For the working class, a class whose consciousness is a vitally important weapon[1], learning from its own experience is of immense importance. Every time it reacts on its own terrain, on a broad scale, united and in solidarity and above all with a revolutionary impetus, it gives rise to important lessons for the future, lessons the class must understand and make use of in future struggles.

This was the case with the Paris Commune of 1871, after which Marx and Engels realised that the working class, in seizing power, could not use the bourgeois state to transform society towards communism. It had to destroy this state and construct a new way of organising society, with elected officials, instantly revocable.

This was also the case with the revolution in Russia in 1905, this year being its 120th anniversary. In this case, there was an even more valuable lesson learnt with the emergence of the mass strike and the creation of its organs of power: the workers' councils (soviets in Russian), which Lenin described as the “finally discovered form of the dictatorship of the proletariat”.

It is to this experience that we want to devote this article, to see how it can help us to understand the current dynamic of class struggle, which the ICC has described as a historic ‘rupture’ with that of the past decades.

January 1905

Before looking at the dynamics of the Russian Revolution of 1905, we need to briefly recall the international and historical context in which this revolution gained momentum. The last decades of the 19th century were characterised by the economic development that was clearly evident throughout Europe. It was against this backdrop that Tsarist Russia, a country whose economy was still marked by considerable backwardness, became the ideal location for the export of large amounts of capital to set up medium and large-scale industries. In the space of a few decades, the economy underwent a profound transformation. In Russia at the end of the 19th century, the growth of capitalism led to a high concentration of Russian workers located in a few large industrial regions. This greatly fostered the search for solidarity and the spreading of its struggle. It was these structural features of the economy which explained the revolutionary vitality of a young proletariat immersed in a deeply backward country where the peasant economy was predominant.

In January 1905, two workers at the Putilov factories in Petersburg were sacked. A wave of solidarity strikes was launched, and a petition for political freedoms, the right to education, the 8-hour day, opposition to taxes, etc., was drawn up to be taken to the Tsar in a mass demonstration. "Thousands of workers - not Social-Democrats, but loyal God-fearing subjects - led by the priest Gapon, streamed from all parts of the capital to its centre, to the square in front of the Winter Palace, to submit a petition to the tsar. The workers carried icons. In a letter to the Tsar, their then leader, Gapon, had guaranteed his personal safety and asked him to appear before the people."[2]

It all came to a head when, on arriving at the Winter Palace with their request to the Tsar, the workers were attacked by the troops who "attacked the crowd with drawn swords. They fired on the unarmed workers, who on their bended knees implored the Cossacks to allow them to go to the Tsar. Over one thousand were killed and over two thousand wounded on that day, according to police reports. The indignation of the workers was indescribable.”[3]

It was this profound indignation of the workers of Petersburg towards the man they called ‘Little Father’, who had responded to their plea with deadly weapons, that gave rise the revolutionary struggles of January. A very rapid change of mood of the proletariat occurred in this period: "A tremendous wave of strikes swept the country from end to end, convulsing the entire body of the nation […] The movement involved something like a million men and women. For almost two months, without any plan, in many cases without advancing any claims, stopping and starting, obedient only to the instinct of solidarity, the strike ruled the land.”[4]

This act of going on strike without any specific demands and in broad solidarity, was both an expression of and an active factor in the maturation, within the Russan proletariat of the time, of the consciousness of being a class and of the need as such to confront its class enemy. The January general strike was followed by a period of continuing struggles for economic demands that came and went across the country. This period was less spectacular but just as important. Bloody clashes broke out in Warsaw, barricades were erected in Lodz and the sailors of the battleship Potemkin in the Black Sea mutinied. This whole period paved the way for the second major period of the revolution.

October 1905

"This second great action of the proletariat already bears a character essentially different from that of the first one in January. The element of political consciousness already plays a much bigger role. Here also, to be sure, the immediate occasion for the outbreak of the mass strike was a subordinate and apparently accidental thing: the conflict of the railwaymen with the management over the pension fund. But the general rising of the industrial proletariat which followed upon it was conducted in accordance with clear political ideas. The prologue of the January strike was a procession to the Tsar to ask for political freedom: the watchword of the October strike ran away with the constitutional comedy of Tsarism! And thanks to the immediate success of the general strike, to the Tsar’s manifesto of October 30, the movement does not flow back on itself, as in January but rushes over outwardly in the eager activity of newly acquired political freedom. Demonstrations, meetings, a young press, public discussions".[5]

A qualitative change occurred in October with the formation of the Petersburg Soviet, which was to become a landmark in the history of the international workers' movement. Following the extension of the typographers' strike to the railways and telegraphs, the workers took the decision in a general assembly to form the Soviet which was to become the nerve centre of the revolution: “The Soviet came into being as a response to an objective need - a need born of the course of events. It was an organisation which was authoritative and yet had no traditions; which could immediately involve a scattered mass of hundreds of thousands of people”.[6]

December 1905

"The fermentation after the brief constitutional period and the gruesome awakening finally leads in December to the outbreak of the third general mass strike throughout the empire. This time its course and its outcome are altogether different from those in the two earlier cases. Political action does not change into economic action as in January, but it no longer achieves a rapid victory as in October. The attempts of the Tsarist camarilla with real political freedom are no longer made, and revolutionary action therewith, for the first time, and along its whole length, knocked against the strong wall of the physical violence of absolutism".[7]

The capitalist bourgeoisie, frightened by the movement of the proletariat, lined up behind the Tsar. The government did not apply the liberal laws it had just granted. The leaders of the Petrograd Soviet were arrested but the struggle continued in Moscow: "The climax of the 1905 Revolution came in the December uprising in Moscow. For nine days a small number of rebels, of organised and armed workers - there were not more than eight thousand - fought against the Tsar’s government, which dared not trust the Moscow garrison. In fact, it had to keep it locked up, and was able to quell the rebellion only by bringing in the Semenovsky Regiment from St. Petersburg.”[8]

