with the council communist group around Paul Mattick. Auerbach’s articles are of interest in showing how the Zionist colonisation of Palestine, by introducing or developing capitalist relations of production, had resulted in the dispossession of the fellahin and thus in the intensification of their social discontent. They also insist that the ultra-nationalist and even fascist elements within Zionism were bound to become an increasingly dominant element within it.  But above all the articles remain on a clear internationalist terrain. In response to the events of 1936, the article entitled “The land of promise: report from Palestine” says:

“The sharpening of the Arab-Jewish relations, beginning in April 1936, which led to guerilla warfare and to an Arab strike, covered over the social unrest of the working class with a lively and warlike national sentiment. On both sides the masses were organized for ‘self-protection and defence’. This self-protection was participated in, on the Jewish side, by the members of all the organizations. The various parties in their appeals laid the blame for the clashes either upon the Arabs or else on the competing parties. It is only to be observed that in this situation not a single organization sought to conduct the struggle against its own bourgeoisie”.

Bordiga is credited with the motto “The worst product of fascism in anti-fascism”: the extremely brutal nature of fascism, itself preaching the unity of all truly ‘national’ classes, tends to give rise to an opposition which in turn aims to subordinate working class interests to those of a broad Popular Front, as happened in France and Spain in the 1930s. In either case, the working class is pushed into abandoning its class identity and independence in favour of this or that faction of the bourgeoisie. Ultimately, fascism and anti-fascism are ideologies for dragooning the proletariat into imperialist war.

We can equally say that the worst product of Zionism is anti-Zionism. The starting point of Zionism is that Jewish workers can only fight anti-Semitism by allying themselves with the Jewish bourgeoisie or surrendering their class interests in the name of national construction. Anti-Zionism, produced by the harsh consequences of this national construction in Palestine, also starts with an all-class alliance of “Arabs”, “Palestinians” or “Muslims”, which in practice can only mean the domination of the indigenous bourgeoisie and, behind that, the hegemony of world imperialism. The deadly cycle of inter-communal violence we saw in 1929 and 1936 was utterly inimical to the development of class solidarity between Jewish and Arab proletarians and this has remained true ever since.  

From Shoah…

“….the mere tendency towards imperialism of itself takes forms which make the final phase of capitalism a period of catastrophe” (Rosa Luxemburg, The Accumulation of Capital, chapter 31)

The war in Spain, which unfolded at the same time as the revolt in Palestine, was a much clearer indication of the essential drama of the time. The crushing of the Spanish proletariat by the forces of fascism and the ‘democratic Republic’ completed the world-wide defeat of the working class and opened the door to a new world war which – as the Communist International had predicted in its early proclamations – would far exceed the first in plumbing the depths of barbarity, above all in the far greater toll it took of civilian life. Already the forced population transfers and gulags implemented by the Stalinist regime in Russia gave a foretaste of the deadly revenge of the counter-revolution against a defeated working class, while the war itself illustrated the determination of capital to maintain its obsolete system even at the cost of spreading destruction and mass murder across the planet. The Nazi regime’s systematic programme of extermination of Jews and other minorities such as Gypsies or the disabled was certainly the product of a qualitatively new level of calculated and yet utterly irrational inhumanity; but this Shoah, this catastrophe which fell on the Jews of Europe, can only be understood as part of a greater catastrophe, a wider Holocaust which was the war itself.  Auschwitz and Dachau cannot be separated from the razing of Warsaw after the uprisings of 1943 and 1944, or the millions of Russian corpses left in the wake of Germany’s invasion of the USSR; but neither can these crimes of Nazism be disconnected from the Allied terror bombing of Hamburg, Dresden, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, or the deadly famine imposed on the masses of Bengal by the British under Churchill’s direction in 1943.

Furthermore, no matter how much the democracies used the evident savagery of Nazism as an alibi for their own crimes, they were largely complicit in the capacity of the Hitler regime to carry through its “Final Solution” to the Jewish question. In an article based on a review of the film The Pianist[10], we gave several examples of this complicity: the Bermuda conference on the refugee question organised by the USA and Britain in April 1943, which took place at the exact same moment as the Warsaw ghetto uprising, decided that there would be no opening of the doors to the huge mass of desperate people facing starvation and annihilation in Europe. The same article also refers to the story of the Hungarian Joel Brandt who came to the Allies with an offer to exchange a million Jews for 10,000 trucks: “as the PCI’s pamphlet[11] puts it, ‘Not only the Jews but the SS as well were taken in by the humanitarian propaganda of the Allies! The Allies didn’t want this 1 million Jews. Not for 10,000 lorries, not for 5,000, not even for nothing!’ Similar offers from Romania and Bulgaria were also rejected. In Roosevelt’s words ‘transporting so many people would disorganise the war effort’”

The official Zionist movement also played its part in this complicity, because they systematically opposed “refugeeism”, ie projects aimed at saving European Jews by allowing them to pass through the borders of countries other than Palestine. The keynote for this policy had already been sounded by Ben Gurion, the ‘Labour’ leader of the Yishuv, before the war:

“If the Jews are faced with a choice between the refugee problem and rescuing Jews from concentration camps on the one hand, and aid for the national museum in Palestine on the other, the Jewish sense of pity will prevail and our people’s entire strength will be directed at aid for the refugees in the various countries. Zionism will vanish from the agenda and indeed not only world public opinion in England and America but also from Jewish public opinion. We are risking Zionism’s very existence if we allow the refugee problem to be separated from the Palestine problem.”[12]. Ben-Gurion’s true indifference to the suffering of the European Jews was even more explicit when he said on 7 December 1938 that “If I knew that it was possible to save all the children of Germany by transporting them to England, but only half of them by transporting them to Palestine, I would choose the second - because we face not only the reckoning of those children, but the historical reckoning of the Jewish people”.

Any idea of direct collaboration between Zionism and the Nazis is treated as an “anti-Semitic trope” in numerous western countries, although there are certainly well-documented cases, notably the Havara agreement in Germany in the early days of the Nazi regime, which enabled Jews who were prepared to emigrate to Palestine to retain a sizeable portion of their funds; in parallel to this, Zionist organisations were allowed to operate legally under the Nazis, since both had a common interest in achieving a ‘Jew-free’ Germany as long as Jewish emigrants went to Palestine.  

This doesn’t contradict the fact that there have indeed been presentations of this kind of agreement which enter the realm of actual anti-Jewish conspiracy theory. The President of the present “Palestine Authority”, Mohamed Abbas, wrote a PhD thesis in the early 80s which can certainly be included in this category, since it makes the claim that the Zionists had exaggerated the number of Jews murdered by the Nazis in order to win sympathy for their cause, while at the same time Abbas casts doubt on the reality of the gas chambers[13].

However, collaboration between factions of the ruling class – even when they are nominally at war with each other – is a basic reality of capitalism and can take many forms. The willingness of warring nations to suspend hostilities and combine forces to crush the common enemy, the working class, when the misery of war provokes it to come out in defence of its own interests, was demonstrated during the Paris Commune of 1871 and again at the end of the First World War. And Winston Churchill, whose reputation as the greatest anti-Nazi of all time is more or less the officially recognised truth in Britain and elsewhere, did not hesitate to apply this policy in Italy in 1943 when he ordered a pause in the Allied invasion from the south to let the “Italians stew in their own juice” – a euphemism for allowing the Nazi power to crush the mass strikes of the workers in the industrial north.

What is certainly true is that the Zionist movement, and above all the state of Israel, have constantly used the experience of the Shoah, the spectre of the extermination of the Jews, to justify the most ruthless and destructive military and police actions against the Arab population of Palestine, and at the same time to assimilate all criticism of the Israeli state with anti-Semitism. But we will return, towards the end of this article, to the maze of ideological justifications and distortions developed by both (or all) sides in the current conflicts in Palestine.

To go back to the course of events set in motion by the war, the massacre of the Jews in Europe sped up immigration into Palestine, despite the desperate attempts of the British to keep it to a minimum, carrying out an extremely repressive policy which resulted in Jewish refugees being deported back to camps in Germany and to the tragedy of the Struma, a boat full of Jewish survivors which was denied entry to Palestine and, after being abandoned by the Turkish authorities, eventually sank in the Black Sea with nearly all on board. British repression provoked an outright war between the Mandate power and the Zionist militias, with the Irgun in particular leading the way in the use of terrorist tactics, such as the blowing up of the King David Hotel and the assassination of Swedish diplomatic mediator Count Bernadotte. The proposal to end the British mandate and partition Palestine between Arabs and Jews had already been made by the British Peel Commission in 1937, since the ‘Arab revolt’ and Zionist discontent had made it clear that the British Mandate was on its last legs; and now the two main powers emerging from the world war, the USA and USSR, saw it in the interest of their own future expansion to eliminate older colonial powers like Britain from the strategically vital Middle East region.  In 1947 both voted in the newly-formed UN for partition, while the USSR supplied the Yishuv with a large number of weapons via the Stalinist regime in Czechoslovakia. Having been largely suppressed by the Allies during the war itself, the truth about the Nazi concentration camps was now emerging and no doubt aroused much sympathy towards the plight of the millions of Jewish victims and survivors, and strengthened the determination of the Zionists to use all means at their disposal to achieve statehood. But the underlying dynamic towards the formation of the state of Israel derived from the post-war imperialist realignment and in particular the relegation of British imperialism to a purely secondary role in the new order.

…to Naqba

As with the question of the relations between the Nazis and the Zionists, the causes of the Naqba (which like Shoah, means catastrophe) are a historical and above all an ideological minefield. The “War of Independence” in 1948 ended with the flight of 750,000 Palestinian refugees from their homes and the expansion of the borders of the new state of Israel beyond the areas originally designated by the UN partition plan. According to the official Zionist version, the refugees fled because the Arab military alliance which launched its offensive against the fledgling Jewish state called on Palestinians to flee areas affected by the fighting in order to return once the Zionist project had been crushed. It’s no doubt true that the Arab forces, which were in reality poorly equipped and coordinated, made all kinds of grandiose claims about an impending victory and thus the possibility of the refugees returning rapidly to their homes. But subsequent research, including that of dissident Israeli historians like Ilan Pappe, has amassed a vast amount of evidence pointing to a systematic policy of terror by the new Israeli state against the Palestinian population, of mass expulsions and destruction of villages which justify the title of Pappe’s best-known work: The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine (2006).

The massacre at Deir Yassin, a village not far from Jerusalem, in April 1948 carried out principally by the Irgun and Lehi, and involving the cold-blooded killing of over 100 villagers, including women and children, is the most infamous atrocity of the 1948 conflict. It was actually condemned by the Jewish Agency for Palestine and the Haganah, who blamed it on the ‘dissident’ armed groups. Although some Israeli historians continue to deny that this was a massacre rather than a simple battle[14], it is generally presented as an exception which did not conform to the “high moral standards” of the Israeli defence forces (an excuse we hear again and again over the current assault on Gaza). In fact, Pappe’s book demonstrates convincingly that Deir Yassin was the rule rather than the exception, since many other Palestinian villages and neighbourhoods – Dawayima, Lydda, Safsaf, Sasa, entire districts of Haifa and Jaffa, to name a few - suffered from similar acts of terror and destruction, even if the number of victims in each one was not usually so high. The Irgun and Lehi were explicit about their motivation in attacking Deir Yassin: not only to gain control of a strategically important site, but above all to create feelings of panic in the entire Palestinian population and convince them that they had no future in the Jewish state. This and similar ‘exemplary’ attacks on Palestinian villages certainly fulfilled this aim, accelerating the massive exodus of refugees who understandably feared that they were facing the same fate as the villagers of Deir Yassin.  Israeli historian Benny Morris wrote in The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem (1988) that Deir Yassin "probably had the most lasting effect of any single event of the war in precipitating the flight of Arab villagers from Palestine." Neither can responsibility for the massacre be laid at the feet of the right-wing gangs alone. The Haganah, including elite units from what is known as the Palmach, provided support for the action and did nothing to stop the slaughter of civilians[15]. And away from the front, Ben Gurion and the leadership of the new state were coordinating all the military actions aimed at ‘neutralising’ the areas inhabited by Arabs and of widening the boundaries of the Jewish state.

There has been much argument about the degree to which there was a coordinated plan to expel as many Arabs as possible beyond these boundaries, often centred around the so-called “Plan Dalet” which presented itself as a strategy for the defence of the Jewish state but which certainly involved precisely the kind of ‘offensive’ actions against areas inhabited by Palestinian Arabs that took place before and during the invasion by the Arab armies. But the fact that the mass exodus of Palestinian Aabs in 1948 coincided exactly with the interests of the Zionist state is surely verified by the fact that so many of the destroyed villages (including Deir Yassin itself) immediately became Jewish settlements or disappeared under the trees of newly planted forests, and that the former residents have never been allowed to return.  

It is not accidental that the mass expulsion of the Palestinians coincided with the fearful inter-communal massacres that took place in India and Pakistan following another partition in the British empire, or that the war in ex-Yugoslavia in the first half of the 90s made the term “ethnic cleansing” a commonplace. The whole period of capitalist decadence, as Rosa Luxemburg predicted, has meant that nationalism – even, and perhaps especially, when it is the nationalism of a group that has suffered the most horrific persecution - can only achieve its ends by the further oppression of other ethnic groups or minorities. 

The Zionist state in the service of imperialism

The state of Israel was thus born into the original sin of the expulsion of a huge proportion of the Arab population of Palestine. Its claims to be “the only democracy in the Middle East” has always been contradicted by this simple reality: despite the fact that it granted the right to vote to those Arabs who remained in the original boundaries of the state of Israel, the “Jewish character of the state” can only be maintained as long as Arab citizens remain in a minority; and, in the same logic, since 1967 Israel has reigned over the Arab population of the West Bank with no intention of ever making them Israeli citizens. But this aside, the existence even of the purest bourgeois democracy has never meant an end to the exploitation and repression of the working class, and in Israel this also applies not only to Arab proletarians, but also to the Israeli Jewish workers, whose struggles for class demands always come up against the “iron wall” of the state trade union, the Histradut (see below). Externally, Israel’s declared commitment to democracy and even ‘socialism’, which were the preferred ideological justifications of the Zionist state up until the late 1980s, never prevented Israel from maintaining very close links, including the supply of military aid, to the most obviously ‘undemocratic’ and openly racist regimes like South Africa under apartheid and the murderous – but also anti-Semitic - Argentine junta after 1976. Above all, Israel was ever willing to further its own imperialist appetites in close collaboration with the dominant imperialism of the post-war period, the USA. Israel participated in the 1956 Suez adventure of the older imperialist powers Britain and France, but after that it knuckled down to being the gendarme of the US in the Middle East, notably in the wars of 1967 and 1973, which were in essence proxy wars between the US and USSR for domination of the region.

Since the 1980s, Israel has more and more come under the sway of right-wing governments which have largely abandoned the old democratic and socialist verbiage of the Zionist left. Under Begin, Sharon and above all Netanyahu, the justification for maintaining Israel as a militarist and expansionist power in its own right tends to rely almost exclusively on references to the Holocaust and the fight for Jewish survival in a sea of anti-Semitism and terrorism. And there has been a lot to justify, from facilitating the massacre of Palestinians in the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps in Lebanon by Falange militias in 1982 to the repeated reprisal bombings of Gaza (2008-2009, 2012, 2014, 2021) which were the predecessors of today’s all-out destruction. The irrational barbarism unfolding in front of our eyes in Gaza today retains its imperialist character, even if in the global atmosphere of ‘every man for himself’ Israel is no longer the reliable servant of US interests that it once was.

‘The Anti-Zionist Resistance’: apologies for a rival imperialist camp

The crimes of the Israeli state are widely chronicled in the publications of the left and far left of capital. Not so much with the repressive and reactionary policies of the Arab regimes and the guerilla gangs sponsored by them and by more global imperialist powers. In the 1948 conflict, the inter-communal massacres that had featured so strongly in 1929 and 1936 also made their appearance. In reprisal for Deir Yassin, a convoy heading towards the Hadassah Hospital in Jerusalem, guarded by the Haganah but mainly carrying doctors, nurses and medical supplies, was ambushed. Medical staff and patients were slaughtered as well as Haganah fighters. Such actions reveal the murderous intent of the Arab armies aiming to crush the new Zionist state. Meanwhile the Hashemite monarchy in Transjordan, following a backroom deal with the British, showed their deep concern for Palestinian statehood by annexing the West Bank and renaming itself simply as Jordan.  As in Egypt, Lebanon, Syria and elsewhere, the majority of Palestinian refugees who had fled to the West Bank were crammed into camps, kept in poverty, and used as an excuse for their conflict with Israel. Unsurprisingly, the misery inflicted on the refugee population not only by the Zionist regime that expelled them but also by their Arab hosts made them a highly volatile element. In the absence of a proletarian alternative, the Palestinian masses became the prey of armed nationalist gangs which tended to form a state within the state in the Arab countries, often linked to other regional powers as a proxy force: the case of Hezbollah in Lebanon being an obvious example.  In the 1970s and 80s, the growing power of the Palestine Liberation Organisation in Jordan and Lebanon led to bloody clashes between the state forces and guerilla gangs – the best-known examples being Black September in Jordan in 1970 and the mass murders in Sabra and Shatila refugee camps in Lebanon in 1982 (carried out by the Lebanese Falange with the active support of the Israeli army).

The left wing of capital is quite capable of denouncing the “reactionary Arab regimes” in the Middle East, of exposing their frequent repressive actions against the Palestinians, but this has not prevented Trotskyists, Maoists and even some anarchists from supporting the same regimes in their wars against Israel or the USA, whether by calling for the victory of Egypt and Syria in the 1973 war[16] or rallying to the defence of the “anti-imperialist” Saddam Hussein against the US in 1991 or 2003. But the speciality of the far left is support for the “Palestinian resistance”, and this has remained constant from the days when the PLO proposed replacing the Zionist regime with a “secular democratic state where Arabs and Jews enjoy equal rights” and the more leftist Popular Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine talked about the Hebrew nation’s right to self-determination, to today’s jihadist organisations like Hamas and Hezbollah which make no secret of their desire to “throw the Jews into the sea” as the Hezbollah leader Nasrallah once put it. And in fact the ‘marxist’ Palestinian Resistance in the 70s and 80s did not flinch from carrying out indiscriminate bombings in Israel and the murder of civilians, as in 1972 when the Black September group killed the 11 Israeli athletes they had taken hostage, or the Lod Airport massacre perpetrated in the same year by the Japanese Red Army on behalf of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. The use of such methods has never troubled the Trotskyists, often with the excuse used by the SWP after the Hamas raid of October 7 2023: “the Palestinian people have every right to respond in any way they choose to the violence that the Israeli state metes out to them every day”[17]

Neither has the left wing of capital been troubled by the fact that the ‘anti-imperialism’ of the Palestinian nationalist movements has from the very beginning meant the search for alliances with other imperialist powers whose sordid interests conflict with those of Israel or the USA.  From the Mufti’s efforts to gain support from Italian and German imperialism in the 30s, to Yasser Arafat courting the USSR or the PFLP’s George Habash looking to Mao’s China, and the “Axis of Resistance” that links Hamas and Hizbollah to Iran and the Houthis, not forgetting further ‘liberation’ groups directly set up by regimes like Syria and Iraq, Palestinian nationalism has never been an exception to the rule that makes national liberation impossible in the epoch of capitalist decadence, offering no more than the replacement of one imperialist master with another.

But within this continuity, there has also been an evolution, or rather, a further degeneration that corresponds to the advent of the final phase of capitalist decadence, the phase of decomposition, marked by a clear increase in irrationality both at the ideological and the military levels. The replacement of democratic and ‘socialist’ mystifications in the ideology of Palestinian nationalism by Islamic fundamentalism and overt anti-Semitism – the Hamas Charter makes extensive and direct use of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a pamhlet about the Jewish plot for global domination fabricated by the Tsarist secret police – reflects this irrationality at the level of thought and ideas. At the same time, the October 7 action, genocidal in its readiness to kill all Jews that came into its sights, but also suicidal in that it could only provoke a much more devastating genocide of Gaza itself, reveals the self-destructive, scorched Earth logic of all of today’s inter-imperialist conflicts.

And of course, the rise of Jihadism is exactly paralleled by the growing domination of Israeli politics by the ultra-religious Zionist right, which claims a God-given right to reduce Gaza to ruins, sends its goons to block the trickle of food supplies to Gaza, and aims to replace the entire Palestinian Arab population of Gaza and “Judea and Samaria” (the West Bank) with Jewish settlements. The religious right in Israel is the death’s head face of Zionism’s long-standing manipulation of the dreams of the Biblical prophets. But for marxists like Max Beer the best of the prophets were a product of the class struggle in the ancient world, and although their hopes for the future were rooted in a nostalgia for an earlier form of communism, they nevertheless looked forward to a world without Pharaohs and kings, and even to the unification of humanity beyond tribal divisions[18]. The call by the religious Zionists for the annihilation of Arab Gaza and the state enforcement of religious/ethnic divisions only shows how far these ancient dreams have been trampled in the mud under the reign of capital.

Finding the exit to the ideological maze

The weaponisation of the Holocaust and of anti-Semitism by the present government of Israel is increasingly overt. Any criticism of Israel’s policies in Gaza or the West Bank, even when it comes from respectable figures like Emmanuel Macron or Keir Starmer, is immediately assimilated with support for Hamas. The Trump regime in the US also sells itself as an intransigent opponent of anti-Semitism and uses this fable to push through its repressive policies against students and academics who have taken part in protests against the destruction of Gaza. Trump’s opposition to anti-Semitism is of course the purest hypocrisy. The “MAGA movement” has numerous links to a number of openly anti-Semitic, fascist-type groups, while its “pro-Israel” stance is largely fuelled by the evangelical Christian right, whose belief system “needs” the return of the Jews to Zion as a prelude to the return of Christ and Armageddon. What the evangelicals are usually less vocal about is their conviction that in the course of these Last Days the Jews will be offered the choice between acknowledging Christ - or death and the fires of hell.

And at the same time, the anti-Zionist left, despite its insistence that anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism are totally separate and the fact that many Jewish groups, both ‘socialist’ and ultra-religious, have taken part in demonstrations for “Free Palestine”, adds further grist to the right-wing mill by its congenital inability to denounce support for Hamas and thus for the outright Jew-hatred which is part of its DNA. Furthermore, when the right harps on about the increase of anti-Semitism since October 7, they don’t have to invent anything, because there has indeed been a growing number of attacks on Jews in Europe and the USA, including the murders and attempted murders that took place in America in May (Washington DC) and June (Boulder, Colorado) of 2025. The right and the Zionist establishment then exploit these events to the hilt, using them to justify more ruthless action by the Israeli state. And this in turn contributes to the further spread of anti-Semitism. In 1938, Trotsky warned that Jewish emigration to Palestine was no solution to the tide of anti-Semitism sweeping Europe and could indeed become a “bloody trap for several hundred thousand Jews”[19]. Today Israel has the potential of being a bloody trap for several million Jews; and at the same time the increasingly murderous policies carried out in its ‘defence’ has created a new variety of anti-Semitism which blames all Jews for the actions of the Israeli state.

This is a true ideological maze and no exit can be found by following the mystifications of the pro-Zionist right or the anti-Zionist left. The only way out of the maze is the uncompromising defence of the internationalist proletarian outlook, founded on the rejection of all forms of nationalism and all imperialist camps.

We have no illusions about how weak this tradition is in the Middle East. The international communist left, the only consistently internationalist political current, has never had any organised presence in Palestine, Israel or other parts of the region. Within Israel, for example, the best-known example of a political tendency opposed to the founding principles of the state, the Trotskyist Matzpen and its various offshoots, saw their internationalist duty in supporting one or another of the different Palestinian nationalist organisations, in particular the more leftist versions like the PDFLP. We have made it clear that supporting an ‘opposing’ form of nationalism has nothing in common with a real internationalist policy, which can only be based on the necessity for the unification of the class struggle across all national divisions.

Nevertheless, the class divide exists in Israel and Palestine and the rest of the Middle East just as in all other countries. Against the leftists who see the Israeli workers as no more than colons, as a privileged elite who benefit from the oppression of the Palestinians, we can point out that Israeli workers have launched numerous strikes in defence of their living standards – which are continually being eroded by the demands of the hugely bloated war economy – and frequently in open defiance of the Histadrut. The Israeli working class announced its participation in the international revival of struggles after 1968: in the strikes that erupted in 1969, they began to form action committees outside the official union. The strikes were spearheaded by the Ashdod dockworkers who were denounced as Al Fatah agents in the press.  In 1972, in response to the devaluation of the Israeli pound, and rejecting the Histadrut’s calls for sacrifices in the name of national defence, workers demonstrated for wage rises outside the union’s headquarters and fought pitched battles against the police. In the same year, in Egypt, especially Helwan, Port Said and Choubra, a wave of strikes and demonstrations broke out in reaction to price rises and shortages; as in Israel, this quickly led to confrontations with the police and many arrests. As in Israel, the workers began to form their own strike committees in opposition to the official unions. At the same time, the leftist students and Palestinian nationalists who began to participate in the workers’ demonstrations calling for the release of imprisoned strikers made “declarations of support for the Palestinian guerilla movement, with demands for the setting up of a war economy (including a wage freeze), and for the formation of a ‘popular militia’ to defend the ‘homeland’ against Zionist aggression…the complete antimony between class struggles and ‘national liberation wars’ in the imperialist epoch is highlighted by these events”[20]. In 2011, in the street demonstrations and occupations against welfare cuts and the high cost of living, slogans targeting Netanyahu, Mubarak and Assad as part of the common enemy were raised, while others pointed out that Arabs and Jews both suffered from the lack of decent housing. There were also efforts to develop discussions that went across the divide between Jews, Arabs and African refugees[21]. In 2006, thousands of state employees in Gaza came out on strike against the non-payment of wages by Hamas.

All these movements implicitly reveal the international essence of the class struggle, even if its expressions in this region have long been profoundly hampered by the hatreds fuelled by endless rounds of terrorism and massacre, and by the readiness of the different bourgeoisies to divert and stifle the slightest hint of opposition to inter-communal violence and war between states. In Gaza recently we have seen some street demonstrations calling for Hamas to step down and for an end to the war. Very soon afterwards it emerged that the Israeli government has been supporting and even arming certain clans and factions within Gaza to take control of these anti-Hamas sentiments. In Israel, a growing number of military reservists are not showing up for duty and a few of these have issued an appeal explaining why they are no longer willing to serve in the army. For the first time, small minorities are questioning the aims of the continuing war against Hamas – not only because it will inevitably reduce the possibility of any of the surviving hostages being released, but also because of the terrible suffering it is inflicting on the Palestinian population, which has been a taboo subject in the atmosphere of mass trauma created by October 7 and its deliberate manipulation by the Israeli state.  But the pacifist ideology that dominates the Israeli dissident movement will act as a further block on the emergence of any authentically revolutionary opposition to the war.

Nonetheless, this incipient asking of questions on both sides of the conflict shows that there is work to be done by internationalists to encourage it to break out of its pacifist and patriotic envelope. Certainly, we can only hope to reach very small minorities at the moment, and we understand that, given the level of ideological intoxication in Israel and Palestine, the most important steps towards a real break with nationalism will require the example, the inspiration, of new levels of class struggle in the central countries of capitalism.

Amos, August 2025

 

Our organisation, the International Communist Current, was founded in January 1975, just over half a century ago. Since then, the world has undergone major upheavals, and it is our responsibility to present the proletariat with an assessment of this period in order to determine what future lies in store for humanity. The prospects are particularly bleak. This current grim state of affairs is leading to widespread suffering across the world population, which explains in particular the steady increase in the consumption of drugs of all kinds and the rise in suicides, including among children. Even the supreme authorities of the global bourgeoisie, from the United Nations to the Davos Forum, which every January brings together the world's leading economic figures, are forced to admit the seriousness of the scourges that are being afflicted on humanity and increasingly threaten its future.

The 2020s have seen a brutal acceleration in the deterioration of the world situation, with an accumulation of disasters - floods and fires linked to climate change and an acceleration in the destruction of life, with a pandemic that has killed more than 20 million human beings and the outbreak of new and increasingly deadly wars in Ukraine, Gaza and Africa, particularly in Sudan, Congo and Ethiopia. This global chaos reached a new stage in January 2025 with the return to power of a sinister showman, Donald Trump, whose ambition is to play with the world like Charlie Chaplin playing with an Earth-shaped balloon in his film The Great Dictator. 

Therefore, this Manifesto is justified not only with our organisation having now existed for a half-century, but also because we are facing an extremely serious historical situation: the capitalist system that dominates the planet is inexorably leading human society towards its destruction. Faced with this unthinkable prospect, it is up to those who are fighting for the revolutionary overthrow of this system, the communists, to put forward historical, political and theoretical arguments in order to arm the only force in society capable of carrying out this revolution: the world proletariat. Because, yes, another society is possible!

 

World communist revolution or the destruction of humanity

The end of the world! This fear was present during the four decades of the ‘Cold War’ between the United States and the ‘Soviet’ Union and their respective allies. These two major powers had accumulated enough nuclear weapons to destroy all human life on Earth several times over, and their constant conflicts through their vassal states raised fears that these conflicts would lead to a direct confrontation between the two giants, ultimately resulting in the use of these terrifying weapons. To convey this threat of death hanging over the whole of humanity, in 1947 the University of Chicago created an Apocalypse Clock on which midnight represents the end of the world.

But after 1989, which saw the collapse of one of the two blocs, one of which called itself ‘socialist’, we saw a profusion of talk about ‘peace’ and ‘prosperity’ from world leaders, journalists and ‘experts’ who were appearing on television every night to share their prejudices, incompetence and lies. The then US President George Bush Sr., as chief liar, even promised in 1990 an era of peace based on a “new world order, where the rule of law would replace the law of the jungle and where the strong will respect the rights of the weak”. (Speech to the United States Congress, 11 September 1990).

Today, these same figures are giving us very different speeches, aware that they would make themselves look completely ridiculous if they continued to display the optimism of previous decades. For it is no longer a secret that the world is in a very bad state, and the realisation that it is heading towards destruction is once again becoming increasingly prevalent in society, particularly among the younger generations. The primary cause of this anxiety is, of course, the degradation of the environment, which is not a future prospect but already a reality today. This destruction does not only take the form of the climate crisis with its ‘extreme events’ such as floods, storms, heatwaves, droughts leading to desertification and fires on an unprecedented scale. It is also living organisms that are threatened with extinction, with the accelerated disappearance of species, particularly plants and animals. It is the poisoning of the air, water and food, and the growing threat of pandemics resulting from the destruction of natural environments, pandemics that could make the Covid pandemic of the early 2020s seem a minor issue in comparison. And, as if these disasters were not enough to cause enough anxiety, we now have the proliferation of increasingly deadly wars, with horrific scenes of battlefield devastation and emaciated children in Gaza and Sudan. These images will remind older people of the terrible famine that struck Biafra during the war there in the late 1960s, which claimed two million lives.

