The attacks on our living conditions are extremely brutal. We would have to go back to the 1930s to find any trace of measures this severe. Faced with this unbearable situation, anger is growing throughout society. This discontent is widespread and we are seeing a need to fight back in every country.  In 2022 workers in Britain mobilised en masse loudly proclaiming: “Enough is enough!”

For weeks Bayrou has been on every TV channel claiming that debt was leading us to bankruptcy, that we are living beyond our means, that the “boomers” were selfish and privileged, and that we had to accept the need to give up our “privileges” for the sake of our children's future. What a disgrace! And at a time when the state is investing hundreds of billions to strengthen the military and the “ultra-rich” are reaping dividend after dividend.

The Bayrou government has fallen and Bayrou organised his departure before today's mobilisation to avoid giving the impression that it’s the street that rules. But we should not be under any illusions, regardless of whatever the next government is, the state will continue to want to inflict all these brutal attacks on us.

 

REGARDLESS OF THE NEW GOVERNMENT'S POLITICAL ORIENTATION, THE BOURGEOISIE WILL STILL INCREASE ITS ATTACKS ON THE WORKING CLASS.

In Belgium, Italy, Spain and the United States, governments everywhere are cutting back on social welfare, on wages, laying off workers and increasing workloads while they increase their spending on the military by billions.

Germany, despite its reputation for economic stability, is facing an unprecedented wave of redundancies. Under commercial pressures and the demands of war, 112,000 jobs have been cut and thousands more are threatened. The government is planning major austerity measures to fill the hole of 30 billion euros expected by 2027. At the same time, Friedrich Merz promises to provide Germany with “The most powerful army in Europe”. The defence budget is expected to increase from 62 billion euros in 2025 to 153 billion euros in 2029 (compared to 44 billion euros in 2019).

Churchill’s “blood, toil, tears and sweat” speech is embraced by all governments, left, right, far right or populist. Regardless of the political affiliation of those who run the state, they all defend the “national interest” which is the interest of the national bourgeoisie. At this very moment, the same attacks are being waged in Britain by a Labour Government.

The debt they want us to shoulder is not a mark of our so-called privileges but of the historic crisis of capitalism.

This is the only future this bankrupt system can offer: ever increasing misery, ever increasing war!

 

WORKING CLASS STRUGGLE IS WORLDWIDE

In the face of such brutality, the workers are no longer willing to bow down. For more than three years, the proletariat in France, Britain, Sweden, Korea, the United States, Canada and Belgium have rediscovered and developed the capacity to respond. Yet there is little media coverage of this - a real black out.

Why? Because the bourgeoisie does not want us to become aware that the problem is global and that the we need to respond internationally. It does not want the exploited class to realise that they share the same interests everywhere, that they are fighting the same struggles everywhere. Even more, it fears they will develop their solidarity and international unity:

- In Belgium: from the “days of action” in December 2024 to the demonstrations during the summer, the workers' combativity and their desire to unify the struggle remained strong.

- In Canada: after the strikes in Montreal, there are now strikes in Quebec.

- In the United States: there were strikes at Boeing, in the automotive sector and in the ports, even in the midst of the election campaign.

- In China: despite fierce police repression, strikes broke out in August in sectors such as pharmaceuticals, textiles, packaging and component parts.

All these struggles show that the working class is no longer willing to sacrifice itself on the altar of the national interest and its exploiters!

 

IS THE “BLOCK EVERYTHING” MOVEMENT AN EXPRESSION OF WORKING-CLASS STRUGGLE?

“How to struggle?” This is the question posed for us today and for tomorrow too. The current movement is proposing the struggle to “block everything” to “put pressure” on Macron to achieve an “equitable and fair-minded policy” from the new government.

