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

In the wake of the Balfour Declaration

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

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

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

In our article More than a century of conflict in Israel/Palestine [1] (International Review 172) we pointed out that Jabotinsky represented a right-wing shift in Zionism which didn’t hesitate to align itself with the extremely anti-Semitic regime in Poland (one of a number of examples of collaboration between the anti-Semitic project of expelling the Jews from Europe and the Zionist willingness to channel these policies towards emigration to Palestine). Although Jabotinsky himself often derided Mussolini’s fascism, his movement undoubtedly sprang from a common root – the development of a particularly decadent and totalitarian form of nationalism whose growth was accelerated by the defeat of the proletarian revolution. This was illustrated by the emergence within Revisionism of the openly fascist Birionim faction and later on the Lehi group around Abraham Stern, who at the beginning of World War Two was prepared to enter into talks with the Nazi regime about forming an anti-British alliance[4]. Jabotinsky himself increasingly saw the British occupiers of Palestine after World War One as the main obstacle to the formation of a Jewish state.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

From Shoah…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

…to Naqba

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

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

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

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

The Zionist state in the service of imperialism

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Finding the exit to the ideological maze

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Amos, August 2025

 

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

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

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

 

World communist revolution or the destruction of humanity

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

 

1917: the revolution in Russia

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

1968: the resumption of the proletarian struggle

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

1970s, 1980s: two decades of struggle

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

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

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

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

 

1990s: Decomposition

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

2020: the return of workers' militancy

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

Revolutionaries of the world

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

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

Let us unite, and tomorrow,

The Internationale,

Will be the human race

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

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

 

AND NOW?

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

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

Workers of all countries, unite!

 

International Communist Current

(September 2025)

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We asked the same question in our Appeal:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

To be fair to the ICT, it should be pointed out that the article does draw the lessons of the Arab Spring of 2011 in Egypt, and points out that this mass movement of a decade and half ago, despite involving massive strikes in the textile industry, was drowned in the polluted ocean of the struggle for democracy. But the article fails to apply this lesson to the democratic struggles of 2025.

Given the failure of the ICT article to warn against the danger of confusing proletarian struggle with the struggle for democracy today, or warn against the danger of acting as though it’s possible to convert the latter into the former, it’s more understandable why this group should have refused the proposed ICC Appeal on democracy which anticipated and adopted a clear position against the democratic campaigns and struggles. This ICC Appeal effectively eliminates the possibility that such campaigns can be turned into class movements.

The rejection of the Appeal by the other groups was not because they disagreed with the letter of the Appeal but its spirit: because the Appeal highlights a gulf between the Communist Left and all other political tendencies (from the extreme right to the extreme left) and prevents any opportunist concessions to the latter.

Similarly, the ICT rejected the ICC’s Internationalist Appeal of 2022 not because it disagreed with this Appeals’ main arguments in theory but because in practice the ICT wanted to pretend that it was possible to create an internationalist movement against war beyond the intransigence of the tradition of the Communist Left: a pretence that gave rise to the bluff of the ‘No War but the Class War’ initiative.

 

Democratic movements can’t be turned into proletarian movements

The idea that the present-day bourgeois democratic movements are ambiguous or fluid in their class nature would mean that they can, potentially, be turned into authentically proletarian movements. And the ICT hasn’t hesitated to assume this ill-founded logic even though the two types of movement are completely antagonistic and incompatible with each other.

The article illustrates this illusion perfectly with a subhead slogan: “From Street war to class war”.

Another example is in a leaflet (11.06.2025) of their US affiliate, the Internationalist Workers Group, against the ICE offensive in America. While pointing out that the Democratic Party presidency of Barack Obama had deported more immigrants than Trump, the leaflet says that:

“Workers everywhere must be prepared to defend themselves, their neighbours, and their coworkers against ICE’s raids. From neighborhood action committees and workplace struggles to mass protests, the struggle must be fought by the working class using its immense strength.”[3]

But the leaflet neglects to mention that a class response in the neighbourhoods to the raids of ICE had already been sabotaged long in advance by the Democratic Party as these quotes in support of the struggle from its representatives indicate:

“He [Trump] has declared a war. Democracy is under assault before our eyes.” (Gavin Newsome, Governor of California). “We are in a war for the soul of our country, for our democracy.” (Dolores Huerta, ex-labour official and civil rights activist). “Protest, carried out peacefully, is the bedrock of our democracy.” (Mayor Andrew Ginther, Columbus, Ohio). “We are advocating for the defence of democracy, the pursuit of justice, and the rule of law.” (Jewish Democratic Council of America).

The desperate struggle of immigrant workers against the militarised actions of ICE today (an agency that has existed since the attack on the Twin Towers in 2001) had already been railroaded along the track of defending US democracy against Trumpian illegality, against the latter’s disregard for democratic laws and procedures. The same laws that previously concealed the brutality of the Democrats' deportations of illegal immigrants. In other words, the protests against ICE today are not a class struggle against the attacks of the capitalist state on immigrant workers but a campaign for the democratic lawful restriction and brutalisation of immigrant workers.

Yet the ICT leaflet calls for the working class to take charge of the struggle against ICE, to turn it into a class movement. This would mean though, if it were possible, a rejection of all national divisions and borders and the confrontation not only of the militarised face of the state in ICE but its democratic alternative face as well. In other words, it would mean a completely different movement on a different class terrain. This would only be possible if the working class had already developed its own class struggle for its own interests to this political level. But as the leaflet and the article mentioned admit, this is as yet far from a reality.

However, neither article nor leaflet draw attention to the workers’ wage struggles on an international scale over the past year and since 2022 (including in the US) that have been developing on a class terrain and are clearly distinguishable from the democratic campaigns and movements, and are the only basis for a completely different future political struggle of the proletariat as an autonomous movement. 

 

A repetition of other opportunist mistakes such as in the Black Lives Matter movement

Unfortunately, the leaflet and article are not an isolated mistake but a repetition of other major errors of the groups of the Communist Left like the one the ICT made in imagining that the BLM riots and protests against the police murder of George Floyd, which erupted in 2020 during Trump’s first presidency, was a working class movement:

“In 1965, just like in 2020, the police kill, and the class responds in defiance to the crooked social order they murder for. The struggle continues”.[4]

The ICT added the qualification that the movement “doesn’t go far enough” and shouldn’t support the Democratic Party. But this doesn’t make sense if the movement is already going in the wrong direction to begin with[5]. It makes even less sense when you consider that the experts in pretending that the mobilisations of democratic opposition can be ‘taken further’ - the leftists - already completely occupy this political terrain and don’t need the assistance of misguided Communist Left groups.

Like the article on today’s democratic struggles, the ICT then declared categorically, without concern for the actual situation of the working class, that “The urban rebellion needs to be transformed into world revolution”.

 

The origins and history of this opportunist wishful thinking on democratic struggles

The ICC Appeal against the democratic campaigns refers to the major acquisition of the Italian Left fraction Bilan in the 1930s, for which ‘democratic struggles’ and ‘proletarian struggle’ are antagonistic, any confusion on this issue proving fatal.

Bilan's position can be summarised as follows: The ‘democratic’ experiments since 1918 have shown that defending democracy negates class struggle, stifles proletarian consciousness and leads its vanguard to treachery:

“The proletariat finds the reason for its historic mission by denouncing the lie of the democratic principle in its own nature and in the need to suppress the differences of classes and the classes themselves.” (“Fascism? Democracy? Communism”. Vercesi, Bilan no. 13, December 1934)

The majority of Bilan later defended this anti-democratic principle at the expense of a split with a minority of the fraction which abandoned this principle and went to fight in the war in Spain in 1936 with the illusion that the military conflict of the democratic republican wing against the fascist wing of the bourgeoisie was the precursor to a proletarian revolution rather than, as reality proved, the preparation of the slaughter of the working class in inter-imperialist war. The minority of Bilan thus confirmed in practice Vercesi’s statement that the defence of democracy leads the proletarian vanguard to treachery.

In the 1930s, rejection of anti-fascism, i.e. rejection of the defence of bourgeois democracy, was the litmus test of a communist tendency.[6]

It should be noted that – without having to renounce their intervention alongside the Republicans in Spain – members of this minority of Bilan were later integrated into the Internationalist Communist Party (PCInt), which is the ancestor of all the groups of the Communist Left that rejected the ICC's Appeal against the democratic campaigns.

The PCint was founded in Italy in 1943 as an internationalist party of the Italian left, but it was very heterogeneous politically. Many militants who had not broken with the positions of the Front and anti-fascism flocked to this new party. The very foundations on which the party was created contained all kinds of ambiguities, which meant that the party constituted a political regression from the positions of the Fraction before the war, the positions of Bilan. While remaining in the proletarian camp in a general sense, the PCint failed to distance itself from the erroneous positions of the Communist International, for example on the trade union question and the question of participation in electoral campaigns.

Only the Gauche Communiste de France group was able, during this period, to maintain an uncompromising position against bourgeois democracy and to continue the political work of Bilan after the Second World War.[7]

At the end of the Second World War, the PCInt developed an ambiguous attitude towards anti-fascist partisan groups in Italy – fully aligned with the imperialist war alongside the Allies – which it believed, due to the presence of workers among them, could somehow be rallied to the proletarian revolution thanks to the PCInt's participation in their ranks.[8]

When the PCInt split in 1952, this initial confusion surrounding its formation was not subsequently clarified, including by Battaglia Comunista (now the ICT), despite its criticism of Bordigism at the time of the split. It was therefore inevitable that this same conciliatory attitude towards democratic struggles would continue to manifest itself.

In 1989, with the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Eastern Bloc regimes, Battaglia misinterpreted the population's anger against Nicolae Ceausescu's hated regime in Romania as a ‘genuine popular uprising’, when in reality the population was mobilising behind the more democratic opposition to replace him. Regarding the democratic demands of the workers' struggles of the time in Russia itself, Battaglia, while admitting that these demands could be used by a wing of the bourgeoisie, stated: "... For these masses imbued with anti-Stalinism and the ideology of western capitalism, the first possible and necessary demands are those for the overthrow of the 'Communist' regime, for a liberalization of the productive apparatus, and for the conquest of 'democratic freedoms" [9]

Clearly the ambiguity of these groups on the rejection of democracy has a long history. But the class intransigence on this principle must be strengthened by the Communist Left, not only for the class struggle today, but for the revolutionary struggle of the future, and for the formation of its class party, which will depend to a large degree on the rejection of all conciliation to one or other of the political formations of the ruling class whose divisions are used to derail this objective.

 

Como, 8.9.25

For over a year and a half, we have been witnessing daily operations by the Israeli army in the Gaza Strip. In the name of ‘Israel's right to defend itself,’ Netanyahu claims to be hunting down the murderous Hamas commandos in their tunnels and wherever the terrorist group may have found refuge, whether in hospitals, schools or refugee camps, in order, as he claims, to free the hostages from 7 October who are still alive.

But the Israeli government couldn't care less about the hostages, who are merely a pretext for its sordid imperialist objectives: Netanyahu and his clique have announced their intention to occupy the entire Gaza Strip forever... completely cleansed of its Arab population! To achieve this, the Israeli bourgeoisie is sparing no expense. The army is showing boundless cruelty in this open-air prison: amid piles of corpses, the population, tossed from zone to zone, north one day, south the next, plunged into despair and lacking everything, lives in constant fear of the abject crimes of the soldiers, of bombs, hunger and disease. At the same time, attacks and expulsion policies have intensified in the West Bank, where thousands of Palestinians are being terrorised and forced to flee.

For Netanyahu and the religious fanatics around him, eliminating the Palestinians from the face of the Earth is now an avowed goal: when the army is not deliberately firing on frightened crowds, it is constantly obstructing the supply of food and basic necessities, shamelessly starving adults, the elderly and children. For more than three months, the government has even completely blocked supplies under pretexts so extravagant that they were in themselves yet another provocation, a barely concealed admission of ethnic cleansing. And all this with the active complicity of Egypt and Jordan, who officially express concern for the fate of the Palestinians while effectively strangling them by preventing them from leaving this hell.

All over the world, we are witnessing immense outrage and protests against the crimes taking place before our very eyes. Demonstrations are taking place in many cities calling for an end to the fighting, with cries of ‘Free Palestine!’ [1]Even the leaders of several European countries, after months of dithering, now feel compelled to condemn the IDF's abuses in Gaza, and even to denounce the reality of an ongoing genocide, such as Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez, who recently spoke out against “a catastrophic situation of genocide”[2].

But behind these statements there is nothing but hypocrisy and lies. The policy of systematic destruction in Gaza is no exception. Quite the contrary! Far from a ‘world at peace’, the entire history of decadent capitalism shows that society is sinking inexorably into barbarism and that no section of the bourgeoisie is capable of putting an end to it.

An unbroken chain of violence

In the 19th century, Karl Marx had already shown that capitalism came into the world through violence, massacres, destruction and pillage, “sweating blood and mud from every pore”: "The discovery of gold and silver in America, the extirpation, enslavement and entombment in mines of the aboriginal population, the beginning of the conquest and looting of the East Indies, the turning of Africa into a warren for the commercial hunting of black skins, signalised the rosy dawn of the era of capitalist production. These idyllic proceedings are the chief momenta of primitive accumulation."[3] The primitive capital necessary for the industrial revolution did not miraculously fall from the sky; its initial accumulation could only exist through plunder, banditry and slavery. In fact, the history of the first capitalist powers is a succession of ignominies, far removed from the ideals of its Enlightenment philosophy: from the large-scale genocide of the Native American peoples (between 80 and 100 million victims!), the development of capitalism has been bloody everywhere. Whether in Great Britain (genocide of the Australian Aborigines, among many other examples), France (extermination of a third of the Algerian population from 1830 onwards), Germany (genocide of the Herero and Nama peoples in Namibia between 1904 and 1908), Russia (1 to 2 million victims during the ethnic cleansing of the Circassians between 1864 and 1867), the United States (during the conquest of the West, for example) and even the ‘small country’ that was Belgium (with 10 million deaths in the Congo!), all bourgeoisies have been involved in the worst atrocities. This violence was also directed against the peasantry of traditional society, as evidenced by the cruelty inflicted by Great Britain on the Irish peasants.

Capitalism is synonymous with structural and institutionalised violence, but the process took a new, qualitative turn after the First World War. At its founding congress in 1919, the Communist International clearly identified the entry of capitalism into its period of decline: “A new epoch has dawned: the epoch of the disintegration of capitalism, of its internal collapse. The epoch of the communist revolution of the proletariat”. Whereas the conquests of the ascendant period had enabled the capitalist powers to develop and universalise new relations of production, the First World War meant that, in the absence of sufficient space and markets, conquest would henceforth take place not primarily on ‘virgin soil’ but through a deadly confrontation with other capitalist powers.

Thus, while the violence of capitalism's period of ascendancy had at least allowed for the development of the productive forces, the violence of its decadence represented a formidable chain of destruction that continued to expand and deepen: "Violated, dishonoured, wading in blood, dripping filth – there stands bourgeois society. This is it in reality. Not all spic and span and moral, with pretence to culture, philosophy, ethics, order, peace, and the rule of law – but the ravening beast, the witches’ sabbath of anarchy, a plague to culture and humanity. Thus it reveals itself in its true, its naked form… One thing is certain. The world war is a turning point. It is foolish and mad to imagine that we need only survive the war, like a rabbit waiting out the storm under a bush, in order to fall happily back into the old routine once it is over. The world war has altered the conditions of our struggle and, most of all, it has changed us"[4].

During the First World War, scientifically planned mass murders (such as gas attacks) and organised atrocities on a very large scale began to appear, as in the genocides of the Pontic Greeks and Armenians, in which millions of people were killed and displaced. This is why in its 1919 Platform the Communist International clearly identified that, faced with capitalism that had become obsolete, the alternative now facing humanity was either socialism or barbarism: “Human culture has been destroyed and humanity is threatened with complete annihilation. There is only one force able to save humanity and that is the proletariat… The final outcome of the capitalist mode of production is chaos. This chaos can only be overcome by the productive and most numerous class – the working class”. Since then, capitalism has continued to spread death and sow barbarism: expulsions, genocides, ethnic cleansing and policies of starvation have become ordinary weapons of war used continuously by all belligerents on a scale unprecedented in human history. After the First World War, even before the horrors of the Second began, this chain of violence continued. Atrocities were perpetrated, for example, this time not against a ‘foreign enemy’, but against Ukrainian peasants (Holodomor) during a famine organised by Stalin (between 2.6 and 5 million dead), or against the Russian population, who died by the millions while working in the gulags.

World War II: the relentless logic of decadent capitalism

The chain of violence finally reached a new level of barbarism during World War II, with 60 to 80 million dead in just six years, not counting the countless victims of hunger, disease and repression after the fighting ended. This conflict followed the same logic as that of 1914-1918, but on an even more murderous scale, reflecting the deepening historical crisis of the system.

The mass atrocities of the Nazi regime and its allies are well documented, but it is undoubtedly the industrialised killing of 3 million people[5], the vast majority of whom were Jews, in the extermination camps that most clearly expresses the height of barbarism that this conflict represented. But while the Nazis were appalling barbarians, it should not be forgotten that they expressed the barbarism of a decadent system, reduced to its most despicable extremes in the deadly competition between all states and all bourgeois factions.

What is much less publicised, however, are the crimes committed by the Allies during the war, including against the Jews. It is now established that the Allies were fully aware of the existence of the extermination camps from the moment they were set up in 1942, as well as the details of the methods of extermination and the number of victims already killed and those yet to be killed[6]. Yet neither the British, US nor Soviet governments took any action to stop or even slow down the massacre. Not even a railway line was bombed! Instead, they repeatedly bombed (with terrifying phosphorus incendiary bombs) numerous German cities with only civilian populations, particularly working-class suburbs, such as Leipzig, Hamburg (at least 45,000 civilian victims) and, above all, Dresden. The latter bombing caused countless casualties. Estimates vary considerably, ranging from 25,000 to 200,000 dead. We are unable to determine the number of victims, but the bombing of Dresden has certain significant characteristics of the barbarity unleashed by the Allies, both in terms of the mobilisation of exceptional resources (1,300 bombers in one night and two days) and the use of ‘banned’ phosphorus bombs, which turned the city into a veritable furnace. All these measures only really make sense when one considers that Dresden was not a major industrial city, nor did it have any real strategic interest. On the other hand, it had a huge population of refugees who had fled the Eastern Front, believing that Dresden would not be bombed. The aim of this exemplary destruction was to terrorise the population and the working class in particular, in order to deprive them of any desire to mobilise on their own class terrain, as had already happened in 1943 in several German and Italian cities. In a memorandum dated 28 March 1945 addressed to the British General Staff, Winston Churchill wrote about these bombings: “It seems to me that the time has come to question the bombing of German cities carried out with the aim of increasing terror, while invoking other pretexts. Otherwise, we would be taking over a country that is completely ruined. For example, we would not be able to obtain building materials from Germany for our own needs [...]. The destruction of Dresden cast serious doubt on the conduct of the Allied bombing." Astonishing cynicism!

But these crimes were ultimately only a prelude to the immense tragedy of the nuclear bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki (approximately 200,000 victims), which were completely unnecessary from a military point of view and intended to intimidate the ‘Soviet’ rival. And it was with the same cynicism, with the same indifference towards the victims, that Russian troops stopped fighting at the gates of Warsaw in order to leave it to the Nazis to crush the ongoing uprising (160,000 to 250,000 civilians killed). For the Stalinist bourgeoisie, haunted by the spectre of the revolutionary wave of 1917 and in the midst of a world war, it was a question of crushing any possibility of proletarian reaction and having a completely free hand to install a government under its thumb. In Italy, Churchill also held back the fighting to allow the fascists to suppress the growing strikes, letting them, in his own words, “stew in their own juice”.

Capitalism is sinking into widespread barbarism

Since 1945, the massacres have never stopped: our planet has not known a single day without military conflict. No sooner had the war ended than the confrontation between the two new rival blocs led to the horrors of the Cold War: the Korean War (3 to 5 million dead), the Vietnam War (around 2 million dead), the first war in Afghanistan (2 million dead according to estimates) and countless extremely deadly proxy wars, such as the Iran-Iraq War in the late 1980s, which left at least 1.2 million dead.

After the Cold War, the massacres resumed with a vengeance, and the world took a turn for the worse, becoming even more chaotic and anarchic as the logic of blocs no longer imposed any discipline on the various states or factions. A new dynamic of decay emerged in this final phase of decadence, the phase of decomposition. Conflicts became increasingly destructive, characterised by short-sighted power grabs with no rational strategic objectives other than to sow chaos among rivals.