The end of the Cold War four decades ago did not mean the end of wars. On the contrary, the collapse of the discipline imposed on their vassals by the two superpowers opened the door to a proliferation of particularly deadly conflicts (several hundred thousand deaths in Iraq during the wars of 1991 and 2003, for example). However, these conflicts were no longer part of the antagonism between the Eastern and Western blocs, and for much of this period there was a significant reduction in military spending, particularly by the major powers. This is no longer the case today: even though we have not seen the formation of new blocs which could be a prelude to a third world war, military spending has risen dramatically. And the weapons that are once again being stockpiled are made to be used, as we are seeing right now in Ukraine, Lebanon, Gaza and Iran. The well-known saying, ‘If you want peace, prepare for war’, which world leaders insistently repeat to us today, has always proved to be false. The more weapons there are, the more deadly the wars that are inevitable in a capitalist system in crisis will be, spreading misery, destruction, famine and death on an ever-increasing scale. And one of the characteristics of the global situation since the early 2020s is that the calamities befalling the world tend to coalesce more and more, feeding and stimulating each other in a kind of infernal vortex.

For example, the melting of ice caps resulting from global warming further accentuates this warming, since this large body of ice has served to reflect the sun’s rays back rather than converting them into heat.

Similarly, climate change and wars are causing more and more famines, leading to increasing emigration to the most developed countries. And this immigration is fuelling the rise of xenophobic populism in these countries and the rise to power of political forces that can only make the situation worse. This is particularly true in economic terms, as can be seen with Trump's measures on trade, in which the imposed tariffs are further exacerbating the instability of the global market and the capitalist economy as a whole, including in the United States. We could review all the crises and disasters that are befalling the world to see how they are all different manifestations of a generalised chaos that is increasingly beyond the control of the world's leaders and is leading humanity towards destruction. Since 28 January 2025, the Doomsday Clock in Chicago has been set at 23:58 hrs,:31 secs, the closest it has ever been to midnight.

Faced with the unfolding catastrophe and the growing threat of humanity's destruction, many people, particularly the young, are refusing to give in to the general despair that is sweeping through society. We regularly see protests against climate change, against environmental destruction and against war, but it is clear that world leaders, even when they make environmentalist or pacifist speeches, have no real concern in preventing these disasters. What we are seeing today, on the contrary, is a general reappraisal of the small ‘green’ measures announced by yesterday's leaders, while their commitments to peace are being discredited day after day. And it is not a question of ‘good’ or ‘bad’ intentions on the part of these leaders. Some of them openly and cynically embrace their criminal intent: Putin and Netanyahu obscenely justify their bombing of civilian populations, while Trump, in word and deed, advocates the destruction of the environment. That said, it is all governments, regardless of their rhetoric and political leanings, that are implementing a massive increase in armaments and repeatedly cutting back on environmental protection policies, in addition to attacking workers' living standards. And this is for very simple reasons. Firstly, in the face of the growing breakdown of the capitalist economy, competition between states can only intensify, and they have no other recourse, apart from reducing the cost of labour, than to abandon environmental protection policies in order to be more competitive on the world market. Secondly, as has always been the case in the past, the deepening economic contradictions of capitalism are leading to an escalation of military antagonisms.

In fact, while the demonstrations by young people against environmental destruction and war reveal a deep concern for fundamental issues, they do not carry any real weight in confrontation with the bourgeoisie that rules the world, because they do not comprise a frontal attack on the ruling class by the proletariat, the only class that can threaten it. As a result, they are easy prey for the demagogic campaigns of the bourgeois parties, whose clear aim is to divert the working class from its fundamental struggle against capitalism. And that lies at the very heart of the historical situation.

In reality, the capitalist system is doomed by history, just as the slave system of antiquity and the feudal system of the Middle Ages were in their time. Like feudal society and, before it, slave society, capitalist society has entered its period of decadence. This decadence began at the start of the 20th century and saw its first major manifestation in the First World War. This was proof that the economic laws of the capitalist system, which had enabled considerable progress in material production during the 19th century, had now become serious impediments, expressed in the growing convulsions such as the First World War and the crisis of 1929. This decline continued throughout the 20th century, notably with the Second World War, which stemmed from this crisis. And while the post-war years brought a period of prosperity coinciding with reconstruction, the economic contradictions of the capitalist system re-emerged at the end of the 1960s, plunging the world into increasing turmoil, with a succession of economic, military, political and climate crises. And these crises cannot be resolved, because they result from the insurmountable contradictions that affect the economic laws of capitalism. Thus, the world situation can only worsen, with increasing chaos and ever more horrifying barbarism. This is the only future that the capitalist system can offer us.

Should we conclude that there is no hope, that nothing, no force in society will be able to oppose this course towards the destruction of humanity? One conclusion is becoming increasingly clear among those who are aware of the gravity of the situation: there is no solution within the capitalist system that dominates the world. But then how can we escape this system? How can we overthrow the power of those who run it? How can we forge a path towards a society that would no longer know the barbarism of today's world, where the immense advances in science and technology would no longer be used to manufacture ever more terrifying instruments of death or to make the earth increasingly uninhabitable, but would, on the contrary be put in the service of human fulfilment?  A society where wars, injustice, poverty, exploitation and oppression would be abolished. A society where all human beings could live in harmony and solidarity, rather than competition and violence. A society that would no longer pit humans against nature, but would instead restore humans to being part of nature.

When we consider the possibility of such a society, there is no shortage of ‘realists’ who shrug their shoulders and try to ridicule such thoughts: ‘these are pipe dreams, fairy tales, utopias’. Of course, it is in the privileged sectors of society and among those who slavishly defend them that we find the most fanatical spokespeople and their contempt for ‘utopian ideas’, but we must recognise that their opinions influence the vast majority of society.

To answer all these questions about the future, we must first look back to the struggles of the past.

 

Recalling the memories of our past struggles to prepare for the struggles ahead

Dreams of an ideal society where injustices would be abolished and humans would live in harmony have existed for a very long time. They can be found in early Christianity, in the Peasants' War in Germany in the 16th century (the Anabaptists around the monk Thomas Müntzer), in the English Revolution of the 17th century (the ‘Diggers’ or ‘True Levellers’) and in the French Revolution of the late 18th century (Babeuf and the ‘Conspiracy of Equals’). These dreams were utopian, it is true. They could not be realised because, at that time, the material conditions for their realisation did not exist. It was the development of the working class alongside the industrial revolution at the end of the 18th century and the beginning of the 19th century that laid the foundations for a communist society on solid material bases.

These foundations were, on the one hand, the enormous abundance of wealth made possible by the laws of capitalism, an abundance that potentially allowed for the full satisfaction of human needs, and, on the other hand, the tremendous growth of the class that produced most of this wealth, the modern proletariat. Indeed, only the working class is capable of bringing about the enormous transformation represented by the abolition of capitalism and the establishment of communism. It alone in society has a real interest in radically uprooting the foundations of capitalism and, first and foremost, commodity production, which lies at the heart of the crisis of this system. For it is precisely the market, the domination of commodities in capitalist production, that is at the root of the exploitation of wage earners. The distinctive feature of the working class, unlike other categories of producers such as agricultural smallholders or artisans, is that it is deprived of the means of production and is forced, in order to live, to sell its labour power to the owners of these means of production: private capitalists or the state. It is because, in the capitalist system, labour power itself has become a commodity, and indeed the principal commodity of all, that the proletariat is exploited. That is why the struggle of the proletariat against capitalist exploitation carries within it the abolition of wage labour and, consequently, the abolition of all forms of commodities. Moreover, this class already produces most of society's wealth. It does so collectively, thanks to the associated labour developed by capitalism itself. But this system has been unable to complete the socialisation of production that it undertook at the expense of small-scale individual production.

This is one of the fundamental contradictions of capitalism: under its rule, production has become global, but the means of production remain scattered among multiple owners, private bosses or nation states, who sell and buy the goods produced and compete with each other. The abolition of the market therefore requires the expropriation of all capitalists and the collective takeover of all means of production by society. This task can only be accomplished by the class that possesses no means of production, when it acts collectively to do this.

 

1917: the revolution in Russia

To those who continue to claim that this revolutionary struggle of the proletariat is nothing more than a ‘sweet dream’, we need only recall historical reality. Indeed, in the mid-19th century, notably with the Chartist movement in England, the June 1848 uprising in Paris, the founding in 1864 in London of the International Workingmen's Association (which quickly became a ‘power’ in Europe) and the Commune of 1871, the proletariat began to prove that it was a real threat to the capitalist class. And this threat was then fully confirmed with the revolution of 1917 in Russia and 1918-23 in Germany.

These revolutions were a striking confirmation of the perspective of the Communist Manifesto adopted by the Communist League in 1848 and written by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. This fundamental document concluded as follows: “Communists disdain to conceal their views and aims. They openly declare that their ends can only be achieved through the forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions Let the ruling classes tremble at a communist revolution! The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win”’

And indeed, from 1917 onwards, the ruling classes, and particularly the bourgeoisie, began to tremble. The power of the international revolutionary wave, culminating in Russia and Germany, was such that it forced governments to end the war. The workers then became aware of their power, organised themselves as a class, met up in permanent general assemblies, organised themselves into soviets (the Russian for ‘councils’), discussed, decided and acted together. They saw the dawn of another possible world unfolding before their eyes.

 

1920-1930-1940-1950: the counter-revolution

For the bourgeoisie, faced with the real possibility of seeing their system of exploitation overthrown and thus losing their privileges, there was fear and fury. In 1871, when the Paris proletariat had been in power for two months, the French bourgeoisie, with the complicity of the Prussian troops still occupying France, unleashed a terrible repression against the ‘Communards’, a ‘bloody week’ that left 20,000 dead. Faced with the revolutionary wave of 1917, it was the global bourgeoisie, and not just that of one or two countries, that unleashed its rage and barbarity. Unanimously, the leaders of all countries, even the most ‘democratic’ ones, gave their support to the White armies led by officers of the fallen Tsarist regime, one of the most reactionary in the world. Worse still, the ‘Socialist’ parties, which had already betrayed the essential proletarian principle of internationalism by actively participating in the World War, reached the depths of ignominy by leading the repression of the revolution in Germany, causing thousands of deaths and ordering the cold-blooded assassination of the two most luminous figures of the proletarian struggle: Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht. ‘“Someone must play the bloodhound. I am not afraid of the responsibility” declared Gustav Noske, one of the leaders of the Social Democratic Party (SPD) and Minister of Defence.

In Russia, the White armies were finally defeated by the Red Army. But in Germany, the bourgeoisie managed to crush the attempts at workers' insurrection in 1919, 1921 and 1923. The Russian revolution found itself isolated, paving the way for the counter-revolution.

This was the scene of the greatest drama of the 20th century: in Russia, the counter-revolution did not triumph from ‘outside’, through the guns of a foreign army, but rather from ‘within’, corrupting, crushing, deporting and murdering while claiming to be and masquerading as the communist revolution. It was in fact the state that had emerged after the overthrow of the bourgeois state that brought about the counter-revolution. This state ceased to serve the proletariat in Russia and the rest of the world and became the defender of the new state bourgeoisie that had succeeded the classical bourgeoisie and now had the task of continuing the exploitation of the working class. This was further confirmation of the perspective put forward by revolutionaries in the mid-19th century: the communist revolution can only be global. This perspective was clearly stated in Engels' text ‘The Principles of Communism’, which prepared the ground for the Communist Manifesto: “The communist revolution will not merely be a national phenomenon but must take place simultaneously in all civilized countries (…). It will have a powerful impact on the other countries of the world, and will radically alter the course of development which they have followed up to now, while greatly stepping up its pace. It is a universal revolution and will, accordingly, have a universal range.” This principle was vigorously defended by all revolutionaries of the 20th century, notably by Lenin, to whom we owe this crystal-clear statement:

"The Russian revolution is only a detachment of the world socialist army, and the success and triumph of the revolution we have accomplished depend on the action of that army. This is a fact that none of us forgets (...). The Russian proletariat is conscious of its revolutionary isolation, and it clearly sees that the united intervention of the workers of the whole world is an indispensable condition and fundamental premise for its victory." (23 July 1918)

This is why the idea of “Socialism in One Country”, put forward by Stalin from 1924 onwards, reveals his betrayal and that of the Bolshevik Party, of which he had become the leader. This betrayal was the first act of the terrible counter-revolution that befell the proletariat in Russia and internationally. In Russia, we saw Stalin and his accomplices eliminate one by one the best fighters of the 1917 revolution, notably during the sinister ‘Moscow trials’ in 1936-38, where the defendants, broken by torture and threats against their families, accused themselves of the worst crimes before being shot in the back of the neck. At the same time, millions of workers were murdered or deported to concentration camps without any reason in order to maintain a climate of terror among the population. Outside Russia, the Stalinised ‘Communist’ parties found themselves at the forefront of sabotaging and even repressing workers' struggles, as was the case in Barcelona in May 1937, when the proletariat of that city rose in revolt against the increasing subjugation imposed on them by the Stalinists.

In Germany, the most important part of defending the capitalist regime had been assumed by the ‘democratic’ parties of the Weimar Republic, and particularly by the Social Democratic Party, but it was necessary for the bourgeoisie to inflict a ‘punishment’ of unprecedented violence on the proletarians of that country in order to permanently remove any urge to rise up against the capitalist order. And it was the Nazi Party that took on this vile task with the monstrous cruelty we all know about.

As for the ‘democratic’ factions of the bourgeoisie, particularly those that dominated in France, the United Kingdom and the United States, they played their part in the counter-revolution in a less spectacular but equally effective manner. These factions were not just content with supporting the repression of the revolutionary proletariat in Russia and Germany (for example, France, which defeated Germany in 1918, returned 16,000 machine guns to it to murder the insurgent workers). It was the ‘democratic’ institutions that served as a stepping stone for Hitler to come to power, and it was the very democratic England that favoured the victory of Hitler and Mussolini's ally in Spain, Franco. It was also during the 1930s that the ‘democracies’ lent respectability to the Stalinist regime by accepting it into the League of Nations in September 1934, a bourgeois organisation that Lenin had described as a “den of thieves” when it was created in 1919. This respectability was reinforced by the signing in May 1935 of the Franco-Soviet Mutual Assistance Treaty (known as the Laval-Stalin Pact).

Thus, the horrific barbarism that developed during the 1930s under the Stalinist and Hitlerite regimes, with the complicity of the ‘democratic’ regimes, warns us of the bloodthirsty fury that seizes the exploiting class when its privileges and power over society are threatened.

But during the 1930s, the proletariat, and global society as a whole, had not yet hit rock bottom. These years were marked by the collapse of the world economy with terrible attacks on the working class, but the latter, due to the depth of its defeat, was unable to respond to these attacks by taking the path of revolution once again. On the contrary, these years led to the greatest tragedy ever experienced by human society: the Second World War, with its 60 million dead, mostly civilians, massacred in Nazi concentration camps or under the carpet bombing of cities on both sides. There is no need to go into the details of this tragedy here, eight decades later. There are still many books, articles and television programmes that provide us with accounts of this. Just recently, a successful film, Oppenheimer, recalled a particularly atrocious episode of this period: the atomic bombs dropped on Japan by the ‘great American democracy’ in August 1945.

One of the most terrible aspects of this war is that it did not provoke a response from the proletariat, as was the case during the First World War. Quite the opposite, the Allied victory in 1945, presented as the triumph of civilisation over barbarism, of ‘democracy’ over fascism, reinforced the illusions that the bourgeoisie maintains within the working class in the major countries, particularly those about ‘democracy’ as the ideal form of social organisation, an organisation which, beyond the rhetoric of its defenders, in reality perpetuates the exploitation of workers, injustice, oppression and wars.

Thus, after the Second World War, the ruling class resumed the methods that had enabled it to immobilise the proletariat and conscript it into imperialist slaughter during the 1930s. Before and after the war, one of the main deceptions served up by the bourgeoisie to the proletariat was to present their defeats as victories. It was undoubtedly the fraudulent myth of the ‘socialist state’ that emerged from the revolution in Russia and was presented as a bastion of the proletariat, when in fact it had become nothing more than the defender of nationalised capital, that constituted the essential weapon for both conscripting and demoralising the proletariat. The proletarians of the whole world, in whom the upheaval of 1917 had given rise to immense hope, were now invited to submit their struggles unconditionally to the defence of the ‘socialist homeland’, and where there were those who were beginning to suspect its anti-working class nature, bourgeois ideology was able to instil the idea that the revolution could have no other outcome than that which it had had in Russia: the emergence of a new society of exploitation and oppression even worse than capitalist society.

In fact, the world that emerged from the Second World War saw a strengthening of the counter-revolution, no longer mainly in the form of terror, assassinations of proletarians, and concentration camps, now reserved for ‘socialist’ states (as in the bloody repressions in East Germany in 1953, Hungary in 1956, and Poland in 1970), but in the much more insidious form of the bourgeoisie's ideological hold over the exploited, a hold favoured by the temporary improvement in the economic situation during post-war reconstruction.

But as the song La semaine sanglante (The Bloody Week), written after the repression of the Paris Commune by the Communard Jean-Baptiste Clément (also author of ‘Temps des cerises’ (Time of Cherries), says: “Les mauvais jours finiront” (The bad days will end). And the ‘bad days’ of the bourgeoisie's total ideological domination came to an end in May 1968.

 

1968: the resumption of the proletarian struggle

The huge strike of May 68 in France (then the largest strike in the history of the world proletariat) signalled the resumption of workers' struggles and the end of the counter-revolution. For May 68 was not a ‘French affair’; it was the first major response by the world proletariat to the attacks of the bourgeoisie, which was facing an economic crisis that marked the end of the post-war boom. The Manifesto adopted at our first congress states:

 “Today, the proletarian flame is again alight throughout the world. In an often confused and hesitant way, but with jolts which sometimes even astonish revolutionaries, the proletarian giant has raised its head and returned to make the aged capitalist structure shake. From Paris to Cordoba [in Argentina], from Turin to Gdansk, from Lisbon to Shanghai, from Cairo to Barcelona; workers' struggles have again become a nightmare for the capitalists. Simultaneously, as part of the general resurgence of the class, revolutionary groups and currents have reappeared, burdened with the enormous task of remaking, both theoretically and practically, one of the most important tools of the proletariat: its class party.”

A new generation was emerging, a generation that had not suffered the counter-revolution, a generation that was confronting the return of the economic crisis by expressing a whole potential for struggle and reflection. The whole social atmosphere was changing: after the lean years, workers were now eager to discuss, to ‘make the world anew’, particularly among the younger generations. The word ‘revolution’ was heard everywhere. The writings of Marx, Lenin and Luxemburg were circulating and provoking endless debate. The working class was striving to recover its history and past experiences.

But one of the most fundamental aspects of this wave of workers' struggles was that it meant that the bourgeoisie did not have a free hand to respond to the crisis of its economic system. For communists, but also for the vast majority of historians, it is clear that the Second World War was the result of the general economic crisis that began in 1929. This war required a profound defeat of the working class, the only force capable of opposing the outbreak of war, as we saw in 1917 in Russia and in 1918 in Germany. But the ability of the world proletariat to react massively and determinedly to the first attacks of the crisis from 1968 onwards meant that its main sectors were not prepared to be drafted into the ‘defence of the Fatherland’, unlike what had happened in the 1930s. And even if it was not a direct result of workers' struggles, the withdrawal of the United States from Vietnam in 1973 proved that the bourgeoisie of the world's leading power was no longer able to mobilise its working-class youth for war, since so many young people refused to go and get themselves killed or to kill Vietnamese in the name of ‘defending the free world’.

It is fundamentally for this reason that the development of the contradictions in the global capitalist economy did not lead to a generalised confrontation between the two blocs, to a third world war.

Another essential aspect of this resumption of class struggle was that it has not only brought the idea of revolution back into the consciousness of many workers, but had also led to the development of small minorities claiming allegiance to the Communist Left, a current which had been fighting since the early 1920s, both within and outside the communist parties that had gone over to the enemy, against the degeneration of these parties and then against the conscription of the proletariat into the Second World War.

As we wrote in the Manifesto of the ICC’s First Congress: “For many years the different fractions, most particularly the German, Dutch, and especially the Italian Left, maintained a remarkable level of activity both in terms of theoretical clarification and denunciation of the betrayals of those parties that continued to call themselves proletarian. But the counter-revolution was too deep and too long to allow the survival of these fractions. Hard hit by the Second World War and by the fact that it did not provoke any resurgence of the class, the last fractions which had survived until then gradually disappeared or entered into a process of degeneration, sclerosis or regression.”

And indeed, in the wake of the workers' struggles beginning in May 1968, we saw the emergence of a whole series of groups and discussion circles that set out to rediscover the Communist Left, engaged in discussions among themselves, and, after several international conferences in 1973-74, participated in the founding of the International Communist Current in January 1975.

 

1970s, 1980s: two decades of struggle

The first wave of struggles that began in May 1968 was undoubtedly the most spectacular: the ‘Italian Hot Autumn’ in 1969 (also called ‘Rampant May’) the violent uprising in Cordoba, Argentina, in May of the same year, and the huge strike in Poland during the winter of 1970, as well as significant movements in Spain and Great Britain in 1972. In Spain in particular, workers began to organise themselves through mass assemblies, even while Franco's regime was still in place, a process that reached its peak in Vitoria in 1976. The international dimension of the wave of struggles echoed as far afield as Israel (1969 and 1972) and Egypt (1972), a region dominated by war and nationalism.

In part, the momentum of this wave of struggles can be explained by the surprise that struck the global bourgeoisie in 1968. After decades of counter-revolution and ideological and political domination over the proletariat, this class had come to believe the rhetoric of those who proclaimed the disappearance of any revolutionary perspective, even the end of class struggle. But the ruling class quickly recovered from its state of surprise and launched a counter-offensive to channel workers' anger towards bourgeois objectives. Thus, following a series of strikes in March 1974 in the United Kingdom, the oldest and most experienced bourgeoisie in the world replaced the Conservative Prime Minister with Harold Wilson, leader of the Labour Party, which presented itself as the defender of workers' interests, particularly because of its close ties to the trade unions. In this country, as in many others, the exploited were then called upon to abandon their struggles so as not to hinder the left-wing governments supposedly defending their interests or to help them to win the elections.

This policy of the bourgeoisie in the main developed countries succeeded in temporarily calming the workers' militancy, but from 1974 onwards the considerable worsening of the capitalist crisis and the attacks on the proletariat led to a significant resurgence of this militancy: strikes by Iranian oil workers, steelworkers in France in 1978, the “Winter of Discontent” of 1978-79 in Britain, dockworkers in Rotterdam (led by an independent strike committee), and steelworkers in Brazil in 1979 (who also challenged the control of the trade unions). This wave of struggles culminated in the mass strike in Poland in August 1980, led by an independent cross-industry strike committee (the MKS), certainly the most important episode in the class struggle since 1968. And although the severe repression of the Polish workers in December 1981 brought this wave to a halt, it did not take long for workers' militancy to re-emerge with the struggles in Belgium in 1983 and 1986, the general strike in Denmark in 1985, the miners' strike in England in 1984-85, the struggles of railway and health workers in France in 1986 and 1988, and the movement of education workers in Italy in 1987. The struggles in France and Italy in particular, like the mass strike in Poland, demonstrated a real capacity for self-organisation with general assemblies and strike committees.

This is not just a list of strikes. This wave of struggles did not go round in circles, but made real advances in class consciousness. This advance gave rise to ‘co-ordinations’ which, in several countries, notably France and Italy, began to compete with the official trade unions, whose role as fire-fighters in the service of the bourgeois state became increasingly apparent during the struggles. These co-ordinations, which often had a corporatist character, were an attempt by the trade union apparatus and far-left organisations to perpetuate, in new forms, the trade unions' hold over workers in order to prevent the politicisation of their struggles, which would mean the recognition of these struggles not only as a form of resistance to capitalist attacks but also as preparations for the eventual struggle against the capitalist system.

 

1990s: Decomposition

In reality, the 1980s were already beginning to reveal the difficulties of the working class in developing its struggle further and carrying out its revolutionary project.

The mass strike in Poland in 1980 was extraordinary in its scale and in the workers' ability to self-organise in the struggle. But it also showed that, in the eastern bloc countries, illusions in western ‘democracy’ were immense. Even more seriously, in the face of the repression that fell upon the workers of Poland in December 1981, the solidarity of the proletariat in the western countries was reduced to platonic declarations, unable to see that, on both sides of the Iron Curtain, it was in fact one and the same struggle of the working class against capitalism. This was the first sign of the proletariat's inability to politicise its struggle and further develop its revolutionary consciousness.

But these difficulties encountered by the working class were exacerbated by the new policy implemented by the dominant sectors of the bourgeoisie. In most countries, the ‘left-wing alternative’ in power gave way to another formula for confronting the working class. The right wing returns to power and launches unprecedented violent attacks against workers, while the left wing in opposition sabotages the struggles from within. Thus, in 1981, US President Ronald Reagan fired 11,000 air traffic controllers on the grounds that their strike was illegal. In 1984, British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher went even further than her friend Reagan. At that time, the working class in Britain was the most militant in the world, setting new records for the number of strike days year after year. For the bourgeoisie of this country, and also of other countries, it was necessary to break their backs. In March 1984, the ‘Iron Lady’ provoked the miners by announcing the closure of numerous pits and, hand in hand with the trade unions, isolated them from the rest of their class brothers. For a year, the miners fought alone, until they were exhausted (Thatcher and her government had prepared their move by secretly stockpiling coal). The demonstrations were brutally suppressed (three dead, 20,000 injured, 11,300 arrests). It took four decades for British workers to overcome the demoralisation and paralysis caused by this defeat. It demonstrated the ability of the bourgeoisie, in Britain and elsewhere in the world, to react intelligently and effectively against the development of workers' struggles, to prevent them from leading to the politicisation of the proletariat and even, in a number of countries, to strip it of its sense of class identity, notably by destroying its fighting spirit in symbolic sectors such as mining, shipbuilding, steel and automobiles.

A short sentence from one of our articles in 1988 sums up the crucial problem facing the working class at the time: “Perhaps it is less easy to talk about revolution in 1988 than it was in 1968.”

This temporary lack of perspective began to affect society as a whole. Nihilism spread. Two little words from a song by the punk band the Sex Pistols were spray-painted on walls across London: “No future”.

It was in this context, with the exhaustion of the 1968 generation and the decay of society beginning to show, that a terrible blow was dealt to our class: the collapse of the eastern bloc and then of the ‘Soviet’ Union in 1989-91 triggered a deafening campaign on ‘the death of communism’. The great lie that ‘Stalinism = communism’ was once again exploited to the full; all the abominable crimes of this regime, which was in reality capitalist, were attributed to the working class and ‘its’ system. Worse still, it was trumpeted day and night: “This is where the workers' struggle leads: to barbarism and bankruptcy! This is where the dream of revolution leads: to a nightmare!” In September 1989, we wrote: “Even in its death throes, Stalinism is rendering a last service to the domination of capital; in decom­posing, its cadaver continues to pollute the at­mosphere that the proletariat breathes.” (“Theses on the economic and political crisis in the eastern countries”, International Review No. 60) And this has been dramatically confirmed. This major historical change in the world situation exacerbated a phenomenon that began to develop during the 1980s and contributed to the collapse of the Stalinist regimes: the general decomposition of capitalist society. Decomposition is not a passing and superficial moment; it is a profound dynamic that leaves its mark on the whole of society. It is the final phase of the decadence of capitalism, a phase of agony that will end in the destruction of humanity or in world communist revolution. As we wrote in 1990: “... the present crisis has developed at a time when the working class is no longer weighed down by the counter-revolution. With its historic resurgence from 1968 onwards, the class has proven that the bourgeoisie did not have its hands free to unleash a Third World War. At the same time, although the proletariat has been strong enough to prevent this from happening, it is still unable to overthrow capitalism, (...). In this situation, where society’s two decisive - and antagonistic - classes confront each other without either being able to impose its own definitive response, history nonetheless does not just come to a stop. Still less for capitalism than for preceding social forms, is a ‘freeze’ or a ‘stagnation’ of social life possible. As a crisis-ridden capitalism’s contradictions can only get deeper, the bourgeoisie’s inability to offer the slightest perspective for society as a whole, and the proletariat’s inability, for the moment, openly to set forward its own can only lead to a situation of generalised decomposition. Capitalism is rotting on its feet.” (“Theses on Decomposition, the Final Phase of Capitalist Decadence”, Point 4)

This putrefaction affects society at all levels and acts like a poison: a rise in individualism, irrationality, violence, self-destruction, etc. Fear and hatred are gradually taking over. Drug cartels develop in Latin America, racism everywhere... Thought is marked by the impossibility of projecting oneself into the future, by a short-sighted and narrow-minded vision; the politics of the bourgeoisie find themselves increasingly limited to a piecemeal approach. This daily immersion inevitably permeates the proletariat. Atomised, reduced to individual citizens, they bear the brunt of the decay of society.

 

2000s, 2010s: attempts at struggle hampered by the loss of class identity

The years 2000-2010 saw a succession of attempts at struggle, all of which were confronted with the fact that the working class no longer knew it existed, that the bourgeoisie had succeeded in making it forget that it was the driving social force of society and the future.

On 15 February 2003, a global demonstration took place against the looming war in Iraq (which would actually break out in March, under the pretext of ‘fighting terrorism’, last eight years and claim one million lives). This movement rejected war, whereas the successive wars of the 1990s had not provoked any resistance. But it was above all a movement confined to the civic and pacifist sphere; it was not the working class that was fighting against the warlike tendencies of its respective state, but a collection of citizens demanding a policy of peace from their governments.

In May-June 2003, in France, there were numerous demonstrations against pension reforms. A strike broke out in the national education sector, and the threat of a ‘general strike’ loomed, but in the end it did not happen and the teachers remained isolated. This sectoral confinement was obviously the result of a deliberate policy of division on the part of the trade unions, but this sabotage was successful because it was based on a very great weakness in the class: teachers considered themselves to be apart, they did not feel like members of the working class. At the time, the very notion of the working class was still lost in limbo, rejected, outdated, shameful.