Yes, we must fight! Yes, we must fight en masse! Yes, we must take to the streets! But this “let's block everything” movement is conceived as a coming together of French citizens, of the “people,” where many groups (small shopkeepers, business owners, restaurant owners, etc.) are mobilising against the government's tax policies, against the attack on their status or corporate privileges. What can we expect from a movement that wants to boycott the economic machine and calls on us to reduce our consumption, block transportation, limit the use of our credit cards, and spread ourselves across roundabouts? What can we expect from a movement whose slogans favour civil disobedience and the Popular Initiative Referendum (that of the yellow vests), whose logic is to target the elites who run the country? Where does such a movement lead? To sowing the illusion that the solution is to put pressure on the policy makers and that a better government for the “people” is possible. Just because other sectors of the population are also victims of government attacks does not mean that the working class should follow such a movement, where it loses its identity as a class. It is solely the working class, an internationally exploited class, that has no national interests to defend. Its struggle against exploitation and the defence of its living conditions is not a struggle for the improvement of its social status but contains within it the seeds of the destruction of the capitalist system itself, the abolition of exploitation, the state, classes, borders, and nations. The “let's block everything” movement does not breathe new life into the fight against capitalism. The publicity given to the movement by all the media and left and far-left parties aims to draw workers into a movement that serves as an outlet for their frustrations, diluting them into the “people” as “angry citizens.” This deafening campaign is hyping up a movement in which workers' demands are drowned out and the futile actions are not in any way our own. It makes use of the current difficulties which the workers have in recognising themselves as a class by derailing them onto the path of the democratic illusion in which the only solution lies in the change of government or president.

 

WITH THE RIGHT AND WITH THE LEFT: A CAMPAIGN OF LIES

In response to our determination to fight, all the political forces of the bourgeoisie attack us ideologically, dividing us or promoting illusions in capitalism. Bayrou’s speech blaming the “boomers” for the debt is despicable. It is despicable that the bourgeois state seeks to drive a wedge between generations, pitting the younger generation, who are called upon to take up the fight against capitalism, against those who, in May 1968, were the protagonists of the largest strike in the history of the workers' movement, possessing a wealth of experience to pass on to this new generation. The propaganda of the left and the far left, to make people believe that the crisis does not exist, that it would be enough to take money from the rich to solve all problems is misleading.

Yes, their billions are sickening in the face of the growing poverty within the working class but this is the very expression of the logic of profit in capitalist society: a system of exploitation of the majority by a controlling minority. Neither in France nor elsewhere can the workers' struggle have as its objective a “fair” distribution of wealth, because there is no such thing as “fair” capitalist exploitation.

The objective of the workers’ struggle has to be to put an end to capitalist exploitation and the law of profit in order to finally be able to satisfy the needs of all of humanity.

 

HOW DO WE FIGHT BACK?

In France, as everywhere else, in order to build a balance of forces that will enable us to resist the relentless attacks on our living and working conditions, which will become even more severe in the future, we must come together, wherever we can, to discuss and promote the methods of struggle that have made the working class strong and enabled it, at certain moments in its history, to shake the bourgeoisie and its system:

- seeking support and solidarity beyond one's factory, company, industry, town, region, or country 

- workers' self-organisation of struggles, particularly within general assemblies, not leaving control to the so-called “specialists” in organising and managing struggles, the unions. 

- the broadest possible discussion on the general needs of the struggle, on the positive lessons to be learned from the struggles but also from the defeats, because there will be defeats, and the greatest defeat is to suffer the attacks without reacting; the first victory of the exploited is to enter into the struggle.

We conclude with this historical example which holds valuable lessons for the future: in Poland, in 1980, workers came together in huge general assemblies to take control of their struggle and decide amongst themselves on their demands and methods of struggle. They did not “shut down the country”, but organised themselves into assemblies and as a class, and that is how they were able to create a balance of power with the state and to push back against the austerity measures. They even took it upon themselves to organise production and economic life to satisfy the strikers own needs and in the interests of the entire population, in a gigantic surge of solidarity and consciousness-raising. This is one of the seeds planted by our predecessors on the long road to revolution, one of the seeds we must nurture in the future, one of the things we must prepare for by coming together and discussing after today so that this class struggle is possible in the future. Because, in the end, the only alternative will be:

 

World Revolution or the Destruction of Humanity

International Communist Current (10 September 2025)

 