So what was the dynamic at work in 1905? That of the mass strike, of that “ocean of phenomena” (Luxemburg) made up of strikes, demonstrations, solidarity, discussions, economic and political demands, in a word all the expressions that characterise the struggle of the working class, manifesting themselves at the same time as the product of a maturation of the consciousness of the workers, a maturation that took place during the events themselves, but also, and above all, the fruit of a subterranean maturation, of an accumulation of experiences and of a deep reflection that at a certain moment became very pertinent. In fact, the events of 1905 did not come out of nowhere, but were the product of the accumulation of a succession of experiences and reflections that had shaken Russia since the end of the nineteenth century. As Rosa Luxemburg stated, "The January mass strike was without doubt carried through under the immediate influence of the gigantic general strike, which in December 1904 broke out in the Caucasus, in Baku, and for a long time kept the whole of Russia in suspense. The events of December in Baku were on their part only the last and powerful ramification of those tremendous mass strikes which, like a periodic earthquake, shook the whole of south Russia, and whose prologue was the mass strike in Batum in the Caucasus in March 1902. This first mass strike movement in the continuous series of present revolutionary eruptions is finally separated by five or six years from the great general strike of the textile workers in St. Petersburg in 1896 and 1897.

The “rupture”, a product of subterranean maturation

This concept of the subterranean maturation of consciousness is found difficult to accept by a large proportion of groups in the proletarian political milieu, but also by a certain number of our contacts or sympathisers. Yet it has its roots in the writings of Marx[9], while Luxemburg referred to the “old mole”, and Lenin did so too,[10] While Trotsky, does not use quite the same vocabulary as the ICC to describe the phenomenon of ‘subterranean maturation’ of consciousness within the proletariat, he makes this very clear in his History of the Russian Revolution and the following passage illustrates this perfectly: "The immediate causes of the events of a revolution are changes in the state-of-mind of the conflicting classes. […]Changes in the collective consciousness have naturally a semi-concealed character. Only when they have attained a certain degree of intensity do the new moods and ideas break to the surface in the form of mass activities".

But, above all, the essence of the processes of subterranean maturation is confirmed in all the important moments in the struggle of the working class. We saw it in 1905, we saw it again in 1917 in Russia, where the October revolution was preceded by strikes against the war, and we have also seen it at work at historic moments closer to home. It was evident in 1980 in Poland with the strike movement that saw “the re-emergance” of the mass strike on the historical stage. The Polish workers had already taken part in important periods of struggle in 1970 and 1976, struggles that had suffered a brutal and bloody repression at the hands of the Stalinist regime. So, armed with these experiences, which contributed to a real subterranean maturation of consciousness, the workers were able in 1980 to launch themselves into a powerful and immediate struggle, whose organisational links and co-ordinating groups across the country provided the basis for the mass strike. Faced with this situation, the authorities were paralysed and were forced to negotiate and grant concessions before then responding with repression when the struggle had subsided.[11]

It is in the tradition of all these experiences of the workers' movement that we interpreted the strikes in Britain in 2022 as the result of a new maturation of class consciousness, not as a random flash in the pan, but as the product of a deep reflection that we see continuing with the return of working class struggle after decades of apathy and lethargy. We have referred to these movements as a ‘rupture’ to emphasise this as a phenomenon of historical and international significance. The major struggles that followed this first manifestation and resurgence of workers' combativity, in France, the United States, elsewhere in the world and most recently in Belgium, confirm that the strikes in Britain were not a local and passing phenomenon but the result of this subterranean maturation that was finally coming to the surface. The various characteristics of the movements that have taken place over the last three years provide confirmation of our analysis:

- The widespread slogan “enough is enough” expressed the long-held feeling that all the promises made in the aftermath of the 2008 ‘financial crisis’ had turned out to be lies and that it was high time workers started making their own demands;

- The slogans ‘we're all in the same boat’ and ‘the working class is back’ expressed a tendency in the working class (still embryonic but real) to rediscover the feeling of being a class with its own collective existence and distinct interests, despite decades of atomisation inflicted by the generalised decomposition of capitalist society and aided by the deliberate  destruction of many traditional industrial sites that employed an experienced working class (mines, steel, etc.).

- In the French movement against the raising of pensionable age to 64, the powerful slogan “you say 64, we give you 68”expressed the reigniting of a collective memory, the memory of the importance of the mass strikes of 1968.

- The international development of minorities tending towards internationalist and communist positions where the majority of these elements and their efforts to unite are less the product of the immediate class struggle and more about raising questions about war, which is proof that the current class movements express something more than just immediate concerns about falling living standards. They express, often in a still confused way, concern about the future offered to us by this system of production, capitalism.

- Finally, further evidence that there is a process of maturation is reflected in the efforts of the bourgeoisie to impose its leadership and sew confusion within the working class through the unions and leftist organisations.  By conveying radical messages to the working class, it aims to subvert its thinking and strengthen its own control.

We are only at the very beginning of this renewal of combativity, of the resumption of the struggles of the class on its own terrain, of an accumulation of new experiences which could lead the class into radicalising its struggles to the point of giving them a more political character, that would call into question the system as such and not just the extent of its attacks and their immediate effects.