In 2006, students in France mobilised en masse against a precarious contract specifically for young people: the CPE (Contrat Première Embauche, or First Employment Contract). This movement revealed a paradox: the working class was continuing to reflect on its situation, but it was unaware of this. The students rediscovered a form of struggle that was authentically working class: general assemblies. These assemblies were the venue for genuine discussions and were open to workers, the unemployed and pensioners. They fostered the development of working-class solidarity between generations and between sectors. This movement shows the emergence of a new generation ready to refuse the sacrifices imposed on them and to fight back. However, this generation also grew up in the 1990s and was thus strongly marked by the apparent absence of the working class and the disappearance of its project and experience. This new generation was therefore not mobilising as an exploited class but diluting itself into the mass of ‘citizens’.

The ‘occupy’ movement that spread across much of the globe in 2011 was marked by the same strengths and weaknesses. Here too, combativeness was developing, as was reflection, but without reference to the working class and its history. For the Indignados in Spain or Occupy in the United States, Israel and the United Kingdom, the tendency to see themselves as ‘citizens’ rather than proletarians made the whole movement vulnerable to democratic ideology. As a result, "Democracia Real Ya!” (Real Democracy Now!) became the movement's slogan. And bourgeois parties such as Syriza in Greece and Podemos in Spain could thus present themselves as the true heirs of these revolts. In other words, workers and children of workers, mobilised as ‘citizens’ among other angry sections of society, small business owners, impoverished shopkeepers and artisans, peasants, etc., cannot develop their struggles against exploitation and therefore against capitalism; on the contrary, they find themselves under the banner of demands for a fairer, more humane, better-managed capitalism, for better leaders.

The period 2003-2011 thus represents a whole series of efforts by our class to fight against the continuing deterioration of living and working conditions under capitalism in crisis, but, deprived of its class identity, it ended up (temporarily) in a greater slump.

And the worsening of decomposition in the 2010s further exacerbated these difficulties: the rise of populism, with all the irrationality and hatred that this bourgeois political current contains, the international proliferation of terrorist attacks, the seizure of power over entire regions by drug traffickers in Latin America and by warlords in the Middle East, Africa and the Caucasus, huge waves of migrants fleeing the horrors of hunger, war, barbarism and desertification linked to global warming... the Mediterranean has become a watery grave for thousands.

This rotten and deadly dynamic tends to reinforce nationalism and reliance on state ‘protection’, and to be influenced by the false critiques of the system offered by populism (and, for a minority, by jihadism). The lack of class identity is aggravated by the tendency towards fragmentation into racial, sexual and other specific categories, which in turn reinforces exclusion and division, whereas only the proletarian struggle can bring about the unity of all sectors of society that are victims of the barbarism of capitalism. And this is for the fundamental reason that it is the only struggle that can abolish this system.

 

2020: the return of workers' militancy

But the current situation cannot be reduced to this decomposition of society. Forces other than those of destruction and barbarism are also at work: the economic crisis continues to worsen and every day drives the need for struggle; the horror of everyday life constantly raises questions that workers cannot help but think about; the struggles of recent years have begun to provide some answers, and these experiences are making their mark without us even realising it. In the words of Marx: “we recognise our brave friend, ... the old mole that can work in the earth so fast, that worthy pioneer.”

In 2019, a social movement against a new pension reform developed in France. Even more significant than the militancy, which was very marked, was the tendency towards solidarity between generations that was expressed in the marches: many workers in their sixties – and therefore not directly affected by the reform – went on strike and demonstrated so that young workers would not suffer this attack from the bourgeoisie.

The outbreak of war in Ukraine in February 2022 caused consternation; there was fear among the working class that the conflict would spread and escalate. But at the same time, the war significantly worsened inflation. Already facing the disastrous effects of Brexit, Britain was the hardest hit. Faced with this deterioration in living and working conditions, strikes broke out in many sectors (health, education, transport, etc.): this is what the media called “the Summer of Discontent”, in reference to ‘the Winter of Discontent’ of 1978-79!

By drawing this parallel between these two major movements separated by 43 years, journalists, often unintentionally, highlighted a fundamental reality: behind this expression of “discontent” lay an extremely profound movement. Two expressions were heard at picket lines across the country: “Enough is enough” and “We are the workers.”  In other words, if British workers are standing up to inflation, it is not only because it is intolerable. It is also because consciousness has matured in the minds of workers, because the mole has been digging for decades and is now poking its nose out: the proletariat is beginning to regain its class identity, to feel more confident, to feel like a social and collective force. The struggles of the working class in Britain in 2022 have an importance and significance that extend far beyond the borders of that country. On the one hand, they were being waged in a country of prime importance in the world, economically, financially and politically, particularly because of the dominance of the English language and the vestiges of the British Empire from the heyday of capitalism. On the other hand, it is the oldest proletariat in the world that we have seen at work, a proletariat which, during the 1970s, had shown exceptional militancy but which then, during the Thatcher years, suffered a major defeat that paralysed it for decades despite massive attacks by the bourgeoisie. The spectacular reawakening of this proletariat is indicative of a profound change in the mindset and consciousness of the entire global proletariat.

In France, a new mobilisation was developing and, there too, demonstrators began emphasising their identification with the workers' camp and took up the slogan “Enough is enough”, translating it as “C’est assez!”. In the marches, references to the great strike of May 1968 are appearing. We were therefore right to write in 2020: "The gains of the struggles of the 1968-89 period have not been lost, even if they may have been forgotten by many workers (and revolutionaries): the fight for self-organisation and the extension of struggles; the beginnings of an understanding of the anti-working role of the unions and the parties of the capitalist left; resistance to being dragooned into war; distrust towards the electoral and parliamentary game, etc. Future struggles will have to be based on the critical assimilation of these gains, taking them further, and certainly not denying or forgetting them." (International Review 164).

The working class must set out to reclaim its own history. In concrete terms, the generations that experienced 1968 and the confrontation with the trade unions in the 1970s and 1980s are still alive today. The young people of the 2006 and 2011 assemblies must also share their experiences with today's youth. This new generation of the 2020s has not suffered the defeats of the 1980s (notably under Thatcher and Reagan), nor the lie of 1990 about the ‘death of communism’ and the ‘end of the class struggle’, nor the hard years that followed. It has grown up in a permanent economic crisis and a world in decline; which is why it still has its fighting spirit intact. This new generation can lead all the others, while listening to them and learning from their experiences, both their victories and their defeats. Past, present and future can once again come together in the consciousness of the proletariat.

Faced with the devastating effects of decomposition, the proletariat will have to politicise its struggles

As we have seen, the 2020s have opened up the prospect of unprecedented upheavals throughout the world, leading ultimately to the destruction of humanity.

More than ever, the working class is therefore faced with a major challenge: to develop its revolutionary project and thus offer the only other possible perspective: communism. To do this, it must first resist all the centrifugal forces that are constantly at work against it. It must be able to avoid being caught up in the social fragmentation that leads to racism, confrontation between rival gangs, withdrawal and fear. It must be able to resist the siren calls of nationalism and war (whether presented as ‘humanitarian’, ‘anti-terrorist’, ‘resistance’, etc.). The various bourgeoisies always accuse the enemy of ‘barbarism’ to justify their own barbarism. Resisting all this rot that is gradually infecting society as a whole and succeeding in developing its struggle and its perspective necessarily implies that the entire working class must raise its level of consciousness and organisation, succeed in politicising its struggles, and create spaces for debate, elaboration and the taking of control of strikes by workers themselves. Because the struggle of the proletariat against capitalism is:

• Workers' solidarity against social fragmentation.
• Internationalism against war.
• Revolutionary consciousness against the lies of the bourgeoisie and populist irrationality.
• Concern for the future of humanity against nihilism and the destruction of nature.

 

Revolutionaries of the world

This brief overview of decades of workers' struggles brings out an essential idea: the historic struggle of our class to overthrow capitalism will still be a long one. Along the way, there will be a succession of pitfalls, traps and defeats. To be ultimately victorious, this revolutionary struggle will require a general increase of consciousness and organisation of the entire working class, on a global level. For this general increase to take place, the proletariat will have to confront all the traps set by the bourgeoisie in the struggle and, at the same time, reclaim its past, its experience accumulated over two centuries.

When the International Workingmen's Association (IWA) was founded in London on 28 September 1864, this organisation became the embodiment of the global nature of the proletarian struggle, a condition for the triumph of the world revolution. It was the source of inspiration for the poem written in 1871 by the Communard Eugène Pottier, which became a revolutionary song passed down from generation to generation of proletarians in struggle, in almost every language on the planet. The lyrics of The Internationale emphasise how this solidarity of the global proletariat is not a thing of the past but points to the future:

Let us unite, and tomorrow,

The Internationale,

Will be the human race

It is up to organised militant minorities to carry out this international regrouping of revolutionary forces. Indeed, while the masses of the working class engage in this effort of reflection and self-organisation mainly during periods of open struggle, a minority has always been committed, throughout history, to the ongoing struggle for revolution. These minorities embody and defend the perseverance and historical continuity of the revolutionary project of the proletariat, which has produced them for this purpose. To quote the Communist Manifesto of 1848: "In what relation do the Communists stand to the proletarians as a whole? The Communists do not form a separate party opposed to the other working-class parties. They have no interests separate and apart from those of the proletariat as a whole. They do not set up any sectarian principles of their own, by which to shape and mould the proletarian movement. The Communists are distinguished from the other working-class parties by this only: 1. In the national struggles of the proletarians of the different countries, they point out and bring to the front the common interests of the entire proletariat, independently of all nationality. 2. In the various stages of development which the struggle of the working class against the bourgeoisie has to pass through, they always and everywhere represent the interests of the movement as a whole. The Communists, therefore, are on the one hand, practically, the most advanced and resolute section of the working-class parties of every country, that section which pushes forward all others; on the other hand, theoretically, they have over the great mass of the proletariat the advantage of clearly understanding the line of march, the conditions, and the ultimate general results of the proletarian movement.”

It is this minority that bears the primary responsibility for organising, debating, clarifying all issues, learning from past failures and bringing accumulated experience to life. Today, this minority, which is extremely small and fragmented into many small organisations, must come together to confront different positions and analyses, reclaim the lessons bequeathed to us by the fractions of the Communist Left, and prepare for the future. To carry out the global revolutionary project, the overthrow of capitalism across the planet, the proletariat must equip itself with one of its most valuable weapons, the lack of which has cost it so dearly in the past: its global revolutionary party. Thus, in October 1917, the Bolshevik Party played an essential role in the overthrow of the bourgeois state in Russia. Conversely, one of the causes of the defeat of the proletariat in Germany was the unpreparedness of the Communist Party in that country, which was only founded during the revolution itself. Its inexperience led it to make mistakes that contributed to the final defeat of the revolution in Germany and, consequently, in the rest of the world.

 

AND NOW?

The situation of the proletarian struggle has changed considerably over the last half-century. As we have seen, the obstacles encountered by the working class on its path to revolution have proved to be much greater than could have been suspected when our organisation was founded. However, the words that appeared in the Manifesto adopted by the First Congress of the ICC remain entirely relevant today: "With its still modest means, the International Communist Current has committed itself to the long and difficult task of regrouping revolutionaries (…). Turning its back on the monolithism of the sects, it calls upon the communists of all countries to be aware of the immense responsibilities which they have, to abandon the false quarrels which separate them, to surmount the deceptive divisions which the old world has imposed on them. The ICC calls on them to join in this effort to constitute (before the class engages in its decisive struggles) the international and unified organisation of its vanguard.”

Similarly, the words of the Manifesto of the 9th Congress of the ICC remain as valid today as they were in 1991: “Never in history has so much been at stake. Never has a social class had to face such a responsibility as the proletariat today. If the class proves unable to take on this responsibility, then it will be the end of civilisation, and even of humanity itself. Millennia of progress, labour, and thought, will be wiped out for ever. Two hundred years of proletarian struggles, millions of working class martyrs, all will have been in vain. To stop the bourgeoisie's criminal manoeuvres, to unmask its vile lies, and to develop your struggles on the path towards the worldwide communist revolution, to abolish the reign of want, and to achieve, at last, the realm of liberty,

Workers of all countries, unite!

 

International Communist Current

(September 2025)

 

In August 2024, even before the election of Donald Trump to a second term as US president, the ICC proposed to other groups of the Communist Left a common Appeal[1] against the growing attempts by the whole of the bourgeois class to mobilise the population behind the false choice: being downtrodden by liberal democratic or right wing populist governments. The Appeal was designed to strengthen the anti-bourgeois democratic position that only the Communist Left is capable of defending consistently and intransigently in the working class.

Unfortunately this ICC Appeal was rejected by nearly all of its recipients just as a similar ICC appeal for a common internationalist statement against the imperialist war in Ukraine in February 2022 was rejected by most of the Communist Left groups.

Today, a year later, the ICC Appeal on the democratic campaigns has lost none of its relevance for the policy of the Communist Left. On the contrary it is even more relevant.

Six months after Trump's return to power, attacks on the working class have continued to intensify: mass militarised deportations and detentions of immigrant workers, massive cuts in welfare and health benefits, over 150,000 job losses for federal workers. A large-scale campaign was launched by both the ‘liberal’ wing of the bourgeoisie and the self-proclaimed ‘socialists’ (Sanders, Ocasio-Cortez, etc.) - all those who align themselves with the Democratic Party - to mobilise the population against these measures. Not of course in order to create a working class struggle against these attacks; but to prevent such a struggle from developing. The propaganda of the liberals and the left is presenting the attacks of the populist right not as the fruit of the capitalist system as a whole for which they are also responsible, but of the populist flouting of democratic rules, the result of Trump’s contempt for the ‘rule of law’, a lack of respect for the independence of the bourgeois judiciary and for the sanctity of the US constitution and for all the other innumerable liberal humanitarian facades hiding the dictatorship of capital over labour.

The goal has been to orchestrate massive protest movements that propose not a working class response, on the terrain of its own class interests against all wings of the bourgeoisie, but to contain and divert revolt into an amorphous defence of the tradition of the democratic state against its populist deviations. And this has borne fruit.

The resistance to Trump’s regime in the US has been characterised by the patriotic protests of many federal workers against the mass layoffs engineered by Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), the revolt on the terrain of the ‘democracy’ and bourgeois ‘law’ against the mass deportations of immigrant workers by Immigration and Custom Enforcement (ICE), and the humanitarian defence of Palestine nationalism against Trump’s support for the Israeli massacre of innocents in Gaza.

And these democratic protest actions have tended to be mirrored in other countries because the election of Trump has tended to increase the polarisation within the bourgeoises of other countries between populist and liberal democratic factions during 2025.

In South Korea the democratic factions mobilised huge demonstrations against the attempted coup of President Yoon Suk Yeol. In Turkey massive numbers came out into the streets ‘defending Turkish democracy’ in support of the leader of the opposition against the autocratic dictates of President Erdogan. In Serbia there were also mass democratic protests against the corruption of President Vucic.

There have been similar movements of greater or lesser extent but reflecting the same motivation in most other countries.

What must be the policy of the working class, which is the only force objectively interested in and capable of overthrowing the present moribund social system, towards these often mass movements of the population? And therefore, what is the role of the most advanced section of the working class whose task is to formulate the general line of march for the whole class?

Communists clearly must denounce both the democratic and populist attacks of the bourgeoisie and warn the working class of the danger of becoming mobilised behind what are in reality fights between different wings of the ruling class and call on workers to struggle on their own ground of the defence of their own interests against the ruling class as a whole. But which political tendency today fulfils this need?

We asked the same question in our Appeal:

“Who are the political forces which actually defend the real interests of the working class against the increasing attacks coming from the capitalist class? Not the inheritors of the Social Democratic parties who sold their souls to the bourgeoisie in the First World War, and along with the trade unions mobilised the working class for the multi-million slaughter of the trenches. Nor the remaining apologists for the Stalinist ‘Communist’ regime which sacrificed tens of millions of workers for the imperialist interests of the Russian nation in the Second World War. Nor Trotskyism or the official Anarchist current, which, despite a few exceptions, provided critical support for one or other side in that imperialist carnage. Today the descendants of the latter political forces are lining up, in a ‘critical’ way behind liberal and left-wing bourgeois democracy against the populist right to help demobilise the working class.

Only the Communist Left, presently few in number, has remained true to the independent struggle of the working class over the past hundred years. In the workers’ revolutionary wave of 1917-23 the political current led by Amadeo Bordiga, which dominated the Italian Communist Party at the time, rejected the false choice between the fascist and anti-fascist parties which had jointly worked to violently crush the revolutionary upsurge of the working class. In his text “The Democratic Principle” of 1922 Bordiga exposed the nature of the democratic myth in the service of capitalist exploitation and murder.

In the 1930s the Communist Left denounced both the left and right, fascist and anti-fascist factions of the bourgeoisie as the latter prepared the imperialist bloodbath to come. When the Second World War did come it was therefore only this current which was able to hold to an internationalist position, calling for the turning of the imperialist war into civil war by the working class against the whole of the capitalist class in every nation. The Communist Left refused the ghoulish choice between the democratic or fascist mass carnage, between the atrocities of Auschwitz or of Hiroshima.”

Today the Left Communist current is still minoritarian and ‘against the stream’ of all this political debris left over from the counter revolutionary period that lasted some 50 years after the defeat of the October Revolution. But the perspective of a renewed assault on world capitalism by the working class re-emerged after the renewal of the open capitalist economic crisis and the massive reawakening of international working-class struggle at the end of the 1960s. The reconstitution of the communist party on the basis of the positions of the Communist Left was thus posed.

The rejection of these ICC appeals by most groups of the Communist Left suggests that the majority of the groups in this political tradition are in a state of sclerosis and degeneration, unable to recognise that their own micro-parties are part of a broader tradition, nor to recognise the importance, for the working class today and in the future, of the intransigence on this position against democracy that the Italian faction of the Communist Left developed in the 1930s.

Consequently, most of these groups are unable to defend it consistently within the working class today and in the future, and in practice fall opportunistically into the dominant leftist discourse.

These groups have produced some articles and leaflets in their press in response to the current democratic campaigns and movements that reflect this confusion. One in particular stands out as typifying their response and so we will use it to highlight a more general illusion.

 

International Communist Tendency:
Blurring the distinction between proletarian movements and movements in defence of bourgeois democracy.

A 22 July 2025 article “In the Wake of the Capitalist Crisis: Protests and Riots - And the Need for an Independent Class Expression” on the ICT website, takes stock of the widespread development of social struggles we have mentioned above. The article then regrets that the working class has not been able to “assert itself as an independent political force in these demonstrations” and proposes as a solution that the working class resume its struggle at a higher level and form an international communist party to link this struggle to the revolutionary overthrow of capitalism. In addition an internationalist struggle against imperialist war is required. So far, so good.

However, in the article’s account of the large protests against the attacks of the populist right in various countries over the past year there is no awareness that the counterpart to these attacks, and therefore the inspiration for these demonstrations, has been the democratic campaign of the rest of the bourgeoisie in the main capitalist countries - not over the attacks of the populist right themselves, but over their undemocratic form. And the bourgeoisie has been doing this for at least the past decade since populism became a dominant political trend within the bourgeois states.

Moreover, the article seems completely unaware that the bourgeoisie has long used its political divisions as a democratic weapon against its proletarian class adversary in order to pacify it and derail it if possible and drown its revolutionary struggle in blood as the Social Democratic led counter revolution in Germany in 1919 brutally showed. Yet the ICT is supposed, as part of the tradition of the Communist Left, to have drawn the lesson of the threat of democracy to the proletariat. We will look at this historic tradition of the Communist Left’s intransigent rejection of democracy a bit later on.

But, for now, we note the connected fact that the article is unable to identify the class nature of these democratic protests and skates over the vital distinction that revolutionaries must make between democratic protests and genuinely proletarian movements.

“This past year we have experienced some of the largest protests in decades in several countries. These struggles have not had a clear class character and have varied greatly in terms of main issues and triggering factors. But even if the working class has not dominated these protests, large parts of the class (and to some extent workers' organizations and strike activity) have clearly been on the move, and no part of the living conditions of proletarians is left untouched by the accelerating crisis of capitalism. Below we will briefly describe some of these protests, what we see as their limitations, and what we believe is the necessary way forward.”

The article then recounts the struggles in South Korea, Greece, Turkey, the US and elsewhere which in fact show that far from not having a ‘clear class character’ they are clearly, despite the presence of many workers within them, on the terrain of the defence of bourgeois democratic values against the authoritarianism and corruption linked to the growth of political populism, and nothing to do with the defence of the workers’ own interests as a class against the whole bourgeois class. [2]

The article therefore omits a warning to the class about involvement in these protests. On the contrary the article suggests that it is possible to take the protest movements ‘forward’ (to where?) by overcoming their supposed limitations. 

The article confirms this error by concluding: “In summary, these struggles can be said to be directed against corruption and an increasingly authoritarian development, and against a state that is no longer delivering its basic services in the face of deepening capitalist crisis. These are not purely proletarian struggles, but it is clear that there are extensive elements of the working class involved. They are expressions of a general dissatisfaction and frustration that is steaming under the surface, and sometimes must explode.”

The recent democratic struggles in various countries show that they are very far from being even ‘impure’ proletarian struggles. They show on the contrary that the general dissatisfaction and frustration of the population with their oppression are still pre-empted or recuperated by the bourgeoisie and drowned in movements to revive democracy and prevent a class struggle, despite the presence of extensive elements of the working class within them.

To be fair to the ICT, it should be pointed out that the article does draw the lessons of the Arab Spring of 2011 in Egypt, and points out that this mass movement of a decade and half ago, despite involving massive strikes in the textile industry, was drowned in the polluted ocean of the struggle for democracy. But the article fails to apply this lesson to the democratic struggles of 2025.

Given the failure of the ICT article to warn against the danger of confusing proletarian struggle with the struggle for democracy today, or warn against the danger of acting as though it’s possible to convert the latter into the former, it’s more understandable why this group should have refused the proposed ICC Appeal on democracy which anticipated and adopted a clear position against the democratic campaigns and struggles. This ICC Appeal effectively eliminates the possibility that such campaigns can be turned into class movements.

The rejection of the Appeal by the other groups was not because they disagreed with the letter of the Appeal but its spirit: because the Appeal highlights a gulf between the Communist Left and all other political tendencies (from the extreme right to the extreme left) and prevents any opportunist concessions to the latter.

Similarly, the ICT rejected the ICC’s Internationalist Appeal of 2022 not because it disagreed with this Appeals’ main arguments in theory but because in practice the ICT wanted to pretend that it was possible to create an internationalist movement against war beyond the intransigence of the tradition of the Communist Left: a pretence that gave rise to the bluff of the ‘No War but the Class War’ initiative.

 

Democratic movements can’t be turned into proletarian movements

The idea that the present-day bourgeois democratic movements are ambiguous or fluid in their class nature would mean that they can, potentially, be turned into authentically proletarian movements. And the ICT hasn’t hesitated to assume this ill-founded logic even though the two types of movement are completely antagonistic and incompatible with each other.

The article illustrates this illusion perfectly with a subhead slogan: “From Street war to class war”.

Another example is in a leaflet (11.06.2025) of their US affiliate, the Internationalist Workers Group, against the ICE offensive in America. While pointing out that the Democratic Party presidency of Barack Obama had deported more immigrants than Trump, the leaflet says that:

“Workers everywhere must be prepared to defend themselves, their neighbours, and their coworkers against ICE’s raids. From neighborhood action committees and workplace struggles to mass protests, the struggle must be fought by the working class using its immense strength.”[3]

But the leaflet neglects to mention that a class response in the neighbourhoods to the raids of ICE had already been sabotaged long in advance by the Democratic Party as these quotes in support of the struggle from its representatives indicate:

“He [Trump] has declared a war. Democracy is under assault before our eyes.” (Gavin Newsome, Governor of California). “We are in a war for the soul of our country, for our democracy.” (Dolores Huerta, ex-labour official and civil rights activist). “Protest, carried out peacefully, is the bedrock of our democracy.” (Mayor Andrew Ginther, Columbus, Ohio). “We are advocating for the defence of democracy, the pursuit of justice, and the rule of law.” (Jewish Democratic Council of America).

The desperate struggle of immigrant workers against the militarised actions of ICE today (an agency that has existed since the attack on the Twin Towers in 2001) had already been railroaded along the track of defending US democracy against Trumpian illegality, against the latter’s disregard for democratic laws and procedures. The same laws that previously concealed the brutality of the Democrats' deportations of illegal immigrants. In other words, the protests against ICE today are not a class struggle against the attacks of the capitalist state on immigrant workers but a campaign for the democratic lawful restriction and brutalisation of immigrant workers.

Yet the ICT leaflet calls for the working class to take charge of the struggle against ICE, to turn it into a class movement. This would mean though, if it were possible, a rejection of all national divisions and borders and the confrontation not only of the militarised face of the state in ICE but its democratic alternative face as well. In other words, it would mean a completely different movement on a different class terrain. This would only be possible if the working class had already developed its own class struggle for its own interests to this political level. But as the leaflet and the article mentioned admit, this is as yet far from a reality.

However, neither article nor leaflet draw attention to the workers’ wage struggles on an international scale over the past year and since 2022 (including in the US) that have been developing on a class terrain and are clearly distinguishable from the democratic campaigns and movements, and are the only basis for a completely different future political struggle of the proletariat as an autonomous movement. 

 

A repetition of other opportunist mistakes such as in the Black Lives Matter movement

Unfortunately, the leaflet and article are not an isolated mistake but a repetition of other major errors of the groups of the Communist Left like the one the ICT made in imagining that the BLM riots and protests against the police murder of George Floyd, which erupted in 2020 during Trump’s first presidency, was a working class movement:

“In 1965, just like in 2020, the police kill, and the class responds in defiance to the crooked social order they murder for. The struggle continues”.[4]

The ICT added the qualification that the movement “doesn’t go far enough” and shouldn’t support the Democratic Party. But this doesn’t make sense if the movement is already going in the wrong direction to begin with[5]. It makes even less sense when you consider that the experts in pretending that the mobilisations of democratic opposition can be ‘taken further’ - the leftists - already completely occupy this political terrain and don’t need the assistance of misguided Communist Left groups.

Like the article on today’s democratic struggles, the ICT then declared categorically, without concern for the actual situation of the working class, that “The urban rebellion needs to be transformed into world revolution”.

 

The origins and history of this opportunist wishful thinking on democratic struggles

The ICC Appeal against the democratic campaigns refers to the major acquisition of the Italian Left fraction Bilan in the 1930s, for which ‘democratic struggles’ and ‘proletarian struggle’ are antagonistic, any confusion on this issue proving fatal.

Bilan's position can be summarised as follows: The ‘democratic’ experiments since 1918 have shown that defending democracy negates class struggle, stifles proletarian consciousness and leads its vanguard to treachery:

“The proletariat finds the reason for its historic mission by denouncing the lie of the democratic principle in its own nature and in the need to suppress the differences of classes and the classes themselves.” (“Fascism? Democracy? Communism”. Vercesi, Bilan no. 13, December 1934)

The majority of Bilan later defended this anti-democratic principle at the expense of a split with a minority of the fraction which abandoned this principle and went to fight in the war in Spain in 1936 with the illusion that the military conflict of the democratic republican wing against the fascist wing of the bourgeoisie was the precursor to a proletarian revolution rather than, as reality proved, the preparation of the slaughter of the working class in inter-imperialist war. The minority of Bilan thus confirmed in practice Vercesi’s statement that the defence of democracy leads the proletarian vanguard to treachery.

In the 1930s, rejection of anti-fascism, i.e. rejection of the defence of bourgeois democracy, was the litmus test of a communist tendency.[6]

It should be noted that – without having to renounce their intervention alongside the Republicans in Spain – members of this minority of Bilan were later integrated into the Internationalist Communist Party (PCInt), which is the ancestor of all the groups of the Communist Left that rejected the ICC's Appeal against the democratic campaigns.

The PCint was founded in Italy in 1943 as an internationalist party of the Italian left, but it was very heterogeneous politically. Many militants who had not broken with the positions of the Front and anti-fascism flocked to this new party. The very foundations on which the party was created contained all kinds of ambiguities, which meant that the party constituted a political regression from the positions of the Fraction before the war, the positions of Bilan. While remaining in the proletarian camp in a general sense, the PCint failed to distance itself from the erroneous positions of the Communist International, for example on the trade union question and the question of participation in electoral campaigns.

Only the Gauche Communiste de France group was able, during this period, to maintain an uncompromising position against bourgeois democracy and to continue the political work of Bilan after the Second World War.[7]

At the end of the Second World War, the PCInt developed an ambiguous attitude towards anti-fascist partisan groups in Italy – fully aligned with the imperialist war alongside the Allies – which it believed, due to the presence of workers among them, could somehow be rallied to the proletarian revolution thanks to the PCInt's participation in their ranks.[8]

When the PCInt split in 1952, this initial confusion surrounding its formation was not subsequently clarified, including by Battaglia Comunista (now the ICT), despite its criticism of Bordigism at the time of the split. It was therefore inevitable that this same conciliatory attitude towards democratic struggles would continue to manifest itself.

In 1989, with the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Eastern Bloc regimes, Battaglia misinterpreted the population's anger against Nicolae Ceausescu's hated regime in Romania as a ‘genuine popular uprising’, when in reality the population was mobilising behind the more democratic opposition to replace him. Regarding the democratic demands of the workers' struggles of the time in Russia itself, Battaglia, while admitting that these demands could be used by a wing of the bourgeoisie, stated: "... For these masses imbued with anti-Stalinism and the ideology of western capitalism, the first possible and necessary demands are those for the overthrow of the 'Communist' regime, for a liberalization of the productive apparatus, and for the conquest of 'democratic freedoms" [9]

Clearly the ambiguity of these groups on the rejection of democracy has a long history. But the class intransigence on this principle must be strengthened by the Communist Left, not only for the class struggle today, but for the revolutionary struggle of the future, and for the formation of its class party, which will depend to a large degree on the rejection of all conciliation to one or other of the political formations of the ruling class whose divisions are used to derail this objective.

 

Como, 8.9.25

For over a year and a half, we have been witnessing daily operations by the Israeli army in the Gaza Strip. In the name of ‘Israel's right to defend itself,’ Netanyahu claims to be hunting down the murderous Hamas commandos in their tunnels and wherever the terrorist group may have found refuge, whether in hospitals, schools or refugee camps, in order, as he claims, to free the hostages from 7 October who are still alive.

But the Israeli government couldn't care less about the hostages, who are merely a pretext for its sordid imperialist objectives: Netanyahu and his clique have announced their intention to occupy the entire Gaza Strip forever... completely cleansed of its Arab population! To achieve this, the Israeli bourgeoisie is sparing no expense. The army is showing boundless cruelty in this open-air prison: amid piles of corpses, the population, tossed from zone to zone, north one day, south the next, plunged into despair and lacking everything, lives in constant fear of the abject crimes of the soldiers, of bombs, hunger and disease. At the same time, attacks and expulsion policies have intensified in the West Bank, where thousands of Palestinians are being terrorised and forced to flee.

