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

Economic crisis, austerity measures and the conditions of pensioners

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

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

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

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

This involves:

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

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

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

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

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

Struggle and repression by the populist government

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

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

Assessment of the pensioners' struggle

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tr

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

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

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

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

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

This has to end, now!”

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

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

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

The class division in health

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The attack on healthcare

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

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

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

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

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

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

Defence of workers’ health

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

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

 

Ernie, April 2025

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

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

Just one point we want to clarify.

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

.

Meeting on Sunday March 2.

1.

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

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

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

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

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

2.

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

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

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

Baboon. 3.3.25

 

 

 

 

 

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

On the re-election of Trump as US president

 

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

***********

Following the public meeting

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

After the Trump 2.0 article

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

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

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

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

DG

 

ICC reply                                   

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

Elections against the working class

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

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

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

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

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

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

Democracy is the greatest danger for the working class

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

ICC, April 2025

 

The New World Disorder: What is to be done?

 

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

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

Nearest tube: Kings Cross

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

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

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