As we indicated in our press, the return of Trump, that resentful braggart propelled to the presidency by the populist wave, represented a serious political setback for the bourgeois factions which, since the implosion of the Soviet bloc and the slow disintegration of the Western bloc, had been struggling to maintain a coherent defence of the needs of American national capital, in terms of both domestic and foreign policy. Trump 2 reflects a considerable loss of political control by the bourgeoisie of the world's leading power. On the foreign front, eight months after coming to power, he has radically shaken up US foreign policy, calling into question historical alliances as well as economic globalisation and the institutions that manage it. He dismisses international law, signed agreements and treated international consultative bodies (such as the UN) with disdain, brutally asserting that only his will, based on American military power, carries decisive weight. Domestically, unlike during his first term, when the presence of a number of generals in key administrative positions and the actions of the secret services had succeeded in mitigating the impact of his decisions, this time he chose the members of his administration and the directors of the main security agencies on the basis of a single criterion: loyalty to him. As a result, no one is now moderating the brutality of his attacks on the ‘deep state’ through the dismissal of tens of thousands of civil servants or the closure of federal agencies, or his attacks on the Democratic ‘political elites’. Trump's aggressive policy doesn’t hesitate to undermine the political and judicial institutions of the bourgeois democratic state. But these are the most sophisticated tools for ensuring the domination of the ruling class, which until now had more or less succeeded in containing and limiting violence between rival bourgeois factions. Trump’s approach is rapidly fueling internal tensions and threatening to bring them to a head. For the bourgeoisie, this amounts to shooting itself in the foot. Let us illustrate this with a few recent examples.

By manipulating crime statistics in certain regions of the United States and exploiting the turmoil caused by his immigration enforcement agency (ICE) rounding up illegal immigrants, Trump, this so-called ‘apostle of peace,’ is behaving like an arsonist in his own country, fueling chaos and tensions between factions of the bourgeoisie. Thus, after deploying the National Guard (which also included Marines) to restore ‘law and order’ in Los Angeles (California) in June, Washington D.C. in August, and Memphis in September, he is now threatening to send the National Guard to Chicago and, eventually, to states such as New York, California, Oregon, etc. — that is, territories governed by Democrats — to impose his law and denigrate Democrats deemed ‘irresponsible.’ Thus, continuing his open challenge to the judicial power of bourgeois democracy itself, he has brought 500 members of the Texas National Guard to Chicago and, moreover, is calling for the imprisonment of the Governor of Illinois and the Mayor of Chicago, who protested against Trump's ‘invasion’. These measures represent a break with the so-called rule of law of bourgeois democracy, which hitherto maintained the appearance of social cohesion essential to the functioning of national capital.

This obsessive resentment on the part of the Trump 2 administration, which has been strongly present from the outset, has intensified in recent months with the order given to the Department of Justice to “investigate, disrupt, and dismantle” the groups and funding sources of its political opponents, accused of encouraging political violence and “domestic terrorism.” This desire for revenge and elimination of its opponents was legitimised by the murder of Charlie Kirk, a Christian activist and MAGA mouthpiece, on September 21. During a tribute held in a stadium in Phoenix, Arizona, Trump, speaking before thousands of supporters on a stage decorated with political and Christian images and symbols, declared: “I hate my opponents and I don’t want the best for them.” The day before, he had already demanded that his Justice Department prosecute his political enemies, including California Senator Adam Schiff, former FBI Director James Comey, and New York Attorney General Letitia James[1]. It was a repugnant display that expresses the level of irrationality in American politics today.

Another example was added on 30 September during a meeting, convened on a whim by the Trump administration, of 800 military commanders, including generals and admirals, who were urgently recalled from around the world to a Marine base in Virginia for a meeting of the utmost importance. Stunned, they were treated to a surreal speech by the Secretary of Defence, former television presenter Pete Hegseth, who demanded that they conform to the highest “masculine” standards: “No more beards, long hair, superficial, individual expression. We’re going to cut our hair, shave our beards and adhere to standards”. Immediately afterwards, Trump urged them to fight “the enemy within”, identified for the first time as illegal immigrants but above all as those he calls “radical left-wing Democrats” (and he is not only referring to the Democratic Party but also to tycoons such as George Soros and Reid Hoffman who finance them), whom he accuses of encouraging insecurity. This statement is in line with his recent threat to invoke the ‘Insurrection Act’ [2] to deploy the army if the federal courts prevent him from using the National Guard. He concluded his speech by criticising their reluctance to applaud him and threatening them: " If you don't like what I'm saying, you can leave the room — because there goes your rank, there goes your future.”

This threat was preceded by several dismissals of high-ranking military officers who had dared to confront him: the Chief of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the Director of the National Security Agency (NSA) and the Director of the Defence Intelligence Agency (DIA), among others. Instead of a speech on the future direction of US imperialist policy, these general officers were humiliated by the Trump clan, an event whose consequences are unpredictable, given that the army is obviously a very powerful structure within the state.