For Netanyahu and the religious fanatics around him, eliminating the Palestinians from the face of the Earth is now an avowed goal: when the army is not deliberately firing on frightened crowds, it is constantly obstructing the supply of food and basic necessities, shamelessly starving adults, the elderly and children. For more than three months, the government has even completely blocked supplies under pretexts so extravagant that they were in themselves yet another provocation, a barely concealed admission of ethnic cleansing. And all this with the active complicity of Egypt and Jordan, who officially express concern for the fate of the Palestinians while effectively strangling them by preventing them from leaving this hell.

All over the world, we are witnessing immense outrage and protests against the crimes taking place before our very eyes. Demonstrations are taking place in many cities calling for an end to the fighting, with cries of ‘Free Palestine!’ [1]Even the leaders of several European countries, after months of dithering, now feel compelled to condemn the IDF's abuses in Gaza, and even to denounce the reality of an ongoing genocide, such as Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez, who recently spoke out against “a catastrophic situation of genocide”[2].

But behind these statements there is nothing but hypocrisy and lies. The policy of systematic destruction in Gaza is no exception. Quite the contrary! Far from a ‘world at peace’, the entire history of decadent capitalism shows that society is sinking inexorably into barbarism and that no section of the bourgeoisie is capable of putting an end to it.

An unbroken chain of violence

In the 19th century, Karl Marx had already shown that capitalism came into the world through violence, massacres, destruction and pillage, “sweating blood and mud from every pore”: "The discovery of gold and silver in America, the extirpation, enslavement and entombment in mines of the aboriginal population, the beginning of the conquest and looting of the East Indies, the turning of Africa into a warren for the commercial hunting of black skins, signalised the rosy dawn of the era of capitalist production. These idyllic proceedings are the chief momenta of primitive accumulation."[3] The primitive capital necessary for the industrial revolution did not miraculously fall from the sky; its initial accumulation could only exist through plunder, banditry and slavery. In fact, the history of the first capitalist powers is a succession of ignominies, far removed from the ideals of its Enlightenment philosophy: from the large-scale genocide of the Native American peoples (between 80 and 100 million victims!), the development of capitalism has been bloody everywhere. Whether in Great Britain (genocide of the Australian Aborigines, among many other examples), France (extermination of a third of the Algerian population from 1830 onwards), Germany (genocide of the Herero and Nama peoples in Namibia between 1904 and 1908), Russia (1 to 2 million victims during the ethnic cleansing of the Circassians between 1864 and 1867), the United States (during the conquest of the West, for example) and even the ‘small country’ that was Belgium (with 10 million deaths in the Congo!), all bourgeoisies have been involved in the worst atrocities. This violence was also directed against the peasantry of traditional society, as evidenced by the cruelty inflicted by Great Britain on the Irish peasants.

Capitalism is synonymous with structural and institutionalised violence, but the process took a new, qualitative turn after the First World War. At its founding congress in 1919, the Communist International clearly identified the entry of capitalism into its period of decline: “A new epoch has dawned: the epoch of the disintegration of capitalism, of its internal collapse. The epoch of the communist revolution of the proletariat”. Whereas the conquests of the ascendant period had enabled the capitalist powers to develop and universalise new relations of production, the First World War meant that, in the absence of sufficient space and markets, conquest would henceforth take place not primarily on ‘virgin soil’ but through a deadly confrontation with other capitalist powers.

Thus, while the violence of capitalism's period of ascendancy had at least allowed for the development of the productive forces, the violence of its decadence represented a formidable chain of destruction that continued to expand and deepen: "Violated, dishonoured, wading in blood, dripping filth – there stands bourgeois society. This is it in reality. Not all spic and span and moral, with pretence to culture, philosophy, ethics, order, peace, and the rule of law – but the ravening beast, the witches’ sabbath of anarchy, a plague to culture and humanity. Thus it reveals itself in its true, its naked form… One thing is certain. The world war is a turning point. It is foolish and mad to imagine that we need only survive the war, like a rabbit waiting out the storm under a bush, in order to fall happily back into the old routine once it is over. The world war has altered the conditions of our struggle and, most of all, it has changed us"[4].

During the First World War, scientifically planned mass murders (such as gas attacks) and organised atrocities on a very large scale began to appear, as in the genocides of the Pontic Greeks and Armenians, in which millions of people were killed and displaced. This is why in its 1919 Platform the Communist International clearly identified that, faced with capitalism that had become obsolete, the alternative now facing humanity was either socialism or barbarism: “Human culture has been destroyed and humanity is threatened with complete annihilation. There is only one force able to save humanity and that is the proletariat… The final outcome of the capitalist mode of production is chaos. This chaos can only be overcome by the productive and most numerous class – the working class”. Since then, capitalism has continued to spread death and sow barbarism: expulsions, genocides, ethnic cleansing and policies of starvation have become ordinary weapons of war used continuously by all belligerents on a scale unprecedented in human history. After the First World War, even before the horrors of the Second began, this chain of violence continued. Atrocities were perpetrated, for example, this time not against a ‘foreign enemy’, but against Ukrainian peasants (Holodomor) during a famine organised by Stalin (between 2.6 and 5 million dead), or against the Russian population, who died by the millions while working in the gulags.

World War II: the relentless logic of decadent capitalism

The chain of violence finally reached a new level of barbarism during World War II, with 60 to 80 million dead in just six years, not counting the countless victims of hunger, disease and repression after the fighting ended. This conflict followed the same logic as that of 1914-1918, but on an even more murderous scale, reflecting the deepening historical crisis of the system.

The mass atrocities of the Nazi regime and its allies are well documented, but it is undoubtedly the industrialised killing of 3 million people[5], the vast majority of whom were Jews, in the extermination camps that most clearly expresses the height of barbarism that this conflict represented. But while the Nazis were appalling barbarians, it should not be forgotten that they expressed the barbarism of a decadent system, reduced to its most despicable extremes in the deadly competition between all states and all bourgeois factions.

What is much less publicised, however, are the crimes committed by the Allies during the war, including against the Jews. It is now established that the Allies were fully aware of the existence of the extermination camps from the moment they were set up in 1942, as well as the details of the methods of extermination and the number of victims already killed and those yet to be killed[6]. Yet neither the British, US nor Soviet governments took any action to stop or even slow down the massacre. Not even a railway line was bombed! Instead, they repeatedly bombed (with terrifying phosphorus incendiary bombs) numerous German cities with only civilian populations, particularly working-class suburbs, such as Leipzig, Hamburg (at least 45,000 civilian victims) and, above all, Dresden. The latter bombing caused countless casualties. Estimates vary considerably, ranging from 25,000 to 200,000 dead. We are unable to determine the number of victims, but the bombing of Dresden has certain significant characteristics of the barbarity unleashed by the Allies, both in terms of the mobilisation of exceptional resources (1,300 bombers in one night and two days) and the use of ‘banned’ phosphorus bombs, which turned the city into a veritable furnace. All these measures only really make sense when one considers that Dresden was not a major industrial city, nor did it have any real strategic interest. On the other hand, it had a huge population of refugees who had fled the Eastern Front, believing that Dresden would not be bombed. The aim of this exemplary destruction was to terrorise the population and the working class in particular, in order to deprive them of any desire to mobilise on their own class terrain, as had already happened in 1943 in several German and Italian cities. In a memorandum dated 28 March 1945 addressed to the British General Staff, Winston Churchill wrote about these bombings: “It seems to me that the time has come to question the bombing of German cities carried out with the aim of increasing terror, while invoking other pretexts. Otherwise, we would be taking over a country that is completely ruined. For example, we would not be able to obtain building materials from Germany for our own needs [...]. The destruction of Dresden cast serious doubt on the conduct of the Allied bombing." Astonishing cynicism!

But these crimes were ultimately only a prelude to the immense tragedy of the nuclear bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki (approximately 200,000 victims), which were completely unnecessary from a military point of view and intended to intimidate the ‘Soviet’ rival. And it was with the same cynicism, with the same indifference towards the victims, that Russian troops stopped fighting at the gates of Warsaw in order to leave it to the Nazis to crush the ongoing uprising (160,000 to 250,000 civilians killed). For the Stalinist bourgeoisie, haunted by the spectre of the revolutionary wave of 1917 and in the midst of a world war, it was a question of crushing any possibility of proletarian reaction and having a completely free hand to install a government under its thumb. In Italy, Churchill also held back the fighting to allow the fascists to suppress the growing strikes, letting them, in his own words, “stew in their own juice”.

Capitalism is sinking into widespread barbarism

Since 1945, the massacres have never stopped: our planet has not known a single day without military conflict. No sooner had the war ended than the confrontation between the two new rival blocs led to the horrors of the Cold War: the Korean War (3 to 5 million dead), the Vietnam War (around 2 million dead), the first war in Afghanistan (2 million dead according to estimates) and countless extremely deadly proxy wars, such as the Iran-Iraq War in the late 1980s, which left at least 1.2 million dead.

After the Cold War, the massacres resumed with a vengeance, and the world took a turn for the worse, becoming even more chaotic and anarchic as the logic of blocs no longer imposed any discipline on the various states or factions. A new dynamic of decay emerged in this final phase of decadence, the phase of decomposition. Conflicts became increasingly destructive, characterised by short-sighted power grabs with no rational strategic objectives other than to sow chaos among rivals.

Here too, the major democracies have blood on their hands, as evidenced by the wars in Yugoslavia (at least 130,000 dead), fuelled by arms supplied by the United States, France and Germany. The attitude of UN troops during this conflict, when they allowed Milosevic's death squads to massacre the population of Srebrenica in July 1995 (around 8,000 killed), is also characteristic of the permanent cynicism of the bourgeoisie. Another example is the attitude of French troops, under UN mandate, during the Rwandan war in the 1990s, who were complicit in the genocide of the Hutus (1 million dead). The major powers have also been directly involved in large-scale massacres, sowing chaos wherever they have intervened, particularly in Afghanistan (165,000 dead, officially, but undoubtedly more), Iraq (1.2 million killed) and today in the Middle East and Ukraine, where the conflict has already claimed more than a million lives. The list is endless.

Gaza, an illustration of the future of capitalism

The chain of violence that has marked the 20th century is now leading, through the threat of widespread war, nuclear risks and environmental destruction, to the possible disappearance of civilisation, or even of humanity itself. While the scenes of horror in Gaza are particularly shocking, the Ukrainian population and certain regions of Russia have also been living for more than three years under bombs and a policy of terror, with the open support of those who are now outraged by the fate of the Palestinians. At the same time, the millions of people suffering from war in Sudan, Congo, Yemen and so many other parts of the world are barely noticed by the media. In Sudan alone, 12 million people have tried in vain to flee the war, and millions more are threatened with starvation under the indifferent gaze of all the ‘democracies’. The Sahara is ablaze, and the Middle East is sinking deeper than ever into chaos. Asia is under severe strain and on the brink of war. In South America, regions ravaged by clashes between rival gangs resemble war zones, as evidenced by the catastrophic situation in Haiti. Even in the United States, the seeds of a potential civil war are visible. Capitalism today presents an apocalyptic image, and it is striking to note that the fields of ruins typical of the end of the Second World War have appeared in a matter of weeks in Ukraine and Gaza.

The wars in the Middle East are part of this deadly process. Symbolising the impasse into which capitalism is sinking, Israel launched a new offensive in the Gaza Strip in May, just as Trump was touring Arab countries, celebrating a series of trade agreements and investment projects, many of which, of course, involved arms sales (142 billion dollars with Saudi Arabia alone!).

The European bourgeoisie is not to be outdone in cynicism. While expressing belated indignation at the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians and threatening (without much insistence) Israel with sanctions, it was meeting at the same time in Albania at the summit of the European Political Community to rally support for Ukraine. Its main concern is not so much to help refugees, nor the victims of Israel's genocidal policy, nor the millions of refugees who have fled and are desperately trying to reach Europe. Their only concern has been to mobilise more weapons and soldiers for the war against Russia, while strengthening brutal measures against ‘illegal immigrants’.

While despicable propaganda from the Israeli government seeks to portray any outrage at the crimes in Gaza as anti-Semitism[7] by exploiting the Holocaust in a despicable manner, the Zionist state, which presents itself as the protector of Jews, the descendants of the Nazi genocide, has itself become an exterminator[8]. This is hardly surprising: the nation-state is not a transcendent category above history; it is the ultimate form of capitalist exploitation and competition. In a world dominated by the relentless logic of imperialism and rivalries between all against all, every state, weak or powerful, democratic or not, is a link in the chain of violence that capitalism inflicts on humanity. To fight for the creation of a new state, Israel yesterday, Palestine today, is to fight to institutionalise the arming of new belligerents and fuel a new graveyard. This is why all extreme left groups that call for support for the ‘Palestinian cause’ are de facto choosing an armed camp and are in fact contributing to the perpetuation of massacres rather than to the liberation of humanity.

EG, 13 July 2025

 

We are currently witnessing an acceleration of history. Not a day goes by without a new, often unprecedented and largely unpredictable event occurring on the international stage. Let us consider a few recent examples: who could have predicted Trump's re-election after his attempted coup in January 2021? Who could even have imagined that such an attempted coup could take place in the United States? What about the divorce between the United States and Europe, with tariffs and customs duties being used as weapons of blackmail, after decades of close cooperation between these countries? What about the policy of annexation, practised not only by Putin in Ukraine, but also claimed by Netanyahu towards the Palestinian territories and by Trump towards Canada, Greenland and the Panama Canal? And then there are the scenarios of endless and barbaric wars (Ukraine, Gaza, Yemen, Sudan...) that have multiplied, even though Bush Sr. announced in 1989, after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the advent of a “new era of peace” and a “new world order”?

We can all agree on the shock caused by the scale and unpredictability of many events that have dominated the news in recent times. We can also all agree about the need to denounce the period of barbarism into which we are increasingly entering. But if we do not want to be mere passive subjects of a rotten system that increasingly calls our future into question; we must make an effort to understand its evolution, its internal dynamics and the origin of these events. To this end, this article aims to show how the phenomena we witness on a daily basis are the expression and result of a process of disintegration of the political apparatus of the bourgeoisie, which operates at the international level and began at the end of the 20th century.

A major expression of this was the collapse of the former ‘Soviet’ bloc, followed by the gradual disintegration of the Western bloc.

The bourgeoisie, a class that has accumulated long experience in governing society

The proletariat, the revolutionary class of our time, if it is to develop a concrete project for the future society in order to advance its historic struggle for communism, has only two tools at its disposal: its unity and its consciousness. On the other hand, the bourgeoisie, the class that currently holds power, did not need to develop a great consciousness and grand projects to seize political power, because the very development of the capitalist economy gave it the material basis to impose itself politically. As the ruling class in society and the exploiting class, the bourgeoisie is incapable of imagining a future beyond capitalist society, so its conception of the world is fundamentally static and conservative. This has consequences for bourgeois ideology and its inability to understand the course of history, because it does not envisage the present as something ephemeral, in constant evolution. It is therefore incapable of making long-term plans and seeing beyond its own mode of production. The difference between the revolutionary class consciousness of the proletariat and the ‘false consciousness’ of the bourgeoisie is therefore not just a matter of degree; it is a difference in nature.

But this does not mean that the bourgeoisie is incapable of grasping reality and drawing on its past experience to develop tools to ensure its domination. Indeed, unlike the proletariat, which, despite being a historical class, does not continuously assert its political presence in society and is subject to all the political fluctuations of different events, with moments of open struggle and others of retreat, the bourgeoisie has the advantage of being the ruling class that holds power and can therefore dispose of all the means necessary to survive as long as possible.

Some parts of it, such as the English bourgeoisie, have accumulated several centuries of experience in the struggle against the previous feudal power, then against other countries, as well as against the proletariat itself. This experience has been used intelligently by the various bourgeoisies in the management of their political power, particularly since the dawn of the phase of decadence at the beginning of the 20th century, when the historical crisis of capitalism began to call into question the survival of the system. It is important for the proletariat to understand that the policy of the bourgeoisie in this period of decadence, regardless of the decisions of this or that government, is always to defend the interests of the ruling class as a whole.

The political game of alternating right-wing and left-wing governments
Democratic control of society

Since capitalist society is based on the exploitation of one class by another, of the working class by the bourgeoisie, the latter needs, in order to perpetuate its control over society for as long as possible, to hide this truth and present things not as they are, but in a distorted way, basing its ideology on the myth of ‘equality between citizens’, making people believe, for example, that we are all equal, that everyone shapes their own destiny and that if someone has problems, it is because they created them themselves by not making the right choices.

The most effective tool of the bourgeoisie for governing a country and ensuring its class domination is therefore the democratic mystification, a system that gives people the illusion that they play a political role as individuals and that they matter in society, that they can even aspire to leadership positions. If today the bourgeoisie maintains, at great expense, a whole political apparatus for the surveillance and mystification of the proletariat (parliament, parties, trade unions, various associations, etc.) and establishes absolute control over all the media (press, radio, television), it is because propaganda is an essential weapon of the bourgeoisie to ensure its domination. Democratic consultations such as elections, referendums, etc., are the practical tools used by the bourgeoisie to obtain from the so-called ‘sovereign’ people, mystifyingly considered as masters of their own destiny, the mandate to decide the fate of society.

Amadeo Bordiga gives us a brilliant description of this mechanism: "Our criticism of such a method must be much more severe when it is applied to society as a whole as it is today, or to given nations, than when it is introduced into much smaller organisations, such as trade unions and parties. In the first case, it must be rejected without hesitation as unfounded, because it does not take into account the situation of individuals in the economy and presupposes the intrinsic perfection of the system without taking into consideration the historical evolution of the community to which it applies. […] This is what political democracy officially claims to be, when in reality it is the form that suits the power of the capitalist class, the dictatorship of this particular class, with the aim of preserving its privileges.

It is therefore not necessary to spend much time refuting the error of attributing the same degree of independence and maturity to the ‘vote’ of each voter, whether they are a worker exhausted by excessive physical labour or a debauched rich man, a shrewd captain of industry or an unfortunate proletarian ignorant of the causes of his misery and the means of remedying it. From time to time, after long intervals, the opinions of these and others are sought, and it is claimed that the fulfilment of this ‘sovereign’ duty is sufficient to ensure the calm and obedience of those who feel victimised and mistreated by the policies and administration of the state”[1] [158].

The classic left/right bipartisanship and the game of alternation

The bourgeoisie exercised this power of control for a long time, as long as it was able to do so, for example by directing the popular vote in one direction or another according to its wishes, by financing the various channels of political propaganda. This game was played in a particularly sophisticated manner in the last century in countries such as France, Italy, Germany, the United States and others, where there were historically right-wing and left-wing factions, through an alternation of right-wing and left-wing governments.

To fully understand this point, we can refer to what we wrote in a previous article in 1982: “At the level of organizing to survive, to defend itself -- here, the bourgeoisie has shown an immense capacity to develop techniques for economic and social control way beyond the dreams of the rulers of the nineteenth century. In this sense, the bourgeoisie has become ‘intelligent' confronted with the historic crisis of its socio-economic system…

In the context of state capitalism, the differences between the bourgeois parties are nothing compared to what they have in common. All start from an over-riding premise that the interests of the national capital as a whole are paramount. This premise enables different factions to work together in a very close way -- especially behind the closed doors of parliamentary committees and in the higher echelons of the state apparatus…

In confronting the proletariat the state can employ many branches of its apparatus in a coherent division of labor; even in a single strike the workers may have to face an array of trade unions, press and television propaganda campaigns of different hues, campaigns by several political parties, the police, the ‘welfare' services and, at times, the army. But to see a concerted use made of all of these parts of the state does not imply that they each see the total framework in which they are each carrying out their function.”[2] [159]

As the proletariat is the greatest enemy of the bourgeoisie, the latter resorts to cunning, particularly in phases of heightened class struggle, to ideologically trap the exploited class. A typical and particularly interesting example is that of Italy after the Second World War. Italy at that time had the Italian Communist Party (PCI)[3] [160], a Stalinist party linked to the Soviet Union, but which still enjoyed strong support among workers. At the same time, Italy, in accordance with the imperialist blocs established following the 1945 Yalta Conference agreements, found itself within the sphere of influence of the United States. As a result, the Italian bourgeoisie, under strong pressure from the American bourgeoisie, used all its resources for more than 40 years, mainly through the Christian Democracy (DC), to maintain its control over the country and ensure alignment with American foreign policy, which aimed to keep pro-Soviet parties such as the PCI out of government.

However, May 1968 in France and the Hot Autumn of 1969 in Italy made the social climate explosive and forced the bourgeoisie to take measures to contain the social storm. Thus, the left-wing parties and trade unions became more radical, with slogans that tended to rally, but only in words, the demands coming from the grassroots. At the same time, a whole campaign was launched, orchestrated by the left-wing parties and made credible by the reactions of the centre and right-wing parties, according to which it would be possible, through grassroots efforts, to catch up with and overtake the Christian Democrats in the elections and finally impose a left-wing government that included the PCI. It was in the 1960s, and especially in the 1970s, that this race took place, which served in part to deceive the proletariat, in Italy but not only there, into believing that it was enough to achieve an electoral majority for electoral promises to be fulfilled.

In fact, the PCI never came to power[4] [161] due to an explicit American veto, but with the varied political composition of Italy at the time, it was possible, depending on the circumstances, to form centre-left governments with the presence of the Italian Socialist Party (PSI), and even governments supported by the PCI. This is how the period of the left ‘in power’ began in many countries, a powerful mystification aimed at channelling the aspirations of the masses of the time into the dead end of bourgeois parliamentarism.

But keeping the left in power, when objective conditions do not allow this left (nor, for that matter, any other faction of the bourgeoisie) to satisfy the needs of the proletariat, is not the best policy to follow, or at least it cannot be applied for too long without discrediting this important faction of the bourgeoisie. That is why, in the 1970s and 1980s, we saw a succession of right-wing and left-wing governments in various countries around the world, depending on the intensity of the workers' struggles underway. The policy of keeping the left in opposition proved particularly effective, as it allowed the various bourgeois left-wing parties and the trade unions to radicalise themselves and denounce government measures without fear of having to implement what they were demanding in demonstrations and in parliament.

The fall of the Berlin Wall
Why this historic event happened and what changed

The process that led to the end of the imperialist blocs and the beginning of an era of chaos was the product of an impasse in the class struggle between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. This impasse was due, on the one hand, to the inability of the working class to sufficiently politicise its struggles throughout the 1980s by giving them a revolutionary dynamic; on the other hand, the bourgeoisie itself, faced with the worsening economic crisis, failed to steer society towards a new imperialist war, as had been the case before the Second World War. In the 1930s, thanks to the ideological weapon of anti-fascism, the bourgeoisie had succeeded in enlisting the proletariat behind its warmongering objectives. But at the end of the 1980s, the proletariat was not politically defeated.

It was the deepening of this impasse that exhausted the leader of the weakest imperialist bloc, the ‘Soviet’ Union, in the militarist effort of maintaining the Cold War, thus causing the bloc to implode[5] [48]. Crushed under the weight of the crisis of the system, to which it was unable to respond with economic and political measures commensurate with the situation, the ‘Soviet’ imperialist bloc collapsed into a thousand pieces. The rival American bloc thus found itself without a common enemy to watch and defend against. This led slowly but surely to a growing tendency among the various Western powers to detach themselves from American protection and embark on an independent path, and even to increasing challenges to the bloc's ‘leader’.

Naturally, the United States attempted to counter this drift, which called into question its leadership and role as a superpower, for example by trying to rally the European powers behind it in a showdown with Saddam Hussein's Iraq, triggering the first Gulf War of 1990-1991[6] [162]. Under duress, and albeit reluctantly, no fewer than 34 different countries, including the main European powers, the countries of South America, the Middle East, etc., submitted to America’s will by participating in a war provoked by the United States itself.

But when, with the second Gulf War in March 2003, the United States once again sought to demonstrate that it held the keys to controlling the global situation, inventing the story that Saddam Hussein possessed "weapons of mass destruction", far fewer countries joined the coalition and, significantly, countries with the weight of France and Germany this time around firmly opposed it from the outset and did not participate.

At the same time, we must remember the wars in the Balkans, which affected the former Yugoslavia, a country bled dry after a bloody separation into seven new nations, and where the diverging interests of the former allies of the Western bloc became even more apparent. In the early 1990s, the government of Chancellor Helmut Kohl, which was pushing for and supporting the independence of Croatia and Slovenia in order to give Germany access to the Mediterranean, directly opposed not only American power but also the interests of France and the United Kingdom. This led to a series of wars in Croatia, Bosnia-Herzegovina and finally Kosovo, which continued until the end of the century, passing through a whole series of shifting alliances which demonstrated the increasingly cynical and short-term nature of imperialist relations in this period.

The crisis of social democracy, the collapse of the Communist Parties and the crisis of leftism

The new international scenario created by the break-up of the blocs, which, as already mentioned, marks the beginning of what we call the phase of decomposition, the final phase of the decadence of capitalism, could not fail to have consequences for domestic politics and for the role and relative importance of the various parties.

On the one hand, the disappearance of the blocs meant that it was no longer necessary to maintain the same government alliances as in the past. This sometimes led to the need to dismantle, by any means possible, the old political alliance that had guided the formation of the various governments. Once again, Italy is an excellent example: after having been controlled for a long time, on behalf of the Americans, by a conglomerate of forces including political parties (the DC at the centre), the Sicilian Mafia, Freemasonry (P2) and the secret services, the attempt by the section of the Italian bourgeoisie that aspired to play a more autonomous role and free itself from this control after the fall of the Berlin Wall met with enormous resistance from this alliance, leading to a series of assassinations of politicians and magistrates, bombings, etc.[7] [163]

On the other hand, the significant decline in the militancy and, above all, the consciousness of the working class caused by the fall of the Soviet Union, which until then had been falsely presented by the media as the epitome of socialism, led to a crisis in the left-wing parties, which were no longer indispensable, or at least didn’t merit the prominence they had acquired, to contain a working-class pressure that had been greatly reduced. This led to profound political change in various countries and the end of the right/left alternation.

The weight of decomposition on the political apparatus of the bourgeoisie

If we consider the essential characteristics of decomposition as it manifests itself today, we see that they all have one thing in common, namely the lack of perspective for society, which is particularly evident in the case of the bourgeoisie on the political and ideological level. This consequently determines the inability of the various political formations to propose long-term, coherent and realistic projects.

This is how we characterised the situation in our ‘Theses on Decomposition’: "Amongst the major characteristics of capitalist society’s decomposition, we should emphasise the bourgeoisie’s growing difficulty in controlling the evolution of the political situation. Obviously, this is a result of the ruling class’ increasing loss of control over its economic apparatus, the infrastructure of society. The historic dead-end in which the capitalist mode of production finds itself trapped, the successive failures of the bourgeoisie’s different policies, the permanent flight into debt as a condition for the survival of the world economy, cannot but effect the political apparatus which is itself incapable of imposing on society, and especially on the working class, the “discipline” and acquiescence necessary to mobilise all its strength for a new world war, which is the only historic “response” that the bourgeoisie has to give. The absence of any perspective (other than day-to-day stop-gap measures to prop up the economy) around which it could mobilise as a class, and at the same time the fact that the proletariat does not yet threaten its own survival, creates within the ruling class, and especially within its political apparatus, a growing tendency towards indiscipline and an attitude of “every man for himself”. This phenomenon in particular allows us to explain the collapse of Stalinism and the entire Eastern imperialist bloc. Overall, this collapse is a consequence of the capitalist world economic crisis; nor should we forget to take account in our analyses of the specificities of the Stalinist regimes as a result of their origins (see our ‘Theses on the economic and political crisis in the USSR and the Eastern Bloc’, International Review, No. 60)...

...This general tendency for the bourgeoisie to lose control of its own policies was one of the primary factors in the Eastern bloc’s collapse; this collapse can only accentuate the tendency:

• because of the resulting aggravation of the economic crisis;
• because of the disintegration of the Western bloc which is implied by the disappearance of its rival;
• because the temporary disappearance of the perspective of world war will exacerbate the rivalries between different bourgeois factions (between national factions especially, but also between cliques within national states).”[8] [46]

The decline of the traditional bourgeois parties created a certain political vacuum at the international level, both on the right and on the left. Moreover, a context in which there were no longer any directives from above began to favour the entry onto the political scene of adventurers and financial magnates with no political experience, but eager to settle matters in their own way. This marked the beginning of a shift in the national political landscape of various countries, which we will attempt to describe below.

Instability and increasing fragmentation of the political apparatus

This acceleration of the crisis in the system at all levels manifests itself in different ways. The fundamental problem is the bourgeoisie's loss of control over the country's political dynamics. This is reflected both in its inability to steer the population's electoral choices towards the most appropriate government team for the situation, as it did in the past, and in its difficulty in formulating valid strategies to contain (let alone overcome) the crisis in the system. In short, the bourgeoisie increasingly lacks the ‘thinking head’ that in the past had enabled it to mitigate the difficulties in its path.

The first effect of this is a loss of cohesion within the bourgeoisie, which, without a common overall plan, is unable to maintain the unity of its various components. This leads to a tendency towards ‘every man for himself’, with increasing difficulty in creating stable alliances. This is evident at the level of individual countries, where it is increasingly difficult to form stable governments due to increasingly unpredictable election results.

In France, after the success of Marine Le Pen's populist coalition in the European elections, Macron surprised everyone by announcing the dissolution of the National Assembly and calling new legislative elections. However, the result was an unmanageable Parliament, divided into three roughly equal blocs: the left (in a very fragile manner, momentarily united by electoral opportunism), the Macronist centre and the far right. After months of institutional deadlock, a centre-right government was formed, only to be torpedoed by a parliamentary vote of no confidence after only three months. Subsequently, Bayrou's centrist government was formed, a minority government and therefore completely precarious. At the time of writing, Bayrou has been overthrown, and Macron's very presidency is being questioned by a large part of the electorate.

In Britain, too, bourgeois politics is marked by great instability, with five new governments in seven years. And the prospects for the current Starmer government have dimmed since the Labour Party's victory in last year's elections with 34% of the vote, as its support has fallen to 23%, while Reform UK, the populist nationalist party led by Nigel Farage, is the most popular, according to the latest polls, with 29%.

In Germany, following the fall of Olaf Scholz's government, formed by the SPD, the Greens and the Liberals and described by the Infratest dimap institute[9] [164] as “the most unpopular in German history” [10] [165], Friedrich Merz's new government, supported by a coalition between the CDU and the SPD, is already losing ground according to the latest polls, while the populist, nationalist AfD party is gaining ground and is now only 3 points behind the CDU.

Pedro Sánchez's Spanish government, based on an alliance between the PS and several Catalan and Basque regional parties, was formed and is being maintained thanks to historic concessions, such as the amnesty law for the leaders of the independence movement involved in organising the illegal referendum on Catalan independence held in 2017. This government is therefore supported by political blackmail from one party over another.