Here too, the major democracies have blood on their hands, as evidenced by the wars in Yugoslavia (at least 130,000 dead), fuelled by arms supplied by the United States, France and Germany. The attitude of UN troops during this conflict, when they allowed Milosevic's death squads to massacre the population of Srebrenica in July 1995 (around 8,000 killed), is also characteristic of the permanent cynicism of the bourgeoisie. Another example is the attitude of French troops, under UN mandate, during the Rwandan war in the 1990s, who were complicit in the genocide of the Hutus (1 million dead). The major powers have also been directly involved in large-scale massacres, sowing chaos wherever they have intervened, particularly in Afghanistan (165,000 dead, officially, but undoubtedly more), Iraq (1.2 million killed) and today in the Middle East and Ukraine, where the conflict has already claimed more than a million lives. The list is endless.

Gaza, an illustration of the future of capitalism

The chain of violence that has marked the 20th century is now leading, through the threat of widespread war, nuclear risks and environmental destruction, to the possible disappearance of civilisation, or even of humanity itself. While the scenes of horror in Gaza are particularly shocking, the Ukrainian population and certain regions of Russia have also been living for more than three years under bombs and a policy of terror, with the open support of those who are now outraged by the fate of the Palestinians. At the same time, the millions of people suffering from war in Sudan, Congo, Yemen and so many other parts of the world are barely noticed by the media. In Sudan alone, 12 million people have tried in vain to flee the war, and millions more are threatened with starvation under the indifferent gaze of all the ‘democracies’. The Sahara is ablaze, and the Middle East is sinking deeper than ever into chaos. Asia is under severe strain and on the brink of war. In South America, regions ravaged by clashes between rival gangs resemble war zones, as evidenced by the catastrophic situation in Haiti. Even in the United States, the seeds of a potential civil war are visible. Capitalism today presents an apocalyptic image, and it is striking to note that the fields of ruins typical of the end of the Second World War have appeared in a matter of weeks in Ukraine and Gaza.

The wars in the Middle East are part of this deadly process. Symbolising the impasse into which capitalism is sinking, Israel launched a new offensive in the Gaza Strip in May, just as Trump was touring Arab countries, celebrating a series of trade agreements and investment projects, many of which, of course, involved arms sales (142 billion dollars with Saudi Arabia alone!).

The European bourgeoisie is not to be outdone in cynicism. While expressing belated indignation at the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians and threatening (without much insistence) Israel with sanctions, it was meeting at the same time in Albania at the summit of the European Political Community to rally support for Ukraine. Its main concern is not so much to help refugees, nor the victims of Israel's genocidal policy, nor the millions of refugees who have fled and are desperately trying to reach Europe. Their only concern has been to mobilise more weapons and soldiers for the war against Russia, while strengthening brutal measures against ‘illegal immigrants’.

While despicable propaganda from the Israeli government seeks to portray any outrage at the crimes in Gaza as anti-Semitism[7] by exploiting the Holocaust in a despicable manner, the Zionist state, which presents itself as the protector of Jews, the descendants of the Nazi genocide, has itself become an exterminator[8]. This is hardly surprising: the nation-state is not a transcendent category above history; it is the ultimate form of capitalist exploitation and competition. In a world dominated by the relentless logic of imperialism and rivalries between all against all, every state, weak or powerful, democratic or not, is a link in the chain of violence that capitalism inflicts on humanity. To fight for the creation of a new state, Israel yesterday, Palestine today, is to fight to institutionalise the arming of new belligerents and fuel a new graveyard. This is why all extreme left groups that call for support for the ‘Palestinian cause’ are de facto choosing an armed camp and are in fact contributing to the perpetuation of massacres rather than to the liberation of humanity.

EG, 13 July 2025

 

We are currently witnessing an acceleration of history. Not a day goes by without a new, often unprecedented and largely unpredictable event occurring on the international stage. Let us consider a few recent examples: who could have predicted Trump's re-election after his attempted coup in January 2021? Who could even have imagined that such an attempted coup could take place in the United States? What about the divorce between the United States and Europe, with tariffs and customs duties being used as weapons of blackmail, after decades of close cooperation between these countries? What about the policy of annexation, practised not only by Putin in Ukraine, but also claimed by Netanyahu towards the Palestinian territories and by Trump towards Canada, Greenland and the Panama Canal? And then there are the scenarios of endless and barbaric wars (Ukraine, Gaza, Yemen, Sudan...) that have multiplied, even though Bush Sr. announced in 1989, after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the advent of a “new era of peace” and a “new world order”?

We can all agree on the shock caused by the scale and unpredictability of many events that have dominated the news in recent times. We can also all agree about the need to denounce the period of barbarism into which we are increasingly entering. But if we do not want to be mere passive subjects of a rotten system that increasingly calls our future into question; we must make an effort to understand its evolution, its internal dynamics and the origin of these events. To this end, this article aims to show how the phenomena we witness on a daily basis are the expression and result of a process of disintegration of the political apparatus of the bourgeoisie, which operates at the international level and began at the end of the 20th century.

A major expression of this was the collapse of the former ‘Soviet’ bloc, followed by the gradual disintegration of the Western bloc.

The bourgeoisie, a class that has accumulated long experience in governing society

The proletariat, the revolutionary class of our time, if it is to develop a concrete project for the future society in order to advance its historic struggle for communism, has only two tools at its disposal: its unity and its consciousness. On the other hand, the bourgeoisie, the class that currently holds power, did not need to develop a great consciousness and grand projects to seize political power, because the very development of the capitalist economy gave it the material basis to impose itself politically. As the ruling class in society and the exploiting class, the bourgeoisie is incapable of imagining a future beyond capitalist society, so its conception of the world is fundamentally static and conservative. This has consequences for bourgeois ideology and its inability to understand the course of history, because it does not envisage the present as something ephemeral, in constant evolution. It is therefore incapable of making long-term plans and seeing beyond its own mode of production. The difference between the revolutionary class consciousness of the proletariat and the ‘false consciousness’ of the bourgeoisie is therefore not just a matter of degree; it is a difference in nature.

But this does not mean that the bourgeoisie is incapable of grasping reality and drawing on its past experience to develop tools to ensure its domination. Indeed, unlike the proletariat, which, despite being a historical class, does not continuously assert its political presence in society and is subject to all the political fluctuations of different events, with moments of open struggle and others of retreat, the bourgeoisie has the advantage of being the ruling class that holds power and can therefore dispose of all the means necessary to survive as long as possible.

Some parts of it, such as the English bourgeoisie, have accumulated several centuries of experience in the struggle against the previous feudal power, then against other countries, as well as against the proletariat itself. This experience has been used intelligently by the various bourgeoisies in the management of their political power, particularly since the dawn of the phase of decadence at the beginning of the 20th century, when the historical crisis of capitalism began to call into question the survival of the system. It is important for the proletariat to understand that the policy of the bourgeoisie in this period of decadence, regardless of the decisions of this or that government, is always to defend the interests of the ruling class as a whole.

The political game of alternating right-wing and left-wing governments
Democratic control of society

Since capitalist society is based on the exploitation of one class by another, of the working class by the bourgeoisie, the latter needs, in order to perpetuate its control over society for as long as possible, to hide this truth and present things not as they are, but in a distorted way, basing its ideology on the myth of ‘equality between citizens’, making people believe, for example, that we are all equal, that everyone shapes their own destiny and that if someone has problems, it is because they created them themselves by not making the right choices.

The most effective tool of the bourgeoisie for governing a country and ensuring its class domination is therefore the democratic mystification, a system that gives people the illusion that they play a political role as individuals and that they matter in society, that they can even aspire to leadership positions. If today the bourgeoisie maintains, at great expense, a whole political apparatus for the surveillance and mystification of the proletariat (parliament, parties, trade unions, various associations, etc.) and establishes absolute control over all the media (press, radio, television), it is because propaganda is an essential weapon of the bourgeoisie to ensure its domination. Democratic consultations such as elections, referendums, etc., are the practical tools used by the bourgeoisie to obtain from the so-called ‘sovereign’ people, mystifyingly considered as masters of their own destiny, the mandate to decide the fate of society.

Amadeo Bordiga gives us a brilliant description of this mechanism: "Our criticism of such a method must be much more severe when it is applied to society as a whole as it is today, or to given nations, than when it is introduced into much smaller organisations, such as trade unions and parties. In the first case, it must be rejected without hesitation as unfounded, because it does not take into account the situation of individuals in the economy and presupposes the intrinsic perfection of the system without taking into consideration the historical evolution of the community to which it applies. […] This is what political democracy officially claims to be, when in reality it is the form that suits the power of the capitalist class, the dictatorship of this particular class, with the aim of preserving its privileges.

It is therefore not necessary to spend much time refuting the error of attributing the same degree of independence and maturity to the ‘vote’ of each voter, whether they are a worker exhausted by excessive physical labour or a debauched rich man, a shrewd captain of industry or an unfortunate proletarian ignorant of the causes of his misery and the means of remedying it. From time to time, after long intervals, the opinions of these and others are sought, and it is claimed that the fulfilment of this ‘sovereign’ duty is sufficient to ensure the calm and obedience of those who feel victimised and mistreated by the policies and administration of the state”[1] [30].

The classic left/right bipartisanship and the game of alternation

The bourgeoisie exercised this power of control for a long time, as long as it was able to do so, for example by directing the popular vote in one direction or another according to its wishes, by financing the various channels of political propaganda. This game was played in a particularly sophisticated manner in the last century in countries such as France, Italy, Germany, the United States and others, where there were historically right-wing and left-wing factions, through an alternation of right-wing and left-wing governments.

To fully understand this point, we can refer to what we wrote in a previous article in 1982: “At the level of organizing to survive, to defend itself -- here, the bourgeoisie has shown an immense capacity to develop techniques for economic and social control way beyond the dreams of the rulers of the nineteenth century. In this sense, the bourgeoisie has become ‘intelligent' confronted with the historic crisis of its socio-economic system…

In the context of state capitalism, the differences between the bourgeois parties are nothing compared to what they have in common. All start from an over-riding premise that the interests of the national capital as a whole are paramount. This premise enables different factions to work together in a very close way -- especially behind the closed doors of parliamentary committees and in the higher echelons of the state apparatus…

In confronting the proletariat the state can employ many branches of its apparatus in a coherent division of labor; even in a single strike the workers may have to face an array of trade unions, press and television propaganda campaigns of different hues, campaigns by several political parties, the police, the ‘welfare' services and, at times, the army. But to see a concerted use made of all of these parts of the state does not imply that they each see the total framework in which they are each carrying out their function.”[2] [31]

As the proletariat is the greatest enemy of the bourgeoisie, the latter resorts to cunning, particularly in phases of heightened class struggle, to ideologically trap the exploited class. A typical and particularly interesting example is that of Italy after the Second World War. Italy at that time had the Italian Communist Party (PCI)[3] [32], a Stalinist party linked to the Soviet Union, but which still enjoyed strong support among workers. At the same time, Italy, in accordance with the imperialist blocs established following the 1945 Yalta Conference agreements, found itself within the sphere of influence of the United States. As a result, the Italian bourgeoisie, under strong pressure from the American bourgeoisie, used all its resources for more than 40 years, mainly through the Christian Democracy (DC), to maintain its control over the country and ensure alignment with American foreign policy, which aimed to keep pro-Soviet parties such as the PCI out of government.

However, May 1968 in France and the Hot Autumn of 1969 in Italy made the social climate explosive and forced the bourgeoisie to take measures to contain the social storm. Thus, the left-wing parties and trade unions became more radical, with slogans that tended to rally, but only in words, the demands coming from the grassroots. At the same time, a whole campaign was launched, orchestrated by the left-wing parties and made credible by the reactions of the centre and right-wing parties, according to which it would be possible, through grassroots efforts, to catch up with and overtake the Christian Democrats in the elections and finally impose a left-wing government that included the PCI. It was in the 1960s, and especially in the 1970s, that this race took place, which served in part to deceive the proletariat, in Italy but not only there, into believing that it was enough to achieve an electoral majority for electoral promises to be fulfilled.

In fact, the PCI never came to power[4] [33] due to an explicit American veto, but with the varied political composition of Italy at the time, it was possible, depending on the circumstances, to form centre-left governments with the presence of the Italian Socialist Party (PSI), and even governments supported by the PCI. This is how the period of the left ‘in power’ began in many countries, a powerful mystification aimed at channelling the aspirations of the masses of the time into the dead end of bourgeois parliamentarism.

But keeping the left in power, when objective conditions do not allow this left (nor, for that matter, any other faction of the bourgeoisie) to satisfy the needs of the proletariat, is not the best policy to follow, or at least it cannot be applied for too long without discrediting this important faction of the bourgeoisie. That is why, in the 1970s and 1980s, we saw a succession of right-wing and left-wing governments in various countries around the world, depending on the intensity of the workers' struggles underway. The policy of keeping the left in opposition proved particularly effective, as it allowed the various bourgeois left-wing parties and the trade unions to radicalise themselves and denounce government measures without fear of having to implement what they were demanding in demonstrations and in parliament.

The fall of the Berlin Wall
Why this historic event happened and what changed

The process that led to the end of the imperialist blocs and the beginning of an era of chaos was the product of an impasse in the class struggle between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. This impasse was due, on the one hand, to the inability of the working class to sufficiently politicise its struggles throughout the 1980s by giving them a revolutionary dynamic; on the other hand, the bourgeoisie itself, faced with the worsening economic crisis, failed to steer society towards a new imperialist war, as had been the case before the Second World War. In the 1930s, thanks to the ideological weapon of anti-fascism, the bourgeoisie had succeeded in enlisting the proletariat behind its warmongering objectives. But at the end of the 1980s, the proletariat was not politically defeated.

It was the deepening of this impasse that exhausted the leader of the weakest imperialist bloc, the ‘Soviet’ Union, in the militarist effort of maintaining the Cold War, thus causing the bloc to implode[5] [34]. Crushed under the weight of the crisis of the system, to which it was unable to respond with economic and political measures commensurate with the situation, the ‘Soviet’ imperialist bloc collapsed into a thousand pieces. The rival American bloc thus found itself without a common enemy to watch and defend against. This led slowly but surely to a growing tendency among the various Western powers to detach themselves from American protection and embark on an independent path, and even to increasing challenges to the bloc's ‘leader’.

Naturally, the United States attempted to counter this drift, which called into question its leadership and role as a superpower, for example by trying to rally the European powers behind it in a showdown with Saddam Hussein's Iraq, triggering the first Gulf War of 1990-1991[6] [35]. Under duress, and albeit reluctantly, no fewer than 34 different countries, including the main European powers, the countries of South America, the Middle East, etc., submitted to America’s will by participating in a war provoked by the United States itself.

But when, with the second Gulf War in March 2003, the United States once again sought to demonstrate that it held the keys to controlling the global situation, inventing the story that Saddam Hussein possessed "weapons of mass destruction", far fewer countries joined the coalition and, significantly, countries with the weight of France and Germany this time around firmly opposed it from the outset and did not participate.

At the same time, we must remember the wars in the Balkans, which affected the former Yugoslavia, a country bled dry after a bloody separation into seven new nations, and where the diverging interests of the former allies of the Western bloc became even more apparent. In the early 1990s, the government of Chancellor Helmut Kohl, which was pushing for and supporting the independence of Croatia and Slovenia in order to give Germany access to the Mediterranean, directly opposed not only American power but also the interests of France and the United Kingdom. This led to a series of wars in Croatia, Bosnia-Herzegovina and finally Kosovo, which continued until the end of the century, passing through a whole series of shifting alliances which demonstrated the increasingly cynical and short-term nature of imperialist relations in this period.

The crisis of social democracy, the collapse of the Communist Parties and the crisis of leftism

The new international scenario created by the break-up of the blocs, which, as already mentioned, marks the beginning of what we call the phase of decomposition, the final phase of the decadence of capitalism, could not fail to have consequences for domestic politics and for the role and relative importance of the various parties.

On the one hand, the disappearance of the blocs meant that it was no longer necessary to maintain the same government alliances as in the past. This sometimes led to the need to dismantle, by any means possible, the old political alliance that had guided the formation of the various governments. Once again, Italy is an excellent example: after having been controlled for a long time, on behalf of the Americans, by a conglomerate of forces including political parties (the DC at the centre), the Sicilian Mafia, Freemasonry (P2) and the secret services, the attempt by the section of the Italian bourgeoisie that aspired to play a more autonomous role and free itself from this control after the fall of the Berlin Wall met with enormous resistance from this alliance, leading to a series of assassinations of politicians and magistrates, bombings, etc.[7] [36]

On the other hand, the significant decline in the militancy and, above all, the consciousness of the working class caused by the fall of the Soviet Union, which until then had been falsely presented by the media as the epitome of socialism, led to a crisis in the left-wing parties, which were no longer indispensable, or at least didn’t merit the prominence they had acquired, to contain a working-class pressure that had been greatly reduced. This led to profound political change in various countries and the end of the right/left alternation.

The weight of decomposition on the political apparatus of the bourgeoisie

If we consider the essential characteristics of decomposition as it manifests itself today, we see that they all have one thing in common, namely the lack of perspective for society, which is particularly evident in the case of the bourgeoisie on the political and ideological level. This consequently determines the inability of the various political formations to propose long-term, coherent and realistic projects.

This is how we characterised the situation in our ‘Theses on Decomposition’: "Amongst the major characteristics of capitalist society’s decomposition, we should emphasise the bourgeoisie’s growing difficulty in controlling the evolution of the political situation. Obviously, this is a result of the ruling class’ increasing loss of control over its economic apparatus, the infrastructure of society. The historic dead-end in which the capitalist mode of production finds itself trapped, the successive failures of the bourgeoisie’s different policies, the permanent flight into debt as a condition for the survival of the world economy, cannot but effect the political apparatus which is itself incapable of imposing on society, and especially on the working class, the “discipline” and acquiescence necessary to mobilise all its strength for a new world war, which is the only historic “response” that the bourgeoisie has to give. The absence of any perspective (other than day-to-day stop-gap measures to prop up the economy) around which it could mobilise as a class, and at the same time the fact that the proletariat does not yet threaten its own survival, creates within the ruling class, and especially within its political apparatus, a growing tendency towards indiscipline and an attitude of “every man for himself”. This phenomenon in particular allows us to explain the collapse of Stalinism and the entire Eastern imperialist bloc. Overall, this collapse is a consequence of the capitalist world economic crisis; nor should we forget to take account in our analyses of the specificities of the Stalinist regimes as a result of their origins (see our ‘Theses on the economic and political crisis in the USSR and the Eastern Bloc’, International Review, No. 60)...

...This general tendency for the bourgeoisie to lose control of its own policies was one of the primary factors in the Eastern bloc’s collapse; this collapse can only accentuate the tendency:

• because of the resulting aggravation of the economic crisis;
• because of the disintegration of the Western bloc which is implied by the disappearance of its rival;
• because the temporary disappearance of the perspective of world war will exacerbate the rivalries between different bourgeois factions (between national factions especially, but also between cliques within national states).”[8] [37]

The decline of the traditional bourgeois parties created a certain political vacuum at the international level, both on the right and on the left. Moreover, a context in which there were no longer any directives from above began to favour the entry onto the political scene of adventurers and financial magnates with no political experience, but eager to settle matters in their own way. This marked the beginning of a shift in the national political landscape of various countries, which we will attempt to describe below.

Instability and increasing fragmentation of the political apparatus

This acceleration of the crisis in the system at all levels manifests itself in different ways. The fundamental problem is the bourgeoisie's loss of control over the country's political dynamics. This is reflected both in its inability to steer the population's electoral choices towards the most appropriate government team for the situation, as it did in the past, and in its difficulty in formulating valid strategies to contain (let alone overcome) the crisis in the system. In short, the bourgeoisie increasingly lacks the ‘thinking head’ that in the past had enabled it to mitigate the difficulties in its path.

The first effect of this is a loss of cohesion within the bourgeoisie, which, without a common overall plan, is unable to maintain the unity of its various components. This leads to a tendency towards ‘every man for himself’, with increasing difficulty in creating stable alliances. This is evident at the level of individual countries, where it is increasingly difficult to form stable governments due to increasingly unpredictable election results.

In France, after the success of Marine Le Pen's populist coalition in the European elections, Macron surprised everyone by announcing the dissolution of the National Assembly and calling new legislative elections. However, the result was an unmanageable Parliament, divided into three roughly equal blocs: the left (in a very fragile manner, momentarily united by electoral opportunism), the Macronist centre and the far right. After months of institutional deadlock, a centre-right government was formed, only to be torpedoed by a parliamentary vote of no confidence after only three months. Subsequently, Bayrou's centrist government was formed, a minority government and therefore completely precarious. At the time of writing, Bayrou has been overthrown, and Macron's very presidency is being questioned by a large part of the electorate.