This will be a long, difficult process, full of obstacles, because we are no longer in the same situation as 1905 in Russia, when in the space of a year the class could go from a simple petition to the Tsar to an openly insurrectionary phase. The present situation is that of the decomposition of capitalism, the final historical phase of capitalism which is demonstrated not only in the putrefaction of the whole political life of the bourgeoisie, but which also weighs on the working class through phenomena whose effects are ideologically exploited by the ruling class to severely and insidiously undermine workers' consciousness:

“- solidarity and collective action are faced with the atomisation of ‘look out for number one’;

- the need for organisation confronts social decomposition, the disintegration of the relationships which form the basis for all social life;

- the proletariat’s confidence in the future and in its own strength is constantly sapped by the all-pervasive despair and nihilism within society;

- consciousness, lucidity, coherent and unified thought, the taste for theory, have a hard time making headway in the midst of the flight into illusions, drugs, sects, mysticism, the rejection or destruction of thought which are characteristic of our epoch.”[12]

So, we must not be impatient, expecting a confirmation of this process at every moment. Revolutionaries have to intervene inside the class with clarity by taking a long-term view of the struggle and above all in helping minorities to understand what are the stakes of the situation and the alternative and inevitable consequences: either the bourgeoisie's threat to humanity's survival or the possibility for the working class to impose its perspective, that of a society without classes, without exploitation, without war, without the destruction of the planet, in short, a truly communist society.

Helis, 22 June 2025

Since 6 June, the Trump administration has decided to dramatically intensify the anti-migrant policy of the US bourgeoisie by organising real manhunts against undocumented immigrants, concentrated in particular in California in the region of Los Angeles, the country's second largest city, where many workers of Latin American origin live.

The migrant raids: an attack on the entire working class

As we pointed out in a leaflet written by a sympathiser close to the ICC[1], this provocation, carried out with extreme brutality, is an attack on the entire proletariat. It is our class brothers and sisters, most of the time exploited in difficult conditions, that the police hunt down and suppress. These raids by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to hunt down, arrest, detain and expel migrants by military force, picking them up at their place of work (building sites, factories, shops, etc.) were very reminiscent of the round-ups of people of Jewish or Gypsy origin in Europe during the Second World War, in order to deport them.

This provoked reactions of solidarity, indignation and disgust in a large part of the population, but more particularly among the exploited who mobilised, including spontaneously, and sometimes succeeded in preventing arrests, as at Paramount in the working class suburbs of Los Angeles.

Mobilising as citizens reduces us to impotence

But these initial reflexes of solidarity were immediately exploited and used by the bourgeoisie, as happened in 2020 after the Minneapolis police murder of George Floyd. Then, the bourgeoisie totally hijacked these stirrings of solidarity and funnelled them behind protest marches led by the anti-racist Black Lives Matter movement to demand more justice and equality, or even the abolition of the police... pleas to the capitalist state, spearhead of exploitation and the defence of the bourgeois order!

In the same way today, the ‘defence committees’ (those of the Los Angeles Rapid Response Network, in particular), made up of trade unions and several organisations and associations of the left of capital, were immediately able to channel the attempts to respond on the rotten terrain of ‘defence of the rule of law’, ‘citizen solidarity’, ‘anti-Trumpism’... in other words the same democratic mystifications which inevitably lead to disarming the proletariat, defusing its struggles, by making people believe that it would be possible to make capitalism more just and human. Nowhere were the mobilisations expressed in defence of the interests of the working class, unlike, for example, what happened in 1917 in Russia when the violent repression of demonstrations on International Women's Day had been the starting point for the extension of strike movements which served as the detonator for the revolutionary wave. Similarly, in February 1941, in the middle of the war, when conditions were extremely difficult, workers in Amsterdam went on strike against the deportation of Jews. Between 22 March and 13 May 1968, the ferocious repression of students also mobilised the working class, driven by instinctive impulses of solidarity.

Today, on the other hand, since the proletariat is not yet capable of responding to repression on its class terrain, the bourgeoisie can easily lead it into an impasse and reduce it to impotence. It was not as a class that the proletarians of Los Angeles mobilised, but as indignant individuals, and even as citizens. In this context, it was impossible for the workers involved in these mobilisations to extend the struggle to the proletariat as a whole in order to build up a real class balance of power against the repression.

This can only lead to a climate of terror, exacerbating tensions between communities and fuelling divisions between proletarians by encouraging the emergence of impotent popular riots, like the numerous race riots in the United States in the past, and like those in California in 1992 after the acquittal of the police officers responsible for the violence inflicted on taxi driver Rodney King the previous year. All that ensued were either hopeless clashes and confrontations with the police and totally pointless traffic blockades, or desperate actions, scenes of looting, vandalism or car fires... In short, mosquito bites on the thick leather hide of the bourgeoisie which justified a huge deployment of the repressive apparatus to maintain public order. It is precisely this ‘maintenance of law and order’ that has now been used by the government as a pretext to call in the army, sending in more than 4,000 reservists from the national guard and 700 marines, particularly feared and rightly described in the past as ‘dogs of war’ trained to kill and to cordon off the city.

The trap of democratic campaigns set by the bourgeoisie

This climate has also left the way open for a fraction of the Democratic Party apparatus to distort these elementary reactions of solidarity and drag workers into a vast ideological campaign on the totally rotten terrain of the defence of bourgeois democracy and the rights of ‘citizens’, of respect for the laws and the American Constitution. This is what has been put forward in particular by the Governor of California, Gavin Newsom, who is already presenting himself as a potential candidate for the next presidential election by multiple declarations of opposition to Trump's policies, accusing the latter of ‘abuse of power’, of having carried out ‘illegal kidnappings’ without the approval of local authorities, of having ‘taken a turn towards authoritarianism’, of ‘behaving like a tyrant’ in order to ‘realise the crazy fantasy of a dictatorial president’, adding that ‘his behaviour threatens the very foundation of our democracy’[2]. The Democratic mayor of Los Angeles, Karen Bass, is not to be outdone in this hypocritical torrent of invective[3]. In addition, the California Attorney General has declared that he has initiated impeachment proceedings against Trump in the courts for ‘violating’ the US Constitution. This anti-Trump campaign has spread very quickly across the country, particularly to other major cities: San Francisco and Santa Ana in California, Dallas and Austin in Texas, but also Chicago, Minneapolis, Atlanta, Boston, New York, etc.

