On December 14 last, on the sands of Australia’s Bondi Beach, two gunmen – a father and son, used two high-powered, legally-owned rifles to open fire on a children’s event marking the start of the Jewish festival of Hanukkah. Fifteen people were killed by the two men, including a 10-year-old girl and an elderly Holocaust survivor. The elder of the two gunmen had been investigated by the Australian police for his links with the Islamic State in 2019. Dozens more were injured. As is now usual in these expressions of capitalist horror, individuals showed great courage and honour in trying to protect their fellow human beings and, as is also usual in these cases, security was lax to non-existent. The first response of the Australian government from the Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and his officials was to defend their state and its “democracy”, while promising further increases in its security and repressive measures that will weigh above all on the working class.

This latest slaughter of innocents comes on the 10-year anniversary of the Charlie Hebdo shooting in Paris, the mass shooting at the Bataclan Theatre in Paris, the bombing of Brussels Airport nine years ago, and, eight years ago, the bombing of Manchester Arena during a concert perpetrated by an individual whose Manchester-based Libyan Jihadi family were working for MI6.  From these four events, all closely related to imperialist interests, over 200 celebrating individuals of all ages were killed and thousands more injured by explosive devices that had “to whom it may concern” written on them. The massacre of civilians, always a feature of oppressive systems, constantly reaches new, sickening heights under capitalism which thrashes about in its own decomposition and moral decay. And in the midst of this our leaders can only offer their hypocritical and empty “condolences” for the victims of their own system while beefing up their security systems.

The decomposition of capitalism, the rotting of a system dying on its feet, brings along with it a rise in all levels of violence, sexual, racial and totally indiscriminate atrocities as well, of course, as the organised violence of the state in the pursuit of imperialist interests through terrorism, warfare and support for warfare. Growing up in and surrounded by this unfolding global putrefaction, the mental health of youth can only be affected and often twisted by the forces of despair, by the no future and no perspective that capitalism holds and generalises throughout the world. Thus, indiscriminate attacks on schoolchildren and students are on the rise everywhere, to the point where they have become commonplace and banal along with attacks by pupils on teachers: “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.”[1] Youth is particularly affected by this ongoing carnage, bewildered, confused and psychologically damaged by the ambient death and destruction taking place all around them.

States that have no care for victims cynically exploit the violent acts that occur in other states for their own imperialist interests. Thus, the butcher Netanyahu castigates Australian Prime Minister Albanese over the Bondi attack, saying that he “allowed the disease of anti-Semitism to spread” because of his politically structured support for a Palestinian state. For his part Albanese proposes “a moment of national unity”, while advocating new measures that further strength the repressive machinery of the state. The ruling class generally unleashes massive ideological campaigns after these atrocities take place stirring up divisions by the way and implementing inquiries and measures that do nothing to “prevent this happening again”, as the empty mantra of the bourgeoisie has it. The only thing that they can do, the action that they are forced to take, is to implement and enforce more security measures, more obvious state repression ostensibly to “manage” and defend the state but, in reality, build up an arsenal of laws and  measures that can and will be used against the working class in its struggle. And in the west particularly, the more experienced bourgeoisie use these outrages and atrocities, not to deal with their root cause because they are beyond its control, but to defend the lie of the democratic state and corral us into being “good citizens” behind it.

The effects of decomposition, the violence, ravages, irrationality and absurdity of capitalism will remain a mortal threat to humanity and a constant danger for the working class and its struggle and, as long as capitalism exists, these threats will only become more manifest. There have been significant moments in history that show that only the struggle of the working class – and the working class alone – can push back the attacks of the ruling class and open a perspective for the future of humanity: the communist revolution. In 1905 in Russia, workers defended Jews against the pogroms unleashed by the Tsarist regime to counter the revolutionary tide; in the Netherlands 1941, in the depths of world war and the counter-revolution, workers in Amsterdam led strikes in order to prevent Jews being rounded-up by the Nazis working in conjunction with the Dutch authorities; in Hungary 1956 when workers came onto the streets against the bloody repression by the bourgeoisie in Poznan and in Poland, 1968, when young workers showed solidarity with students by joining them when they were being attacked by the police. Whether it’s a terrorist attack or that of a psychologically damaged individual, the working class can do little to prevent such occurrences which can only proliferate with the decomposition of capitalism. Indeed, there are dangers for it in getting involved in the campaigns of the ruling class around such events. What the working class can do, as it begun to with force and vigour in 2022, is develop its own struggle against this rotting system because in that struggle lies the perspective for a future that can go beyond the horrors of capitalism.

Baboon, 24.12.25

Letter from a contact

I find it very difficult to accept your point of view on the establishment of a dictatorship of the proletariat.

Of all forms of society, democracy is, in my opinion, the best, because in a democracy, freedom of expression is respected. It is thanks to our democratic form of society that the ICC can express its criticism of the capitalist system. In a fascist dictatorship, for example, the ICC would not have been able to criticise the capitalist system. If the ICC had indeed expressed its opinion against capitalism, you would probably have disappeared into concentration camps. But in a dictatorship of the proletariat, liberals, for example, cannot criticise communism. If liberals had indeed expressed their criticism of communism, they would probably have disappeared into re-education camps. That is why I am in favour of a democratic society and against any form of dictatorship. Because in a democratic society, all opinions are respected…

Our response

In his letter, the comrade raises an important question that lies at the heart of the mystification around democracy that the ruling class wants to hammer into the heads of the exploited, that, in a true democracy, all individuals would be equal (‘one man, one vote’) and, even if its implementation is not perfect, citizens would have the task of defending the democratic state which is, according to Churchill,  “the worst form of government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time."

We salute the comrade's sense of responsibility in that he very explicitly expresses a fundamental disagreement, or at least a questioning, of a fundamental position of the ICC and the legacy of marxism in general. However, without wishing to offend the comrade, the vision he expresses in his letter completely ignores the conditions in which bourgeois democracy emerged and developed, foremost among which are the massacres carried out by democratic states against the struggling proletariat and their ferocity targeting revolutionary organisations as soon as they begin to pose the slightest threat to the established order. It was indeed the democratic French Republic that slaughtered the Paris Commune, it was the democratic Weimar Republic that crushed the German revolution of 1918-1919 in blood, it was the ‘great Western democracies’ that hunted down revolutionaries such as Rosa Luxemburg and Leon Trotsky, often hand in hand with autocratic, fascist or Stalinist regimes.