In Britain, too, bourgeois politics is marked by great instability, with five new governments in seven years. And the prospects for the current Starmer government have dimmed since the Labour Party's victory in last year's elections with 34% of the vote, as its support has fallen to 23%, while Reform UK, the populist nationalist party led by Nigel Farage, is the most popular, according to the latest polls, with 29%.

In Germany, following the fall of Olaf Scholz's government, formed by the SPD, the Greens and the Liberals and described by the Infratest dimap institute[9] [38] as “the most unpopular in German history” [10] [39], Friedrich Merz's new government, supported by a coalition between the CDU and the SPD, is already losing ground according to the latest polls, while the populist, nationalist AfD party is gaining ground and is now only 3 points behind the CDU.

Pedro Sánchez's Spanish government, based on an alliance between the PS and several Catalan and Basque regional parties, was formed and is being maintained thanks to historic concessions, such as the amnesty law for the leaders of the independence movement involved in organising the illegal referendum on Catalan independence held in 2017. This government is therefore supported by political blackmail from one party over another.

We have cited examples from the most powerful countries in Europe (but similar situations also exist in Austria, the Netherlands and Poland, among others) because, compared to the governments that existed in these same countries in the not-so-distant past, the current administrations pale by comparison. For example, Willy Brandt in Germany, promoter of Ostpolitik and winner of the Nobel Peace Prize in 1971, was Chancellor from 1969 to 1974; Angela Merkel, considered one of the most powerful women in the world, held this position from 2005 to 2021 (a full 15 years!) and Margaret Thatcher, nicknamed the Iron Lady, who left her mark on a long period of political influence, was British Prime Minister from May 1979 to November 1990, a total of 11 years! This comparison makes us realise how fragile, volatile and precarious the current situation is.

But the same fragmentation is evident at the international level, where Brexit[11] [40], decided by the 2016 consultative referendum, and then Trump's ‘tariff’ operation[12] [41] this year, to name just a few major examples, have marked, one after the other, important moments of rupture in previous international collaborations between states.

The rise and fall of the environmentalists, a product of decay

In a context where communism was considered a failure, when the working class no longer demonstrated in the streets as before, but where economic pressure remained and environmental disasters were multiplying, environmental movements of all kinds began to emerge around the world. The first appeared in the 1970s and 1980s and spread and developed in various countries, advocating not only respect for nature but also the rejection of militarism and war.

Unfortunately, viewing environmental problems in isolation and not as a manifestation of how capitalism destroys nature, especially in its decadent phase, led individuals protesting against these problems to believe that things could be resolved within the existing system and to join new bourgeois offshoots, each with its own leader seeking a political space in which to express themselves.

However, these movements remained very much in the minority, even when they sought to compete in elections, and proved to be short-lived. This can be explained by the fact that these movements often arose and fought for specific environmental causes: opposition to the construction of a dam or nuclear power plant, pollution caused by large industries, etc. Consequently, once attention shifted away from the specific issue, the weight of opinion surrounding it also ceased its support.

However, in some countries, such as Germany and Belgium, ‘green’ political parties have managed to ‘break through’ and even enter government. Founded under the impetus of certain personalities, including Daniel Cohn-Bendit, a leader of the 1968 student movement in France, the German Greens have grown steadily since the early 1980s, winning 27 seats (5.6%) in the Bundestag in 1983 and victory in the regional elections in Hesse in 1985, where Joschka Fischer, another leader of the movement, was appointed Minister of the Environment. The discrediting of the other traditional parties naturally favoured the growth of ‘newcomers’ such as the Greens in Germany. But the problem is that, as we have tried to develop above, governing a country is not an easy task. It is true that the bourgeoisie has accumulated a wealth of experience, but this cannot be easily and immediately transferred to a newly formed party. On the other hand, the German Greens immediately proved to be just like any other bourgeois politicians. After presenting a superficial election programme in 1980 that even talked about ‘dismantling’ the German army and initiating the ‘dissolution’ of military alliances such as NATO and the Warsaw Pact, in 1999, for the first time, they had renounced their pacifism, when Joschka Fischer defended the deployment of NATO aircraft to bomb Serbia. The same situation was repeated when the 2021 election manifesto opposed sending weapons to war zones and called for a ‘new impetus for disarmament’, priorities that were subsequently included in the coalition agreement on which the Scholz government was formed. They then made a U-turn in keeping with their bourgeois nature, thanks to the work of Vice-Chancellor and Minister for Economic Affairs and Climate Robert Habeck and Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock, the two most prominent members of the Green Party in Olaf Scholz's cabinet. Both succeeded in tugging at the Chancellor's sleeve to urge him to send heavy weapons to Ukraine. Habeck's response in Kiel to protesters who called him a ‘warmonger’ was significant: “In this situation, where people are defending their lives, their democracy and their freedom, Germany and the Greens must be prepared to face reality”[13] [42].

The decay of the bourgeois political apparatus
The rise of the far right and the strengthening of populism

A striking phenomenon that has occurred in recent decades is the rapid development of populist movements and, in their wake, far-right parties. A quick look at current government formations around the world shows, for example, that in Europe, seven countries, including Italy, the Netherlands, Sweden and Finland, have already established a government majority with a significant populist component, while in other cases, such as France, Germany and the United Kingdom, the populist movement has gained considerable political representation or achieved resounding success (Brexit). The phenomenon is continuing to grow, to the point where some of its representatives now hold important ministerial positions, in Italy and the Netherlands for example. In South America, with Bolsonaro in Brazil and Milei in Argentina, and in Asia, with Modi in India, populists have been elected as heads of state. Last but not least, in the United States, the most powerful country in the world, a populist adventurer at the head of the MAGA (Make America Great Again) movement has won a second term as head of the federal state.

The tendency towards the political ‘vandalism’ of these movements, which manifests itself in the rejection of ‘elites’, the rejection of foreigners, the search for scapegoats, the retreat into the ‘indigenous community’, conspiracy theories, the belief in a strong and providential leader, etc., is first and foremost the product of the ideological putrefaction conveyed by the lack of perspective in capitalist society[14] [37], which affects the capitalist class first and foremost.

But the breakthrough and development of populism in the political life of the bourgeoisie has been determined above all by one of the major manifestations of the decomposition of capitalist society: the increasing difficulty of the bourgeoisie to control the evolution of the situation on the political level, through its most ‘experienced’ parties, which have lost not only their credibility but also their ability to manage and control the situation on the political level: “The return of Trump is a classic expression of the political failure of those factions of the ruling class who have a more lucid understanding of the needs of the national capital; it is thus a clear expression of a more general loss of political control by the US bourgeoisie, but this is a world-wide tendency and it is particularly significant that the populist wave is having an impact in other central countries of capitalism: thus we have seen the rise of the AfD in Germany, of Le Pen’s RN in France, and Reform in the UK. Populism is the expression of a faction of the bourgeoisie but its incoherent and contradictory policies express a growing nihilism and irrationality which does not serve the overall interests of the national capital. The case of Britain, which has been ruled by one of the most intelligent and experienced bourgeoisies, shooting itself in the foot through Brexit is a clear example. Trump’s domestic and foreign policies will be no less damaging for US capitalism: at the level of foreign policy, by fuelling conflicts with its former allies while courting its traditional enemies, but also domestically, through the impact of its self-destructive economic ‘programme’. Above all, the campaign of revenge against the ‘deep state’ and ‘liberal elites’, the targeting of minority groups and the ‘war on woke’ will stir up confrontations between factions of the ruling class which could take on an extremely violent character in a country where an enormous proportion of population own weapons; the assault on the Capitol on January 6, 2021, would pale into insignificance in comparison. And we can already see, in embryo, the beginnings of a reaction by parts of the bourgeoisie who have most to lose from Trump’s policies (for example, the state of California, Harvard University, etc). Such conflicts carry the threat of dragging in the wider population and represent an extreme danger to the working class, its efforts to defend its class interests and forge its unity against all the divisions inflicted on it by the disintegration of bourgeois society. The recent “Hands Off” demonstrations organised by the left wing of the Democratic Party are a clear example of this danger, since they succeeded in channelling certain working class sectors and demands into an overall defence of democracy against the dictatorship of Trump and consorts. Again, while these internal conflicts may be particularly sharp in the USA, they are the product of a much wider process. Decadent capitalism has long relied on the state apparatus to prevent such antagonisms from tearing society apart, and in the phase of decomposition the capitalist state is equally forced to resort to the most dictatorial measures to maintain its rule. And yet at the same time, when the state machine itself is riven by violent internal conflicts, there is a powerful thrust towards a situation where “the centre cannot hold, mere anarchy is loosed upon the world” as the poet WB Yeats put it. The ‘failed states’ we are seeing most vividly in the Middle East, Africa or the Caribbean present an image of what is already brewing in the most developed centres of the system. In Haiti, for example, the official state machine is increasingly powerless in the face of competing criminal gangs, and in parts of Africa inter-gang competition has risen to the height of ‘civil war’. But in the US itself, the current domination of the state by the Trump clan more and more resembles the rule of a mafia, with its open espousal of the methods of blackmail and threat ."[15] [43]

This situation has very significant repercussions on the entire global political and economic scene. Indeed, as long as the various countries, despite competition between them, managed to maintain a policy of cooperation on certain issues, such as economic policy in particular or imperialist policy, the fall into the abyss of decadence and decomposition of the system could be slowed down, at least in part. But today, the blind and irresponsible policies (from a bourgeois point of view) of many countries, including the United States itself, not only fail to slow down the crisis of the system, but in fact accelerate it.

Irrationality and loss of sight of the interests of the state

These deep divisions within the bourgeoisie express the weight of ‘every man for himself’, which means that the various components no longer feel bound by a higher interest in defending the interests of the state, or that of an ‘international order’, but rather pursue the interests of particular political factions, cliques or specific economic families, at any cost. Furthermore, it is often the case that interest groups that rise in society to the point of winning important government positions have no prior political training. All this means that the politics pursued by the bourgeoisie today are increasingly characterised by a high degree of improvisation and irrationality which, naturally, in a context of growing disorder, only accelerates global chaos. We have already mentioned totally irrational measures such as the decision to hold a referendum on Brexit in Britain and Trump's tariff policy. We will simply add a few details about the composition of the team for the second term of Trump, the leader of the most powerful country in the world: everyone can examine for themselves what is happening in a similar way in other countries.

Here is a judgement that appeared in an Italian newspaper (certainly not a left-wing newspaper!) at the beginning of the year: “No president has ever recruited such a crowd of criminals, extremists, scoundrels, crooks and undesirable individuals.[16] [44]”. Let's take a closer look at some of the members of the Trump administration. Trump's first choice for Attorney General was Matt Gaetz, but he had to withdraw. The reason? Not because he was his lawyer, the one who had guided him with diabolical skill through his legal troubles. The real reason was that he was facing charges of sexual harassment and drug use, which is certainly not ideal for a Minister of Justice.

Then there is the sensational case of notorious anti-vaxxer Robert F. Kennedy Jr., appointed to head the Department of Health and Human Services, despite having declared his desire to abolish polio vaccines and being known as a conspiracy theorist. More than 75 Nobel laureates opposed Kennedy Jr.'s appointment as Health Secretary, saying it would ‘endanger public health’. More than 17,000 doctors (out of 20,000), members of the Committee for the Protection of Healthcare, opposed Kennedy Jr.'s appointment, citing the fact that Kennedy has undermined public confidence in vaccines for decades and poses a threat to national health. Epidemiologist Gregg Gonsalves of Yale University, who also opposed Kennedy Jr.'s appointment, said that putting Kennedy in charge of a health agency would be like “putting a flat-Earther in charge of NASA”.

Pete Hegseth, a notorious homophobe, has been appointed to head the Pentagon (with a budget of $800 billion and 3 million employees). And, surprise surprise, he is also being sued for sexual harassment.

As for the other members of the government, reports suggest that most of them are extremists, poorly trained or particularly anti-establishment. What unites them is their absolute loyalty to their leader. Trump doesn't care if they swear allegiance to the Constitution; he just needs them to swear allegiance to him and to prove it.

Trump immediately distinguished himself by eliminating thousands of civil servants whom he considered troublesome or who, in his view, performed duties incompatible with his mandate. But he was even more brutal towards those who directly opposed him, using vindictive methods worthy of mafia feuds.

The policy against those whom Trump considers traitors is their direct elimination. Various examples illustrate this:

• On 22 August, the FBI raided the Maryland home of John Bolton, who served as national security adviser in the first Trump administration but later became highly critical of the president.
• A grand jury investigation has been authorised into the origins of the investigation into Trump's ties to Russia.

• Another investigation is underway into California Democratic Senator Adam Schiff, who is accused of tax fraud but who had accused Trump of profiting from stock market fluctuations following various tariff announcements.
• Another investigation is underway against New York Attorney General Letitia James, who filed a legal brief to end the arrests of immigrants.
• the dismissal of Fed Governor Lisa Cook, who opposed Trump's demands for lower interest rates and was then accused of falsifying documents in order to obtain more favourable terms for a mortgage...
• the latest news concerns former FBI director and Trump opponent Comey, who is being prosecuted for ‘serious crimes’.

Gangsterism and vandalism

What was previously considered a characteristic of peripheral, so-called Third World countries, namely gangsterism and vandalism in politics, is now widespread in the world's most advanced countries, including the United States, a country once hailed as the beacon of democracy. Once again, the Trump case is proof of this.

Let's start by saying that Trump inherited both racism and good relations with the Italian-American mafia from his father, Fred Sr. [17] [45]. While his father had good relations with the Gambinos, Genoveses and Luccheses, his son has them with the Franzeses and Colombos. The episode that led to the construction of Trump Tower is particularly well known. In 1979, when the first brick was laid, a strike at the cement factories blocked the sale of this material. But Trump circumvented the union blockade by buying it directly from S & A Concrete. The hidden owners of the construction company were Anthony ‘Fat Tony’ Salerno of the Genovese family and Paul Castellano of the Gambino family, two families already close to his father and whose leaders met regularly at Cohn's, Trump's versatile lawyer at the time. But he also made important deals with the Russian mafia: in 2011, Trump emerged from ten years of lawsuits, multiple bankruptcies and £4 billion in debt... and this time he was saved by ‘Russian money’ from Felix Sater, whose father, Michael Sheferovsky, was a close friend not only of the Genovese family, but also of Semion Yudkovich Moguilevitch, the ‘boss of bosses’ of the Russian mafia.

Numerous women have already claimed that Trump raped them at beauty pageants or other events. We also know that Trump paid a lot of money to silence the two women who accused him of having illicit relationships with him, porn star Stormy Daniels and former Playboy playmate Karen McDougall. This accusation led to his conviction, but he was exempted from prosecution. In early 2024, two separate juries found that Trump had defamed writer E. Jean Carroll by denying her allegations of sexual assault. He was ordered to pay a total of $88 million. Also well-known is his association with Epstein, who was accused of rape, abuse and, most notably, international child trafficking. He appears with Trump in dozens of photos. Finally, Trump was also found guilty of thirty-four counts of falsifying business records, which were revealed during the investigation into payments made to Stormy Daniels.

Will the proletariat be able to take advantage of this loss of control by the bourgeoisie?

All the elements we have reported in this article clearly demonstrate a weakening of the bourgeoisie's ability to manage its political system and therefore an increased difficulty in dealing with the global crisis of the system, economically, environmentally, etc. There is no doubt about that.

But we must be careful not to imagine that this weakness of the bourgeoisie can be converted into an advantage, a strength for the proletariat. There are at least two reasons for this. The first concerns the process that will lead to revolution. The growing weaknesses of the bourgeoisie are by no means assets that enable the working class to develop its strength. Since the project of this class is completely antagonistic to everything that capitalism represents, the weakening of the bourgeoisie does not benefit the proletariat (which has only its unity and consciousness at its disposal). Secondly, while showing clear signs of decline, the bourgeoisie displays considerable vigilance and lucidity in matters of class struggle, the result of two centuries of experience of confrontation with the working class. This experience leads it not only to be vigilant, but above all to prevent any working class action by exploiting the very effects of decomposition against the proletariat itself.

For example, all populist propaganda, which often resonates with some of the most vulnerable and least class-conscious sections of the working class, is constructed by exploiting people's fears of competition for jobs or housing from immigrants or those who are ‘different’. Secondly, and more importantly, it exploits populist hype to draw workers into anti-populist campaigns in defence of the democratic state.

However, the manifestations of decomposition (through ecological crises, increasingly frequent environmental disasters, but above all the spread and intensification of wars, naturally accompanied by the worsening of the economic crisis) are increasingly forcing certain elements to seek an alternative to the current barbarism, even if they are still very much in the minority. The economic attacks that the bourgeoisie is already forced to wage against the workers will be the best stimulus for the class struggle and will allow for the future political maturation of the struggles. This alone will enable workers not only to defend themselves against the mystifications of the bourgeoisie, but also to regain an understanding of the deep-rooted causes of the current crisis of the system and turn it into a source of strength in their struggle.

 

Ezechiele, 27 August 2025

 

[1] [46] Amadeo Bordiga, “The Democratic Principle [47]”, 1922, MIA (Marxists Internet Archive).

[2] [48] “Notes on the Consciousness of the Decadent Bourgeoisie [31]”, International Review n° 31, 4th quarter 1982.

[3] [32] The Italian Communist Party had lost all its proletarian character as a result of the process of ‘Bolshevization’ (in fact, Stalinization) between the late 1920s and early 1930s.

[4] [49] In reality, at the end of the war and immediately after the proclamation of the Republic, the PCI had been in power with the DC and other left-wing parties (PSIUP and PRI) from July 1946 to 1 June 1947. The reason for this was that in 1942-1943 there had been major strikes in the north of the country and several proletarian political groups had been formed, including the Internationalist Communist Party, which had quickly gained hundreds of members. The formation of this ‘national unity’ government, which brought together the various forces that had fought in the Resistance, served to convince a proletariat that had been showing signs of awareness that it now had valid representatives even within the government and that it therefore no longer needed to fight. It is no coincidence that, once it was certain that the proletarian uprising had subsided, the bourgeoisie withdrew its support for the PCI and other left-wing parties and formed only centre or right-wing governments until the turbulent years of 1968-1969.

[5] [50] For an analysis of these events, see our “Theses on the Economic and Political Crisis in the Eastern Countries [34]”, International Review n° 60, 1st quarter 1990. For more on the concept of the phase of decomposition, see also the “Theses on Decomposition”,  [37]International Review n° 107, 4th quarter 2001.

[6] [51] “Crisis in the Persian Gulf: Capitalism Means War! [35]” International Review n° 63, 4th quarter 1990.

[7] [52] For an analysis of this interesting point, see “Mafia Attacks: Settling Accounts Between Capitalists,” Revolution Internationale n° 215 [53], September 1992 (in French).

[8] [54] Excerpts from points 9 and 10 of Theses on Decomposition [37], already cited.

[9] [55] “Wissen, was Deutschland denkt [56]” (“Knowing what Germany thinks”)

[10] [57] “Scholz trails conservative CDU/CSU in election polls [58]”, In Focus website.

[11] [59] “Brexit, Trump: setbacks for the ruling class, nothing good for the proletariat [40]”, International Review n° 157, Summer 2016.

[12] [60] “Capitalism has no solution to the global economic crisis! [41]”, World Revolution n° 403, Spring, 2025.

[13] [61] EUROPATODAY – “Germany sends tanks to Ukraine because pacifists have become interventionists [62]”

[14] [63] See point 8 of the “Theses on Decomposition [37]”.

[15] [64] “Resolution on the international situation (May 2025) [43]”, International Review 174, Summer 2025.

[16] [65] “Gangs of America alla corte di Trump [66]”, Il Foglio, 27 January 2025.

[17] [67] As a young man, his father was arrested for being one of the most active members of the KKK.

26th Congress of the ICC

Report on the class struggle (May 2025)

Below we publish the report on the class struggle presented at the 26th Congress of the ICC. This document, written in December 2024, does not take into account the events that occurred in 2025 (Trump's return to the White House, massive struggles in Belgium, etc.), but the validity of the perspectives outlined remains. This report develops important elements of analysis on what the ICC calls the “rupture” in the dynamic of the class struggle and on the impact of decomposition on the working class.

