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

 

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

 

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