So where does this discrepancy come from between the bloody history of bourgeois democracy and the comrade's idea that in a democratic society, all opinions are respected? Very often, the difficulty lies not in the answer, but in how the question is posed. In his letter, the comrade speaks of democracy as an abstract concept, that of ‘democracy in general’ which is taken outside of history and class relations. But in history, there has never been such a thing as ‘democracy in general’. In ancient times, Athenian democracy was the political organisation of slave owners who ruthlessly exercised their domination over the exploited masses. Similarly, today there is no such thing as ‘democracy in general’: there are only bourgeois democracies, which, as we will try to convince our comrade and our readers, are nothing more than machines for oppressing the working class, and the most sophisticated weapon of the bourgeoisie for exercising its dictatorship over the rest of society.

Bourgeois democracy is the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie

Indeed, for marxists, today's society is not a collection of equal individuals, a kind of agora where all opinions freely confront each other in the marketplace of ideas. On the contrary, today's society is divided into classes with conflicting interests, a society in which the bourgeoisie dominates and exploits the proletariat. Thus, in the 19th century, the various factions of the ruling class were able to share power in Parliament by seeking to exclude the proletariat (through denying the right to vote, for example). Yet the workers movement was fighting for the establishment of democratic states. So why was this?  Because ‘democracy in general’ is the least bad of all systems? Because marxism had illusions about the possibility of overthrowing capitalism through Parliament? No! The marxist current saw even further ahead. Democracy was then the weapon of the revolutionary bourgeoisie against the old feudal structures that still clung to power, and the working class could still wrest genuine reforms (working hours, wages, end of child labour, etc.) from capitalism in its heyday. In both cases, the aim was to promote the development of the proletariat in order to... better overthrow capitalism and its democratic state. The bourgeoisie systematically and violently suppressed in blood the democratic demands of the working class.

However, with capitalism entering its decadent phase with the First World War, the conditions for exercising power changed. Imperialist competition between nations intensified, forcing the bourgeoisie to exercise greater discipline behind the state. Parliament became a mere rubber-stamp, a chamber for the directives of the executive branch, and capitalism was no longer able to grant real reforms to the working class. Everywhere, the democratic form of the state became an empty shell, a pure ideological mystification intended to hinder the revolutionary perspective that was now on the agenda.

The democratic structure of the state is, like all other forms of the state within capitalism (military dictatorship, fascism, Stalinism, etc.), an instrument designed to ensure and perpetuate the domination of the bourgeoisie over society. It is even the most sophisticated form of this:

- ‘Universal suffrage’ has proved to be one of the most effective means of concealing the dictatorship of capital behind the illusion of a ‘sovereign people’. It is still one of the preferred instruments for both channelling the discontent of the working class and maintaining the illusion that it is possible to make the capitalist world more just and humane through democracy. For marxists, on the contrary, since capitalism entered its period of decadence (at the time of the First World War), the proletariat has no longer had any truly positive reforms to wrest from the bourgeoisie; capitalism has become an irredeemably reactionary and destructive system. It is no coincidence that the bourgeoisie began to push the proletariat en masse towards the ballot box when capitalism entered its period of decline, particularly in those countries where the working class is highly concentrated and experienced in struggle.

- ‘Freedom of the press’ is perfectly compatible with the monopoly of information by the bourgeoisie and its mainstream media. The role of the latter is to disseminate official state communiqués and to drown (with the help of social media) the truth under a daily deluge of lies, false information and absurdities. The message disseminated ad nauseam by the bourgeois press is that there is no alternative to capitalism. Moreover, ‘restrictions’ can be placed on the freedom of the press at any time the democratic state deems it necessary, as is done by all governments during wars or when the proletariat defends its revolutionary perspective.

- ‘Freedom of expression and association’, like ‘freedom of speech’, are also mystifications ‘tolerated’ ... as long as they do not threaten the power of the bourgeoisie and its imperialist interests. There are numerous examples of flagrant restrictions on these ‘freedoms,’ including against competing bourgeois factions. In the United States, the ‘world champion of democracy’ and ‘home of human rights’, American citizens were persecuted for their left-wing sympathies during the McCarthy era in the 1950s. During the great strike of May 1968 in France, far-left groups were banned and their leaders arrested. Over the past year, the group Palestine Action in Britain has been proscribed as a terrorist organisation. Since its founding in 1975, and despite its relatively modest size, the ICC has not been spared either: its militants have also been followed, intimidated and subjected to searches.

As Lenin wrote in The State and Revolution (1917), "A democratic republic is the best possible political shell for capitalism, and, therefore, once capital has gained possession […], it establishes its power so securely, so firmly, that no change of persons, institutions or parties in the bourgeois-democratic republic can shake it.” In short, bourgeois democracy is a perfect synonym for the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie.

But what about the dictatorship of the proletariat?

Throughout history, no oppressed class has been able to overthrow the old society without going through a revolution and a phase of dictatorship designed to break by force the resistance of the existing ruling class and ready to go to any extremes to maintain its domination. Thus, as in the American and French revolutions, the bourgeoisie had to wrest the state apparatus from the hands of the aristocracy, waging a policy of repression and terror against the counter-revolution in the name of democracy and human rights.

However, as the Paris Commune and the revolutionary experience of 1917-1923 taught us, the working class cannot use the bourgeois state to establish its own domination over society. Indeed, the state is not a neutral instrument that could just as easily be used to defend the privileges of the exploiters as to benefit the exploited class. On the contrary, in all its forms, the state is essentially an instrument of class domination over society. Engels, in The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, demonstrates very well that the state is a specific product of class society, designed to maintain, through coercion (army, police, justice, surveillance, social control, etc.), the cohesion of society for the benefit of the ruling class, an instrument of violence directed against the exploited classes. The task of the proletarian revolution, which entails the elimination of classes and exploitation, is therefore to destroy the bourgeois state from top to bottom[1], and the political weapon used for this destruction is the workers' councils. These councils are not a pipe dream or a utopia, but the “finally discovered form”, as Lenin wrote, of the dictatorship of the proletariat. It was the working class itself that first brought about this form of political organisation during the Russian Revolution of 1905.