 

The resolution on the international situation adopted at the 25th International Congress analysed the dynamics of the class struggle as follows: “The revival of workers’ combativity in a number of countries is a major historical event which is not the result of local circumstances alone and cannot be explained by purely national conditions. Driven by a new generation of workers, the scale and simultaneity of these movements testify to a real change in the mood of the class and break with the passivity and disorientation that prevailed from the end of the 1980s to the present day”. The Summer of Discontent in the UK in 2022, the movement against pension reform in France in the winter of 2023, the strikes in the USA, particularly in the car industry, at the end of the summer of 2023, remain the most spectacular manifestations of the historical and international dimension of the development of workers' struggles. The strikes lasting almost 7 weeks by Boeing employees and the unprecedented strike by 45,000 dockworkers in the USA in the middle of the presidential election campaign represent the latest episodes in the real break in the dynamic of the class struggle compared with the situation in previous decades. Moreover, as we write the first lines of this report, the working class of the major economic powers is preparing to undergo unprecedented attacks as a result of the accelerating economic crisis, heralding major reactions by the class in the months ahead. But this movement of renewed combativeness and development of the subterranean maturation of class consciousness is taking place in a context of worsening decomposition, where the simultaneous effects of the economic crisis, the chaos of war and the ecological disaster are fuelling an infernal whirlwind of destruction. Trump's comeback to the White House, signifying a real rise in power of the populist current in American society, is going to constitute an additional weighty obstacle which the class struggle is going to have to confront not only in the USA but also on an international scale. The aim of this report is to provide a basis for reflection which will enable the ICC to deepen its understanding of the current dynamics of the class struggle and its historical implications. But also to assess in more detail the obstacles facing the proletariat, in particular the impact of the effects and ideological manifestations of decomposition.

 

I - The reality of a rupture in the dynamic of class struggle

The analysis of the rupture in the dynamic of class struggle from the summer of 2022 has been greeted with scepticism and even sarcasm within the political milieu, in particular by the historic organisations of the Communist Left such as the Internationalist Communist Tendency and the Bordigist groups. Similarly, doubts and disagreements were expressed at the ICC's public meetings, including by fellow travellers accustomed to the ICC's method and framework of analysis. This situation was exploited by the parasitic milieu[1], such as Controverses, which was quick to use our past analytical errors to mock our current analysis (‘you have over-estimated the class struggle in the past, what's different now?’).

A - Defending the marxist method of analysis

These reactions to our analysis were in fact the expression of a purely empiricist and immediatist approach. On the other hand, if the ICC was able, almost immediately, to recognise a profound change in the series of strikes by the British workers, it was because we were able to draw on our experience, particularly the method which had enabled Mark Chirik to grasp the May 68 movement not as a simple momentary reaction of the working class in France but as the expression of a historical and international movement, whereas the historical groups of the Communist Left  totally missed its significance.

As a result, today, as in the late 1960s, the ICC is the only organisation able to understand the historically significant international dynamic of the development of workers' struggles around the world since 2022. This is the result of understanding:

- the framework of analysis of the decadence of capitalism and the emergence from counter-revolution since the end of the 1960s, unlike the Bordigist current or the analysis of the course to a third generalised war defended by the ICT, implying a politically defeated working class;

- that the accentuation of the economic crisis on a world scale forms the most fertile ground for the development of workers' combativity on an international scale;

- that the development and scale of this workers' combativity from the summer of 2022 onwards in the United Kingdom, unprecedented since the 1980s, in the oldest proletariat in history, was necessarily of historic and international significance;

- that this change of mindset within the class is the product of the development of the subterranean maturation that has been taking place within the class since the beginning of the 2000s;

- that the rupture is not limited to the scale and multiplication of struggles throughout the world, but is accompanied by the development of reflection on an international scale in the different layers of the working class and, in particular, by in-depth reflection within politicised minorities;

- that this dynamic is a long-term one, and therefore contains the potential for the recovery of class identity and the politicisation of struggles (indispensable milestones if the working class is to have the capacity to confront the bourgeois state directly), after decades of a decline in consciousness within the class.

Here lies the strength of the marxist method inherited from the Communist Left: an ability to discern the major changes in the dynamics of capitalist society, well before they have become too obvious to be denied.

 

B - The need to overcome confusion on this question

However, it is vital to fully grasp the consequences and implications of our analysis and to fight against superficial approaches which can arise. Among the main ones are:

- a tendency to reduce the rupture to the scale of the expression of combativity and the development of struggles, neglecting the process of subterranean maturation;

- implying that the development of struggles can enable the working class to counter the effects of decomposition, or that populism weakens the bourgeois state's ability to deal with the reaction of the working class;

- A tendency to see the whirlwind effect and the rupture as two parallel dimensions, watertight one from the other.

Fundamentally, these vacillations express a difficulty in analysing the dynamics of class struggle in the historical context of decomposition. The basic reasons for this include:

- a general tendency to underestimate the negative impact of the phase of decomposition on the class struggle;

- A difficulty in assimilating the now inadequate nature of the concept of the historical course. This contributes in particular to distorting the prism through which the class struggle is viewed: “Thus, 1989 marks a fundamental change in the general dynamics of capitalist society in decadence.

Before that date, the balance of power between the classes was the determining factor in this dynamic: it was on this balance of power that the outcome of the exacerbation of the contradictions of capitalism depended: either the unleashing of the world war, or the development of class struggle with, in perspective, the overthrow of capitalism.

After that date, this general dynamic of capitalist decadence is no longer directly determined by the balance of power between classes. Whatever the balance of power, world war is no longer on the agenda, but capitalism will continue to sink into decay, since social decomposition tends to spiral out of the control of the contending classes”[2].

Consequently, the analysis of two opposing and contradictory poles, developing concomitantly, fits into the framework set out above. However, these two seemingly parallel dimensions of the situation are intertwined. It is in a world fuelled by every man for himself, social atomisation, irrationality of thought, nihilism, each against all, war and environmental chaos, and the increasingly incoherent and destructive policies of the national bourgeoisies, that the working class is forced to develop its struggle and mature its reflection and consciousness. Consequently, and as we have often repeated, the period of decomposition is not a necessity for the march towards revolution, and even less is it in favour of the working class[3]. However, the considerable dangers that decomposition poses for the working class and humanity as a whole must not lead the working class and its revolutionary minorities to adopt a fatalistic attitude and give up the fight. The historical perspective of proletarian revolution is still open!

 

II - Struggles against economic attacks are the road to the recovery of class identity

The repercussions of the crisis will be the deepest and most brutal of the entire period of decadence, under the cumulative effects of inflation, budget cuts[4] , redundancy plans[5] (exacerbated in particular by the introduction of artificial intelligence into the production system) and the drastic reduction in wages. This situation means that the bourgeoisie will have less and less room to manoeuvre in its ability to cope with the effects of the economic crisis, as it has in previous decades, and the planned economic policies of the Trump administration can only have the effect of a further dive into the world economic morass. Consequently, faced with the growing impoverishment and the considerable deterioration in working conditions that the working class will suffer as a result of the intensification of the exploitation of labour power, the conditions will ripen for the working class to fight back. But in this general situation, we must above all take the measure that all these attacks affect simultaneously the three main capitalist countries  (USA, China, Germany). Europe is going to see an unprecedented dismantling of the car industry, certainly on the same scale as that of coal and steel in the 70s and 80s. We must therefore prepare for the emergence of large-scale struggles in the years to come, particularly in the main areas of capitalism, and start now to examine the profound implications of this new situation.

To give just few examples: the German proletariat, which until now has been at the rear guard of the class struggle, is going to play a much more central role in the class struggle against capital. In China, the explosion in unemployment, particularly among young people (25%), will increasingly erode the myth of a modern and prosperous China and will lead to reactions from an inexperienced proletariat still largely influenced by the Maoist doctrine, the ideological weapon of state capitalism.

Similarly, the scale of the crisis has not spared the proletariat in Russia, which is bearing the full brunt of the consequences of the war economy. This leads us to expect reactions from this fraction of our class, without however neglecting the profound weaknesses caused by the counter-revolution and aggravated by decomposition.  

We also need to pay closer attention to the class struggle in the Indo-Pacific region. The year 2024 was marked by strikes in many sectors (automobile, construction, education…) in several countries in the region (India, China, South Korea, Japan, Taiwan, Indonesia) against falling wages, factory closures and worsening working conditions.

However, if indeed economic attacks form the most favourable terrain for the development of class struggle - not only in the immediate defensive sense (a vital element in the recovery of class identity) but also in the emergence of a conscious understanding that the mode of production as a whole is totally bankrupt and must give way to a new society - we need to assess more precisely which types of attack are most conducive to the development of solidarity and unity within the class in both the short and long term.

The multiplicity of attacks, for example, company closures and the job cuts that accompany them, are leading to numerous struggles in several central countries at the moment, but they remain largely isolated and lead to a kind of impasse. It is very difficult for workers to fight against factory closures, when strike action alone will not be enough to put pressure on bosses who are already planning to close companies. One example is the difficulty workers at Port Talbot in Wales have had in developing a struggle against the closure of this key steelworks. In fact, more generally, the ICC is going to have to look closely at the impact of mass unemployment on the development of proletarian consciousness. Regarding this direct result of economic crisis “while in general terms it may help to reveal capitalism’s inability to secure a future for the workers, it is nonetheless today a powerful factor in the ‘lumpenisation’ of certain sectors of the class, especially of young workers, which therefore weakens the class’ present and future political capacities”[6]. Consequently, it is only when it has taken a further step in the development of its consciousness, when it is able to conceive of itself as a class with a role to play in the future of society, that the question of mass redundancies and mass unemployment will truly constitute elements enabling the class to mount a united response to the bourgeois state, as well as developing a more in-depth reflection on the bankruptcy of capitalism.

Attacks on wages, on the other hand, can create a more favourable balance of forces. In fact, the struggles that led to the breakthrough in 2022 were essentially about wages. This also seems to have been demonstrated by the latest episode of struggles in the USA over the last few months. Because wage labour forms the basis of the relationship between capital and labour, the question of defending wages is the ‘common interest’ of all workers against their exploiters. This struggle “unites them in a common thought of resistance – combination. Thus combination always has a double aim, that of stopping competition among the workers, so that they can carry on general competition with the capitalist. If the first aim of resistance was merely the maintenance of wages, combinations, at first isolated, constitute themselves into groups as the capitalists in their turn unite for the purpose of repression, and in the face of always united capital, the maintenance of the association becomes more necessary to them than that of wages…. This mass is thus already a class as against capital, but not yet for itself. In the struggle, of which we have noted only a few phases, this mass becomes united, and constitutes itself as a class for itself. The interests it defends become class interests. But the struggle of class against class is a political struggle”[7].

 

III. War, decomposition and class consciousness

In the period of massive workers’ struggles between 1968-75, when the central countries of capitalism had been through a long period of prosperity, there were still strong illusions about the possibility of restoring the “glorious years”, especially by electing governments of the left. Thus although these movements gave rise to a definite politicisation of minorities[8], notably with the reanimation of the tradition of the Communist Left, the potential for the struggles themselves to give rise to a more general politicisation in the class was limited; and even in the struggles of the 80s, it was still far less clear that the capitalist system was reaching the end of its tether, and the workers’ struggles, even when massive in scale and capable of acting as a block to the drive towards world war, did not succeed in generalising a political perspective for the overcoming of capitalism.

The fundamental result of the stalemate between the classes in the 1980s was the development of the new phase of decomposition, which became a further obstruction to the capacity of the working class to reconstitute itself as a revolutionary force. But the acceleration of decomposition has also made it much easier to understand that the long decline of capitalism has now reached a terminal phase in which the choice between socialism and barbarism has become increasingly apparent. Even if the feeling that we are heading towards barbarism is much more widespread than the conviction that socialism provides a realistic alternative, the increasing recognition that capitalism has nothing to offer humanity but a spiral of destruction still provides the foundations for a future politicisation of the class struggle.

Along with the economic crisis, which remains the essential basis for the development both of the open struggles of the class and the growth of an awareness of the bankruptcy of the system,  the  two elements which most clearly underline the reality of capitalism’s impasse are the proliferation of and intensification of imperialist wars, and the inexorable advance of the ecological catastrophe, most recently symbolised by the massive floods in Valencia which demonstrate that this catastrophe will no longer be limited to the ‘peripheral’ regions of the system. However, as factors in the emergence of a political awareness in the class, the two elements are not equal.

We have long rejected the idea, still clung to by most of the groups of the proletarian political milieu, that war, in particular world war, offers a favourable terrain for the outbreak of revolutionary struggles. In articles written in the International Review of the 1980s[9], we showed that while this conception was based on the real experience of past revolutions (1871, 1905, 1917), and while any class struggle in times of mobilisation for war inevitably poses political questions in a very rapid manner, the disadvantages facing revolutionary movements that arise in direct response to war considerably outweigh the ‘benefits’. Thus

• The experience of the First World War gave the ruling class a very important lesson, which it was to apply very systematically before, and at the closing stages of, the Second World War: prior to launching a global war, first you must impose a profound physical and ideological defeat on the proletariat, and when the miseries and horrors of war provoke any signs of proletarian reactions, they must be crushed immediately (cf the objective collaboration of Allied and Nazi forces in the annihilation of the workers’ revolts in Italy in 1943, the terror bombing of Germany, etc).
• The old schema of revolutionary defeatism, which held that the defeat of one’s own government is favourable to the development of the revolution, as well as containing an inherent ambiguity about the need to oppose all governments in a situation of war, has been demonstrably refuted by the fact that the division between victorious and defeated nations creates deep divisions in the world proletariat, as was most clearly seen in the wake of the 1914-18 war.
• Capitalism’s military technology has ‘advanced’ to the point where fraternisation across the trenches becomes less and less feasible, and it has also made it far more likely than any future world war would rapidly lead to a nuclear escalation and “mutually assured destruction”.

The current wars in Ukraine and the Middle East have confirmed that the main obstacles to the capitalist war drive are much less likely to come from revolts in the countries directly engaged in warfare, and more likely to emerge from the central fractions of the proletariat who are only indirectly impacted by imperialist war through the mounting demands of the war economy.

None of this implies, however, that war is no longer a factor in the development of class consciousness and the process of politicisation. On the contrary, we have seen:

• That the omnipresence of war, especially since the Russian invasion of Ukraine, remains a significant factor in the emergence of minorities putting into question the whole capitalist system;
• That the capacity of workers to defend their own class interests in spite of the call for sacrifices in the name of ‘defending freedom’ was a key element in the rupture of 2022. Furthermore, the recognition that workers are being asked to pay for the bloating of the war economy was posed explicitly among some of the more combative workers engaged in the struggles after 2022, notably in France[10].

It's true that in both examples, we are talking more about the politicisation of minorities than the politicisation of struggles. This is not surprising given the number of ideological traps facing those who begin to draw connections between capitalism and war: on the one hand, we have the example of how the populists in Europe and above all the US have recuperated any embryonic anti-war sentiments in the class, even turning it, in the case of the Ukraine war, into a barely concealed pro-Russian orientation. On the other, we have a host of leftists brandishing a version of internationalism which may even appear to denounce both warring camps in Ukraine but which always amounts, in the end, to an apology for one side or the other. And the same leftists, who are generally much more partisan in their support for the “Axis of Resistance” against Israel, are an important factor in the exacerbation of the religious and ethnic divisions stirred up by the Middle East war. It is hardly surprising that a genuine internationalist response to the current wars is limited to a searching minority – and even within this minority, even within the groups of the Communist Left, confusions and inconsistencies are only too evident.

In the concluding section of the Theses of the Decomposition, we put forward the reasons why the economic crisis remains the principal vector in the capacity of the working class to rediscover its class identity and form itself into a class openly opposed to capitalist society, in contrast to the main phenomena of decomposition:

“while the effects of decomposition (eg pollution, drugs, insecurity) hit the different strata of society in much the same way and form a fertile ground for aclassist campaigns and mystifications (ecology, anti-nuclear movements, anti-racist mobilisations, etc), the economic attacks (falling real wages, layoffs, increasing productivity, etc) resulting directly from the crisis hit the proletariat (ie the class that produces surplus value and confronts capitalism on this terrain) directly and specifically; unlike social decomposition which essentially effects the superstructure, the economic crisis directly attacks the foundations on which this superstructure rests; in this sense, it lays bare all the barbarity that is battening on society, thus allowing the proletariat to become aware of the need to change the system radically, rather than trying to improve certain aspects of it”.[11]

These formulations remain essentially valid, even if it’s not strictly true that the destruction of nature is merely an aspect of the superstructure, since it is a direct product of capitalist accumulation and threatens to undermine the very conditions for the survival of human society and the continuation of production. If the worsening ecological crisis can be a potential factor in small minorities[12] calling into question the very foundations of capitalist production, it remains a factor of fear and despair for a large part of the class.  The ecological disaster tends to hit all strata in society in much the same way, even if its most devastating effects are generally felt by the working class and the exploited, and thus remains “a fertile ground for aclassist campaigns and mystifications”, and this tends to restrict the ability of elements perturbed by the ecological disaster to understand that the only solution is via the class struggle. Furthermore, the immediate ‘solutions’ put forward by capitalist states to the deterioration of the natural environment often involve direct attacks on the living standards of a part of the working class, in particular massive lay-offs to replace fossil fuel-based production by ‘cleaner’ technologies. In this sense, demands to save the environment are more often a factor of division than of unification in the ranks of the working class, unlike the economic crisis which tends to ‘level down’ the whole proletariat.

The conclusion to the Theses does not include the impact of war on the development of class consciousness, but what we can say is that:

• The question of imperialist war – like the prolonged and irresolvable economic crisis which lies at its root - is not a specific product of capitalist decomposition but is a central element throughout the whole epoch of decadence;
•  there is a much closer link between economic crisis and war: in particular, the development of a war economy carries with it a very evident and quite generalised assault on workers’ living standards through inflation, intensification of the pace of work, and so on. Resisting this assault on a class terrain, even when founded on a clear internationalist world outlook only in a tiny minority, cannot fail to raise profoundly political questions about the link between capitalism and war, and about the common international interests of the proletariat. This is the principal reason why the politicisation of minorities in a proletarian sense is showing itself to be based on a reaction to the question of war much more than to the more specific phenomena of decomposition, including the acceleration of the ecological crisis. And further down the line, the growing threat and utter irrationality of war will be a real factor in the future politicisation of struggles. But we must emphasise that it is only at the further point in the development of class identity and class struggle that these steps towards politicisation – whether around the question of war or the more characteristic expressions of decomposition, like the ecological crisis – can shift from the level of small minorities to much broader and more open movements of the working class.

 

IV - The ability of the bourgeoisie to use its classic weapons against the working class

However much it is fragmented and weakened by the advancing decay of its own mode of production, the bourgeoisie will never lose the capacity to respond to the development of the class struggle. In response to the revival of struggles since 2022, and in particular to the development of the subterranean maturation of consciousness, we have thus seen the ruling class make ample use of its ‘classical’ instruments for controlling the proletariat:

• The trade unions, which have radicalised their language in anticipation of or response to the outbreak of workers’ combats. This was a very clear element in the struggles in Britain for example, where the leadership of the trade unions most directly involved in the struggles was assumed by very left-wing elements like Mick Lynch of the railway workers’ union, the RMT.
• The leftist groups, particularly the Trotskyists, some of whom (“Revolutionary Communist Party”, “Révolution Permanente”, etc) have begun once again talking about communism and, as already mentioned, can appear to defend internationalist positions, especially in response to the war in Ukraine. Many of these groups have recruited successfully among the young, a muted echo of what took place after the battles of May-June 68 in France.

 

V - The weight of decomposition and the bourgeoisie’s  instrumentation of its main manifestations

As we mentioned above, we have recently heard in discussions that the current struggles of the class could make it possible to push back the effects of decomposition, or that decomposition weakens the bourgeoisie in its capacity to fight back against the working class. Such ideas call into question the idea that decomposition does not favour the struggle of the working class. Fear, withdrawal, despair caused by the generalisation of warlike barbarity; nihilism, atomisation, irrationality of thought engendered by the absence of a future and the destruction of social relations, are all obstacles to the development of class solidarity and of a collective, united struggle, and to the maturing of thought.

But we are also seeing how the bourgeoise is using the products of its own rot against the development of workers’ struggles, in particular:

• Through the campaigns against populism and the far right, the most ‘chemically pure’ product of decomposition, reviving the time-honoured ideology of anti-fascism and the defence of democracy. These campaigns, which will undoubtably intensify in the wake of Trump’s victory in the US election, have the double advantage of persuading workers to place the defence of the democratic illusion above the fight for their own ’selfish’ class interests, and of countering the threat of class unity by dragging different sectors of the working class behind the competing capitalist camps.
• This strategy of division is also seen in the different forms of the “culture wars”, which play on the conflict between the “woke” and the “anti-woke” around numerous issues (gender, migration, environment, etc as well as around the increasingly violent disputes between political parties).
• The development of anti-immigration campaigns by right-wing and far-right parties aims to instil a pogrom atmosphere, scapegoating migrants and foreigners and blaming them for the decline in living standards. This kind of ideological poison can only be countered by the ability of the class to forge its unity and solidarity against the material attacks faced by all proletarians.
• The situation will also be marked by revolts by the intermediate classes, which the bourgeoisie will use to distort workers’ struggles and reflection.

