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.

After the crazy escalation of the last few months over customs duties and the resulting stock market and dollar crashes, the world is hanging on Trump's every move, wondering what decisions he will or will not take, which ones he will backtrack on... For the vast majority of the bourgeoisie, the current US administration's policy is ‘absurd’ and Trump's decisions are ‘crazy’; they threaten the development of an already faltering global economy, and first and foremost of the US economy. According to recent IMF forecasts, US economic growth will fall by nearly 1% compared to previous forecasts, the Chinese economy by 0.6% and finally the global economy by 0.5%.

In reality, what fundamentally threatens the global economy and humanity is decadent capitalism, which has entered its final phase of decomposition, where the effects of the economic crisis, wars, the climate crisis and all the manifestations of the rottenness of this society are now combining. Trump, like populism, is nothing more than a product of this dynamic.

The foundations of the great economic disorder

Since the reappearance of the historic crisis of capitalism in the late 1960s, a product of capitalism's fundamental contradictions, the bourgeoisie has implemented palliative measures to try to postpone the most severe effects of the recession. The effectiveness of such policies depended on the ability of the major industrialised countries to agree on a certain level of international cooperation, based on the implementation of mechanisms of state capitalism which, in particular, formed the framework for the globalisation of the economy and initially enabled economic exchanges to escape the chaos raging, for example, on the imperialist front and in the political life of the bourgeoisie. Thus, at the height of the economic turmoil of 2007-2008, which had already hit the United States hard, and that of 2009-2011 with the ‘sovereign debt’ crisis, the bourgeoisie was able to coordinate its responses, which made it possible to mitigate the blows of the crisis somewhat and ensure an anaemic ‘recovery’ during 2013-2018.

But such a policy reached its limits in the growing tendency of the different national factions of the bourgeoisie to go it alone, making them less and less capable of providing a minimally concerted response, through palliative measures, to the global crisis of capitalism. Such an ‘evolution’ was the hallmark of the expansion of the decomposition of capitalism, in particular of the ‘every man for himself’ mentality at all levels of society, including the management of capital by the bourgeoisie. This was confirmed in a striking way with the 2020 pandemic and then the wars in Ukraine and the Middle East, which led to the closure of borders and gave rise to a very significant trend in favour of measures to ‘relocalise’ production, preserve key sectors in each national capital, and develop barriers to the international movement of goods and people. All this has contributed to sowing chaos in monetary, financial and trade policies.

Trump2 as a factor exacerbating economic destabilisation

It is in this minefield that Trump is returning to business with his uninhibited, irrational, changeable and completely unpredictable populist policy. While being a product of the rottenness of capitalism, Trump is in turn an active factor in its decline. This is illustrated most convincingly by his actions at the head of the US executive in the trade war he has launched against the world. The ‘economic’ justifications put forward by the Trump administration in its crusade to increase tariffs on most imported goods are either bluff, ridiculous, or both.

One of them, almost laughable, is that until now the United States had been too generous with its partners, who never tired of taking advantage of Uncle Sam's largesse (‘The whole world is taking advantage of us’). It was therefore necessary to ‘set the record straight’ by charging hefty customs duties on certain imported goods.

Another justification invokes the fight against inflation, which is a sensitive issue in the United States since the surge in prices under the Biden presidency had largely contributed to the Democrats' electoral defeat in the last elections. It is not clear how higher prices for imported goods could lower prices in the United States, except through mysterious compensatory mechanisms. But that is not the point: what is really going on here is an attempt to mask the real cause of inflation. The increase in customs duties will certainly not prevent inflation, which has a completely different cause: “The fundamental causes of inflation are to be found in the specific conditions of the capitalist mode of production in its decadent phase. Empirical observation allows us to see that inflation is fundamentally a phenomenon of this epoch of capitalism and that it manifests itself most sharply in periods of war (1914-1918, 1939-45, Korean War, 1957-8 in France during the Algerian war…) i.e. at times when unproductive expenditure is at its highest. It is thus logical to consider that it is by beginning with this specific characteristic of decadence, the immense role of armaments production and unproductive expenditure in general in the economy that we can attempt to explain the phenomenon of inflation”.[1]

In short, if the cost of living is rising in the United States as elsewhere, it is largely to pay for (unproductive) military spending. Indeed, maintaining a huge military lead over all its imperialist rivals – including the most powerful among them, China – comes at a cost that is far from negligible and has to be paid by the population.