For the first time in history, instead of the police and the army, the workers' councils claimed the monopoly of weapons and instead of a handful of professional politicians ‘chosen’ every four or five years to defend bourgeois property and exploitation, power was exercised by the entire working class, with representatives who could be mandated and dismissed at any time. Instead of the dictatorship of the minority over the vast majority, it was the dictatorship of the vast majority over the minority. In short, the dictatorship of the proletariat is the proletarian freedom of criticism exercising power against capitalist exploitation and the armed resistance of the bourgeoisie.

Depriving the proletariat of its weapons, namely the workers' councils, because they are instruments expressing dictatorship and wanting to dissolve the working class into ‘the people’ in the name of democracy, would only mean demanding it abandons its revolutionary perspective, the only alternative perspective to the continued, inevitable and further descent of capitalism into barbarism, war and widespread misery.

ICC, 31 December 2025

ICC public meeting

Saturday 7 February,

The Lucas Arms, 245A Grays Inn Rd, London WC1X 8QY, and online. 2-5pm UK time, ​2-5pm UK time.

In 1991, in response to the collapse of the eastern bloc and the war in the Gulf, the ICC wrote: “faced with the tendency towards generalized chaos which is specific to decomposition and which has been considerably accelerated by the Eastern bloc's collapse, capitalism has no other way out in its attempt to hold together its different compo­nents than to impose the iron strait-jacket of military force. In this sense, the methods it uses to try to contain an increasingly bloody state of chaos are themselves a factor in the aggravation of military barbarism into which capitalism is plunging”. ("Orientation Text: Militarism and Decomposition", International Review 64).

 The US attack on Venezuela, the mounting threat to annex Greenland and to once again launch air strikes against the regime in Tehran confirm in particular that it is the world’s strongest power that has become the main factor in the acceleration of chaos and disintegration, a process which bears with it the threat of the destruction of humanity.

 The ICC is calling a public meeting to discuss the implications of these developments. We aim to go deeper into the evolution of imperialist conflicts, but also aim to pose questions about the impact of these events on the class struggle, and what should be the response of the internationalist minority faced with the “aggravation of military barbarism into which capitalism is plunging”.

 On this occasion, there will be separate three meetings on the same day, in English, French and Spanish. To take part in the English meeting online, write to [email protected] [2]. 

On 8 January 2026, a mountain of garbage collapsed in Barangay Binaliw, Cebu City, in the Philippines, crushing lives beneath tons of capitalist waste. At least 13 people were killed. Dozens remain missing. But the true culprit is not gravity, nor nature - it is a social system that piles waste on the poor and calls it ‘development’.

This was not a tragedy. It was a crime. And the fingerprints are all over the machinery of capitalism.

Profits before life: the calculated neglect of Binaliw

The Binaliw landfill was never safe. It was a festering monument to capitalist indifference, operated by Prime Integrated Waste Solutions under the guise of a “public-private partnership.” In reality, it was a ticking time bomb - an open dumpsite masquerading as a landfill, carved into a mountain and stacked high with garbage, in defiance of basic engineering and human decency.

Warnings were issued. Residents protested. Councilor Joel Garganera himself condemned the site as a disaster waiting to happen. But the city government and its corporate partners pressed on. Why? Because in capitalism, waste is not a problem to solve - it is a business to exploit. And the lives of workers and the urban poor are expendable in the balance sheets of profit.

Green lies and the theater of reform

Now, as the dead are pulled from the rubble, the state performs its familiar ritual: crocodile tears, promises of ‘investigation’, and vague talk of ‘improvement’. But as the ICC makes clear in its “Manifesto on ecology [3]”, these gestures are nothing but theater. Reform is a lie. Regulation is a smokescreen. The system cannot be fixed because it is functioning exactly as designed.

Capitalism’s greenwashing - its climate summits, its ‘net zero’ pledges, its technocratic tinkering - only deepens the crisis. It is not malfunctioning. It is decaying. And in its decay, it poisons the air, the water, the soil - and the very possibility of a future.

The disposable working class: sacrificed to the god of garbage

Who died in Binaliw? Not the executives. Not the politicians. It was the workers. The scavengers. The families living in the shadow of a garbage mountain. They were sacrificed on the altar of capitalist ‘efficiency’, buried not just by trash, but by the contempt of a system that sees them as trash.

This is not unique to Cebu. From Payatas to Delhi, from Lagos to Jakarta, the poor are forced to live and die in the margins of waste. Capitalism creates zones of sacrifice - geographic and human - and calls it progress.

Revolution or extinction: the ICC’s unflinching verdict

The ICC does not mince words: capitalism is ecocidal. It cannot be reformed. It must be overthrown. The working class is the only force with the power and interest to reorganize society on a rational, ecological, and human basis.

This means rejecting every illusion: electoral politics, nationalist ‘solutions’, NGO band-aids, and bourgeois climate activism. It means building an international, revolutionary movement rooted in class struggle and historical memory - especially the lessons of the workers’ councils of 1917–1919.

No more graves beneath the garbage!

The Binaliw collapse is not an isolated event. It is a symptom of a dying system that will drag us all down with it unless we act. The choice is not between better waste management and worse - it is between a world organized for human need, or a world buried in its own filth.

We owe the dead more than mourning. We owe them justice. And justice will not come from the state, the market, or the ballot box. It will come from the streets, the factories, the assemblies of workers who refuse to be buried alive.

Let the stench of Binaliw be the smell of capitalism’s rotting corpse. Let us bury the system before it buries us.

 Internasyonalismo (Philippines) 22 January 2026

In a previous article on pro-Palestinian demonstrations in Italy[1], we denounced the bourgeoisie's trap designed to divert the outrage over the massacres in Gaza into nationalist support for Palestine, i.e for the Palestinian state and the Palestinian ruling class, which is at war, notably with its Iranian allies, against a rival bourgeoisie, that of Israel. Against war and the steamroller of nationalism, the only perspective for the proletariat is to defend the unity and solidarity of workers in all countries, to refuse to allow workers to be drafted into a war that is not theirs, in which they are forced to murder their class brothers and sisters. This perspective of concrete and living international class solidarity is still a long way off, or at least it is defended today only by small revolutionary minorities. But it is the only possible way to prevent the bourgeoisie from plunging the entire planet into military barbarism. The enemy is not the worker from another country who has been forcibly conscripted; “the enemy is in our own country, it is our own bourgeoisie,” proclaimed the revolutionaries during the first imperialist world war, when the proletariat was still reeling from the declaration of war. In 1912 in the United States, the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) also pointed out that the national flag is always used to blindfold workers and make them lose sight of their class interests[2]. In other words, the demand for a ‘free’ Palestine is the opposite of proletarian internationalism; it is a call to continue the imperialist war.