We have cited examples from the most powerful countries in Europe (but similar situations also exist in Austria, the Netherlands and Poland, among others) because, compared to the governments that existed in these same countries in the not-so-distant past, the current administrations pale by comparison. For example, Willy Brandt in Germany, promoter of Ostpolitik and winner of the Nobel Peace Prize in 1971, was Chancellor from 1969 to 1974; Angela Merkel, considered one of the most powerful women in the world, held this position from 2005 to 2021 (a full 15 years!) and Margaret Thatcher, nicknamed the Iron Lady, who left her mark on a long period of political influence, was British Prime Minister from May 1979 to November 1990, a total of 11 years! This comparison makes us realise how fragile, volatile and precarious the current situation is.

But the same fragmentation is evident at the international level, where Brexit[11] [166], decided by the 2016 consultative referendum, and then Trump's ‘tariff’ operation[12] [167] this year, to name just a few major examples, have marked, one after the other, important moments of rupture in previous international collaborations between states.

The rise and fall of the environmentalists, a product of decay

In a context where communism was considered a failure, when the working class no longer demonstrated in the streets as before, but where economic pressure remained and environmental disasters were multiplying, environmental movements of all kinds began to emerge around the world. The first appeared in the 1970s and 1980s and spread and developed in various countries, advocating not only respect for nature but also the rejection of militarism and war.

Unfortunately, viewing environmental problems in isolation and not as a manifestation of how capitalism destroys nature, especially in its decadent phase, led individuals protesting against these problems to believe that things could be resolved within the existing system and to join new bourgeois offshoots, each with its own leader seeking a political space in which to express themselves.

However, these movements remained very much in the minority, even when they sought to compete in elections, and proved to be short-lived. This can be explained by the fact that these movements often arose and fought for specific environmental causes: opposition to the construction of a dam or nuclear power plant, pollution caused by large industries, etc. Consequently, once attention shifted away from the specific issue, the weight of opinion surrounding it also ceased its support.

However, in some countries, such as Germany and Belgium, ‘green’ political parties have managed to ‘break through’ and even enter government. Founded under the impetus of certain personalities, including Daniel Cohn-Bendit, a leader of the 1968 student movement in France, the German Greens have grown steadily since the early 1980s, winning 27 seats (5.6%) in the Bundestag in 1983 and victory in the regional elections in Hesse in 1985, where Joschka Fischer, another leader of the movement, was appointed Minister of the Environment. The discrediting of the other traditional parties naturally favoured the growth of ‘newcomers’ such as the Greens in Germany. But the problem is that, as we have tried to develop above, governing a country is not an easy task. It is true that the bourgeoisie has accumulated a wealth of experience, but this cannot be easily and immediately transferred to a newly formed party. On the other hand, the German Greens immediately proved to be just like any other bourgeois politicians. After presenting a superficial election programme in 1980 that even talked about ‘dismantling’ the German army and initiating the ‘dissolution’ of military alliances such as NATO and the Warsaw Pact, in 1999, for the first time, they had renounced their pacifism, when Joschka Fischer defended the deployment of NATO aircraft to bomb Serbia. The same situation was repeated when the 2021 election manifesto opposed sending weapons to war zones and called for a ‘new impetus for disarmament’, priorities that were subsequently included in the coalition agreement on which the Scholz government was formed. They then made a U-turn in keeping with their bourgeois nature, thanks to the work of Vice-Chancellor and Minister for Economic Affairs and Climate Robert Habeck and Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock, the two most prominent members of the Green Party in Olaf Scholz's cabinet. Both succeeded in tugging at the Chancellor's sleeve to urge him to send heavy weapons to Ukraine. Habeck's response in Kiel to protesters who called him a ‘warmonger’ was significant: “In this situation, where people are defending their lives, their democracy and their freedom, Germany and the Greens must be prepared to face reality”[13] [168].

The decay of the bourgeois political apparatus
The rise of the far right and the strengthening of populism

A striking phenomenon that has occurred in recent decades is the rapid development of populist movements and, in their wake, far-right parties. A quick look at current government formations around the world shows, for example, that in Europe, seven countries, including Italy, the Netherlands, Sweden and Finland, have already established a government majority with a significant populist component, while in other cases, such as France, Germany and the United Kingdom, the populist movement has gained considerable political representation or achieved resounding success (Brexit). The phenomenon is continuing to grow, to the point where some of its representatives now hold important ministerial positions, in Italy and the Netherlands for example. In South America, with Bolsonaro in Brazil and Milei in Argentina, and in Asia, with Modi in India, populists have been elected as heads of state. Last but not least, in the United States, the most powerful country in the world, a populist adventurer at the head of the MAGA (Make America Great Again) movement has won a second term as head of the federal state.

The tendency towards the political ‘vandalism’ of these movements, which manifests itself in the rejection of ‘elites’, the rejection of foreigners, the search for scapegoats, the retreat into the ‘indigenous community’, conspiracy theories, the belief in a strong and providential leader, etc., is first and foremost the product of the ideological putrefaction conveyed by the lack of perspective in capitalist society[14] [46], which affects the capitalist class first and foremost.

But the breakthrough and development of populism in the political life of the bourgeoisie has been determined above all by one of the major manifestations of the decomposition of capitalist society: the increasing difficulty of the bourgeoisie to control the evolution of the situation on the political level, through its most ‘experienced’ parties, which have lost not only their credibility but also their ability to manage and control the situation on the political level: “The return of Trump is a classic expression of the political failure of those factions of the ruling class who have a more lucid understanding of the needs of the national capital; it is thus a clear expression of a more general loss of political control by the US bourgeoisie, but this is a world-wide tendency and it is particularly significant that the populist wave is having an impact in other central countries of capitalism: thus we have seen the rise of the AfD in Germany, of Le Pen’s RN in France, and Reform in the UK. Populism is the expression of a faction of the bourgeoisie but its incoherent and contradictory policies express a growing nihilism and irrationality which does not serve the overall interests of the national capital. The case of Britain, which has been ruled by one of the most intelligent and experienced bourgeoisies, shooting itself in the foot through Brexit is a clear example. Trump’s domestic and foreign policies will be no less damaging for US capitalism: at the level of foreign policy, by fuelling conflicts with its former allies while courting its traditional enemies, but also domestically, through the impact of its self-destructive economic ‘programme’. Above all, the campaign of revenge against the ‘deep state’ and ‘liberal elites’, the targeting of minority groups and the ‘war on woke’ will stir up confrontations between factions of the ruling class which could take on an extremely violent character in a country where an enormous proportion of population own weapons; the assault on the Capitol on January 6, 2021, would pale into insignificance in comparison. And we can already see, in embryo, the beginnings of a reaction by parts of the bourgeoisie who have most to lose from Trump’s policies (for example, the state of California, Harvard University, etc). Such conflicts carry the threat of dragging in the wider population and represent an extreme danger to the working class, its efforts to defend its class interests and forge its unity against all the divisions inflicted on it by the disintegration of bourgeois society. The recent “Hands Off” demonstrations organised by the left wing of the Democratic Party are a clear example of this danger, since they succeeded in channelling certain working class sectors and demands into an overall defence of democracy against the dictatorship of Trump and consorts. Again, while these internal conflicts may be particularly sharp in the USA, they are the product of a much wider process. Decadent capitalism has long relied on the state apparatus to prevent such antagonisms from tearing society apart, and in the phase of decomposition the capitalist state is equally forced to resort to the most dictatorial measures to maintain its rule. And yet at the same time, when the state machine itself is riven by violent internal conflicts, there is a powerful thrust towards a situation where “the centre cannot hold, mere anarchy is loosed upon the world” as the poet WB Yeats put it. The ‘failed states’ we are seeing most vividly in the Middle East, Africa or the Caribbean present an image of what is already brewing in the most developed centres of the system. In Haiti, for example, the official state machine is increasingly powerless in the face of competing criminal gangs, and in parts of Africa inter-gang competition has risen to the height of ‘civil war’. But in the US itself, the current domination of the state by the Trump clan more and more resembles the rule of a mafia, with its open espousal of the methods of blackmail and threat ."[15] [169]

This situation has very significant repercussions on the entire global political and economic scene. Indeed, as long as the various countries, despite competition between them, managed to maintain a policy of cooperation on certain issues, such as economic policy in particular or imperialist policy, the fall into the abyss of decadence and decomposition of the system could be slowed down, at least in part. But today, the blind and irresponsible policies (from a bourgeois point of view) of many countries, including the United States itself, not only fail to slow down the crisis of the system, but in fact accelerate it.

Irrationality and loss of sight of the interests of the state

These deep divisions within the bourgeoisie express the weight of ‘every man for himself’, which means that the various components no longer feel bound by a higher interest in defending the interests of the state, or that of an ‘international order’, but rather pursue the interests of particular political factions, cliques or specific economic families, at any cost. Furthermore, it is often the case that interest groups that rise in society to the point of winning important government positions have no prior political training. All this means that the politics pursued by the bourgeoisie today are increasingly characterised by a high degree of improvisation and irrationality which, naturally, in a context of growing disorder, only accelerates global chaos. We have already mentioned totally irrational measures such as the decision to hold a referendum on Brexit in Britain and Trump's tariff policy. We will simply add a few details about the composition of the team for the second term of Trump, the leader of the most powerful country in the world: everyone can examine for themselves what is happening in a similar way in other countries.

Here is a judgement that appeared in an Italian newspaper (certainly not a left-wing newspaper!) at the beginning of the year: “No president has ever recruited such a crowd of criminals, extremists, scoundrels, crooks and undesirable individuals.[16] [170]”. Let's take a closer look at some of the members of the Trump administration. Trump's first choice for Attorney General was Matt Gaetz, but he had to withdraw. The reason? Not because he was his lawyer, the one who had guided him with diabolical skill through his legal troubles. The real reason was that he was facing charges of sexual harassment and drug use, which is certainly not ideal for a Minister of Justice.

Then there is the sensational case of notorious anti-vaxxer Robert F. Kennedy Jr., appointed to head the Department of Health and Human Services, despite having declared his desire to abolish polio vaccines and being known as a conspiracy theorist. More than 75 Nobel laureates opposed Kennedy Jr.'s appointment as Health Secretary, saying it would ‘endanger public health’. More than 17,000 doctors (out of 20,000), members of the Committee for the Protection of Healthcare, opposed Kennedy Jr.'s appointment, citing the fact that Kennedy has undermined public confidence in vaccines for decades and poses a threat to national health. Epidemiologist Gregg Gonsalves of Yale University, who also opposed Kennedy Jr.'s appointment, said that putting Kennedy in charge of a health agency would be like “putting a flat-Earther in charge of NASA”.

Pete Hegseth, a notorious homophobe, has been appointed to head the Pentagon (with a budget of $800 billion and 3 million employees). And, surprise surprise, he is also being sued for sexual harassment.

As for the other members of the government, reports suggest that most of them are extremists, poorly trained or particularly anti-establishment. What unites them is their absolute loyalty to their leader. Trump doesn't care if they swear allegiance to the Constitution; he just needs them to swear allegiance to him and to prove it.

Trump immediately distinguished himself by eliminating thousands of civil servants whom he considered troublesome or who, in his view, performed duties incompatible with his mandate. But he was even more brutal towards those who directly opposed him, using vindictive methods worthy of mafia feuds.

The policy against those whom Trump considers traitors is their direct elimination. Various examples illustrate this:

• On 22 August, the FBI raided the Maryland home of John Bolton, who served as national security adviser in the first Trump administration but later became highly critical of the president.
• A grand jury investigation has been authorised into the origins of the investigation into Trump's ties to Russia.

• Another investigation is underway into California Democratic Senator Adam Schiff, who is accused of tax fraud but who had accused Trump of profiting from stock market fluctuations following various tariff announcements.
• Another investigation is underway against New York Attorney General Letitia James, who filed a legal brief to end the arrests of immigrants.
• the dismissal of Fed Governor Lisa Cook, who opposed Trump's demands for lower interest rates and was then accused of falsifying documents in order to obtain more favourable terms for a mortgage...
• the latest news concerns former FBI director and Trump opponent Comey, who is being prosecuted for ‘serious crimes’.

Gangsterism and vandalism

What was previously considered a characteristic of peripheral, so-called Third World countries, namely gangsterism and vandalism in politics, is now widespread in the world's most advanced countries, including the United States, a country once hailed as the beacon of democracy. Once again, the Trump case is proof of this.

Let's start by saying that Trump inherited both racism and good relations with the Italian-American mafia from his father, Fred Sr. [17] [171]. While his father had good relations with the Gambinos, Genoveses and Luccheses, his son has them with the Franzeses and Colombos. The episode that led to the construction of Trump Tower is particularly well known. In 1979, when the first brick was laid, a strike at the cement factories blocked the sale of this material. But Trump circumvented the union blockade by buying it directly from S & A Concrete. The hidden owners of the construction company were Anthony ‘Fat Tony’ Salerno of the Genovese family and Paul Castellano of the Gambino family, two families already close to his father and whose leaders met regularly at Cohn's, Trump's versatile lawyer at the time. But he also made important deals with the Russian mafia: in 2011, Trump emerged from ten years of lawsuits, multiple bankruptcies and £4 billion in debt... and this time he was saved by ‘Russian money’ from Felix Sater, whose father, Michael Sheferovsky, was a close friend not only of the Genovese family, but also of Semion Yudkovich Moguilevitch, the ‘boss of bosses’ of the Russian mafia.

Numerous women have already claimed that Trump raped them at beauty pageants or other events. We also know that Trump paid a lot of money to silence the two women who accused him of having illicit relationships with him, porn star Stormy Daniels and former Playboy playmate Karen McDougall. This accusation led to his conviction, but he was exempted from prosecution. In early 2024, two separate juries found that Trump had defamed writer E. Jean Carroll by denying her allegations of sexual assault. He was ordered to pay a total of $88 million. Also well-known is his association with Epstein, who was accused of rape, abuse and, most notably, international child trafficking. He appears with Trump in dozens of photos. Finally, Trump was also found guilty of thirty-four counts of falsifying business records, which were revealed during the investigation into payments made to Stormy Daniels.

Will the proletariat be able to take advantage of this loss of control by the bourgeoisie?

All the elements we have reported in this article clearly demonstrate a weakening of the bourgeoisie's ability to manage its political system and therefore an increased difficulty in dealing with the global crisis of the system, economically, environmentally, etc. There is no doubt about that.

But we must be careful not to imagine that this weakness of the bourgeoisie can be converted into an advantage, a strength for the proletariat. There are at least two reasons for this. The first concerns the process that will lead to revolution. The growing weaknesses of the bourgeoisie are by no means assets that enable the working class to develop its strength. Since the project of this class is completely antagonistic to everything that capitalism represents, the weakening of the bourgeoisie does not benefit the proletariat (which has only its unity and consciousness at its disposal). Secondly, while showing clear signs of decline, the bourgeoisie displays considerable vigilance and lucidity in matters of class struggle, the result of two centuries of experience of confrontation with the working class. This experience leads it not only to be vigilant, but above all to prevent any working class action by exploiting the very effects of decomposition against the proletariat itself.

For example, all populist propaganda, which often resonates with some of the most vulnerable and least class-conscious sections of the working class, is constructed by exploiting people's fears of competition for jobs or housing from immigrants or those who are ‘different’. Secondly, and more importantly, it exploits populist hype to draw workers into anti-populist campaigns in defence of the democratic state.

However, the manifestations of decomposition (through ecological crises, increasingly frequent environmental disasters, but above all the spread and intensification of wars, naturally accompanied by the worsening of the economic crisis) are increasingly forcing certain elements to seek an alternative to the current barbarism, even if they are still very much in the minority. The economic attacks that the bourgeoisie is already forced to wage against the workers will be the best stimulus for the class struggle and will allow for the future political maturation of the struggles. This alone will enable workers not only to defend themselves against the mystifications of the bourgeoisie, but also to regain an understanding of the deep-rooted causes of the current crisis of the system and turn it into a source of strength in their struggle.

 

Ezechiele, 27 August 2025

 

[1] [172] Amadeo Bordiga, “The Democratic Principle [173]”, 1922, MIA (Marxists Internet Archive).

[2] [174] “Notes on the Consciousness of the Decadent Bourgeoisie [159]”, International Review n° 31, 4th quarter 1982.

[3] [160] The Italian Communist Party had lost all its proletarian character as a result of the process of ‘Bolshevization’ (in fact, Stalinization) between the late 1920s and early 1930s.

[4] [175] In reality, at the end of the war and immediately after the proclamation of the Republic, the PCI had been in power with the DC and other left-wing parties (PSIUP and PRI) from July 1946 to 1 June 1947. The reason for this was that in 1942-1943 there had been major strikes in the north of the country and several proletarian political groups had been formed, including the Internationalist Communist Party, which had quickly gained hundreds of members. The formation of this ‘national unity’ government, which brought together the various forces that had fought in the Resistance, served to convince a proletariat that had been showing signs of awareness that it now had valid representatives even within the government and that it therefore no longer needed to fight. It is no coincidence that, once it was certain that the proletarian uprising had subsided, the bourgeoisie withdrew its support for the PCI and other left-wing parties and formed only centre or right-wing governments until the turbulent years of 1968-1969.

[5] [176] For an analysis of these events, see our “Theses on the Economic and Political Crisis in the Eastern Countries [48]”, International Review n° 60, 1st quarter 1990. For more on the concept of the phase of decomposition, see also the “Theses on Decomposition”,  [46]International Review n° 107, 4th quarter 2001.

[6] [177] “Crisis in the Persian Gulf: Capitalism Means War! [162]” International Review n° 63, 4th quarter 1990.

[7] [178] For an analysis of this interesting point, see “Mafia Attacks: Settling Accounts Between Capitalists,” Revolution Internationale n° 215 [179], September 1992 (in French).

[8] [180] Excerpts from points 9 and 10 of Theses on Decomposition [46], already cited.

[9] [181] “Wissen, was Deutschland denkt [182]” (“Knowing what Germany thinks”)

[10] [183] “Scholz trails conservative CDU/CSU in election polls [184]”, In Focus website.

[11] [185] “Brexit, Trump: setbacks for the ruling class, nothing good for the proletariat [166]”, International Review n° 157, Summer 2016.

[12] [186] “Capitalism has no solution to the global economic crisis! [167]”, World Revolution n° 403, Spring, 2025.

[13] [187] EUROPATODAY – “Germany sends tanks to Ukraine because pacifists have become interventionists [188]”

[14] [189] See point 8 of the “Theses on Decomposition [46]”.

[15] [190] “Resolution on the international situation (May 2025) [169]”, International Review 174, Summer 2025.

[16] [191] “Gangs of America alla corte di Trump [192]”, Il Foglio, 27 January 2025.

[17] [193] As a young man, his father was arrested for being one of the most active members of the KKK.

26th Congress of the ICC

Report on the class struggle (May 2025)

Below we publish the report on the class struggle presented at the 26th Congress of the ICC. This document, written in December 2024, does not take into account the events that occurred in 2025 (Trump's return to the White House, massive struggles in Belgium, etc.), but the validity of the perspectives outlined remains. This report develops important elements of analysis on what the ICC calls the “rupture” in the dynamic of the class struggle and on the impact of decomposition on the working class.

 

The resolution on the international situation adopted at the 25th International Congress analysed the dynamics of the class struggle as follows: “The revival of workers’ combativity in a number of countries is a major historical event which is not the result of local circumstances alone and cannot be explained by purely national conditions. Driven by a new generation of workers, the scale and simultaneity of these movements testify to a real change in the mood of the class and break with the passivity and disorientation that prevailed from the end of the 1980s to the present day”. The Summer of Discontent in the UK in 2022, the movement against pension reform in France in the winter of 2023, the strikes in the USA, particularly in the car industry, at the end of the summer of 2023, remain the most spectacular manifestations of the historical and international dimension of the development of workers' struggles. The strikes lasting almost 7 weeks by Boeing employees and the unprecedented strike by 45,000 dockworkers in the USA in the middle of the presidential election campaign represent the latest episodes in the real break in the dynamic of the class struggle compared with the situation in previous decades. Moreover, as we write the first lines of this report, the working class of the major economic powers is preparing to undergo unprecedented attacks as a result of the accelerating economic crisis, heralding major reactions by the class in the months ahead. But this movement of renewed combativeness and development of the subterranean maturation of class consciousness is taking place in a context of worsening decomposition, where the simultaneous effects of the economic crisis, the chaos of war and the ecological disaster are fuelling an infernal whirlwind of destruction. Trump's comeback to the White House, signifying a real rise in power of the populist current in American society, is going to constitute an additional weighty obstacle which the class struggle is going to have to confront not only in the USA but also on an international scale. The aim of this report is to provide a basis for reflection which will enable the ICC to deepen its understanding of the current dynamics of the class struggle and its historical implications. But also to assess in more detail the obstacles facing the proletariat, in particular the impact of the effects and ideological manifestations of decomposition.

 

I - The reality of a rupture in the dynamic of class struggle

The analysis of the rupture in the dynamic of class struggle from the summer of 2022 has been greeted with scepticism and even sarcasm within the political milieu, in particular by the historic organisations of the Communist Left such as the Internationalist Communist Tendency and the Bordigist groups. Similarly, doubts and disagreements were expressed at the ICC's public meetings, including by fellow travellers accustomed to the ICC's method and framework of analysis. This situation was exploited by the parasitic milieu[1], such as Controverses, which was quick to use our past analytical errors to mock our current analysis (‘you have over-estimated the class struggle in the past, what's different now?’).

A - Defending the marxist method of analysis

These reactions to our analysis were in fact the expression of a purely empiricist and immediatist approach. On the other hand, if the ICC was able, almost immediately, to recognise a profound change in the series of strikes by the British workers, it was because we were able to draw on our experience, particularly the method which had enabled Mark Chirik to grasp the May 68 movement not as a simple momentary reaction of the working class in France but as the expression of a historical and international movement, whereas the historical groups of the Communist Left  totally missed its significance.

As a result, today, as in the late 1960s, the ICC is the only organisation able to understand the historically significant international dynamic of the development of workers' struggles around the world since 2022. This is the result of understanding:

- the framework of analysis of the decadence of capitalism and the emergence from counter-revolution since the end of the 1960s, unlike the Bordigist current or the analysis of the course to a third generalised war defended by the ICT, implying a politically defeated working class;

- that the accentuation of the economic crisis on a world scale forms the most fertile ground for the development of workers' combativity on an international scale;

- that the development and scale of this workers' combativity from the summer of 2022 onwards in the United Kingdom, unprecedented since the 1980s, in the oldest proletariat in history, was necessarily of historic and international significance;

- that this change of mindset within the class is the product of the development of the subterranean maturation that has been taking place within the class since the beginning of the 2000s;

- that the rupture is not limited to the scale and multiplication of struggles throughout the world, but is accompanied by the development of reflection on an international scale in the different layers of the working class and, in particular, by in-depth reflection within politicised minorities;

- that this dynamic is a long-term one, and therefore contains the potential for the recovery of class identity and the politicisation of struggles (indispensable milestones if the working class is to have the capacity to confront the bourgeois state directly), after decades of a decline in consciousness within the class.

Here lies the strength of the marxist method inherited from the Communist Left: an ability to discern the major changes in the dynamics of capitalist society, well before they have become too obvious to be denied.

 

B - The need to overcome confusion on this question

However, it is vital to fully grasp the consequences and implications of our analysis and to fight against superficial approaches which can arise. Among the main ones are:

- a tendency to reduce the rupture to the scale of the expression of combativity and the development of struggles, neglecting the process of subterranean maturation;

- implying that the development of struggles can enable the working class to counter the effects of decomposition, or that populism weakens the bourgeois state's ability to deal with the reaction of the working class;

- A tendency to see the whirlwind effect and the rupture as two parallel dimensions, watertight one from the other.

Fundamentally, these vacillations express a difficulty in analysing the dynamics of class struggle in the historical context of decomposition. The basic reasons for this include:

- a general tendency to underestimate the negative impact of the phase of decomposition on the class struggle;

- A difficulty in assimilating the now inadequate nature of the concept of the historical course. This contributes in particular to distorting the prism through which the class struggle is viewed: “Thus, 1989 marks a fundamental change in the general dynamics of capitalist society in decadence.

Before that date, the balance of power between the classes was the determining factor in this dynamic: it was on this balance of power that the outcome of the exacerbation of the contradictions of capitalism depended: either the unleashing of the world war, or the development of class struggle with, in perspective, the overthrow of capitalism.

After that date, this general dynamic of capitalist decadence is no longer directly determined by the balance of power between classes. Whatever the balance of power, world war is no longer on the agenda, but capitalism will continue to sink into decay, since social decomposition tends to spiral out of the control of the contending classes”[2].

Consequently, the analysis of two opposing and contradictory poles, developing concomitantly, fits into the framework set out above. However, these two seemingly parallel dimensions of the situation are intertwined. It is in a world fuelled by every man for himself, social atomisation, irrationality of thought, nihilism, each against all, war and environmental chaos, and the increasingly incoherent and destructive policies of the national bourgeoisies, that the working class is forced to develop its struggle and mature its reflection and consciousness. Consequently, and as we have often repeated, the period of decomposition is not a necessity for the march towards revolution, and even less is it in favour of the working class[3]. However, the considerable dangers that decomposition poses for the working class and humanity as a whole must not lead the working class and its revolutionary minorities to adopt a fatalistic attitude and give up the fight. The historical perspective of proletarian revolution is still open!

 

II - Struggles against economic attacks are the road to the recovery of class identity

The repercussions of the crisis will be the deepest and most brutal of the entire period of decadence, under the cumulative effects of inflation, budget cuts[4] , redundancy plans[5] (exacerbated in particular by the introduction of artificial intelligence into the production system) and the drastic reduction in wages. This situation means that the bourgeoisie will have less and less room to manoeuvre in its ability to cope with the effects of the economic crisis, as it has in previous decades, and the planned economic policies of the Trump administration can only have the effect of a further dive into the world economic morass. Consequently, faced with the growing impoverishment and the considerable deterioration in working conditions that the working class will suffer as a result of the intensification of the exploitation of labour power, the conditions will ripen for the working class to fight back. But in this general situation, we must above all take the measure that all these attacks affect simultaneously the three main capitalist countries  (USA, China, Germany). Europe is going to see an unprecedented dismantling of the car industry, certainly on the same scale as that of coal and steel in the 70s and 80s. We must therefore prepare for the emergence of large-scale struggles in the years to come, particularly in the main areas of capitalism, and start now to examine the profound implications of this new situation.

To give just few examples: the German proletariat, which until now has been at the rear guard of the class struggle, is going to play a much more central role in the class struggle against capital. In China, the explosion in unemployment, particularly among young people (25%), will increasingly erode the myth of a modern and prosperous China and will lead to reactions from an inexperienced proletariat still largely influenced by the Maoist doctrine, the ideological weapon of state capitalism.

Similarly, the scale of the crisis has not spared the proletariat in Russia, which is bearing the full brunt of the consequences of the war economy. This leads us to expect reactions from this fraction of our class, without however neglecting the profound weaknesses caused by the counter-revolution and aggravated by decomposition.  

We also need to pay closer attention to the class struggle in the Indo-Pacific region. The year 2024 was marked by strikes in many sectors (automobile, construction, education…) in several countries in the region (India, China, South Korea, Japan, Taiwan, Indonesia) against falling wages, factory closures and worsening working conditions.

However, if indeed economic attacks form the most favourable terrain for the development of class struggle - not only in the immediate defensive sense (a vital element in the recovery of class identity) but also in the emergence of a conscious understanding that the mode of production as a whole is totally bankrupt and must give way to a new society - we need to assess more precisely which types of attack are most conducive to the development of solidarity and unity within the class in both the short and long term.

The multiplicity of attacks, for example, company closures and the job cuts that accompany them, are leading to numerous struggles in several central countries at the moment, but they remain largely isolated and lead to a kind of impasse. It is very difficult for workers to fight against factory closures, when strike action alone will not be enough to put pressure on bosses who are already planning to close companies. One example is the difficulty workers at Port Talbot in Wales have had in developing a struggle against the closure of this key steelworks. In fact, more generally, the ICC is going to have to look closely at the impact of mass unemployment on the development of proletarian consciousness. Regarding this direct result of economic crisis “while in general terms it may help to reveal capitalism’s inability to secure a future for the workers, it is nonetheless today a powerful factor in the ‘lumpenisation’ of certain sectors of the class, especially of young workers, which therefore weakens the class’ present and future political capacities”[6]. Consequently, it is only when it has taken a further step in the development of its consciousness, when it is able to conceive of itself as a class with a role to play in the future of society, that the question of mass redundancies and mass unemployment will truly constitute elements enabling the class to mount a united response to the bourgeois state, as well as developing a more in-depth reflection on the bankruptcy of capitalism.

Attacks on wages, on the other hand, can create a more favourable balance of forces. In fact, the struggles that led to the breakthrough in 2022 were essentially about wages. This also seems to have been demonstrated by the latest episode of struggles in the USA over the last few months. Because wage labour forms the basis of the relationship between capital and labour, the question of defending wages is the ‘common interest’ of all workers against their exploiters. This struggle “unites them in a common thought of resistance – combination. Thus combination always has a double aim, that of stopping competition among the workers, so that they can carry on general competition with the capitalist. If the first aim of resistance was merely the maintenance of wages, combinations, at first isolated, constitute themselves into groups as the capitalists in their turn unite for the purpose of repression, and in the face of always united capital, the maintenance of the association becomes more necessary to them than that of wages…. This mass is thus already a class as against capital, but not yet for itself. In the struggle, of which we have noted only a few phases, this mass becomes united, and constitutes itself as a class for itself. The interests it defends become class interests. But the struggle of class against class is a political struggle”[7].

 

III. War, decomposition and class consciousness

In the period of massive workers’ struggles between 1968-75, when the central countries of capitalism had been through a long period of prosperity, there were still strong illusions about the possibility of restoring the “glorious years”, especially by electing governments of the left. Thus although these movements gave rise to a definite politicisation of minorities[8], notably with the reanimation of the tradition of the Communist Left, the potential for the struggles themselves to give rise to a more general politicisation in the class was limited; and even in the struggles of the 80s, it was still far less clear that the capitalist system was reaching the end of its tether, and the workers’ struggles, even when massive in scale and capable of acting as a block to the drive towards world war, did not succeed in generalising a political perspective for the overcoming of capitalism.