The consequences of the tariff war

The ‘tariff war’ is just one economic illustration of the questioning of the world order established after 1945, which has already largely fallen apart on the imperialist level with the ‘transatlantic divorce’, in favour of a totally irrational and unpredictable policy of everyone against everyone else. However, in economic terms, the lack of visibility about the future is a factor that inhibits economic activity for capitalism. In the case of Trump's policy, it is more than a lack of visibility; it is the impossibility of predicting anything, since he is capable of changing his position overnight and several times in a row, depending on his immediate interests. His approach, which consists of trying to score points at the expense of his opponents of the moment, is not limited to economic issues such as customs duties, as we can also see it at work on the imperialist front in the peace negotiations in Ukraine.

Furthermore, responding to the economic depression by lifting customs duties completely ignores the lessons that the bourgeoisie learned from the Great Depression of the 1930s, namely that protectionism can only aggravate the crisis of overproduction by further reducing markets.

Finally, the Trump administration's aberrant and authoritarian methods, often completely irrational not only in terms of the proper functioning of capitalism but also in terms of the United States' own interests, project the image of a world power that is unpredictable and can no longer be trusted. As the world's leading economic power, far ahead of all its rivals, particularly in economic and military terms, the impact of Trump's policies on relations between nations across the globe can only be devastating.

The heaviest and most devastating effects of this global destabilisation will be felt first and foremost by the class exploited under capitalism: the working class. This will happen directly through inflation, which will severely erode its purchasing power and therefore its ability to survive in the current situation. But national capital will also have to find ways to compensate for the increased costs associated with the reconfiguration of production flows resulting from globalisation and relocations. To do this, they will have no choice but to attack the proletariat, cut jobs, worsen working conditions to reduce marginal costs, and slash wages and indirect income linked to social protection. The announcements by various European governments about the ‘efforts’ to be made to ‘save’ the national economy are nothing more than ideological preparation for the blows that will rain down on the proletariat.

The working class everywhere must expect to be the first to pay for this plunge into uncertainty and chaos. The attacks will intensify and will inevitably be accompanied by ideological campaigns that will shift the blame for the situation onto Trump, onto the attack on ‘democracy’, onto the warmongers in America, Russia and no doubt elsewhere when necessary. The trade war will also serve to amplify nationalist rhetoric about protecting ‘our values,’ defending ‘our economic heritage’ and ‘the greatness of our nation.’ We must not fall for this. The decomposition of capitalism is dragging the system in all its dimensions into the abyss. Nothing can pull humanity out of the abyss, neither the measures that have been tried time and again and have always generated more crises and wars, nor the workers sacrificing their wages or working conditions to cheapen the costs of production. Nothing, except a total and radical questioning of this system, its overthrow in favour of a society free from the domination of capital and for the sole benefit of humanity and its environment. This society, communism, is a project in the hands of the proletariat, which, in fighting against the attacks launched against it by the bourgeoisie, will increasingly be able to recognise its own power and its historical responsibilities. The road ahead is undoubtedly still very long, but the perspectives outlined by the current situation only serve to highlight the urgency of developing the struggle.

Syl. D.

 

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

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

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

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

This has to end, now!”

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

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

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

The class division in health

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The attack on healthcare

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

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

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

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

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

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

Defence of workers’ health

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

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

 

Ernie, April 2025

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

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

Just one point we want to clarify.

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

.

Meeting on Sunday March 2.

1.

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

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

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

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

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

2.

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

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

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

Baboon. 3.3.25

 

 

 

 

 

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

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

Intense warmongering and militaristic propaganda

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

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

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

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

More anti-working class attacks

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

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

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

Class struggle is a vital necessity

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

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

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

WH, 5 April 2025

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

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

 

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

On the re-election of Trump as US president

 

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

***********

Following the public meeting

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

After the Trump 2.0 article

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

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

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

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

DG

 

ICC reply                                   

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

Elections against the working class

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

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

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

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

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

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

Democracy is the greatest danger for the working class

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

ICC, April 2025

 

The New World Disorder: What is to be done?

 

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

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

Nearest tube: Kings Cross

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

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

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

 

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

Trump, a fascist?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Populism and anti-fascist campaigns

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

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

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

The trap of demonstrations in defence of the bourgeois state

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

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

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

Camille, 21 April 2025

 

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

The definitive end of the imperialist relations established since 1945

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

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

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

The irreversibility of the Transatlantic divorce

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

R. Havanais / 20.4.2025

 

 

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

 

A break with passivity and disarray

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

Lac, 15 April 2025.

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

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

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

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

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

Imperialist war and the tasks of the communist left

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

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

Bordigists and the national question

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

D'nA