This is what those who waved the Palestinian flag at demonstrations in Italy fail to see.

We have often demonstrated in our articles that the era of capitalism's ascendancy is well and truly over, an era in which the emergence of new nations represented progress in terms of the development of productive forces and the growth of the proletariat. However barbaric the wars that unified nations may have been, as was the case in Italy in 1860 and in Germany after 1870, they represented a step forward in the development of capitalism and, consequently, of its gravedigger: the working class. It was then possible for workers, under certain conditions, by organising themselves separately, to sometimes support wars of national liberation and struggles for democratic rights.

That time is irretrievably gone; capitalism is no longer and will never again be a factor of progress. The task of the proletariat is now to resist attacks on wages and working conditions and, by politicising their struggles, to constitute themselves as a class, to prepare to overthrow the bourgeois state everywhere, firmly rejecting all nationalist propaganda. This is a long-term task that requires workers to become aware of their interests and their ultimate goal. Revolutionaries must play their part in this politicisation and, even if they are still in the minority, continue to denounce without fail the dominant ideology, particularly when it’s propagated by organisations that claim to be working class or even revolutionary - all the ‘left-wing parties’ of the bourgeoisie. The latter, systematically advocating the defence of the small bourgeois Palestinian state on the pretext that it is ‘under attack’ or ‘weaker’, are merely endorsing the confinement of its proletarians in a logic of war, in the name of a supposed ‘liberation’. The slogan “Free Palestine” is a trap!

The genocide in Gaza provokes anger and indignation. These kinds of feelings have often radicalised the class struggle, especially when workers are victims of repression. The history of the workers’ movement provides countless examples of this. It is normal to get involved in the class struggle with our emotions, but these can also be bad advisers because they trap us in the immediate and in outward appearances.

However, the current situation has absolutely nothing to do with the class struggle. On both sides, the proletarians are hostages to an imperialist conflict, victims driven to crime and hatred towards each other. It is therefore necessary to take a step back and not allow ourselves to be drawn into the nationalist trap. This is obviously extremely difficult for the proletarians and politicised elements of Israel and Palestine, as they are directly immersed in this barbarism, without the political weapons of the proletariat, without the internationalist solidarity of their class brothers in other countries. They are caught up in the heat of events, amid provocations and revenge, the rage of despair and powerlessness, in an atmosphere marked by death and the ideology of war. We have seen that it was also very difficult for the proletarians in Italy because of the currently very low level of consciousness in the class, whose maturation is only just beginning on an international scale. They still have to take a step forward to be able to unmask the deceptive discourse of the ruling class. Let us take a few fragments of this discourse:

1. ‘It is only fair to demand a national home for the Palestinians, as the Jewish people demanded and obtained after the Second World War.’ The creation of the State of Israel took place during the Cold War between the two great imperialist blocs led by the USSR and the United States. It is the product of imperialist war, as shown by the regional wars that have constantly bloodied the Middle East. If a Palestinian state is created in turn, the same will be true. Calling for a ‘free’ Palestinian state means formalising yet another competitor on the world stage, calling for the endless pursuit of imperialist war in this dog-eat-dog world that will once again pit all the states in the region against each other, each seeking to rely on the medium and great powers that defend their geostrategic interests on the international stage. All states, regardless of their size and power, are imperialist states. All are compelled to defend their national and strategic interests, their place on the bloody chessboard of decadent capitalism.

2. ‘To abandon the struggle for a free Palestine is to implicitly accept the massacre of the Palestinians and leave the way open for the annexation of all their territories by Israel.’ Rejecting the terrain of imperialist war and nationalism does not mean abandoning the struggle! For the proletariat, it means regaining the means to fight for their own class interests, it means being able to acquire the enormous strength that stems from the fact that Israeli and Palestinian proletarians have the same class interests, that they can overcome these divisions imposed by the bourgeoisie. Yes, this perspective is not immediately achievable. Yes, the working class does not yet have the means to oppose the massacres head-on. But the alternative proposed by the left wing of capital is the creation of a new imperialist state already in the orbit of Iran and Hezbollah. It is an exploited working class that is being sent to its death by Hamas or another ‘more presentable’ faction of the Palestinian bourgeoisie that is just as barbaric.

Far from putting an end to the massacres and preventing capitalism from sinking deeper into war, nationalist slogans in favour of a ‘free Palestine’ only serve to distract workers from the only perspective capable of truly ending capitalist barbarism: world revolution. Through these campaigns, the bourgeoisie seeks to prevent the proletarians of the major capitalist metropolises from developing their resistance to the effects of the crisis and the rise of militarism, which are essential stepping stones towards the politicisation of struggles and mass strikes, the only means capable of providing a beginning of a response to the imperialist, destructive and murderous adventures of the bourgeoisie. International class solidarity is a powerful lever, the only one that can give respite to the working class on the periphery of capitalism, deeply impacted by war, while awaiting the emergence of an international revolutionary wave.

3. ‘The great powers or institutions such as the International Court of Justice have the means to end this war and impose peace.’ The peace plan that Trump is seeking to impose reveals to us every day how much of a new deception it is. This attempt is doomed to failure and the hypocrisy is total. Trump would like to be able to resolve the problems caused by this war in Gaza so that he can deploy his forces in the Pacific against the Chinese enemy, that is, to prepare for other wars. The idea of ‘peace’ under capitalism is always a pure lie and a pipe dream. The rare moments of respite, when each nation prepared for war through an arms race, are now turning into a ‘hybrid war’, against a backdrop of rampant militarism and high-intensity conflicts. War is not simply the result of the will or a decision of the bourgeoisie. War is a product of the capitalist system. As Jaurès said, ‘capitalism carries war within it like a cloud carries a storm’.