 

VI - The necessity for the proletariat to respond on its own class terrain

Faced with this huge ideological onslaught, the only possible response from the standpoint of the proletariat can be:

• The recovery of the lessons of past combats which can elucidate the sabotaging role of the unions and the left and prepare the ground for the self-organised and unified struggles of a higher phase of the rupture.
• The development, in and around the open struggles, of the proletariat’s sense of itself as a class opposed to capital, indispensable both for the capacity of the class to defend its immediate demands and for the development of an understanding of its historical mission as the gravedigger of capital.

It goes without saying that the revolutionary organisation has an irreplaceable role to play in the evolution of consciousness in this direction. The ability of the ICC to assume its role depends precisely on its ability to take the measure of the immense challenges facing the working class in the decades to come.

ICC, May 2025

 

Preamble

This resolution was adopted in early May 2025 by the 26th Congress of the ICC. As such, it can only take into account events and situations prior to that date. This is obviously the case for any position on the international situation, but in the present case it is particularly important to note this because we are currently witnessing a rapid succession of particularly spectacular and unpredictable events of major importance on the three main levels: imperialist tensions, the economic situation of global capitalism and the balance of forces between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie. Due to the kind of ‘tsunami’ currently affecting the world, the content and some of the positions taken in this resolution may appear outdated by the time it is published. That is why, beyond the facts mentioned in it, which may be overshadowed by new developments in the situation, it is important that it provides a framework for understanding the causes, significance and stakes of the events unfolding before our eyes.

One of the main factors behind the current upheavals is obviously the inauguration of Donald Trump on 20 January 2025, which led to a spectacular divorce between the United States and almost all European NATO member countries. All the ‘experts’ and bourgeois leaders agree that the new international policy of the American bourgeoisie, particularly with regard to the war in Ukraine, is a major event that marks the end of the ‘Atlantic Alliance’ and the ‘American umbrella’, forcing those formerly under the ‘protection’ of Washington’ to reorganise their military strategy and embark on a frantic arms race. The other major decision of the Trump administration is obviously the launch of a trade war of an intensity not seen in nearly a century. Very quickly, particularly with the wave of panic that swept through the stock markets and financial circles, Trump was forced to partially backtrack, but his brutal and contradictory decisions cannot fail to have an impact on the deterioration of the economic situation of global capitalism. These two fundamental decisions by the Trump administration have been a very important factor in the chaotic development of the global situation. But these decisions must also, and above all, be understood as manifestations of a number of deep historical trends currently at work in global society. Even before the collapse of the Eastern Bloc and the Soviet Union (1989-1991), the ICC put forward the analysis that capitalism had entered a new phase of its decadence, ‘the ultimate phase (...) in which decomposition becomes a decisive factor, if not the decisive factor, in the evolution of society’. And the chaotic events of recent months are further confirmation of this reality. The election of Trump, with its catastrophic consequences for the American bourgeoisie itself, is a prime example of the growing inability of the bourgeois class to control its political game, as we predicted 35 years ago. Similarly, the divorce between the United States and its former NATO allies confirms another aspect of our analysis of decomposition: the great difficulty in the current period, if not the impossibility, of forming new imperialist blocs as a prerequisite for a new world war. Finally, another aspect that we have emphasised, particularly since our 22nd Congress in 2017 – the growing impact of the chaos that is increasingly taking hold of the political sphere of the bourgeoisie on its economic sphere – has found further confirmation in the economic upheavals caused by the decisions of the populist Trump.

It is therefore within the framework of our analysis of decomposition that this resolution attempts to examine in greater detail the issues at stake in the current historical period. And this examination must necessarily also consider the consequences for the struggle of the working class of the chaotic events affecting global society.
 

Resolution on the international situation to the 26th ICC Congress
 

1. “…just as capitalism itself traverses different historic periods - birth, ascendancy, decadence - so each of these periods itself consists of several distinct phases. For example, capitalism’s ascendant period can be divided into the successive phases of the free market, shareholding, monopoly, financial capital, colonial conquest, and the establishment of the world market. In the same way, the decadent period also has its history: imperialism, world wars, state capitalism, permanent crisis, and today, decomposition. These are different and successive aspects of the life of capitalism, each one characteristic of a specific phase….” (Theses on Decomposition[1]). The same applies to the phase of decomposition itself, which marked a qualitative step in the development of decadence; this phase is now in its fourth decade, and since the beginning of the 2020s, with the outbreak of the Covid pandemic and the unleashing of murderous wars in Ukraine and the Middle East, it has reached a level of acceleration which marks a further significant step, in which all its various manifestations are inter-acting with and intensifying each other in what we have called the “whirlwind” effect.
    
2. This assessment has been fully confirmed since the 25th ICC Congress: economic crisis, imperialist war, ecological breakdown and a growing loss of control over the bourgeoisie’s own political apparatus are combining together and exacerbating each other, carrying the clear threat of the destruction of humanity. This ‘poly crisis’ is already recognised by some of the most important institutions of the ruling class, as we showed in the report on decomposition adopted by the 25th ICC Congress, but they are powerless to offer any solutions. Instead, the most irrational elements of the ruling class are on the rise, expressed most clearly by Trump’s victory in the US presidential election. Trump is a transparent product of the decomposition of the system, but the ‘shitstorm’ of measures undertaken immediately upon assuming power also demonstrates that the assumption of government office by a populist faction led by a narcissistic adventurer in the most powerful country on the planet will be an active factor in the acceleration of decomposition and the bourgeoisie’s overall loss of control of its own system.
    
3. The factor of imperialist competition and war is at the very heart of this deadly vortex. But contrary to the arguments of the majority of groups in the proletarian political milieu, the whirlwind effect does not bring with it a disciplined march towards new blocs and a third world war. Rather it intensifies the tendency of ‘every man for himself’ which was already becoming dominant in the wake of the collapse of the Russian imperialist bloc and the definitive onset of the period of decomposition at the beginning of the 1990s. As we predicted in a number of fundamental texts written at that time, the demise of the eastern bloc led to the unravelling of the bloc dominated by the US, despite various efforts of American imperialism to impose its authority over its former allies. And we have insisted that this new world disorder would take the form of spreading, intractable and increasingly destructive wars which are no less dangerous than a course towards world war precisely because of the lack of any bloc discipline. The latest moves by the US under Trump embody a new stage in the mounting chaos that dominates imperialist rivalries in the phase of decomposition. And whereas the global disorder unleashed by the collapse of the Russian bloc in 1989-91 was centred around a weaker economic and military power, the fact that the ‘new disorder’ has the world’s leading power at its very heart presages even more profound plunges into chaos in the period ahead.
    
4. The central axis of global imperialist conflict remains the antagonism between the USA and China. At this level there is a strong element of continuity with the Obama and Biden administrations in seeing China as the main rival to US dominance. This shift in the central focus of imperialist antagonisms from western Europe, as it was during the Cold War, to the Pacific region, is an important factor in Trump’s willingness to reduce the ‘defence of Europe’ to a much lower place in US strategy. In a general sense, the policy of containing China by encircling it with regional alliances and imposing limits on its economic expansion will continue, even if the tactical and concrete means may differ. However, the unpredictability of Trump’s approach could bring with it wild swings from attempts to placate Beijing to openly provocative actions around Taiwan. In general, this very unpredictability will act as a further factor in the destabilisation of international relations.
    
5. By contrast, Trump’s policies towards Ukraine represent a real break with the ‘traditional’ foreign policies of the USA, based on vigorous opposition to Russian imperialism. The attempt to come to a deal with Russia over the Ukraine war which shuts out Europe and Ukraine, accompanied by the public humiliation of Zelensky in the White House, marks an important new level in the division between the US and the main powers of Europe, showing how far we are from the formation of a new ‘western bloc’. This divorce is not a merely contingent event, but has much deeper roots. Direct conflict between the US and Europe was already apparent in the war in Yugoslavia in the early 90s, with France and Britain backing Serbia, Germany backing Croatia and the US supporting Bosnia. In today’s culmination of this process, which in 2003 also saw European powers like France and Germany refusing to follow the US into the invasion of Iraq, America is more and more seen as a new enemy, symbolised by US voting with Belarus, North Korea and Russia against a UN resolution on February 24th condemning the Russian invasion, and by the open threats to convert Canada, Greenland and Panama into property of the USA, by military force if need be. At the very least, the US is perceived as an unreliable ally, obliging the European powers to come together in a series of emergency conferences to consider how they can ensure their imperialist ‘defence’ without the USA’s military umbrella. However, the real divisions among these powers – for example between governments run by populist or far right parties which lean towards Russia, and most importantly between France and Germany at the very core of the European Union – should not be underestimated as a further obstacle to the formation of a stable European alliance. And the current US regime will certainly do all it can to increase divisions among the countries of the EU, which Trump has explicitly attacked as a formation that was set up to “screw the USA”.
    
6. At the same time, again in clear discontinuity with the approach of the previous US administration and the main European powers, who have advocated a ‘two state solution’ to the conflict in Israel/Palestine, the Trump regime is openly supporting the annexationist policies of the Israel’s right wing government by removing sanctions against the violent actions of West Bank settlers, appointing Mike Huckabee - who declares that ‘Judaea and Samaria’ were given to Israel by God 3,000 years ago – as US ambassador to Israel, and above all by calling for the ethnic cleansing of nearly two million Palestinians from Gaza and transforming the whole area into a heaven for real estate speculation. These policies, despite their strong admixture of fantasy, can only perpetuate and intensify the conflicts which are already being ramped up and spread throughout the Middle East, most clearly in Yemen, Lebanon and Syria, where the internal war is far from over despite the replacement of the Assad regime, and where Israel has been carrying out more deadly air raids, which are generally perceived as a warning to Turkey. In particular, the blank cheque Trump has handed to the Netanyahu government also contains the likelihood of further direct clashes between Israel and Iran.
    
7. Meanwhile other imperialist conflicts are brewing or already getting worse, particularly in Africa, where the Congo, Libya and Sudan have become veritable theatres of massacre and famine. Africa is another example of local conflicts being fuelled by a bewildering variety of regional states (such as Rwanda in the Congo) and the larger imperialist players (US, France, China, Russia, Turkey, etc) who may be allies in one conflict and enemies in another.
   Even though the hunt for vital raw materials is a key aspect of many of these conflicts, the main characteristic of all these wars is that they bring fewer and fewer benefits either economic or strategic for all their protagonists. Above all they do not point to a solution to the world economic crisis through the devaluation of capital or the reconstruction of ruined economies as it is said by many of the groups of the proletarian political milieu. The economist vision of these groups simply ignores the real direction of capitalism in its final stages – which is towards the destruction of humanity and not a new stage in the cycle of accumulation.
    
8. The growing inter-action between economic crisis and imperialist rivalry, and of the effects of decomposition on the state of the world economy, are both plainly illustrated by the avalanche of tariffs decreed by the Trump regime. This ‘declaration of war’ on the rest of the world’s economies, aimed at close neighbours and former allies as well as avowed enemies, can be seen as an attempt by the US to demonstrate its power as an imperialist giant capable of standing alone without having to answer to any other state or international body. But it is also based on an economic ‘strategy’ which believes that the USA can prosper best by undermining or ruining all its economic rivals. This is a purely suicidal approach which will immediately backfire on the US economy and consumers through rising prices, shortages, plant closures and redundancies. And of course, a severe slump in the US could not fail to have world-wide implications. In particular, a number of economists have warned of the danger of the US defaulting on its enormous national debt, the bulk of which is ‘owned’ by Japan and its main challenger, China; and it is evident that a US default would not only do incalculable damage to the world economy, but would inevitably spill over into the sphere of the imperialist rivalry between the US and China. All this shows that the America First policy of the Trump regime is in complete contradiction with the ‘globalised’ character of the world economy in which the USA itself has been the most active force, in particular following the collapse of the eastern bloc in the early 90s; it also marks a return to protectionist measures which the most powerful bourgeoisies have largely abandoned since they demonstrated their utter failure as a way of dealing with the world economic crisis in the 1930s. The USA’s current attempt to dismantle the last political and military vestiges of the world imperialist order established in 1945 is paralleled by measures that clearly threaten all the global institutions set up in the wake of the Great Depression and World War Two to regulate world trade and contain the crisis of overproduction.
    
9. It thus comes as no surprise that the world’s stock exchanges have reacted to Trump’s tariffs with mounting panic, while numerous economic ‘experts’ have been predicting a world-wide recession, vicious trade wars (which are already taking shape, particularly between the US and China), spiralling inflation and even an “economic nuclear winter”[2]. These reactions obliged Trump to take a step back from some of his economic threats, but there is little confidence that the new US administration can be trusted any longer as a guarantor of economic stability – on the contrary. The fears expressed by the ‘markets’ are well grounded, but revolutionaries must also make it clear that while they are certainly a severely aggravating factor in the deepening economic crisis, they are not its ultimate cause. The underlying disease of the world economy must be traced to the world crisis of overproduction, which has in essence been permanent since 1914 and which also has an evolving history behind the extreme point it is now reaching. Well before the announcement of the Trump tariffs, the world’s leading economies, notably Germany and China, as well as the US, were already sinking into an economic morass, expressed by factory closures in leading industries, unmanageable levels of debt, rising prices in many countries, growing youth unemployment and so on. The end of the Chinese ‘economic miracle’ is particularly significant because, in contrast to the situation created by the financial meltdown of 2008, China will no longer be able to play the role of ‘world locomotive’.
    
10. The world crisis of overproduction, as Rosa Luxemburg predicted, results from the shrinking of an ‘outside’ for capitalism to expand into. These areas of pre-capitalist economy were still considerable when Luxemburg advanced her thesis, and they still held some possibilities in the phase of ‘globalisation’, notably through the capitalising of China and other Far Eastern economies. But today, even if capitalists continue to cast hungry eyes on remaining pre-capitalist economic areas, notably in India and Africa, it will be increasingly difficult to exploit them because of the acceleration of decomposition through local wars and ecological destruction. Other ‘superstructural’ elements also enter into the system’s historic impasse:
    
    a)  The enormous weight of global debt, the medication for overproduction which can only poison the patient, and which, as in 2008, constantly threatens to explode in the form of massive financial instability. And, as the ICC already noted in the 1980s, we are witnessing the growth of a ‘casino economy’, taking the form of unrestrained speculation and expressing a growing gap between real value and fictional capital. A striking example of this is the spread of bitcoin and similar ‘cryptocurrencies’, designed to evade centralised control and thus acting as another potentially destabilising factor for the world economy.
    
    b)  The mounting impact of ecological disasters, which have become an increasingly destructive ‘production cost’.
    
    c)  The exponential growth of the refugee problem, frequently the product of war and ecological catastrophe, and which is confronting the bourgeoisie with an insoluble problem, since on the one hand it cannot afford to integrate this mass of migrants into an ailing economy, while on the other it cannot afford to lose this source of cheap labour and will find that a policy of forced deportations such as the Trump administration has now set in motion will cost billions to carry out.
    
    d)  Above all, as the drive to war intensifies, the world economy is more and more compelled to bear the enormous weight of the growing impact of militarism, which may at some moments give the illusion of ‘economic growth’ but which, as the Gauche Communiste de France already pointed out in the aftermath of World War II, represents a pure loss for global capital. And open warfare itself has a direct impact on the world economy, typified by the increase in shipping costs resulting from direct attacks on ships in the Black Sea and the Red Sea

The inevitable result of the deepening crisis, and in particular the development of a war economy, will be unprecedented attacks on the living conditions of the proletariat and impoverished masses. The bourgeoisie in European countries is already talking openly about the need for more welfare cuts to pay for ‘defence spending’.​

 

11. At the level of the ecological crisis, the never-ending rounds of international conferences have failed to bring the world any closer towards its carbon reduction commitments, on the contrary: the 1.5 degree target for limiting rising temperatures has already been declared dead by a number of climate scientists. Year upon year solid scientific research provides clear indicators that the climate crisis is already here: each year is declared the ‘hottest on record’, the melting of the polar ice-caps reaches new and genuinely alarming levels, more and more plants and animal species are disappearing, such as the insects which are indispensable to the food chain and to the process of pollination. Moreover, the crisis is not only evident in the countries of the ‘periphery’, adding to the global refugee crisis as more and more regions of the planet are rendered uninhabitable by drought or flooding. It is now moving from the peripheries to the centres, as shown by the wildfires in California and floods in Germany and Spain. Trump’s denial of any such thing as the climate crisis has immediately been enshrined in the work of the new administration: the very term climate change is removed from government documents, and funding for research into the problem is drastically cut; restrictions on emissions and fossil fuel extraction projects are removed under the banner of “drill baby drill”; the USA pulls out of international agreements on climate. All this will give a new and world-wide impetus to the denialist world-view, a central plank of the populist parties which are everywhere on the rise. The same applies to the USA’s withdrawal from the World Health Organisation and the appointment of Robert Kennedy, a committed anti-vaxxer, to the leadership of the US health departmentat a time when we are facing the threat of new pandemics (such as avian flu). Such pandemics are another product of the breakdown in the relationship between humanity and nature which capitalism has taken to its furthest point in history. These head-in-the-sand measures will only increase the danger. But the populists’ suicidal attitude to the mounting ecological crisis is at root only a reflection of the utter impotence of all factions of the ruling class in the face of the destruction of nature, since none of them can exist without a commitment to endless ‘growth’ (ie, accumulation at any cost), even when they pretend that there is no contradiction between capitalist growth and green policies. Neither can the bourgeoisie as a class develop truly global solutions to the ecological crisis, the only ones that make any sense. No faction of the ruling class can transcend the national framework, any more than it can call for an end to the accumulation of capital. Thus, the advance of the ecological crisis can only accelerate the tendency towards chaotic military conflicts as each nation tries to salvage what it can faced with dwindling resources and mounting disasters. And the reverse is also true: war, as has already been measured in the conflicts in Ukraine and the Middle East, is itself a growing factor in the ecological catastrophe, whether through the huge carbon emissions needed to produce and maintain military equipment, or through the poisoning of the air and soil by the use of ever-more destructive weaponry, which in many cases is a deliberate tactic aimed at weakening the enemy’s food supplies or other resources. Meanwhile the menace of nuclear disaster – either through the destruction of nuclear power stations or the actual use of tactical nuclear weapons – is always looming in the background. The interaction between war and ecological crisis is another patent illustration of the whirlwind effect.

12. The return of Trump is a classic expression of the political failure of those factions of the ruling class who have a more lucid understanding of the needs of the national capital; it is thus a clear expression of a more general loss of political control by the US bourgeoisie, but this is a world-wide tendency and it is particularly significant that the populist wave is having an impact in other central countries of capitalism: thus we have seen the rise of the AfD in Germany, of Le Pen’s RN in France, and Reform in the UK. Populism is the expression of a faction of the bourgeoisie but its incoherent and contradictory policies express a growing nihilism and irrationality which does not serve the overall interests of the national capital. The case of Britain, which has been ruled by one of the most intelligent and experienced bourgeoisies, shooting itself in the foot through Brexit is a clear example. Trump’s domestic and foreign policies will be no less damaging for US capitalism: at the level of foreign policy, by fuelling conflicts with its former allies while courting its traditional enemies, but also domestically, through the impact of its self-destructive economic ‘programme’. Above all, the campaign of revenge against the ‘deep state’ and ‘liberal elites’, the targeting of minority groups and the ‘war on woke’ will stir up confrontations between factions of the ruling class which could take on an extremely violent character in a country where an enormous proportion of population own weapons; the assault on the Capitol on January 6, 2021, would pale into insignificance in comparison. And we can already see, in embryo, the beginnings of a reaction by parts of the bourgeoisie who have most to lose from Trump’s policies (for example, the state of California, Harvard University, etc). Such conflicts carry the threat of dragging in the wider population and represent an extreme danger to the working class, its efforts to defend its class interests and forge its unity against all the divisions inflicted on it by the disintegration of bourgeois society. The recent “Hands Off” demonstrations organised by the left wing of the Democratic Party are a clear example of this danger, since they succeeded in channelling certain working class sectors and demands into an overall defence of democracy against the dictatorship of Trump and consorts. Again, while these internal conflicts may be particularly sharp in the USA, they are the product of a much wider process. Decadent capitalism has long relied on the state apparatus to prevent such antagonisms from tearing society apart, and in the phase of decomposition the capitalist state is equally forced to resort to the most dictatorial measures to maintain its rule. And yet at the same time, when the state machine itself is riven by violent internal conflicts, there is a powerful thrust towards a situation where “the centre cannot hold, mere anarchy is loosed upon the world” as the poet WB Yeats put it. The ‘failed states’ we are seeing most vividly in the Middle East, Africa or the Caribbean present an image of what is already brewing in the most developed centres of the system. In Haiti, for example, the official state machine is increasingly powerless in the face of competing criminal gangs, and in parts of Africa inter-gang competition has risen to the height of ‘civil war’. But in the US itself, the current domination of the state by the Trump clan more and more resembles the rule of a mafia, with its open espousal of the methods of blackmail and threat.