The fundamental result of the stalemate between the classes in the 1980s was the development of the new phase of decomposition, which became a further obstruction to the capacity of the working class to reconstitute itself as a revolutionary force. But the acceleration of decomposition has also made it much easier to understand that the long decline of capitalism has now reached a terminal phase in which the choice between socialism and barbarism has become increasingly apparent. Even if the feeling that we are heading towards barbarism is much more widespread than the conviction that socialism provides a realistic alternative, the increasing recognition that capitalism has nothing to offer humanity but a spiral of destruction still provides the foundations for a future politicisation of the class struggle.

Along with the economic crisis, which remains the essential basis for the development both of the open struggles of the class and the growth of an awareness of the bankruptcy of the system,  the  two elements which most clearly underline the reality of capitalism’s impasse are the proliferation of and intensification of imperialist wars, and the inexorable advance of the ecological catastrophe, most recently symbolised by the massive floods in Valencia which demonstrate that this catastrophe will no longer be limited to the ‘peripheral’ regions of the system. However, as factors in the emergence of a political awareness in the class, the two elements are not equal.

We have long rejected the idea, still clung to by most of the groups of the proletarian political milieu, that war, in particular world war, offers a favourable terrain for the outbreak of revolutionary struggles. In articles written in the International Review of the 1980s[9], we showed that while this conception was based on the real experience of past revolutions (1871, 1905, 1917), and while any class struggle in times of mobilisation for war inevitably poses political questions in a very rapid manner, the disadvantages facing revolutionary movements that arise in direct response to war considerably outweigh the ‘benefits’. Thus

• The experience of the First World War gave the ruling class a very important lesson, which it was to apply very systematically before, and at the closing stages of, the Second World War: prior to launching a global war, first you must impose a profound physical and ideological defeat on the proletariat, and when the miseries and horrors of war provoke any signs of proletarian reactions, they must be crushed immediately (cf the objective collaboration of Allied and Nazi forces in the annihilation of the workers’ revolts in Italy in 1943, the terror bombing of Germany, etc).
• The old schema of revolutionary defeatism, which held that the defeat of one’s own government is favourable to the development of the revolution, as well as containing an inherent ambiguity about the need to oppose all governments in a situation of war, has been demonstrably refuted by the fact that the division between victorious and defeated nations creates deep divisions in the world proletariat, as was most clearly seen in the wake of the 1914-18 war.
• Capitalism’s military technology has ‘advanced’ to the point where fraternisation across the trenches becomes less and less feasible, and it has also made it far more likely than any future world war would rapidly lead to a nuclear escalation and “mutually assured destruction”.

The current wars in Ukraine and the Middle East have confirmed that the main obstacles to the capitalist war drive are much less likely to come from revolts in the countries directly engaged in warfare, and more likely to emerge from the central fractions of the proletariat who are only indirectly impacted by imperialist war through the mounting demands of the war economy.

None of this implies, however, that war is no longer a factor in the development of class consciousness and the process of politicisation. On the contrary, we have seen:

• That the omnipresence of war, especially since the Russian invasion of Ukraine, remains a significant factor in the emergence of minorities putting into question the whole capitalist system;
• That the capacity of workers to defend their own class interests in spite of the call for sacrifices in the name of ‘defending freedom’ was a key element in the rupture of 2022. Furthermore, the recognition that workers are being asked to pay for the bloating of the war economy was posed explicitly among some of the more combative workers engaged in the struggles after 2022, notably in France[10].

It's true that in both examples, we are talking more about the politicisation of minorities than the politicisation of struggles. This is not surprising given the number of ideological traps facing those who begin to draw connections between capitalism and war: on the one hand, we have the example of how the populists in Europe and above all the US have recuperated any embryonic anti-war sentiments in the class, even turning it, in the case of the Ukraine war, into a barely concealed pro-Russian orientation. On the other, we have a host of leftists brandishing a version of internationalism which may even appear to denounce both warring camps in Ukraine but which always amounts, in the end, to an apology for one side or the other. And the same leftists, who are generally much more partisan in their support for the “Axis of Resistance” against Israel, are an important factor in the exacerbation of the religious and ethnic divisions stirred up by the Middle East war. It is hardly surprising that a genuine internationalist response to the current wars is limited to a searching minority – and even within this minority, even within the groups of the Communist Left, confusions and inconsistencies are only too evident.

In the concluding section of the Theses of the Decomposition, we put forward the reasons why the economic crisis remains the principal vector in the capacity of the working class to rediscover its class identity and form itself into a class openly opposed to capitalist society, in contrast to the main phenomena of decomposition:

“while the effects of decomposition (eg pollution, drugs, insecurity) hit the different strata of society in much the same way and form a fertile ground for aclassist campaigns and mystifications (ecology, anti-nuclear movements, anti-racist mobilisations, etc), the economic attacks (falling real wages, layoffs, increasing productivity, etc) resulting directly from the crisis hit the proletariat (ie the class that produces surplus value and confronts capitalism on this terrain) directly and specifically; unlike social decomposition which essentially effects the superstructure, the economic crisis directly attacks the foundations on which this superstructure rests; in this sense, it lays bare all the barbarity that is battening on society, thus allowing the proletariat to become aware of the need to change the system radically, rather than trying to improve certain aspects of it”.[11]

These formulations remain essentially valid, even if it’s not strictly true that the destruction of nature is merely an aspect of the superstructure, since it is a direct product of capitalist accumulation and threatens to undermine the very conditions for the survival of human society and the continuation of production. If the worsening ecological crisis can be a potential factor in small minorities[12] calling into question the very foundations of capitalist production, it remains a factor of fear and despair for a large part of the class.  The ecological disaster tends to hit all strata in society in much the same way, even if its most devastating effects are generally felt by the working class and the exploited, and thus remains “a fertile ground for aclassist campaigns and mystifications”, and this tends to restrict the ability of elements perturbed by the ecological disaster to understand that the only solution is via the class struggle. Furthermore, the immediate ‘solutions’ put forward by capitalist states to the deterioration of the natural environment often involve direct attacks on the living standards of a part of the working class, in particular massive lay-offs to replace fossil fuel-based production by ‘cleaner’ technologies. In this sense, demands to save the environment are more often a factor of division than of unification in the ranks of the working class, unlike the economic crisis which tends to ‘level down’ the whole proletariat.

The conclusion to the Theses does not include the impact of war on the development of class consciousness, but what we can say is that:

• The question of imperialist war – like the prolonged and irresolvable economic crisis which lies at its root - is not a specific product of capitalist decomposition but is a central element throughout the whole epoch of decadence;
•  there is a much closer link between economic crisis and war: in particular, the development of a war economy carries with it a very evident and quite generalised assault on workers’ living standards through inflation, intensification of the pace of work, and so on. Resisting this assault on a class terrain, even when founded on a clear internationalist world outlook only in a tiny minority, cannot fail to raise profoundly political questions about the link between capitalism and war, and about the common international interests of the proletariat. This is the principal reason why the politicisation of minorities in a proletarian sense is showing itself to be based on a reaction to the question of war much more than to the more specific phenomena of decomposition, including the acceleration of the ecological crisis. And further down the line, the growing threat and utter irrationality of war will be a real factor in the future politicisation of struggles. But we must emphasise that it is only at the further point in the development of class identity and class struggle that these steps towards politicisation – whether around the question of war or the more characteristic expressions of decomposition, like the ecological crisis – can shift from the level of small minorities to much broader and more open movements of the working class.

 

IV - The ability of the bourgeoisie to use its classic weapons against the working class

However much it is fragmented and weakened by the advancing decay of its own mode of production, the bourgeoisie will never lose the capacity to respond to the development of the class struggle. In response to the revival of struggles since 2022, and in particular to the development of the subterranean maturation of consciousness, we have thus seen the ruling class make ample use of its ‘classical’ instruments for controlling the proletariat:

• The trade unions, which have radicalised their language in anticipation of or response to the outbreak of workers’ combats. This was a very clear element in the struggles in Britain for example, where the leadership of the trade unions most directly involved in the struggles was assumed by very left-wing elements like Mick Lynch of the railway workers’ union, the RMT.
• The leftist groups, particularly the Trotskyists, some of whom (“Revolutionary Communist Party”, “Révolution Permanente”, etc) have begun once again talking about communism and, as already mentioned, can appear to defend internationalist positions, especially in response to the war in Ukraine. Many of these groups have recruited successfully among the young, a muted echo of what took place after the battles of May-June 68 in France.

 

V - The weight of decomposition and the bourgeoisie’s  instrumentation of its main manifestations

As we mentioned above, we have recently heard in discussions that the current struggles of the class could make it possible to push back the effects of decomposition, or that decomposition weakens the bourgeoisie in its capacity to fight back against the working class. Such ideas call into question the idea that decomposition does not favour the struggle of the working class. Fear, withdrawal, despair caused by the generalisation of warlike barbarity; nihilism, atomisation, irrationality of thought engendered by the absence of a future and the destruction of social relations, are all obstacles to the development of class solidarity and of a collective, united struggle, and to the maturing of thought.

But we are also seeing how the bourgeoise is using the products of its own rot against the development of workers’ struggles, in particular:

• Through the campaigns against populism and the far right, the most ‘chemically pure’ product of decomposition, reviving the time-honoured ideology of anti-fascism and the defence of democracy. These campaigns, which will undoubtably intensify in the wake of Trump’s victory in the US election, have the double advantage of persuading workers to place the defence of the democratic illusion above the fight for their own ’selfish’ class interests, and of countering the threat of class unity by dragging different sectors of the working class behind the competing capitalist camps.
• This strategy of division is also seen in the different forms of the “culture wars”, which play on the conflict between the “woke” and the “anti-woke” around numerous issues (gender, migration, environment, etc as well as around the increasingly violent disputes between political parties).
• The development of anti-immigration campaigns by right-wing and far-right parties aims to instil a pogrom atmosphere, scapegoating migrants and foreigners and blaming them for the decline in living standards. This kind of ideological poison can only be countered by the ability of the class to forge its unity and solidarity against the material attacks faced by all proletarians.
• The situation will also be marked by revolts by the intermediate classes, which the bourgeoisie will use to distort workers’ struggles and reflection.

 

VI - The necessity for the proletariat to respond on its own class terrain

Faced with this huge ideological onslaught, the only possible response from the standpoint of the proletariat can be:

• The recovery of the lessons of past combats which can elucidate the sabotaging role of the unions and the left and prepare the ground for the self-organised and unified struggles of a higher phase of the rupture.
• The development, in and around the open struggles, of the proletariat’s sense of itself as a class opposed to capital, indispensable both for the capacity of the class to defend its immediate demands and for the development of an understanding of its historical mission as the gravedigger of capital.

It goes without saying that the revolutionary organisation has an irreplaceable role to play in the evolution of consciousness in this direction. The ability of the ICC to assume its role depends precisely on its ability to take the measure of the immense challenges facing the working class in the decades to come.

ICC, May 2025

 

Preamble

This resolution was adopted in early May 2025 by the 26th Congress of the ICC. As such, it can only take into account events and situations prior to that date. This is obviously the case for any position on the international situation, but in the present case it is particularly important to note this because we are currently witnessing a rapid succession of particularly spectacular and unpredictable events of major importance on the three main levels: imperialist tensions, the economic situation of global capitalism and the balance of forces between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie. Due to the kind of ‘tsunami’ currently affecting the world, the content and some of the positions taken in this resolution may appear outdated by the time it is published. That is why, beyond the facts mentioned in it, which may be overshadowed by new developments in the situation, it is important that it provides a framework for understanding the causes, significance and stakes of the events unfolding before our eyes.

One of the main factors behind the current upheavals is obviously the inauguration of Donald Trump on 20 January 2025, which led to a spectacular divorce between the United States and almost all European NATO member countries. All the ‘experts’ and bourgeois leaders agree that the new international policy of the American bourgeoisie, particularly with regard to the war in Ukraine, is a major event that marks the end of the ‘Atlantic Alliance’ and the ‘American umbrella’, forcing those formerly under the ‘protection’ of Washington’ to reorganise their military strategy and embark on a frantic arms race. The other major decision of the Trump administration is obviously the launch of a trade war of an intensity not seen in nearly a century. Very quickly, particularly with the wave of panic that swept through the stock markets and financial circles, Trump was forced to partially backtrack, but his brutal and contradictory decisions cannot fail to have an impact on the deterioration of the economic situation of global capitalism. These two fundamental decisions by the Trump administration have been a very important factor in the chaotic development of the global situation. But these decisions must also, and above all, be understood as manifestations of a number of deep historical trends currently at work in global society. Even before the collapse of the Eastern Bloc and the Soviet Union (1989-1991), the ICC put forward the analysis that capitalism had entered a new phase of its decadence, ‘the ultimate phase (...) in which decomposition becomes a decisive factor, if not the decisive factor, in the evolution of society’. And the chaotic events of recent months are further confirmation of this reality. The election of Trump, with its catastrophic consequences for the American bourgeoisie itself, is a prime example of the growing inability of the bourgeois class to control its political game, as we predicted 35 years ago. Similarly, the divorce between the United States and its former NATO allies confirms another aspect of our analysis of decomposition: the great difficulty in the current period, if not the impossibility, of forming new imperialist blocs as a prerequisite for a new world war. Finally, another aspect that we have emphasised, particularly since our 22nd Congress in 2017 – the growing impact of the chaos that is increasingly taking hold of the political sphere of the bourgeoisie on its economic sphere – has found further confirmation in the economic upheavals caused by the decisions of the populist Trump.

It is therefore within the framework of our analysis of decomposition that this resolution attempts to examine in greater detail the issues at stake in the current historical period. And this examination must necessarily also consider the consequences for the struggle of the working class of the chaotic events affecting global society.
 

Resolution on the international situation to the 26th ICC Congress
 

1. “…just as capitalism itself traverses different historic periods - birth, ascendancy, decadence - so each of these periods itself consists of several distinct phases. For example, capitalism’s ascendant period can be divided into the successive phases of the free market, shareholding, monopoly, financial capital, colonial conquest, and the establishment of the world market. In the same way, the decadent period also has its history: imperialism, world wars, state capitalism, permanent crisis, and today, decomposition. These are different and successive aspects of the life of capitalism, each one characteristic of a specific phase….” (Theses on Decomposition[1]). The same applies to the phase of decomposition itself, which marked a qualitative step in the development of decadence; this phase is now in its fourth decade, and since the beginning of the 2020s, with the outbreak of the Covid pandemic and the unleashing of murderous wars in Ukraine and the Middle East, it has reached a level of acceleration which marks a further significant step, in which all its various manifestations are inter-acting with and intensifying each other in what we have called the “whirlwind” effect.
    
2. This assessment has been fully confirmed since the 25th ICC Congress: economic crisis, imperialist war, ecological breakdown and a growing loss of control over the bourgeoisie’s own political apparatus are combining together and exacerbating each other, carrying the clear threat of the destruction of humanity. This ‘poly crisis’ is already recognised by some of the most important institutions of the ruling class, as we showed in the report on decomposition adopted by the 25th ICC Congress, but they are powerless to offer any solutions. Instead, the most irrational elements of the ruling class are on the rise, expressed most clearly by Trump’s victory in the US presidential election. Trump is a transparent product of the decomposition of the system, but the ‘shitstorm’ of measures undertaken immediately upon assuming power also demonstrates that the assumption of government office by a populist faction led by a narcissistic adventurer in the most powerful country on the planet will be an active factor in the acceleration of decomposition and the bourgeoisie’s overall loss of control of its own system.
    
3. The factor of imperialist competition and war is at the very heart of this deadly vortex. But contrary to the arguments of the majority of groups in the proletarian political milieu, the whirlwind effect does not bring with it a disciplined march towards new blocs and a third world war. Rather it intensifies the tendency of ‘every man for himself’ which was already becoming dominant in the wake of the collapse of the Russian imperialist bloc and the definitive onset of the period of decomposition at the beginning of the 1990s. As we predicted in a number of fundamental texts written at that time, the demise of the eastern bloc led to the unravelling of the bloc dominated by the US, despite various efforts of American imperialism to impose its authority over its former allies. And we have insisted that this new world disorder would take the form of spreading, intractable and increasingly destructive wars which are no less dangerous than a course towards world war precisely because of the lack of any bloc discipline. The latest moves by the US under Trump embody a new stage in the mounting chaos that dominates imperialist rivalries in the phase of decomposition. And whereas the global disorder unleashed by the collapse of the Russian bloc in 1989-91 was centred around a weaker economic and military power, the fact that the ‘new disorder’ has the world’s leading power at its very heart presages even more profound plunges into chaos in the period ahead.
    
4. The central axis of global imperialist conflict remains the antagonism between the USA and China. At this level there is a strong element of continuity with the Obama and Biden administrations in seeing China as the main rival to US dominance. This shift in the central focus of imperialist antagonisms from western Europe, as it was during the Cold War, to the Pacific region, is an important factor in Trump’s willingness to reduce the ‘defence of Europe’ to a much lower place in US strategy. In a general sense, the policy of containing China by encircling it with regional alliances and imposing limits on its economic expansion will continue, even if the tactical and concrete means may differ. However, the unpredictability of Trump’s approach could bring with it wild swings from attempts to placate Beijing to openly provocative actions around Taiwan. In general, this very unpredictability will act as a further factor in the destabilisation of international relations.
    
5. By contrast, Trump’s policies towards Ukraine represent a real break with the ‘traditional’ foreign policies of the USA, based on vigorous opposition to Russian imperialism. The attempt to come to a deal with Russia over the Ukraine war which shuts out Europe and Ukraine, accompanied by the public humiliation of Zelensky in the White House, marks an important new level in the division between the US and the main powers of Europe, showing how far we are from the formation of a new ‘western bloc’. This divorce is not a merely contingent event, but has much deeper roots. Direct conflict between the US and Europe was already apparent in the war in Yugoslavia in the early 90s, with France and Britain backing Serbia, Germany backing Croatia and the US supporting Bosnia. In today’s culmination of this process, which in 2003 also saw European powers like France and Germany refusing to follow the US into the invasion of Iraq, America is more and more seen as a new enemy, symbolised by US voting with Belarus, North Korea and Russia against a UN resolution on February 24th condemning the Russian invasion, and by the open threats to convert Canada, Greenland and Panama into property of the USA, by military force if need be. At the very least, the US is perceived as an unreliable ally, obliging the European powers to come together in a series of emergency conferences to consider how they can ensure their imperialist ‘defence’ without the USA’s military umbrella. However, the real divisions among these powers – for example between governments run by populist or far right parties which lean towards Russia, and most importantly between France and Germany at the very core of the European Union – should not be underestimated as a further obstacle to the formation of a stable European alliance. And the current US regime will certainly do all it can to increase divisions among the countries of the EU, which Trump has explicitly attacked as a formation that was set up to “screw the USA”.
    
6. At the same time, again in clear discontinuity with the approach of the previous US administration and the main European powers, who have advocated a ‘two state solution’ to the conflict in Israel/Palestine, the Trump regime is openly supporting the annexationist policies of the Israel’s right wing government by removing sanctions against the violent actions of West Bank settlers, appointing Mike Huckabee - who declares that ‘Judaea and Samaria’ were given to Israel by God 3,000 years ago – as US ambassador to Israel, and above all by calling for the ethnic cleansing of nearly two million Palestinians from Gaza and transforming the whole area into a heaven for real estate speculation. These policies, despite their strong admixture of fantasy, can only perpetuate and intensify the conflicts which are already being ramped up and spread throughout the Middle East, most clearly in Yemen, Lebanon and Syria, where the internal war is far from over despite the replacement of the Assad regime, and where Israel has been carrying out more deadly air raids, which are generally perceived as a warning to Turkey. In particular, the blank cheque Trump has handed to the Netanyahu government also contains the likelihood of further direct clashes between Israel and Iran.
    
7. Meanwhile other imperialist conflicts are brewing or already getting worse, particularly in Africa, where the Congo, Libya and Sudan have become veritable theatres of massacre and famine. Africa is another example of local conflicts being fuelled by a bewildering variety of regional states (such as Rwanda in the Congo) and the larger imperialist players (US, France, China, Russia, Turkey, etc) who may be allies in one conflict and enemies in another.
   Even though the hunt for vital raw materials is a key aspect of many of these conflicts, the main characteristic of all these wars is that they bring fewer and fewer benefits either economic or strategic for all their protagonists. Above all they do not point to a solution to the world economic crisis through the devaluation of capital or the reconstruction of ruined economies as it is said by many of the groups of the proletarian political milieu. The economist vision of these groups simply ignores the real direction of capitalism in its final stages – which is towards the destruction of humanity and not a new stage in the cycle of accumulation.
    
8. The growing inter-action between economic crisis and imperialist rivalry, and of the effects of decomposition on the state of the world economy, are both plainly illustrated by the avalanche of tariffs decreed by the Trump regime. This ‘declaration of war’ on the rest of the world’s economies, aimed at close neighbours and former allies as well as avowed enemies, can be seen as an attempt by the US to demonstrate its power as an imperialist giant capable of standing alone without having to answer to any other state or international body. But it is also based on an economic ‘strategy’ which believes that the USA can prosper best by undermining or ruining all its economic rivals. This is a purely suicidal approach which will immediately backfire on the US economy and consumers through rising prices, shortages, plant closures and redundancies. And of course, a severe slump in the US could not fail to have world-wide implications. In particular, a number of economists have warned of the danger of the US defaulting on its enormous national debt, the bulk of which is ‘owned’ by Japan and its main challenger, China; and it is evident that a US default would not only do incalculable damage to the world economy, but would inevitably spill over into the sphere of the imperialist rivalry between the US and China. All this shows that the America First policy of the Trump regime is in complete contradiction with the ‘globalised’ character of the world economy in which the USA itself has been the most active force, in particular following the collapse of the eastern bloc in the early 90s; it also marks a return to protectionist measures which the most powerful bourgeoisies have largely abandoned since they demonstrated their utter failure as a way of dealing with the world economic crisis in the 1930s. The USA’s current attempt to dismantle the last political and military vestiges of the world imperialist order established in 1945 is paralleled by measures that clearly threaten all the global institutions set up in the wake of the Great Depression and World War Two to regulate world trade and contain the crisis of overproduction.
    
9. It thus comes as no surprise that the world’s stock exchanges have reacted to Trump’s tariffs with mounting panic, while numerous economic ‘experts’ have been predicting a world-wide recession, vicious trade wars (which are already taking shape, particularly between the US and China), spiralling inflation and even an “economic nuclear winter”[2]. These reactions obliged Trump to take a step back from some of his economic threats, but there is little confidence that the new US administration can be trusted any longer as a guarantor of economic stability – on the contrary. The fears expressed by the ‘markets’ are well grounded, but revolutionaries must also make it clear that while they are certainly a severely aggravating factor in the deepening economic crisis, they are not its ultimate cause. The underlying disease of the world economy must be traced to the world crisis of overproduction, which has in essence been permanent since 1914 and which also has an evolving history behind the extreme point it is now reaching. Well before the announcement of the Trump tariffs, the world’s leading economies, notably Germany and China, as well as the US, were already sinking into an economic morass, expressed by factory closures in leading industries, unmanageable levels of debt, rising prices in many countries, growing youth unemployment and so on. The end of the Chinese ‘economic miracle’ is particularly significant because, in contrast to the situation created by the financial meltdown of 2008, China will no longer be able to play the role of ‘world locomotive’.
    
10. The world crisis of overproduction, as Rosa Luxemburg predicted, results from the shrinking of an ‘outside’ for capitalism to expand into. These areas of pre-capitalist economy were still considerable when Luxemburg advanced her thesis, and they still held some possibilities in the phase of ‘globalisation’, notably through the capitalising of China and other Far Eastern economies. But today, even if capitalists continue to cast hungry eyes on remaining pre-capitalist economic areas, notably in India and Africa, it will be increasingly difficult to exploit them because of the acceleration of decomposition through local wars and ecological destruction. Other ‘superstructural’ elements also enter into the system’s historic impasse:
    
    a)  The enormous weight of global debt, the medication for overproduction which can only poison the patient, and which, as in 2008, constantly threatens to explode in the form of massive financial instability. And, as the ICC already noted in the 1980s, we are witnessing the growth of a ‘casino economy’, taking the form of unrestrained speculation and expressing a growing gap between real value and fictional capital. A striking example of this is the spread of bitcoin and similar ‘cryptocurrencies’, designed to evade centralised control and thus acting as another potentially destabilising factor for the world economy.
    
    b)  The mounting impact of ecological disasters, which have become an increasingly destructive ‘production cost’.
    
    c)  The exponential growth of the refugee problem, frequently the product of war and ecological catastrophe, and which is confronting the bourgeoisie with an insoluble problem, since on the one hand it cannot afford to integrate this mass of migrants into an ailing economy, while on the other it cannot afford to lose this source of cheap labour and will find that a policy of forced deportations such as the Trump administration has now set in motion will cost billions to carry out.
    
    d)  Above all, as the drive to war intensifies, the world economy is more and more compelled to bear the enormous weight of the growing impact of militarism, which may at some moments give the illusion of ‘economic growth’ but which, as the Gauche Communiste de France already pointed out in the aftermath of World War II, represents a pure loss for global capital. And open warfare itself has a direct impact on the world economy, typified by the increase in shipping costs resulting from direct attacks on ships in the Black Sea and the Red Sea

The inevitable result of the deepening crisis, and in particular the development of a war economy, will be unprecedented attacks on the living conditions of the proletariat and impoverished masses. The bourgeoisie in European countries is already talking openly about the need for more welfare cuts to pay for ‘defence spending’.​

 

11. At the level of the ecological crisis, the never-ending rounds of international conferences have failed to bring the world any closer towards its carbon reduction commitments, on the contrary: the 1.5 degree target for limiting rising temperatures has already been declared dead by a number of climate scientists. Year upon year solid scientific research provides clear indicators that the climate crisis is already here: each year is declared the ‘hottest on record’, the melting of the polar ice-caps reaches new and genuinely alarming levels, more and more plants and animal species are disappearing, such as the insects which are indispensable to the food chain and to the process of pollination. Moreover, the crisis is not only evident in the countries of the ‘periphery’, adding to the global refugee crisis as more and more regions of the planet are rendered uninhabitable by drought or flooding. It is now moving from the peripheries to the centres, as shown by the wildfires in California and floods in Germany and Spain. Trump’s denial of any such thing as the climate crisis has immediately been enshrined in the work of the new administration: the very term climate change is removed from government documents, and funding for research into the problem is drastically cut; restrictions on emissions and fossil fuel extraction projects are removed under the banner of “drill baby drill”; the USA pulls out of international agreements on climate. All this will give a new and world-wide impetus to the denialist world-view, a central plank of the populist parties which are everywhere on the rise. The same applies to the USA’s withdrawal from the World Health Organisation and the appointment of Robert Kennedy, a committed anti-vaxxer, to the leadership of the US health departmentat a time when we are facing the threat of new pandemics (such as avian flu). Such pandemics are another product of the breakdown in the relationship between humanity and nature which capitalism has taken to its furthest point in history. These head-in-the-sand measures will only increase the danger. But the populists’ suicidal attitude to the mounting ecological crisis is at root only a reflection of the utter impotence of all factions of the ruling class in the face of the destruction of nature, since none of them can exist without a commitment to endless ‘growth’ (ie, accumulation at any cost), even when they pretend that there is no contradiction between capitalist growth and green policies. Neither can the bourgeoisie as a class develop truly global solutions to the ecological crisis, the only ones that make any sense. No faction of the ruling class can transcend the national framework, any more than it can call for an end to the accumulation of capital. Thus, the advance of the ecological crisis can only accelerate the tendency towards chaotic military conflicts as each nation tries to salvage what it can faced with dwindling resources and mounting disasters. And the reverse is also true: war, as has already been measured in the conflicts in Ukraine and the Middle East, is itself a growing factor in the ecological catastrophe, whether through the huge carbon emissions needed to produce and maintain military equipment, or through the poisoning of the air and soil by the use of ever-more destructive weaponry, which in many cases is a deliberate tactic aimed at weakening the enemy’s food supplies or other resources. Meanwhile the menace of nuclear disaster – either through the destruction of nuclear power stations or the actual use of tactical nuclear weapons – is always looming in the background. The interaction between war and ecological crisis is another patent illustration of the whirlwind effect.

12. The return of Trump is a classic expression of the political failure of those factions of the ruling class who have a more lucid understanding of the needs of the national capital; it is thus a clear expression of a more general loss of political control by the US bourgeoisie, but this is a world-wide tendency and it is particularly significant that the populist wave is having an impact in other central countries of capitalism: thus we have seen the rise of the AfD in Germany, of Le Pen’s RN in France, and Reform in the UK. Populism is the expression of a faction of the bourgeoisie but its incoherent and contradictory policies express a growing nihilism and irrationality which does not serve the overall interests of the national capital. The case of Britain, which has been ruled by one of the most intelligent and experienced bourgeoisies, shooting itself in the foot through Brexit is a clear example. Trump’s domestic and foreign policies will be no less damaging for US capitalism: at the level of foreign policy, by fuelling conflicts with its former allies while courting its traditional enemies, but also domestically, through the impact of its self-destructive economic ‘programme’. Above all, the campaign of revenge against the ‘deep state’ and ‘liberal elites’, the targeting of minority groups and the ‘war on woke’ will stir up confrontations between factions of the ruling class which could take on an extremely violent character in a country where an enormous proportion of population own weapons; the assault on the Capitol on January 6, 2021, would pale into insignificance in comparison. And we can already see, in embryo, the beginnings of a reaction by parts of the bourgeoisie who have most to lose from Trump’s policies (for example, the state of California, Harvard University, etc). Such conflicts carry the threat of dragging in the wider population and represent an extreme danger to the working class, its efforts to defend its class interests and forge its unity against all the divisions inflicted on it by the disintegration of bourgeois society. The recent “Hands Off” demonstrations organised by the left wing of the Democratic Party are a clear example of this danger, since they succeeded in channelling certain working class sectors and demands into an overall defence of democracy against the dictatorship of Trump and consorts. Again, while these internal conflicts may be particularly sharp in the USA, they are the product of a much wider process. Decadent capitalism has long relied on the state apparatus to prevent such antagonisms from tearing society apart, and in the phase of decomposition the capitalist state is equally forced to resort to the most dictatorial measures to maintain its rule. And yet at the same time, when the state machine itself is riven by violent internal conflicts, there is a powerful thrust towards a situation where “the centre cannot hold, mere anarchy is loosed upon the world” as the poet WB Yeats put it. The ‘failed states’ we are seeing most vividly in the Middle East, Africa or the Caribbean present an image of what is already brewing in the most developed centres of the system. In Haiti, for example, the official state machine is increasingly powerless in the face of competing criminal gangs, and in parts of Africa inter-gang competition has risen to the height of ‘civil war’. But in the US itself, the current domination of the state by the Trump clan more and more resembles the rule of a mafia, with its open espousal of the methods of blackmail and threat.