To give in to support for the ‘nation’, an embodiment of this system, is not only to accept but to promote the logic of war. The only way to end war, or at least initially to hinder the bourgeoisie's warmongering projects, is to reject all patriotism and nationalism, defending the unity of the proletariat, first and foremost in the major capitalist metropoles, where the working class has a wealth of historical experience, but also on the periphery of capitalism where the class may be weakened by the weight of intermediate social strata. The communist revolution will put an end to imperialist war once and for all by abolishing the economic categories of capitalism: wage labour, value production, competition, classes and national borders. This is why it is so important to defend internationalist positions and the autonomous struggle of the working class throughout the world, a working class which, in Italy as elsewhere, is today capable of developing its consciousness, albeit slowly due to numerous obstacles and the still strong ideological hold of the bourgeoisie.

Avrom E, December 2025

 

 

The US military raid on Venezuela on Saturday 3 January raised several questions about the scale of the attack, about the motives of the US government and which position to defend as revolutionaries.

We received contributions from two different contacts, which we welcome because of their clear defence of the internationalist position in reaction to the US military strike. Both recognise the motive of the US for this attack, i.e. compelling any recalcitrant nation on the American continent to comply with the needs of the US. Both are convinced that this expression of force is also directed against China and intended to chase this country out of the Western Hemisphere.

One of the contributions also mentions another motive: “the American bourgeoisie requires an expansion of markets”. It was Trump who boasted all the time about tens of millions of barrels of oil that Venezuela was going to supply to the United States. But the American bourgeoisie, and in particular the oil companies, knew very well that Venezuela will not provide an opportunity for sustainable profitable investments. At the same time, the population of Venezuela is too poor to buy the expensive American products en masse.

In fact, generally speaking, wars in the current period do not lead to an economic boost for capitalism and not even to an economic advantage for the victorious nation. This is one of the reasons why we speak about the irrationality of wars in the present period. The only “victory” for the US, in line with the recent US National Security Strategy, is having chased China and Russia (the closer ally of Venezuela) more or less out the continent. But it must pay the price of an increased instability in this part of the continent, “forcing the United States into a headlong rush of military interventions and adventures”[1]. This is another characteristic of the present period of decomposition: the US, violating international law and inviting others to do the same, as the main factor for the increase of the chaos in the world.

 

The first contribution

For some time now, Trump and the assortment of nationalist ghouls who accommodate him in the leadership of the MAGA movement (be they politicians, propagandists, or activists) have openly expressed their intentions to assert more stringent control over the region in which the U.S. lies, by force if necessary, with calls for: making Canada the 51st state, invading Mexico, and even annexing Greenland. A new development has now occurred in this regard. After months of bombing Venezuela and threats of regime change against its “socialist” president, Nicolas Maduro, he has been captured by American military forces and the Trump administration has asserted U.S. leadership in determining the government of Venezuela going forward, threatening the new president and former vice president, Delcy Rodriguez, to soften Venezuela to American imperial interests, lest it be attacked again, and this time worse. Following this development, Trump has made threats against Gustavo Petro, the leftist president in Colombia who’s made a point of condemning the coup of Maduro, and also reiterated his desire to annex Greenland.

There are two main reasons for this hawkishness across the region. The first is that the American bourgeoisie requires an expansion of markets, all the better in the case of U.S. political occupation where it would have an enormous edge on the world market. Protectionist policies would likely be utilized as well to ensure the industries obtained from these expansionist projects were sufficiently monopolized by the American bourgeoisie. The second reason is that the American state, with Trump at the helm, is preparing itself for war, particularly against China, and finds it necessary to absorb countries within its region into its political umbrella, or at least to make them effectively subordinate, even if their official sovereignty is maintained. Speaking of China, the capture of Maduro and insistence that Rodriguez align herself with the U.S. is not only a Venezuelan or a Latin-American affair, but is also a development in the rivalry between the two largest powers in the arena of world imperialism, the U.S. and China. Seeing as Maduro’s Venezuela was aligned with Chinese imperialism, the prospect of a realignment towards the U.S. means for China the threat of losing a significant ally in the region of its imperial rival.

MAGA propagandists often portray the Venezuelan situation as the freeing of the Venezuelan people from a brutal dictator. Even much of the democratic opposition doesn’t disagree with the coup of Maduro, it simply criticizes the method which was used to do it. It too has always called for the Venezuelan people to be freed from Maduro’s regime in some way. All this, however, is simply veiled language for what is actually intended. Both the MAGA and the democratic bourgeoisie mean by freedom the freedom for Venezuelan markets to be penetrated by American capital. Whether this occurs in an environment of liberal democracy or “dictatorship” is of little consequence to them, despite what their propaganda might suggest. Ultimately, whether one is in a liberal democracy or a “dictatorship,” they are inevitably in a dictatorship of the bourgeoisie, of capital.

On the other hand, leftist propagandists often portray the Venezuelan situation as yet another attack by the U.S. on a socialist country. Far from being socialist, however, Maduro’s Venezuela, and Chavez’s before him, was simply a state-capitalist regime, that is to say, it nationalized significant portions of its economy, which were in turn directed by the state bureaucracy. But nationalization is not socialism, as it retains capitalist social relations. The fact that the state, rather than private firms, becomes a more prominent employer of wage labor doesn’t negate this fact. Nor was Maduro’s government a government of the working class, or dictatorship of the proletariat, as was seen, for example, in the Paris Commune of the late 19th Century or the council republics of the early 20th Century. The working class never took power in Venezuela via a revolution. Rather, Maduro was the successor of Chavez, who himself took power via election within the framework of a bourgeois state with broad petty-bourgeois appeals to the “masses” and social reforms.

Whether Venezuela be China-aligned or U.S.-aligned, “dictatorial” or liberal-democratic, state-capitalist or private-capitalist, the Venezuelan proletariat will remain exploited and oppressed. Only through the creation of its own independent political organs in opposition to the existing, bourgeois state, and the subsequent crushing of that bourgeois state, can the Venezuelan proletariat begin to transform its conditions. And only through the Venezuelan proletariat’s fraternization, and eventual fusion, with the proletariat in the other countries of the world, given they’ve also succeeded in conquering political power, can social revolution be carried through to such an extent that capitalism is transcended and a new mode of production arises, that of communism, in which states and classes will have dissolved.