13. The irrationality expressed by populism is at root an expression of the irrationality of a system which has long outlived its usefulness for humanity. It is therefore inevitable that the whole of decomposing bourgeois society will be increasingly gripped by a plague of mental illness which frequently expresses itself in murderous violence. The spread of terrorist atrocities from major war-zones to the capital cities of the West was one of the first signs of the advent of the phase of decomposition, but the coupling of terrorist activity with the most irrational ideologies has become increasingly apparent as this phase has advanced and accelerated. Thus, the ideologies which most often inspire terrorist acts, whether perpetrated by radical Islamists or neo-Nazis, are only a concentrated expression of beliefs that are much more widespread, notably beliefs in all kinds of conspiracy theories and in an impending apocalypse, all of which offer a dangerously distorted picture of capitalism’s real mode of operation and its actual slide towards the abyss. It is also characteristic that some of the most recent acts of mass murder – such as the use of cars as weapons in the cities of Germany, or the horrible murders of children in Southport which sparked off the racist riots in Britain in the summer of 2024 – have been more or less detached from any actual terrorist organisations and even from any justifying ideology, expressing rather the suicidal impulses of profoundly disturbed individuals. Elsewhere such impulses take the form of mounting violence against women, sexual minorities and children. It is evident that the working class is not immune from this plague and that it acts as a direct counter to the needs of the class struggle: the need for solidarity and unity and for a coherent thought which can lead to a real understanding of how capitalism works and where it is going.  

14. The pole leading towards chaos and collapse is thus becoming increasingly visible. But there is another pole, that of the class struggle, demonstrated by the ‘rupture’ since 2022, which is not a flash in the pan, but has a historical depth founded on the undefeated nature of the proletariat in the main centres of the system and the reality of a long process of subterranean maturation. But it also continues to take a much more overt form, as the example of Belgium shows. In the US, Trump’s policies will lead to a rapid increase in inflation, undermining promises made to workers in particular; and the attempt to slash government jobs is already giving rise to some embryonic class resistance. In Europe, the bourgeoisie’s demand for sacrifice in the name of boosting the machinery of war will certainly encounter serious resistance from an undefeated working class. The class movements that characterise the rupture re-affirm the centrality of the economic crisis as the main stimulant of the class struggle. But at the same time, the proliferation of war and the increasing cost of the war economy, above all in the main countries of Europe, will be an important factor in the future politicisation of the struggle, in which the working class will be able to make a clear link between the sacrifices demanded by the war economy and the growing attacks on its living standards, and eventually to integrate all the other threats coming from decomposition into a struggle against the system as a whole.

15. Despite the depth of the new phase in the class struggle, it is vital not to conceive its development as parallel to and independent from the pole of chaos and destruction. This is most evident in the real danger that the working class will be increasingly disoriented by the effects of social atomisation, growing irrationality and nihilism; where it will find it hard to avoid being drawn into the visceral rage and frustration of a general population reacting against disasters, repression, corruption, social insecurity and violence, as we have seen in the recent protests and revolts in the USA, Serbia, Turkey, Israel and elsewhere. The ruling class is fully capable of using the effects of the decomposition of its own system against the working class: exploitation of ‘cultural’ divisions (woke versus anti-woke, etc); partial struggles reacting to the deepening of oppression and discrimination against certain layers of society; anti-migration campaigns, etc. Especially dangerous are the renewed ‘democratic resistance’ campaigns against the ‘danger of fascism, authoritarianism and oligarchies’, the aim of which is to divert anger against a sinking system towards the Trumps, Musks, Le Pens and the rest of the populists and the far right, who are merely a caricatural expression of capitalism’s putrefaction. The right wing of the bourgeoisie can also make its appeals to democracy in the face of the machinations of the ‘deep state’, one of Trump’s favourite themes now being echoed in France following the judicial decision to bar Le Pen from standing in the next presidential election. But the ‘defence of democracy’ is the particular speciality of the left and far-left wing of the political apparatus. Moreover, in anticipation to the development of the class struggle, the far-left and the trade unions have radicalised their language and attitude: we are seeing the Trotskyists and official anarchists holding the banner of a fake internationalism vis-à-vis the Ukraine and Gaza wars, and sometimes the left has assumed the leadership of the trade unions as happened in the struggles in the UK. We will also see a renovation of their discourse and activity in the years to come, aimed at channelling the potential for the maturation of proletarian consciousness, which necessarily goes through an uneven process of advances and retreats, onto a bourgeois terrain which can only lead to defeat and demoralisation.

16. The rupture with the passivity of the past few decades also stimulates the process of reflection on an international scale amongst different layers of the class, particularly evident in the form of the emergence of searching minorities. It is in this area that we most clearly observe the capacity of the working class to pose more far-ranging questions about the future of this system, particularly around the question of war and internationalism. However, the potential of these minorities to evolve towards revolutionary positions remains fragile, due to a number of dangers:

• The radicalisation of a number of leftist tendencies, particular the Trotskyists.
• The influence of parasitism as a destructive force which aims to build a cordon sanitaire against the communist left, appearing to act ‘from the inside’, and nourished by the ambience of decomposition.
• The persistent influence of opportunism in the real proletarian political milieu, which deforms the role of the organisation and opens the way to tolerating the penetration of alien ideologies into the proletariat.

Revolutionary activity is meaningless without the struggle to construct a political organisation able to struggle against the dominant ideology in all its forms. The period ahead requires the elaboration of a lucid analysis of the evolution of the international situation, an ability to anticipate what will be the central dangers faced by the proletariat, but also to recognise the real development of the struggle and of class consciousness, in particular when the latter evolves in a largely ‘subterranean’ manner which will be missed by those who are fixated on immediate appearances.

Revolutionary organisations must act as a pole of attraction for searching elements and as a lighthouse of programmatic and organisational clarity, based on the historical acquisitions of the communist left. They must understand that the work of building a bridge to the future world party is a combat that will be carried out over a long period and will demand a persistent struggle against the impact of capitalist decomposition in its own ranks through concessions to democratism, localism, each for themselves etc. The persistence of a deep opportunism and sectarianism within the proletarian milieu emphasises the unique responsibility of the ICC in the effort to prepare the conditions for the emergence of the party of the communist revolution.

ICC, 10/5/2025

In a speech at the United Nations in September 2025 United States President Donald Trump claimed that, in the first 7 months of his second term as president, he already had ended 7 ‘unendable’ wars: those of Cambodia and Thailand, Kosovo and Serbia, Congo and Rwanda, Pakistan and India, Israel and Iran, Egypt and Ethiopia, Armenia and Azerbaijan.

At most these conflicts have seen ceasefires (not all engineered by Trump) but there has been no peaceful resolution of them and they are ready to reignite at any moment. Moreover, the major wars of Trump’s tenure that he inherited from President Biden between Russia and Ukraine and Israel and Gaza have in the main worsened despite Trump’s intention to end them from day one of his presidency. The current ceasefire in Gaza (10.10.25), allowing the survivors of the massacre to return to the rubble of their homes, will bring at best a pause in the horror of interminable war in the Middle East.

The BBC amongst other media outlets have delighted at poking fun at the obvious untruth of Trump’s claim. But there was an intended message behind his bluff: that the United Nations (instigated by the United States in 1945) has been unable to provide the peace that it was set up to maintain (which is true), and now only he and his unilateral policy of America First, also known as ‘Make America Great Again’, is capable of engineering world peace.

The reality behind this episode only shows that around the world, imperialist conflicts, great and small, are multiplying all the time today, and that not only the transnational institutions of liberal democracy, like the UN, have been incapable of ending them, but neither has the bluff of populist nationalism. A capitalist peace in any form is impossible today and only a class with internationalist interests, the working class, is capable of achieving peace through the overthrow of national states on a world scale.

This uncompromising perspective, the only one that conforms to the long-term reality of the situation, has been the defining difference between the Communist Left and all other supposed revolutionary political tendencies like the Trotskyists or Anarchists that always claim, in the midst of the carnage, support for the ‘lesser evil’ imperialisms whether for Palestine today, North Vietnam in the 1960s or democratic allied imperialism in the Second World War.

US geopolitical hegemony since 1945: into the wood chipper

If we want to make an accurate assessment of Trump’s first 7 months of office, we have to go beyond the affirmation that his administration has continued to pursue the wars, austerity and repression of all previous capitalist governments. We have to explain what has been radically different about his presidency in regard to previous ones, even in comparison with his first term of office, (2016-2020) in order to understand the particularly serious dangers the US situation holds for the working class.

No other Communist Left group, has been capable of making this analysis, of warning of the threats and traps in store, since they only see ‘more of the same’ in the first months of Trump’s presidency.[1]

In previous articles on Trump’s coming to power at the beginning of this year we have pointed out that his policy of America First would not have the desired effect of restoring the United States to greatness on the world stage.[2]

On the contrary Trump’s first months have accelerated, at full speed, the weakening of US geopolitical hegemony - known as the Pax Americana – in favour of a growing free-for-all by its former allies and enemies alike.

US imperialism dominated the world from 1945-89 because it was the gendarme of the most powerful imperialist bloc. But its victory after the collapse of the weaker, rival Eastern bloc, turned out to be a Pyrrhic one. The removal of the threat of Russian imperialism loosened the chains that previously held the nations of the Western bloc together in subservience to the US. The period 1989-2025 has consequently seen the fruitless attempt of the US to maintain its previous hegemony despite the massively destructive and bloody display of its military superiority.

The radical contribution of Trump has been to turn a vice into a virtue and instead of trying to repair American domination as previous US presidencies have done, he has attempted to break it up altogether, lambasting it as a ‘con’ perpetrated by its allies to ‘screw’ the US. Instead of trying to abate the tendency of ‘every man for himself’ in imperialist relations that has been weakening US power since 1989, the second Trump administration has become its principal advocate on the world stage.

Throwing all the fixtures and fittings of the Pax Americana onto the scrap heap has been the Trump presidency’s most historic achievement. The first days of his second administration witnessed his appetite for annexing Greenland, Panama, and Canada; all allies of the US. But his most dramatic reversal of previous US policy was in the questioning of US commitment to NATO, the military alliance that has always been the centrepiece of the Western Bloc and provided the model for US alliances in other geopolitical theatres. The US was now ambivalent about its recognition of the crucial article of the NATO charter that in effect provides US support to any European member threatened by Russia. The now haphazard diplomacy of US toward its defence of Ukraine has encouraged the Kremlin to intensify its military invasion of that country and make threatening actions to Eastern European NATO countries, Poland, Latvia, Rumania, Estonia.

Knowing that its backer of last resort has in effect deserted it, the main powers of Western Europe are now forced to try to become militarily independent of the US and radically increase arms spending, with all the implications that has for the spread of war to Europe, the further bankruptcy of their economies and the pauperisation of a restive working class.

Trump has claimed this divorce with Europe as a victory but in reality it represents, long term, a weakening of the hold of the US over one of the world’s most important industrial heartlands.

The same fraying of US hegemony has developed in the Middle East, where foreign policy under Trump has become an adjunct of the regional imperialist ambitions of Israel at the expense of the US's own interests in maintaining the balance of power and its other alliances in the area. In the Far East the disregard of the US for its commitment to its former allies - Japan, Australia and India - puts in question the policy of containment of its main imperialist rival China, which has benefited from the greater margin of manoeuvre thus permitted.

At least Trump, in his open contempt for the US’s former leadership of the Western Bloc, has finally removed the illusion that the parameters of the Cold War remain the same - the polarisation of world imperialism around two major axes - and confirmed the reality that we are now fully in a multi-polar epoch, where the possibility of the formation of blocs is less and less likely, but which makes the proliferation of imperialist conflict in all areas of the world the norm.

Incredibly there are those on the Communist Left who are still living nostalgically in the Cold War and believe that the imperialist conflicts multiplying today are harbingers of World War 3. This would mean that the world’s working class was already defeated. Yet it is precisely the undefeated nature of the working class today that helps to define the current period and the improbability of the formation of new imperialist blocs.

These antique groups of the Communist Left are like the Japanese soldier Hiroo Onoda who refused to accept until 1974 that World War 2 had ended 29 years earlier. In fact these groups are even more obtuse, since 36 years after the collapse of the Berlin Wall they are still looking at the world through Cold War glasses. 

Goodbye to US soft power

It is not just at the diplomatic/military level that the Trump presidency has undermined US world leadership. All the ‘transnational’, ‘soft’ institutions that gave a humanist, international, pluralistic veneer to the American bloc - economic, trade, financial, social, environmental, health - that the US has dominated and financially supported since 1945 (the World Trade Organisation, the G7 meetings of industrialised nations, the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, World Health Organisation), all of them have lost the support of the new administration. The United States Agency for International Development, USAID, was, until Trump effectively abolished it in February 2025, the world’s largest agency for foreign aid previously having an average budget $23billion a year.

The imposition by Trump of massive trade tariffs on the rest of the world, allies and foes alike, has been the most dramatic illustration of an abrupt economic change in the US policy of globalisation and free(ish) trade. Other countries, according to the Trumpian justification of this policy, have been cheating the US, such as the EU, when in fact the latter and its antecedents have been the vehicle for the economic integration of Western Europe under the aegis of the United States.

The Trumpian illusion is that the US can use its military and economic superiority to make the rest of the world pay for the crisis. But such a policy will inevitably backfire on the economic level as well, as the Tariff offensive is already beginning to show, destabilising the dollar as the lynchpin of the world economy.

Whether at the ideological, economic or military level the US has, under Trump, abandoned any hegemonic intentions in favour of the dubious benefits of disrupting the existing order. ‘American First’, and unpredictability, is not a unifying perspective and method. The reverse, in fact.

The US is no longer a bastion of stable government

Hitherto a major pillar of American world power was that it existed internally as a stable bastion of liberal democracy; a moral and political example to its allies and a rallying cry against the despotism of the Eastern Bloc and more recently to ‘revisionist’ powers like Russia, China and Iran. 

At the end of his first presidential term Trump already deliberately targeted the holy edicts and places of American liberal democracy by encouraging the armed assault of his supporters on the Washington Capitol in January 2020 to try and overturn the legal vote for Joe Biden. He made the American nation look like a ‘banana republic’ to the rest of the world according to former president George W Bush. Trump has continued along the same track in his second term, breaking convention after convention of liberal democratic norms. He has manipulated the judiciary - supposedly independent of political interference - by forcing the sacking or indictment of his enemies within the state machine, and their potential imprisonment, notably James Comey former director of the FBI. He is trying to pressurise the Federal Reserve Board and its director Jay Powell, also supposedly independent of the short-term needs of the government in power, to lower interest rates. He’s even sacked the head of statistics when she announced the ‘wrong’ employment figures.

Recently Trump has fabricated pretexts to use the military to intervene in civil disturbances such as the protests against the deportation of immigrants in Los Angeles, or crime as in Washington DC, Portland or Chicago thereby corrupting the independence of the armed forces from political interference and using them to discredit and usurp the authority of the Democratic Party-elected regimes in these cities. The militarisation of the operations of ICE - Immigration and Customs Enforcement - is another populist flouting of democratic procedure.

It used to be a liberal, bi-partisan norm that the heads of US government departments - health, defence, environment etc - would either be competent in their fields or respectful of the permanent experts employed in these departments. This has also been given a populist makeover. Most grotesquely the opponent of vaccinations, and believer that circumcision is likely to cause autism, Robert F Kennedy Jr, has been appointed health secretary, while Pete Hegseth, previously employed as a talk show host on Fox News, is put in charge of the defence (now ‘war’) department. Recently he commanded US generals around the world to come to Washington to hear a lecture on the need to be fit and shave off beards!

When the president declares that climate change is a ‘con’ then it is obvious that the Environmental Protection Agency is not going to bound by scientific advice. The new administrator of the EPA, Lee Zeldin, said ‘we are driving a dagger into the heart of the climate change religion.’

Trump has retained only one criteria for the appointment of the leaders of state bureaucracies - loyalty to himself.

Trump’s 7 months have therefore been a full scale attack on all the pillars of US power since 1945, whether military, strategic, economic, political or ideological. These bases were already being undermined by the loss of direction and perspective that developed after the collapse of the Eastern Bloc; the failure of its military attempts to preserve its hegemony; and the fallout from the Great Recession of 2008.

But for the populist Trump the cause of the decline of US imperialism was the result of one of the very factors that were responsible for its previous ascendancy: its liberal democratic ethos. By desecrating this guiding spirit Trump believes he can rejuvenate American capitalism and recover the ascendancy of another era.

However, it would be wrong to see that this reversal has been the result of Trump himself - despite his claims. Trump is only the most dramatic expression of a universal populist political trend that has been gaining ground in the period of decomposition, at the expense of liberal democracy.

Trump, populism and the decay of liberal democracy

Francis Fukuyama, a prominent US political expert, famously declared after the fall of the Berlin Wall: “What we may be witnessing is not just the end of the Cold War, or the passing of a particular period of postwar history, but the end of history as such: that is, the end point of mankind's ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.” -  Francis Fukuyama, “The End of History?”, The National Interest, No. 16 (Summer 1989)

Since then, he has had to change his opinion about the victory of liberal democracy and reject the corresponding illusion of the neoconservatives around president George W Bush that the US was, after 1989, going to lead a unipolar world.

The collapse of Stalinism was merely the precursor of a generalised decay of the political forms of capitalist rule in the period of the decadence - and more recently, decomposition - of the bourgeois order. The one-party state of the Russian bloc developed in particular to satisfy the imperialist military needs of the Second World War and its aftermath. But its economic weakness increasingly undermined the inflexibility of the state in the face of the long world economic crisis beginning in the 1960s, eventually leading to complete collapse.

However, the regimes of the Western Bloc also began to lose their raison d’être after the defeat of their main imperialist adversary after 1989. The liberal democratic states and their ideology had cohered around the imperialist perspectives of the Western Bloc. But increasingly, after the removal of its main opponent, this disciplined respect for liberal norms uniting all the bourgeois factions behind the state was removed, and the liberal democratic regimes begin to mimic the endemic corruption and every-man-for-himself mentality typical of the operation of the Stalinist regimes.

This tendency to lose political control was exacerbated by the ineluctable worsening of the economic crisis, especially the consequences of the officially-named 2008 Great Recession that had to be paid in full… by the working class. At the same time the multiplication of ‘forever wars’ around the globe was directly involving the Western liberal democratic regimes and their budgets. The promise of peace and prosperity made by the West after 1989 was given the lie. The tattered credibility of the traditional parties of liberal democracies was revealed in the steady loss of their percentage of the vote.

This void was filled by populist political forces, whose general character consisted of castigating only the symptoms of the failures of capitalism and of offering irrational panaceas: the replacement of long-term imperialist diplomacy and alliances with incoherent, nativist nationalism that corresponds more to the free-for-all reigning on the world stage; the blaming of elites - the huge parasitic state bureaucracies, Wall Street, and well-paid experts for the economic crisis - scapegoating immigration and other foreigners for the decline of living standards; replacing the woke ideology of liberalism with common sense traditional values.

Populism is revealed not as an opponent of capitalism, democracy and the democratic state. After all it was President Abraham Lincoln who defined government in a populist way: ‘the rule of the people, by the people, for the people’. No, the populist enemy is the traditional liberal practice of the democratic state that has supposedly distorted the meaning of the rule of the people and excluded them from power.

Populism is not a new political phenomenon but an incoherent reaction, from fractions of the ruling class, to the inevitable contradictions and limitations of the liberal representative form of the bourgeois state.

The pretence of this state to rule in the name of the people is inevitably exposed in practice by the exploitation and repression of the mass of population in the interest of a minoritarian ruling class by the state. The mass of the population is deliberately excluded from direct participation in political power by the representative principle of the state. The popular forms of democracy that arose in the bourgeois revolutions (English, American, French) had to be crushed in order to stabilise the new bourgeois states. The liberal representative democracies of the 19th century - with the exception of the US - excluded the majority of the population from the vote. Universal suffrage only becomes generalised after the First World War, when the workers parties had betrayed and been integrated into the bourgeois state and legislative functions have largely passed into the hands of the Leviathan executive, so the workers vote therefore has minimal effect on the direction of capitalist policy. Hence the regular call of parts of the bourgeoisie to restore the impossibility of ‘power to the people’.

What’s new today is that right wing political populism has become more than an oppositional pressure valve for the liberal establishment and, because of the conditions described above in the period of decomposition, has actually taken political power in what were previously the most politically stable of the capitalist regimes of the world.