This behaviour, apart from its irresponsibility, is a flagrant manifestation of the decay of the bourgeoisie and the global tendency to lose control of its political game, which can also be found in many European and Asian countries (from France to Korea, for example). The seriousness of this loss of control for the bourgeoisie is underlined by the fact that it affects the founding countries of capitalism, and in particular the world's leading power - a striking sign of the acceleration of its decomposition. This is the product of the impasse in which the capitalist mode of production finds itself. Populism, with its inconsistent, nihilistic and irrational policies, destabilises not only the foreign policy of states, but also the political apparatus of so-called bourgeois democracy, based on the system of checks and balances, which allowed agreements to be reached between the different factions of the bourgeoisie. Such a situation, fuelled by a headlong rush into a logic of every man for himself, now threatens more and more clearly to lead to very violent clashes between them.

However, even when affected by a crisis, the bourgeoisie still uses expressions of the rottenness of its system against the working class. In this sense, the latter must avoid at all costs being drawn into conflicts between bourgeois factions that have nothing to do with its own interests. The Democrats, the trade unions and the extreme left-wing groups of the bourgeoisie are trying by all means to draw it into movements for the defence of democracy and ‘democratic legality’ in relation to immigrants and against the ‘authoritarian’ populism of ‘King’ Trump. This was again the case on 18 October with the ‘No Kings’ demonstrations, massively organised in all states of the United States: "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 channeling certain working class sectors and demands into an overall defence of democracy against the dictatorship of Trump and consorts”[3].

It is essential for the proletariat to preserve its independence as a class and not to enlist in either faction of the bourgeoisie, which will always have an excuse to try to recruit it for its own benefit. The ‘villain’ in this film is not Trump, but capitalism, which is rotten to its core and has no future to offer, but threatens the very existence of human society. More specifically, the proletariat must reject the terrain of defending democracy against a supposed fascist dictatorship. The terrain of the workers' struggle lies in the defence of their own interests as an exploited and revolutionary class, as workers have demonstrated since 2022 in several countries around the world, and in 2024 in the United States itself (for example, with the dockers' strike in some 40 ports on the east and south coasts). This is the only political space where a perspective can be developed against the madness of capitalism.

EK (20 October)

 

A raucous campaign against migrants, much evidence of a crisis in the Labour government, and the continuing struggle of workers defending their living conditions. This whole situation is a striking manifestation of what the ICC calls the two poles at work in the world situation: on the one hand the acceleration of capitalist decomposition, expressed in the growing irrationality typified by populism and the far right, increased war mongering, and a general loss of control by the bourgeoisie; on the other hand, the struggle of the working class, a break with a long period of passivity and disorientation that prevailed from the end of the 1980s, which was signalled by workers in Britain in 2022.  Based on a long international process of subterranean maturation of consciousness, the working class in the heartlands of capitalism has shown that it is not defeated.

The racist campaign flared up in August with crowds protesting against the housing of asylum seekers and refugees, mobilised by an array of right-wing groupings. Even though physical attacks on buildings housing refugees did not occur this time, the threats and intimidation emanating from these protests was no less real, and refugee support organisations received several death threats. These activities express a spreading spirit of general hatred that “is clearly an example of the rotting of capitalist society as a whole”[1]. The protests were accompanied by the mass display of the Union Jacks and the St. George's Cross “festooning lamp-posts or being painted onto walls and roundabouts”[2] a clear message to foreigners to get lost.

This whole anti-migrant campaign reached a crescendo on Saturday 13 September, when the far right led by Tommy Robinson, former leader of the English Defence League, mobilised a crowd of 150,000 that blocked Whitehall in central London and overflowed into Trafalgar Square. The whole thing was livestreamed on X, which at its peak had 2.9 million viewers.

The demo was supported by the strong presence of several far-right European politicians. New Zealander and Christian fundamentalist Brian Tamaki called for all public expressions of non-Christian faiths to be banned. Elon Musk spoke to the crowd through a video call saying that “massive uncontrolled migration” was contributing “to the destruction of Britain” and called for protesters to get ready for a violent uprising in response.