Synthesiz

 

The second contribution

On the Venezuelan shakedown

The second quarter of the 21st century began as the last one had ended: with wars, occupations and military adventures. Only 3 days into the New Year, the spectacular kidnap of Venezuelan President Maduro and his wife by the USA – backed by air and naval forces including the world’s largest aircraft carrier, a nuclear-powered submarine, spy planes and 15,000 troops – is the most obvious example. But the continuation of the war in Ukraine, the on-going genocidal strangulation of Gaza and the widening Israeli occupation of the West Bank, plus the carnage in Sudan, speak of a social system gripped by a deepening spiral of self-destruction on a global scale.

Why the ‘Hollywood-style’ capture of Maduro?

It certainly wasn’t, as Trump has insisted, because of Maduro or his state’s involvement in the drug trade, something in which the US itself is well versed. Indeed, President Trump has pardoned over 100 convicted narcotics offenders since coming to office for the second time – the most recent being the freeing of ex-Honduras President Hernández who had been sentenced to 45 years jail by a US court in March 2025.

Nor was it primarily to gain access to Venezuela’s oil reserves, said to be the largest on the planet. While the mafia-like US state has confirmed it will ‘run’ the country and ‘wet its beak’ in the oil profits it hopes to extract, global demand for oil (and prices) are falling and even China, which had invested billions to secure supply, had largely written this off as ‘bad business’.

No: the main driving force of this ‘mission impossible’ - orchestrated in the face of all previously established rules of international conduct - was to again demonstrate the US’s overwhelming military might in front of its ‘allies’ and its rivals. In a world of ‘every man for himself’ America once more acted out the role of Top Gun.

It was a warning to the US’s allies that, as Trump boasted, it was uncontested in the western hemisphere. It was clearly a signal to the ruling religious clique in Iran that regime change is the order of the day; it sent a message that Putin, who had met with Maduro in Moscow a few months previously and voiced his unwavering support, was in fact powerless to defend those in Russia’s orbit, as the fall of Assad (in Syria) had indicated the previous year. And while some bourgeois commentators felt that the lawlessness endorsed by the Trump clique would only encourage China to mimic such antics vis-à-vis Taiwan, the mighty US war machine assembled in the Caribbean has a global as well as regional reach.

Why such a demonstration of force by the US?

Following the collapse of the Eastern bloc, the US used the first Gulf war as a means not just to threaten its enemies but, above all, to keep its allies under the godfather’s thumb. For the disappearance of the ‘Soviet Union’ and its sphere of influence implied a corresponding crumbling of the western alliance – a process recognised and completed early in Trump’s second term with the “Atlantic divorce.”

But just as the Gulf wars failed to prevent the growing chaos in international affairs, the tendency of ‘every man for himself’ was actually stimulated by the US’s intervention which brought a veritable feeding frenzy in the wake of it actions in Iraq, in Afghanistan, in Libya and today in Syria.

Decomposition, the final phase of capitalism’s decadence, itself has a history. Today, the bloating of military budgets in almost every nation as war or war preparations become generalised and in particular, the growth of China as a serious economic if not yet equally powerful military rival, threaten USA hegemony. Washington bailed out the Trump-friendly Milei regime in Argentina with a package of 20 billion dollars to provide a counter-weight against the influence of China in Argentina and Venezuela was another South American country reliant on Beijing’s largesse. Thus, the US show of boastful bravado in fact stems from a global and historic weakening of its dominance, even in its own ‘backyard.’ Its actions create yet further regional and global instability, demonstrating the utter irrationality of imperialist wars in this epoch.

The US intervention in Venezuela is more than mere spectacle. It is a stepping up of the stakes, a further departure from international ‘norms’, a further lurch into chaos. It will for a while reassert the US’s will. But it can’t prevent the increasing decomposition of capitalist relations with murderous implications for the planet’s populations. It will in fact only accelerate this process.

KT 4.1.2026

 

It took just one night for US special forces to kidnap Nicolas Maduro in the heart of Caracas and imprison him in a New York jail. This impressive show of force, intended to decapitate the Venezuelan government, was an opportunity for Donald Trump to boast once again and issue a warning to the world:

"No nation in the world can accomplish what we have accomplished !"

Behind Trump and Maduro, the same capitalist barbarism

Trump's supporters played their usual role as defenders of democracy: by overthrowing a dictator, America had exported ‘peace, freedom and justice for the great people of Venezuela’.

This time, the charade did not go down well. Trump no longer even bothers with international law, the false pretext that the major powers, led by the United States, have used since 1945 to justify their imperialist actions and impose their ‘order’. The US military has thus intervened outside any legal framework under the flimsy pretext of fighting narco-terrorism. And Trump did not even hesitate to justify his intervention by pointing to the juicy profits that, according to him, American control of Venezuelan oil could generate. Trump and his clique therefore have no interest in democracy; they had only one goal in mind: to overthrow an uncooperative regime, place Venezuela under guardianship and deal a huge blow to its rivals, notably Russia and above all China, which has been on the offensive for years and is establishing itself in Latin America: “American dominance in the Western Hemisphere will never again be questioned” (Trump).

Of course, Maduro's supporters, particularly the forces that control capital, namely the ‘radical’ left-wing parties, immediately denounced this as a violation of international law and as an example of  ‘imperialist aggression’. The Bolivarian regime, at the head of a ‘non-aligned’ country, represents, according to them, a hotbed of resistance to ‘American imperialism’.

This discourse is pure hypocrisy! Venezuela is far from being the innocent little victim of the American ogre. In their confrontation with the United States, Maduro, and Chavez before him, have unflinchingly enlisted the support of Putin's Russia and the Islamic Republic of Iran, thereby demonstrating that Caracas, like all countries in the world, however weak they may be, is a genuine cog in the wheel of imperialism, its wars and its plundering. While Venezuela is clearly no match for the American juggernaut militarily, its leaders have not hesitated to use both oil and cartels as weapons of war. As a veritable corridor for cocaine produced in Colombia, Venezuela has thus contributed greatly to the flood of drugs into its enemies' countries.