At the same time, this high-profile campaign in defence of democracy has given fresh impetus to anti-populist propaganda, a variant on the false opposition between fascism and anti-fascism[4], already put forward by the most ‘radical’ fringes of the Democratic Party behind Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and by the "Hands Off! movement a few months ago. This assimilation is also based on protests against Trump's ‘dictatorial’ methods in the United States, which have been widely relayed by extensive anti-Trump propaganda at international level. In reality, it corresponds to a gigantic ideological intoxication by designating Trump as the person responsible for all the ills, the better to exonerate capitalism and hinder the development of an awareness of the irremediable bankruptcy of an exploitative system in full putrefaction, of which populism and Trump are only a caricatured expression.

However, on the face of it, this ideological campaign has a certain credibility because there is a real mobilisation of certain American bourgeois factions against Trump's policy and they are worried about it for two essential reasons:

- on the one hand, these factions are aware of the dangers of this policy, which only generates more chaos, weakening the credibility and tarnishing the image of the United States internationally and, domestically, accentuating social divisions, even risking in the long term the creation of a climate of civil war;

- on the other hand, they are convinced (and rightly so) that this openly xenophobic policy will have catastrophic repercussions for the American economy by depriving it of a cheap labour force which, until now, has kept many companies and sectors afloat and the national economy growing. Employers in several sectors of the economy have expressed their concern about these raids. Trump himself finally acknowledged that his immigration policies were hurting farmers, hotels and restaurants. Shortly afterwards, he temporarily suspended the raids on these businesses.

Trump has continued to fan the flames of this campaign by going further and further into security overkill, threatening to intervene in other parts of the country, particularly in Chicago with the army, and to use the same means as in Los Angeles. It is also threatening to use the Insurrection Act, i.e. to introduce a state of emergency while going even further in its persecution of migrants.

At the same time, anti-migrant measures are tending to spread to populist-dominated parts of the country. The governor of Texas has declared a curfew. In addition, the conservative-dominated Supreme Court has just legalised the government's request to deport them to third countries. Against this backdrop, an uncontrolled escalation of tensions cannot be ruled out, as the situation is becoming increasingly unpredictable and irrational.

Boundless hypocrisy on the part of the bourgeoisie

The hypocrisy and cynicism of the ruling class can be seen everywhere:

- in the United States, where Trump's anti-migrant policy is simply following in the footsteps of his Democratic predecessors in government: it was under the Obama administration that measures to deport undocumented workers reached record levels and it was the Biden administration that served as a model for the brutality of the methods of repression, particularly in 2021 during the ferocious charges by mounted border guards and police on the approaches to the border with Mexico;

- in the rest of the world, particularly in Europe, which growing masses of refugees are seeking to reach by any means necessary. They are found in distress in the Mediterranean trying desperately to escape poverty and war in both Africa and the Middle East. Once again, it is in the name of respect for the law and the European Union's Schengen area agreements that these abominations are practised, regardless of the government in power: in Italy, Meloni has tightened anti-migrant legislation (increasing the number of detention centres, abolishing protection for asylum seekers, transferring them to Albania, encouraging them to sign contracts to return to their country of origin, etc.). In France, Macron, who is trying to present himself in the international arena as a champion of democratic rights, is at the same time putting his Interior Minister Retailleau in charge of the dirty work with methods that Trump would envy: in mid-June, for example, he mobilised more than 4,000 men (gendarmes, police, customs officers, the armed force known as ‘Sentinelle’) for a vast operation to control ‘illegal immigration’ in the name of ‘zero tolerance’ at the Gare du Nord in Paris and almost simultaneously at 450 other sites, while congratulating himself on having arrested and sent back more than 47,000 ‘illegal immigrants’ since the beginning of 2025. Similar operations have been launched in Germany. In Spain, under the respectable veneer of a ‘regularisation policy’ of Pedro Sanchez's social-democrat government, acts of barbarism are regularly recorded: for example, the bodies of migrants were recently discovered tied hand and foot off the Balearic Islands.

Nor has the bourgeoisie failed to use the fractions of migrants most susceptible to the poison of nationalism. For example, during the protests against Trump's anti-migrant policy, the media complacently and widely broadcast images of Mexican flags being waved by some demonstrators.

All these elements only confirm the trap set everywhere for the working class to lead it away from a response and a struggle on its own terrain by using its weaknesses and illusions to draw it into a false choice between impotent and desperate popular riots or rallying to the bourgeoisie's democratic campaigns.

The proletariat must firmly reject the xenophobic calls to violence by MAGA and others, as well as the appeals of other factions of the bourgeoisie to defend democracy on pain of being subjected to the yoke of the dictatorship of capital, which can only lead to ever greater misery and barbarism.

No illusions! Defending the interests of the working class means categorically refusing to give in to the siren songs of the bourgeoisie and its defence of democracy, which tries to mask the hideous face of the dictatorship of capitalism as well as the stench of its own rotting on its feet!

Despite the obstacles, the future belongs to the class struggle!

Despite all their weaknesses and difficulties, particularly in the United States, and despite all the obstacles and traps laid by their class enemy, the working class has demonstrated in recent years its ability to react to the constant and ever-increasing attacks of the bourgeoisie. It has thus shown that there is another pole in the evolution of the present situation, a pole opposed to the descent into misery, barbaric warfare and annihilation towards which this dying system is inexorably heading. In the bowels of society, the same cry of anger, ‘Enough is enough’, is ripening, and is being expressed openly in the workers' struggles, in a way that is still confused and contradictory, but which is proclaiming everywhere: "We will no longer accept to passively suffer the attacks and the accelerated deterioration in our living and working conditions that are inflicted on us every day!"[5]

This is what happened in the United States in the autumn of 2023 during the almost simultaneous strikes at the three major car manufacturers, and later at Boeing, against redundancy programmes and austerity.[6] But just as significantly, in the midst of the American election campaign at the end of 2024, workers were able to mobilise on their own class terrain, as in the hotel sector or during the strike by almost 50,000 dockers which lasted several days before the Biden administration put an end to it by rushing into negotiations. Over the last few months, in the ‘Trump 2’ era, when attacks and massive budget cuts have intensified, workers have shown their fighting spirit intact, particularly in the health sector: In January, more than 5,000 nurses, midwives and doctors called a 46-day strike in the Providence network in Oregon (the longest ever in the state's health sector); in February, it was the turn of nurses at the University Medical Centre in New Orleans to lead a 48-hour strike, followed by 800 others in Pennsylvania, which lasted 5 days. In March, California became one of the main hotbeds of social unrest: employees of the Santa Clara Valley transport company went on strike for 17 days, interrupted only by a court ruling, and shortly afterwards public hospital workers in the same region went on strike for 4 days. At the end of April, more than 50,000 workers in the Los Angeles district went on strike, covering several sectors (health, social services, cleaning and security staff, laboratory assistants, etc.) to protest against the new employment contract imposed on them.