13. The irrationality expressed by populism is at root an expression of the irrationality of a system which has long outlived its usefulness for humanity. It is therefore inevitable that the whole of decomposing bourgeois society will be increasingly gripped by a plague of mental illness which frequently expresses itself in murderous violence. The spread of terrorist atrocities from major war-zones to the capital cities of the West was one of the first signs of the advent of the phase of decomposition, but the coupling of terrorist activity with the most irrational ideologies has become increasingly apparent as this phase has advanced and accelerated. Thus, the ideologies which most often inspire terrorist acts, whether perpetrated by radical Islamists or neo-Nazis, are only a concentrated expression of beliefs that are much more widespread, notably beliefs in all kinds of conspiracy theories and in an impending apocalypse, all of which offer a dangerously distorted picture of capitalism’s real mode of operation and its actual slide towards the abyss. It is also characteristic that some of the most recent acts of mass murder – such as the use of cars as weapons in the cities of Germany, or the horrible murders of children in Southport which sparked off the racist riots in Britain in the summer of 2024 – have been more or less detached from any actual terrorist organisations and even from any justifying ideology, expressing rather the suicidal impulses of profoundly disturbed individuals. Elsewhere such impulses take the form of mounting violence against women, sexual minorities and children. It is evident that the working class is not immune from this plague and that it acts as a direct counter to the needs of the class struggle: the need for solidarity and unity and for a coherent thought which can lead to a real understanding of how capitalism works and where it is going.  

14. The pole leading towards chaos and collapse is thus becoming increasingly visible. But there is another pole, that of the class struggle, demonstrated by the ‘rupture’ since 2022, which is not a flash in the pan, but has a historical depth founded on the undefeated nature of the proletariat in the main centres of the system and the reality of a long process of subterranean maturation. But it also continues to take a much more overt form, as the example of Belgium shows. In the US, Trump’s policies will lead to a rapid increase in inflation, undermining promises made to workers in particular; and the attempt to slash government jobs is already giving rise to some embryonic class resistance. In Europe, the bourgeoisie’s demand for sacrifice in the name of boosting the machinery of war will certainly encounter serious resistance from an undefeated working class. The class movements that characterise the rupture re-affirm the centrality of the economic crisis as the main stimulant of the class struggle. But at the same time, the proliferation of war and the increasing cost of the war economy, above all in the main countries of Europe, will be an important factor in the future politicisation of the struggle, in which the working class will be able to make a clear link between the sacrifices demanded by the war economy and the growing attacks on its living standards, and eventually to integrate all the other threats coming from decomposition into a struggle against the system as a whole.

15. Despite the depth of the new phase in the class struggle, it is vital not to conceive its development as parallel to and independent from the pole of chaos and destruction. This is most evident in the real danger that the working class will be increasingly disoriented by the effects of social atomisation, growing irrationality and nihilism; where it will find it hard to avoid being drawn into the visceral rage and frustration of a general population reacting against disasters, repression, corruption, social insecurity and violence, as we have seen in the recent protests and revolts in the USA, Serbia, Turkey, Israel and elsewhere. The ruling class is fully capable of using the effects of the decomposition of its own system against the working class: exploitation of ‘cultural’ divisions (woke versus anti-woke, etc); partial struggles reacting to the deepening of oppression and discrimination against certain layers of society; anti-migration campaigns, etc. Especially dangerous are the renewed ‘democratic resistance’ campaigns against the ‘danger of fascism, authoritarianism and oligarchies’, the aim of which is to divert anger against a sinking system towards the Trumps, Musks, Le Pens and the rest of the populists and the far right, who are merely a caricatural expression of capitalism’s putrefaction. The right wing of the bourgeoisie can also make its appeals to democracy in the face of the machinations of the ‘deep state’, one of Trump’s favourite themes now being echoed in France following the judicial decision to bar Le Pen from standing in the next presidential election. But the ‘defence of democracy’ is the particular speciality of the left and far-left wing of the political apparatus. Moreover, in anticipation to the development of the class struggle, the far-left and the trade unions have radicalised their language and attitude: we are seeing the Trotskyists and official anarchists holding the banner of a fake internationalism vis-à-vis the Ukraine and Gaza wars, and sometimes the left has assumed the leadership of the trade unions as happened in the struggles in the UK. We will also see a renovation of their discourse and activity in the years to come, aimed at channelling the potential for the maturation of proletarian consciousness, which necessarily goes through an uneven process of advances and retreats, onto a bourgeois terrain which can only lead to defeat and demoralisation.

16. The rupture with the passivity of the past few decades also stimulates the process of reflection on an international scale amongst different layers of the class, particularly evident in the form of the emergence of searching minorities. It is in this area that we most clearly observe the capacity of the working class to pose more far-ranging questions about the future of this system, particularly around the question of war and internationalism. However, the potential of these minorities to evolve towards revolutionary positions remains fragile, due to a number of dangers:

• The radicalisation of a number of leftist tendencies, particular the Trotskyists.
• The influence of parasitism as a destructive force which aims to build a cordon sanitaire against the communist left, appearing to act ‘from the inside’, and nourished by the ambience of decomposition.
• The persistent influence of opportunism in the real proletarian political milieu, which deforms the role of the organisation and opens the way to tolerating the penetration of alien ideologies into the proletariat.

Revolutionary activity is meaningless without the struggle to construct a political organisation able to struggle against the dominant ideology in all its forms. The period ahead requires the elaboration of a lucid analysis of the evolution of the international situation, an ability to anticipate what will be the central dangers faced by the proletariat, but also to recognise the real development of the struggle and of class consciousness, in particular when the latter evolves in a largely ‘subterranean’ manner which will be missed by those who are fixated on immediate appearances.

Revolutionary organisations must act as a pole of attraction for searching elements and as a lighthouse of programmatic and organisational clarity, based on the historical acquisitions of the communist left. They must understand that the work of building a bridge to the future world party is a combat that will be carried out over a long period and will demand a persistent struggle against the impact of capitalist decomposition in its own ranks through concessions to democratism, localism, each for themselves etc. The persistence of a deep opportunism and sectarianism within the proletarian milieu emphasises the unique responsibility of the ICC in the effort to prepare the conditions for the emergence of the party of the communist revolution.

ICC, 10/5/2025

In a speech at the United Nations in September 2025 United States President Donald Trump claimed that, in the first 7 months of his second term as president, he already had ended 7 ‘unendable’ wars: those of Cambodia and Thailand, Kosovo and Serbia, Congo and Rwanda, Pakistan and India, Israel and Iran, Egypt and Ethiopia, Armenia and Azerbaijan.

At most these conflicts have seen ceasefires (not all engineered by Trump) but there has been no peaceful resolution of them and they are ready to reignite at any moment. Moreover, the major wars of Trump’s tenure that he inherited from President Biden between Russia and Ukraine and Israel and Gaza have in the main worsened despite Trump’s intention to end them from day one of his presidency. The current ceasefire in Gaza (10.10.25), allowing the survivors of the massacre to return to the rubble of their homes, will bring at best a pause in the horror of interminable war in the Middle East.

The BBC amongst other media outlets have delighted at poking fun at the obvious untruth of Trump’s claim. But there was an intended message behind his bluff: that the United Nations (instigated by the United States in 1945) has been unable to provide the peace that it was set up to maintain (which is true), and now only he and his unilateral policy of America First, also known as ‘Make America Great Again’, is capable of engineering world peace.

The reality behind this episode only shows that around the world, imperialist conflicts, great and small, are multiplying all the time today, and that not only the transnational institutions of liberal democracy, like the UN, have been incapable of ending them, but neither has the bluff of populist nationalism. A capitalist peace in any form is impossible today and only a class with internationalist interests, the working class, is capable of achieving peace through the overthrow of national states on a world scale.

This uncompromising perspective, the only one that conforms to the long-term reality of the situation, has been the defining difference between the Communist Left and all other supposed revolutionary political tendencies like the Trotskyists or Anarchists that always claim, in the midst of the carnage, support for the ‘lesser evil’ imperialisms whether for Palestine today, North Vietnam in the 1960s or democratic allied imperialism in the Second World War.

US geopolitical hegemony since 1945: into the wood chipper

If we want to make an accurate assessment of Trump’s first 7 months of office, we have to go beyond the affirmation that his administration has continued to pursue the wars, austerity and repression of all previous capitalist governments. We have to explain what has been radically different about his presidency in regard to previous ones, even in comparison with his first term of office, (2016-2020) in order to understand the particularly serious dangers the US situation holds for the working class.

No other Communist Left group, has been capable of making this analysis, of warning of the threats and traps in store, since they only see ‘more of the same’ in the first months of Trump’s presidency.[1]

In previous articles on Trump’s coming to power at the beginning of this year we have pointed out that his policy of America First would not have the desired effect of restoring the United States to greatness on the world stage.[2]

On the contrary Trump’s first months have accelerated, at full speed, the weakening of US geopolitical hegemony - known as the Pax Americana – in favour of a growing free-for-all by its former allies and enemies alike.

US imperialism dominated the world from 1945-89 because it was the gendarme of the most powerful imperialist bloc. But its victory after the collapse of the weaker, rival Eastern bloc, turned out to be a Pyrrhic one. The removal of the threat of Russian imperialism loosened the chains that previously held the nations of the Western bloc together in subservience to the US. The period 1989-2025 has consequently seen the fruitless attempt of the US to maintain its previous hegemony despite the massively destructive and bloody display of its military superiority.

The radical contribution of Trump has been to turn a vice into a virtue and instead of trying to repair American domination as previous US presidencies have done, he has attempted to break it up altogether, lambasting it as a ‘con’ perpetrated by its allies to ‘screw’ the US. Instead of trying to abate the tendency of ‘every man for himself’ in imperialist relations that has been weakening US power since 1989, the second Trump administration has become its principal advocate on the world stage.

Throwing all the fixtures and fittings of the Pax Americana onto the scrap heap has been the Trump presidency’s most historic achievement. The first days of his second administration witnessed his appetite for annexing Greenland, Panama, and Canada; all allies of the US. But his most dramatic reversal of previous US policy was in the questioning of US commitment to NATO, the military alliance that has always been the centrepiece of the Western Bloc and provided the model for US alliances in other geopolitical theatres. The US was now ambivalent about its recognition of the crucial article of the NATO charter that in effect provides US support to any European member threatened by Russia. The now haphazard diplomacy of US toward its defence of Ukraine has encouraged the Kremlin to intensify its military invasion of that country and make threatening actions to Eastern European NATO countries, Poland, Latvia, Rumania, Estonia.

Knowing that its backer of last resort has in effect deserted it, the main powers of Western Europe are now forced to try to become militarily independent of the US and radically increase arms spending, with all the implications that has for the spread of war to Europe, the further bankruptcy of their economies and the pauperisation of a restive working class.

Trump has claimed this divorce with Europe as a victory but in reality it represents, long term, a weakening of the hold of the US over one of the world’s most important industrial heartlands.

The same fraying of US hegemony has developed in the Middle East, where foreign policy under Trump has become an adjunct of the regional imperialist ambitions of Israel at the expense of the US's own interests in maintaining the balance of power and its other alliances in the area. In the Far East the disregard of the US for its commitment to its former allies - Japan, Australia and India - puts in question the policy of containment of its main imperialist rival China, which has benefited from the greater margin of manoeuvre thus permitted.

At least Trump, in his open contempt for the US’s former leadership of the Western Bloc, has finally removed the illusion that the parameters of the Cold War remain the same - the polarisation of world imperialism around two major axes - and confirmed the reality that we are now fully in a multi-polar epoch, where the possibility of the formation of blocs is less and less likely, but which makes the proliferation of imperialist conflict in all areas of the world the norm.

Incredibly there are those on the Communist Left who are still living nostalgically in the Cold War and believe that the imperialist conflicts multiplying today are harbingers of World War 3. This would mean that the world’s working class was already defeated. Yet it is precisely the undefeated nature of the working class today that helps to define the current period and the improbability of the formation of new imperialist blocs.

These antique groups of the Communist Left are like the Japanese soldier Hiroo Onoda who refused to accept until 1974 that World War 2 had ended 29 years earlier. In fact these groups are even more obtuse, since 36 years after the collapse of the Berlin Wall they are still looking at the world through Cold War glasses. 

Goodbye to US soft power

It is not just at the diplomatic/military level that the Trump presidency has undermined US world leadership. All the ‘transnational’, ‘soft’ institutions that gave a humanist, international, pluralistic veneer to the American bloc - economic, trade, financial, social, environmental, health - that the US has dominated and financially supported since 1945 (the World Trade Organisation, the G7 meetings of industrialised nations, the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, World Health Organisation), all of them have lost the support of the new administration. The United States Agency for International Development, USAID, was, until Trump effectively abolished it in February 2025, the world’s largest agency for foreign aid previously having an average budget $23billion a year.

The imposition by Trump of massive trade tariffs on the rest of the world, allies and foes alike, has been the most dramatic illustration of an abrupt economic change in the US policy of globalisation and free(ish) trade. Other countries, according to the Trumpian justification of this policy, have been cheating the US, such as the EU, when in fact the latter and its antecedents have been the vehicle for the economic integration of Western Europe under the aegis of the United States.

The Trumpian illusion is that the US can use its military and economic superiority to make the rest of the world pay for the crisis. But such a policy will inevitably backfire on the economic level as well, as the Tariff offensive is already beginning to show, destabilising the dollar as the lynchpin of the world economy.

Whether at the ideological, economic or military level the US has, under Trump, abandoned any hegemonic intentions in favour of the dubious benefits of disrupting the existing order. ‘American First’, and unpredictability, is not a unifying perspective and method. The reverse, in fact.

The US is no longer a bastion of stable government

Hitherto a major pillar of American world power was that it existed internally as a stable bastion of liberal democracy; a moral and political example to its allies and a rallying cry against the despotism of the Eastern Bloc and more recently to ‘revisionist’ powers like Russia, China and Iran. 

At the end of his first presidential term Trump already deliberately targeted the holy edicts and places of American liberal democracy by encouraging the armed assault of his supporters on the Washington Capitol in January 2020 to try and overturn the legal vote for Joe Biden. He made the American nation look like a ‘banana republic’ to the rest of the world according to former president George W Bush. Trump has continued along the same track in his second term, breaking convention after convention of liberal democratic norms. He has manipulated the judiciary - supposedly independent of political interference - by forcing the sacking or indictment of his enemies within the state machine, and their potential imprisonment, notably James Comey former director of the FBI. He is trying to pressurise the Federal Reserve Board and its director Jay Powell, also supposedly independent of the short-term needs of the government in power, to lower interest rates. He’s even sacked the head of statistics when she announced the ‘wrong’ employment figures.

Recently Trump has fabricated pretexts to use the military to intervene in civil disturbances such as the protests against the deportation of immigrants in Los Angeles, or crime as in Washington DC, Portland or Chicago thereby corrupting the independence of the armed forces from political interference and using them to discredit and usurp the authority of the Democratic Party-elected regimes in these cities. The militarisation of the operations of ICE - Immigration and Customs Enforcement - is another populist flouting of democratic procedure.

It used to be a liberal, bi-partisan norm that the heads of US government departments - health, defence, environment etc - would either be competent in their fields or respectful of the permanent experts employed in these departments. This has also been given a populist makeover. Most grotesquely the opponent of vaccinations, and believer that circumcision is likely to cause autism, Robert F Kennedy Jr, has been appointed health secretary, while Pete Hegseth, previously employed as a talk show host on Fox News, is put in charge of the defence (now ‘war’) department. Recently he commanded US generals around the world to come to Washington to hear a lecture on the need to be fit and shave off beards!

When the president declares that climate change is a ‘con’ then it is obvious that the Environmental Protection Agency is not going to bound by scientific advice. The new administrator of the EPA, Lee Zeldin, said ‘we are driving a dagger into the heart of the climate change religion.’

Trump has retained only one criteria for the appointment of the leaders of state bureaucracies - loyalty to himself.

Trump’s 7 months have therefore been a full scale attack on all the pillars of US power since 1945, whether military, strategic, economic, political or ideological. These bases were already being undermined by the loss of direction and perspective that developed after the collapse of the Eastern Bloc; the failure of its military attempts to preserve its hegemony; and the fallout from the Great Recession of 2008.

But for the populist Trump the cause of the decline of US imperialism was the result of one of the very factors that were responsible for its previous ascendancy: its liberal democratic ethos. By desecrating this guiding spirit Trump believes he can rejuvenate American capitalism and recover the ascendancy of another era.

However, it would be wrong to see that this reversal has been the result of Trump himself - despite his claims. Trump is only the most dramatic expression of a universal populist political trend that has been gaining ground in the period of decomposition, at the expense of liberal democracy.

Trump, populism and the decay of liberal democracy

Francis Fukuyama, a prominent US political expert, famously declared after the fall of the Berlin Wall: “What we may be witnessing is not just the end of the Cold War, or the passing of a particular period of postwar history, but the end of history as such: that is, the end point of mankind's ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.” -  Francis Fukuyama, “The End of History?”, The National Interest, No. 16 (Summer 1989)

Since then, he has had to change his opinion about the victory of liberal democracy and reject the corresponding illusion of the neoconservatives around president George W Bush that the US was, after 1989, going to lead a unipolar world.

The collapse of Stalinism was merely the precursor of a generalised decay of the political forms of capitalist rule in the period of the decadence - and more recently, decomposition - of the bourgeois order. The one-party state of the Russian bloc developed in particular to satisfy the imperialist military needs of the Second World War and its aftermath. But its economic weakness increasingly undermined the inflexibility of the state in the face of the long world economic crisis beginning in the 1960s, eventually leading to complete collapse.

However, the regimes of the Western Bloc also began to lose their raison d’être after the defeat of their main imperialist adversary after 1989. The liberal democratic states and their ideology had cohered around the imperialist perspectives of the Western Bloc. But increasingly, after the removal of its main opponent, this disciplined respect for liberal norms uniting all the bourgeois factions behind the state was removed, and the liberal democratic regimes begin to mimic the endemic corruption and every-man-for-himself mentality typical of the operation of the Stalinist regimes.

This tendency to lose political control was exacerbated by the ineluctable worsening of the economic crisis, especially the consequences of the officially-named 2008 Great Recession that had to be paid in full… by the working class. At the same time the multiplication of ‘forever wars’ around the globe was directly involving the Western liberal democratic regimes and their budgets. The promise of peace and prosperity made by the West after 1989 was given the lie. The tattered credibility of the traditional parties of liberal democracies was revealed in the steady loss of their percentage of the vote.

This void was filled by populist political forces, whose general character consisted of castigating only the symptoms of the failures of capitalism and of offering irrational panaceas: the replacement of long-term imperialist diplomacy and alliances with incoherent, nativist nationalism that corresponds more to the free-for-all reigning on the world stage; the blaming of elites - the huge parasitic state bureaucracies, Wall Street, and well-paid experts for the economic crisis - scapegoating immigration and other foreigners for the decline of living standards; replacing the woke ideology of liberalism with common sense traditional values.

Populism is revealed not as an opponent of capitalism, democracy and the democratic state. After all it was President Abraham Lincoln who defined government in a populist way: ‘the rule of the people, by the people, for the people’. No, the populist enemy is the traditional liberal practice of the democratic state that has supposedly distorted the meaning of the rule of the people and excluded them from power.

Populism is not a new political phenomenon but an incoherent reaction, from fractions of the ruling class, to the inevitable contradictions and limitations of the liberal representative form of the bourgeois state.

The pretence of this state to rule in the name of the people is inevitably exposed in practice by the exploitation and repression of the mass of population in the interest of a minoritarian ruling class by the state. The mass of the population is deliberately excluded from direct participation in political power by the representative principle of the state. The popular forms of democracy that arose in the bourgeois revolutions (English, American, French) had to be crushed in order to stabilise the new bourgeois states. The liberal representative democracies of the 19th century - with the exception of the US - excluded the majority of the population from the vote. Universal suffrage only becomes generalised after the First World War, when the workers parties had betrayed and been integrated into the bourgeois state and legislative functions have largely passed into the hands of the Leviathan executive, so the workers vote therefore has minimal effect on the direction of capitalist policy. Hence the regular call of parts of the bourgeoisie to restore the impossibility of ‘power to the people’.

What’s new today is that right wing political populism has become more than an oppositional pressure valve for the liberal establishment and, because of the conditions described above in the period of decomposition, has actually taken political power in what were previously the most politically stable of the capitalist regimes of the world.

The coming to power of populism is a cure that is worse than the disease for the interests of the whole bourgeoisie. Firstly of course populism has no real alternative solutions to war or crisis; it is characterised essentially only by amateurish methods, vandalising policies and the fermenting of chaos and scandals that exacerbates the real problems instead of solving them. Populist leaders, once ensconced in power, prove themselves just as corrupt and depraved as the elitist figures they are replacing. Typically, the repugnant Jeffrey Epstein scandal has implicated Trump as well as Clinton for example. Trump himself has become a multi-billionaire. Instead of creating wealth and jobs for the working class his tariff policy has proved to be a regressive tax on the poorest. As has the ‘One Big Beautiful Bill Act’ which will deprive more millions of workers from access to healthcare. Protectionism will hardly expand US manufacturing as it is claimed to do[3]

Populism in power in effect becomes ‘populism for plutocrats’ as the astute organ of the bourgeoisie, the Financial Times, says.

Trump and the working class

Trump was elected partly because of dissatisfaction with falling living standards under Biden. But poverty levels are continuing to rise under Trump, inflation continues to cut into wages, unemployment will rise partly because of savage cuts in federal employment and because of the mirage of the expanding bubble of Artificial Intelligence. The latter is attracting vast investment in the United States precisely because it has the capacity to vastly eliminate more jobs. But the further misery this will inflict on the working class will only accentuate the crisis of overproduction and the financial crashes that are its logical consequence.

We are seeing then, exemplified in the US, not only the crumbling of the liberal democratic political edifice but also the unmasking of its populist alter ego, in the face of a working class which hasn’t submitted passively to the further austerity that will continue to be demanded by the irresolvable crisis of capitalism and all factions of the bourgeoisie.

It might appear then that the working class can, in the face of the present political turmoil of the bourgeoisie, put forward its own class demands and ultimately the perspective of its own political power.

But the bourgeoisie is able to use its own political putrefaction and internal conflicts against its principal class enemy to divide the working class, suppress its class identity and steer it into false battles and objectives. The one advantage for the bourgeoisie in the ascension of political populism is that it creates a false debate, a diversionary conflict, that steers the working class away from understanding the real causes of its pauperisation and its own class solution. As the Financial Times said of the rise of populism in Britain in 2016: ‘let them eat Brexit’.[4]

In fact, this splitting of the working class is what is happening in the US today: the working class is being asked to actively take sides either for the outrages of populism or for liberal democracy, to choose between different exploiters and executioners. The leftists are particularly active in trying to mobilise workers behind the ‘lesser evil’ of the Left of the Democratic Party in the US.

Unfortunately, parts of the Communist Left, deliberately blind to the reality of the situation, are giving ground opportunistically to the ‘democratic movements’ that are part of the false oppositions proposed by the bourgeoisie, in the false hope of turning them into genuine proletarian struggles.

The working class, in order to defend its interests, will have to fight all factions of the ruling class and not get caught up in a struggle which is not its own. The revolutionary movement has since Marx rejected the mystification of democracy and equality in capitalism - whether of the liberal or populist kind - because the bourgeois order has always been riven by a class exploitation that is cemented by state oppression. Marx’s synonym for ‘Liberty, Equality and Fraternity’ was ‘Infantry, Cavalry and Artillery’.

Against the dictatorship of capital whatever its guise - liberal democratic, fascist, populist or, Stalinist - the working class will eventually have to oppose its own class dictatorship embodied in the workers councils that were first deployed in the 1905 and 1917 Russian revolutions.

To conclude: the 7 months of President Trump’s second term have been perfectly in keeping with US capitalism’s need for more wars, exploitation and immiseration of the working class and repression. Trump’s special contribution has been to irreparably trash the facade of US liberal democracy in every domain and therefore further weaken US imperialist leadership on the world arena and provide a massive stimulus to capitalist chaos both internally and externally.

The present and future danger for the working class is that it will be dragged into the more and more violent conflict between populist and liberal wings of the bourgeoisie.

It must autonomously remain on its own class terrain where it continues to struggle for its own class interests that will inevitably bring it up against the ruling class as a whole, and not one or other of its competing factions.

Como 11.10.2025

The election of Donald Trump as President of the United States has considerably disrupted the world economic order in place since the end of the Second World War, with institutions regulating trade and currencies, and a certain consistency in the orientations of different national capitals. The American shift towards extreme protectionism and its rejection of all international cooperation has not only had an immediate impact on all the central countries of capitalism, but above all, has opened a period of uncertainty linked to the brutal and undoubtedly definitive erasure of all the efforts made until then by the international bourgeoisie to distance the capitalist economy from chaos and every man for himself as much as possible. Such a policy greatly contributes to destabilisation, particularly in economic and political terms, with inevitable consequences for the dynamics of the class struggle, the future scale of which remains difficult to measure today.

Marxism is not a dogmatic theory that provided all the answers 150 years ago. It is above all a method that borrows a fundamental approach from science: constantly verifying the validity of theory against the facts. Taking a step back from the situation does not mean detaching oneself from the facts, quite the contrary. The first question we have to ask ourselves as marxists in the face of these upheavals is whether our overall framework for analysing the historical trends of capitalism should be called into question or whether, on the contrary, current events confirm it. Then, based on this framework of analysis, we have to consider the impact that the combination of various factors – wars, economic crisis, trade destabilisation, climate change – has on capitalism, in order to provide our class with the clearest possible analysis of these upheavals and the challenges they pose for the future.

The extensive excerpts from the report on the economic crisis, ratified by our 26th International Congress in the spring of 2025, which we publish below, demonstrate the validity of our analytical framework and allow us to outline the historical perspectives. However, the process never stops, and in a situation as fluid as the one we are experiencing today, it is more important than ever for revolutionary organisations to continually deepen this framework.

Since the report was written, developments have only further confirmed the perspectives outlined by the Congress. The Trump administration's haphazard, volatile, but ultimately brutal implementation of tariffs has led to a previously unimaginable acceleration of every man for himself in the economic sphere, the evaporation of the ‘opportunities’ of globalisation and a brutal and chaotic disorganisation of production and logistics circuits (supply chains) throughout the world. Each national capital is pushed to take charge of strategic sectors of production which, moreover, cannot escape the reality of the saturation of the world market. This exacerbation of every man for himself greatly accentuates the crisis of overproduction.

The crisis of overproduction is therefore only exacerbated by the growing destabilisation of world trade, protectionist policies and, above all, the explosion in military spending. Far from putting an end to the bloody and endless conflicts that are undermining the planet, as Trump constantly boasts, the United States is the first to add fuel to the fire, as illustrated by the situation in Gaza, the conflict with Iran or, more recently, its aggressive policy towards Venezuela, which is increasing the pressure of the war economy on public accounts and on the overall health of capital itself. The historic divorce between the United States and Europe is reflected in particular in America’s blackmail of other NATO countries to buy and produce weapons for Ukraine and to increase their arms expenditure and production in order to take charge of their own defence.

All this is happening in a context of national bourgeoisies losing control of their political game, thus affecting their ability to cooperate and attempt a minimal regulation of a devastated global market. In the United States, factions of the ruling class are tearing each other apart over what policy to pursue. In Europe, states are finding it increasingly difficult to maintain consistency in defending the national capital and maintaining a stable policy for the future.

Such a panorama only confirms the state of decay of capitalism and the fact that the economic sphere, which, through artifices and circumventions of the fundamental laws of the system, had largely escaped this decay, but is now not only falling prey to it, but above all accelerating the infernal vortex that is dragging this system into decomposition.

So how can we continue to defend the idea that capitalism is still capable of launching new cycles of accumulation through the destruction of capital wrought by war, as organisations in the proletarian political milieu continue to argue?[1] The abysmal debt of all capitalist states, the gigantic losses linked to destruction and the war economy, the disorganisation of markets and the reality of chronic overproduction invalidate any idea of the possibility of an eternal development of the system.

How can we still defend the 19th-century vision of technological progress capable of increasing overall productivity? Today, technological progress is certainly incomparable to that of the ascendant period of capitalism. But on the one hand, it is almost exclusively directed towards the military sphere, a trend that began at the start of the decline, while, on the other hand, and above all, the productivity gains evaporate in overproduction due to the impossibility of selling all the goods produced and therefore of realising the total expected surplus value. They are therefore unable to contribute to a “new cycle of accumulation” – even if certain sectors or a number of companies can still do well – since the markets likely to offer the outlets necessary for the realisation of surplus value have long been saturated on a global scale.

Does this mean that the ICC sees the decline of the capitalist mode of production, and even more so its period of decomposition, as an inevitable dynamic that will pave a natural path towards communism? Not at all! Decomposition paves the way for the collapse of the capitalist system, but this does not open the path to communism but rather threatens to bring about the destruction of humanity and its environment if the working class fails to impose its perspective. And this perspective of communism will always remain the fruit of a life-and-death struggle against capital. That is why it is up to revolutionaries to be perfectly clear about the historical responsibility of the proletariat, which does not have an eternity before it to overcome its difficulties, to shake off the weight of bourgeois and petty-bourgeois ideologies and rediscover its identity as a revolutionary class bearing the only viable and possible future for humanity, that of communism.

In this context, the purpose of a congress report is to provide the organisation with a solid analytical framework for understanding the situation in the years to come. Taking a long-term view, a report cannot remain stuck in current events and must take a broader perspective, as was the aim of this report, in particular through two central questions for understanding recent economic events:

• the growing interaction between decomposition and economic crisis, which illustrates the turmoil in which bourgeois society finds itself from an economic point of view;
• the increasingly relentless nature of the impasse of overproduction.

 

1. The growing vortex of interdependence between decomposition and crisis

The interdependence between the economic crisis and the manifestations of decomposition at different levels is evident in a multitude of phenomena:

• on the one hand, overproduction has continued to shake the global economy: for example, a major crisis has erupted in German industry, particularly in the automobile industry, with Germany's economic problems mirroring those of the EU, while in the United States, a speculative stock market bubble has burst;
• on the other hand, disruption to global trade and production doubled in a matter of months. For example, due to attacks by the Houthis, 95% of ships that should have crossed the Red Sea had to be diverted. In 2023, drought caused delays in the Panama Canal, increasing the cost of goods and raw materials moving between the United States and China, as well as on other global shipping routes;
• and then, the ravages caused by the interaction of climate change and a capitalist economy suffering from more than 50 years of crisis are being felt around the world. Massive flooding in Pakistan, the effects of drought in Europe and elsewhere, devastating floods in Valencia, Spain's third largest city, have all destroyed or weakened local and regional economies.