Left-wing parties may well boast of ‘21st-century socialism’, but the ‘Bolivarian leaders’ are nothing more than a bourgeois clique that is hated and corrupt to the core. Chávez and Maduro have both pursued a systematic policy of job insecurity and increased exploitation, impoverishing the population as never before, and violently repressing the numerous protests that have punctuated their reign. The country has thousands of political prisoners. Kidnappings, torture and extrajudicial executions are commonplace. This ‘paradise on earth’ of 28 million inhabitants has 8 million refugees, the highest rate in the world! Maduro's ‘terrorism’ has been directed primarily against the working class!

As in every conflict, the bourgeoisie seeks to make us choose one bourgeois camp over another, to lock us into a false alternative between nations at war. But nowhere, neither in the United States, nor in Venezuela, nor in Ukraine, nor in Russia, nor in Israel, nor in Palestine, does any bourgeois faction offer the slightest hope for a more just and peaceful world. For this world is one of capitalism in irremediable crisis, where all states, whether democratic or authoritarian, populist or liberal, are in competition, all are imperialist and are active agents of destruction and chaos.

A new stage in chaos has been reached

Latin America is a microcosm of the barbarism into which capitalism is sinking. Rampant poverty, trafficking of all kinds, large-scale corruption, the disintegration of social and state structures... the continent increasingly resembles a gigantic Wild West. Through his military operation, Trump is importing war and the promise of considerably accelerating this chaos.

Today, Trump is strutting about, confident in the omnipotence of his army: “We are going to run the country until such time as we can do a safe, proper and judicious transition,” But the trouble is only just beginning. Far from the ‘ideal’ scenario of the 1973 coup in Chile, Washington is no longer able to replace one leader with another at will. We are no longer in the Cold War era, when the bourgeoisies were still disciplined and concerned with preserving the general interests of national capital within the framework of their military bloc.

Now, without the existence of these blocs, every man for himself and chaos reign supreme. The United States has spent twenty years trying, in vain, to establish stable governments in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and Syria. Even if Trump is “not afraid to put boots on the ground” the same will be true in Venezuela. Whatever happens, the US administration will have to deal with an extremely divided Venezuelan bourgeoisie1 [7] that Maduro had struggled to bring to heel. What Trump is likely to end up with is a powerless state, a fractured, miserable and anarchic country, a hub for all kinds of trafficking and the starting point for new waves of emigration.

All of this risks destabilising the entire continent and forcing the United States into a headlong rush of military interventions and adventures. Neighbouring Colombia has already deployed its troops to the border, fearing the consequences of a humanitarian crisis and conflicts between cartels. Even the US government is aware of the instability to come: “We are ready to launch a second, larger attack if necessary,” Trump said. And his Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, has already threatened Cuba with words worthy of a movie mafia boss: "If I lived in Havana and was part of the government, I would be at least a little worried... "

The consequences of this intervention go beyond the American continent alone. Trump has just trampled on all the international regulatory bodies designed to manage rivalries between nations, and wiped his feet on the legal framework that had allowed the United States to impose itself as the world's policeman in the past. Trump is acknowledging that: the United States no longer has the power to impose a world order faced with the development of every man for himself. Thus he is exploiting, ever more brutally, America’s immense military superiority to impose US interests. In the midst of chaos, only force is law.

In fact, Operation Absolute Resolve is not only a blow to the great Chinese rival, it is also a warning to the Europeans: while Trump has made clear his intention to seize Venezuela's vast hydrocarbon reserves, the United States will not hesitate to stab its ‘allies’ in the back if the defence of American strategic interests requires it. Katie Miller, the wife of the White House deputy chief of staff, posted a photo of Greenland draped in the colours of the American flag on the day of Maduro's abduction, accompanied by a caption that was explicit to say the least: “soon”...

Capitalism has nothing more to offer humanity than ever more wars and barbarism. The only force that can put an end to capitalist war is the working class, because it carries within it a revolutionary perspective, that of the overthrow of capitalism. It was the revolutionary struggles of the proletariat in Russia and Germany that ended the First World War! The working class will have to conquer real and lasting peace everywhere by overthrowing capitalism on a global scale. It will take years of struggle to regain its class identity and its weapons of struggle. But there is no other way to overthrow this moribund and destructive system!

EG, 4 January 2026

1 [8] Moreover, the United States has made no secret of the fact that Operation Absolute Resolve was made possible by complicity at the highest levels of the Venezuelan government.

 

In the second half of 2025, several countries in Asia, Africa and Latin America, racked by intense and widespread poverty, were rocked by popular uprisings. These began in Indonesia in August, followed by Nepal and the Philippines in September. They then spread to Peru and several African countries (Togo, Morocco, Madagascar and Tanzania) and broke out in just a few months. Anger was fuelled by corruption, injustice, inequality and lack of transparency in countries heavily affected by the crisis of global capitalism.

The mainstream media exploited these movements, claiming that young people, Generation Z, were going to change the world. But should the world welcome these popular uprisings, and will they help to put an end to barbarism?

Nepal is one of the poorest countries in the world and suffers from high inflation, chronic underemployment and low levels of investment. Its economy is kept afloat mainly by money transfers from hundreds of thousands of young people working abroad in appalling conditions. In Indonesia, the economy is also under severe strain, and there are signs that the country is approaching a debt crisis, with high unemployment, massive lay-offs in the industrial sector, and households hit by a crisis linked to the sky-high cost of living. These countries all suffer from underemployment, considerable income inequality, absolute poverty and recurring food crises.

The population of all these countries is very young. Often, young people under the age of 30 represent 50%, and sometimes even 60%, of the population. And the unemployment rate among this generation is very high. For example, in Indonesia, it exceeds 15%; in Nepal, it is well over 20%; in Peru, it is around 30%; and in Morocco, it is even approaching 40%! The outlook is extremely bleak for a large part of the youth in these countries. This is one reason for their involvement en mass in these forms of protest.

Added to this is endemic corruption, which infuriates the wider population. According to “Transparency International's 2024 Corruption Perceptions Index”, all the countries affected by these movements, which mobilise mainly young people, are among the most corrupt: Morocco and Indonesia rank 99th, Nepal 107th, the Philippines 114th, Togo 124th, Peru 127th and Madagascar 140th out of 180 countries. During the protests, the persistent corruption of the ruling clique is always one of the central issues.