This clearly shows that the rise in anger and the break with passivity at an international level that we have repeatedly emphasised since 2022, with the underlying change of mindset within the proletariat, are not a flash in the pan and are continuing. These struggles can only develop in the face of the crushing blows of the crisis and the attacks that capitalism has in store everywhere in the future.

It should also be clear from this situation that in the United States, as elsewhere, strikes and struggles against the effects of the crisis are the most favourable terrain for the development of class struggle and class consciousness. In this context and with this perspective of the future, which is still distant, where the class will have further developed its collective strength and recovered its class identity as well as its capacity to politicise its struggles, there is no doubt that it will also be able to respond to the repression of migrants directly on its own class terrain of mobilisation.

 

Wim, 26 June 2025

[1] Against Trump’s xenophobic assaults on the working class and the cries to “defend democracy” [4], ICConline, June 2025

On 12 June, Israel launched a massive bombing raid on Iran, which immediately retaliated. Thousands of missiles, rockets and drones lit up the sky. Underneath, homes and hospitals were destroyed. The international press spoke of an extremely serious situation that could plunge the Middle East into chaos.

During the night of 21 June, the United States entered the conflict, dropping 13-tonne penetrating bombs to destroy Iranian nuclear sites. Such powerful weapons had not been used since the Second World War.

It is in this situation of escalating war and barbarism that our organisation decided to organise an international online public meeting. While the aim of this gathering is obviously to discuss, analyse and understand the situation, there is something even more important: to bring together revolutionary forces, isolated from each other in many countries, to assert together the proletarian voice of internationalism.

In this sense, we can say from the outset that this international public meeting was a real success. Organised in just a few days, many comrades responded to the call, denounced the imperialist nature of all sides and all nations involved in the conflict, and forcefully defended the idea that the only future for humanity is the solidarity and unity of workers across borders, racial divisions and religions.

Our only regret is the absence - with the exception of Internationalist Voice - of other revolutionary groups of the Communist Left, whom we had warmly invited. 1 [8]

An extremely serious world situation

All participants affirmed that the current accumulation of wars is the product of the capitalist system and imperialist rivalries between powers, large and small. As one comrade pointed out: “Pandora's box was opened in 1914”. But how can we explain the current rise in tensions? Why are wars beginning to spread again and threaten ever larger regions of the planet? Why is arms production exploding everywhere?

Many comrades highlighted the growing polarisation between the US and China:

– “This is a global struggle between two great powers: China and the United States.”

– “The United States is refocusing its imperialist attention on China, and this has been very clear since the AUKUS agreements with Australia, in particular.”

Other contributions also highlighted the pursuit of economic interests:

– “This conflict is fundamentally linked to trade routes and economic gateways.”

– “These powers are fighting for economic control, trade routes and technological superiority.”

Other speakers emphasised what they saw as the rational and political vision of the bourgeoisie: “[wars] are political tools of the ruling class, used to delay revolutionary movements, exploit societies and guarantee capitalist interests.”

Other comrades, on the contrary, highlighted that the root of the current dynamic was the development of growing chaos. One speaker emphasised this point, pointing to the reality of “fragmentation” and “every man for himself”’, highlighting “the fluctuations in Trump's politics, which reflect the struggles within the bourgeoisie”. We fully agree with this response that emerged in the debate. The dynamic of the discussion then made it possible to begin to address the question behind the whole current global dynamic: are we facing the formation of two new imperialist blocs, as during the First World War, the Second World War and the Cold War? In other words, are we heading towards the Third World War? This question is important because such a global conflagration, given the capacity for annihilation of so many powers, would be synonymous with a widespread nuclear holocaust and therefore the end of humanity. The majority response in the debate was NO! One comrade stated very clearly: “We are not heading towards blocs like in the First and Second World Wars, but towards fragmentation, as we are seeing in Ukraine, Africa and the Middle East.” Another added: “As for blocs, I don't see them forming. It's interesting to see the extent to which Netanyahu is acting on his own initiative: it will be interesting to know whether the ICC thinks that the United States is using Israel as an attack dog or whether it is rather a case of Netanyahu following an ‘every man for himself’ policy”. 2 [9]

To fully grasp the significance of the dynamics of chaos, we must start from the historical phase of capitalism: decomposition. It was at the end of this discussion that the ICC intervened to defend this idea, which we believe is essential: "From 1945 to 1990, the world was structured into two blocs with two superpowers [...] In 1989, with the collapse of the USSR, one might have thought that the United States would emerge as the great victor and dominator, but the American bourgeoisie immediately understood the difficulties that would arise. There was the great speech by Bush Senior emphasising the need for a ‘new world order’ and there was the demonstration of military force in the Gulf. […] Why this demonstration? The American bourgeoisie told the world, and in particular its allies, ‘you owe us obedience, we have overwhelming military force’. In the immediate term, the first Gulf War was a huge military victory. But only two years later, Yugoslavia exploded: the former allies (France, Germany, the United States) played their own cards. […] And that blew Yugoslavia apart into four or five countries. That sums up what has been happening for 35 years now. In other words, the United States has increasingly overwhelming military power compared to all its competitors, and it is widening the gap. It invests as much each year as the rest of the world. And they are striking harder and harder. We can see this with Iran. And yet this does not calm all their opponents. On the contrary! It fuels dispersion. It fuels the desire of every imperialist to play their own card. This is the real historical dynamic that will not stop, and that is why what is happening in Iran is extremely serious and historic."