The coming to power of populism is a cure that is worse than the disease for the interests of the whole bourgeoisie. Firstly of course populism has no real alternative solutions to war or crisis; it is characterised essentially only by amateurish methods, vandalising policies and the fermenting of chaos and scandals that exacerbates the real problems instead of solving them. Populist leaders, once ensconced in power, prove themselves just as corrupt and depraved as the elitist figures they are replacing. Typically, the repugnant Jeffrey Epstein scandal has implicated Trump as well as Clinton for example. Trump himself has become a multi-billionaire. Instead of creating wealth and jobs for the working class his tariff policy has proved to be a regressive tax on the poorest. As has the ‘One Big Beautiful Bill Act’ which will deprive more millions of workers from access to healthcare. Protectionism will hardly expand US manufacturing as it is claimed to do[3]

Populism in power in effect becomes ‘populism for plutocrats’ as the astute organ of the bourgeoisie, the Financial Times, says.

Trump and the working class

Trump was elected partly because of dissatisfaction with falling living standards under Biden. But poverty levels are continuing to rise under Trump, inflation continues to cut into wages, unemployment will rise partly because of savage cuts in federal employment and because of the mirage of the expanding bubble of Artificial Intelligence. The latter is attracting vast investment in the United States precisely because it has the capacity to vastly eliminate more jobs. But the further misery this will inflict on the working class will only accentuate the crisis of overproduction and the financial crashes that are its logical consequence.

We are seeing then, exemplified in the US, not only the crumbling of the liberal democratic political edifice but also the unmasking of its populist alter ego, in the face of a working class which hasn’t submitted passively to the further austerity that will continue to be demanded by the irresolvable crisis of capitalism and all factions of the bourgeoisie.

It might appear then that the working class can, in the face of the present political turmoil of the bourgeoisie, put forward its own class demands and ultimately the perspective of its own political power.

But the bourgeoisie is able to use its own political putrefaction and internal conflicts against its principal class enemy to divide the working class, suppress its class identity and steer it into false battles and objectives. The one advantage for the bourgeoisie in the ascension of political populism is that it creates a false debate, a diversionary conflict, that steers the working class away from understanding the real causes of its pauperisation and its own class solution. As the Financial Times said of the rise of populism in Britain in 2016: ‘let them eat Brexit’.[4]

In fact, this splitting of the working class is what is happening in the US today: the working class is being asked to actively take sides either for the outrages of populism or for liberal democracy, to choose between different exploiters and executioners. The leftists are particularly active in trying to mobilise workers behind the ‘lesser evil’ of the Left of the Democratic Party in the US.

Unfortunately, parts of the Communist Left, deliberately blind to the reality of the situation, are giving ground opportunistically to the ‘democratic movements’ that are part of the false oppositions proposed by the bourgeoisie, in the false hope of turning them into genuine proletarian struggles.

The working class, in order to defend its interests, will have to fight all factions of the ruling class and not get caught up in a struggle which is not its own. The revolutionary movement has since Marx rejected the mystification of democracy and equality in capitalism - whether of the liberal or populist kind - because the bourgeois order has always been riven by a class exploitation that is cemented by state oppression. Marx’s synonym for ‘Liberty, Equality and Fraternity’ was ‘Infantry, Cavalry and Artillery’.

Against the dictatorship of capital whatever its guise - liberal democratic, fascist, populist or, Stalinist - the working class will eventually have to oppose its own class dictatorship embodied in the workers councils that were first deployed in the 1905 and 1917 Russian revolutions.

To conclude: the 7 months of President Trump’s second term have been perfectly in keeping with US capitalism’s need for more wars, exploitation and immiseration of the working class and repression. Trump’s special contribution has been to irreparably trash the facade of US liberal democracy in every domain and therefore further weaken US imperialist leadership on the world arena and provide a massive stimulus to capitalist chaos both internally and externally.

The present and future danger for the working class is that it will be dragged into the more and more violent conflict between populist and liberal wings of the bourgeoisie.

It must autonomously remain on its own class terrain where it continues to struggle for its own class interests that will inevitably bring it up against the ruling class as a whole, and not one or other of its competing factions.

Como 11.10.2025

The election of Donald Trump as President of the United States has considerably disrupted the world economic order in place since the end of the Second World War, with institutions regulating trade and currencies, and a certain consistency in the orientations of different national capitals. The American shift towards extreme protectionism and its rejection of all international cooperation has not only had an immediate impact on all the central countries of capitalism, but above all, has opened a period of uncertainty linked to the brutal and undoubtedly definitive erasure of all the efforts made until then by the international bourgeoisie to distance the capitalist economy from chaos and every man for himself as much as possible. Such a policy greatly contributes to destabilisation, particularly in economic and political terms, with inevitable consequences for the dynamics of the class struggle, the future scale of which remains difficult to measure today.

Marxism is not a dogmatic theory that provided all the answers 150 years ago. It is above all a method that borrows a fundamental approach from science: constantly verifying the validity of theory against the facts. Taking a step back from the situation does not mean detaching oneself from the facts, quite the contrary. The first question we have to ask ourselves as marxists in the face of these upheavals is whether our overall framework for analysing the historical trends of capitalism should be called into question or whether, on the contrary, current events confirm it. Then, based on this framework of analysis, we have to consider the impact that the combination of various factors – wars, economic crisis, trade destabilisation, climate change – has on capitalism, in order to provide our class with the clearest possible analysis of these upheavals and the challenges they pose for the future.

The extensive excerpts from the report on the economic crisis, ratified by our 26th International Congress in the spring of 2025, which we publish below, demonstrate the validity of our analytical framework and allow us to outline the historical perspectives. However, the process never stops, and in a situation as fluid as the one we are experiencing today, it is more important than ever for revolutionary organisations to continually deepen this framework.

Since the report was written, developments have only further confirmed the perspectives outlined by the Congress. The Trump administration's haphazard, volatile, but ultimately brutal implementation of tariffs has led to a previously unimaginable acceleration of every man for himself in the economic sphere, the evaporation of the ‘opportunities’ of globalisation and a brutal and chaotic disorganisation of production and logistics circuits (supply chains) throughout the world. Each national capital is pushed to take charge of strategic sectors of production which, moreover, cannot escape the reality of the saturation of the world market. This exacerbation of every man for himself greatly accentuates the crisis of overproduction.

The crisis of overproduction is therefore only exacerbated by the growing destabilisation of world trade, protectionist policies and, above all, the explosion in military spending. Far from putting an end to the bloody and endless conflicts that are undermining the planet, as Trump constantly boasts, the United States is the first to add fuel to the fire, as illustrated by the situation in Gaza, the conflict with Iran or, more recently, its aggressive policy towards Venezuela, which is increasing the pressure of the war economy on public accounts and on the overall health of capital itself. The historic divorce between the United States and Europe is reflected in particular in America’s blackmail of other NATO countries to buy and produce weapons for Ukraine and to increase their arms expenditure and production in order to take charge of their own defence.

All this is happening in a context of national bourgeoisies losing control of their political game, thus affecting their ability to cooperate and attempt a minimal regulation of a devastated global market. In the United States, factions of the ruling class are tearing each other apart over what policy to pursue. In Europe, states are finding it increasingly difficult to maintain consistency in defending the national capital and maintaining a stable policy for the future.

Such a panorama only confirms the state of decay of capitalism and the fact that the economic sphere, which, through artifices and circumventions of the fundamental laws of the system, had largely escaped this decay, but is now not only falling prey to it, but above all accelerating the infernal vortex that is dragging this system into decomposition.

So how can we continue to defend the idea that capitalism is still capable of launching new cycles of accumulation through the destruction of capital wrought by war, as organisations in the proletarian political milieu continue to argue?[1] The abysmal debt of all capitalist states, the gigantic losses linked to destruction and the war economy, the disorganisation of markets and the reality of chronic overproduction invalidate any idea of the possibility of an eternal development of the system.

How can we still defend the 19th-century vision of technological progress capable of increasing overall productivity? Today, technological progress is certainly incomparable to that of the ascendant period of capitalism. But on the one hand, it is almost exclusively directed towards the military sphere, a trend that began at the start of the decline, while, on the other hand, and above all, the productivity gains evaporate in overproduction due to the impossibility of selling all the goods produced and therefore of realising the total expected surplus value. They are therefore unable to contribute to a “new cycle of accumulation” – even if certain sectors or a number of companies can still do well – since the markets likely to offer the outlets necessary for the realisation of surplus value have long been saturated on a global scale.

Does this mean that the ICC sees the decline of the capitalist mode of production, and even more so its period of decomposition, as an inevitable dynamic that will pave a natural path towards communism? Not at all! Decomposition paves the way for the collapse of the capitalist system, but this does not open the path to communism but rather threatens to bring about the destruction of humanity and its environment if the working class fails to impose its perspective. And this perspective of communism will always remain the fruit of a life-and-death struggle against capital. That is why it is up to revolutionaries to be perfectly clear about the historical responsibility of the proletariat, which does not have an eternity before it to overcome its difficulties, to shake off the weight of bourgeois and petty-bourgeois ideologies and rediscover its identity as a revolutionary class bearing the only viable and possible future for humanity, that of communism.

In this context, the purpose of a congress report is to provide the organisation with a solid analytical framework for understanding the situation in the years to come. Taking a long-term view, a report cannot remain stuck in current events and must take a broader perspective, as was the aim of this report, in particular through two central questions for understanding recent economic events:

• the growing interaction between decomposition and economic crisis, which illustrates the turmoil in which bourgeois society finds itself from an economic point of view;
• the increasingly relentless nature of the impasse of overproduction.

 

1. The growing vortex of interdependence between decomposition and crisis

The interdependence between the economic crisis and the manifestations of decomposition at different levels is evident in a multitude of phenomena:

• on the one hand, overproduction has continued to shake the global economy: for example, a major crisis has erupted in German industry, particularly in the automobile industry, with Germany's economic problems mirroring those of the EU, while in the United States, a speculative stock market bubble has burst;
• on the other hand, disruption to global trade and production doubled in a matter of months. For example, due to attacks by the Houthis, 95% of ships that should have crossed the Red Sea had to be diverted. In 2023, drought caused delays in the Panama Canal, increasing the cost of goods and raw materials moving between the United States and China, as well as on other global shipping routes;
• and then, the ravages caused by the interaction of climate change and a capitalist economy suffering from more than 50 years of crisis are being felt around the world. Massive flooding in Pakistan, the effects of drought in Europe and elsewhere, devastating floods in Valencia, Spain's third largest city, have all destroyed or weakened local and regional economies.

The rising cost of living, destruction, transport problems and pollution have had a growing impact on the US economy. The effect of the Los Angeles fires is not limited to the destruction of buildings: "AccuWeather calculated its economic impact by examining not only losses related to property damage, but also lost wages due to the slowdown or shutdown of economic activity in the affected areas, infrastructure repairs, supply chain issues, and transportation difficulties. Even when homes and businesses are not destroyed, residents may be unable to work due to evacuations; businesses may close due to the dispersal of their customers or the inability of their suppliers to make deliveries. Smoke inhalation can have short-, medium- and long-term health consequences, which weigh heavily on overall economic activity." These effects may be further amplified by the waves of forest fires that rage throughout most of the year in the United States and Canada.

This economic, imperialist and ‘natural’ turmoil is accelerated by the political earthquake caused by Trump's election. Even before he came to power, the threat of tariffs and four more years of political chaos was imminent. "Uncertainty looms over 2025, including the risks of trade tensions and ongoing geopolitical challenges. The trade outlook for 2025 is clouded by potential policy changes, including higher tariffs that could disrupt global value chains and impact key trading partners. Such measures risk triggering retaliation and repercussions, affecting industries and economies throughout supply chains. The mere threat of tariffs creates unpredictability, weakening trade, investment and economic growth."[2]

This chaos and unpredictability of a “terra incognita” is shaking up the three main rival capitalist powers.

1.1. The United States

The world's largest economy is still in decline. A recovery was observed after the pandemic, but it was partly due to Biden's vast support plan, which aimed to reverse the decline of American industry. Manufacturing jobs, the main source of profits, have fallen by 35% since 1979. In 2023, there were 12.5 million manufacturing jobs, the same number as in 1946 (it should be borne in mind that the US population has more than doubled since then – from 141.4 million in 1946 to 336.4 million in 2023).

To cope with the growing impact of the economic crisis, the American bourgeoisie has borrowed more and more money. The United States has seen its debt-to-GDP ratio rise from 32% in 1980 to 123% in 2024. This means that it is drawing trillions of dollars from the rest of the global economy to repay its debts. Every year, the US government spends as much on debt repayment as it does on defence. In 2023, the gap between US spending and revenue was £1.8 trillion, nearly double the military budget! The new administration's barrage of attacks on federal civil servants is partly a response to their rampant growth. The irresponsible and brutal manner in which they are being carried out will have a chaotic impact on American capitalism. The sudden halt in public funding for essential services such as health care, tax collection, social security contributions, essential medical research, etc., will have increasingly harmful consequences for the economy and society.

Internationally, Trump's upheaval of the rules is generating great uncertainty and instability in the global economy. The imposition of tariffs on all US competitors, and the threat of even more draconian tariffs if governments tax American products “unfairly”, is creating tensions not only between the US and its rivals, but also between the rivals themselves.

This scorched earth policy will further plunge capitalism into crisis: "... Trump's proposed policies will not reduce the overall trade deficit. Reducing the bilateral deficit with China would only increase deficits with other countries. This is inevitable, given the persistent macroeconomic pressures. Furthermore, his discriminatory trade policies, with tariffs of 60% on China and 10-20% on others, are bound to spread. Trump and his acolytes will find that exports from other countries are replacing those from China through transhipments, assembly in other countries or direct competition... there will undoubtedly be retaliation. Such a spread of high tariffs in the United States and around the world is likely to lead to a rapid decline in global trade and production."[3]

Furthermore, this economic instability will be exacerbated by the Trump administration's deportation policy. The American Immigration Council has stated that deporting all undocumented immigrants could cost up to $315 billion and require between 220,000 and 409,000 new civil servants and law enforcement officers. It also indicated that deporting one million people per year would cost £967 billion over ten years. This number of migrants being sent back, combined with the loss of remittances, will also destabilise some regions of Central and Latin America and exacerbate the instability of American capitalism.

1.2. China

China is no longer the ‘saviour’ of the global economy that it was after 2007: its industrial overcapacity has become a runaway train dragging the global economy into an ever-deepening crisis: "Simply put, in many crucial economic sectors, China is producing far more output than it, or foreign markets, can sustainably absorb. As a result, the Chinese economy runs the risk of getting caught in a doom loop of falling prices, insolvency, factory closures, and, ultimately, job losses. Shrinking profits have forced producers to further increase output and more heavily discount their wares in order to generate cash to service their debts. Moreover, as factories are forced to close and industries consolidate, the firms left standing are not necessarily the most efficient or most profitable. Rather, the survivors tend to be those with the best access to government subsidies and cheap financing.[…]

“For the West, China’s overcapacity problem presents a long-term challenge that can’t be solved simply by erecting new trade barriers. For one thing, even if the United States and Europe were able to significantly limit the amount of Chinese goods reaching Western markets, it would not unravel the structural inefficiencies that have accumulated in China over decades of privileging industrial investment and production goals. Any course correction could take years of sustained Chinese policy to be successful. For another, Xi’s growing emphasis on making China economically self-sufficient—a strategy that is itself a response to perceived efforts by the West to isolate the country economically—has increased, rather than decreased, the pressures leading to overproduction. Moreover, efforts by Washington to prevent Beijing from flooding the United States with cheap goods in key sectors are only likely to create new inefficiencies within the U.S. economy, even as they shift China’s overproduction problem to other international markets."[4]

The above quote is an excellent description of the impact of the overproduction crisis on China and the global economy.

1.3. The EU, Russia, Israel

The German economic and political giant has been mired in economic and political crisis for the past two years. The political instability of the German bourgeoisie makes it even more difficult to manage the economic crisis that accelerated in 2024. The dramatic worsening of the crisis of overproduction in Germany, with the announcement of a wave of layoffs and company closures in the autumn of 2024, has revealed the fragility of this industrial giant in the face of the worsening global economic crisis. It is particularly affected by the Chinese crisis. This decline is accelerated by the German state's need to increase its defence spending and, as a result, reduce its public spending.

The economic turmoil of German capitalism is fundamentally an expression of the deep problems facing the EU as a whole: “The EU also benefitted from a favourable global environment. World trade burgeoned under multilateral rules. The safety of the US security umbrella freed up defence budgets to spend on other priorities. In a world of stable geopolitics, we had no reason to be concerned about rising dependencies on countries we expected to remain our friends.

“But the foundations on which we built are now being shaken.

 “The previous global paradigm is fading. The era of rapid world trade growth looks to have passed, with EU companies facing both greater competition from abroad and lower access to overseas markets. Europe has abruptly lost its most important supplier of energy, Russia. All the while, geopolitical stability is waning, and our dependencies have turned out to be vulnerabilities…

“The EU is entering the first period in its recent history in which growth will not be supported by rising populations. By 2040, the workforce is projected to shrink by close to 2 million workers each year. We will have to lean more on productivity to drive growth. If the EU were to maintain its average productivity growth rate since 2015, it would only be enough to keep GDP constant until 2050 – at a time when the EU is facing a series of new investment needs that will have to be financed through higher growth.

 “To digitalise and decarbonise the economy and increase our defence capacity, the investment share in Europe will have to rise by around 5 percentage points of GDP to levels last seen in the 1960s and 70s. This is unprecedented: for comparison, the additional investments provided by the Marshall Plan between 1948-51 amounted to around 1-2% of GDP annually.”[5]

It is estimated that the development of EU economies to meet this challenge, particularly in terms of armaments, will require €750-800 billion: a heavy investment in armaments of all kinds, offset by an inevitable reduction in social spending.

This increasingly unstable quagmire, composed of fundamental economic contradictions, manifestations of decomposition on various levels and imperialist tensions, as well as the interdependence of all these factors, is clearly wreaking havoc on the global economy. Added to this is the growing impact of the barbarity of war.

Russian capitalism appears to have withstood the impact of war and sanctions. In truth, this illusion is based on increased military spending, rising energy prices, booming investment in the war economy (the Russian capitalist class can only invest in Russia because of the sanctions) and rising public deficits. As we have already said, this situation masks the depth of the weakening of Russian capitalism by the war. The crushing weight of militarism is the most obvious proof of this. The domination of militarism over the economy is plunging Russia back into the instability of the former USSR: "In short, 40 years after Mikhail Gorbachev came to power, Moscow is facing a resurgence of the problems encountered by Gorbachev and his predecessors. The military will dominate the Russian economy for years to come. Even after a settlement in the current war, the Kremlin will have to rebuild its military stockpiles, maintain the arms race and retrain the army. The military-industrial complex will continue to drain investment, human resources and civilian sector capabilities."

As for the Israeli bourgeoisie, it faces a similar dynamic. The wars in Gaza, the West Bank and Lebanon have had a phenomenal impact on the Israeli state's deficit. Before the war began, the Ministry of Finance projected a deficit of 1.1% of GDP in 2024; it is now estimated at 8%. Israel's security budget is the second highest in the world. The wars have had a dramatic impact on economic activity in the south and north of the country. The loss of Palestinian workers in certain sectors and the impact of conscription have had adverse consequences. The credit rating of Israeli capitalism has fallen for the first time in its history. All this has increased its dependence on US support.

The idea that Israel and the United States will ethnically cleanse Gaza and build a Mediterranean resort is as illusory as it is revolting. To clear the rubble would require 100 lorries working 24 hours a day for 21 years. There are at least 14,000 bodies still under the rubble and 7,500 tonnes of unexploded ordnance. Military barbarism, economic chaos and the rise to power of populist factions of the bourgeoisie are creating an unprecedented level of instability in the capitalist system.

2. The agony of a world dominated by capitalist relations

When Stalinism collapsed in 1989, after more than 40 years of the return of the crisis that had begun in the mid-1960s, the ICC pointed out that the contradictions and manifestations of the decadence of moribund capitalism, which had marked the history of this decadence, had not only not disappeared with time, but had persisted. Indeed, they had accumulated and deepened to culminate in the phase of decomposition, which crowns and completes three quarters of a century of agony for a capitalist mode of production condemned by history.

With regard to the crisis of state capitalism expressed by the collapse of the USSR, our organisation then highlighted:

• that the collapse of Stalinist state capitalism demonstrated the impotence of state capitalist measures to permanently bypass the laws of the market and demonstrated the powerlessness of the world bourgeoisie in the face of the crisis of overproduction;
• that the absence of perspective unleashed within the ruling class, and especially within its political apparatus, a growing tendency towards indiscipline and every man for himself;
• that the bankruptcy of Stalinism, after that of the Third World, heralded the bankruptcy of capitalism in its most developed poles.