Corruption, the spark that ignited the ‘Gen Z’ revolts

In Indonesia, the large popular demonstrations on 25th August were triggered by the announcement of a 50 million rupees per month housing allowance of for members of parliament. This came at the time of mass lay-offs (of more than 80,000 workers), a more than 100% increase in property tax and major budget cuts in education, public works and health. In response to these protests, the Trade Union Coalition (KSPI) decided to call for a general strike on 28 August, making economic demands strongly marked by nationalism and totally awash with democratic mystifications, such as an end to offshoring, an end to lay-offs, an increase in the minimum wage and a review of the anti-corruption laws. However, on 29 August, with the death of a delivery driver who was hit by a police car, the situation worsened and it sparked riots in 30 provinces across the country for a whole week, with dozens of public and private buildings set on fire and more than 2,000 people arrested.

In Nepal, the immediate trigger for the popular protests was the government's ban on 26 social media platforms on 4 September. This blockage was seen as an attempt by the government to cover up its corruption. The banners and placards brandished at the rallies denounced the culture of nepotism, corruption and impunity. For a generation facing unemployment, inflation and disillusionment with traditional parties, these practices epitomise ‘a failing system’. When riot police used live ammunition on 8/9 September, killing more than 70 protesters and injuring more than 2,000 others, the protests escalated. In response, young people unleashed blind and vengeful violence: looting, attacking and chasing politicians, and setting fire to the headquarters of the Congress Party and the Parliament.

In Morocco, the deaths of eight women, who were victims of negligent health care in public hospitals in the town of the Prime Minister, led to a series of protests against widespread corruption among the ‘elites’ and nepotism among politicians. The gap between the lack of prospects for young people, massive unemployment, and the state's costly investments in stadiums for the African Cup of Nations and the 2030 World Cup was a driving force behind the anger, which was fiercely repressed by the authorities, resulting in three deaths, hundreds of injuries and thousands of arrests.

Popular revolts are a dead end

While indignation and the desire to fight are legitimate, the protesters are directing their anger against the mismanagement of the state or the corruption of this or that politician or bourgeois faction, which is only targeting the symptoms of the putrefaction of the entire capitalist system. It is the capitalist economy, now undergoing an unprecedented crisis, that is the cause of the suffering and misery in these countries, a crisis that is sacrificing ever larger sections of the world's population, starting with those in the most fragile countries, in an attempt to prolong its rule. It's the historic crisis of capitalism that lies behind the total lack of prospects for the mass of the population, and especially for young people, who are facing chronic unemployment.

Popular revolts are by definition heterogeneous and do not have a class character: they mobilise ‘the people’, but the working class is unable to develop its own autonomous struggle because the boundaries between classes are blurred. In fact, these revolts are incapable of developing any perspective other than the illusion of a nation-state abandoning its predictable abuses which means they feed all the democratic illusions in defence of the state that the bourgeoisie uses to distance the proletariat from its revolutionary perspective. They are thus not directed against the bourgeois state, but only against its ‘malign effects’ that are thought to be 'fixable’.

However, when they are reduced to impotence and a lack of perspective, one of the intrinsic characteristics of popular revolts is aimless violence. Since demands cannot be met, immediately and satisfactory, rage begins to take over and the movements quickly degenerate into blind violence, destroying everything in their path. But clashes with the forces of repression, the occupation of government buildings, the hunting down of members of the government, and even the massive participation of workers in these actions do not give these social movements a revolutionary character, not even a potential one, despite the repeated efforts of the capitalist far left to make us believe so.[1]

These popular revolts are regularly exploited and manipulated by bourgeois cliques and used to their advantage. Protests against corruption in the Philippines, against income inequality in Indonesia, or against the ban on social media in Nepal, etc.; all these pretexts provide bourgeois organisations with an excellent smokescreen for settling their rivalries, as was the case during the anti-corruption demonstration on 17 November in Manila, which was largely hijacked by a Christian sect in favour of Duterte's camp.

We see the effects of this impasse in Iran, where the working class, unable to develop its struggle independently, to direct its discontent against exploitation, trapped by illusions about ‘democracy,’ ‘the people,’ “individual rights,” is caught up and massacred in bloody clashes between bourgeois factions, all of which promise a country free of corruption, freer, and more just.

All these protests end either in false victories, when the old bourgeois faction is replaced by a new one, or in outright state repression, or both. And the state's response to these demonstrations is generally brutal: in Nepal, it has left more than 70 dead and hundreds injured; in Indonesia, thousands have been arrested; in Madagascar, 22 have been killed and more than a hundred injured. Popular revolts, reflecting a world without a future and characteristic of the system's phase of decomposition, can only spread the ills of a putrefying capitalism.[2]

We must fight on our class terrain

Popular revolts perpetuate the myth of a fairer and better-managed capitalism and are in no way a springboard for class struggle. They represent a major obstacle and a dangerous trap for the proletariat. For the demands made during these movements “dilute the proletariat within the general population, blurring its awareness of its historical struggle, subjecting it to the logic of capitalist domination and reducing it to political impotence”[3].  The proletariat has everything to lose by allowing itself to be drowned in a wave of popular protests, totally blinded by democratic illusions and the possibility of a ‘clean’ capitalist state.

On the contrary, workers must impose their own slogans, their own demands and organise their own rallies, within the framework of a movement of their own. By fighting on the economic front (wages, ‘reforms’, redundancies, etc.), they are beginning, even without seeing it clearly, to oppose the very structures of capitalist society and wage-exploitation. In the long term, they are creating the conditions for broader reflection and an awareness of the revolutionary perspective.

The proletariat is, in fact, the only force in society capable of offering an alternative to the increasingly unbearable conditions of an obsolete capitalism. But this cannot succeed within the borders of a single country, especially when this proletariat is isolated from the battalions of the proletariat at the heart of capitalism and has little experience of the struggle against bourgeois democracy and the many traps that this class sets for it. Only by developing a common struggle with the working masses of the central countries, who have a long experience of dealing with the democratic mystification, will it be possible to bring about the necessary overthrow of capitalism and the emancipation of humanity.

 

Dennis, January 2026