With the observation that Iran is weakening having been acknowledged by several speakers, the discussion was able to go further: "Iran is humiliated and weakened, but the mullahs remain in control. The question is one of destabilisation in the region, the importance of the working class in Iran and the ability of the mullahs to remain in power. Their lack of air power […] emboldens its neighbours."

Ultimately, this new conflict between Israel, Iran and the United States marks a qualitative step in the acceleration of chaos and warlike barbarism. For the first time since 2003, when the United States wanted to strengthen its position in the Pacific, it has once again been forced to intervene militarily, further evidence of the decline of its hegemony. The show of force through bombings, intended to impress China and (in a completely illusory manner) to impose its authority, is a clear sign of this. Furthermore, this new war involves two regional powers, one of which, Iran, is threatening to collapse. The extreme weakening of the mullahs' power is contributing to an unprecedented destabilisation of the entire Middle East and even more broadly of the whole world. 3 [10]

What should be the response of the working class?

Faced with growing barbarism and the threat of widespread war, it was clear that all participants were looking for a forum to defend proletarian internationalism. This was reflected in the following statement: “I am delighted that we are seeking a coherent proletarian internationalist line.” This search made it possible to state clearly that "internationalism is a position we defend. The working class is international, and our strategy and tactics are based on this principle.” The discussion then focused on how to implement this cardinal principle of the workers' movement, which has been stated since the Communist Manifesto of 1848, emphasising that “the proletarians have no country." The shared view was to emphasise, as one comrade put it, that “in the face of the barbarism of imperialist war, we call on the proletariat not to support one country over another. Against war, we call on workers around the world to unite and adopt a class position, not a nationalist position”. Everyone recognised that this was a demanding task, a difficult struggle in the face of intense bourgeois propaganda. The discussion continued, attempting to identify the ideological traps and obstacles set by the bourgeoisie for the working class, denouncing the democratic mystifications and false friends that are the left, the trade unions and particularly the leftists who are currently riding high: “leftism can mobilise to support for nationalism or anti-Trump demonstrations”.

In the face of all this propaganda, the discussion was a source of reflection on how the working class is fighting today and what lessons can be learned:

– The first lesson was the clear recognition that the working class “is not defeated”. This is the context in which the meeting highlighted the need to assess the reality of “a subterranean maturation of consciousness” within the proletariat and a dynamic of “rupture”’ in the face of the stagnation of recent decades. 4 [11]

– The second essential lesson is that the working class does not have the strength to oppose war in the belligerent countries where it is caught in the crossfire and the logic of revenge. Similarly, in the peripheral countries, it remains too marked by democratic mystification and the weight of nationalism. As one comrade points out: “Nationalism is a serious disease that affects the working class and Third Worldism in underdeveloped countries. Look at the illusions, for example, about Nasser, Mugabe, etc. They were brutal oppressors, not defenders of freedom. The scenes of people celebrating Hamas attacks on Israel are a disgrace to the working class.”

– The third lesson is to recognise the importance of the experience of the proletariat in Western countries, the reality of its struggles, even if these do not yet make it possible to oppose the war, let alone stop it: "Faced with the development of wars, we may want there to be a real working-class response that stops the wars. In fact, for the time being, and for a long time to come, this is not possible!"

– The fourth lesson we can draw is that despite its struggles, the weaknesses of the proletariat are still too great for it to develop its consciousness to the point of politicising its struggle. This will be a slow, difficult and very long process, fraught with obstacles and pitfalls.

– The final lesson, in the face of this difficult reality, is that the ICC has insisted on the danger of giving in to impatience. This is indeed a scourge that is the mark of the influence of petty-bourgeois ideology and a vector of opportunism within the workers' movement. As an ICC speaker put it, "Trevor [a participant] said that Marx would understand the need to avoid impatience, and that's true. In the workers' movement, the question of immediacy and impatience has been a real problem. In the Communist League, during the confrontation between Marx and the Willich-Schapper tendency, [...] Willich and Schapper said that the revolution had to be made now. Marx said that this was a dead end, that the proletariat would have to struggle for many decades to be able to confront the bourgeoisie. This was already a problem in the 19th century. Impatience is at the root of opportunism. There is a famous text by Rosa Luxemburg which explains that for many years we went from victory to victory, and then we suffered terrible defeats. Among true revolutionaries, the idea is that we cannot solve problems now. There are many disasters, massacres, barbarism: we cannot prevent that now. This idea must be present in our minds. This is a distinction from leftists: leftists say ‘now’; in 1968, the slogan was ‘revolution now’, a petty-bourgeois idea. We are working for the future, for the long term. After 1968, many disappointed young people who wanted revolution right away were lost to the struggle (there was even talk of suicide among disappointed young people). We must return and fight firmly against immediate action. The workers’ movement has existed for two centuries, we do not know when the revolution will take place, but the only way to prepare the perspective is to prevent the destruction of the potential that exists in a minority of the class; we must say that we need to be patient.”

One of the last interventions insisted that “it is very important that comrades do not become discouraged by the absence of mass strikes in the heart of Europe; it will take a long time. Today, a step forward has been taken: revolutionaries and internationalists have come together to clarify a dimension of the class struggle.” We consider that the concern and spirit expressed in this intervention are important for resistance and struggle.

To conclude this article, we reiterate our call for discussion and encourage all our comrades and readers to come and participate in our next meetings. To do so, simply keep an eye on our website, where we regularly publish the dates and locations of these debates. We also call for the distribution of our recently published leaflets on the question of war, as well as those on the class struggle (which are available on our website in PDF format).