The ICC also analysed that, in the chaotic context of this new historical phase and in a capitalist world profoundly altered by the effects of decadence, the disappearance of the blocs offered an opportunity to maintain the profitability of capital and to prolong the survival of capitalism through "globalisation": the extension of capitalist exploitation and capitalist social relations to the furthest corners of the planet, hitherto inaccessible due to the existence of the imperialist blocs.[6] These same conditions enabled China's rapid rise.[7] However, we have pointed out that “globalisation” was only an interlude allowing the capitalist system to relatively preserve its economy from the effects of decomposition. The worsening of the real state of the economy, the weakening of the dynamics of globalisation undermined the realisation of expanded accumulation, while the weight of military spending and the impasse of overproduction shattered the scaffolding of global finance based on staggering debt. The 2008 crisis, the most serious since 1929, marked a turning point in the history of the capitalist mode of production's descent into its historical crisis. It confirmed that the capitalist system finds itself even more completely locked into a situation where (due to the exhaustion of the last extra-capitalist markets) the universal hegemony of capitalist class relations makes the realisation of expanded accumulation increasingly difficult.[8]

In these conditions of deadlock and social decomposition, the phenomena already existing in decadence take on a new quality, due to the bourgeoisie's inability to offer any perspective other than “resisting, step by step, but without hope of success, the advance of the crisis. That is why the current situation of open crisis presents itself in radically different terms from the previous crisis of the same type, that of the 1930s”[9]. After 2008, the closure of the “opportunities” of globalisation and the increasingly obvious inability of capitalism to overcome its crisis of overproduction resulted in the explosion of every man for himself, not only in relations between capitalist nations, but also within each nation, while the effects of decomposition took on a new and powerfully destructive scale for the capitalist economy in the early 2020s. They are accelerating and striking at the heart of capitalism as the combined effects of the economic crisis, war and the climate crisis interact and multiply their impact, destabilising the economy and its productive infrastructure. “While each of the factors fuelling this ‘whirlwind’ effect of decomposition represents in itself a serious risk of collapse for states, their combined effects far exceed the simple sum of each of them taken in isolation.” [10]. Among the various factors contributing to the whirlwind effect, war is accelerating the worsening of the crisis.

2.1. Decomposition fuels the headlong rush into militarism

This “epochal change” is bringing about the return of high-intensity warfare. It thereby:

• fuels the shockwave of military conflicts on the global economy (Ukraine, Middle East, Red Sea); the prospect of major conflicts (Taiwan) or “regional” conflicts (India/Pakistan, Morocco/Algeria) exposes the economy to incalculable and unpredictable disruptions; war weakens and exhausts national economies (Russia, Ukraine, Israel);
• produces remarkable unanimity among the different factions of each bourgeoisie in each national capital around the world to prioritise increased military spending: during Trump's first term, within NATO, three countries (including only one European country, Greece) out of around thirty allocated 2% of GDP to defence; today, only eight countries, including seven European countries, have not reached this target. Since the NATO summit in June 2025, the plan is to allocate 5% of GDP to defence, including 3.5% to the purchase of military equipment. To achieve this, all states are committed to strengthening the war economy and adapting their means of production, which involves rebuilding strategic food and military (ammunition) stocks and making a considerable effort to accelerate military production (e.g. the transition of this entire industry to three 8-hour shifts in France in order to achieve major reductions in production times – for example, it has been halved for Caesar cannons). This also involves seeking to standardise military equipment among allies to enable industry to increase its capacity, and relocating military production capacity (gunpowder in France) within their territory for those where this can be done.

As industrial power is the basis of military power, each national capital is attempting to reindustrialise, which essentially involves:

• investment in key sectors of military power, such as robotisation, digitalisation and AI. For example, the US has begun repatriating the production of latest-generation semiconductors to its own soil in order to guarantee its monopoly;
• the integration of other aspects that are essential to the growth of these sectors: efforts to train a skilled workforce and adapt education (which has been a victim of cost-cutting), and the ability to produce abundant and inexpensive electricity;
• artificially keeping alive strategic sectors such as steel (with overcapacity of 25-30% worldwide and up to 60% in France) through state intervention, which irrationally reinforces overproduction.

Even on a strategic level, however, reindustrialisation comes up against the very causes of deindustrialisation: insufficient profitability, which led to the disappearance or relocation of industries, and the burden of debt, which has skyrocketed since 2020 and restricts the room for manoeuvre of each national capital.

The surge in unproductive spending is weighing heavily on national capital and driving inflation.

Furthermore, the general rise of every man for himself and warlike tensions against the backdrop of US-China rivalry:

• is intensifying competition between nations and leading to a global reorganisation of industrial production along imperialist fault lines. The impossibility of decoupling the US and Chinese economies has given way to the ‘risk reduction’ that the United States wants to impose on its allies. This dynamic is accompanied by a trend towards the cartelisation of supply chains for strategic materials or products with a view to ‘securing’ them, which are then used as a means of pressure and blackmail to gain a position of strength. This is particularly the case for rare metals and minerals, given the difficulty of accessing them on a large scale to operate entire value chains – more than half of their refining is under Chinese control – as well as energy sources;
• disrupts global trade through export restrictions and public subsidies to industries deemed vital to national security and sovereignty (this affects 12.7% of G20 countries' imports and 10% globally);
• is driving increased use of digital technologies and additive manufacturing, enabling companies to move their production closer to the point of sale in order to accelerate the pace of supply chain reorientation and reduce the appeal of locating production in China;
• is profoundly changing and destabilising the domestic conditions of national production for each national capital: as summarised by Defence Minister Lecornu for France, for example, regarding the grey area of hybrid warfare that powers are constantly waging: “without being at war, it is no longer possible to say that we are at peace”; "Cyber attacks are on the rise and target a huge number of companies, public institutions and even local authorities. The armed forces are deploying capabilities to identify, thwart and resist these attacks within the state, but every business leader, every administrative manager and every local elected representative must also protect their organisation against this threat, which affects everyone.”; “Technological leaps, the militarisation of space and digital technology, information warfare and the exploitation of economic weaknesses enable competitors to devise and implement new threats that can have extremely serious consequences. One of the risks facing France today is that of being defeated without being invaded.”[11].
• leads to a general increase in prices (of between two and six hundred percent), as well as a change in the conditions under which they are set; the lowest cost is no longer the only criterion; added to this are the prices of “scarcity” and “security" as well as the financial capacity of the highest bidder.

2.2 Decomposition aggravates the crisis of state capitalism in the central countries

In all the central parts of capitalism, the state, guarantor of the interests of national capital, is the central actor in the economy: in a profoundly changed and changing economic, social and imperialist environment, its intervention remains predominant. However, the seriousness of capitalism's impasse, as well as the necessities of building a war economy, are fuelling clashes within each national bourgeoisie, in a context where each national capital is deeply weakened:

• by the weight of debt, which severely restricts the ability of states to invest and reduces the room for manoeuvre of each national capital to support the national economy;
• by the disappearance of cooperation between powers to deal with the contradictions and (predictable) convulsions of a system still threatened by financial crises.

Faced with the challenges of “national sovereignty” and the chaotic effects of decomposition, particularly its repercussions on the economy; and faced also with the issue of accumulated debt (exceeding or representing several times GNP), the balance of state budgets and the balance of payments (mostly in deficit) take on a new crucial importance for each national capital. With its resilience in the face of its rivals at stake, this represents a new vulnerability and fragility within the context of the worsening of decomposition. The question of budgetary balance arises, as each national economy becomes increasingly locked into the inherent contradictions of the difficulty of accumulating capital, while cheating the law of value has reached historically unprecedented levels since the pandemic.

Debt – or rather its scale – divides the bourgeois factions: in the United States, for the adoption of the budget, Trump demanded an unlimited increase in the government debt ceiling, a proposal that was ultimately rejected, including with the support of some Republicans. In Germany, the issue of special off-budget funds and the need, defended by part of the bourgeoisie, to abandon the “debt brake” (enshrined in the Constitution), seen as a “brake on the future”, was a key cause of the implosion of the governing coalition. In China, the Communist Party is bringing the financial sector back into line, calling on it to serve the economy more effectively and contribute more to national wealth.

The tendency for the ruling class to lose control of its political game due to the effects of decomposition on the bourgeoisie and society, and the resulting instability and chaos, are affecting the coherence, long-term vision and continuity of the defence of the overall interests of national capital:

• the political crisis in France is preventing the adoption of a budget; divisions between bourgeois factions in Germany are affecting the EU's ability to prepare for the economic consequences of Trump's arrival in power;
• the coming to power of irresponsible populist factions (with programmes that are unrealistic for national capital) is weakening the economy and the measures imposed by capitalism since 1945 to prevent the uncontrolled spread of the economic crisis. Trump is coming to power with a plan that is diametrically opposed to the policy previously pursued by the US government, aimed at promoting cryptocurrencies and wholesale financial deregulation.

The clique around Trump wants to locate these crypto projects in the United States and make digital assets and other innovations a crucial instrument for “making America more powerful than ever.” Speculative products par excellence (which Trump hopes will be a lucrative source of income), backed by major US tech stocks or the dollar and traded on the stock market through new products, cryptocurrencies, used as an alternative means of payment, can only compete with and weaken the currencies issued and guaranteed by central banks. Due to their inherent volatility (their solidity is equal to that of the company that issues them – far from that of a central bank), by escaping the banking system and without a supervisory mechanism, the widespread use of cryptocurrencies can only affect the financial stability of the capitalist system, weakening the control exercised by countries over exchange rates and the money supply.

Trump's arrival in power and his aggressive economic policy are another factor dividing and destabilising each bourgeoisie in terms of the policy and course of action to be taken to deal with it (see the tensions with Canada and Trudeau's resignation, and also the divisions within the EU). The measures proposed by populism only increase the chaos and uncertainty.

More generally, the tendency to lose sight of the general interests of capital is becoming more pronounced, due to deep divisions within the ruling class over how to manage the economic crisis; a bourgeoisie fragmented by conflicts that go beyond simple competitive relations, where factions are fighting for their survival in the face of the insoluble dilemmas and contradictions facing each national capital, and where each option will generate its share of losers. These conflicts are leading to an increasingly clear trend towards the domination of the state by clans and cliques primarily motivated by the defence of their own interests, where the obsession with controlling their position involves sidelining any potential rivals. They fill decision-making bodies with loyalists, even openly challenging the principles of state functioning, such as the separation of powers, the independence of the judiciary and election results. This trend is particularly marked with the arrival of populism in power: Trump, for example, arrived with a staff of 4,000 loyalists selected to thoroughly clean up the “deep state”, and the management of the state took on a distinctly oligarchic character, with tech giants such as Musk and Zuckerberg, among others, financing and supporting Trump with the clear intention of taking advantage of the situation.

In the long run, this can only result in incompetence, mismanagement and a decline in the sense of responsibility and, ultimately, a decline in economic efficiency and effectiveness, not to mention the inevitable conflicts and upheavals resulting from the desire to retain power at all costs through violence and coups, which can only ultimately weaken national capital, as illustrated by Trump's call to march on the Capitol at the end of his first term, Bolsonaro's coup attempt in Brazil, and that of President Yoon Suk-yeol in South Korea in December 2024.

"If Western state capitalism has been able to survive its Stalinist rival, it is in the same way that a more robust organism resists the same disease for longer. (...) Capitalism today exhibits tendencies similar to those that caused the demise of Stalinist state capitalism. As for Chinese state capitalism, marked by Stalinist backwardness despite the hybridisation of its economy with the private sector, and riddled with numerous tensions within the ruling class, the hardening of the state apparatus is a sign of weakness and a promise of future instability.”

2.3. The impasse of overproduction is becoming increasingly relentless

“The picture presented by the capitalist system confirms Rosa Luxemburg's predictions: capitalism will not experience a purely economic collapse but will sink into chaos and convulsions:

• “the almost complete absence of extra-capitalist markets is now changing the conditions under which the main capitalist states must achieve expanded accumulation: increasingly, this can only be achieved, as a condition of their own survival, to the direct detriment of rivals of the same rank, by weakening their economies. The ICC's prediction in the 1970s of a capitalist world that can only survive by reducing itself to a small number of powers still capable of achieving a minimum level of accumulation is increasingly coming true. – As an expression of this impasse, due in particular to the growing weight of unproductive military spending, inflation will remain a permanent disruptive factor for economic stability.”;
• for these reasons, the entire capitalist system remains highly exposed to the occurrence of large-scale financial crises and currency destabilisation.

The level of overproduction combined with the anarchy inherent in capitalist production, as well as the repercussions of imperialist conflicts and the increasing destruction of ecosystems, are profoundly destabilising capitalist production and increasingly exposing society to risk. The occurrence of shocks that jeopardise the ability to continue production, leading to shortages and supply chain disruptions, bring incalculable social and economic consequences. Further, as is already the case for certain commodities in some areas – agriculture, pharmaceuticals and other segments of production – it is becoming apparent that the deepening of decomposition means the cessation of the production of such commodities because their continuance is not sufficiently profitable. Thus, overproduction and the resulting difficulty in accumulating wealth paradoxically lead to shortages.

Overproduction is also evident in the serious crisis in the agricultural sector, which has given rise to peasant revolts worldwide, including in the central countries. Weighed down by the crisis (rising energy and input costs), which has been exacerbated in Europe by the historic decline in production due to the climate and the historic increase in epizootic diseases leading to mass slaughter of livestock, many farms are doomed to disappear (e.g. in France, where 84,000 full-time equivalent jobs are expected to be lost by 2050 and 200,000 farms – half of the total! – are expected to disappear). In response, governments (particularly in the EU) are pushing for increased industrialisation of animal and plant production, accompanied by the abandonment of any ‘green’ objectives. This intensification of agricultural productivism, which global capitalism is rushing headlong into (and which is a major cause of environmental destruction), encourages the development of zoonoses, such as the one incubating in the United States, which could potentially have consequences similar to those of the Spanish flu of 1918.

Finally, the introduction of AI into production is an attempt by capitalism to increase global GDP growth and reverse the general decline in labour productivity over the last two decades: "Automation will affect a growing proportion of the workforce. Over the past two decades, it has mainly replaced medium-skilled occupations such as machine operators, metalworkers and clerical workers. Automation will now affect high-income occupations such as doctors, lawyers, engineers and university professors. Although new jobs will be created, there will be a mismatch between the jobs lost and the newly created jobs. This mismatch could prolong the period of unemployment for many workers...”[12] “Automation could eliminate 9% of existing jobs and radically change about a third of them over the next 15 to 20 years.”.[13] Forty per cent of hours worked could disappear in central countries. This “fourth industrial revolution”, yet another attempt to temporarily escape the contradictions of overproduction, reduces the size of the solvent market, while the rise in the organic composition of capital, which corresponds to its generalisation, calls for even greater accumulation. Ultimately, AI can only further reinforce the impasse.

Furthermore, the rise of AI, which consumes large amounts of water to cool infrastructure sometimes located in arid areas (!) and electricity (consumption will increase tenfold in the United States by 2026), has enormous environmental repercussions. It stimulates the consumption of fossil fuels, as in the case of the United States, which plans to increase drilling by 18%, or China, where it depends on coal. AI is also expected to cause shortages in certain regions of the United States!

The capitalist economy is therefore increasingly marked by uncertainty, destabilisation and chaos, the fragility and weakening of the system, and the endless growth of its crisis. The disappearance of international coordination to deal with the crisis and the retreat into national isolation also express capitalism's inability to produce new engines capable of reviving the global economy, whereas the United States in the 1980s and China after 2008 were still able to play this role. Due to the general weakening of the capitalist system, all states are sinking into crisis: the absence of sufficient extra-capitalist markets is now changing the conditions under which the main capitalist states must achieve expanded accumulation: increasingly, this can only be achieved, as a condition of their own survival, at the direct expense of rivals of the same rank by weakening their economies.

ICC

 

While the economies of the major European countries are in recession or witnessing modest growth, the Spanish economy is performing well with a 3.2% growth of GDP in 2024. Where Belgium, Britain and France have announced drastic austerity plans and cuts to social welfare, the ‘liberal’ Spanish government claims that it is “improving people's lives”. Where Paris, London, Berlin, etc., are openly talking about increasing military spending, President Sánchez appears to ‘resist’ these increases. While most European governments are taking unashamed measures to restrict the arrival of immigrants, the Spanish government appears to be a ‘bulwark’ against xenophobia and populism. So, is this radical image of the left-wing Spanish government justified? Absolutely not.

If other states, just as supportive of war and capitalist exploitation as Spain, are willing to perpetuate this myth of the ‘new Spanish miracle’, it is because they seek to perpetuate the misconception that a ‘prosperous’ capitalism is possible and that it is possible to stop war or the rise of populism with left-wing governments such as the one led by Sánchez.

Have working class living standards improved?

The official statistics contradict this claim. Since 2008, the purchasing power of wages has fallen, eroded by rising prices, particularly housing costs, which have seen a sharp increase, leading to overcrowding and insecurity for working-class families. What is growing is what is known as “working poverty”, i.e. increased numbers of working-class families who, even though in work, cannot afford basic necessities.[1]

The reduction in unemployment, so touted by the government and its trade union and left-wing partners, is in reality a replacement of stable employment with part-time, temporary or “fixed term” jobs[2], where workers' lives are at the mercy of commercial developments or the whims of the employer. Now we hear talk of a new “social breakthrough” with the hypothetical reduction to the working day, when in reality the proportion of employees working unpaid overtime is even higher today than before the 2019 labour reform.

The government boasts of economic growth that is in reality based largely on speculative investments (in the property sector), a dependency on tourism (which accounts for 13% of GDP) and the profits arising from the extreme exploitation of workers, mainly those with immigrant origins.

A government for peace?

As a left-wing government, Sánchez's administration tends to hide its commitment to exploitation and war behind “national solidarity” and pacifist pretentions. This was the case at the recent NATO summit, where the president ‘stood apart’ from other leaders, seemingly dissociating himself from the frantic race to war and the increase in military budgets. But the truth is that, a few months earlier, this ‘progressive’ government had agreed to increasing its military expenditure by 2.5% of GDP (nearly 41 billion euros), further increased with a Plan for Industrial Defence (an additional10 billion euros) and a commitment to invest an additional 34 billion euros in future years.[3] A few weeks later, Pedro Sánchez personally announced a plan to increase military manpower from 116,000 to 140,000 over the next eight years.

With sickening cynicism, Sira Rego, Minister of Youth and member of the most left-wing party, SUMAR, said: “It would be contradictory to have to choose between developing a social programme and military spending, and to see hospitals and schools closing, and to see the future of our generation threatened by the accumulated production of weapons”. But that is exactly what they are doing with a freeze on aid to people dependent on it and by encouraging workers to take out private health insurance owing to the decline of the public health system. They are also making a lot of teachers redundant and teachers in Catalonia, the Basque Country, Asturias, Madrid, etc. have been actively demonstrating their opposition to these attacks.

A government in favour of migrant workers?

Another characteristic of the propaganda of the left-wing parties of capital is to exaggerate the atrocities of the right wing in order to cover up their own record. This has happened recently, for example, in the United States,[4] as well as in the events in Torre Pacheco in Spain, when the ‘Socialist’ government of Sánchez and its leftist supporters tried to present themselves as being the more 'liberal' by denouncing the xenophobic and racist behaviour of far-right gangs. While the ‘progressive’ government claims to be on the side of the workers, it's only to exploit them better. It tells them to take credit for the ‘prosperity’ in Spain. And how they should take credit! A recent study revealed that migrant workers in Spain earn 30% less than workers with Spanish nationality.[5] With all her hypocrisy, Minister Pilar Alegría said, regarding the attacks on the migrant population in Torre Pacheco: “Our country has nothing to do with these violent individuals who mistreat people under the pretext of defending Spain”. And this comes from the spokesperson of a government that is responsible for the Melilla barrier massacre and that negotiates with the governments of Morocco, Mauritania, etc., over the crackdown on those trying to escape wars and chao

The left-wing government states that ‘the people’ want it to resist change in order to defend the “social benefits won over decades”. This is a lie hiding the fact that no matter which government is in charge, the only future that global capitalism can offer humanity is that of increasing wars and poverty. The only way to avoid this grim fate is by the working class, mobilising and uniting as a class in its struggle against all factions of the exploiting class. They want us to believe that within the various factions of the ruling class there are some that are ‘more beneficial to workers’ or that they offer a ‘more humane’ form of capitalism. This is the worst kind of deception, used to disarm us in the face of growing barbarism.

Valerio (1 August, 2025)