The rising cost of living, destruction, transport problems and pollution have had a growing impact on the US economy. The effect of the Los Angeles fires is not limited to the destruction of buildings: "AccuWeather calculated its economic impact by examining not only losses related to property damage, but also lost wages due to the slowdown or shutdown of economic activity in the affected areas, infrastructure repairs, supply chain issues, and transportation difficulties. Even when homes and businesses are not destroyed, residents may be unable to work due to evacuations; businesses may close due to the dispersal of their customers or the inability of their suppliers to make deliveries. Smoke inhalation can have short-, medium- and long-term health consequences, which weigh heavily on overall economic activity." These effects may be further amplified by the waves of forest fires that rage throughout most of the year in the United States and Canada.

This economic, imperialist and ‘natural’ turmoil is accelerated by the political earthquake caused by Trump's election. Even before he came to power, the threat of tariffs and four more years of political chaos was imminent. "Uncertainty looms over 2025, including the risks of trade tensions and ongoing geopolitical challenges. The trade outlook for 2025 is clouded by potential policy changes, including higher tariffs that could disrupt global value chains and impact key trading partners. Such measures risk triggering retaliation and repercussions, affecting industries and economies throughout supply chains. The mere threat of tariffs creates unpredictability, weakening trade, investment and economic growth."[2]

This chaos and unpredictability of a “terra incognita” is shaking up the three main rival capitalist powers.

1.1. The United States

The world's largest economy is still in decline. A recovery was observed after the pandemic, but it was partly due to Biden's vast support plan, which aimed to reverse the decline of American industry. Manufacturing jobs, the main source of profits, have fallen by 35% since 1979. In 2023, there were 12.5 million manufacturing jobs, the same number as in 1946 (it should be borne in mind that the US population has more than doubled since then – from 141.4 million in 1946 to 336.4 million in 2023).

To cope with the growing impact of the economic crisis, the American bourgeoisie has borrowed more and more money. The United States has seen its debt-to-GDP ratio rise from 32% in 1980 to 123% in 2024. This means that it is drawing trillions of dollars from the rest of the global economy to repay its debts. Every year, the US government spends as much on debt repayment as it does on defence. In 2023, the gap between US spending and revenue was £1.8 trillion, nearly double the military budget! The new administration's barrage of attacks on federal civil servants is partly a response to their rampant growth. The irresponsible and brutal manner in which they are being carried out will have a chaotic impact on American capitalism. The sudden halt in public funding for essential services such as health care, tax collection, social security contributions, essential medical research, etc., will have increasingly harmful consequences for the economy and society.

Internationally, Trump's upheaval of the rules is generating great uncertainty and instability in the global economy. The imposition of tariffs on all US competitors, and the threat of even more draconian tariffs if governments tax American products “unfairly”, is creating tensions not only between the US and its rivals, but also between the rivals themselves.

This scorched earth policy will further plunge capitalism into crisis: "... Trump's proposed policies will not reduce the overall trade deficit. Reducing the bilateral deficit with China would only increase deficits with other countries. This is inevitable, given the persistent macroeconomic pressures. Furthermore, his discriminatory trade policies, with tariffs of 60% on China and 10-20% on others, are bound to spread. Trump and his acolytes will find that exports from other countries are replacing those from China through transhipments, assembly in other countries or direct competition... there will undoubtedly be retaliation. Such a spread of high tariffs in the United States and around the world is likely to lead to a rapid decline in global trade and production."[3]

Furthermore, this economic instability will be exacerbated by the Trump administration's deportation policy. The American Immigration Council has stated that deporting all undocumented immigrants could cost up to $315 billion and require between 220,000 and 409,000 new civil servants and law enforcement officers. It also indicated that deporting one million people per year would cost £967 billion over ten years. This number of migrants being sent back, combined with the loss of remittances, will also destabilise some regions of Central and Latin America and exacerbate the instability of American capitalism.

1.2. China

China is no longer the ‘saviour’ of the global economy that it was after 2007: its industrial overcapacity has become a runaway train dragging the global economy into an ever-deepening crisis: "Simply put, in many crucial economic sectors, China is producing far more output than it, or foreign markets, can sustainably absorb. As a result, the Chinese economy runs the risk of getting caught in a doom loop of falling prices, insolvency, factory closures, and, ultimately, job losses. Shrinking profits have forced producers to further increase output and more heavily discount their wares in order to generate cash to service their debts. Moreover, as factories are forced to close and industries consolidate, the firms left standing are not necessarily the most efficient or most profitable. Rather, the survivors tend to be those with the best access to government subsidies and cheap financing.[…]

“For the West, China’s overcapacity problem presents a long-term challenge that can’t be solved simply by erecting new trade barriers. For one thing, even if the United States and Europe were able to significantly limit the amount of Chinese goods reaching Western markets, it would not unravel the structural inefficiencies that have accumulated in China over decades of privileging industrial investment and production goals. Any course correction could take years of sustained Chinese policy to be successful. For another, Xi’s growing emphasis on making China economically self-sufficient—a strategy that is itself a response to perceived efforts by the West to isolate the country economically—has increased, rather than decreased, the pressures leading to overproduction. Moreover, efforts by Washington to prevent Beijing from flooding the United States with cheap goods in key sectors are only likely to create new inefficiencies within the U.S. economy, even as they shift China’s overproduction problem to other international markets."[4]

The above quote is an excellent description of the impact of the overproduction crisis on China and the global economy.

1.3. The EU, Russia, Israel

The German economic and political giant has been mired in economic and political crisis for the past two years. The political instability of the German bourgeoisie makes it even more difficult to manage the economic crisis that accelerated in 2024. The dramatic worsening of the crisis of overproduction in Germany, with the announcement of a wave of layoffs and company closures in the autumn of 2024, has revealed the fragility of this industrial giant in the face of the worsening global economic crisis. It is particularly affected by the Chinese crisis. This decline is accelerated by the German state's need to increase its defence spending and, as a result, reduce its public spending.

The economic turmoil of German capitalism is fundamentally an expression of the deep problems facing the EU as a whole: “The EU also benefitted from a favourable global environment. World trade burgeoned under multilateral rules. The safety of the US security umbrella freed up defence budgets to spend on other priorities. In a world of stable geopolitics, we had no reason to be concerned about rising dependencies on countries we expected to remain our friends.

“But the foundations on which we built are now being shaken.

 “The previous global paradigm is fading. The era of rapid world trade growth looks to have passed, with EU companies facing both greater competition from abroad and lower access to overseas markets. Europe has abruptly lost its most important supplier of energy, Russia. All the while, geopolitical stability is waning, and our dependencies have turned out to be vulnerabilities…

“The EU is entering the first period in its recent history in which growth will not be supported by rising populations. By 2040, the workforce is projected to shrink by close to 2 million workers each year. We will have to lean more on productivity to drive growth. If the EU were to maintain its average productivity growth rate since 2015, it would only be enough to keep GDP constant until 2050 – at a time when the EU is facing a series of new investment needs that will have to be financed through higher growth.

 “To digitalise and decarbonise the economy and increase our defence capacity, the investment share in Europe will have to rise by around 5 percentage points of GDP to levels last seen in the 1960s and 70s. This is unprecedented: for comparison, the additional investments provided by the Marshall Plan between 1948-51 amounted to around 1-2% of GDP annually.”[5]

It is estimated that the development of EU economies to meet this challenge, particularly in terms of armaments, will require €750-800 billion: a heavy investment in armaments of all kinds, offset by an inevitable reduction in social spending.

This increasingly unstable quagmire, composed of fundamental economic contradictions, manifestations of decomposition on various levels and imperialist tensions, as well as the interdependence of all these factors, is clearly wreaking havoc on the global economy. Added to this is the growing impact of the barbarity of war.

Russian capitalism appears to have withstood the impact of war and sanctions. In truth, this illusion is based on increased military spending, rising energy prices, booming investment in the war economy (the Russian capitalist class can only invest in Russia because of the sanctions) and rising public deficits. As we have already said, this situation masks the depth of the weakening of Russian capitalism by the war. The crushing weight of militarism is the most obvious proof of this. The domination of militarism over the economy is plunging Russia back into the instability of the former USSR: "In short, 40 years after Mikhail Gorbachev came to power, Moscow is facing a resurgence of the problems encountered by Gorbachev and his predecessors. The military will dominate the Russian economy for years to come. Even after a settlement in the current war, the Kremlin will have to rebuild its military stockpiles, maintain the arms race and retrain the army. The military-industrial complex will continue to drain investment, human resources and civilian sector capabilities."

As for the Israeli bourgeoisie, it faces a similar dynamic. The wars in Gaza, the West Bank and Lebanon have had a phenomenal impact on the Israeli state's deficit. Before the war began, the Ministry of Finance projected a deficit of 1.1% of GDP in 2024; it is now estimated at 8%. Israel's security budget is the second highest in the world. The wars have had a dramatic impact on economic activity in the south and north of the country. The loss of Palestinian workers in certain sectors and the impact of conscription have had adverse consequences. The credit rating of Israeli capitalism has fallen for the first time in its history. All this has increased its dependence on US support.

The idea that Israel and the United States will ethnically cleanse Gaza and build a Mediterranean resort is as illusory as it is revolting. To clear the rubble would require 100 lorries working 24 hours a day for 21 years. There are at least 14,000 bodies still under the rubble and 7,500 tonnes of unexploded ordnance. Military barbarism, economic chaos and the rise to power of populist factions of the bourgeoisie are creating an unprecedented level of instability in the capitalist system.

2. The agony of a world dominated by capitalist relations

When Stalinism collapsed in 1989, after more than 40 years of the return of the crisis that had begun in the mid-1960s, the ICC pointed out that the contradictions and manifestations of the decadence of moribund capitalism, which had marked the history of this decadence, had not only not disappeared with time, but had persisted. Indeed, they had accumulated and deepened to culminate in the phase of decomposition, which crowns and completes three quarters of a century of agony for a capitalist mode of production condemned by history.

With regard to the crisis of state capitalism expressed by the collapse of the USSR, our organisation then highlighted:

• that the collapse of Stalinist state capitalism demonstrated the impotence of state capitalist measures to permanently bypass the laws of the market and demonstrated the powerlessness of the world bourgeoisie in the face of the crisis of overproduction;
• that the absence of perspective unleashed within the ruling class, and especially within its political apparatus, a growing tendency towards indiscipline and every man for himself;
• that the bankruptcy of Stalinism, after that of the Third World, heralded the bankruptcy of capitalism in its most developed poles.

The ICC also analysed that, in the chaotic context of this new historical phase and in a capitalist world profoundly altered by the effects of decadence, the disappearance of the blocs offered an opportunity to maintain the profitability of capital and to prolong the survival of capitalism through "globalisation": the extension of capitalist exploitation and capitalist social relations to the furthest corners of the planet, hitherto inaccessible due to the existence of the imperialist blocs.[6] These same conditions enabled China's rapid rise.[7] However, we have pointed out that “globalisation” was only an interlude allowing the capitalist system to relatively preserve its economy from the effects of decomposition. The worsening of the real state of the economy, the weakening of the dynamics of globalisation undermined the realisation of expanded accumulation, while the weight of military spending and the impasse of overproduction shattered the scaffolding of global finance based on staggering debt. The 2008 crisis, the most serious since 1929, marked a turning point in the history of the capitalist mode of production's descent into its historical crisis. It confirmed that the capitalist system finds itself even more completely locked into a situation where (due to the exhaustion of the last extra-capitalist markets) the universal hegemony of capitalist class relations makes the realisation of expanded accumulation increasingly difficult.[8]

In these conditions of deadlock and social decomposition, the phenomena already existing in decadence take on a new quality, due to the bourgeoisie's inability to offer any perspective other than “resisting, step by step, but without hope of success, the advance of the crisis. That is why the current situation of open crisis presents itself in radically different terms from the previous crisis of the same type, that of the 1930s”[9]. After 2008, the closure of the “opportunities” of globalisation and the increasingly obvious inability of capitalism to overcome its crisis of overproduction resulted in the explosion of every man for himself, not only in relations between capitalist nations, but also within each nation, while the effects of decomposition took on a new and powerfully destructive scale for the capitalist economy in the early 2020s. They are accelerating and striking at the heart of capitalism as the combined effects of the economic crisis, war and the climate crisis interact and multiply their impact, destabilising the economy and its productive infrastructure. “While each of the factors fuelling this ‘whirlwind’ effect of decomposition represents in itself a serious risk of collapse for states, their combined effects far exceed the simple sum of each of them taken in isolation.” Among the various factors contributing to the whirlwind effect, war is accelerating the worsening of the crisis.

2.1. Decomposition fuels the headlong rush into militarism

This “epochal change” is bringing about the return of high-intensity warfare. It thereby:

• fuels the shockwave of military conflicts on the global economy (Ukraine, Middle East, Red Sea); the prospect of major conflicts (Taiwan) or “regional” conflicts (India/Pakistan, Morocco/Algeria) exposes the economy to incalculable and unpredictable disruptions; war weakens and exhausts national economies (Russia, Ukraine, Israel);
• produces remarkable unanimity among the different factions of each bourgeoisie in each national capital around the world to prioritise increased military spending: during Trump's first term, within NATO, three countries (including only one European country, Greece) out of around thirty allocated 2% of GDP to defence; today, only eight countries, including seven European countries, have not reached this target. Since the NATO summit in June 2025, the plan is to allocate 5% of GDP to defence, including 3.5% to the purchase of military equipment. To achieve this, all states are committed to strengthening the war economy and adapting their means of production, which involves rebuilding strategic food and military (ammunition) stocks and making a considerable effort to accelerate military production (e.g. the transition of this entire industry to three 8-hour shifts in France in order to achieve major reductions in production times – for example, it has been halved for Caesar cannons). This also involves seeking to standardise military equipment among allies to enable industry to increase its capacity, and relocating military production capacity (gunpowder in France) within their territory for those where this can be done.

As industrial power is the basis of military power, each national capital is attempting to reindustrialise, which essentially involves:

• investment in key sectors of military power, such as robotisation, digitalisation and AI. For example, the US has begun repatriating the production of latest-generation semiconductors to its own soil in order to guarantee its monopoly;
• the integration of other aspects that are essential to the growth of these sectors: efforts to train a skilled workforce and adapt education (which has been a victim of cost-cutting), and the ability to produce abundant and inexpensive electricity;
• artificially keeping alive strategic sectors such as steel (with overcapacity of 25-30% worldwide and up to 60% in France) through state intervention, which irrationally reinforces overproduction.

Even on a strategic level, however, reindustrialisation comes up against the very causes of deindustrialisation: insufficient profitability, which led to the disappearance or relocation of industries, and the burden of debt, which has skyrocketed since 2020 and restricts the room for manoeuvre of each national capital.

The surge in unproductive spending is weighing heavily on national capital and driving inflation.

Furthermore, the general rise of every man for himself and warlike tensions against the backdrop of US-China rivalry:

• is intensifying competition between nations and leading to a global reorganisation of industrial production along imperialist fault lines. The impossibility of decoupling the US and Chinese economies has given way to the ‘risk reduction’ that the United States wants to impose on its allies. This dynamic is accompanied by a trend towards the cartelisation of supply chains for strategic materials or products with a view to ‘securing’ them, which are then used as a means of pressure and blackmail to gain a position of strength. This is particularly the case for rare metals and minerals, given the difficulty of accessing them on a large scale to operate entire value chains – more than half of their refining is under Chinese control – as well as energy sources;
• disrupts global trade through export restrictions and public subsidies to industries deemed vital to national security and sovereignty (this affects 12.7% of G20 countries' imports and 10% globally);
• is driving increased use of digital technologies and additive manufacturing, enabling companies to move their production closer to the point of sale in order to accelerate the pace of supply chain reorientation and reduce the appeal of locating production in China;
• is profoundly changing and destabilising the domestic conditions of national production for each national capital: as summarised by Defence Minister Lecornu for France, for example, regarding the grey area of hybrid warfare that powers are constantly waging: “without being at war, it is no longer possible to say that we are at peace”; "Cyber attacks are on the rise and target a huge number of companies, public institutions and even local authorities. The armed forces are deploying capabilities to identify, thwart and resist these attacks within the state, but every business leader, every administrative manager and every local elected representative must also protect their organisation against this threat, which affects everyone.”; “Technological leaps, the militarisation of space and digital technology, information warfare and the exploitation of economic weaknesses enable competitors to devise and implement new threats that can have extremely serious consequences. One of the risks facing France today is that of being defeated without being invaded.”
• leads to a general increase in prices (of between two and six hundred percent), as well as a change in the conditions under which they are set; the lowest cost is no longer the only criterion; added to this are the prices of “scarcity” and “security" as well as the financial capacity of the highest bidder.

2.2 Decomposition aggravates the crisis of state capitalism in the central countries

In all the central parts of capitalism, the state, guarantor of the interests of national capital, is the central actor in the economy: in a profoundly changed and changing economic, social and imperialist environment, its intervention remains predominant. However, the seriousness of capitalism's impasse, as well as the necessities of building a war economy, are fuelling clashes within each national bourgeoisie, in a context where each national capital is deeply weakened:

• by the weight of debt, which severely restricts the ability of states to invest and reduces the room for manoeuvre of each national capital to support the national economy;
• by the disappearance of cooperation between powers to deal with the contradictions and (predictable) convulsions of a system still threatened by financial crises.

Faced with the challenges of “national sovereignty” and the chaotic effects of decomposition, particularly its repercussions on the economy; and faced also with the issue of accumulated debt (exceeding or representing several times GNP), the balance of state budgets and the balance of payments (mostly in deficit) take on a new crucial importance for each national capital. With its resilience in the face of its rivals at stake, this represents a new vulnerability and fragility within the context of the worsening of decomposition. The question of budgetary balance arises, as each national economy becomes increasingly locked into the inherent contradictions of the difficulty of accumulating capital, while cheating the law of value has reached historically unprecedented levels since the pandemic.

Debt – or rather its scale – divides the bourgeois factions: in the United States, for the adoption of the budget, Trump demanded an unlimited increase in the government debt ceiling, a proposal that was ultimately rejected, including with the support of some Republicans. In Germany, the issue of special off-budget funds and the need, defended by part of the bourgeoisie, to abandon the “debt brake” (enshrined in the Constitution), seen as a “brake on the future”, was a key cause of the implosion of the governing coalition. In China, the Communist Party is bringing the financial sector back into line, calling on it to serve the economy more effectively and contribute more to national wealth.

The tendency for the ruling class to lose control of its political game due to the effects of decomposition on the bourgeoisie and society, and the resulting instability and chaos, are affecting the coherence, long-term vision and continuity of the defence of the overall interests of national capital:

• the political crisis in France is preventing the adoption of a budget; divisions between bourgeois factions in Germany are affecting the EU's ability to prepare for the economic consequences of Trump's arrival in power;
• the coming to power of irresponsible populist factions (with programmes that are unrealistic for national capital) is weakening the economy and the measures imposed by capitalism since 1945 to prevent the uncontrolled spread of the economic crisis. Trump is coming to power with a plan that is diametrically opposed to the policy previously pursued by the US government, aimed at promoting cryptocurrencies and wholesale financial deregulation.

The clique around Trump wants to locate these crypto projects in the United States and make digital assets and other innovations a crucial instrument for “making America more powerful than ever.” Speculative products par excellence (which Trump hopes will be a lucrative source of income), backed by major US tech stocks or the dollar and traded on the stock market through new products, cryptocurrencies, used as an alternative means of payment, can only compete with and weaken the currencies issued and guaranteed by central banks. Due to their inherent volatility (their solidity is equal to that of the company that issues them – far from that of a central bank), by escaping the banking system and without a supervisory mechanism, the widespread use of cryptocurrencies can only affect the financial stability of the capitalist system, weakening the control exercised by countries over exchange rates and the money supply.

Trump's arrival in power and his aggressive economic policy are another factor dividing and destabilising each bourgeoisie in terms of the policy and course of action to be taken to deal with it (see the tensions with Canada and Trudeau's resignation, and also the divisions within the EU). The measures proposed by populism only increase the chaos and uncertainty.

More generally, the tendency to lose sight of the general interests of capital is becoming more pronounced, due to deep divisions within the ruling class over how to manage the economic crisis; a bourgeoisie fragmented by conflicts that go beyond simple competitive relations, where factions are fighting for their survival in the face of the insoluble dilemmas and contradictions facing each national capital, and where each option will generate its share of losers. These conflicts are leading to an increasingly clear trend towards the domination of the state by clans and cliques primarily motivated by the defence of their own interests, where the obsession with controlling their position involves sidelining any potential rivals. They fill decision-making bodies with loyalists, even openly challenging the principles of state functioning, such as the separation of powers, the independence of the judiciary and election results. This trend is particularly marked with the arrival of populism in power: Trump, for example, arrived with a staff of 4,000 loyalists selected to thoroughly clean up the “deep state”, and the management of the state took on a distinctly oligarchic character, with tech giants such as Musk and Zuckerberg, among others, financing and supporting Trump with the clear intention of taking advantage of the situation.

In the long run, this can only result in incompetence, mismanagement and a decline in the sense of responsibility and, ultimately, a decline in economic efficiency and effectiveness, not to mention the inevitable conflicts and upheavals resulting from the desire to retain power at all costs through violence and coups, which can only ultimately weaken national capital, as illustrated by Trump's call to march on the Capitol at the end of his first term, Bolsonaro's coup attempt in Brazil, and that of President Yoon Suk-yeol in South Korea in December 2024.

"If Western state capitalism has been able to survive its Stalinist rival, it is in the same way that a more robust organism resists the same disease for longer. (...) Capitalism today exhibits tendencies similar to those that caused the demise of Stalinist state capitalism. As for Chinese state capitalism, marked by Stalinist backwardness despite the hybridisation of its economy with the private sector, and riddled with numerous tensions within the ruling class, the hardening of the state apparatus is a sign of weakness and a promise of future instability.”

2.3. The impasse of overproduction is becoming increasingly relentless

“The picture presented by the capitalist system confirms Rosa Luxemburg's predictions: capitalism will not experience a purely economic collapse but will sink into chaos and convulsions:

• “the almost complete absence of extra-capitalist markets is now changing the conditions under which the main capitalist states must achieve expanded accumulation: increasingly, this can only be achieved, as a condition of their own survival, to the direct detriment of rivals of the same rank, by weakening their economies. The ICC's prediction in the 1970s of a capitalist world that can only survive by reducing itself to a small number of powers still capable of achieving a minimum level of accumulation is increasingly coming true. – As an expression of this impasse, due in particular to the growing weight of unproductive military spending, inflation will remain a permanent disruptive factor for economic stability.”;
• for these reasons, the entire capitalist system remains highly exposed to the occurrence of large-scale financial crises and currency destabilisation.

The level of overproduction combined with the anarchy inherent in capitalist production, as well as the repercussions of imperialist conflicts and the increasing destruction of ecosystems, are profoundly destabilising capitalist production and increasingly exposing society to risk. The occurrence of shocks that jeopardise the ability to continue production, leading to shortages and supply chain disruptions, bring incalculable social and economic consequences. Further, as is already the case for certain commodities in some areas – agriculture, pharmaceuticals and other segments of production – it is becoming apparent that the deepening of decomposition means the cessation of the production of such commodities because their continuance is not sufficiently profitable. Thus, overproduction and the resulting difficulty in accumulating wealth paradoxically lead to shortages.

Overproduction is also evident in the serious crisis in the agricultural sector, which has given rise to peasant revolts worldwide, including in the central countries. Weighed down by the crisis (rising energy and input costs), which has been exacerbated in Europe by the historic decline in production due to the climate and the historic increase in epizootic diseases leading to mass slaughter of livestock, many farms are doomed to disappear (e.g. in France, where 84,000 full-time equivalent jobs are expected to be lost by 2050 and 200,000 farms – half of the total! – are expected to disappear). In response, governments (particularly in the EU) are pushing for increased industrialisation of animal and plant production, accompanied by the abandonment of any ‘green’ objectives. This intensification of agricultural productivism, which global capitalism is rushing headlong into (and which is a major cause of environmental destruction), encourages the development of zoonoses, such as the one incubating in the United States, which could potentially have consequences similar to those of the Spanish flu of 1918.

Finally, the introduction of AI into production is an attempt by capitalism to increase global GDP growth and reverse the general decline in labour productivity over the last two decades: "Automation will affect a growing proportion of the workforce. Over the past two decades, it has mainly replaced medium-skilled occupations such as machine operators, metalworkers and clerical workers. Automation will now affect high-income occupations such as doctors, lawyers, engineers and university professors. Although new jobs will be created, there will be a mismatch between the jobs lost and the newly created jobs. This mismatch could prolong the period of unemployment for many workers...”[10] “Automation could eliminate 9% of existing jobs and radically change about a third of them over the next 15 to 20 years.”.[11] Forty per cent of hours worked could disappear in central countries. This “fourth industrial revolution”, yet another attempt to temporarily escape the contradictions of overproduction, reduces the size of the solvent market, while the rise in the organic composition of capital, which corresponds to its generalisation, calls for even greater accumulation. Ultimately, AI can only further reinforce the impasse.

Furthermore, the rise of AI, which consumes large amounts of water to cool infrastructure sometimes located in arid areas (!) and electricity (consumption will increase tenfold in the United States by 2026), has enormous environmental repercussions. It stimulates the consumption of fossil fuels, as in the case of the United States, which plans to increase drilling by 18%, or China, where it depends on coal. AI is also expected to cause shortages in certain regions of the United States!

The capitalist economy is therefore increasingly marked by uncertainty, destabilisation and chaos, the fragility and weakening of the system, and the endless growth of its crisis. The disappearance of international coordination to deal with the crisis and the retreat into national isolation also express capitalism's inability to produce new engines capable of reviving the global economy, whereas the United States in the 1980s and China after 2008 were still able to play this role. Due to the general weakening of the capitalist system, all states are sinking into crisis: the absence of sufficient extra-capitalist markets is now changing the conditions under which the main capitalist states must achieve expanded accumulation: increasingly, this can only be achieved, as a condition of their own survival, at the direct expense of rivals of the same rank by weakening their economies.

ICC

 

While the economies of the major European countries are in recession or witnessing modest growth, the Spanish economy is performing well with a 3.2% growth of GDP in 2024. Where Belgium, Britain and France have announced drastic austerity plans and cuts to social welfare, the ‘liberal’ Spanish government claims that it is “improving people's lives”. Where Paris, London, Berlin, etc., are openly talking about increasing military spending, President Sánchez appears to ‘resist’ these increases. While most European governments are taking unashamed measures to restrict the arrival of immigrants, the Spanish government appears to be a ‘bulwark’ against xenophobia and populism. So, is this radical image of the left-wing Spanish government justified? Absolutely not.

If other states, just as supportive of war and capitalist exploitation as Spain, are willing to perpetuate this myth of the ‘new Spanish miracle’, it is because they seek to perpetuate the misconception that a ‘prosperous’ capitalism is possible and that it is possible to stop war or the rise of populism with left-wing governments such as the one led by Sánchez.

Have working class living standards improved?

The official statistics contradict this claim. Since 2008, the purchasing power of wages has fallen, eroded by rising prices, particularly housing costs, which have seen a sharp increase, leading to overcrowding and insecurity for working-class families. What is growing is what is known as “working poverty”, i.e. increased numbers of working-class families who, even though in work, cannot afford basic necessities.[1]

The reduction in unemployment, so touted by the government and its trade union and left-wing partners, is in reality a replacement of stable employment with part-time, temporary or “fixed term” jobs[2], where workers' lives are at the mercy of commercial developments or the whims of the employer. Now we hear talk of a new “social breakthrough” with the hypothetical reduction to the working day, when in reality the proportion of employees working unpaid overtime is even higher today than before the 2019 labour reform.

The government boasts of economic growth that is in reality based largely on speculative investments (in the property sector), a dependency on tourism (which accounts for 13% of GDP) and the profits arising from the extreme exploitation of workers, mainly those with immigrant origins.

A government for peace?

As a left-wing government, Sánchez's administration tends to hide its commitment to exploitation and war behind “national solidarity” and pacifist pretentions. This was the case at the recent NATO summit, where the president ‘stood apart’ from other leaders, seemingly dissociating himself from the frantic race to war and the increase in military budgets. But the truth is that, a few months earlier, this ‘progressive’ government had agreed to increasing its military expenditure by 2.5% of GDP (nearly 41 billion euros), further increased with a Plan for Industrial Defence (an additional10 billion euros) and a commitment to invest an additional 34 billion euros in future years.[3] A few weeks later, Pedro Sánchez personally announced a plan to increase military manpower from 116,000 to 140,000 over the next eight years.

With sickening cynicism, Sira Rego, Minister of Youth and member of the most left-wing party, SUMAR, said: “It would be contradictory to have to choose between developing a social programme and military spending, and to see hospitals and schools closing, and to see the future of our generation threatened by the accumulated production of weapons”. But that is exactly what they are doing with a freeze on aid to people dependent on it and by encouraging workers to take out private health insurance owing to the decline of the public health system. They are also making a lot of teachers redundant and teachers in Catalonia, the Basque Country, Asturias, Madrid, etc. have been actively demonstrating their opposition to these attacks.

A government in favour of migrant workers?

Another characteristic of the propaganda of the left-wing parties of capital is to exaggerate the atrocities of the right wing in order to cover up their own record. This has happened recently, for example, in the United States,[4] as well as in the events in Torre Pacheco in Spain, when the ‘Socialist’ government of Sánchez and its leftist supporters tried to present themselves as being the more 'liberal' by denouncing the xenophobic and racist behaviour of far-right gangs. While the ‘progressive’ government claims to be on the side of the workers, it's only to exploit them better. It tells them to take credit for the ‘prosperity’ in Spain. And how they should take credit! A recent study revealed that migrant workers in Spain earn 30% less than workers with Spanish nationality.[5] With all her hypocrisy, Minister Pilar Alegría said, regarding the attacks on the migrant population in Torre Pacheco: “Our country has nothing to do with these violent individuals who mistreat people under the pretext of defending Spain”. And this comes from the spokesperson of a government that is responsible for the Melilla barrier massacre and that negotiates with the governments of Morocco, Mauritania, etc., over the crackdown on those trying to escape wars and chao

The left-wing government states that ‘the people’ want it to resist change in order to defend the “social benefits won over decades”. This is a lie hiding the fact that no matter which government is in charge, the only future that global capitalism can offer humanity is that of increasing wars and poverty. The only way to avoid this grim fate is by the working class, mobilising and uniting as a class in its struggle against all factions of the exploiting class. They want us to believe that within the various factions of the ruling class there are some that are ‘more beneficial to workers’ or that they offer a ‘more humane’ form of capitalism. This is the worst kind of deception, used to disarm us in the face of growing barbarism.

Valerio (1 August, 2025)