WH, 29 June 2025

 

 

1 [12] We agree with the very accurate remarks of one of the participants: “It is regrettable that no comrades from other organisations of the Communist Left are present. It is important that organisations maintain polemics, discussions and correspondence. Only within the framework of the Communist Left will the working class be victorious.” As we have said, Internationalist Voice was an honourable exception here. See their website for their clear internationalist response to the current war in the Middle East: en.internationalistvoice.org

2 [13] We believe that these two aspects are not contradictory: Biden and then Trump had to deal with the ‘every man for himself’ logic that is inflaming the Middle East, including the Israeli government, which favours its own interests over those of its American ally. In this context, however, the United States has pursued policies that seek to maintain its grip on the situation as best it can.

3 [14] Iran is undermined by the centrifugal forces of its minorities, the Azeris in the north and the Baluchis in the south, and by its religious divisions, not to mention the border powers lying in wait, whose imperialist tensions are sharpening, as illustrated by the tensions between India and Pakistan. These are only initial reflections that will need to be pursued in further discussions in order to better understand the geopolitical context and the chaos in which the proletarian struggle will have to develop.

4 [15] See in particular International Review No. 173, “The historical roots of the ‘rupture’ in the dynamics of the class struggle since 2022 (Part I) [6]” and Part II [16] [16](April,  2025).

 

On 10 June, in Austria, a former pupil living in ‘extreme seclusion’ killed ten people and injured eleven others in a school in Graz. On the same day, a schoolboy murdered a supervisor at Nogent-sur-Marne secondary school in France. He was only 14! Both arrived with weapons: the first with a firearm, killing by shooting ‘indiscriminately’, the second with a kitchen knife in his bag, intent on stabbing someone. That someone was the 31-year-old mother who had decided to work in a secondary school to help young people, to protect them. And that's exactly what she was doing that morning, when the police were searching bags at the school entrance. In recent years, outside the United States, where the phenomenon has become almost commonplace due to the widespread possession of firearms, these horrors have also multiplied in schools and universities across Europe, in Finland, the Czech Republic, Croatia, Serbia and elsewhere.

Everywhere, the same no-future that tortures humanity

Why such acts? Sometimes it's hatred of school, of that institution of the state that sends out the image of ‘no-future’, that makes us feel good for nothing, that crushes us under the weight of despair, fear, withdrawal and humiliation. The murderers are themselves kids crushed from the inside by a violent society that really has no future, a capitalist society that is rotting away. They often can't put into words the rage that burns and consumes them, turning their distress into blind vengeance and people into cold-blooded killers. So they strike back at society: they kill as they are socially crushed, they murder a class sister or brother.

Society is fragmenting and disintegrating. Unemployment, misery, problems with housing, work and healthcare are everywhere. Everywhere, wars are multiplying. Everywhere, the planet is going haywire. Everywhere, the anguish of seeing no future. The absence of perspective is the most profound cause of stress and even profound psychological disorders. For example, in 2025 in France, 25% of teenagers will suffer from generalised anxiety disorders, 40% will have depressive symptoms and 17% will be likely to suffer from moderately severe or even severe psychological disorders[1].  And it's the same in every country in the world. Capitalism is breaking down and dragging all hope and future with it. It is the collapse of capitalism upon itself that is driving this nihilism, across all generations and in all countries.

In Sweden, the number of complaints lodged by teachers about violence against them has doubled in 10 years[2]. In the United Kingdom, dozens of teachers are assaulted by their pupils every year, one of the highest rates in Europe[3].  And stabbings are on the increase everywhere, leading to growing paranoia both inside and outside schools. In 2022, a report by the research arm of the US Department of Education predicted 93 shootings in a year, compared with 10 ten years earlier. In all four corners of the globe, the ‘epidemic’ of violence is raging, affecting younger and younger teenagers.

Everywhere the same responses

And to deal with it, the bourgeoisies are not competing in originality: hand-held cameras and self-defence courses in the United Kingdom, cameras and security gates in the United States, even arming teachers. And politicians are advocating greater judicial ‘firmness’. In France, just after these minutes of horror, Prime Minister François Bayrou proposed security gates, a stronger penal response and a ‘mental health’ plan[4].  Marine Le Pen could think of nothing more original than advocating the condemnation of parents.

Here and elsewhere, the only response that capitalism can provide to the increase in violence is ever more violence and repression. A 14-year-old is locked up without any real psychological help, parents are sentenced without any educational help, teachers are being given guns in response to shootings, and so on.

But to support a developing adult, you need human and financial resources, you need teachers and educational assistants in large numbers, you need doctors, school nurses, psychologists and psychiatrists, you need individual follow-up, you need help for families... Instead, we  see repression and, in the face of the crisis, the reduction in the number of professionals and care facilities.

Only the working class can reverse this phenomenon

These young murderers are not monsters. They are human beings who commit monstrous acts. They have been born into a sick, dying society. Their hatred and murderous intoxication are first internalised under the permanent terror of capitalist social relations, then explode in a series of despicable acts. Whether we are 14, 31 or 70 years old, we are all suffering the effects of the decomposition of capitalist society and its ravages around the world. What young people need is not surveillance cameras, punishment or law reform, but hope. And hope is to be found in the fight for a better future, first and foremost against poverty, job insecurity and the horrors that capitalism inflicts on us, and ultimately in the fight for a new society, without exploitation, crisis or war. And to fight together, across all generations and all trades, against the barbarity of the system. Only the struggle of the working class has a perspective to offer. "Workers have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win.”

Manon, 10 July 2025

 

ICC Introduction

We welcome the contribution by the comrade who attended our international online public meeting organised in response to the Israeli and US attacks on Iran. We agree with his overall assessment of the meeting and encourage others to respond to his points and make further contributions.