It is clear that this nationalist campaign is not only limited to far-right organisations. The whole bourgeoisie is involved in the campaign: each of them in their own way defending the interests of the British state and the ideological attacks on the working class. Labour responded to the patriotic flag-waving by insisting that the Union Jack “belongs to all of us”, and that “British values”, touted by the far right, are actually the democratic values of tolerance and multiculturalism. Further to the left, appeals are made for a struggle against fascism, paving the way for a more militant defence of the bourgeois state and its ‘democracy’.

These events are not a particular British phenomenon; as was shown by the presence of rightwing politicians of several countries at the 13 September demo. They cannot be viewed separately from the international dynamic, where the right blames and attacks migrants for the woes in society and the left organises the defence of the migrants with an appeal to the values of democracy. In the US the raids against “illegal” workers and the protests against them are an ongoing phenomenon with ever more fatal results. In Poland and the Netherlands, in a so-called support to increased official border controls, vigilantes thronged the German border, ready to turn back any asylum seekers they came across. In Australia thousands of rightwing activists participated in anti-immigration rallies on 31 August in several cities across the country with clashes taking place as marchers were met with counter-demonstrations, waving an array of national flags. In the Netherlands, a relatively small anti-migrant protest on 20 September was attacked by a mob looking for a violent confrontation with the police and attacking buildings of established political institutions.

These events are an expression of increasingly brutal divisions within the ruling class, which it turns against the working class. The accompanying propaganda, whether coming from the right or from the left of capital, is meant to dissolve the working class, whose revolutionary project is precisely destined to transcend all divisions, above all the national, and to drag the various constituent parts into the fictitious community of the “nation”.

However these ideological attacks have not prevented the workers in the UK, despite the still embryonic recovery of its class identity, from continuing its participation in the rupture with the long years of passivity and disorientation. Since the character of the working class is eminently international this implies that an ideological attack against the workers in one country is not of decisive significance as long as other sectors of the class still develop their combativity.

This explains why workers in the UK have not been silenced in recent months. A small selection from various workers’ strikes shows this:

• Stagecoach bus drivers in Newcastle went on strike on 18th August in protest against below-inflation pay offers to bus workers,
• Workers on the London Underground went on strike for better pay and a reduction in working hours from 7 to 11 September
• More than 2000 bus drivers of Bee Network began for the third time a four-day strike across Greater Manchester on Friday 19 September, after rejecting substandard pay offers.
• More than 1500 workers at Sellafield nuclear power station went on strike on Monday 15 September, because of a disagreement with the site-specific pay entitlements
• Staff at the University of Bradford were on strike between 22 September until Friday 3 October for a further 10 days in a row over course closures and job cuts.

Thus, the mass display of the national flags may have lured individual workers to join the xenophobic protests, but the British working class has not abandoned its struggle.

Moreover, the working-class reaction to these nationalist campaigns must not be measured solely on the basis on what happened in Britain. It is a matter for the entire working class. And this time the most impressive response came from the workers in France where, on the 18th of September, more than a million workers gathered in the street in different cities to express their dissatisfaction and willingness to defend their class interests. Workers in France have clearly shown their intention not to accept the economic attacks of the bourgeoisie without a reaction, just as the working class in Belgium did in the first months of this year in its struggle against the austerity plans of the government.

The demands of the economic crisis, of spiralling debt and the need to boost the war economy, are forcing the bourgeoisie in all countries to impose wage freezes and cut state expenditures on health and welfare benefits[3]. In France the planned attacks are particularly vicious: as they concern health, education, transport, sick leave, unemployment and pension benefits, minimum social benefits. In the UK the proposed attacks on the disabled and job-cuts in the NHS are just warning shots in what will become a major assault on the working class. The need for workers to respond on their own class terrain will become increasingly evident, in Britain and everywhere else.

And it is only by fighting on such a class basis that the working class can offer a way out from a society which is rotting on its feet, spewing out war, racism and the endless battle of each against all. Only by recognising that it is a class which owns nothing but its labour power will it understand that it is a class of immigrants and that the division between ‘native’ and ‘migrant’ workers can only benefit our exploiters. By recovering its class identity it will recognise that workers have no fatherland to defend and no national flags to wave, because they are exploited by the same enemy class in all countries, and that our true interests lie in the struggle for a world without nation states, a world community without classes and without borders.

Dennis 16/10/25