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Letter from Baboon

Firstly, the ICC should be saluted for organising this and other recent meetings, thus fulfilling its obligations as a revolutionary organisation to the full. The work involved in organising these international and on-line meetings is onerous, but it has been well worth the effort, particularly at this latest meeting which again involved dozens of comrades and interested parties from a number of countries. The discussion was wide-ranging and effective in looking at the questions of imperialism: the war on Iran, the Middle East more widely, the loss of control by the bourgeoisie, the question of the strengthening of centrifugal tendencies within the international situation and the position and perspectives for the working class. But there was also an overriding coherence in line with the lessons of the class struggle historically that made a strong link to the revolutionary period around the 3rd International and the important and essential clarifications made by revolutionaries at the time, clarifications that continue to underline the major lessons of internationalism and imperialism that are so important to defend today. “Internationalism brought to life” as the conclusion said of the meeting.

A comrade from outside the ICC, T, made his own important conclusion, calling the meeting part of the responsibility of the Communist Left (while noting the absence of other elements from it), calling it a “step forward” and one dimension of the class struggle. He also emphasised the undefeated nature of the working class in the present period and insisted on the necessity for revolutionary patience given the long haul that many comrades insisted upon; an essential element to which we can add, with Lenin, a sense of humour. The immediatism and opportunism of the Internationalist Communist Tendency’s scramble with its No War But The Class War is the opposite of the role of revolutionaries today.

On MH’s and Jaycee’s position on the US bourgeoisie

The position of MH is that the ICC’s position on the loss of control by the US bourgeoisie with the election of arch-populist Trump contradicts his view that the attack on Iran was “a desperate attempt to secure its (the USA’s) hegemony”; and that the ICC’s position on Trump’s irresponsibility, contradicted the fact that it was “a step towards full-blow barbarism”. But these positions can sit perfectly well with each other, i.e., they are not in opposition. Jaycee sort of supported MH’s position, adding that Trump was a TV cartoon character and tweeter. This position goes towards that of the ICT’s, which characterises the Trump element as a personality trait and generally ignores the question of the centrifugal tendencies of the bourgeoisie, the power of populism and the consequences it has for the international situation.

Trump 1 represented a loss of control by the main factions of US state capitalism but Trump was kept in check and the damage he could cause was limited. Trump 2 was an even greater loss of control, leading to Trump Unchained. The “second coming” of the populist MAGA movement to the reins of power in the highest citadel of imperialism sees the USA as the major contributor to the chaos, irrationality and barbarism across the globe and a major expression of decomposition (as populism is), adding to the “whirlwind effect”.

Trump’s (his lackeys have no say in this) contradictory and bizarre antics on the international stage show that he completely ignores his intelligence services, services which have been particularly hit by the DOGE chainsaw of Musk, weakening their links to the various committees and bodies of the State Department and the upper echelons of the political establishment.  At root this is an attack on the vital role that intelligence plays in the defence of the national interest. This is hardly the “Machiavellianism” proposed by MH elsewhere. For example, the fact that Trump’s position on the Middle East seems to be at least partially determined by Netanyahu’s special adviser, Ron Dermer, who has been ensconced in the White House recently, and who is constantly in touch with his boss.

Attacks are going to rain down on workers everywhere and not just those currently put in place by Trump. One of the main points of the meeting was that events – of the class struggle or capitalist barbarism – can’t be seen to elicit an immediate response from the working class; we’ve seen the errors of that in practice with the ICT’s NWBCW committees. While time is running out for humanity under the threats from capitalism, for the working class there is still a long way to go and there can be no doubt that it is reflecting on events and perspectives in a subterranean fashion.

Baboon, 4.7.25

 

There has been a big media furore in Britain about the rap group Bob Vylan leading a chant at the Glastonbury festival: “Death Death to the IDF”. The BBC livestreamed the event and have had to issue an apology for not cutting it off, since the slogan could be officially classified as “hate speech” or “incitement to violence”.

Revolutionaries, internationalists, aren’t concerned with the BBC’s legal issues, and we don’t doubt that the impending police “investigation” into Vylan and Kneecap’s sets is yet another expression of the increasingly repressive attitude of the British state.

But we are against the “death to the IDF” slogan because it is counter-revolutionary. It is accompanied by the waving of Palestinian flags and it can only mean that all soldiers of the Israeli army deserve death at the hands of the armed Palestinian nationalist gangs, proxies of Iranian imperialism. Contrast this to the slogans of the workers’ movement towards troops dragged into imperialist war: “turn the guns the other way”, “fraternisation”, “formation of workers’ and soldiers’ councils”. In short, turn imperialist war into proletarian revolution in both camps: the dismantling of all bourgeois armies and national states, the construction of a world without borders.

The principal problem facing proletarians in Israel and Palestine today is that over a century of mobilisation and indoctrination by both Zionism and Palestinian nationalism has made such slogans unrealisable without a major development of the class struggle on a world scale. But we can certainly denounce all those, even when they pose as socialists and revolutionaries, whose activities and slogans serve to spread the plague of nationalism. We can certainly work towards the development of a pole of internationalists willing to stand up for the real goals of the proletarian revolution. Such a stance means intransigent opposition to all states or factions engaged in the current imperialist war in the Middle East: the state of Israel and the USA on the one side, and Iran, Hamas and Hizbollah on the other. 

Bob Vylan’s chant was supposedly raised as a gesture of solidarity with the rap group Kneecap. We aren’t going to comment on the lyrical skills of Bob Vylan or Kneecap. But they suit each other politically, since Kneecap distinguishes itself by draping itself in Irish flags, raising chants in support of Hamas and Hezbollah, and bearing a name which reminds us of the most common form of repression against all forms of dissent in the areas ruled by the IRA: crippling their victims by shooting them in the knee. And this was always in fitting continuity with one of the founding counter-revolutionary actions of the IRA: the suppression of the workers’ strikes and embryonic councils that appeared in Ireland in 1921-22 as part of the world-wide revolutionary wave[1].

Amos, June 2025